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The whole university is dismantling itself, and parts of the machinery are not working. For example, an MPH applicant to the Public Health School received this letter (passed on by a reader):
Thank you for your application to our MPH program in Public Health Nutrition. Due to budget cuts, we are not able to offer [...]
Archive for the ‘Education policy’ Category
January 27th, 2010
January 7th, 2010
Category: California Politics, Education policy
The governor proposes swapping prison uniforms for mortarboards. I’m all for it. But he’s proposing to do it the wrong way.
December 18th, 2009
Category: Education policy, Teaching
Kevin Carey says that college educators are failing to teach students much of anything and concealing the information that would prove it. He’s basically right. But he might be surprised to how supportive college professors might be of efforts to do somethign about it.
November 25th, 2009
Category: California Politics, Education policy, Policy Analysis, Policy briefs, Political Science, Politics and Leadership
Debate in California about the funding cuts for higher education has become quite perplexing, partly because some of the parties are not thinking very clearly about it, partly because the question is fairly complicated, partly because the politics of California budgeting have become so pathological. In response to relentless nagging from David Schutz (well, he [...]
November 21st, 2009
Category: Education policy, Sports
Cal won its last two games against good teams, one close and today’s running away, so I have to retract the snarky aside about Tedford’s record in this post. We will have a winning season, probably win our last game as well, and finish in the upper division of the conference. The team recovered from [...]
November 19th, 2009
Another couple of shoes have dropped in the story of screwed-up values and national humiliation at Berkeley. The good news: readers will recall that the faculty senate passed a resolution demanding that subsidies to the intercollegiate athletics program stop going up, and quickly go back to zero (the accumulated debt of this program, which is [...]
November 4th, 2009
Category: Education policy, Sports
[UPDATE 2: Our resolution passed 3:2 91-68 in a very well-attended meeting. Local coverage here. Woo, hoo!]
The Berkeley faculty will meet tomorrow afternoon about the Intercollegiate Athletics program. This is a $65m per year enterprise that is supposed to operate on a self-sustaining basis but instead gets $12m per year in subsidies from various campus [...]
October 16th, 2009
Category: Education policy, Sports
Certain of my colleagues are taking advantage of the current financial crisis of the university by asking whether a big-time competitive athletic program is really central to our educational and research mission. These people are at best quibblers and whiners, at worst unpatriotic, unAmerican subversive agents (indeed, I know one of them to be an [...]
October 4th, 2009
Category: Education policy, Sports
Cal’s quarterback, Kevin Riley, hasn’t been playing as well as expected this year (completely crushing losses in the last two games). The coach put him in for a full half last year against USC, exactly a week after he suffered a concussion. Brain damage from repeated head impacts can take a long time to show [...]
September 29th, 2009
…a prima facie case of chronic educational malpractice at Berkeley. Apparently we have close to 3000 alumni who learned (from us?) that the most important thing they can do for Cal now is to buy a fifty-year football ticket for the price of a small house.
….One might ask, so what if it does make money? We could probably make a fortune with a modeling agency renting out good-looking undergraduates who got a custom-greased ride through their academics and beauty scholarships instead of pay; would that make it a good idea? It’s about as mission-relevant as our football program.