Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Only in America

Many CEOs and top-level managers manage to capture an enormous share of the surplus as payment in exchange for working. That we know.

We also know that, while faculty salaries have stagnated, the size and salaries of collegiate athletic coaching staffs have soared in recent years.

Then there are those, like former-Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis, who get their cut of the surplus for literally not working—for doing nothing.

As has been the case for many years, former Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis again received more money from the university in a recent year than any Notre Dame athletics employee.

Weis — who was fired by Notre Dame in November 2009 — received what has become his customary $2,054,744 during the 2014 calendar year, according to the university’s new federal tax return.

That means Weis received more from Notre Dame in 2014 than all but two university employees listed on the return, which the school provided Monday in response to a request from USA TODAY Sports.

Vice President and chief investment officer Scott Malpass was credited with nearly $5.4 million in total compensation in 2014, including just over $1 million that had been reported as deferred compensation in prior years; Malpass’ total also included nearly $2.9 million in bonus pay. Michael Donovan, the school’s managing director for private capital investments, was credited with more than $2.3 million, including just under $400,000 that had been reported as deferred pay in prior years and more than $1.1 million in bonus compensation. . .

According to the school’s tax records, Weis received more than $6.6 million pay and severance in 2009. He subsequently has been paid nearly $10.3 million by Notre Dame from 2010 through 2014. The tax records say that Weis was due to be paid through December 2015.

During that time, Weis also worked as an assistant for the Kansas City Chiefs and the  University of Florida. In December 2011, he became the head coach at Kansas, which was paying him $2.5 a season until firing him in late September 2014 with more than $5.6 million owed him under that contract.

 

Disclaimer: I am an employee of the University of Notre Dame but I have no say in determining the pay of anyone, working or not.

Cult of CEOs

The United States suffers from an obscene cult of CEOs. Whether we’re talking about “Neutron Jack” Welch (who was celebrated for raising GE’s market value while laying off tens of thousands of workers) or Bill Gates (who made Microsoft competitive by engaging in anticompetitive practices) or Lloyd Blankfein (head of the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”)—they’re routinely feted as being ruthless, “transgressive” leaders who make change happen in the corporate world.

I suppose it comes as no surprise, then, that two business professors—Hamid Bouchikhi and John R. Kimberly [ht: kc]—would extend that celebration to CEOs in the academy, by studying the decision by Dean of Arts and Letters Mark Roche to divide the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame.*

Transgressive leaders are those who are expected by members to abide by sacred organizational norms but who deliberately violate them for the sake of what they believe to be the greater good of the organization. . .The model of transgressive leadership we propose emerged in the wake of field work at the University of Notre Dame, where a new Dean of the College of Arts and Letters forced a paradigmatic, organizational, and managerial reorientation of economics after a long period of repeated and failed attempts by others to redirect the department.

What’s bizarre about this study is that the authors make clear that Roche did, in fact, violate many of the “sacred organizational norms” of the academy—and then they go on to celebrate him as a transgressive leader who managed to create a new, exclusively neoclassical department of economics.

What did Roche do to get to the point of forcing a split within the department? According to the authors, he “committed a series of lower intensity transgressive acts,” including expressing his own view of the paradigmatic orientation of the department, producing and publicly sharing numbers about members’ research productivity, and violating “the sacred norm of academic self-governance and democratic decision making in a research university” by appointing an advisory board, vetoing hiring proposals, and recruiting a new outside chair against the formal opposition of the existing departmental faculty. Those, of course, were all in the way—once the department itself didn’t cave to his demands—of preparing for, in 2003, the splitting of the department into two separate and unequal departments.

The department voted (15-6) against the split. So did the College Council (by a tally of 25 to 14). And the decision was challenged by several prominent mainstream economists, including Robert Solow (in a letter to the president of the university):

You should know that I am a mainstream economist, in fact a mainstream mainstream economist. But I am not an uptight mainstream economist. Economics, like any discipline, ought to welcome unorthodox ideas, and deal with them intellectually as best it can. It does pretty well, in fact. To conduct a purge, as you are doing, sounds like a confession of incapacity. I grant that you are not shooting the Trotskyites in the back of the head, but merely sending them to Siberia, That is not much of an improvement.

