I wish I could share your optimism, Stevan, but we just
published
a book about Rutgers (by an English professor there) that
shows
that the Rutgers administration, pressured by the sports
boosters
on its board of trustees, are quite happy to spend lots of
money
on upgrading the football stadium and ensuring that the team
will
rank in the top ten while the academic infrastructure of the
school, including classrooms, literally crumbles into
disrepair.
Is this "rational"? Not to my mind, but it is
happening in many
places these days. "A lot of e-mails and phone
calls" from not
only their faculty but students and alumni as well have had
no
effect on the university's determination to sacrifice its
academic reputation at the altar of big-time sports-so much
for
faculty power and the "dead-obvious solution" to
the university's
$34 million budget deficit.
Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press
>It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in
questionis
>just a one-step deduction (which I think
universityadminstrators,
>even with their atrophied neurons, should still
becapable of making,
>if they are still capable of getting up in themorning at
all), the
>dance-step will be mastered: Faced with thequestion
"Do we use the
>newfound windfall cancellation savingsfrom our former
publication
>buy-in to pay for the newfoundpublication costs of our
research
>publication output, or forsomething else, letting our
research
>output fend for itself?"they will -- under the
pressure of logic,
>necessity,practicality, self-interest, and a lot of
emails and phone
>callsfrom their research-publishing faculty -- find
their way to
>thedead-obvious solution...
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Stevan Harnad
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