Love and miss Steve Goodman – the only artist whose songs had direct parallels to my life. Having my car towed by the Lincoln Park Pirates; sitting in Wrigley Field listening to Go Cubs Go (a bittersweet experience as I’m a White Sox fan); and best of all, riding on the City of New Orleans as it pulls out of Kankakee, my home town.
If we had Republican state legislatures which were something other than somnambulant, this would be answered with…
1. Some severely prescriptive legislation about the content of a baccalaureate, master’s, first professional, and research degree. That would include a 30-credit core curriculum composed of specified courses in philosophy, history, and statistics and research methods, a prohibition on prescribing distribution credits, and a prohibition on requiring fewer than 42 credits graded C or above to recognize a major.
2. It would also be answered with legislation which would prescribe that every baccalaureate-granting campus be governed by a board of 5-19 persons elected by a postal ballot of past degree recipients registered to vote in the state and that such elections shall be held every fourth year of a quadrennial cycle and that any person who has served on a board for 14 of the last 16 years or who shall hit that wall in the coming four years must stand down.
3. It would also be answered with legislation that no school is to offer any degree or concentration within a degree program bar those found in a glossary enacted by the legislature. The glossary would not include victimology programs.
4. It would also prescribe that no school may offer any degree program in the glossary without first applying for a permit from the state board of regents.
5. It would also prescribe that any degree program in existence for 12 years be subject to periodic audit by the state comptroller’s office to ascertain if a critical mass of degrees have been awarded since the last audit to students whose board and achievement test scores placed them at the 32d percentile or higher of their entering class. A critical mass would be defined as a mean of 7 such diplomas per year over the previous six years. A failure to meet a critical mass of interest would ordinarily result in the establishment of a scholarship program for students wishing to study the subject out of state and the closure of the program by the state comptroller, unless the department be a last refuge department so prescribed by statutory law.
6. It would also prescribe that a baccalaureate degree consist of 120 credit-hours of study, defines a credit-hour as 10 50-minute lectures or the equivalent of 80 minute lectures, and require at least one hour-long closed book examination for any course given, no matter how many credit-hours of which it consists. It would define a master’s degree as 48 credit-hours in a given subject, of which a prescribed limit could be allocated to a thesis or internship.
7. It would also require that the instructor’s corps be understood to consist of quasi-faculty, who teach but do not teach completed courses by themselves or as part of a team (of which examples would be athletic coaches, music tutors, remedial tutors, and workshop instructors from the library and IT service), and faculty, who do teach such. It would require that all faculty be classified into categories of ‘clinical faculty’ and ‘regular faculty’, the former being working and retired professionals in a given discipline and the latter being teachers who may or may not have outside interests. It would require that all faculty be classifiable as those working in the liberal arts and those working in the mechanical arts. The former would consist of the academic arts and sciences and the performing and studio arts. The latter would consist of occupational subjects. It would require that clinical faculty be found only in the occupational schools and in the performing and studio arts.
8. It would require that part-time faculty be (1) clinical faculty or (2) be employed in the core program as lecturers or (3) be limited to a quota in a given department. A segmented department would be limited to one p/t faculty member per segment; an unsegmented department would be limited to one p/t faculty for the whole department.
9. It would require that faculty holding continuous tenure at an institution be limited to a fixed % of regular faculty, say, 38%. It would require that grants of continuous tenure be limited to faculty who have reached the age of 45 and have logged the equivalent of 12 years worth of f/t teaching.
10. It would mandate that faculty retire when they (1) are eligible for Medicare, and (2) are eligible for full Social Security, and (3) have logged the equivalent of 35 full-time years of employment as contributors to TIAA-CREF. Emeritus faculty could be recalled spot to fill in for faculty on leave but would have no office or regular teaching schedule.
11. Faculty not granted continuous tenure would work on multi-year contracts. An ‘instructor’ would be a faculty member on a contract of 1-6 semesters. A ‘lecturer’ would be on a contract of 7-12 semesters. Faculty who have been cut would be entitled to a terminal contract of a length equal to their total years of service divided by four, with the proviso that they not be employed past their date of mandated retirement and with the proviso that the institution can substitute for all or part of the terminal contract a lump sum severance settlement which consists of the discounted present value of the compensation they would otherwise have earned on their terminal contract.
12. All faculty in a given department would receive the same compensation, pro-rated for those on part-time contracts, bar those who receive supplemental compensation through the interest and dividend income associated with an endowed chair. Compensation would differ from department to department per the market.
