Biddy Martin, Chancellor of the UW-Madison, leaves soon for the presidency of Amherst. She recently was conniving with Gov. Walker to radically alter the UW's governance. The idea was, I think, bad enough under any circumstance but it was ruinously reckless under the crooked and incompetent Walker Administration. In any event, the move failed. Martin claims this failure has nothing whatsoever to do with her leaving. Either she is a liar or a rotten human being. If her intent was regardless of the outcome of the changes to the UW system to leave, she really oughtn't have undertaken a radical reform she had no intention of overseeing. If, on the other hand, she was stringing Amherst along in the hopes that the changes would take place, she lied. Either way good riddance.
She earned 437k here plus perks and will get 500k there plus perks. That's an absurdly large salary to say nothing of the perks. She is everything that is wrong with higher education and education more generally: inflated salaries for disingenuous administrators whose every move is undertaken with an eye toward their next and higher paying position. Meanwhile, the worker bees laboring in the classrooms find their security disappearing and the salaries either stagnating or in decline.
Along the way higher education seems to have forgotten about the students
ReplyDeleteThat's partially correct, I think. It's the professionalization of the administration combined with the cult of the manager that's led to administrators treating education as if it were a business instead of a, you know, an inherently difficult and often impossible task of trying to create educated people.
ReplyDeletePlus someone has to have their name on those nice buildings. Most my professional life has been spent in higher Ed and it seems like the nicer the buildings the worse the education, and of course the higher the tuition.
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