In the last six days, I am certain that I spent at least 25 hours in the car and most of it behind the wheel. A long but good family trip. Anyway, I’m a bit behind, but I came across a couple of things I thought I’d group together in one post to kick off the race to the end of the semester.
- EMU Football finishes perfectly bad season. I don’t want to dwell too much on the emu’s perfectly wrong, 0-12 season, mainly because I’ve dumped enough on them already and I don’t want to kick ‘em when they’re down. But a sports savvy colleague of mine pointed out a problem that I hadn’t really thought about before. Sure, we should give Ron English at least one more year as head coach; but what exactly has this guy got to recruit on? “Hey, come play for me at EMU– we’re already at the bottom!”
- “Gov. Jennifer Granholm: Without big change, massive higher education cuts on horizon.” One of the “fun facts” from the article: in 1960, state appropriations made up 77% of the budget at the University of Michigan; today, it’s 22%. And it’s likely to get worse, too. Speaking of which:
- “Haves vs. Have-Nots at Public Universities,” from The New York Times. A lot of interesting points here, including the idea that maybe students from different income levels ought to pay different amounts of tuition at public universities.
- “Faculty objects to changing UT’s tenure process,” from the Toledo Blade, though I saw a version of this story a couple weeks ago in Inside Higher Ed. Basically, the president at the University of Toledo wants to be able to interview faculty going up for tenure to help aid his decision, and the faculty union is not happy about it. I think this is one of those situations in which both the suits and the union are wrong. I mean, the union shouldn’t be freaking out about faculty talking to the president; rather, I think faculty ought to be happy that the president wants to be a part of the process. Conversely, if UT President Lloyd Jacobs thinks that a 30 minute interview is all he needs to make an informed judgment about the tenure worthiness of faculty member, well, he’s nuts. The Blade article quotes the president of the faculty union as saying “Dr. Jacobs is on record talking about how he’ll be able to judge people on the basis of gestures, intonation, and other things.” That’s a little disturbing.