13. Total compensation per (FTE) worker in a given institution would be, by law, within x% of total compensation per worker among private sector employees in the state. Total compensation paid for the most handsomely compensated employees outside the faculty would be limited by a formula which has as arguments the compensation-per-worker of the state’s private sector employees, the total number of fte employees in the institution outside the faculty, and the total number in the ‘handsomely compensated subset’. If the school employs more than 350 non-faculty, the subsets so limited will be the top 50 non faculty employees by compensation, the top 8, and the top employee.
14. Schools in the state will be debarred by law from granting appearance fees in excess of a certain % of personal income per capita in the state or of providing for a visitors’ expenses for travel, lodgings, and meals outside the appearance fee extended. Schools would also be debarred from imposing mandatory charges on students apart from tuition and room-and-board, would be debarred from giving cash grants and vouchers to student clubs, and would be debarred from maintaining student governments.
15. Faculty contracts, promotions, and tenure could only be granted by a vote the board of trustees, with the yeas and the nays recorded. The subject’s department and the provosts with their associated interdepartmental committees would provide recommendations.
Art,
Nice list of reforms and would have a very positive effect on undergraduate education. What it doesn’t address is graduate education and the role of faculty research at most of the large state universities. I’m, of course, thinking primarily of the sciences, though with the right incentives good research could come back to the humanities and social studies rather than the BS they produce now.
Nice list of reforms
Thanks. Almost no one likes what I say on any subject, so I feel better today.
What it doesn’t address is graduate education and the role of faculty research at most of the large state universities.
I’ve reviewed the number of people employed as scientists and scholars in business, industry and government and the number of people employed as post-secondary teachers (the latter deflated to account for the fact that the mean schedule for a post-secondary teacher amounts to 70% time employment). In occupations apart from this which require extensive training, certification, and (commonly) licensure, the ratio of extant practitioners to degrees awarded varies but seems to settle around 22.5:1. If that applies to post-secondary teachers and researchers in various venues, the professions could be staffed with about 96,000 degree awards per year. That amounts to about 3.3% of the sum of baccalaureate, master’s, first professional, and research degrees awarded each year in the us. Some of these people will stay a mean of two years and leave with a master’s and some will stay a mean of seven years and leave with a research degree. I haven’t a clue what the ratio of one to the other is, but you’re still going to be talking about a low-single digit share of those enrolled in baccalureate-granting institutions at any one time.
IMO, and in accordance with what’s roughly normal in New York, I’m going to suggest that state systems of higher education allocate 3/4 of their baccalaureate-and-above enrollment to teaching institutions and 1/4 to research institutions. That way, graduate students with these sorts of aspirations would account for roughly 13% or 15% of the enrollment at research institutions and 0% at teaching institutions. (Post-baccalaureate students at teaching institutions would be in such a state of the world a single-digit share of the total enrollment at such and studying for vocational master’s which require fewer than 60 credit hours, with the only academic subject you might find with a post-baccalaureate program being computer science, wherein terminal master’s are quite common. The sort of vocational master’s you might see at teaching institutions would be the most common – MBA, MEd, MSN, &c.).
I haven’t a clue to what problems you’re referring. I do remember the EduBlogger Erin O’Connor (who has now left academe) told of consulting with a faculty member at her undergraduate institutions as she was contemplating offers for a graduate school berth. He tells her “Erin, never pay for a PhD”. She went to the school that gave her the most generous funding and loved it. My stupid suggestion is that people writing dissertations be put on the rolls of the university’s medical insurance plan and given stipends as if they were employees, no exceptions. Perhaps the stipends would be paid out of the general fund or perhaps out of soft money. You have fewer people writing dissertations and you expect them to finish within nine years, no exceptions. Master’s degrees in academic subjects (computer science the exception) are awarded only by research institutions and awarded to people who lose interest in the program or in whom the program administrators lose interest.
Another idea is to have federal agencies do their own research in house with their own employees. If they want to pick the brains of university-based faculty, have them offer generous temporary fellowships which would include an indemnity to the home institution for loss of services. In these circumstances, federal agencies would be undertaking research to fulfill their institutional mission better, not to advance the frontiers of knowledge generally (as a rule). Federal agencies working to advance the frontiers of knowledge would either be engaged in very lumpy and capital intensive projects (like the space program or polar exploration or high-energy physics) or would be components of the crown jewels (the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress). You could follow the same principle at the state level. No grants appropriated. At all.
