Indiana Higher Ed: ‘Strategic’ and ‘Budget Cut’ not Mutually Exclusive Concepts
Doug Lederman, of Inside Higher Ed explains how the Indiana Commission on Higher Education is continuing to meet its goals of rewarding efficient performance in spite of budget cuts:
Economic downturns are often the enemy of state higher education reforms, especially those that involve money. It’s hard enough for state leaders to do things like reallocate funds to reward performance when times are good; when money is tight, the often fragile consensus necessary to make major changes tends to crumble.
Which is why the announcement last week that Indiana’s commissioner of higher education recommended distributing budget cuts to state colleges based in significant part on a set of performance measures was so extraordinary.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education’s decision to disproportionately cut the budgets of some institutions because their per-student costs are higher and their completion rates are lower is consistent with the state’s recently expanded performance funding system.
But it breaks with states’ standard operating procedure of cutting institutions’ budgets across the board, or equivalently to their enrollment size — and that departure from the status quo stood out for many state policy experts…Continue reading Performance (De-)Funding >>
Colleges and Corporations in Pittsburgh Pledge ‘Voluntary Contributions’ in Lieu of More Taxes…Okaaaay.
The Allegheny Institute has commentary on a recent development in Pittsburgh, PA, which it finds troubling:
Monday, December 21st marked the demise of the proposed tuition tax, also known as the “Post Secondary Education Privilege Tax” and the “Fair Share Tax”, as the City and the Pittsburgh college and university community reached an accord in which the Mayor and Council agreed to table the tax. But what has arisen in its stead brings a new set of very troubling concerns.
The colleges, along with a non-profit health insurer, have pledged higher voluntary contributions to the City. That coalition, which also includes at least one major Pittsburgh corporation (Duquesne Light) and possibly others, will then work with the City to secure “significant legislation in Harrisburg that allows the city to have a revenue stream that will protect the city going forward and fund [its pension] obligation into the future”.
According to the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor, speaking at a joint press conference, Pittsburgh’s pension difficulties are the product of unwise financial decisions in the past. He went on to say that “the responsibility for dealing with [legacy costs] now is ours”. Presumably, when using the term “ours” he was referring to the coalition of non-profits and the corporate community.
How does the coalition expect to make a case to the state legislature when there is plenty of evidence that the City will resist any remedial changes to the status quo, no matter how minimal?
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The coalition, no matter how well meaning, is engaged in another round of enabling the City in its addiction to spending and poor financial management. The problem is a lack of political will to take on powerful special interests. Why would the City change when it can count on the kindness of well-meaning, but sadly misguided, friends to bail them out one more time?
Read the whole story: Humbug: Coal to the Coalition for More Taxes
Happy 2010 – Meh.
Peter Hannaford has a rant on The American Spectator, explaining why January 1, 2010 is NOT the beginning of a new decade:
…A few years ago, when we were changing from 1999 to 2000, a large number of media people (NBC’s Brian Williams was a notable exception) surmised — without thinking — that it denoted a change from one century to another. It did not. The centuries actually changed from the 20th to the 21st one year later, on January 1, 2001.
Now, many of these same media folk have surmised that the first decade of the new century ends this Thursday, December 31, followed by a new one the next day. Collectively, they seem to have forgotten that the world normally count from One to 10 or One to 100, not Zero to 9 or Zero to 99…Continue reading The Zero Decade >>
Half-Price Tuition! (in Dubai)
Tamar Lewin, of The New York Times, reports that university branches in Dubai are struggling:
The collapse of Dubai’s overheated economy has left the outposts of Michigan State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United Arab Emirates struggling to attract enough qualified students to survive.
In the last five years, many American universities have rushed to open branches in the Persian Gulf, attracted by the combination of oil wealth and the area’s strong desire for help in creating a higher-education infrastructure. Education City in Qatar has brought in Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth.
Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates that make up the U.A.E. and the one that controls most of its oil, is still flourishing. And it is still generous in its support for the most ambitious American educational effort in the area, New York University’s liberal-arts college, which is scheduled to open there next fall with a highly selective class of 100 young students from around the world.
In Dubai, however, the timing for Michigan State and the Rochester Institute of Technology could hardly have been worse…Continue reading on NYTimes.com >>
Students, please bring your iPhones to class…What?!
Brian X. Chen had an article on the Wired Gadget Lab earlier this month, explaining how the iPhone could re-boot education:
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.
That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.
The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.