And Deirdre McCloskey (in an article in the Eastern Economics Journal):

What’s the problem nowadays at Notre Dame? … The Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, one Mark Roche, together with his agent in Economics, Richard Jensen, and with the backing of the Provost, Nathan Hatch, and the apparent entrepreneurship of the Dean of the Graduate School, Jeffrey Kantor, has decided that Notre Dame’s Econ Dept is broke . . . and should become mainstream…The Department has resisted. It’s being punished with appointments imposed on it; its promotions have been turned back. It may be abolished entirely, its distinctive graduate program scrapped, and a new one started that will be drearily Samuelsonian.

But the dean, with the protection of the university administration, ultimately got what he wanted. And, according to the authors, Roche’s transgressions ultimately served the good of his college because he sought to appease the faculty (by opening new communications channels and rewarding faculty members whose work met his criteria), thus leading to a celebratory self-evaluation (in his own private notes):

When I stepped down there was a truly joyful reception, as much like a wedding reception as a retirement party. It may be self-deception, but my sense was that there was more gratitude for what had been accomplished than for my leaving office.

Ultimately, Bouchikhi and Kimberly celebrate the cult of CEOs—who “have a clear vision of what needs to change and accept the collateral human cost, for others and for themselves, if they perceive causing hardship to others as a requirement.” It is a model that is well established in the corporate world and is increasingly becoming the norm in the new corporate university.

 

*Disclaimer: as regular readers of this blog know, I was a member of the Department of Economics when, in 2003, Roche, with the support of the university administration, decided to divide the department into two (one of which, the Department of Economics and Policy Studies, of which I was also a member, was dissolved by Roche’s successor, in 2010). I didn’t know about this research when it was being conducted but I am cited numerous times in the paper.

Higher education has a Koch problem

It used to be the case that, for the most part, the Koch brothers were bottom-feeders when it came to higher education. They approached (or were approached by) financially strapped schools that were only too willing to sell their academic-freedom souls for relatively small infusions of cash.

The exception was, of course, George Mason University, the largest public research university in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which took in just under $80 million from Koch foundations from 2005 to 2014.

Now, the grants are getting larger and the recipients much richer and more prominent. In some cases, the Koch brothers are supporting right-wing, free-market scholars and programs; in other cases, they’re buying the prestige based on an association with highly ranked colleges and universities. And, of course, a mixture of the two.

Here are three recent examples:

Earlier this year, the University of Louisville announced the receipt of $6.3 million from the foundations of businessmen “Papa” John Schnatter ($4.64 million) and Charles Koch ($1.66 million) to create the new John H. Schnatter Center for Free Enterprise.

Rebecca Peek, a U of L senior and member of the Student Labor Action Project, said she was ashamed of the school’s agreement.

“It will certainly affect curriculum and limit the viewpoints taught to business students,” she said in a statement. “As a student at the University of Louisville I want to know that I am being presented with information for the sake of knowledge, not to promote the personal agenda of a private interest group.”

The same pair has donated a combined $12 million to create a similar “free enterprise” teaching institute at the University of Kentucky.

At UK, the grant will establish a “John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise” and expand the work of a current capitalism program underwritten by BB&T bank, according to a university news release. About $10 million will go to the institute. The remaining $2 million gives Schnatter naming rights to an atrium in the new business school building.

Finally, the University of Notre Dame has just announced that its International Security Center has received a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to further develop and expand its role as a forum for broader scholarship on U.S. foreign policy.

“We’re delighted to work with the Koch Foundation on our International Security Center, which we’ve been committed to for many years,” said John T. McGreevy, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “We think it’s important for academics to have a voice in policy debates about international affairs, and we believe our scholars’ research can inform those policy debates.”

Just to be clear, Notre Dame has the tenth largest endowment in the nation, with $8.2 billion in its fund at the end of fiscal year 2014.

Update

Here is a link (pdf) to the list of of colleges and universities that, according to the Koch family foundations and philanthropy, have received grants from the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Center for Public Integrity has a list of 16 colleges and universities that received at least $25,000 in Koch foundation funding in 2014. Apparently, the University of Dayton in Ohio has decided it is no longer interested in receiving Koch-connected money.

Academic unfreedom in economics

We forget, at our peril, the extent to which academic unfreedom is enforced in departments of economics across North America.

