Sure. But the original point by @tarrator was that if it were all about money, you’d get rid of college athletics, not just football. If it’s just football, many if not most programs post a profit.
Athletic departments is another matter entirely. Also:
There are a lot of hidden costs associated with big-time (and small-time for that matter) college sports, especially big-time football and basketball, many of which can’t be quantified into dollars and cents.
Texas is one of a few outliers, and based on this, Athletics Spending - UT News , the high water mark for athletic transfer to non-athletic (presumably) funds is $12 million. Nothing to sneeze at, but hardly worth the effort and distraction involved in running a gargantuan athletics department, especially at a school and operation as large as UT. Miami, which also runs a big-time football program, is more typical, historically operating at break-even or loss. Compare to its UHealth, which netted the school over $400 million last year. If it were dollars and cents, you’d focus on expanding UHealth or some other such value-added program and ditch sports. Of course, sports generates love and loyalty and irrational enthusiasm, and that all translates to donations.
Don’t get me wrong. I, too, have an irrational love for college sports. But it’s a hard one to justify on economics alone unless you went straight Darwin with it and only ran for-profit programs, which would eliminate everything but football and men’s bb.
The bill, which calls for five-year review of tenure by the board of trustees, was signed into law in April of 2022, and some of us are wondering what the big deal is because there hasn’t been a mass exodus of faculty? They have 5 years in which to make other plans. I would guess that if there is a negative effect, it would more likely be long-term. I have no idea if that will be the case, but yelling “all’s well!” because of a data point over less than one year doesn’t seem compelling.
I am more conservative than many posters in this forum; at least I suspect that to be the case. Any even I would say that the idea that this isn’t entirely politically motivated is honestly laughable. People may like the idea on other than a partisan basis, but that’s where it’s coming from, 100%. Denying it is ridiculous. I give you the most obvious partisan talking points by House Speaker Sprowls from the linked article. And it’s not as if there hasn’t ever been a political assault on academia and the intellectual class in this country.
Let the board of trustees/governors appoint a president and let the president run the university. I don’t see the need for this law, which feels more like grandstanding. Academia is just such an easy and soft target. The average person doesn’t understand or appreciate the role that higher education, beyond that of super practical training, plays in our society and why it’s a good thing. It’s too abstract an idea for a lot of people.
Have you seen the cost for a new pool? Last year I priced one out, and it was close to $70K.
I’m sure the President’s pool will be twice the size and have a bunch of extra’s. The President’s house is a focal point for socializing, events and fund raising.
The decision to build it was made prior to Sasse being chosen and he had no input. It’s cost is being handled by donors (not school funds).
Of course it’s political. Anything that comes out of the state legislature is political by it’s very nature.
The focus on Tenure is about accountability. The legislature (and the public in general) are naturally negative about Tenure (“Why do they get a job for life and we don’t?!”). Tenure is a complicated subject (it’s not about a “job for life”) and one the University system has to defend to the legislature.
If you followed the reaction to Ben Sasse being selected for President, you can see members of the Faculty and the union making a lot of noise about it. The legislature folks also see this, and take the response as being political. They tend to respond to that, usually when it’s time to determine funding.
The 5 year tenure review thing is a nothing burger. It’s being done by the same folks that normally do reviews (not by anyone outside of the normal university system). Reviews already happen. I doubt we’ll see any noticeable increases in the number of folks that may lose tenure.
On the plus side, it gets the legislature to stop threatening to change tenure.
Maybe not quite in the sense I mean it. It seems to me much more about grandstanding and throwing a partisan punch. I would like to think that not everything that comes out of the state legislature falls into this category of partisan maneuvering. At least I’m not ready to be quite that cynical about state government.
I wasn’t aware that tenure was such a long-standing issue with the Florida legislature, or that it was that complicated. I don’t think we have that problem in Washington state; but I could be wrong.
Obviously this group wouldn’t be interested in holding to account professors who push a conservative view about market economies and small government. Anyway, once I see “indoctrination,” I pretty much stop reading.
Tenure, as a concept, is often misunderstood. It’s not a job for life, as it’s often described in the media, but an indefinite academic appointment that can be terminated for cause/finacial exigency or program discontinuation. Also, academic freedom isn’t the same thing as one’s 1st amendment rights. For example, freedom of inquiry isn’t covered by your 1st amendment.
Tenure has been “questioned” by state legislatures for years. Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin are recent examples. When Wisconsin “gutted” tenure in 2015/16, there was much talk about Wisconsin losing “top professors”.
In fact, a study was done in 2021 to review the impact on University faculty and students. The nerds (myself included) may find it interesting. What impact faculty headcount was the reduction in funding that also happen with the law that was passed in 2016. Also declining enrollment across the state has put pressure on university budgets, also impacting hiring. While some individuals may have chosen to leave, most of the loses seem to be due to not filling tenure track positions due to budget concerns.
