UT System Leaders Look Back at a Long Year
Like many at the end of this year, University of Texas System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa and Gene Powell, the chairman of the board of regents, are in a reflective mood.
This week, they released a year in review — a list of 48 accomplishments from 2011, including the work of two task forces on productivity and online learning, the selection of Dr. Ronald DePinho as president of UT's MD Anderson Cancer Center and their participation in hearings held by the Legislature’s new joint oversight committee on higher education.
In an interview with the Tribune, both men said the item ...
Comments (3)
Bill Eaves via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Clean house, president & all
Milan Moravec
University of California Berkeley Chancellor must be fired.
. On an all in cost, Birgeneau has molded Cal. into the most expensive public university. Faculty wages must reflect California's ability to pay, not what others are paid.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau ($450,000 salary) dismissed many needed cost-cutting options. Birgeneau did not consider freezing vacant faculty positions, increasing class size, requiring faculty to teach more classes, doubling the time between sabbaticals, freezing pay & benefits, reforming pensions & health benefits.
Birgeneau said such faculty reforms would not be healthy for Cal. Exodus of faculty, administrators: who can afford them?
We agree it is far from the ideal situation. Birgeneau cannot expect to do business as usual: raising tuition; granting pay raises & huge bonuses during a weak economy that has sapped state revenues & individual income.
We must act. Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police deployed violent baton jabs on students protesting increases in tuition. The sky above Cal. will not fall when Birgeneau ($450,000 salary) is ousted.
Email opinions to the UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu
Jakob Tissaphernes
The Regents who celebrate the fiction that they are running the UT system are simply the hapless servants of a system that despises teaching specifically and Western Civilization generally, that rewards "research" (mostly trivial junkthink) and blows public funds on wasteful activities, such as ballooning salaries for administrators.
Here is what Republicans should do - and it is something taxpayers will support.
First, public funds should be given directly to students --not instituions-- in the form of vouchers. Undergrad tuition by law should be nothing more than the cost of undergrad education minus the state voucher - undergrads should not have to subsidize graduate training or anything else, as they currently do. This practice is risible on many levels.
All professors should be legally required to teach 3 classes per semester. Currently, and perversely, the more seniority and research publications a professor has, the less time in the classroom. UT should have separate non-teaching research faculty, not research faculty who hatefully dischage their limited teaching duties using foreign teaching assistants who can barely speak English.
Tenure has perverted higher education profoundly and should be replaced with fixed contracts. Freedom of expression is constitutionally guaranteed to all Americans. Also, if anyone thinks there is freedom of expression in higher education, they should try getting tenure as an open Republican!