I had The Talk with my chair

I turned in my application for a sabbatical next year. It’ll almost certainly be approved. Yay!

While I was there, I also discussed my future plans. I’m going to start phased retirement the year after that, 2026, and teach a 75% load that year. I’ll be negotiating with my colleagues about the years after that, but I’m thinking I’ll probably be outta here in 4 years.

I just hit my breaking point and decided to commit to an exit strategy. All of my classes are so inert — too many quiet faces staring expressionlessly at me every day. The students are fine, I just think I’m getting too old and losing that spark to trigger good engagement. They deserve better.

More good news: maybe there will be a job opening for a new biologist in a few years…if the administration eventually approves a replacement.

It’s Wisconsin — I’m surprised they didn’t fire him for veganism

Joe is the one on the right.

Joe Gow was a successful academic, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and he had an unusual hobby: he and his wife made porn. This is a case where we can even say it’s harmless stuff that isn’t exploitive at all, since it’s just the partners (they called themselves “@SexyHappyCouple”) and a few friends making home videos about the value of intimacy.

The university Board of Regents freaked out.

Regents are weird people selected for being staid and wealthy, and they tend to be far more conservative than the universities they manage. They forced Gow to step down from his position and threatened to strip him of his tenure.

They’ve gone and done it.

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously voted to revoke the tenure of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s former Chancellor Joe Gow.

The decision followed the recommendation to remove Gow by the UWL faculty committee in June and a hearing in front of the Regents on Sept. 20, the final step in a drawn-out faculty disciplinary process after discovering Gow’s involvement in pornographic content in Dec of 2023.

On Sept. 27. the Regents discussed Gow’s case in a closed-door session at UW-Parkside. They voted 17-0 to “dismiss with cause” and adopted a dismissal order in an open session with no discussion. Under Wisconsin state law to dismiss a tenured position there must be “just cause and only after due notice and hearing.”

Because of the termination, Gow will lose his faculty salary of $91,915 and over $310,000 in unused sick leave.

They called him “abhorrent” and “disgusting” who did “reputational harm” to the university. I actually looked at some of the videos. They weren’t to my taste, but sure, fine, they are optimistic and enthusiastic, and have a good message, even if I personally prefer privacy as part of my intimate life. These videos are examples of free speech that do absolutely no harm. And they fired him over them?

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Amy Wax has been saying…

  • Telling a Black student “that she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action.’”
  • “Stating in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women and remarking such a stereotype was accurate in the same way as ‘Germans are punctual.’”
  • Telling a student “invited to her home, that ‘Hispanic people don’t seem to mind…liv[ing] somewhere where people are loud.’”
  • “Stating in class that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity.”
  • “Commenting after a series of students with foreign-sounding names introduced themselves that one student was ‘finally, an American’ adding, ‘it’s a good thing, trust me.’”

Wax was suspended with pay for a year. She did not lose her tenure.

Who is doing the most harm to their university?

The bad actor problem in academia

I wrote about Amy Wax, who is a flamboyantly villainous evil professor. She’s still employed by UPenn, still has tenure, and despite fierce censure isn’t at real risk for losing her job. It made me think of a less cartoonishly bad person employed at the University of Minnesota.

Back in 2021, a paper was published that flagged a specific molecule, Aβ*56, as a likely causative agent in Alzheimer’s disease. It came out of the lab of Karen Ashe at the University of Minnesota, and the first author was Sylvain Lesne, a junior associate of Ashe’s. Shortly afterwards, people noticed that some of the data figures had been manipulated. It was obvious. It was the kind of thing that can’t happen accidentally — someone had to have intentionally gone in and shifted bands and added data to the figures.

Ashe has said the right thing, I think.

“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”

I’m willing to believe she didn’t know — I know how PI’s work. She has a team of people who do the actual scientific observations, and they bring images to her, and she trusts them and doesn’t pull up the raw data to scrutinize it with a microscope. But then, if she didn’t do it, who did?

I’m going to guess it wasn’t gremlins scampering about the lab. It wasn’t the custodians maliciously tinkering with the computers while cleaning up late at night. We have to ask who benefits from making the data ‘better,’ and the answer is…Sylvain Lesne. Who is now a full professor at the University of Minnesota. Cool. Although I’d never trust his work after this.

This fraud may not be as damaging as one might fear. I’d guess that the lab already had a fair amount of evidence that Aβ*56 was important; the fraudster wouldn’t invent a new phenomenon out of whole cloth, they’d just make the data they’ve got stronger.

There have been no repercussions to any of the people involved. They all agree (except Lesne, who has been silent) that fraud occurred, that it was done by someone named on the paper, but…nope, nothing has been done.

