Castagnera on Risk Management in Higher Education… and more

Monday, April 8, 2013

AAUP releases 2012 faculty pay data

English: Widely regarded as an authoritative source on sound academic practice, the AAUP's Policy Documents and Reports, also known as the Redbook, contains the Association's major policy statements. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Average pay equals $84,000.

http://chronicle.com/article/2013-AAUP-Survey-Table/138291/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Chronicle of Higher Ed's Salary Explorer:

http://chronicle.com/article/aaup-survey-data-2013/138309#id=144050

Gap has widened between publics and privates.

http://chronicle.com/article/As-Public-Private-Pay-Gap/138359/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Sunday, April 7, 2013

FBI asking why Rutgers Roundball Whistleblower allegedly wanted nearly $1 mil from the University

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/sports/ncaabasketball/fbi-said-to-be-investigating-ex-assistant-to-rice.html?hp&_r=4&

Italy's experience with Internet policy is seen as a caution to China

Beppe Grillo (Photo credit: Niccolò Caranti)

SINOGRAPH Italy's Internet politics menace China
While online debate in China represents a potential training ground for future democratic dialogue, the dangers of Internet politics can be seen in the rise of Italy's "5 Star Movement". The prevailing voices in Beppe Grillo's movement are those most active on the web, and they post the most barbed comments. Such chaotic, volcanic politics only lead masses to seek radical leaders. - Francesco Sisci (Apr 3, '13)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-030413.html

BEIJING - It is, if you will, the usual tale of two countries: one very large and one quite small; one overpopulated, one mid-sized; one eager to succeed, the other timid. Both are old civilizations; pizza, noodle, and rice eaters; superstitious; and fond of firecrackers, Marco Polo, art, and good food. Yes, the countries are China and Italy, bound now in a strange manner by respective - and independent - recent political and social developments.

Italy over the past century was a staging ground for experiments with new political solutions that had global consequences. Fascism was born in Italy in the 1920s, although it also flourished elsewhere and caused the start of World War II. In the 1970s, the Italian pro-Soviet Communist Party supported coalition governments that included pro-American parties, showing that communism could be adapted to a democratic environment. Thus, it inspired reforms in Gorbachev's USSR some years later, something that led to the collapse of communism in Europe altogether.

One then wonders whether the new Italian political entity the "5 Star Movement", created by comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, will also lead to something else - and what that could be. The "5 Star Movement" scored a huge success in the recent Italian elections while refusing to reach out to voters through talks and debates on TV, the traditional means of political campaigning for the past five decades.

It canvassed votes by means of old-fashioned public meetings and by modern web chats and Tweets shot through the Internet and mobile phones. He and his followers explained that this is the new web democracy. In fact, there is something extremely modern in Grillo's political movement. Certainly, US President Barack Obama understood the importance of the web and relied on songs spread on Facebook and Twitter slogans. But he still went on TV and engaged in all the traditional campaign activities.

Grillo, conversely, refused TV appearances, political debates, and even interviews in the Italian press, and this magnified his image, bringing him almost 25% of the vote. The Internet is and was the ground for internal debates. Candidates were selected through mock elections on the web among Grillo's supporters; policy discussions were held in web chats rather than in smoky rooms. There were no meetings, no cells, and no steering committees.

Actually, this is not the only new element of Grillo's party. Contrary to all past practices, Grillo and his main partner, Gianroberto Casalegno, chose not to run for parliament. Notwithstanding that, these two extra-parliamentary leaders control all their elected deputies in parliament through a series of binding agreements. Meanwhile, the few top leaders decide the party line in informal gatherings on phone calls. It may not sound good - the party looks more like a private entity than an organization to promote political change and effective popular participation - but it has so far provided an organization that works similar to, if not better than, the old party systems.

That is, Grillo's party organized only over the Internet, without any of the traditional trappings of old fashioned politics. Then this kind of association could also be possible in any country where traditional party organizations are forbidden, but the Internet and telecommunications are highly developed - so why not China?

Certainly, Beijing has long spotted the potentially disruptive dangers of organizing over the Internet, especially thanks to the warnings of the so far ill-fated "jasmine revolutions" in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. China learned that uprisings in Xinjiang and Tibet were made possible by Internet networking, and thus it decided not to close or forbid the web but to manage it, through a series of controls preventing major protests.

However, the Bo Xilai case has shown that the party is now vulnerable not only to opposition from outside (for instance, pro-independence protests in Xinjiang or Tibet) but also to challenges to the present leadership from within. Party members dissatisfied with the current policies, yet not "anti-revolutionary'', may cluster in web chats, groups, and networks organized via popular Chinese social websites, such as QQ, Wechat, or even Taobao.

Here political, social, and economic debates are so widespread and pervasive that they are impossible to check. Then the policy so far has been, wisely, to let these debates surface more or less unhindered in order to make the opposition clear and thus provide a warning to the leadership of possible dangers. These dangers can be in policies that need to be adjusted or in people who should to be recruited into the leadership or sidelined.

