My post yesterday joined a chorus of voices pointing out David Levy’s many delusions and errors. Here are a few of the interesting ones:
- Attacking Community Colleges by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber
- The Last Enclosures> at Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted
- More Accusations of Professor Laziness at NeuroDOJO
- In Which the Professor Expresses Her Frustration with … by Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science
- First They Went After the K-12 Teachers, Then … by Julia Good Fox at goodfox
- Stupid or Lying: Wildly Overpaid Faculty Edition by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money
- Professors Work Harder than You Do, David C. Levy by Philip Nel at Nine Kinds of Pie
These various posts point to the gross flaws in Levy’s understanding about what faculty do, about how we have to spend our time, about how much time it takes to teach and carry our our other tasks. They draw on experience from a range of institutions, from teaching-heavy colleges to R-1 universities.
As these posts indicate, Levy is wrong on every point and for every type of institution.
A concluding observation on tuition increases. Tuition has been climbing because public support of higher education has been plummeting with real consequences for students:
California’s CSU system has lost approximately $1 billion in state funding over the past 4 years. Consequently, the system is going to close admissions for many of its 23 campuses for the Spring 2013 semester, denying admission to nearly 16,000 students, and will wait-list all students applying for the 2013-2014 academic year. If Governor Brown’s proposed budget initiative to increase taxes is defeated, an additional 20,000-25,000 students will be denied admissions.
California might be an extreme example, but it is not unique: Higher Education Vanishing Before Our Eyes.