College and University Roundup

A fist­ful of education-related tabs that have been sit­ting in my RSS reader, wait­ing for me to say some­thing insight­ful about them:

• The Library Web Site of the Future (Inside Higher Ed): “Sev­eral years ago aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions shifted con­trol of their Web sites from tech­nol­ogy wiz­ards to mar­ket­ing gurus. At the time there was back­lash. The change in out­look was per­ceived as a cor­po­rate sell­out, a philo­soph­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the uni­ver­sity Web site from can­did cam­pus snap­shot to soul­less adver­tiser of cam­pus wares to those who would buy into the brand… I was one of the resisters. Now I think the mar­ket­ing peo­ple got it right. The first thing librar­i­ans must do after end­ing the pre­tense that the library Web site suc­ceeds in con­nect­ing peo­ple to con­tent is under­stand how and why the insti­tu­tional home­page has improved and what we can learn from it. Doing so will allow aca­d­e­mic libraries to dis­cover answers to that first ques­tion; how to cre­ate user com­mu­nity aware­ness about the elec­tronic resources in which the insti­tu­tion heav­ily invests.” My thoughts: Isn’t it weird to have a por­tal at all? Why not some­thing like Firefox’s Ubiq­uity, that just lets you type “pubmed liver can­cer” to con­nect directly to the resource? (Note: part of the genius of Ubiq­uity is that it shows you what com­mands are pos­si­ble! it is poten­tially more user-friendly than any drill­down portal.) 
• To Keep Stu­dents, Col­leges Cut Any­thing But Aid (New York Times): “The increases high­light the hand-to-mouth exis­tence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known insti­tu­tions. With only tiny endow­ments, they need full enroll­ment to sur­vive, and they are anx­ious to pre­vent top stu­dents from going else­where. Falling even a few stu­dents short of expec­ta­tions can mean lay­ing off fac­ulty, elim­i­nat­ing courses or shelv­ing planned expan­sions. ‘The last thing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties are going to cut this year is finan­cial aid,’ said Kathy Kurz, an enroll­ment con­sul­tant to col­leges. ‘Most of them rec­og­nize that their dis­count rates are going to go up, but they’d rather have a dis­counted per­son in the seat than no one in the seat.’” My thoughts: It’s weird. If stu­dents don’t enroll, we’ll have to lay off fac­ulty. So, in order to pay for an increased aid bud­get, we must lay off faculty.
• In Tough Times, Human­i­ties Must Jus­tify Their Worth (NYT): “As money tight­ens, the human­i­ties may increas­ingly return to being what they were at the begin­ning of the last cen­tury, when only a minus­cule por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion attended col­lege: namely, the province of the wealthy. That may be unfor­tu­nate but inevitable, Mr. Kro­n­man said. The essence of a human­i­ties edu­ca­tion — read­ing the great lit­er­ary and philo­soph­i­cal works and com­ing ‘to grips with the ques­tion of what liv­ing is for’ — may become ‘a great lux­ury that many can­not afford.’” My thoughts: Boooooo. This arti­cle, like its ret­ro­grade view of what the human­i­ties are about, stinks.
• See Also: Siamese Twins (Wyatt Mason/Harpers): “Fowler’s Mod­ern Eng­lish Usage, in any of its incar­na­tions, is pure plea­sure. There’s doubt­less a med­i­c­i­nal value to its entries, but they enter­tain so deeply and purely that it all goes down very sweetly. Over the years, I’m sure I’ve read it more for plea­sure than with pur­pose, less in the hope of resolv­ing a con­fu­sion over ‘pleonasm’ than to dis­cover that ‘pleonasm’ was some­thing at all. Where the New Oxford Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary defines the term as ‘the use of more words than are nec­es­sary to con­vey mean­ing, either as a fault of style or for empha­sis,’ Fowler’s offers a lit­tle les­son.” My thoughts: I love this.
• Col­lec­tive Grad­u­ate School Action (The Econ­o­mist): “If you’re going to go back to school, now is the time to do it. Not only is the oppor­tu­nity cost of the time spent extremely low — wages aren’t likely to rise any time soon, and there may not be a job avail­able any­way — but so to is the oppor­tu­nity cost of the money invested. What, you’d rather have that tuition sit­ting in the mar­ket right now? Or in a home?” My thoughts: Clearly, it depends on the school and your goals. But not every­one should lis­ten to that siren song. I entered grad­u­ate school dur­ing the last Big Reces­sion. Now I’m leav­ing dur­ing the next Great Depres­sion. There are no sure-fire ways to ride these out — and a dis­ser­ta­tion can be as much an anchor as a lifeboat.
  

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