Universities in the market place

Adam Tooze has written thoughtfully about the student demonstrations at Columbia, and I came across Branko Milanovic’s post via John Naughton.

Tooze writes:

There was no riot last night at Columbia any more than there has been at any other point. The violence came from the police side and it came at the invitation and request of the University administration.

My colleague at the FT Edward Luce is right. It was the adults not the students that caused the real disorder. It is the University administration not the student protestors who have seriously disrupted the end of term and examinations. Chartbook 280 The state as blunt force – impressions of the Columbia campus clearance.

Here is an excerpt of a post from Branko Milanovic:

The novelty, for me, in the current wave of freedom of speech demonstrations in the United States was that it was the university administrators who called for the police to attack students. In at least one case, in New York, the police were puzzled why they were brought in, and thought it was counter-productive. One could understand that this attitude by the administrators might happen in authoritarian countries where the administrators may be appointed by the powers-to-be to keep order on campuses. Then, obviously, as obedient civil servants, they would support the police in its “cleansing” activity although they would rarely have the authority to call it in…

But in the US, university administrators are not appointed by Biden, nor by Congress. Why would they then attack their own students? Are they some evil individuals who love to beat up younger people?..

The answer is, No. They are not. They are just in a wrong job. They are not seeing their role as what traditionally was the role of universities, that is to try to impart to the younger generation values of freedom, morality, compassion, self-abnegation, empathy or whatever else is considered desirable. Their role today is to be the CEOs of factories that are called universities. These factories have a raw material which is called students and which they turn, at regular annual intervals, into graduates. Consequently, any disturbance in that production process is like a disturbance to a supply chain. It has to be eliminated as soon as possible in order for the production to resume. Graduating students have to be “outputted”, the new students brought in, moneys from them have to be pocketed, donors have to be found, more funds to be secured. Students, if they interfere with the process, need to be disciplined, if necessary by force. Police has to be brought in, order to be restored.

The administrators are not interested in values, but in the bottom-line. Their job is equivalent to that of a CEO of Walmart, CVS, or Burger King. They will use the talk about values, or “intellectually-challenging environment”, or “vibrant discussion” (or whatever!), as described in a recent article in The Atlantic, as the usual promotional, performative speech that top managers of companies nowadays produce at the drop of a hat. Not that anyone believes in such speeches. But it is de rigueur to make them. It is a hypocrisy that is widely accepted. The issue is that such a level of hypocrisy is still not entirely common at universities because they were, for historical reasons, not seen exactly like sausage factories. They were supposed to produce better people. But this was forgotten in the scramble for revenue and donors’ money. Thus the sausage factory cannot stop, and the police needs to be called in. Universities as factories – by Branko Milanovic

But if you look at the President of Columbia’s cv it is not hard to be sceptical of her role as a university president. John Naughton points out:

The President of the institution is Minouche Shafik, described by Wikipedia as a British-American academic and economist. She has been serving as the 20th president of Columbia University since July 2023. She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023.

From 2014 to 2017, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and also previously as permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She was created a life peeress by Elizabeth II in 2020.

John Naughton adds:

(Footnotes: Actually Shafik was the Director of the LSE; it’s only since her departure that the role has been rebranded as “President and Vice-Chancellor”. Also, it’s not clear how much of an ‘academic’ Shafik is. She was an Adjunct (i.e. unpaid) Professor in the Economics department of Georgetown University for five years, and an Associate Visiting Professor at the Wharton School, but the bulk of her career thus far suggests someone who is basically an administrator. This may be relevant to what follows.)

Whatever the lessons of these recent events, the managers of universities have over the last three to four decades undermined a key reason for their own existence and access to public funding. Better to attach a few portakabins to job centres.

The State of the UK

Two adjacent stories today

Carer convicted over benefit error worth 30p a week fights to clear his name | Benefits | The Guardian

A carer who says he was “dragged through the courts” and had to sell his home to pay back almost £20,000 in benefit overpayments is fighting to clear his name after the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) acknowledged he made an innocent mistake.

George Henderson, 64, said he made a gain of just 30p a week while claiming carer’s allowance for his son John, who has learning difficulties and is addicted to heroin. He now costs the Treasury £1,000 a month more in benefits, having become homeless and too unwell to work.

Henderson said he was left suicidal after being prosecuted by the DWP, which accused him of fraudulently claiming the benefit for six years while he was caring for John, who is now 42.

And the DWP said“We are committed to fairly supporting all those who need the welfare system, while fulfilling our duty to treating taxpayers’ money responsibly.

And now the other:

Michelle Donelan used £34,000 of taxpayer funds to cover libel costs | Michelle Donelan | The Guardian

UK taxpayers have paid out more than £34,000 to cover the cost of the science secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, the Guardian can reveal, more than double the sum the government had previously admitted.

The legal fees racked up by the cabinet minister after wrongly accusing an academic of supporting or sympathising with Hamas cost the public an additional £19,000, on top of the £15,000 libel settlement.

She faced calls to resign from opposition parties and criticism from Tory backbenchers as she was urged to cover the cost of settling the libel action herself after apologising and publicly retracting her remarks.

