When the bare minimum gets an A
There’s something fundamentally amiss when one can attend a class with the intention of zoning out or phoning in and still get a good grade. According to results from the National Survey of Student Engagement, approximately 20 percent of students nationwide admitted to frequently going to class without completing their homework, and of those students, 36 percent of seniors and 29 percent of freshmen generally earned A’s. We’ve all done it — taken the class or professor widely known to be so easy that you can complete the entire New York Times crossword puzzle and the Wonderword found in this newspaper, eat lunch and answer two days’ worth of e-mails during each of its meeting times and still emerge with an A. Some call these “luxury classes” — necessary breaks from the mental grind of the courses that you work overtime for because they actually matter to you. We call them acts of rebellion. As long as UT requires that we take basic courses outside of our majors, we will try to make those basic courses as painless as possible to our psyches and our GPAs. As Warren Buffet once said, “that which is not worth doing is not worth doing well,” and, well, he’s done pretty well. Until the University does away with oppressively boring lecture classes and memorization-based learning, we’ll heed the doctrine of the self-made billionaire.
Leech college presidencies?
While the financial and media industries bloodlet employees like it’s 1981, there’s at least one profession in which stewards are receiving raises: the college presidency. According to a comprehensive report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the average pay and benefits package for presidents of public research institutions increased by nearly 8 percent last year. Seven public university leaders saw their annual paychecks rise to above $1 million.
Our own President William Powers brings home $676,912 per year, $65,945 of which comes from public funds. Contrasted with the $1.3 million salary of E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, Powers’ compensation is practically ascetic.
For those of us anxious about leaving the cradle of UT and finding lucrative jobs in a decapitated economy, college presidencies are, unfortunately, hard to come by. But if you really want to cash in, the private sector is the place to be — David J. Sargent, the president of Suffolk University in Boston, brings home $2.8 million per year as the country’s highest-paid college president. Sargent has certainly worked his way up to his earnings — he’s been employed at the college for 52 years, and his current salary is recompense resulting from decades of being underpaid.
Scientists are intelligent, design is not, survey says
For the time being, UT students will be spared the indignity of having to take Intelligent Design 101. The Texas Freedom Network Education Fund recently surveyed science faculty at private and public universities in Texas and found a staggering 97.7 percent reject the notion of intelligent design as actual science. Ninety-one percent of those scientists believe that evolution is compatible with religion, and 95 percent support evolution-only science curriculums.
In light of the agenda of the Texas Education Agency, who last year fired its director of science for forwarding an e-mail about a talk on evolution to a colleague, the numbers from this survey are refreshing and telling. Clearly, select government officials who let church interfere with state and lobby for the teaching of intelligent design have no business legislating science curriculum. As the 81st Legislative Session approaches, we hope the strong numbers from Texas’ most able minds will speak to the necessity of curriculums based on facts, not pseudoscientific suppositions.