Most departments of economics offer—in the classroom and in terms of research and policy advice—only mainstream economics. By that I mean they hire economists who only teach, conduct research, and offer policy advice defined by one or another version of mainstream (neoclassical and Keynesian) economics. Other approaches to economics—generally, these days, referred to as heterodox economics—simply aren’t recognized by or represented within those departments. That was true in the decades leading up to the crash of 2007-08 and, perhaps even more startling, it has continued to be the case in the years since.

That’s particularly true in departments that have doctoral programs in economics. While heterodox economists are often hired by undergraduate departments (such as, most famously, the University of Southern Maine), you simply won’t find heterodox economics or heterodox economists at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and Chicago.

Now, there have been a few departments of economics over the years that have been defined in terms of a significant presence (although generally still a minority view) of heterodox economics. The University of Massachusetts Amherst was certainly one of them (which, to offer the appropriate disclosure, is where I did my doctoral work). The list also includes the New School for Social Research, the University of California-Riverside, American University, and, more recently, the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

I was in fact hired by another of those departments, at the University of Notre Dame, which as readers of this blog know was first split off as a separate department (in 2003) and then (in 2010) simply dissolved by the administration of the university.

What was extraordinary about that episode was the length mainstream economists (and their allies within the university administration) were willing to go to stamp out any and all forms of nonmainstream economics. Not, to be clear, because there was any kind of financial crisis, but simply to first marginalize and then remove entirely the existence of heterodox economics from the curriculum, research profile, and policy recommendations of the department.

I note that history because it was invoked in the extensive investigation of academic freedom in the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (pdf).* The department at Manitoba is the only place in Canada where doctoral students can receive significant training in nonmainstream or heterodox economics. According to the report,

Prior to 2006, the Department of Economics approached hiring, curriculum and pedagogical issues with an approach that made room for heterodox, as well as mainstream views, although the heterodox group remained a minority of the department. This was achieved through a solid degree of good will that permeated the Department.

After that, the “solid degree of good will that permeated the Department” was undermined by the orthodox or mainstream members of the department who, in various ways, sought to “to change the direction of the Economics Department by moving to a more mainstream/orthodox emphasis.” The problem of academic freedom within the department, according to the student newspaper, has still not been resolved.

What is extraordinary in all of this is how few departments there are in all of North America where doctoral students can be exposed to and learn—not to mention, after they complete their degrees and then find a job, teach, conduct research, offer policy advice associated with—heterodox approaches to economics. And, on top of that, in the few departments where both mainstream and heterodox approaches are in fact represented, the length to which mainstream economists (and, as I wrote above, their allies within university administrations) will go to marginalize or eliminate heterodox approaches to economics.

The University of Manitoba is just the latest example in the long line of attempts to define, impose, and police the rules of academic unfreedom in the discipline of economics in North America.

*Just to correct the historical record, though, the 2003 decision to split the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame was opposed by 11 of the 16 members of the department, a group that included both mainstream and heterodox economists. Because they were opposed to the split, they were not invited to join the new Department of Economics and Econometrics, which defined itself from the beginning as a purely neoclassical program.

Transforming economics education

 

After the crash of 2008, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, students around the world have been calling for radical changes in the way economics is taught. They know that the discipline of economics, today as in the past, includes more than neoclassical economics—but, for the most part, students are not being exposed to concepts and methods other than those of neoclassical economic theory.

There are, of course, a handful of departments where non-mainstream theories have been developed and taught, alongside and in addition to neoclassical (and, for that matter, traditional Keynesian) economics. In the United States, in terms of Ph.D.-granting institutions, they include the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (where I received my degree), American University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Utah, and New School University.

As Aaron Steelman recognizes, that handful also once included the University of Notre Dame. But that is no longer the case, since the current Department of Economics advertises itself as as purely neoclassical department.

Unfortunately, Steelman gets the history wrong.

In 2003, administrators at the University of Notre Dame decided to split the Department of Economics into two: the Department of Economics and Policy Studies (DEPS) and the Department of Economics and Econometrics (DEE). Why the divide? In large part because there were significant differences in methodological approaches and fields of study within the department.

