[lbo-talk] judge rules against ward churchill

[Michael McIntyre]

Point taken, but I'd say that in some ways universities were riding high
with the very large expansion of postwar funding, something that ground to a
halt in the early 1970s.  There was a time, I'm told, when multiple job
offers were the norm, most faculty were tenured or tenure-track, faculty
governance wasn't entirely a joke, and both salaries and operating budgets
were expanding.  Today anyone considers herself lucky to have an offer, most
faculty are adjuncts, faculty governance institutions are entirely supine,
and salaries for even the favored few are flat or declining.  (Salary
compression or even inversion is a huge issue on most campuses).  Aside from
atrocities like the Finkelstein firing (and who knows how many others that
never make headlines), one finds manifest the wholesale buying and selling
of academic programs.  My institution, DePaul, in return for $10 million
from the Hilton family, is starting up an MBA in "hospitality leadership".
It gets a laugh when I say they should have held out for an extra $5 million
to endow the Paris Hilton Chair in Escort Services, but these people have no
shame.

I sometimes comfort myself with a well-known quote from Max Weber:

"Hence academic life is a mad hazard.  If the young scholar asks for my
advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him
can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says, give up any hope.
But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you
can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond
you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one
always receives the answer: 'Of course, I live only for my "calling.' Yet, I
have found that only a few persons could endure this situation without
coming to grief."

MM

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> On Jul 7, 2009, at 10:14 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote:
>
>  Our universities have sunk to such a low state in almost all respects that
>> they appear beyond fixing.  If anyone can offer me a hopeful sign,
>>
>> I'd love to hear it.
>>
>
> This sucks, re: Churchill. But when were the universities riding high? When
> William Graham Sumner ruled the roost?
>
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