Of course, if they get lots of people enrolling, they will have the actual classes taught by part-timers. That’s the part of the academy that they like.
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It’s a multi layer grift. The front facing grift is collecting donations and tuition fees to an unaccredited university. That’s your classic Trump scam. There’s a reason they have two different donation links in their top bar on the front page. The deeper grift appears to be a combination tax scam and ideological laundering facility. Their primary funding seems to come from a non-profit organization, less than a year old, with no resources, but controlled purely by the family of a venture capitalist. This lets a billionaire create useful propaganda at a couple steps remove, especially once it has aged for a few years and some people forget that structure. Endowing a chair here and there is expensive and doesn’t give you the control of building the whole university from the ground up.
GMU has enough of its own power that they don’t have the fine grained control they want. Lonsdale doesn’t want to have to bid against the Kochs for a professor when he can build his own stable.
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It’s also wingnut welfare for the people they stack the faculty with.
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https://www.uclafoundation.org/resources.aspx?content=endowment
Endowed Chair (with salary support): $5 million
The Endowed Chair (with salary support) will support a new faculty full time employee (FTE) on a permanent basis. This Chair is a special incentive to recruit and/or retain gifted faculty members whose teaching and research exemplify UCLA’s mission. Endowment income provides salary support and resources for research and teaching.
Prices range from $50,000 (Library Funding) to $100 million (Health Sciences Institute)
and because you guys like to dunk on George Mason, here’s their pricelist.
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So which of these endowed chairs will Donald Trump be invited to fill? (My personal preference would be The Chair, if you get my meaning if you catch my drift)
The Donald J Trump High Chair.
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Has anyone given that movement in academic hiring a flashy makeover as “the Gig Academy” yet, or do they just prefer to not talk about it to the degree possible?
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What partisan Think-Tanks do for politicians, these guys wasn’t to do for your average illiterate idiot - which is basically, take their money and tell them what they want to hear.
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There is some lip service paid to talking about the fact that over half of all classes are taught by part-timers. But nothing much has been done (in my field) other than focusing on job diversity at the graduate level (training grad students for jobs outside the academy).
And to be fair, there are some folks (often older people, or retirees) who do want to just pick up a class here or there to teach. But there are far more of folks like me and far less of folks like them.
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An in-law completed a program at an unaccredited religious college. She’s not from a wealthy family. For the cost of tuition, offset in part by her free labour, she got a sense of belonging that comes from strict ideological conformity and a useless bit of paper.
I’m picturing this institution as a secular version of the same.
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That could be the intent. I just don’t think secular ideology offers the same impetus to spend that kind of money on something useless as religious zealotry does.
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Since this doesn’t seem to be a quick scam, like Trump U, I assume that they’ve got some kind of plan for accreditation.
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Probably the same grifting strategy as trying to qualify for loans: if they get an accreditation they get more money from students; if they fail, they play the victim of the “intolerant liberal elites” and fundraise on that basis.
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I do think colleges caught themselves in a pickle by offering such rich tenure packages in decades past. On one hand, offering your tenured faculty not only stability, but also room to think and grow is absolutely necessary for academia to thrive. On the other … no one really thought through the long-term impacts of having to hire a bunch of a part-time teachers at $30/hour while paying off a 96-year-old professor who has no reason to retire.
I don’t know what the ideal middle-ground solution to this problem would be, other than perhaps term limits on tenure (which feels counter-intuitive?). But whatever the answer may be … I doubt that the “new financial model” being envisioned by UATX’s libertarian backers will be good for faculty wages OR academic development.
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Sorry, but I disagree. Sure there are a few old farts that make more than they should, but this is almost exclusively used as a disingenuous excuse from schools that view teachers as the enemy and try to screw them over any chance they get. For instance, there is never any talk about the wasted salary going to admins in much higher paying jobs, with more security, that essentially do nothing to further education
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A drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on administration and sports in most American colleges. If tenure were eliminated to-morrow most schools would still operate on the adjunct system because they like cheap labour.
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I think it very much does. Look at the Qanon “movement”… it’s fully secular, but built on the same concepts of blind faith that some religious groups are built on.
I mean… I don’t get that much… I don’t think so. I get paid per-class, per-semester, so…
I’ve known several profs who basically worked almost until they died. But also, I know a couple of younger profs who passed away (including one who was on my tenure committee who literally died a week before my defense, RIP Denis Gainty!) and those tenure lines were never replaced by teh university. They hired lecturers instead (who have their own tenure like structure to go through without tenure).
But you’re right that there are real problems within the tenure system as it stands. It’s been a breeding ground for all kinds of exploitation of grad students, undergrads, and those of us who are not in secure job paths. But of course, those aren’t the problems that this group wants to solve - they want to go back to having mostly white men having secured position and to get out the “woke” crowd. Much like the right wing, they are going after mostly the humanities as the problem.
Anyways… it’s depressing.
But part of the reason that new positions are not opening up is because a lot of profs just stick around for years. If there is only so much money to spread around a department for tenure lines, there is just not going to be room for newly hired tenure track positions. Combine that with the attempts by the corporate university to centralize power at the university level rather than having it at the department level, and it’s a recipe for just what we’re seeing now. People who are in secure positions have not seen what’s going on as a problem, as their jobs were secure. There is a lot of focus on how it’s the problem for the recent phds to solve, not one that impacts them. We are the ones who did not work hard enough or build enough networks to ensure job security or brown nose enough. THEY are never the problem, we are.
Yes. That doesn’t mean the system of privilege that has been dominated by white male boomers and is now being destroyed behind them isn’t part of the problem.
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I don’t have detailed knowledge of the subject; but from the labor statistics googling around I did it didn’t look like tenured and tenure-track faculty (at least in more recent years) are actually being particularly lavishly rewarded.
Job stability in an area you are passionate about is, of course, quite desirable; but paying a whole $100k/year for someone with a PhD and enough postdoctorate experience to actually be tenure track certainly doesn’t look bank-breaking either by the standards of university budgets or by private sector standards for even BAs with a little seniority or a spark of promise; certainly masters-level qualifications.
There are some substantially more expensive faculty, of course, but those tend to be things like surgeons or people in areas of science or mathematics that have substantial demand in industry and so have to offer more unless they want to draw faculty exclusively from those with with a passion for teaching or academic research so high that it’s worth $500k/year or more to them.
Was there a time when tenured faculty were markedly more expensive; vs. just decently comfortable in salary terms and atypically stable in terms of not being at-will employees subject to ritual layoffs to appease the market periodically?
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That’s true, but you have to look at it from a broader perspective. While some profs are highly paid, most are making a pretty high middle class salary. But the real reward is job security and knowing that you’re not going to lose your job over most things.
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