I find that extremely disturbing, that there is false evidence floating around in the literature, and no culprit has been recognized, and no one is even trying to find out who is responsible. I once found that our distilled water system was producing slightly contaminated water, and I spent days tearing down the still and scrubbing and sterilizing every component to remove the problem, but a taint in the research system? Nah, we can’t do anything about that.

Only a fool would be fooled by Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a notorious racist and extremist, recognized as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Only an extremely naive person could read any of his articles, which are generally pleasantly written and express less obvious hate than an extremely patronizing condescension. For example, did you know that he actually likes black people? Sure does. He says so.

Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.

The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.

That’s enough. You can read the rest of his article, where he mentions how they complimented his hat and speak an interesting dialect and are so trusting and child-like if you want, but you’ll recognize the game — he thinks that diminishing people into shallow stereotypes is flattering them.

I trust that readers here are not idiots and wouldn’t for an instant regard Jared Taylor’s condescension as anything but demeaning. Which means, obviously, that Amy Wax is not a reader here. Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn who has been regularly making racist comments to her students, insulting the Asian and Black students at her university, who have been lobbying for years to see her fired. She is such a dumb bigot that she invited Jared Taylor to speak to her classes…for some unfathomable purpose. Was she looking for training in treating her minority students more repulsively?

She has already applied that talent for condescension to Asian students, in addition to black students.

I confess I find Asian support for these [liberal] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Just like Jared Taylor, she’s a master at deploying stereotypes like backhanded compliments.

She hasn’t been fired yet, but she has been slapped down a bit.

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

It’s good to have tenure, isn’t it? You can even survive a blistering attack like this one, from the administration.

Wax’s conduct, according to [former U President] Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said.

For that, her punishment is half-pay for a year and a loss of summer salary — I bet her half-pay is more than my full pay, and I don’t get summer salary, either, and unlike Awful Amy, I can’t make it up through my connections to the Hoover Institute, or by hitting the lucrative right-wing lecture circuit.

Just wait, she’s going to be declared a martyr by the “free speech” poltroons. Not bad for someone unable to recognize how vile Jared Taylor is.

“Stanford’s Red Wedding”

Stanford University is rich — $30 billion endowment, all that silicon valley money flowing their way — and you’d think that would translate into well-supported education. Working against that, though, is that universities, even private universities, tend to be ruled by regents chosen for their wealth and conservative bias, and somehow they always decide against egalitarianism and education. Senior faculty also become jealous and protective of their privilege, and can do great harm to their discipline. That’s how great universities erode into mediocrity.

So now the university has decided to terminate a prestigious creative writing program.

I want to add more detail below to the decision made last week by Stanford University: All twenty-three Creative Writing Lecturers were told they’d be fired, some this academic year, some next academic year. This is a group of lecturers who have — along with our students — built one of the top CW programs in the country, and who have done so with very little university support over the last four years, since the death of our fierce, mighty, and visionary program director Eavan Boland.

Creative writing programs are an important part of a liberal arts curriculum. I can tell you having taught creative writing, a lot of students have a dull, plodding approach to writing and it takes a great deal of effort to teach them to add a little fire or music to their writing. Stanford can afford to maintain a great creative writing program, but apparently doesn’t want to. Why? There are hints in the pattern of firings.

  • The Jones Lecturers asked for a raise in 2023 (many lecturers made around $52,000), and exactly a year later, all of the lecturers who asked for pay raise were told they’d be fired. This seems beyond suspicious to us and to our students, and is in fact outrageous.
  • The deans and our own director clearly indicated in the August 21 meeting that we would be replaced with younger and lower-paid lecturers. This is also evident in the university’s online statement here. Again, completely outrageous.
  • It was the Senior Professors of our Creative Writing Program who voted to fire us, their junior colleagues, but interestingly… it was only the MALE professors who voted to fire us. Not one woman professor voted to fire the Jones Lecturers. And the decision to fire us was clearly not unanimous, and in fact received pushback from the English Department and in other quarters in the university.

Oh. They fired all the professors who had dared to ask for a raise ($52K/year would be a stretch in Morris, Minnesota, but Palo Alto? Insane), they are completely changing the program to be taught by adjuncts with one-year appointments, and huh…it was the men among the senior professoriate who decided to kill the program.

They’re turning a bunch of skilled writers loose with a solid dose of resentment? That’s a great way to build your brand, Stanford.

Don’t be that professor

This is Charles Conteh, a political scientist at Brock University in Canada.

He had a post-doc named Amy Lemay. They worked together on a paper; reading between the lines, it sounds like an awkward partnership. She provided lots of data, but suggested that it really needed to be split into a couple of papers. Conteh disagreed.