In a way, then, these web debates in China are becoming the training ground for greater democratic political debate, even without open debates on TV or in newspapers, which remain quite conservative compared to the web. Here the party leadership, party members, and common people are learning to engage with one another and to feel engaged in the country and its policy. Thus they all start to develop a wider sense of belonging, or guishugan (see Xi has to get the party started, Asia Times Online, December 22, 2012).

But in Grillo's experience there are other elements that may be worrisome for China or any other country experimenting with web democracy. In the Grillo experience, one can see that the prevailing voices of the movement are the ones most active on the web, posting the most in chats, the most vocal, and the ones with the most barbed comments.

In a way, it is the same situation one sees in the emergence of leadership in a crowd, as literature Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti noted in his classic Masses and Power. In its chaotic, ebullient, lava-like form, the masses find their leader among the most extreme, radical, spirited people and discard, reject, and even destroy the most reasonable, cooler minds.

This is evident in Grillo's rhetoric, which is full of irony, jokes, and extravagant remarks, which the reader doesn't know whether to take at face value or not. There is no cold analysis or clear proposals, but sloganeering meant to stir emotions for revolutionary times-and not to rule a country. This language is similar to the Cultural Revolution-style labeling one can find in many Chinese chat rooms, where people call each other names rather than dissect the arguments and offering solutions to the many issues of the country.

In China, public rhetoric seems not to have evolved since the time of the Cultural Revolution, and it is pervading the spirit of many public intellectuals who believe, like during the Cultural Revolution, that the only a revolutionary can be a critic of the government and that the present status quo must be toppled. It may be true or not, but this is actually contrary to the experience of the past three decades, which have proved the value of and positive results from incremental reforms.

Yet the beliefs of these Chinese intellectuals come from the communist tradition, which disregards the impact of reforms on change - and China is ruled by a party that calls itself communist. Meanwhile, reforms, which have been the instruments of government and change in Beijing for the past 30 years, are considered the only means for change in capitalist countries, which openly oppose communism and its revolution. There is a lot of irony here, and much room for improvement.

Then, in a way, to eliminate the latent revolutionary danger of so much of the Internet rhetoric, which works with the logic of an ebullient crowd, the current ruling party has to clearly separate from the legacy of its communist revolutionary roots. The spirit of this was in fact evident for centuries to the Chinese: the rules and the rhetoric needed to gain power (traditionally by leading a peasant uprising, as did Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, and Mao Zedong) cannot be the same rules and the rhetoric used to hold on power. These elements are clear to China, as Beijing is clear about taking seriously the Internet and its political leverage on domestic decision-making.

This brings us back to Italy. If the path for future reforms is roughly clear in China, it is not clear at all in Italy, where nobody so far has been able to control the snowball effect of Grillo/the Internet on Italian politics. Nobody has challenged Grillo on his home turf, the Internet, and nobody has challenged him on his revolutionary rhetoric, either by carrying out some of the reasonable reforms he proposes (cut the huge costs of Italian politics) or by disputing some of his demagoguery (a minimum wage for "being a citizen'', a measure that could rot the core of Italian economy).

Then with or without Grillo, the yearning for revolution is growing in Italy. The social and economic fabric of the country is certainly too strong to suggest a real revolution in Italy. With about five million small and medium enterprises, over 80% of the people owning at least one house, and menial jobs granted to second-class citizens (some two million foreign immigrants with little or no rights), there is just nobody who really wants to turn the country upside-down. But that doesn't mean there are no aspirations for dramatic change, and so far only Grillo has been able to give a voice and a shape to this aspiration, as the national economy is spiraling down and making everything worse.

Here, there is no clear path ahead. Nobody is clear about what Grillo wants to do if he gets power; possibly he himself doesn't know. Nobody is clear about the crawling impact economic crises in Cyprus and Slovenia could have on the weak political balance in Italy and thus on the overall solidity of the euro.

This makes the situation in Italy highly critical for everybody, and yet it is hard to intervene and know what the future holds for the country while revolutionary winds grow stronger.

Here again China is different. Whereas the leadership is strong and setting long-term goals for the next 10 or 20 years, its society is and feels weak. Most people have a home or a piece of land (over 80% of the population), but these are rights recently acquired, and many people still feel uncertain about them. Many have made money, but anti-corruption campaigns have been routing out many because of political allegiances to this or that party boss. Many with money have therefore been fleeing the country and feel uncertain about their fortunes.

Meanwhile, others are coming in, elbowing their way through the ones who are leaving. Plus, social, cultural, and ethical values are changing at a fast pace, so that one generation feels its values are no longer valid for the next one, and within just a few years, there is little or nothing to pass on. These elements create an unstable group of business leaders and also an unstable basis for social and moral interaction. In politics, there are fierce power struggles, but it is all hidden, making it difficult for anybody to gauge or check, and also making it difficult to predict how one should set sails for business opportunities.

In other words, Chinese society is unstable as the leadership tries to show steadiness. And thus it is true, if the leadership were to split, the whole country would tremble and shake. But then again, if the leadership stays united, the mass of society will move ahead.

Nothing like this is clear in Italy. Grillo could well steer Italy out of the euro and thus start a breakdown of the currency and a global financial crisis with unpredictable implications.

