Those pesky faculty - Wisconsin takes action

Several decades ago a dark comedy on the BBC was called "A very peculiar practice" and it was about academic life at Lowland University. The university had hired a new president from the USA to lead them forward, the appropriately named Jack Daniels, who decided they could save a lot of money by getting rid to the students and any non-revenue producing faculty.  University faculty are a very pesky lot, and running a university without them might be an easier job, but not much educating is going to be getting done. Also the university won't be run very well because it will have adopted stupidly and foolishly the business model. You see, at a university, if run well,and ideas and governance run both up and down and across the organizational chart. Administrators who think things only travel down are soon confronted with textbook order forms (A colleague did this to the one-time chair of our governing board of trustees to demonstrate that in fact faculty did have a role in decision making.). Shared governance is an important part of a university's culture, and please understand, the faculty are usually looking out for the best interests of students and education. But faculty study things like science, and politics, and the like, and their authoritative manner, like they were experts or something, rubs a lot of politicians, and administrators, the wrong way especially when faculty forget who they work for, i.e., the state, for those us in public education. The GnOPe, which has been called the party of stupid for some obvious reasons, has been conducting a war on education, especially higher education, for some time now, and it's no surprise because university faculty tend to disagree with their governing ideology, their knowledge denial, and their social policies, and they can influence students too!  Faculty do tend to be outspoken because our jobs are protected from retaliation by tenure by and large, unless you don't want to hear what faculty have to say. It's a great thing being a tenured full professor, let TPP tell you, and it's true his outspoken reputation might not be so great if protection against retaliation were not in place. So now just north of us, having gone after the unions, Wisconsin is turning its attention to dismantling what is arguably one of the great state higher educational systems including its flagship, the University of Wisconsin Madison. This will be done by cutting their budget, telling faculty to work harder (showing that those making the demand don't know what university faculty do or why they do it), and to make sure the faculty don't bitch too much, well, let's do away with tenure because the state should be able to fire state workers any time they want, for any reason. Now, these legislators and the governor don't think this will actually work out very well, but they don't care if it doesn't work well so long as they have enough teachers to train workers for the state. Oh, wait, that's one of the prime directives for universities in Lincolnland! 

How to "improve" university professors and destroy higher education in the process

The GnOPe in particular wants to destroy the one remarkably good thing the USA ever constructed: a public education system. The cynical view is that a party that governs by ideology rather than knowledge doesn’t really want a public capable of “critical thinking”.  And in the case of higher education, the GnOPe so dislikes higher education especially that they are willing to toss the economic baby out with the academic bathwater. Of course a lot of people might get upset if a political party actually came right out and said, “we’re out to destroy public education and those expensive universities in particular”, so the plan is to kill them with a thousand small cuts. North Carolina, one of the academic powerhouses of the “south”, is showing just how this is to be done. Under the guise of “improvement” you demand that professors, all professors, have a high teaching load or 4 courses per semester. You may think that doesn’t sound like too much, but then you haven’t calculated how much time is needed for class preparation and evaluations (grading).  In the case of biology, a single 4 hour class generates six hours of class time, 3 lectures and a 3 hour laboratory. Even with a graduate student assistant to help, it took at least 2 hours to assemble and set up a laboratory class and another hour to put it all away. Fresh materials and other supplies took another 2 hours of shopping every week.  And the lab guide, the instructions, had to come from somewhere especially if you are not teaching labs like a cookbook. At a university lectures are not supposed to be a simple guided tour of a textbook. In TPP’s classes he generally knew more and expected more than was delivered in a textbook, and if you know textbooks, especially science textbooks, the conceptual forest is often totally hidden by the factual trees. Now to fulfill a 4-4 load in the sciences a professor would have to teach 3 such courses (and then each three hour lab counts the same as a 1 hour lecture, a for real accounting!).  It boggles the mind. Now please remember that science is not just a subject, a body of knowledge, science is also a very successful process for learning. You learn to do science by the ancient method of apprenticing, but doing science with a master. Science just eats time for lunch, and there are a limit to how many students you can have working under your supervision. So what can be concluded? One, too many of the current crop of politicians either have no idea what science (or other scholarly endeavors) is, or if they do know, they don’t think it’s very important. Two, these politicians don’t understand education at all, but that isn’t stopping them from meddling in a negative way. Three, this has the potential to be the most ruinous political activity ever, one that actually does put our nation, and its international standing, at risk. Too many of these fools think a nation’s status is determined solely by how many boom-booms it has.  Four, many of these anti-education politicians think many fewer professors are needed doing research if you just cut out all those stupid, useless research programs and focused on real human needs. Oh, TPP could say much more about the type of personalities that think research is all and only about us, but this only shows you how little they understand the basis of doing basic research just to satisfy curiosity, the need to learn new things, because if they did know how research worked, they’d know that with a remarkable frequency, “useless” knowledge becomes important for unforeseen reasons.  In places (corporations) or in countries where research has to be focused on “important” or “needed” outcomes, you often see the most humdrum, unimaginative sorts of research, projects pursued without any intellectual passion or creativity.  So wise up people; this has nothing to do with “improving” education. It has everything to do with destroying higher education. 

Very depressing trend - decline of collections based research

The decline in collections-based research at universities has been in decline for some time as hiring decisions attempted to track newer, shinier, more fundable areas of biology. We used to say that collections-based research would only persist in museums and botanical gardens, but obviously that isn't so any longer. This is of course very short sighted, but that is actually the nature of science these days. Legislators no longer understand the need or value of basic research, and it's proven an easy target for their ridicule and criticism. Perhaps this is just another facet of the war on science and higher education in the USA, long an area of our strength. Things do not bode well for the future.