More on the War on Tenure

From Inside Higher Ed:

It’s been a tumultuous year for faculty members within the University of Wisconsin System, from threats to the Wisconsin Idea to a proposed $300 million budget cut to Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that professors do more work to compensate for the slash. But many professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday afternoon when the state Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute, along with adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of financial exigency.

Read rest here.

Academic Freedom Watch: University of Manitoba

Based on an investigation conducted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), mainstream economists in the department of economics at the University of Manitoba, including the dean of faculty, have systematically marginalized heterodox professors. Robert Chernomas, a heterodox economics professor at the U of M, filed a grievance with university administration in 2009 claiming that the process for selecting a chair was “contrary to the collective agreement, unfair, unreasonable, and biased in relation to Dr. Chernomas.” Professor Chernomas had applied for the job but was not shortlisted by the committee. The committee eventually selected Pinaki Bose, an economics professor from the University of Memphis, in 2010. Since this appointment, according to Chernomos, heterodox professors have been "suppressed and isolated" to such an extent that they no longer hold any positions of authority or influence in the department.

Read rest here.

You get what you pay for; but not when it comes to business degrees

Veblen famously doubted whether Law Schools had a place in Universities, and as I noted not too long ago he was not altogether happy with what we would now call Business or Management Schools. He said in The Higher Learning in America:

"A college of commerce is designed to serve an emulative purpose only -- individual gain regardless of, or at the cost of, the community at large -- and it is, therefore, peculiarly incompatible with the collective cultural purpose of the university. It belongs in the corporation of learning no more than a department of athletics. Both alike give training that is of no use to the community,except, perhaps, as a sentimental excitement. Neither business proficiency nor proficiency in athletic contests need be decried, of course. They have their value, to the businessmen and to the athletes, respectively, chiefly as a means of livelihood at the cost of the rest of the community, and it is to be presumed that they are worth while to those who go in for that sort of thing. Both alike are related to the legitimate ends of the university as a drain on its resources and an impairment of its scholarly animus. As related to the ostensible purposes of a university, therefore, the support and conduct of such schools at the expense of the universities is to be construed as a breach of trust."

You would imagine then that at least for those that paid for a business degree it would have a compensation in the form of higher pay after graduation. It is not the case, as the PayScale last college salary report shows. Economics majors make considerably more than accounting, finance and business majors. Funny that enticement of pay opportunities is one of the ways in which business and management schools attract students and try to encroach economic departments in many universities.