Those who considered themselves within the “mainstream” of the profession, generally using a neoclassical framework to examine issues such as economic growth and industrial organization, tended to move to the DEE. Those whose work was generally considered more “heterodox” or “pluralistic,” employing a variety of methodological approaches to address questions regarding race and gender, inequality, and the development of economic thought, among others, tended to form the nucleus of the DEPS. Less than a decade later, the DEPS was closed by university administrators and what was simply called the Department of Economics emerged again.

Faculty within the DEE tended to neatly fit into the new department, while many faculty members within the DEPS moved to various departments throughout the university.

First, the university administration decided to split the existing department of economics into two not because there were “significant differences in methodological approaches and fields of study within the department.” Those differences had existed for decades, which was precisely one of the strengths of the department. Graduate and undergraduate students, within and across courses, were regularly exposed to and encouraged to think critically about both mainstream (neoclassical and Keynesian) and heterodox (Post Keynesian, radical, Marxian, and institutionalist) approaches to economics. No, the decision was made in order to eliminate the heterodox component of the economics program: by splitting the department in 2003 (and giving all new hires and control over the Ph.D. program to a new department, Economics and Econometrics) and then dissolving the original renamed department (Economics and Policy Studies) in 2010.

Second, there were no particular differences, then or now, in terms of areas of study. Faculty members in the original (pre-2003) department of economics conducted research and taught courses on a wide range of subjects: microeconomics, macroeconomics, labor, development, public policy, industrial organization, and so on. Just as faculty members do now, in the new (post-2010) department of economics. The only difference was students who took courses in the original department were exposed to many different methods and approaches; students today only learn one approach.

Finally, faculty members were not assigned to the two departments in 2003 according to their different methodological approaches. There were plenty of neoclassical economists in Economics and Policy Studies. The sole criterion was how faculty members voted: the 16 members of the original Department of Economics who voted against splitting the department were assigned to Economics and Policy Studies, while the 5 members who voted in favor of splitting the department comprised the nucleus of Economics and Econometrics. In other words, the decision was political not methodological.

That’s how the long tradition of the eclectic, pluralist Notre Dame approach to economics was brought to an end—exactly when students around the world are calling for a new approach to economics education, one that includes a wide range of methods and theories. Students today correctly understand that the neoclassical economics they’re being taught as the only viable approach is both responsible for the crises that broke out in 2007-08 and has had little to offer once the crises broadened and deepened across the world. They want to see what else economics has to offer.

The problem, of course, is that many of their professors either don’t know about those alternative theories and approaches (because they themselves were never exposed to them in graduate school) or simply dismiss them (with the excuse that neoclassical economics is the only game in town if students want to be successful). That’s because most departments don’t offer anything other than neoclassical economics and, as Steelman correctly observes, students from programs that do offer heterodox economics are not hired “into departments at highly ranked research universities.”

All the more reason, then, for economics education to be transformed.

Only in America

Follett Higher Education Group, a division of Illinois-based Follett Corporation, which operates more than 980 campus bookstores at colleges and universities nationwide,

informed its employees on November 8 that it is “adjusting [its] store staffing model to put more hours on the sales floor whenever students are shopping most,” by laying off 570 full-time employees at 400 of its stores, effective immediately.

Follett spokesperson Tom Kline confirmed this past Monday that the company cut 23 full-time positions last month at the University of Notre Dame. He said each of those positions is being replaced with at least two part-time workers.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Then and now

How things have changed at the University of Notre Dame over the course of the past 45 years.

In 1967, the University sponsored and then signed the so-called Land O’ Lakes Statement, in which representatives from the participating Catholic universities declared their independence from the Vatican and committed themselves to participating in “the total university life of our time.”

Today, the University announced that it has filed a lawsuit “challenging the constitutionality of a federal regulation that requires religious organizations to provide, pay for, and/or facilitate insurance coverage for services that violate the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The lawsuit does recognize that Notre Dame now “employs over 5,000 full- and part-time employees,” many of whom are women, “and is the largest employer in St. Joseph County.” Not to mention the thousands of female students, both graduate and undergraduate.

In one sense at least, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: as David J. O’Brien [pdf] observed, the group that met at Land o’ Lakes, Wisconsin “included no women, despite the fact that women’s colleges accounted for a majority of Catholic institutions of higher education.”