How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream

How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream
Author: Richard M. Huber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1992
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Parents groan as college tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation. Students wonder where the distinguished professors are hiding as inexperienced graduate students take over the classroom. Business executives, straining to increase employee output, question how faculty productivity is measured. Alumni suspect the trustees of their alma mater are not exacting accountability for administrative performance. The public is concerned that "political correctness" is warping the curriculum. Taxpayers ask whether they are getting their money's worth on state-supported campuses. Richard Huber addresses these issues in a book that is both entertaining to read and striking in its insights. Tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation in part because universities enhance their academic reputations by hiring high-salaried scholars with low teaching loads. Undergraduate teaching is often terrible because professors are trained as researchers and rewarded as scholars, not teachers. Faculty output is measured by crude instruments which encourage goofing off as a masquerade for productive work. Trustees fail to enforce accountability because they are typically not familiar with the academic world and are confused by a university culture so totally different from their own corporate culture. The current brawl over the curriculum is not just an ivory tower dispute over race and ethnicity but a challenge to what kind of place America is to be. Taxpayers are not getting their money's worth because research and doctoral-granting universities, the focus of this book, are locked into outmoded personnel practices that assume all tenured professors will be productive scholars. Huber concludes with realistic reforms to improve the teaching of undergraduates and reduce the cost of higher education. And that would be a win-win prescription for the nation as well as the universities.

Earth Resources

Earth Resources
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 852
Release: 1977
Genre: Astronautics in earth sciences
ISBN:

Land and Leisure

Land and Leisure
Author: Carlton S. Van Doren
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2019-04-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429649444

First published in 1974. Leisure has come to be a vital force in our lives, a part of self-discovery, essential for our well-being. With increased amounts of leisure time, there has been rapid growth in the demand for diverse recreational facilities and their subsequent overuse. With this in mind, it is clear why the planning, managing and administration of recreational resources, particularly in urban areas, is of personal interest to everyone. Land and Leisure introduces the student to all aspects of recreational land use - spatial, economic, behavioural and physical. This second edition is designed to demonstrate some of the basic up-to-date ideas and issues of the last decade and a half that have been influential in shaping decisions, and is concerned both with urban recreation and the uses of resources within metropolitan areas and with the role of the private sector in providing facilities. The book is divided into five parts with discussions ranging over topics such as the individual's recreational needs, recreational land-use evaluation, regional planning and the problems of decision-making and the provision of recreational resources. Its interdisciplinary approach will enable students to understand the problems, concepts, methods and approaches helpful in furthering and integrating their knowledge of recreational resources.