Positing that state of the world, imagine each state institution had a research endowment. The costs of managing the endowment and distributing its proceeds would be borne by the institution’s general fund. All the real interest and dividend income thrown off by the endowment would go to research grants to faculty at the institution itself. Faculty in a given discipline at the state’s institutions would send into the board of regents nominations of people not at their home institutions to serve as outside auditors. The state’s schools would be organized into consortia and there would be a committee of auditors for each discipline to be found within the consortia. The charges for the services of the auditors would be borne by the institutions within each consortium, apportioned among them according to FTE as modified by a fudge factor differentiating teaching and research institutions. The auditors would be chosen by lot from among the nominations and granted satisfactory fees for their work if they elected to take the job. Grant proposals would be evaluated blind, at least formally. (Presumably the auditors will have an idea who is up to what at the institutions for which they audit).
The endowments would be funded by special bond issues rather than state appropriations. In any state or portion of a state, people committed to research funding might put a proposition on the ballot, which could be done by getting sufficient signatures from registered voters in the jurisdictions in which you propose to hold the referendum. “Sufficient” might mean 2% of the registered voters in the jurisdiction, but not exceeding a certain raw number determined by formula. If it’s a statewide referendum and it passes, the state then issues the bonds on its own credit. The share each institution receives is determined by multiplying the institution’s fte enrollment by a fudge factor determined by institutional type. If the referendum is held in just a part of the state and passes, the value determined is apportioned between the counties of that section of the state according to their personal income flow as determined by (say) the Census Bureau or BEA. The honeypot is then apportioned among the institutions in that section of the state according to shares calculated by multiplying the fte enrollment of each by a fudge factor.
Private institutions could rely on private donations and bequests for financing faculty research (which might be open to faculty at public institution as well).
Interesting, if not particularly deep article on “The Psychology of Alien Contact” plus links to other interesting related topics at
I obviously haven’t read it yet – and 77 pages is a lot, on top of everything else. However, if it’s based on the presentation by McCraw and the others to the legislature (I watched 11 hours worth) and then the questions and remarks of the legislators, I will say this: he was a very poor communicator and contradicted himself many times, and their questions often indicated they hadn’t understood what he was saying. The whole thing was rather remarkable, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
I’m looking forward to the Great Enrollment Decline starting in 2025:
_____________________________
A new report by economists at Carleton College predicts that universities nationwide will see a significant enrollment decrease starting in 2025.
According to Nathan Grawe, a professor of economics at the college in Northfield, Minn., most colleges and universities will start seeing a significant reduction in enrollment beginning in 2025 due to the marked decline in the birth rate that occurred between 2008 and 2011. According to Grawe, the major reason behind the decline in birthrate was the uncertainty created by the financial crisis in 2008.
“When the financial crisis hit in 2008, young people viewed that economic uncertainty as a cause for reducing fertility,” explained Grawe. “The number of kids born from 2008 to 2011 fell precipitously. Fast forward 18 years to 2026 and we see that there are fewer kids reaching college-going age.”
Combined with the crashing academic brand and low ROI on non-STEM degrees, it should be interesting to see how universities cope.
I won’t be sympathetic.
I’ve made a first pass through the report. It’s a much better effort than the one issued earlier. There is a mostly coherent presentation of events, but the addition of a line-by-line timeline would have greatly helped matters, I don’t know why they didn’t add one. There are still unanswered questions but the report makes no claim of being the final effort; It’s titled as an ‘Interim Report’.
The figure in black, who was targeted by the early-arriving policeman that asked permission to shoot (and didn’t) turns out to be a coach that was ushering children off the playground to safety.
Almost 400 law enforcement personnel responded (confirming some of my earlier suspicions about cross-fire hazards) but the chief failure noted was the failure to follow the Incident Response Plan, notably to set up a Command & Control structure that would have taken over the management of communications and centralized it on site, but away from the firing line, to organize and delegate authority and issue instructions. There is much to learn from the report and I encourage all to read and review it.
And so it goes…
What happened shouldn’t have…but it did; and it is what certainly should have been surmised…
Sure could have done without the massive CYA / coverups, though…
…but people are people…and “He/She/Xhe who has not sinned….”
