Making Universities into Hedge Funds
Bob Samuels has written a well-researched article on the flow of money into and within universities, carefully dissecting how student tuition and humanities departments are actually the supporters of university research activities (by virtue of using tuition as collateral as well as providing cheap labor for most of the undergraduate instruction) rather than the other way around, as is usually suggested. We would disagree with his suggestion of more assessment (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism for more details about the problems of higher education assessment in the UK context), but agree whole heartedly with the idea of creating separate teaching and research faculty; it is exactly this idea that we put forth at our undergraduate institution as a way of dealing with abyssmally poor instruction. However, we worry that none of his suggestions will come to pass until those who were responsible for getting us into this mess are held accountable.
Posted on 2010-02-02 01:51:58