terrapinsanity.com

We often write about budget ironies – administrators who raise tuition or donations in the name of excellence or student opportunities, but who then spend out on exclusive buildings, exclusive parties or expensive sports programs before going off to celebrate victory (of their shakedown, not sports.)

One of the expensive assistant coaches hired in the last year may have celebrated just a little too much. The Baltimore Sun reports assistant men’s basketball coach Dalonte Hill has been arrested for DUI.

Here’s a man paid more than almost all faculty members in the state of Maryland to work on something completely unrelated to (if not at odds with) educational programs. Now he won’t be working even at that, at least for the near term. The same article reports he won’t be with the team in the upcoming games, pending a campus review of the situation.

Everything in Maryland will soon get more expensive once Governor O’Malley gets his way in the recently-proposed budget just submitted to the General Assembly. For those keeping score, that includes tuition. Campus tuition would go up three percent under his proposal.

They have it this morning, as the Washington Post reports on campus plans to build a new president’s mansion … in spite of budget cuts, slashed athletic programs and languishing efforts to provide for immediate student needs. (You’ll recall that we reported on this last month in the same article congratulating Freeman Hrabowski on successful student projects.)

Front page no less. They must be delighted. Except … they’re letting Brodie Remington take point on this. The reason is obvious – he’s walking wounded already, so let the guy who is already a known short timer be the face to unpopular moves we’re driving through.

What’s not obvious until you look a little closer is how hard the administration is trying to keep President Loh out of this entirely. As the Post reports, spokesmen have repeatedly denied requests to reach Low for comment, and the same has been true in other reports. Central has scrambled former President Mote to give some weak justification for that which he never came out on while on the job. No credibility there … he’s just saluting and trying to draw a little heat away from the kitchen.

The prevailing mood is simple: weather a little PR for one news cycle and we’ll get what we want regardless of how it looks.

UM Physics Professor Joe Reddish on NPR on Sunday: “With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it. Get ‘em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”

Yet another coach with an expensive contract is being let go from College Park, bringing UM’s cost of keeping America’s coaches off the bread lines to something like a bazillion dollars. Is there an athletics coordinator still not employed somewhere? The inhumanity of it all! Quick, let’s hire him so he can be protected too!

Never mind losing seasons, budget in the toilet and other sports getting the axe. We simply can’t make do with just any coaches, you know, even the kind who get half a mega-buck per year guaranteed. Time to axe some more programs so we can get the coach who is just right.

Same question as before, though: do we know any human being at UM who is involved in achieving educational outcomes of any kind and who gets even half this cash?

Let’s listen in as the locals discuss expenses in Main Admin:

If you want the homecoming parade in my town… you have to pay.

Carmine, I think it’s wrong to extort money from the college.

Look… as the mayor of Faber, I’ve got big responsibilities. These parades are very expensive. You’re using my police, my sanitation people, my free Oldsmobiles. If you mention extortion again, I’ll have your legs broken.

I’m sure I can arrange a nice honorarium from the student fund.

Oh, sorry, right conversation, different era. Here’s what goes on today: campus administrators get entertainment, faceless Athletic Association fat cats get fatter, and students get the bill. As usual.

We’re sure the student athletes in under-performance programs (you know, ones that graduated students instead of make money for the all-controlling athletics association) feel okay for eliminating their sport so the athletics association can get new artificial turf on practice fields, to the tune of $1 million (thanks for that, Diamondback.)

More on Comcast Center and athletic financial woes from a former executive board member of the University of Maryland Terrapin Club in this morning’s Sun. We like the part about charging Comcast $55M for the center’s naming deal, but then promising the fees back in the form of mandatory student fees. The company gets naming rights simply for serving as a short term money lender, and students not only get the bill – they get their cars towed so all the important people (those concerned with athletics, not academics) can play their games.

This morning’s Post has a column by Charles Lane, Maryland’s plan to cut 8 varsity teams shows its true colors. This calls it like it is – President Loh “doubling down” on big-time athletics and the cash, at expense of scholarship – and notes in particular that the sports recently cut here for budget reasons were the ones most populated with students who graduate. (College Park can’t get even 3 out of 5 football players to graduate? Seriously?) We all know what will happen to our outcomes statistics when the programs populated by students with good outcomes go away. Of course, the figure most sought by leadership is one that has a dollar sign next to it. Loh is out of his depth.