In emails seen by Retraction Watch, Conteh asked Lemay and another faculty member for feedback in March 2023, on a draft of the article they were writing. After reviewing their feedback, Conteh said he could no longer proceed with the project, citing “serious reservations” about Lemay’s suggestions to publish separate papers based on policy reports they had produced for Niagara’s Community Observatory platform.

“We can (and most likely will) cite them in future papers, but I object to the idea of us reproducing and republishing them in their current forms,” Conteh wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch. “I plan to revisit this project at a future date, but at this point, after some reflection, what I can candidly say is that I am not clear about a collaborative way forward.”

So far, so good. As the primary author, it was Conteh’s decision whether the work was ready to publish or not, and it’s actually commendable to not clutter the literature with a paper that was not up to standards. I’m on his side on that, so far.

Except…Conteh then went ahead and published the paper without attribution or acknowledgment anyway! He didn’t even inform his collaborators what he was doing, and they discovered accidentally that he’d dissolved their partnership and intentionally done the exact opposite of what he’d said he would do!

Months later, Lemay discovered the published paper online by accident. The article used text from the policy briefs she had worked on, without citing those sources.

Yikes. I wonder if maybe his relationship with his post-doc was rocky and contentious — I’ve known from first-hand experience a post-doc with an extraordinarily bad relationship with his PI — but that does not excuse improper attribution, and worst of all, plagiarism. Conteh is clearly in the wrong here.

But he then he slathered on a good-sized dollop of bullshit on his behavior, and any sympathy evaporated.

Lemay asked Conteh to add her as a co-author to the paper. In October, Conteh asked a journal editor if the authorship could be updated to include Lemay and another co-author’s name.

Conteh replied he was “glad that you’ve suddenly taken an interest in being a co-author in the manuscript now that it has been published. I am adding your name not because I think you deserve it or are entitled to it, but because it is the noble thing to do.”

You don’t get to magically turn plagiarism into nobility by slapping on an author’s name — that sounds more like you’re trying to buy her cooperation with an authorship, which is not noble at all. Also, if you think she does not deserve it, how is adding an unwarranted authorship “noble”? Get off that high horse, Dr Conteh. You’re just another opportunist.

I also see how Conteh could be a difficult person to work with.

The paper has been retracted, and a Brock University inquiry found Conteh in the wrong.

Another interesting point:

Though she recently finished a postdoc, Lemay worked in academia for 25 years before pursuing her PhD. At this point in her career, she said, she is not intimidated by the “power imbalance” in academia, as some younger students who are still forging a career path may be.

Yes, the hierarchical nature of academia is itself an obstacle to progress.

Degree in Three — don’t fall for it

Shhh. Don’t let my university administrators know about this post. It’s secret.

The University of Minnesota Morris has a new scheme for recruiting called Degree In Three. It’s promoting the idea that you can graduate in 3 years, rather than four. It’s all empty PR.

They aren’t lying. It’s true. It’s possible to complete your bachelor’s degree in three years at UMM.

What they’re not saying is that this is not a new program, students have always been able to do this. UMM allows considerable flexibility — there’s never been any kind of fixed year by year requirements where there is a necessary fourth year component to the degree. I was advising students 20 years ago about ways to finish an accelerated program. It just required either coming in with a buttload of college credits (entirely possible, Minnesota has Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) where advanced high school students could get college credits), or you could just take overloads every semester. It wasn’t fun or easy, but it was doable. I usually tried to dissuade students from going that route, but now it’s an advertising gimmick.

Where I object is that nothing has changed. We certainly haven’t reduced graduation requirements. You still have to complete 120 credits; you can do that by taking 20 credits every semester for three years, or, as they suggest, 16 credits every semester + 8 credits of summer courses every year. So, basically, our Degree in Three program is about telling students to work harder faster.

One obstacle to this plan is that we don’t have the staffing to provide every course every semester, so students will have to plot a very specific path through the available courses to complete all the requirements. For instance, we don’t offer ecology in the spring here, because normally it’s so cold and snowy as to preclude any fieldwork — if you thought you’d just take it in spring of your third year, nuh-uh, you’re going to have to take it in a fourth year anyway. It also limits flexibility. Your schedule is so tight that if you fail to get in to a necessary course one year, the cascade of failed prerequisites may screw all of your plans. No, we’re not hiring additional faculty to cope with this problem.

