Via ConfessionsofaCommunityCollegeDean, a Chronicle article on the importance of shared governance in universities:

Shared governance, especially in the context of a search for a top administrator, means that professors, staff members, and sometimes students get to participate in the process — unlike the bad old days when a university official could hire whomever he (and it was invariably a male) wanted without any input. “Shared” means that everyone has a role…
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“Shared” doesn’t mean that every constituency gets to participate at every stage.
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Clearly, the main reason why a search — especially for an administrator — cannot be a simple matter of a popular vote is that someone must remain accountable for the final decision, and committees cannot be held accountable.

Many governance institutions break down because they are a committee structure that is charged with decision making, rather than oversight, and no single individual is responsible for outcomes. At the same time, individual committee members will invariably cry foul when their own brilliance is dismissed by the group or the decision maker.

Categories: Careers, Governance, The Academy
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Joanna Jacobs passes along Barry Schwartz’s recommendation that elite universities use a lottery for admissions (I couldn’t find the whole article):

There is probably a right answer to the questions “Whom should we admit?” or “Which college should I select?” But we won’t know until after the fact. Chance factors (roommate assignment, romantic successes or failures, or which English professor evaluates your first papers) might have a bigger effect on success and satisfaction than the tiny differences among applicants (or schools) within the range of acceptability. So once a set of “good enough” students or “good enough” schools has been identified, it probably doesn’t matter much which one you choose; or if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance what the right choice is.

College admissions is a crap shoot, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Let colleges admit the all-stars, reject the losers, and show the people in the middle just how much randomness is involved. As long as students are using the Common Application to apply to multiple schools, though, the application becomes even more like a lotto ticket. Is this applicant applying to Cornell to hedge in case they don’t get into Columbia, or do they really want to go there?

The solution? Use a bidding market. Give each student who fills out the common application 1000 points and allow them to allocate them among schools they apply to. Weight students in the lottery based on the number of points they bid, so that students who bid more get more of a chance. People will still get into college - being in the “middle” group of Harvard applicants still makes you in the top group of many other great schools.

Bidding systems solve another problem as well. A friend of mine used to work in an admissions office, and she said they would look at other schools a candidate applied to and reject those who seemed highly qualified and applied to top tier schools because the office thought they weren’t likely to accept the admissions offer in the first place. Restricting the number of bidding points lets universities measure not only a student’s binary desire to attend signaled by applying (yes/no), but also the strength of their desire to attend the school (number of points bid).

Most people overestimate the role of going to a good college on life outcomes. They also overestimate how good admissions offices are at picking which people get in and which don’t. Exposing just how random it is, as Schwartz notes, will expose just how much “luck” is involved. Does that mean that a Harvard student and a Community College student are on the same intellectual level? Doubtful, but it will show the Princeton student that they could just as easily be at Duke, if only the lottery had been different.

Categories: Education, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Information Markets, Matching Mechanisms, The Academy
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Go White!

Categories: Ephemera, The Academy
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Also, if faculty governance actually means something, then faculty unionization makes no sense. You’re either management or labor; not both. If you really run the place, then you’re management. If you claim to run the place and you unionize to negotiate against it, I’d call that ’self-dealing.’ It’s a flagrant ethical violation, and of dubious legality. You can’t have it both ways.

From this blog that I just discovered, featuring the musings of an Anonymous Community College Dean

Categories: Careers, Education, Governance, Law, The Academy
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Chris Anderson has noticed that risk aversion and a lack of imagination are making CIOs irrelevant:

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

Later on he notes that this is the biggest problem at universities:

The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

From what I know, universities didn’t create CIOs until recently, and they don’t really have much function. Most departments manage there own IT. In the liberal arts, this just means faculty and administrator desktops, but in the hard sciences it usually involves research equipment that goes over the central service’s head. Yes, there are certain shared services that the university needs - most importantly single sign-on, but I’d argue mail and file storage as well - but then get out of the way. With the price of storage as low as it is, I can’t imagine why universities have such low quotas, which is one of the things that drives engineering and art colleges to run their own parallel systems. If your job is keeping the lights on, that’s where you need to innovate - give people the tools they need to do what they want to do better, don’t blow money on tools that other people do better, cheaper.

