The Academic Destruction of the University of Tulsa | Hacker News Reader

The Academic Destruction of the University of Tulsa

city-journal.org

22 pointsdontread27 comments

Alumni here that graduated a few years ago. I'm a brown guy (that matters in this context.)

During my time there, the university was super obsessed with being in the top XX list. From what I could see, that obsession wasn't channeled through research but through superficial things like new buildings and multi-million dollar stadium. Why? Because that's what all big and famous universities have! Look at that big lawn. It does nothing of function but boy does it look majestic.

The push for fairness and equality etc was REALLY needed. Racism was just a way of life. I witnessed tenured professors in the CS department make very causal racist remarks. There was a black guy who was upset that the professor always chose his project/team to be the "Black team". After he left, the prof casually said "well at least he didn't shoot the place up". Perhaps the most ironic was an Indian prof who seemed to hate all other Indians. If you were black people assumed you were there for sports and not because you really were smart and interested in education.

Some of the comments in the linked article will give you an idea of the bubble that Tulsa/Oklahoma lives in. People claiming it's the liberal agenda and "social justice" that was unnecessary and ruined it. Sure, if you're white and born in Oklahoma it's unnecessary.

Funny enough after graduating and moving to the west coast I'm not reminded of my skin color every day.

Interesting. The one thing that I didn't see mentioned in the article at all was the Faculty Senate. At most universities I've been at, Shared Governance between faculty and administrators was the rule, and big decisions like the ones described in this article could not have happened without senate approval. Did TU not have a policy of shared governance?

It was weird how the corporatization and the "social-justice agenda" were lumped together like that in the article. Usually the people who criticize the former aren't the ones getting upset about the latter.

Yes, it does strike me as "remember in the past when things were better before the liberals ruined it?"

And yet conservatives are usually the ones writing off the liberal arts as useless pursuits of "liberal snowflakes", not advocating for them as essential facets of civilization.

Edit: To be clear, the behavior described by the above commenter is reprehensible. Independently of that, I think it's incredibly sad that universities are being turned into businesses that only care about profit. Obviously that makes the original article a mixed bag.

A click bait title from the author. Reads like he is just upset that the direction chosen wasnt his. Personally I think being unique in your values, and giving the finger to US News, is a rational choice for a mid tier college.

And who can argue that colleges haven't failed to adapt to today's economy? Literally some small schools have larger Latin departments than CS.

Maybe this experiment will work. Maybe it won't. But, as long as students are informed in their choice, I think it's worth trying.

A large part of this experiment seems to consist of increasing the losses of the athletics program, such as the extra $9M subsidy in a year when the total deficit was $26M.

High expenditure on athletics is often justified by the revenue it generates, but that is clearly not the case here. Is there any plausible case to be made that this extra expenditure will lead to the athletics program becoming self-sustainingly profitable in time to save the university?

For those interested, there is a formal petition to the president of the university at the change.org link below. The petition contains a list of all the specific programs cut, more details about the process failures involved, and specific suggestions/demands of the administration to rectify these failures - something that was largely missing from the piece originally linked. You can find the petition here: https://www.change.org/p/president-gerard-clancy-saving-the-...

I disagree with author comment "Our infantilized and indoctrinated students will receive but a light wash of liberal arts before they are popped from the higher-education oven. They will perhaps be credentialed, but they will not be educated." I have a CS PHD. I have not read any books he mentioned in the article. Am I credentialed but not educated? I wish I know more about those things, but frankly I'm reading Game of Thrones, won't have time for that... well, I might actually be ignorant monkey now I think about it. Hodor!

I am generally in favor of the liberal arts, but this sort of smug self-satisfaction and assumption of superiority, as displayed here, does not sit well with me.

MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

MOOCs as they are currently structured really only serve the most motivated students. When I was a young person, I needed the structure, culture and environment to succeed as a student in tertiary education. If I had been trying to do my college courses from home, or outside of an environment full of my fellow students, I would never have done them with the degree of seriousness they would have deserved, and I would have learned way less.

> MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

Both higher and secondary should be revolutionized with MOOCs, not as replacements for traditional schooling by themselves, but as an enabling technology for flipped classrooms with no in-person lecture where all in-person contact time is high-value interaction.

I think there is value in flipped classrooms, but they do have an impact on the classroom experience. Did you see this NYT article from last week?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley...

That doesn't seem to be using a flipped classroom model to maximize value of in-person contact time by moving static lecture out of classroom time; that seems to be replacing much of the school-hours direct contact time with online solo learning.

When I've read about flipped classroom, a lot of the instruction is described as teachers working closely with students, given the importance of individualized instruction. However, that does also result in a lot of solo learning.

