Where’s the Money At?

Where’ s the money flowing to in American education? (Thanks to Jeremy S for these links)

It’s going to summer houses for administrators and star faculty. NYC Gives Its Stars Loans for Summer Homes

It’s going to golden parachutes for administrators who take advantage of graduate students and adjuncts.  CUNY’s Leader’s Retirement Comes With Paid Sabaticcal and Teaching Job.  His retirement salary? $490,000.

It’s going towards hot tubs in dorms. In Student Housing, Luxury Overshadowing Studying

It’s not going to poor kids in inner city schools. Budget Cuts Reach Bone For Philadelphia Schools.  

Suburban Strolling

We moved to this new town about two years ago. It’s a large town – nearly 30,000 people here and a large geographic boundaries. When school gets out and the roads are packed with parents and kids, traffic jams up. It can take 30 minutes to get from one part of town to the other. There are seven elementary schools and two middle schools. Jonah will have 500 classmates when he starts high school in the fall.

There are large sections of the town that I haven’t explored yet. It was always a town for upper middle class suburbanites, so there are some very impressive turn of the century homes in certain pockets of the town. My home is in a neighborhood that was populated later in the 1950s, when they drained the swamps, so our block isn’t that interesting.

Last week, I roamed around some of the cooler areas in town and took some pictures. One block sits high up on a ridge. In the right spot, you can see the Manhattan skyline.

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The homes on the ridge are huge and are surrounded by mature trees.

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I need to check out the interiors. Because I’m nosy.

Some Days Everything Is Broken

The air conditioner doesn’t work. Need to put a call into the repair service. Again. They said they fixed last week, but they lied.

My blog migration isn’t working. I can’t get the friggin’ data into the friggin’ blog. I spent two hours on tech support yesterday, and one hour today. They have created a ticket for me, which I suspect means that they are shoving my problem under a bed with dust bunnies.

The car has been serviced. I need to drive to the garage near my parents house, pick it up, and drop off my folks’ loaner car.

Sigh.

I might need a Egg McMuffin. Eight hours until I can uncork a bottle of wine without judgment.

Can Vogue Be Smart?

ImageIn the New Republic, Jessica Grose asks “can women’s magazines do serious journalism?” Grose says that Vogue, Elle, and other magazines that center around fashion, do also include great articles. She says that maybe writers who write for those magazines should tout their credentials more. 

I buy girlie magazines all the time, usually as impulse purchases at the supermarket. I do like looking at the pictures of the pretty shoes and make-up tips, but I also read the articles. And I like them. 

I bought last month’s issue of Elle. The memoir-ish article “Gone Girls” was excellent. Vogue has great articles about art, books, and travel. Actually, their entire culture section is quite excellent. Hmmm. I’ll have to go to the unicorn exhibit at the Cloisters this month. 

The Baby Penalty

Mary Ann Mason has an excellent blog post in Slate about how female academics face “a baby penalty.” Yeah? Who knew?

The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s, but not men’s, academic careers. For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high price. They are far less likely to be married with children. We see more women in visible positions like presidents of Ivy League colleges, but we also see many more women who are married with children working in the growing base of part-time and adjunct faculty, the “second tier,” which is now the fastest growing sector of academia. Unfortunately, more women Ph.Ds. has meant more cheap labor. And this cheap labor threatens to displace the venerable tenure track system.

Mason concludes that women with children need to “lean in” to overcome these barriers to employment.

Honestly, I just gave up on pursuing an academic career. The barriers are too high and, after a while, banging your head against the wall seems rather pointless. Shrug. There are other career paths. There also other life paths, because after all, there’s more to life than a career.