There is luxury, and there is…

In Doncaster, a town in northern England, $100,000 will buy you a four-bedroom house. In Dubai, it will get you a four-bedroom penthouse—for a night. The Royal Mansion, the nightly rate for which makes it the world’s priciest suite, sits on the 18th and 19th floors of the Atlantis The Royal hotel. It comes with 1,100 square metres (12,000 square feet) of marble floors, a terrace with an infinity pool, a steam room, Hermès shampoo, $500 bathrobes, a not-so-mini bar and, naturally, a butler.

The Economist

Oodles of noodles

Oodles of noodles: how a global favourite became an economic red flag

They are a portable, resilient and long-lasting store of nourishment in times of need — from dire to impulsive and all points between. There is a reason that instant noodles have replaced cigarettes as the primary currency of the informal economy in dismally catered US prisons. This ready-to-eat grub, pioneered in the late 1950s to feed a ruined Japan in the protracted aftermath of war, takes the prize for being cheap and fast, but delicious.

I may dissent from this this view. YMMV.

Boeing, profit engineering and the destruction of value

Boeing: how not to run a national champion

The ongoing Boeing story (from the FT).

It’s not a surprise – late in life, even Welch realised that the focus on shareholder returns had been a mistake – or as he pithily put it “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” and that you build value for shareholders by building a good company and a good product.

Comment by BrassMonkey

Well this is what happens when you lay-off or demotivate a significant proportion of the layer of highly competent technical experts in a technology and manufacturing company. These Fellows and Senior Engineer meeting leads are the unsung glue that holds a business like Boeing on course. Ensuring it stays true to the well established aerospace principles while maintaining productivity and fighting the corner for technical professionalism against the onslaught of profit engineering . These seasoned experts ‘set the culture’ on the shop floors and ensured that it was maintained across B2B interfaces. Boeing has a serious problem of leaders that find their ways to the top who do not have technical or manufacturing backgrounds. This is in stark contrast to Airbus, where a significant number of their executive team have risen through the ranks building aircraft and factories. One sentence to sum up the whole problem. Top management don’t care about safety, they will cite “shareholder returns”, they don’t want to know about the issues just build lots of planes, do it quickly and make them cheap

Comment by Super Hank Petram

It’s not fixable. They have just appointed a new CEO-designate to succeed Calhoun. She is an accountant.

Medicine and health care is far, far, worse.

Frans de Waal taught the world that animals had emotions

Frans de Waal taught the world that animals had emotions

The young male chimps at Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem were fighting again. They were running round their island, teeth bared, screaming. Two in particular were battling until one definitively won, and the other lost. They ended up, apparently sulking, high in widely separate branches of the same tree. Then young Frans de Waal, who was observing their wars for his dissertation, saw something astonishing. One held out his hand to the other, as if to say “Let’s make it up.” In a minute they had swung down to a main fork of the tree, where they embraced and kissed.

He did not hesitate to call this what it was: reconciliation. What was more, it was essential if the group was to cohere and survive. The word, though, scandalised his tutors. Studying primates in those days, the mid-1970s, was mostly a matter of recording violence, aggression and selfishness.

Frans de Waal has died. All brings to mind the wonderful photo of the chimp and Jane Goodall eyeing each other up in the Think Different series.

That old world

Europe’s economy is a cause for concern, not panic

But as America’s population has risen by a quarter since 1994, while ageing Europe’s has grown far less, the two economies are in fact somewhat closer in terms of income per person than they were at the time of Bill Clinton and Jacques Delors. Factoring in working hours, which are both shorter and on a steady decline in the eu, leaves European workers with even less to blush about. Put very simply, the French and their neighbours toil a third less than Americans, earn a third less, and are a lot more tanned by the end of August.

When I worked in France, in Pierre Chambon’s lab in Strasbourg, Gallic pride was taken in the ability to publish ‘big’ papers before the competitors in the USA and take all of August off.

Posted on Journée internationale de la Francophonie

Yes, but what do we do about sociopathy?

Via John Naughton

Luckily, Apple has just provided us all with a reminder — its rules for in-app purchases in the US, Simmonds discovers, provide “a jarring, but not surprising, reminder that Apple is not a real person and not worthy of your love”.

Quite so. Repeat after me, all corporations are sociopathic — even though they’re run by humans. They’re what Charlie Stross calls “Slow AIs”, which is why it’s naive to ascribe their behaviour to the moral deficiencies of those who run them.

Therapy or punishment? Or revenge?

On hatred dressed as justice

Robert Badinter persuaded France to abolish the guillotine

Hatred was never so frightening as when it wore the mask of justice. Badinter had seen enough of hatred to know that; all men of his generation had. And he always mistrusted the mob. As a teenager, he had watched two armed men drag a shorn, half-naked girl through the streets because she was a “fille à Boches”—“a girl of the Germans”.

The desperate reality of a UK surgeon in Gaza

The desperate reality of a surgeon in Gaza

I came to understand why families without shelter cluster together when they are under attack, so they can live or die together.