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A Day in the Life of a Retired Illinois Professor
David Rubenstein, via the Weekly Standard, thanks the Illinois taxpayer for his retirement package from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rubenstein estimates that "given a normal life span, these benefits nearly doubled my salary. And in Illinois these benefits are constitutionally guaranteed, up there with freedom of religion and speech." It is a startling illustration of the runaway cost of a higher education that increasingly bypasses the needs of students to maintain bloated administrative bureaucracies. This kind of system also provides faculties with malincentives detrimental to student learning. "To be sure," Rubenstein stresses, "some of my colleagues were prodigious researchers, devoted teachers, and outstanding departmental, university, and professional citizens. But sociologists like to talk about what they call the 'structural' constraints on behavior. While character and professional ethics can withstand the incentives to coast, the privileged position of a tenured professor guarantees that there will be slackers." The old wisdom holds true: you can't pay a good teacher enough and you can't pay a bad teacher little enough, but, as Rubenstein points out, higher education is creating structures that corrupt. The responsibility lies with the trustees to end such structures, because if they will not stand up for students, who will? Not the same deans, provosts, chancellors/presidents who keep their own bloated salaries by going along to get along. Rubenstein also offers insightful comments on the political bias of college academia.
Posted by mbrindle on June 10, 2011 at June 10, 2011 04:00 PM
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