Last updated on 02/25/2016
Update: I’m told that the angry ranter featured in the 2nd video is a student, not a faculty or community member. The meaningless blatherer in the first video was correctly identified as the U of Iowa’s president.
Here’s video of new U of Iowa President Bruce Harreld – a former IBM VP hired by their board after a sham search – speaking in polite, meaningless platitudes, and some U of Iowa faculty and community members speaking with angry, meaningless diatribes. It’s hard to say which is less civil, who should be more embarrassed, or who is hurting the cause of higher education more.
We’re lucky that the UO Board saved us from a president like this, and that the UO Senate keeps engaging with the UO administration with serious questions about where UO is going.
Where does Senate believe the UO should be going? Its all well and good to cry that we suck and are mediocre (which we call excellence) but a list of concrete Academic goals that the Senate would like the UO to reach, would be good. Well, like what kind of goal, gee, I don;t know:
–meaningful gen ed reform
–new kinds of undergraduate degree programs
–better emphasis on interdisciplinary curricula material
–better structure for undergraduate research
–revamping our graduate offerings to more relevant current topics (e.g. global justice) to increase grad students
–reforming CAS so it cares more about the scholarship of ideas than it does about beans ….
just a partial list