Lane does well until his conclusion, at which point he advocates:

[D]onating to these beleaguered student-athletes would do more than support a good cause — it would also register a protest against the warped priorities that prevail at too many institutions of higher education.

Noooooo! Donating to these programs means Loh’s extortion has worked! Loh is holding the successful programs hostage and betting soft-hearted alumni will tithe to fill in the gap.

The best message all alum could send is a statement “We’re withholding donations to any program on campus until you turn your focus back to excellence in education. Get your priorities right!”

We’re much entertained this morning by a nice little report in the Diamondback on where we are with the new General Education requirements. (See General Ed curriculum moves forward) It begins…

With 10,000 freshly printed copies of an entirely new recruiting brochure and a redesigned website launching next week, university officials are several steps closer to phasing the current CORE curriculum into the newly revamped General Education program.

Sounds grand! Of course … nobody yet knows what a lot of the new requirements will be since we have not yet figured them out. It was only a week ago that some of those responsible for papering over the gaping holes in Farvardin’s Folly held a working lunch to talk about what the upper level ‘scholarship in practice’ component might be, for example, and memos are just going out to faculty inviting discussion of same.

So to translate the DB article: “We decided on an advertising program and are excited to print up new color glossies, and we’re sure we will have some of that academical content figured out by the time y’all would ever get here.” Sure gives you a sense of confidence that we are serious about scholarship, huh?

President Loh’s comments in the same DB article were the most refreshing we have seen on the new Gen Ed program, however:

University President Wallace Loh said the biggest challenge in implementing the new program lays in funding new courses and recruiting faculty members to teach them.

“The major issue is not the quality of the proposal — it’s implementation. Implementation means, among other things, money,” Loh said in an interview. “I’m certainly very supportive not only of the general education program, but also of its implementation, so it’s not just on paper and we bring it into an operational reality.”

Many people observed right from its start that the revised Gen Ed model was high in cost, disruptive to many other campus business processes and all for little measurable scholastic gain. In classic College Park fashion, those who voiced questions were pummeled by the Main Admin knee breakers who quickly assured everyone that this Admissions Undergraduate Studies initiative would simply look fabulous. Nice to see a frank acknowledgement that maybe there are some cost issues after all.

What are some of the unreal aspects? They’ve been written of in the past (here and elsewhere) and will be demonstrated graphically stating with the next freshman class, but greatest among them is the I-series. Each I-series course is almost inextricably bound to a professor who crafted it. We have yet to see the first example of such a course (of the handful on which I-series was patterned) carry over into a successful offering by any other faculty member, and indeed the calls for courses make clear that Main Admin anticipates huge turnover. What this churn means is that:

• Students can’t make four-year plans since nobody knows for sure what I-series courses can run even a semester in advance in some cases, much less a couple years. Courses dependent upon specific faculty members become dependent upon that professor’s professional schedule.
• Most students who find they’ve done poorly in a class likely won’t get an opportunity for re-take to repair the GPA. So much for freshman forgiveness. Big advising issues down the line.
• Department chairs who once had a stable target for fulfilling their Gen Ed tithe now have a moving target. When doing enrollment management they once knew which courses met core and could anticipate how many seats they would need to cover, and when making decisions about, say, sabbaticals or hiring, they only needed to think in terms of aggregate teaching capacity. Did they have enough to cover their teaching obligations? Now chairs will be further constrained as they either need to keep faculty tethered to the I-series courses they created (which will chaff in departments where teaching ‘service’ courses is not rewarded in promotion decisions) or hand an I-series course – which by definition lacks enduring content and is heavy on a prof’s ‘unique flair’ – to someone else, wishing them luck. And we know that an outline with attached powerpoint slides simply are not an adequate carrier of the essence of a course even in ordinary classes – this simply won’t work where the essence of the course is based on a specific professor. Students will be the big losers here. At least the instructor will still get a pay check.

The list goes on but the definitive reason we know the new Gen Ed is broken is also contained in the DB article: “…some faculty members are still in the process of being trained to teach the new courses.” Wow. And we thought faculty were the ones in the drivers seat for their classes.