Agree fully. I would go one step further. No raises for anyone who recieves pay from the public sector. No exceptions. May God bless unbridled capitalism.

I came here despite the fact that I already had a tenured postion and my pay wasn't really that much higher because I was excited about the program, the direction of the school, and the future of south mississippi, and the kind of community life that living in the South offers. It seemed like a good combination of challenge with reasonably good odds that this was a place that had a future that could be stimulating. The faculty was engaged; the region was growing; the university was clearly on an upward trajectory.

We keep acting as though the only reason good people will come is money -- and while that is important, there are other things besides the bottom line. I think once upon a time this was the kind of place that could attract an relatively young, progressive academic executive . . . . who liked the idea of carving out a name for himself/herself by taking a university that had many promising elements but was also in the porrest state in the nation and continuing to build it. If people need to be paid as high as other institutions outside the state to take up that challenge, then perhaps they are not for us . . .

On the other hand, we may now need to really need to bribe someone -- we have been hurt by economics, the hurricane, and all of the damage that has been done to faculty and staff morale and trust . . . it would not necessarily to be pleasure to run this university right now. On the other hand, the next President is going to have a big honeymoon if he/she articulates how the business of a university differs from BUSINESS and treats faculty and staff with respect, partnering with them in bringing the university out of this time and into the future.

It is the bottom line people who are dead souls and who insist that only the bottom line counts and you can't get good people without big pay (as they think of themselves). THEY need to be bribed to do a job they really don't like and aren't really suited for -- THEY are the ones who, failing to be successful in the outside world, retire to the academy not to participate in its intellectual life but to wield power. It is difficult not to be contemptuous of the kind of people who never have written a book, have never produced a creative work; have never taught in a college classroom successfully, have never served on acadedmic committees or performed a major piece of research but who somehow feel qualified to run the affairs of an institution in which these elements are central to the core of what a university does. This is the difference between Aubrey, for all his frailities (and what President does not have them?) and our current President. Aubrey loved the university . . . and though he may not have been a scholar he loved scholars, loved teachers, loved students -- and he understood what made them (us) tick. He also loved the broader aspects of the intellectual and cultural community that a university is -- so much so that his Presidency was about trying to grow all of those things. In other words -- we need a President who understands the soul, the spirit that makes a university the entity that it is - and thus can speak to why an embodied university -- a university which occupies real space, and real time, and in which the life of the university is not just its classrooms or its knowlege but the community of embodied experiences that make up what we call a "university." If I had my way, I'd pass a truth in advertising law because the "online universities have hi-jacked the title and all that it has meant and they have devalued it to mean only content delivery. A university is so much more than that.

Good people are attracted by a vision -- either one that exists to which they can attach themselves or one that they can bring into being. They will always measure the relationship between the potentials of such a job for success or failure and the gap between the pay they will be able to negotiate and what they might get somewhere else. But the highest paying places don't always offer academic exuectives the most potential for creative leadership . . .

"Good people are attracted by a vision -- either one that exists to which they can attach themselves or one that they can bring into being. They will always measure the relationship between the potentials of such a job for success or failure and the gap between the pay they will be able to negotiate and what they might get somewhere else. But the highest paying places don't always offer academic exuectives the most potential for creative leadership . . ."

Stephen,
You are exactly right about this. And as you said earlier in your post, it was the possibilities at USM that attracted and kept many gifted teachers, researchers, and artists.

Pie in the sky wrote:

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It is difficult not to be contemptuous of the kind of people who never have written a book, have never produced a creative work; have never taught in a college classroom successfully, have never served on acadedmic committees or performed a major piece of research but who somehow feel qualified to run the affairs of an institution in which these elements are central to the core of what a university does. The same could be said of college professors who have never had the task of running a university. They've never had to meet a budget,raise money,pay the electric bill,or do any of the myriad of tasks that people in the real world do. They are full of contempt and hatred but offer little of real value.

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Nice thought -- and untrue in terms of running a university, but often suprisingly untrue when having to manage budgets and people.

For instance, I was Production Manager for the Williamstown Theatre Festival for a couple of years. Oversaw several million dollars each season and administered a fairly complicated festival with several hundred people working in extremely complicated and high stress situations. I'm not going to claim I was a whiz -- but I did it and understand the stresses involved. The faculty is not as isolated from the professional world as the myth has it -- that may have been true back in C.S. Lewis time and place -- it is less and less true and particularly untrue in a modern university.

Secondly -- being a bad administrator or boss isn't hard to identify in any environment. The university is a particular kind of environment that demands a different kind of management style because the university by its nature encourages diversity rather than uniformity; discussion that precedes action; and intellectual activity which thrives best when the hand of authority is present in the sense of providing guidance and stability but least obtrusive in matters of content and creative output.

The world of professors is just as real as the world of any other worker -- professors are workers, after all. Most professors practice budget keeping every day. You are out of touch.

 

Pie in the sky wrote:

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The same could be said of college professors who have never had the task of running a university. They've never had to meet a budget,raise money,pay the electric bill,or do any of the myriad of tasks that people in the real world do. They are full of contempt and hatred but offer little of real value.

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Painting with a pretty broad brush, aren't you Pie?  Granted, most professors have never faced "the task of running a university." Wouldn't you include amoung that number the current president of USM prior to his appointment?  Some profs very well may have never had to meet a budget or raise money; others have. The same can be said of most of us out here in the so-called real world.

But I am baffled at your reference to those who never had to "pay the electric bill"?  Never had to "do any of the myriad tasks that people in the real world do"?  Who in the world do you believe takes care of these matters for college professors?

 

I want to point out that college professors do in fact live in the real world. They are upstanding honest people. By contrast anyone who is critical of them does not live in the real world. This is what my teachers at USM taught me and I learned it well.