And, as in all cases, if you’re having discussions about whether or not you’re relevant anymore, it means you’re already irrelevant. It’s time to either reinvent what you do, or stop wasting resources.

Categories: Business and Economics, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, The Academy
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Greg Mankiw has discovered the unofficial translation of his textbook by Stand Up Economist Yoram Bauman:

Categories: Business and Economics, Funny, The Academy
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Taking a short break from sunny, geriatric Weston Florida (winds around 18 mpg, gusting to 27), I give you a technique for scoring your think tank panelists:

In times dominated by momentous questions of war and foreign policy, a particular kind of Washingtonian is bound to thrive: the think-tank pundit. But competition is relentless. Good judgment and extensive research may help advance a career, but what really matters in Washington is an elusive quality known as “Say-sO Superiority,” or SOS. Staffers at Asia Policy Point, a Washington foreign policy research center, devised the following highly scientific measure to calculate a speaker’s SOS score (and to keep themselves awake during luncheon talks).

Categories: Funny, Politics, The Academy
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Some happenings in Econoland:

After calling attention to their plight, I often advise my students to try collusion. Call a meeting, work out study quotas, and see how much easier their lives get. To date - and as far as I can tell - no class has ever called my bluff (though once I taught a class with four students, and got a little nervous!).

Frankly, I’m not worried. I’m not afraid to put bad ideas in my students’ heads because I’m confident that attempted collusion would fail. And in the process, my students would learn a valuable economic lesson.

Bryan Caplan wants his students to try and game the system, but is confident that they wont. Cartels are hard.

And Freakonomist explains why correlation doesn’t mean causation, no matter how much you want it to:

The example I often use to demonstrate why we don’t want to make public policy based on correlations is particularly relevant today in light of the Chicago Bears playing in the Super Bowl. In my example, Chicago’s beloved Mayor Daley is trying to think of ways to increase the likelihood that the Bears win the game. He’s noticed that whenever the Bears win, people in Chicago are happy. Which sparks a great idea: decree that all Bears fans have to be happy on Super Bowl Sunday. It has always been true in the past that winning games and being happy go together, so by demanding the Bears’ fans are happy, it will cause the Bears to win the Super Bowl.

Categories: Business and Economics, The Academy
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In the Ann Arbor Business Review, Detroit Renaissance President Doug Rothwell:

I think that it clearly shows the importance of our universities in helping us make economic transformation a reality. Google is in Ann Arbor because of the relationship with the University of Michigan. And I think that too often in the past this state has not embraced its public universities, particularly its flagship universities - Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, the research universities - as really being absolutely vital to the future economic health of the state.

From AnnArborIsOverRated

Categories: Business and Economics, Community, Education, The Academy, Users as Partners
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A major piece in the strategy to attract the new crop of scholars was “cluster hiring” — recruiting groups of researchers who share an approach to an academic discipline and have existing relationships.

Via Marginal Revolution, it’s from this DukeNews piece which reads like an B-School Case Study.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Matching Mechanisms, The Academy
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Seymour Martin Lipset, acclaimed political scientist, is dead at 84 (NYTimes, WaPo).

I was introduced to Lipset in my first semester as an undergraduate, studying his work on the relationship between democracy and economic development in multiple classes. I used his pamphlet “The Socialism of Fools—The Left, the Jews and Israel” in a few papers I wrote as an undergrad on the strange Antisemitism and authoritarianism of the radical left (most cite it for his anecdote about Martin Luther King refuting anti-Zionism as Antisemitism). My interests often coincided with his, and I kept re-discovering his works (which, I admit, I’ve only read a small fraction of). I admired Lipset’s political independence (nobody could pin him down), and his continued affiliation to the Jewish community. He continued to research and publish well into old age, and he will certainly be missed.
When I first started this blog, I didn’t want to pass along the obits, because I felt most of the other blogs I read could do a better job, but I didn’t see this on any of them.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Politics, The Academy
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