For MEB, forever and ever.

First, as an adjunct professor, I can't say I had too much sympathy with any of the particpants in that affair, the affair being the firing and rehiring of the UVA President, if there are lessons to be learned, the first of which is that the Higher Learning needs less administrators, and more teachers.

You can't swing a dead cat in higher education without hitting a rule or an adminstrator, which costs money, and worse time and energy.

Someone someday will make a video along the lines of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, except that they'll call it the Turtles as Administrator's skit of the Administrators of Administrators of Silly Walks.

Turtles is from the following allegory.

The Master is approached by the Grasshopper with the following question: "Master, what holds up the earth?"

"An elephant."

"What holds up the elephant?"

"Four turtles, one per foot."

"What holds up the turtles?"

"It's turtles all the way down, and get back to work Grasshopper."

It's administrators all the way down in higher education, lacking only an overt Administrators of Adminstrators of Silly Walks Ministry, always finding more work for each other to do, which is great for administrators, if not great for anyone else. To be fair, the idea of telling academics to do something they don't want to do is not appealing if you know any academics, as they're cats and herding, like that great IBM commerical.

If you want to reform Higher Education, the first thing to do is say, "A ten per cent cut across the board in administrative expense, senior level expenses first, preferably salaries, save for the "Coordinators." Cut those in half."

Even better, shut down quality of life improvements, and let them revert to about 1980, save for connectivity to the Internet, maybe, since of course now that I'm old I had to walk uphill ten miles through the snow blah, blah, blah. The arms race in building is a significant cost driver, in which some form of mutual truce would be helpful to avoid assured destruction. Good luck with that, as it's all keeping up with the Joneses.

But I digress as to an adjunct's perspective on the UVA affair, none of who's characters are in the slightest bit earning any sympathy from me.

It's not like if the UVA President had in fact been fired permanently that she would have been a garbage collector the rest of her life, since she got paid about a quarter of a million dollars, instead of $18,000 in a good year from one college, unless you had the temerity to tell her she was suppressing free speech in a legally actionable manner on a "Send All" campus email, and she was an Englsh major: LOL

If an adjunct ever crossed someone like her, which I did with "Liberals "more than once, "Gee, if Shinseki said hundreds of thousands of troops years, and there are 130,000 in Iraq, that's a problem, Duh"  they could starve to death in the current version of Higher Learning, especially for questioning the current Leftist orthodoxies in the Social Sciences, save for parts of economics, and even there the Keynesians wield a lot of power, as to the supposed "academic freedom" this episode is supposedly about.

The UVA President I have little sympathy for, because not once did she speak in all of this to the plight of adjunct faculty, who teach one half of the college classes in the United States, generally speaking without any health insurance, not even a catastrophic policy for an appendectomy, and on often on a semseter to semester basis, where one word, one look from someone like her, and that adjunct is a garbage collector in today's "Higher Learning."

The hedge fund billionaire who launched this episode is also not a sympathetic character from an adjunct's perspective, not because he's a billionaire, but because he's practicing so far outside his field, as to what it is that makes a University different than a corporation.

What makes a University different than a private corporation is that part of its mission very clearly is to advance knowledge of Nature in ways that may or may not have a practical impact for centuries, which is something corporations will rarely do, mainly by accident, even though it benefits everyone.

That's not because corporations are bad, but because they have a different set of objectives by their nature, as to having to please current shareholders.

Who the shareholders are in Academia in theory is society, if in practice Administrators and Faculty are pretty adept at extracting what economists call rents, like benefit packages that priced a whole generation of academics out of anything but adjuncting, and which like public sector union workers in Stockton are now blowing up in their faces. At least the firefighters and cops I would grant need that early retirement aspect, since you can't usually chase down a crack dealer or climb a ladder to a fire very well when you are sixty.

So I weep not for the UVA President, because what did she do for adjuncts, zero, although hedge fund billionaires aren't tbe best people to take the needed cost-knife to Higher Education, which would start in reality in Adminstrative expense, and especially the buildings arms race for spoiling students further.

finis