Colleges in Trouble

For years innumerable (and students innumerate — the latter, not our fault), we have been purveying an educational product that made no sense (and I fought the mythos, but the insanity was invincible). OF COURSE, students will migrate to community colleges, now that the luxury no longer can be afforded of courting economic Armageddon for the sake of exposure to pedagogy delivered by professors who are actively punished for each second benightedly devoted to serving their students well, rather than publishing as incessantly as if possessed by the injunction from Thessalonians about when to pray. And where, I’d like to know, have those prodigious sums been going, the tuition moneys that have been escalating at rates that can only be described with exponential expressions? I’ll tell you one place they haven’t been going. Into the pockets of the academicians who do the actual teaching, as virtually any retired professor who’s actually labored in the trenches and experienced the system of incentives will tell you. More sense would accrue from a policy of hiring professional football players on the basis of their ability to play chess than now emerges from the ideology of hiring and tenuring only teachers to whom teaching is anathema, and devotion thereto to the detriment of grant-grubbing an immitigable disgrace. I will profoundly grieve the loss of any institution and any teacher who falls to the current economic climate, but my God, what *have* we been doing?