(Alas we seem to be living in the “Age of Coverups”…)
“Bodycam Video, Report Exposes “Systemic, Egregious” Law Enforcement Failures In Uvalde School Mass Shooting”— https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bodycam-video-report-exposes-systemic-law-enforcement-failures-uvalde-school-mass
And here we have a fairly whimsical opinion piece (by one of the usual suspects), lamenting, bemoaning, weeping, gnashing teeth, tearing out hair by the roots, and heaping dung and ashes on whatever hair is left…just BECAUSE—get this!!—the DEMOCRATS haves NOT been able to perpetrate a CATASTROPHE even greater than the one they have thus far succeeded in foisting upon America, its citizenry…and the larger world….:
“NY Mag column declares ‘death’ of ‘Democrats’ domestic ambitions:’ A ‘catastrophe’ with ‘a thousand fathers’;
“New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the result of Democrat-controlled government ‘a failure’ ” https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-mag-column-declares-death-democrats-domestic-ambitions-catastrophe-thousand-fathers
Yep, the Democrats have utterly blown it, this comedian woefully claims…apparently not aware of the extraordinary success “Biden” has had so far in TRANSFORMING (AKA destroying—all the better to “BBB”) “his” country.
To be sure, the clueless, if oh-so-earnest, Topsy Turvy pundit—mensch that he is—is oh-so-benevolently careful NOT to pin all the blame on Manchin (and Sinema)!!
Such a DECENT guy. (Such a perceptive guy!)
I would suggest that the author has only to wait a bit to see the massive dimensions of utter destruction (for which he seems to be pining) materialize before his very eyes, though one may well wonder if he’ll even be ABLE to notice what’s looming before his very eyes—as the saying goes, “Patience, jackass…”—upon which…he’ll be able to rejoice to the very pith of his soul.
(Of course the headline should really read: “Manchin ‘Intentionally Sabotaging’ Biden’s Agenda to DESTROY THE COUNTRY”…but hey, what’s a little bit of stealth editing here and there?)
Hmm… Might one wonder if any of those earnest-dedicated-‘n-rarin’-to-go Bernie Bro’s are gonna get the message?…
Key graf:
‘…The Vermont senator charged that Manchin is harming future generations[!] when he derails climate change, because it “is an existential threat to humanity,”[!] insisting that he is sabotaging not only the president’s agenda, but “what the American people want[!], what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.” [Exclamation points mine; Barry M.]
Aggie:
I now have read the new report too, and I agree that although it lacks some things it is enormously better than what went before. It is pretty good, in my opinion. It also happens to substantiate some theories I was developing about the mindset of the officers. We already knew about the lack of communication and coordination and it documents that quite well, too.
I plan to write about it (and co-ordinate that with some things McCraw said in his testimony on June 21 to the legislature), but this new report is so huge and there are so many details that it’s an unwieldy task. I have many thoughts about what it says.
That part you mention about the officer who supposedly had a chance to kill the shooter but it turns out that if the officer had shot he would have killed or wounded the coach – and how this was erroneously reported by the press and by the ALERTT university report – I think that is emblematic of so many problems with reporting and rushing to judgment. I bet most people will nevertheless never get the corrected facts, and will continue to think that an officer had a chance to get the shooter when that apparently is not true. That particular incident actually ends up underlining why officers have to be cautious about their shots, and that all the weekend warriors who thought that guy obviously should have shot into that schoolyard from so far away were wrong.
The “we knows” didn’t? Totally unanticipated. This isn’t the first rodeo.
Tragedy and atrocity are profitable. It’s best to be first when clicks or bucks are at stake.
Love and miss Steve Goodman – the only artist whose songs had direct parallels to my life. Having my car towed by the Lincoln Park Pirates; sitting in Wrigley Field listening to Go Cubs Go (a bittersweet experience as I’m a White Sox fan); and best of all, riding on the City of New Orleans as it pulls out of Kankakee, my home town.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/in-unprecedented-move-northern-arizona-u-to-require-four-diversity-courses-to-graduate/
If we had Republican state legislatures which were something other than somnambulant, this would be answered with…
1. Some severely prescriptive legislation about the content of a baccalaureate, master’s, first professional, and research degree. That would include a 30-credit core curriculum composed of specified courses in philosophy, history, and statistics and research methods, a prohibition on prescribing distribution credits, and a prohibition on requiring fewer than 42 credits graded C or above to recognize a major.
2. It would also be answered with legislation which would prescribe that every baccalaureate-granting campus be governed by a board of 5-19 persons elected by a postal ballot of past degree recipients registered to vote in the state and that such elections shall be held every fourth year of a quadrennial cycle and that any person who has served on a board for 14 of the last 16 years or who shall hit that wall in the coming four years must stand down.
