This is what I’m working on this morning… First draft…
Gen. Petraeus, the former CIA director, is finding his post-scandal life to be quite financially rewarding. He will cash in on speaking engagements and the chairmanship of a company that advises businesses about where to set up their factories overseas. The clear lesson from the Gen. Petraeus affair, as well as the come-back of Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer, is short-term shame, long-term Kaching! Somewhere in South Carolina, John Edwards is taking notes.
Added to Patreaus’s portfolio of jobs is a one-semester class at CUNY Macaulay Honors College for which he would be paid $200,000. A staff of assistants will help him write his syllabus and grade term papers. After Gawker first broke the news and the scandal grew, CUNY announced that Patraeus would teach the class for $1.
So far, the media has focused on Patraeus himself and the way that former public officials can find retirement very lucrative, even those who carry on affairs with their adoring biographers. But, really, the focus needs to move to CUNY administrators, as well other higher education administrators who have turned higher education into a reality show for Big Names.
To fully understand the galling conduct of CUNY administrators, one must compare Patraeus’s $200,000 deal with the salary that they offer the average instructor. The average instructor at CUNY isn’t a tenured professor. 80 percent of the courses taught in the CUNY system are taught by adjunct instructors.
More to come.
Apt. 11d 
I think I’m starting to understand your thesis about universities, especially public ones, and the games they are playing on the loan dime. But, I see the problem as being a bigger one about how services are provided by the government, that appears in K-12 education & in health care/health insurance.
In order to remain financially viable, the service (university, K-12, health care/health insurance) has to continue include a broad swathe of people, including those with money to pay for those services, some on the private market. So, they end up offering “middle-class” perks (gifted education, Petraeus, fancy dorm amenities, mammograms on demand, birthing suites with views) to keep the wealthier folks in their orbit. That, in turn, drives up the cost of everything, for everyone.
So, we end up with long and unresolvable arguments about what is a need and what is a perk.
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I hope you will engage the larger issues raised Zujaja Tauqeer. (I don’t know how to post links, but you can read coreyrobin.com for July 7.) Should CUNY have a Macauley Honors College, which does the sorts of things that fancy private colleges do (especially the ones that are trying to climb the greasy pole)? Or is it inappropriate for an institution to have one branch run like a Vanderbilt or a Wake Forest, while the rest of the institution hires cheap adjuncts to teach students with significantly weaker credentials?
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I don’t think honors colleges should be spending money on speakers or frills, but they are a very good idea in general. The ones with which I’m familiar were simply supplying more advanced coursework to those would could use it. It isn’t any different from the way you need prerequisites to get into the upper level courses.
My own experience (and honors program, not a separate college) was mostly that I was taking graduate seminars as an undergrad (with a reduced output of papers). You certainly could not take all of your classes from the honors. My current institution has a separate college. I think it was one of the first to do so. But the honors college kids still take most of their courses from the regular colleges.
Also, how to make a link.
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“The ones with which I’m familiar were simply supplying more advanced coursework to those would could use it.”
This is the concept of tracking, and the same argument is made in K-12 — that the “gifted” track classes don’t use any more resources, but merely offer advanced work to the group of students who can handle it (along with access to peers).
Honors classes these days do seem to offer more than just access to higher level work, though I think this varies significantly among individual institutions. I’ve heard of priority registration, access to special dorms (which might just provide peers, but sometimes also provides better living accommodations), honors seminars with particular profs, individualized advising, . . . .
In some cases, you could reasonable argue that the institution still isn’t spending more on those students, because they aren’t offering them other services that might be needed by poorly prepared students (like tutoring, remedial classes and the like).
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I think we did get priority registration for the first semester at least. Everybody got individualized advising, but we got individualized advising from faculty. We certainly didn’t get better living accommodations. The honors seminars weren’t with professors who didn’t teach other classes open to all, but the seminar itself wouldn’t have been available to them.
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You’ll want to be careful to update. The scuttlebutt in my inbox is that Petreus is now due to be paid $1 by CUNY.
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Ah, never mind. You have it in there.
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Not sure what he gets paid, but he’s ALSO at USC in the fall: http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/50160/general-petraeus-named-judge-widney-professor-at-usc/
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USC probably falls into the social climbing private university category, so they are probably paying Petraus a pretty penny. (Mind you, $150,000 would be low for a prestigious professor.) My impression is that HYP don’t need extra prestige–they add prestige to whomever they hire–so it’s the universities one tier down that will fork out big bucks for a Petraeus.
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My critique with CUNY and other colleges here actually has nothing to do with student loans. (I have several gripes with academia.)
My beef in this case is that there are three castes in academia. One are the high paid celebrity professors who get big salaries and perks like subsidized loans for weekend homes. They are paid this amount simply for their names. Names = reputation = higher rankings in stupidly created college ranks.
The next level down is slightly more numerous. They are the tenured faculty, who are pretty much doing the same job that my dad did for forty years. It’s a little different. Less teaching, more conferences and administrative work. But more or less the same. Their numbers shrink every year.
The bottom level, which is growing exponentially are the temporary workers. They teach the lion share of classes and in many cases, are paid less per hour than a McDonald’s worker. Adjunct jobs, which come with no benefits, are deadend jobs. They aren’t a necessary step toward a better job. They are disposable workers.
This system isn’t bad because it increases the expense of schools. Some might even argue that the kids benefit, because adjuncts are better teachers than the upper caste. It’s an awful system, because it is deeply immoral. I suppose it is just a reflection of all the other crap going out there in the world (see the McDonald’s post), but it makes me ill.
(excuse typos. getting kicked off computer by an 11-year old punk)
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But does it make a difference if all three classes are not at the same institution? The Ivies don’t use a lot of adjuncts, and the ones they do hire are paid a lot more than the ones at CUNY (or Ramapo). So Harvard has classes one and two, and CUNY has classes two and three. It seems to upset people if the same university has classes one and three, however.
BTW, I think class two is a lot more numerous, not “slightly more numerous,” than class one. There must be at least twenty anonymous (tenured) toilers at Harvard for every one Henry Louis Gates.
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I was considering the academic issue from the consumer point of view, rather than the employee. I do find the loss of viable long term work in “middle” the changing economy a big concern — I think the structure you’re describing is invading every workspace. As I’ve said before, I don’t see any mitigation in the trends (though maybe a better economy will have an effect). It’s part of what makes us all so anxious about our children’s future: we see a future where they either have to be celebrities or commodified workers.
But the academic workplace is just not where my angry sympathies lie (nor with associates at law firms). I still think the beginnings of a solution to the adjunct problem will only start when people have to stop taking those unsustainable jobs and that no other intervention is going to change the academic math.
And, to the extent that people have no choice, I’m more concerned with the worker at McDonalds, who may really have no other choice, and thus can’t not take the job.
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y81, most colleges are not Harvard or Williams or Swarthmore. Most colleges are like CUNY or Rutgers of Cleveland State. Most college students attend a school where there are a lot adjuncts. So, I have no gripe with elite schools that pay their workers fairly. My gripe is with the schools that have a few high paid celebrities, a shrinking number tenured faculty, and a large number of poorly paid workers.
bj, you’re totally right that adjuncts are not as bad off as the McDonald’s workers. They have willingly taken a bad deal. Presumably they have skills and education that could be translated into better paid jobs outside of academia, but don’t do it for a variety of reasons. Maybe.
The conversation has moved onto the McDonald’s workers and I want to keep the focus on that group. So, let’s move on.
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