Francesco Sisci is a columnist for the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore. His e-mail is fsisci@gmail.com (posted with his permission)

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Lord knows there are too many of us already

Protect access to birth control!

Public comment to President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services:
Thank you for the new the Affordable Care Act rules on contraception, which ensure that women have access to no-cost birth control. Please continue to protect this access, regardless of the right-wing opposition.

Dear Jim,

The Obama Administration made every reasonable effort to compromise with religiously-affiliated employers when implementing rules on women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

An update to the birth control benefit in the health care reform gives religious employers the ability to hand the responsibility to provide birth control coverage to a third party insurance company.¹ But right-wing opponents led by the Conference of Catholic bishops are still balking at the plan.²

President Obama did the right thing for women when he rejected the demands of right-wing activists and gave all women access to no-cost birth control through their insurance coverage.³ But before these new guidelines go into effect, his administration is holding a public comment period on the new rules. We know that anti-woman activists will flood President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services with comments urging the administration to overturn its historic decision.

President Obama needs to hear that the vast majority of Americans support his decision to ensure access to no-cost birth control for all women. Click here to submit a public comment in support of access to birth control.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the medical community agree that providing no-cost birth control is an essential part of preventive health care for women. And Kathleen Sebelius, the director of HHS, said that providing birth control at no cost to women should be like "covering flu shots.”⁴

However, before activists from CREDO and Planned Parenthood began petitioning President Obama, theNew York Times reported that the president was dangerously close to caving to the demands of the anti-woman lobby by adding a giant loophole that would keep a large number of women from being able to access no-cost birth control.⁵

CREDO members sent over 160,000 petitions and made over 3,000 calls to the White House asking President Obama not to cave. In the end, President Obama listened to our call to protect women's health. But that doesn't mean our work is done.

Some right-wing organizations are already balking at the plan even though it allows religious employers to avoid providing birth control directly to their employees. These anti-woman extremists will surely use the public comment process to file reams of objections to the plan. So let's make sure the president hears from those of us who want him to stand strong and protect access to contraception.

Make sure that President Obama hears that the vast majority of Americans support his decision to ensure access to no-cost birth control for all women. Click below to submit a comment in support of access to contraception:
http://act.credoaction.com/go/107?t=4&akid=7239.3371131.2NzpsS

Thank you for standing up for women's access to birth control.

Jordan Krueger, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Submit your comment now:

1. Julie Rovner, "White House Tries Again To Find Compromise On Contraception." NPR, February 01, 2013.
2. Imani Gandy, "So What’s the Deal with the New Contraception Mandate Rules?" RH Reality Check, February 01, 2013.
3. N.C. Aizenman, "Obama Birth Control Policy: Administration Lays Out Proposals For Carrying Out Compromise.” The Huffington Post, 3-16-2012.
4. N.C. Aizenman, "New U.S. rules require insurance coverage for contraception.” The Washington Post, 8-1-2011.
5. Robert Pear, "Democrats Urge Obama to Protect Contraceptive Coverage in Health Plans." New York Times, 11-19-2011.

WIsh I had thought of this title for my new book on terrorism

English: Northern Ireland Peace/Anti-Terrorism logo. Artwork is of a Terrorist behind a 'No Entry' symbol, superimposed on map of Northern Ireland. Text reads: "NO to terrorism... We Wont Go Back!". This banner artwork is for those concerned about increasing Dissident terrorism in post 'Good Friday Agreement' Ireland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why Democracy Encourages Terrorism
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/democracy-and-terrorism/32605?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Rutgers Roundball Scandal Has Reached the AD

SVG version of the Rutgers "R" logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr. Robert L. Barchi, President
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
83 Somerset Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1281

Dear Dr. Barchi:

I write in confirmation of our conversation earlier today during which we agreed that it was in the best interests of Rutgers University that I step down from my position as Director of Intercollegiate Athletics. I do so reluctantly because I always have and always will love Rutgers. I want to thank the people who have supported me throughout my years as a student-athlete and Athletic Director and help them understand my reasoning in this situation.

My continued tenure as Athletic Director is no longer sustainable for the University which I attended and where a piece of me will always remain. In connection with the incidents involving former basketball Coach Mike Rice, as was the case with all other matters which I handled on behalf of the University, I always tried my best to do what is right. I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on the events which led to today. As you know, my first instincts when I saw the videotape of Coach Rice's behavior was to fire him immediately. However, Rutgers decided to follow a process involving university lawyers, human resources professionals, and outside counsel. Following review of the independent investigative report, the consensus was that university policy would not justify dismissal. I have admitted my role in, and regret for, that decision, and wish that I had the opportunity to go back and override it for the sake of everyone involved.

I trust that my tenure at Rutgers will not be judged by this one incident. I am proud of my efforts to lead Rutgers into the Big Ten, and of all of the accomplishments of our student-athletes in the classroom and on the field of play. I want to thank our great fans, the hardest working staff in collegiate athletics, and every one of our fine student-athletes. It has been my great pleasure to serve my alma mater.

Sincerely,

Tim Pernetti
Class of 1993

http://www.scarletknights.com/news/release.asp?prID=13052#.UWAdi47FVT5