The verdict? It’s working quite well…Continue reading on Wired.com >>
Robert P. George
David Kirkpatrick, on the New York Times this week has a great story about Robert P. George, whom Kirkpatrick calls, “The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker“:
On a September afternoon, about 60 prominent Christians assembled in the library of the Metropolitan Club on the east side of Central Park. It was a gathering of unusual diversity and power. Many in attendance were conservative evangelicals like the born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who helped initiate the meeting. Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, was there as well. And so were more than half a dozen of this country’s most influential Roman Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Archbishop John Myers of Newark and Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia.
At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker. Dressed in his usual uniform of three-piece suit, New College, Oxford cuff links and rimless glasses, George convened the meeting with a note of thanks and a reminder of its purpose. Alarmed at the liberal takeover of Washington and an apparent leadership vacuum among the Christian right, the group had come together to warn the country’s secular powers that the culture wars had not ended. As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.
Two months later, at a Washington press conference to present the group’s “Manhattan Declaration,” George stepped aside to let Cardinal Rigali sum up just what made the statement, and much of George’s work, distinctive. These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”
Even marriage between a man and a woman, Rigali continued, was grounded not just in religion and tradition but in logic. “The true great goods of marriage — the unitive and the procreative goods — are inextricably bound together such that the complementarity of husband and wife is of the very essence of marital communion,” the cardinal continued, ascending into philosophical abstractions surely lost on most in the room. “Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man. Indeed, they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”
George looked on with arms crossed and lips sealed. But he was obviously pleased. To anyone who knew George’s work, the cardinal’s words sounded very much as if George had written them, and when I asked him about it later, he acknowledged providing assistance. Rigali’s remarks were a summation of the distinctive moral philosophy that is the foundation of George’s power…Continue reading on the New York Times >>
Still more ‘Jobs’ in Denver
Kieran Nicholson of The Denver Post, “Four more banks were robbed in Denver on Friday, continuing a recent acceleration in the robberies. Since Monday, 14 metro banks have been robbed.”
Continue reading Robbers hit 14 Denver metro banks in a week >>
Also see:
To see where jobs are legitimately on the rise, check out Some metros aren’t participating in the recession.
Is Colorado’s State Government Too Big?
Tim Hoover, at The Denver Post, reports on Colorado’s budget shortfall:
Colorado’s budget shortfall has grown another $40 million, to $600.6 million, for the fiscal year that ends in June, state economists said Friday.
And the state is now facing what appears to be closer to a cumulative $1.5 billion shortfall from the current year through the next fiscal year that starts in July, an increase from previous estimates that put the budget gap at $1 billion to $1.3 billion.
The good news, though, is that things are starting to turn around for the state.
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The recovery has been most noticeable in the past few months in the form of job growth, Mullis said. Net gains in employment were seen in October and November, with 1,800 more jobs alone in the latter month.
And the state’s plunge in consumer spending is starting to reverse, she said.
Still, Colorado remains battered from the recession, having lost 5 percent of its jobs since May 2008…Continue reading Colorado’s budget shortfall keeps growing >>
Jean-Francois Revel’s career-long argument against utopian thinking
Guy Sorman, at City Journal reviews Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era by Jean-Francois Revel:
French public intellectuals have a reputation—well-deserved—for being socialists, Marxists, or Trotskyists. One thinks in this regard of popular figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Simone de Beauvoir, all with fan clubs on American campuses. Some French thinkers, however, have carried forward another intellectual tradition, that of classical liberalism—pro-democracy and pro-market—and running from the work of Alexis de Tocqueville to Albert Camus to the philosopher and journalist Jean-François Revel, who died at 82 in 2006.
Revel, as demonstrated in the newly translated edition of his 1999 book, Last Exit to Utopia, hated all utopias, and always put reality first. For him, the plain facts showed that capitalism worked better than socialism. Yet self-proclaimed intellectuals stuck to socialism even after it had clearly failed. Throughout his career, Revel would attack, with vivacity and much humor, the blindness of these leftist thinkers. In Last Exit to Utopia, Revel systematically contrasted the indisputable realities with the stubborn leftist commitment to dubious social experiments.
Revel’s books are always a joy to read: his literary skill is in the vein of Voltaire or Moliere. He could never solve the ultimate puzzle of the Left’s blindness, however: why would educated scholars elevate utopian fantasy above reality?
Continue reading Bad Ideas Never Die >>
More Jobs Opening?
Remember all of those “Jobs on the rise,” in Denver recently? Well, The Denver Post is reporting that the trend is continuing:
The FBI is investigating another bank robbery in the Denver area, one of nine bank robberies in Denver this week. Authorities do not believe the crimes are related…Three banks were robbed Monday and three Tuesday…Continue reading With three more, nine bank holdups just this week >>
To see where jobs are legitimately on the rise, check out Some metros aren’t participating in the recession.