3. It would also be answered with legislation that no school is to offer any degree or concentration within a degree program bar those found in a glossary enacted by the legislature. The glossary would not include victimology programs.
4. It would also prescribe that no school may offer any degree program in the glossary without first applying for a permit from the state board of regents.
5. It would also prescribe that any degree program in existence for 12 years be subject to periodic audit by the state comptroller’s office to ascertain if a critical mass of degrees have been awarded since the last audit to students whose board and achievement test scores placed them at the 32d percentile or higher of their entering class. A critical mass would be defined as a mean of 7 such diplomas per year over the previous six years. A failure to meet a critical mass of interest would ordinarily result in the establishment of a scholarship program for students wishing to study the subject out of state and the closure of the program by the state comptroller, unless the department be a last refuge department so prescribed by statutory law.
6. It would also prescribe that a baccalaureate degree consist of 120 credit-hours of study, defines a credit-hour as 10 50-minute lectures or the equivalent of 80 minute lectures, and require at least one hour-long closed book examination for any course given, no matter how many credit-hours of which it consists. It would define a master’s degree as 48 credit-hours in a given subject, of which a prescribed limit could be allocated to a thesis or internship.
7. It would also require that the instructor’s corps be understood to consist of quasi-faculty, who teach but do not teach completed courses by themselves or as part of a team (of which examples would be athletic coaches, music tutors, remedial tutors, and workshop instructors from the library and IT service), and faculty, who do teach such. It would require that all faculty be classified into categories of ‘clinical faculty’ and ‘regular faculty’, the former being working and retired professionals in a given discipline and the latter being teachers who may or may not have outside interests. It would require that all faculty be classifiable as those working in the liberal arts and those working in the mechanical arts. The former would consist of the academic arts and sciences and the performing and studio arts. The latter would consist of occupational subjects. It would require that clinical faculty be found only in the occupational schools and in the performing and studio arts.
8. It would require that part-time faculty be (1) clinical faculty or (2) be employed in the core program as lecturers or (3) be limited to a quota in a given department. A segmented department would be limited to one p/t faculty member per segment; an unsegmented department would be limited to one p/t faculty for the whole department.
9. It would require that faculty holding continuous tenure at an institution be limited to a fixed % of regular faculty, say, 38%. It would require that grants of continuous tenure be limited to faculty who have reached the age of 45 and have logged the equivalent of 12 years worth of f/t teaching.
10. It would mandate that faculty retire when they (1) are eligible for Medicare, and (2) are eligible for full Social Security, and (3) have logged the equivalent of 35 full-time years of employment as contributors to TIAA-CREF. Emeritus faculty could be recalled spot to fill in for faculty on leave but would have no office or regular teaching schedule.
11. Faculty not granted continuous tenure would work on multi-year contracts. An ‘instructor’ would be a faculty member on a contract of 1-6 semesters. A ‘lecturer’ would be on a contract of 7-12 semesters. Faculty who have been cut would be entitled to a terminal contract of a length equal to their total years of service divided by four, with the proviso that they not be employed past their date of mandated retirement and with the proviso that the institution can substitute for all or part of the terminal contract a lump sum severance settlement which consists of the discounted present value of the compensation they would otherwise have earned on their terminal contract.
12. All faculty in a given department would receive the same compensation, pro-rated for those on part-time contracts, bar those who receive supplemental compensation through the interest and dividend income associated with an endowed chair. Compensation would differ from department to department per the market.
13. Total compensation per (FTE) worker in a given institution would be, by law, within x% of total compensation per worker among private sector employees in the state. Total compensation paid for the most handsomely compensated employees outside the faculty would be limited by a formula which has as arguments the compensation-per-worker of the state’s private sector employees, the total number of fte employees in the institution outside the faculty, and the total number in the ‘handsomely compensated subset’. If the school employs more than 350 non-faculty, the subsets so limited will be the top 50 non faculty employees by compensation, the top 8, and the top employee.
14. Schools in the state will be debarred by law from granting appearance fees in excess of a certain % of personal income per capita in the state or of providing for a visitors’ expenses for travel, lodgings, and meals outside the appearance fee extended. Schools would also be debarred from imposing mandatory charges on students apart from tuition and room-and-board, would be debarred from giving cash grants and vouchers to student clubs, and would be debarred from maintaining student governments.
15. Faculty contracts, promotions, and tenure could only be granted by a vote the board of trustees, with the yeas and the nays recorded. The subject’s department and the provosts with their associated interdepartmental committees would provide recommendations.
