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While some of us are news junkies and cheerfully follow the Diamondback along with many other sources, not everyone on campus stays plugged in. But if there is just one edition per year that everyone snaps up, it’s the annual listing of salaries. It is up this morning.

It takes a bit of interpretation, unfortunately, so before you conclude how much someone is actually paid then you need to know a few more things:

• A faculty member with multiple appointments (split between departments, colleges or institutes) will have multiple entries. What’s listed in the guide is the spreadsheet entry per unit, and some faculty take funds from more than one unit.
• Even so what’s listed for many faculty is a goal, not what they’re actually paid by the state. Depending on their contract, they may need to bring in outside funding to bring their pay up to this published amount. (Or not – some are fully funded on 12-months.)
• The list may not consistently reflect administrative increments (extra cash given to a member of professorial faculty who agrees to perform administrative duties in their unit) versus overloads (extra cash given to someone who agrees to do some specific tasks above and beyond their base appointment.) Some are factored into reported figures. Some are not.
• The list only addresses state funding. There is plenty of cash thrown about by Deans who tap Foundations that they argue are private and not subject to the disclosure obligations to the Diamondback. Yes, there are employees on this list who, from the state perspective, must appear to be working virtually for free, yet get their main support from these other sources – even though the paycheck still looks the same as everyone else’s. And no, it is not just athletics!
• These values don’t reflect furlough days. (The latest round were not technically furloughs but one-time salary reductions, and so should have been reflected in this report but obviously were not.)

Enjoy comparing this to last year’s guide. You’ll see increases in spite of the freeze – at least for Deans’ cronies and other friends of Central.

We noted previously that campus has been eager to embrace the new Gen Ed requirements, in part for what they think are cost savings. A mandate for experiential learning lets UM deliver credits where someone else – not faculty – delivers the content. We also noted that the Labor Department has started to crack down on campus job shopping its free labor out to government and industry.

The next shoe to drop on this came in the form of new guidelines from labor, reported in the Chronicle. This suggests that the student effort can remain unpaid, but at the cost to campus of having far more faculty oversight of the experience, connecting the dots as an educational activity.

This is as it should be. In our experience, the practical and experiential learning opportunities afforded to students can be terrific ways to integrate major content, sharpen skill sets and focus students on career realities. But that presumes someone is indeed connecting those dots. The way we have always recognized that such an activity is a good one, rather than craven hucksterism by campus, is that it takes far more faculty effort. (The hours necessarily vary more, the experiences must be personalized, and no amount of ‘course prep’ can be reused – you’re doing the prep fresh each time.) If campus sticks to its intent to expand experiential requirements – as the Senate dutifully signed off on – then this means far higher costs to us in the future.

That’s bad news for some pretty cash-strapped departments, some of which are in colleges that have already fully gotten their central offices totally out of the undergraduate education business (so no top cover available.)

With the rest of our College Park community we’ve watched in horror as footage of the post-basketball “riot” – complete with police assaults on party-goers – has emerged (sometimes grudgingly, as evident in the last day, when we learn that only some of the surveillance camera footage has been exposed.)

In other circumstances we’d make some snarky comment about how leadership laments this not for the civil rights abuse but for the impact on the important recruiting mission of poor Babs Gill, director of admissions.

The stark truth, however, is that we’re not just watching a civil rights disaster unfold – we’re potentially on the brink of fostering new ones.

This campus is presently searching for a new chief of police, following retirement of a good man who did a good job for a number of years. Three candidate replacements have emerged, ala
today’s Diamondback. Two have ties with the county and regional operations that were responsible for “peace keeping” at the riot.

But let’s be clear about what this means. One in particular, David Mitchell, doesn’t just “have ties”. He trained and mentored the senior leadership that was on watch for that fiasco. As a chief of Prince George’s County police, then superintendent of state police, Mitchell set the standard and tone for officers moving up through the ranks to leadership positions today. Mitchell himself is a product of PGPD from the 1970′s. However poor a reputation today’s PG operation has, today’s troops are the kinder gentler version compared to the head knocking days of yesteryear. Mitchell made his bones on in the early 80′s on TARS, “Tactical Alarm Response”, a unit now disbanded because of its awkward record of suspects getting dead. So today a student or two got a wood shampoo from some pumped up troop. Your point?

With Mitchell, this campus can bring one of law enforcement’s ultimate political cronies into its fold, solidifying a reputation for College Park being a rest stop for officials to collect a pay check between important jobs. In doing so we will invite more of what we all just witnessed.

Or it can start fresh with other candidates for the job.

Following the Diamondback’s article this morning we know now that students, through their official organization on campus, the SGA, have had their input to the new Gen Ed plan. Not that it will change what is about to be rammed through. Good thing they didn’t blink, as they’d have missed the chance altogether.

The key observation in today’s article is:

The University Senate just released senators’ amendments Tuesday in anticipation of today’s meeting, where they will vote on the General Education proposal.

Since Congress can rush through fundamental changes to the nation’s economy in a space of hours without reading text, everyone else must feel this process is okay too. And besides, this is only the campus Gen Ed requirement, not a national health insurance system. What could go wrong with that? Who needs to care that approvals will be applied without stakeholders even knowing the changes, much less have a chance to contemplate consequences? We’re only talking about how our graduates fare and our university is hence viewed in the nation over the next few decades.

Right?

We shouldn’t be so concerned. Nobody believes the Provost will follow this blueprint any more closely than he follows the grand Strategic Plan, that we rammed through in similar breakneck speed. These exercises are becoming write-only documents, that are created to get Central off our backs. And besides, once we start learning the problems with this plan, under this Provost we can rush through even more changes in a panic.

So who needs to think hard about these things? To study consequences, run controlled pilots, model success rates of present students under proposed plans, calibrate expectations, engineer roll-out plans or persuade colleagues to reach strong consensus? Those are only things cared about by serious scholars, and apparently we no longer have any of those in College Park.

With a new Gen Ed requirement on the immediate horizon, incoming students can look forward to more mandated volunteerism, err, we mean experiential learning, which for many (most?) would be met by unpaid internships.

But in Friday’s New York Times we see the Obama administration appears to be cracking down on unpaid internships as a violation of Federal law. (See “Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say”.)

Cool. So this means students will get paid internships instead, right? No problem.

No, no problem for anyone who thinks we can spend our way to solvency, eat our way out of obesity, drink our way to sobriety and screw our way back to virginity. Everyone else should likely expect there will simply be far fewer good student opportunities for “experiential learning.”

Damn. We might just have to go back to educating our own students.