If the teacher is working with 25 students for a 50 minute class, that's 2 minutes of individualized instruction per student. Even with the students working with the teacher in groups, you're going to have a lot of students working alone when they're not working in the teacher's group.

Anecdotal but I did linear algebra at a local CC in a "flipped" classroom. We were expected to watch lectures (youtube videos from a MIT or whatever) outside of class and then class was supposed to be a discussion of the homework, which we also had to do out of class and was provided no class time prior to it being due to discuss, in class. There was no real teaching on behalf of the professor. I can't just interject a video when I have a question about the subject matter. I'd either have to wait it out and see if it was answered later, rewind and watch again, or find another video explaining the same concept. All of a sudden an hour long video became an hour and a half to two hour endeavor. Just absolutely time consuming. It came off as lazy by the teacher. To be fair was like his first or second semester doing it but I didn't care to take the class again. Some of the smartest guys I knew we absolutely frustrated with it also. We all gave him bad reviews. Learning should be interactive. This was not. My friend group would basically meet up and teach ourselves the concepts. It was way harder than it should have been.

I'd rather MOOC's be used to supplement a traditional lecture. I know I used the hell out of Khan Academy during Calc 1-3 which were all traditional lectures.

Hmm. With a video, you can pause it and go google for details.

Asking a professor is likely more efficient. It's still not as easy — you need to break his/her flow, and the professor must have enough spare time to answer.

Also, when you do more yourself you pay less; it can be important.

From my experience, going through harder parts of a textbook with a motivated friend or two works best.

The sort of questions I have when trying to do this sort of thing are often not well answered by search engines, as they often of the form "huh? I didn't follow how the last thing you said comes from (or is otherwise related to) the things that came before."

But they don’t answer the question of the role schools play in social development. There is also the question of how to effectively test students outside a supervised exam - online makes cheating plenty easier. And last is how to replace classroom labs which require special equipment. These are not impossible tasks for MOOCs to account for but all that I think these courses have only shown compelling methods of providing instruction and information on-demand and the ability to replay this instruction. School is a lot more than that.

Social development can also occur online, then go face-to-face when desired. Look at the social bonds people form in online games.

You can visit a university for a supervised exam at the end of a course. Exam sessions held even twice a year would allow people studying at different paces plan their time.

But you don't need to sit in the lecture halls. You can study where, when, and as much as it fits your life. (I stopped visiting most lectures after the sophomore year; I got an MD w/ honorable mentions nevertheless. I just studied more efficiently by myself.)

This system will likely result in your having many diplomas, for each significant course, and maybe a grand diploma for having a set of course diplomas and e.g. doing a master's work. But you can mix and match much more easily, and manage your time more flexibly.

The only losing side would be athletes. They'd have to find a different way to organize into minor leagues.

You're desscribing a very loosely defined and optimistic view of how things can and will play out. This is like the equivalent of seeing the early stages of bitcoin and deciding we should all ditch all current forms of money for cryptocurrency. I could list out a bunch of ways in which the system "can" work if I felt so optimistic about the idea of the technology just like this, but any points I would make based on my intuition and desires would be put in serious doubt in light of how cryptocurrencies have played out in reality thus far.

Sadly so many universities are bloated with administrators. Part of the reason the costs are so high. Then they hire adjunct professors who make about as much as a waiter at a good restaurant does. I don't know if TU uses adjuncts but most college's do and this includes Ivy League schools. So the money in general is not going to faculty (that is the full time ones) but the administrators. At some point they are going to have to get rid of the administrative bloat and bring costs down. They are not going to do this willingly. But I think college has reached a price point that is too high that the public is questioning if it is worth the cost.

I'm not sure the data backs that up:

Average expenditure per student:

Instruction: $17,996

Student Services and Academic Support (Not all of which are administrators): $9528

That results in $0.52 spent on Student Services and Academic Support for each $1.00 spent on Instruction. In 1999, that number was $0.47 spent on Student Services and Academic Support per $1.00 spent on Instruction. That's not a huge increase in administrators.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a...

The cost of college is largely driven by reductions in state support for public institutions, and the resulting increases in tuition by both private and public schools:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...

It might also be worth including some or possibly all of the $7,403 which is allocated to Institutional support (in the tables).

This page offers a summary of what that classification includes and it includes some clearly essential activities:

https://www.wisconsin.edu/financial-administration/accountin...

[edit typo]

That's fair, but it doesn't change the argument much. If you add the Institutional Support, you get these costs being 87% of Instructional Costs in 1999, and 94% in 2016. That is an increase of 8% as compared to 5% by my original calculation.

The faculty in question should unionize! Would be a great way to test the administrators' commitment to social justice.

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