Art,
Nice list of reforms and would have a very positive effect on undergraduate education. What it doesn’t address is graduate education and the role of faculty research at most of the large state universities. I’m, of course, thinking primarily of the sciences, though with the right incentives good research could come back to the humanities and social studies rather than the BS they produce now.
Nice list of reforms
Thanks. Almost no one likes what I say on any subject, so I feel better today.
What it doesn’t address is graduate education and the role of faculty research at most of the large state universities.
I’ve reviewed the number of people employed as scientists and scholars in business, industry and government and the number of people employed as post-secondary teachers (the latter deflated to account for the fact that the mean schedule for a post-secondary teacher amounts to 70% time employment). In occupations apart from this which require extensive training, certification, and (commonly) licensure, the ratio of extant practitioners to degrees awarded varies but seems to settle around 22.5:1. If that applies to post-secondary teachers and researchers in various venues, the professions could be staffed with about 96,000 degree awards per year. That amounts to about 3.3% of the sum of baccalaureate, master’s, first professional, and research degrees awarded each year in the us. Some of these people will stay a mean of two years and leave with a master’s and some will stay a mean of seven years and leave with a research degree. I haven’t a clue what the ratio of one to the other is, but you’re still going to be talking about a low-single digit share of those enrolled in baccalureate-granting institutions at any one time.
IMO, and in accordance with what’s roughly normal in New York, I’m going to suggest that state systems of higher education allocate 3/4 of their baccalaureate-and-above enrollment to teaching institutions and 1/4 to research institutions. That way, graduate students with these sorts of aspirations would account for roughly 13% or 15% of the enrollment at research institutions and 0% at teaching institutions. (Post-baccalaureate students at teaching institutions would be in such a state of the world a single-digit share of the total enrollment at such and studying for vocational master’s which require fewer than 60 credit hours, with the only academic subject you might find with a post-baccalaureate program being computer science, wherein terminal master’s are quite common. The sort of vocational master’s you might see at teaching institutions would be the most common – MBA, MEd, MSN, &c.).
I haven’t a clue to what problems you’re referring. I do remember the EduBlogger Erin O’Connor (who has now left academe) told of consulting with a faculty member at her undergraduate institutions as she was contemplating offers for a graduate school berth. He tells her “Erin, never pay for a PhD”. She went to the school that gave her the most generous funding and loved it. My stupid suggestion is that people writing dissertations be put on the rolls of the university’s medical insurance plan and given stipends as if they were employees, no exceptions. Perhaps the stipends would be paid out of the general fund or perhaps out of soft money. You have fewer people writing dissertations and you expect them to finish within nine years, no exceptions. Master’s degrees in academic subjects (computer science the exception) are awarded only by research institutions and awarded to people who lose interest in the program or in whom the program administrators lose interest.
Another idea is to have federal agencies do their own research in house with their own employees. If they want to pick the brains of university-based faculty, have them offer generous temporary fellowships which would include an indemnity to the home institution for loss of services. In these circumstances, federal agencies would be undertaking research to fulfill their institutional mission better, not to advance the frontiers of knowledge generally (as a rule). Federal agencies working to advance the frontiers of knowledge would either be engaged in very lumpy and capital intensive projects (like the space program or polar exploration or high-energy physics) or would be components of the crown jewels (the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress). You could follow the same principle at the state level. No grants appropriated. At all.
Positing that state of the world, imagine each state institution had a research endowment. The costs of managing the endowment and distributing its proceeds would be borne by the institution’s general fund. All the real interest and dividend income thrown off by the endowment would go to research grants to faculty at the institution itself. Faculty in a given discipline at the state’s institutions would send into the board of regents nominations of people not at their home institutions to serve as outside auditors. The state’s schools would be organized into consortia and there would be a committee of auditors for each discipline to be found within the consortia. The charges for the services of the auditors would be borne by the institutions within each consortium, apportioned among them according to FTE as modified by a fudge factor differentiating teaching and research institutions. The auditors would be chosen by lot from among the nominations and granted satisfactory fees for their work if they elected to take the job. Grant proposals would be evaluated blind, at least formally. (Presumably the auditors will have an idea who is up to what at the institutions for which they audit).