That’s why I think the 5 year tenure review will have little impact on faculty retention. What matters is funding for faculty, used in hiring and salary raises. Money talks.
Interesting bit in the study (being an engineer), is how engineering faculty headcounts was not, in general, impacted. The universities made filling those roles a priority, even though engineering (and medical) faculty are amongst the best paid.
Professor’s performance is reviewed annually, just like everybody else’s. The new requirement for a 5 uear review just adds more bureaucratic burden to the process. Tenure is more about academic freedom than job security.
If tenure was genuinely about academic freedom, you’d see more, or at least some, conservative professors in the sociology, political science, journalism, history, education and English departments. But you don’t. The tenure program has evolved significantly from what was intended, which is why some are trying to fix it. It doesn’t matter if it’s k-12 or colleges or universities. These organizations, like every organization, can do better.
I don’t. Never said I did. But the political leanings of faculty within US colleges and universities has been recorded in numerous studies and surveys, and the results are no secret. Is UF more balanced than the results of these studies and surveys? Maybe, but I doubt it. My student’s experience with these departments on campus, although anecdotal, confirms what I believe to be true. My family is filled with current and former college professors, and they have experienced the challenges that come from trying to become tenured when you don’t pass the political litmus test. Those who profess to hold the freedom of speech so dear tend to behave very differently in higher education.
Have you considered the idea that those who have considerable education in these areas might become more “liberal” in response to that accumulation of knowledge and perspective?
Colleges and universities are commonly more diverse than high schools (which are typically more diverse than elementary schools), since they tend to enroll students from larger areas. They are also commonly more diverse than many other workplaces or neighborhoods that people settle in after entering the work force. Hence, it is possible that there is some self-selection of faculty in favor of those who like diversity over those who do not (who may prefer other jobs for this reason). To the extent that liking diversity tends to be associated with left-leaning politics, that may be a driver for left-leaning people being more likely to want to work in colleges and universities.
This is a pipeline issue. The people who tend to want to go into academia (in most, but not all, disciplines) trend left to begin with. It’s more about self-selection than anything else. These are people who are more willing to accept the opportunity cost of 5-10 years of lost income while in a Ph.D. program for the sake of doing what they love, similarly likely to favor careers with lower salaries if they can pursue their passions, more likely to have had positive experiences in their college’s intellectual environments, and so on. Conservatives are more likely to favor graduate and professional degrees that can launch them into high-earning careers sooner. Graduate school is not transformative in the way the college is – it’s not turning people liberal. Scholars who’ve studied the political imbalance in academia have also found no evidence of discrimination. It’s really self-selection – so if you have fewer conservatives going into academia in the first place, you’ll have fewer still coming out (because a lot of people choose other paths).
No, not at all. I would argue that those who spend most of their careers in academia may be what some consider “well educated,” but I find they are woefully unprepared to compete and succeed in the outside world. I think many of them gravitate to liberal ideology because it protects them from the real world. There are, of course, highly educated liberals who are wildly success outside of academia. I believe that much of their liberal beliefs are a result of elitism. That elitism comes from the same place as your suggestion that their accumulated knowledge and perspective makes them liberal because they are superior in some way to more conservative individuals. I’ve never understood this level of arrogance from people who profess to embrace tolerance, diversity, inclusion and equity. But I am fully aware it exists.
What is the outside world, exactly? And how are we defining competition and success? A lawyer is trained and prepared to compete and succeed in the world of law. An accountant is trained and prepared to compete and succeed in the world of finance. An engineer, a consultant, a doctor, an architect – all trained and prepared to compete and succeed in their respective worlds. An academic is likewise trained and prepared to compete in the world of academia. How are academic disciplines more sheltered, how are they less useful and broadly applicable than other people’s professional worlds? (They might not be as useful to you but this does not means that academic work is not useful.)
Working in the world of academia also involves interacting with the world outside academic settings: through museum work, policy and civic engagement initiatives, consulting on public projects relevant to our disciplines, communicating complex ideas to a broader public through interviews with the media or writing for popular audiences, consulting on or working in digital humanities or STEM projects and programs, conducting outreach efforts to nonprofits, industries, and public schools … and, yes, teaching (which does, after all, put us in contact with a wider public, because undergraduates come from all walks of life and are mostly headed toward non-academic futures). As a history professor, I have done almost all of the things I just listed. So I’m not really sure why people have the impression that academics are only capable of working within a tiny professional bubble and become useless idiots outside of it. And as far as elitism is concerned, this tendency is hardly endemic to academia, nor does it pervade all of academia. We can see in the professions of law, business, and medicine (to name just three examples) that elitism is not exclusive to academics, and it does not have a partisan slant.
