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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.

College Park’s international partner, for whom all campus business processes are being optimized, continues its war on America, as reported today in the Washington Post and BBC.

Never mind the obvious military technology that is lost to China this way, the economic loss of intellectual property is estimated (in the above stories) to be as much as $20 billion annually, a figure that may understate the real situation according to the FBI’s briefing to campus on this last spring. UM leadership of course does its part to keep those costs to China down by using Maryland tax funding to subsidize the technology transfer. Way to go, Terps!

The Post headline announced “Maryland athletic department’s revenue can’t keep pace with spending”. To which we say, “duh.”

Athletic directors and coaches here are already among the state’s highest paid employees – and that’s before you count the matching funds provided by Foundations, all of which are not subject to the same level of public scrutiny. But it isn’t enough to pay that for any one coach. Today we’re paying for several contracts’ worth of coaching per sport, as the campus buys out the contracts of old coaches in order to pay top dollar for new ones. President Loh signed off on such deals only a couple months ago, and now announces a new commission to get to the bottom of our fiscal woes because he is shocked, just shocked, to discover the budget is not stable.

To find the whole recipe for fiscal woes, mix in the expensive facilities renovations – which contrary to PR are not generally available to the whole campus community – and flavor with the ‘special’ division of responsibilities between the state and foundation budgets. (Taxpayers are responsible for paying invoices and the Athletics Foundation is responsible for handling receipts. Sweet deal.)

If Loh needs to burn the time of 17 highly-paid colleagues to find out why his spending decisions ran us into a hole, then we’re sure in for a bumpy ride with him at the wheel. Of course he is a smart man and likely knows the answer already, which means he needs an especially large committee to study the matter for a long time and bury the answer. That means we’re really in for a bumpy ride.

Interim Provost Ann Wylie just rolled out the Blended Learning Initiative, one of the last of the ideas initiated by the bean counters in her predecessor’s operation (and itself a sign that she has not yet flushed all the non-academic bean counters from her own administration.) It is another academic disaster in the making.

First, just what the heck is “blended learning” and why is it here? From the web site, we don’t actually learn what it is, but we find it “involves a combination of face-to-face and online interactions, built on a rich collaboration environment that includes a variety of information sources such as multimedia data, social technologies (such as blogs, Wikis, Twitter), simulations, and visualization for individual and collaborative learning and for team projects.”

Whew! That all sounds cutting edge and zesty, but let’s cut to what is really going on: reducing expense of content delivery in courses, and by that we mean, spreading the biggest expense – faculty time and attention, as it should be – across more students. Engagement – quality time shared between top students and top scholars at the flagship – will be reduced as students interact more with software created by those scholars (or more likely staff that is less costly) and teams (which is to say, students will lead each other through experiences that once involved a faculty member.)

It used to be that parents, paying top dollar for what should be top experiences, became agitated upon learning that content delivery was a job for not the faculty but the faculty’s teaching assistants and graduate students. We think they won’t be any happier to learn their tuition checks will soon buy only a virtual faculty member and tweets. (We’re eager to know how junior English fares when conducted in 140 character chunks.) In the long run, why pay top dollar for College Park when you can get the same on-line experience for less at UMUC?

Okay, so there really are some innovative educational approaches apart from traditional methods that could be tried in some classes, and we look forward to seeing if campus can bring some of them along. Unfortunately – and this is the real basis for our cynicism – none of this scales, and all of it is today driven by the bean counters.

We know of several cutting-edge practices being pioneered here (interestingly, none of them represented in this Blended Learning albatross) that have the effect of giving students more value out of each unit of professor time – but that is because of the professor, not the technology! These are gifted scholars who can materialize a mesmerizing presentation out of thin air, and do more with a simple piece of chalk and stone slate. Let these faculty pour themselves into crafting superior lab experiences and it all becomes better. But what percentage of our faculty are in this league?

Provost Wylie just rolled out an initiative that was demanded (and launched internally) by her predecessor’s bean counters, under the banner of excellence promised by a few gifted scholars, but without any consideration of how this can’t scale to implementation by the rest of us in College Park, who will be spread even more thinly. Its like pointing to a high-end concept car as evidence that super performance is possible, and then using this evidence as justification to ration gas to the rest of the aging delivery fleet.

There is a pattern. Farvardin’s Gen Ed program featured several cost-saving (even if shallower) measures that don’t scale. Mandated volunteerism, for example – students garnering credits for work as interns, appropriate to their discipline, are thought to be a way to cash a tuition check where some bureaucrat elsewhere (instead of an expensive faculty member here) delivers the content (if there is any.) That should take a small percentage off the top of our Gen Ed load, they thought. And I-series – another advertising program that was patterned on the work product of a handful of gifted scholars, but based on a business model which can’t be sustained – is in the process of showing us that inspired courses once offered to only a handful of students can become pretty pedestrian once you need an army of ordinary faculty to offer it to huge sections open to the masses.

Bean counters want more with less, and like all the temp staff occupying offices over in Central these days, Wylie accommodated administrative and political over academics. Sadly, get past the advertising hype and you’ll see that we will do less with less.

The budget news is not rosy but at least not as bad as yesteryear: no raises in the coming year but neither are there any furloughs expected. (Of course, we’ve heard that message before…) And wow: eligible state employees will even get a $750 one-time bonus!

Unfortunately the state’s socialist tendencies are showing. When the state grabbed money from its ready cash machine (us) it took based on a progressive scale. There was no sharing the pain equally – some workers lost only a couple days to furloughs, others lost up to ten days. Multiply that times the several years of loss and it adds up.

Yes, yes, the money grab was pegged to one’s annual salary, since those evil rich people can afford it, and never mind how a lot of people sacrificed to become qualified for such positions, only to be told to sacrifice some more. Never mind how they made life decisions – about such things mortgages or college bills – on the expectation that the state would be good for the salary in return for honest labor as originally priced. Yeah, they can afford to give back.

But now that cash (a pittance) is going the other direction it is everyone shoulder to shoulder sharing equally.

This inequity makes clear that the campus values mediocrity over the standout excellence of people who, while rewarded with greater salary, should have been expected to win on behalf of the campus. And we’re not talking about basketball contracts here either. Organizations that penalize a product in the market will get less of that product, and what Maryland does penalizes excellence. We will have less excellence over time.

How about we all chip in our $750 bonuses and buy some excellent administrators?