New book recommendation about higher education for your Public Library

Richard Vedder, "Restoring the Promise; Higher Education in America" his final points.

• "College administrative staff often exceeds the teaching staff. Vedder says, “I doubt there is a major campus in America where you couldn’t eliminate very conservatively 10% of the administrative payroll (in dollar terms) without materially impacting academic performance.”
• Reevaluate academic tenure. Tenure is an employment benefit that has costs, and faculty members should be forced to make trade-offs between it and other forms of university compensation.
• Colleges of education, with their overall poor academic quality, are an embarrassment on most campuses and should be eliminated.
• End speech codes on college campuses by using the University of Chicago principles on free speech.
• Require a core curriculum that incorporates civic and cultural literacy.
• The most important measure of academic reforms is to make university governing boards independent and meaningful. In my opinion, most academic governing boards are little more than yes men for the president and provost."

As reported by Walter E. Williams "Smart Ways to Make College Cheaper and Better," Daily Signal, May 15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=A6ryUtm4W9g  A YouTube of Vedder’s lecture on this topic.  Very little has changed since I went to college in the 1960s, except for the soaring costs, and I didn't have to take any diversity or retraining classes.

He reports that “Harvard and Bridgewater State are 15 miles apart--Bridgewater is a better school" (audience laughs). I looked it up--Harvard is 5X more expensive than Bridgewater.

Vedder says had been teaching for 53 years (he’s emeritus at Ohio University) and was told he needed to report for "diversity training" and he refused.  He says University of Michigan has 93 diversity coordinators and wonders if black and Hispanic students are better off. I think OSU beats that, and has more. But IED departments are not intended to help minorities and women, they are intended to punish and terrorize the white majority and provide jobs for administrative staff who graduated with "studies" degrees (my comment, not his).

There's a war against white males on American campuses. Alumni--check out your donor status and demand a change. One question from the audience was from a parent who said her son was required to take a course on "Climate Change" at his college which was not taught by any professor and contained no science, only opinion and popular magazines. She wants her money back! I don't blame her.

Amy Bishop file found

You can read the scan here. It's really chilling. One thing I noticed right away was that her mother called the police instead of an ambulence for the wounded (not yet dead) brother. Also, Amy Bishop was lucky (although not her colleagues 25 years later) to have not been shot by the police as they attempted to disarm her and she refused to put down the shotgun after she fled the murder scene (the family kitchen).

Update: From the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Her colleagues agree that she could be unusual. William Setzer, chairman of the chemistry department, recalls that she would interrupt meetings with bizarre tangents, “left field kind of stuff.” Robert O. Lawton, a biology professor who was in the room during the shooting but escaped unscathed, also thought she could be strange, but said she wasn’t the strangest academic he’d run across in his long career.

Another professor, however, has long been wary of Ms. Bishop. He asked The Chronicle not to use his name because, considering recent events, he is worried about his own safety. The professor, who was a member of Ms. Bishop’s tenure-review committee, said he first became concerned about Ms. Bishop’s mental health “about five minutes after I met her.”

The professor said that during a meeting of the tenure-review committee, he expressed his opinion that Ms. Bishop was “crazy.” Word of what he said made it back to Ms. Bishop. In September, after her tenure denial, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging gender discrimination. The professor’s remark was going to be used as possible evidence in that case." [Since she killed or critically wounded most of the people on her committee I doubt that he will remain anonymous for long.]