The endowments would be funded by special bond issues rather than state appropriations. In any state or portion of a state, people committed to research funding might put a proposition on the ballot, which could be done by getting sufficient signatures from registered voters in the jurisdictions in which you propose to hold the referendum. “Sufficient” might mean 2% of the registered voters in the jurisdiction, but not exceeding a certain raw number determined by formula. If it’s a statewide referendum and it passes, the state then issues the bonds on its own credit. The share each institution receives is determined by multiplying the institution’s fte enrollment by a fudge factor determined by institutional type. If the referendum is held in just a part of the state and passes, the value determined is apportioned between the counties of that section of the state according to their personal income flow as determined by (say) the Census Bureau or BEA. The honeypot is then apportioned among the institutions in that section of the state according to shares calculated by multiplying the fte enrollment of each by a fudge factor.
Private institutions could rely on private donations and bequests for financing faculty research (which might be open to faculty at public institution as well).
Interesting, if not particularly deep article on “The Psychology of Alien Contact” plus links to other interesting related topics at
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/alien-contact-psychology/
Education (related):
“How the Best of Intentions Created Today’s Academic Disasters”—
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/07/how-the-best-of-intentions-created-todays-academic-disasters/
H/T Instapundit.
A “mea culpa” laundry list of how misplaced—and not-at-all-well-thought-through—so-called ALTRUISM can fail spectacularly…
(“…can fail…”?)
…And what happens when logic, sense and morality are simply tossed out the window (by Professors to nowhere)….
“Incarcerated transgender woman Demi Minor impregnates two inmates at NJ prison”—
https://nypost.com/2022/07/16/transgender-woman-demi-minor-impregnates-two-inmates-at-nj-prison/
H/T Instapundit.
Barry Meislin, that NY Post headline clearly displays the current insanity. A person capable of impregnating female inmates is not a woman.
Seems to becoming a cottage industry, though.
In the UK, too…
But back to ballet:
https://redstate.com/alexparker/2022/07/17/when-caucasians-cut-rugs-dance-school-boots-ballet-because-its-wickedly-white-n596416
and fataphobic, tutu
https://youtu.be/nEjPDS8Jp1E
not attempted murder because reasons,
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsmanchester/shocking-image-of-knifeman-sex-offender-slashing-17-year-olds-throat-on-bus-in-random-attack/ar-AAZyAf7
It looks like the Uvalde Police Dept is in for a bad week.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1547022196991610881
A 77 page report has been issued
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/house-committee-report-on-uvalde-shooting
Aggie:
I obviously haven’t read it yet – and 77 pages is a lot, on top of everything else. However, if it’s based on the presentation by McCraw and the others to the legislature (I watched 11 hours worth) and then the questions and remarks of the legislators, I will say this: he was a very poor communicator and contradicted himself many times, and their questions often indicated they hadn’t understood what he was saying. The whole thing was rather remarkable, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
https://twitter.com/AKA_RealDirty/status/1548531431735009280?t=ghNDHv6YiN_gRqpOTZ-z0Q&s=19
Re: Higher Education
I’m looking forward to the Great Enrollment Decline starting in 2025:
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A new report by economists at Carleton College predicts that universities nationwide will see a significant enrollment decrease starting in 2025.
According to Nathan Grawe, a professor of economics at the college in Northfield, Minn., most colleges and universities will start seeing a significant reduction in enrollment beginning in 2025 due to the marked decline in the birth rate that occurred between 2008 and 2011. According to Grawe, the major reason behind the decline in birthrate was the uncertainty created by the financial crisis in 2008.
“When the financial crisis hit in 2008, young people viewed that economic uncertainty as a cause for reducing fertility,” explained Grawe. “The number of kids born from 2008 to 2011 fell precipitously. Fast forward 18 years to 2026 and we see that there are fewer kids reaching college-going age.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/college-enrollment-predicted-to-fall-by-15-percent-starting-in-2025
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Combined with the crashing academic brand and low ROI on non-STEM degrees, it should be interesting to see how universities cope.
I won’t be sympathetic.
I’ve made a first pass through the report. It’s a much better effort than the one issued earlier. There is a mostly coherent presentation of events, but the addition of a line-by-line timeline would have greatly helped matters, I don’t know why they didn’t add one. There are still unanswered questions but the report makes no claim of being the final effort; It’s titled as an ‘Interim Report’.
The figure in black, who was targeted by the early-arriving policeman that asked permission to shoot (and didn’t) turns out to be a coach that was ushering children off the playground to safety.
Almost 400 law enforcement personnel responded (confirming some of my earlier suspicions about cross-fire hazards) but the chief failure noted was the failure to follow the Incident Response Plan, notably to set up a Command & Control structure that would have taken over the management of communications and centralized it on site, but away from the firing line, to organize and delegate authority and issue instructions. There is much to learn from the report and I encourage all to read and review it.