A course overload is serious business. I’ve often had to advise students who sign up for too many courses at once, confident that they could handle it, and then they get sick one week or a relative dies and kaboom, suddenly, no they can’t handle it. I try to recommend that my students take only two lab courses at once, because they’re already a big time-suck, but I’ve had some students try to take three…they just disappear for a semester. It’s a miserable amount of work. Our students are ambitious over-achievers, so they’ll try and some will succeed, but I’m not here to crack whips.

The whole program is antithetical to the liberal arts experience. Students are supposed to have the opportunity to explore the world of ideas, taking classes in a specific degree-granting program, but also being able (even required and expected) to take a variety of courses outside that program. Oh, you’re trying to get a degree in biochemistry, but you’ve discovered that you love poetry and literature? So sorry, you don’t have time to take those courses before we trundle you out the door at an accelerated pace.

I get a fair number of prospective students coming to visit me (maybe not so many after you leak this to the administration) and I know I’m going to meet parents and students in a hurry who will ask me about this program. I will tell them that sure, I can advise them on how to speed-run through college, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The four year plan is much more comfortable and will allow you to enjoy college and develop a breadth of interests. I also know that some of those ambitious students will be back in my office in their second year panicking because they failed an o-chem exam and now think that revising their graduation plan will cost them that $20,000 that they imagined “saving” thanks to the Degree in Three plan.

I repeat, there’s nothing dishonest about the Degree in Three plan. It’s just nothing new, costs the university absolutely nothing, and is just about telling the students they can graduate faster if they work much harder. It’s not a great selling point, if you ask me.

They didn’t ask me, of course. I’ve been at faculty meetings where we irrelevant faculty make these same points, but hey, the advertising campaign is in the works.

What does Auburn University do?

I know they have to have good people working there, and any major state university is going to be providing support to valuable programs, but…if you asked me to name something memorable about Auburn, I’m afraid my brain is going to be flooded with nothing but FOOOBAAAWWW. It’s a sports school. They seem to think that’s the whole raison d’etre for existing. They spent $30 million on football alone last year. And that’s their reputation.

In recent decades, Auburn University added hundreds of millions of dollars in spending to its budget. The additional money didn’t go to the English department, nor to the sociology department. Some science departments only got a trickle more.

Instead, much of the money went toward administrative salaries, buildings and, no surprise, sports.

Auburn piled millions more each year into paying down the debt it borrowed for campus upgrades, including an $84 million basketball arena. It hired hundreds of administrators and professional staff. Spending on the president’s office and other administrative departments often increased far faster than that on many academic subjects.

That’s from a breakdown of Auburn’s budget. They’re pouring money into everything but education, and guess how they’re paying for it? By raising tuition to cover a spending spree.

Among Auburn’s projects built between 2002 and 2016: A $20 million building that is home to information technology staff. A $20 million kinesiology building with labs focused on physical activity and human movement. A $16 million indoor sports facility project that allows student athletes to practice during bad weather.

In 2013, Auburn opened a recreation and wellness center that cost $74 million to build. It includes climbing towers, an indoor track and an outdoor pool with a diving well, basketball goals and its own wet climbing wall.

In 2009, students voted to increase fees to finance the center’s operations, and each paid $450 toward it last school year.

In addition, in 2016, the university began a multiyear $15 million renovation of the president’s house.

Though donors sometimes help with building costs, Auburn paid for many buildings in part by borrowing money, which shows up in annual budgets as debt service. In 2016, Auburn spent about $60 million paying down its debt, much of which was related to buildings. That’s roughly triple what it spent in 2002.

You know, I can’t blame them. They are merely serving the demands from donors, alumni, and potential students — the reason many people go to Auburn is foobaww. If the administration were to pare down athletics expenditures, if they were to stop promoting football, football, football and try to become the intellectual powerhouse they have the potential to be, the citizens of Alabama would rise up in fury and cut them off at the knees, and their students would flee to some other Southern state that is still pushing football. They’ve got a donor base that is rich and wants “their” team to win, and students who are there on Mommy & Daddy’s money and want their perks and privileges.

The school’s student body is unusually well-heeled for a public school. Only 11% of full-time freshmen received federal Pell Grants, reserved for low-income students, in 2021-22. That’s one of the lowest percentages of any public U.S. university and also the vast majority of private colleges.

Auburn also ranks among the most expensive public schools for poor families, who attend some state schools for almost nothing. Auburn freshmen from families earning under $30,000 annually owed an average $17,481 in total costs after scholarships in 2021-22, federal data show.

Interesting, given that Alabama is the 6th poorest state in the nation. Auburn does not serve the general population, but rather the wealthiest citizens. It is officially a public state college, but looks more like a private college with specialized appeal.

They’re also afflicted with the parasites that infest every educational institution in the country.

