“The University Besieged”

Although its subject is the Cal State system, this piece speaks to all those universities whose managers blow millions (or, as NYU would, billions) on new buildings, while throwing students into ever deeper debt, and freezing salaries/cutting benefits for faculty.

The University Besieged, Jeff Lustig

“In a community genuinely dedicated, as a community, to higher education, no manager would accept tens of thousands of dollars of salary increases while the real salaries of those who fulfilled its core mission were being cut. No non-classroom building would be built or auxiliary activities, like athletic programs, maintained undiminished when students had to pay drastically hiked fees (15.5 percent now on top of a 32 percent increase last year—amounting to more than three times the fees students paid in 2000.)(17) If it is claimed that the funds for classroom buildings and auxiliary expenditures come out of different accounts, I’d reply that managers who’ve shown the ingenuity many do in moving money around—coming up in the CSU, for example, with a half-billion dollars internally to pay for new management software —could surely find a way to staunch student fee increases or boost faculty salaries if they had a mind to.”

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He’s talking about the Cal State system, but…