Higher education corruption in California

The taxpayer-supported University of California is seeing off departing president Robert Dynes with a cushy severance package. Matier & Ross, the outstanding investigative reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, lay out the shape of the going away present:

"...first he will be entitled to a full year's paid leave to brush up on his studies." [....]

"Now that he has to vacate the UC-provided president's mansion in Kensington, Dynes - like all senior administrators - is eligible for a low-interest home loan to help him relocate.... it's uncertain whether Dynes will take advantage of the benefit." [....]

"When Dynes chooses to retire completely from academic life, his pension will be based on a percentage of the average of his last highest-earning years. That would include his time as president.

"Upshot: Calculations show that if he were to stop working next June, he could either cash out for $1.6 million or get $145,524 a year in retirement pay."

All of this coming to a guy they say was "nudged out as UC's top dog after a string of embarrassing stories about the university's liberal pay and perk packages for top managers"

So the punishment for embarrassing the university by wretched excess in pay and perks appears to be more wretched excess for the miscreant! That is a form of twisted logic that can only exist within an organizational culture that regards itself as exempt from any accountability to others.

A similar contempt for taxpayers and tuition-payers is the way top UC managers try to have the best of both worlds: academia and corporations. When justifying their increasingly high salaries, university presidents and other top academic managers cite pay scales for executives of comparably-sized private companies.

But when it comes to the academic perks, little things like 400 grand for a full year's vacation, then the robes come out and it's perk, perk, perk your way to financial happiness. Like the outrageous bennies granted the late Denice Denton (a $30,000 backyard dog run for the Chancellor's mansion at the University of California Santa Cruz and a high paying job for her female companion among others), the incident once again betrays the get-it-while-you-can attitude that evidently permeates upper ranks of academia in places like the University of California. I am reminded of the scenes of Russian revolutionaries invading the homes of the aristocrats and grabbing whatever they could carry off of the lifestyle enjoyed by those they have hated and envied their entire lives.

If top management of big schools wants to play in the corporate major leagues when it comes to pay, then they should obey the league rules there, like personal accountability for performance metrics, strict accountability for their decisions, transparency in accounting and broad disclosure that goes beyond Sarbanes-Oxley, since they are nonprofits and some are organs of government.

There is a risk component to executive responsibility in corporations, and that is one justification for the high pay. If academics do not want to bear the risks, then they don't deserve comparability in pay.

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British schools dodging core subjects

The proportion of pupils obtaining five good GCSEs in core subjects is in long-term decline, research suggests. As 600,000 pupils prepare to open their GCSE results tomorrow, a new analysis of the trends in results shows a widening gap between the pass rate for five good GCSEs in any subject and for pass rate when fundamental subjects such as maths and science are included. The proportion of students gaining five good (A*-C) GCSEs including English, maths, science and a language, has fallen from 61 per cent in 1996 to 44 per cent last year. Over the same period the overall pass rate for five good GCSEs in any subject has risen from 44 to 58 per cent. Tomorrow's results are expected to show another rise.

Michael Gove, the Tory education spokesman, who carried out the analysis, said the results suggested that schools were trying to maximise their league table position by moving away from core subjects, the very subjects that universities and employers were looking for most. Heads are accused of entering students for "easier" vocational courses - which can be worth more than four GCSEs each in the league tables. "These figures emphasise the importance of truly robust measurements of achievement. The decline in core subjects marks a worrying trend and underlines the need for teaching to focus on the neglected basics," Mr Gove said.

The Conservative analysis shows that, although the proportion of pupils getting five or more good GCSEs in any subject has increased by 13.6 percentage points in the past decade, the improvement when English and mathematics are taken into account is less than ten points. Figures including English, maths and science have improved by only 5.4 percentage points on the period. Figures including English, mathematics, science and a modern foreign language, have declined since 1996, by 1.5 points.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, rejected the Tory analysis as "cheap spin". As modern foreign languages were no longer compulsory at GCSE, it made no sense to include them in any new league table of results, he said. "Adding any optional GCSE in and then using this as evidence of failure simply undermines the real achievements of teachers, schools and pupils," he said. "The number of children achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths has risen substantially since 1997, and our new tough measures will show the proportion achieving grade C or above in a modern foreign language as well as science."

At the heart of the disagreement between the Government and the Opposition lies a fundamental disagreement over how best to measure school performance. Last year ministers took the bold step of introducing a new, deliberately tougher benchmark showing how schools were performing in the basics of literacy and numeracy. By this measure, only 45 per cent of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including English and maths - considerably less than the 58 per cent of pupils achieving five good passes in any subject, the traditional measure. Later this year the Government will add science passes to its basic measure of success. The Tories, however, want an even greater emphasis on core, or traditional subjects.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, agreed that merely measuring how many pupils got five good GCSEs in any subject was no longer satisfactory, as this masked weaknesses in the basics. "You could take an NVQ in ICT [information and communication technology] and this would be worth the equivalent of four GCSEs," he said. But he questioned the Tory analysis: "It is stretching a point to include modern foreign languages, as these are not compulsory." Professor Smithers added, however, that he expected this year's maths results to be disappointing. Last year the pass rate in maths was lower than for all other main subjects, as more than 343,000 pupils (45.7 per cent) failed to gain even a C.

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The need to study warfare

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You'll provoke not a counterargument-let alone an assent-but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

It's no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history-understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict's outcome and its consequences-had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war-and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever..........

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren't necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans-over 3.2 million-lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation's 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn't just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them-which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, "War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it." Wars-or threats of wars-put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Milosevi?'s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces-but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things," observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. "The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."

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