But Auburn has disproportionately hired administrators and staff. Between 2002 and 2016, Auburn added nearly 600 full-time employees, numbers published by the college show. The number of faculty grew by 10% while the number of administrators grew by 73%.

Though average salaries for professors climbed in the mid-2000s, over the next decade they roughly kept pace with inflation, Auburn’s figures show.

In Auburn’s academic colleges, spending on the administration—usually the dean of a college and his or her staff—often rose faster than spending on individual academic departments.

In some administrative areas outside of Auburn’s academic colleges, spending often rose even faster.

Gogue earned $846,000 in salary, bonus and benefits in calendar 2016, the last full year of his first term as president, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks pay for public college presidents.

He earned more money in other years. In 2017, for example, his total compensation topped $2.1 million because he received a payout of deferred compensation that had been previously set aside. Gogue said he doesn’t remember details from his compensation at Auburn.

I’d love to see a similar analysis of the University of Minnesota system. I often feel that we’re busily hiring administrators, while academic departments are scraping along understaffed, begging to fill faculty lines that are empty because of attrition or retirements or people looking for better positions, and we’re told there is a hiring freeze or worse, only a limited number of slots are available, so departments are expected to fight with each other to see who gets the position. When we’re down to 3 people teaching all of science, or 2 people teaching all of the humanities, I don’t think our surplus of administrators will step in to teach our classes (and we wouldn’t want them to — we’ve got standards.)

I’m also thinking that $2 million would cover the salaries and benefits of about 20 entry level faculty.

Sympathy for the state next door

Oh, Wisconsin. The Republicans want to strangle their university system.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers had proposed a $305 million increase for the UW System over the next two school years.

Republican lawmakers instead cut state funding for campuses by $32 million in an effort to defund diversity offices, which they see as a waste of money.

UW-Madison will bear the brunt, losing $7 million, or 44%, of this year’s $16 million cut. The university enrolls about one-third of UW System students. UW-Madison declined to comment on the cut.

Diversity offices are a waste of money? Only if you think only wealthy and middle class white people deserve a university education…which, I will admit, is true to the Republican ethos. Don’t worry, though, they’re dangling a carrot with the promise of restoring the money. All the university has to do is focus on vocational programs and cut all the diversity and equity programs. This is

UW System has a chance to recoup the $32 million budget cut. Officials must present a plan to the Republican-controlled budget-writing committee on how campuses would spend the money on workforce development.

The Regents will receive a preview of the plan in October, said UW System chief finance officer Sean Nelson. Spending will focus on engineering, data, science and nursing programs.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said the UW System won’t get its money back unless it eliminates diversity and equity programs — an idea UW officials have previously shot down.

“Let’s hope these campuses start by eliminating their unnecessary (diversity, equity and inclusion) positions,” he said in a statement responding to the latest furlough news. “It would be a first step in showing they’re serious about cutting wasteful spending, shoring up their deficits, and working with the Legislature to develop sustainable long-term funding solutions.”

Well, great. My daughter is currently on the job market, and the kinds of jobs she’s looking for are in biomedical computing — so those positions aren’t in immediate danger. But a healthy workplace in academia or industry requires a good balance, and also requires diversity, so this is a long-term threat.

Another long-term problem is that we’ve been starving the universities in Minnesota as well as Wisconsin.

Ten of the 13 universities are projecting deficits this year, too, and many are taking significant action to rein in spending. UW-Oshkosh is laying off 200 employees and mandating furloughs for all other staff. UW-Parkside and UW-Platteville are considering similar measures.

Most campuses are using money from a tuition increase to offset their deficits. The Regents voted earlier this year to increase in-state undergraduate tuition across all 13 universities by about 5%. It was the first time since 2012.

Many campuses are also tapping tuition balances, which is what campuses carry over as their main source of reserves. They’ve been spending down their reserves for more than a decade. UW-Oshkosh, for example, said it expects to deplete its balances by the end of this school year.

“This is not sustainable,” Rothman put it plainly.

Again, this is the Republican agenda. Diversity programs are just the latest crack in the system that they’re hammering on, but make no mistake: the ultimate goal is the destruction of all of higher ed.

Reality check

If you read the newspapers or watch Fox News (nobody here pays attention to Fox News, right?) you may come away with a skewed perspective of the hierarchy of power at universities. Here’s a helpful perspective, with myth on the left, reality on the right.

The only omission is the absence of coaches, but maybe that’s OK. Coaches don’t actually make any decisions or contribute to academic life, they are off to the side, grinning happily as they skim off millions of dollars, with which the trustees and donors fill their pockets.

The students return to my university today. I’ll try not to infect them with my cynicism.