And so it goes…
What happened shouldn’t have…but it did; and it is what certainly should have been surmised…
Sure could have done without the massive CYA / coverups, though…
…but people are people…and “He/She/Xhe who has not sinned….”
(Alas we seem to be living in the “Age of Coverups”…)
“Bodycam Video, Report Exposes “Systemic, Egregious” Law Enforcement Failures In Uvalde School Mass Shooting”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bodycam-video-report-exposes-systemic-law-enforcement-failures-uvalde-school-mass
And here we have a fairly whimsical opinion piece (by one of the usual suspects), lamenting, bemoaning, weeping, gnashing teeth, tearing out hair by the roots, and heaping dung and ashes on whatever hair is left…just BECAUSE—get this!!—the DEMOCRATS haves NOT been able to perpetrate a CATASTROPHE even greater than the one they have thus far succeeded in foisting upon America, its citizenry…and the larger world….:
“NY Mag column declares ‘death’ of ‘Democrats’ domestic ambitions:’ A ‘catastrophe’ with ‘a thousand fathers’;
“New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the result of Democrat-controlled government ‘a failure’ ”
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-mag-column-declares-death-democrats-domestic-ambitions-catastrophe-thousand-fathers
Yep, the Democrats have utterly blown it, this comedian woefully claims…apparently not aware of the extraordinary success “Biden” has had so far in TRANSFORMING (AKA destroying—all the better to “BBB”) “his” country.
To be sure, the clueless, if oh-so-earnest, Topsy Turvy pundit—mensch that he is—is oh-so-benevolently careful NOT to pin all the blame on Manchin (and Sinema)!!
Such a DECENT guy. (Such a perceptive guy!)
I would suggest that the author has only to wait a bit to see the massive dimensions of utter destruction (for which he seems to be pining) materialize before his very eyes, though one may well wonder if he’ll even be ABLE to notice what’s looming before his very eyes—as the saying goes, “Patience, jackass…”—upon which…he’ll be able to rejoice to the very pith of his soul.
File under: Chait crime….
To be fair, when it comes to comedy, NO ONE surpasses Bernie Sanders!
“Sen. Sanders: Manchin ‘Intentionally Sabotaging’ Biden’s Agenda”—
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/berniesanders-joemanchin-climatechange/2022/07/17/id/1079165/
(Of course the headline should really read: “Manchin ‘Intentionally Sabotaging’ Biden’s Agenda to DESTROY THE COUNTRY”…but hey, what’s a little bit of stealth editing here and there?)
Hmm… Might one wonder if any of those earnest-dedicated-‘n-rarin’-to-go Bernie Bro’s are gonna get the message?…
Key graf:
‘…The Vermont senator charged that Manchin is harming future generations[!] when he derails climate change, because it “is an existential threat to humanity,”[!] insisting that he is sabotaging not only the president’s agenda, but “what the American people want[!], what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.” [Exclamation points mine; Barry M.]
Aggie:
I now have read the new report too, and I agree that although it lacks some things it is enormously better than what went before. It is pretty good, in my opinion. It also happens to substantiate some theories I was developing about the mindset of the officers. We already knew about the lack of communication and coordination and it documents that quite well, too.
I plan to write about it (and co-ordinate that with some things McCraw said in his testimony on June 21 to the legislature), but this new report is so huge and there are so many details that it’s an unwieldy task. I have many thoughts about what it says.
That part you mention about the officer who supposedly had a chance to kill the shooter but it turns out that if the officer had shot he would have killed or wounded the coach – and how this was erroneously reported by the press and by the ALERTT university report – I think that is emblematic of so many problems with reporting and rushing to judgment. I bet most people will nevertheless never get the corrected facts, and will continue to think that an officer had a chance to get the shooter when that apparently is not true. That particular incident actually ends up underlining why officers have to be cautious about their shots, and that all the weekend warriors who thought that guy obviously should have shot into that schoolyard from so far away were wrong.
The “we knows” didn’t? Totally unanticipated. This isn’t the first rodeo.
Tragedy and atrocity are profitable. It’s best to be first when clicks or bucks are at stake.
Being right? Nevermind.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jill-biden-problems-of-the-moment-dashed-president-bidens-hopes-and-plans/
“Jill Biden: ‘Problems of the Moment’ Dashed President Biden’s ‘Hopes and Plans’”