Posts Tagged ‘Clay Shirky’
Clay Shirky’s Adjunct Math
Other people have already taken up Clay Shirky’s latest more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger piece about how we just can’t afford the university anymore in these tough times. I just wanted to check the math about adjuncts.
I recently saw this pattern in my home institution. Last fall, NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors proposed reducing senior administrative salaries by 25%, alongside a ‘steady conversion’ of non-tenure-track jobs to tenure-track ones ‘at every NYU location’. The former move would save us about $5 million a year. The latter would cost us $250 million.
Now NYU is relatively well off, but we do not have a spare quarter of a billion dollars per annum, not even for a good cause, not even if we sold the mineral rights under Greenwich Village.
The operating budget of NYU in fiscal year 2014 is $6.5 billion. $250 million is a shade under 4% of that number. 4% is a lot to cut out of a budget — you couldn’t do it overnight — but it’s not some impossible goal either. It wouldn’t take a ton of long-term planning and reorganization to cut down 4% over a period of, say, five years. I know a lot of academic units have been made to cut deeper than that in recent years. (UPDATE: See the comments for what the math looks like if you cordon off the hospital funds.)
This seems eminently doable and something the university should absolutely prioritize.
Hilariously, $5 million to $250 million is not that far off from 3.8%; it’s 2%. 2% is a paltry sum, not even worth discussing next to the whole. One sentence later, 3.8% is a king’s ransom we could literally never find even if we sold the mineral rights to Greenwich Village.
Resistance is Futile: Forests, Lightning, MOOCs, and the Borg Complex
A Borg Complex is exhibited by writers and pundits whenever you can sum up their message with the phrase: “Resistance is futile.”
Michael Sacasas and Aaron Bady with the latest on the MOOC Collective.
The rhetorical function of “MOOC” is this bait and switch: MOOC is a fantasy of potential, a stand-in for what could be, whose possibility makes it unnecessary to produce evidence for its plausibility. This is also why Shirky doesn’t talk about the lightning that’s destroying the rotten tree. He doesn’t talk about what will replace “College” once MOOC’s have destroyed it, or defend the proposition that a world with MOOC’s instead of colleges is a good thing. He just talks about how terrible actually existing college is. The aftermath can take care of itself; the futurologist places his faith in it, but he does not subject it to all that much scrutiny.
Thursday Night Links
* Clay Shirky, getting right to the point: “MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree.” Okay, now we’re getting honest! Let’s have that conversation.
* Some people like to claim that minorities can’t take jokes; those people have never had to try to take a joke. The frat in question, incidentally, has already managed to be re-suspended.
* A brief history of the first eleven Lady Doctors Who.
* North Carolina Appoints Pre-School Opponent To Head Pre-School Services.
* The Tick That Can Make You a Vegetarian.
* It’s not you, it’s quantitative cost-benefit analysis.
* Average earnings of young college graduates are still falling.
* I’m extremely disappointed to report I haven’t read a single one of the 10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You’ve Never Read.
* The federal prison population has spiked 790% since 1980.
* The Master of The Master of Disguise has watched the Dana Carvey flop 21 times since November.
* Is marijuana the last, best hope for labor unions?
* Justice League starts from scratch.
* Fox News Claims Solar Won’t Work in America Because It’s Not Sunny Like Germany.
* And just to see if Tim Wientzen read down this far: when Joyce sketched Bloom.