Amidst a climate of financial worry for many American students, the tide of amply-compensated Presidents refusing or returning portions of their salaries appears to be growing. The Daily Princetonian reports that Amy Guttman, the President of the University of the University of Pennsylvania, and her husband have made two gifts totaling $250,000 to support undergraduate […]
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The Center for College Affordability offers a great chart of the week, displaying the growth in the number of staff per student. At both public and private universities, the faculty numbers grew modestly, but were dwarfed by the change (1976 to 2006) in the increase in the number of “other professional” positions. Interestingly, private universities […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual survey of executive compensation in Higher Education was released today, and, as usual, remarkable for its upper reaches. Median salaries at public universities increased by 7.6% in the past year, delivering such plum earnings as Ohio University’s $1,346,225 Presidential compensation, or the University of Michigan’s $760,196. Not so bad […]
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Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University since October 2007, holds the record for heading the most universities in America. Here’s Gee’s history at the helms of U.S. institutions of higher learning: West Virginia University (1981-1985), University of Colorado-Boulder (1985-1990), a first round at Ohio State (1990-1997), Brown University (1997-2000), Vanderbilt University (2000-2007), and now, […]
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Observers of today’s campuses have undoubtedly encountered a phenomenon that I will call “incidentism.” Its principle characteristics are as follows: First, a seemingly minor often obscure, innocuous event, e.g., a student newspaper cartoon, an off-hand remark by the school president, an invitation to a “controversial” outside speaker, among countless other possibilities, triggers boisterous outrage among […]
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Advisers to student newspapers, on both the high school and college level, sometimes lose their jobs for backing student journalists who report stories displeasing to school administrators. Or under the implied threat of being fired, faculty advisers may steer the journalists in a direction the administration wants them to go. So the California legislature overwhelmingly […]
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As the twelve-year tenure of popular President Timothy Sullivan drew to a close in the Spring of 2005, the search for his successor was well underway. Under the direction of the Rector of the College’s governing Board of Visitors, Susan Magill, a political appointee whose day job was chief of staff for Virginia Senator John […]
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Confirming what college administrators have known for years, Education Sector has released a report based on U.S. Department of Education figures detailing huge gaps between the college graduation rates of white students and those of blacks. The gap (measured by failure to graduate within six years from a four-year institution) averages about 20 percent, although […]
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Although the mainstream media would have you believe he was a martyr to religious fundamentalists and moral Pecksniffs, Gene Nichol lost his job as president of the College of William and Mary in Virginia for only one reason: he was a lousy administrator who seemed not to be able to get it into his head […]
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Bruce Benson, a wealthy Republican businessman, is off to a bad start as the nominee for president of the three-campus University of Colorado system. One objection is that he lacks a Ph.D., which is unusual, but not unheard of. Dwight Eisenhower ruffled few feathers as president of Columbia University before his run for the presidency. […]
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The Alice-in-Wonderland view of Duke University received yet another boost: a committee of the board of trustees has affirmed President Richard Brodhead’s “compelling vision” for Duke and found “general support, overwhelming support, for the leadership that the president is providing.” The obvious question here is “What leadership?” Brodhead’s performance during the Duke non-rape crisis was […]
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Consider the unbelievable obtuseness of Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University. Bacow talks endlessly about how he and Tufts revere the principle of free speech. Last spring someone at Tufts apparently induced New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his commencement speech, to congratulate the university for its fierce protection of free expression. Yet that […]
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KC Johnson’s remarkable blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, has generated 90,000 reader comments since it emerged as the most reliable source of information and analysis on the Duke/Nifong non-rape scandal. The following is an excerpt from a November 6 reader comment on Duke’s president Richard Brodhead and the book, “Until Proven Innocent” by Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. […]
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When I wrote about the ludicrous Columbia Spectator op-ed linking a “Euro-Centric curriculum” to the noose incidents, I suggested that the author was clearly not alone in her sentiments. Today we have confirmation; there are plenty of fools at Columbia. The Spectator reports: Beginning today, five Columbia students will go on a hunger strike to […]
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Drew Faust’s inauguration as Harvard President last Friday featured a surprising presence: the Harvard ROTC. The ROTC, which has been banned from the Harvard campus since 1969, formed a closing color guard composed of Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force students. Most wouldn’t have expected Faust to invite the ROTC – and they’d be right […]
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Candace DeRussy, in Raise The Towers: A Call to Good Governance, a new paper from the Texas Public Policy Foundation offers a terse round-up of problems afflicting university governance, and offers a summary of several modes of reform. Her initial diagnosis is a sharp distillation of the problem: Paradoxically, it is the elusive dual nature […]
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