Yeah, like I said in the thread, I am sure the finances are more complicated than a direct comparison would allow, but the Uni is willing to find the money, either by tuition or personal capital, for sports but not academics.

My heart breaks for the academics and techs, who will enter an already crowded higher ed labor market, and for the students, who will surely have less opportunity now with four fewer programs.

And that’s just football. Fred Hoiberg made $4.5 million last year and his contract guarantees a salary boost, and he had a losing conference record and didn’t even make March Madness.

I checked the rest of his tenure as head coach, and Rhule has never had a winning conference record and Nebraska football under his coaching has never been ranked. His buy out from this extension is $15 million. They can’t even get rid of a losing coach for less than the cost of four programs.

50 people’s lives (not to mention spouses, kids and other dependents) are flipped upside down because the University regents decided their value wasn’t worth the cost, but a losing football coach gets his million-dollar salary extended and (through bonuses) increased. That’s fucked up.

I am sure higher education financing is more complicated than I make it out to seem, and I am sure someone could probably work the numbers to show that Nebraska’s football program is a money maker and warrants Rhule’s excessively high salary (which was just extended). But come on…

50 people are going to have to look for work because the University decided their collective labor was worth less than a losing record in football.

50 positions across four cancelled programs and two mergers will save the University about $8.7 million dollars, or a little more than the base salary of their head football coach who failed to make the playoffs.

@josheyler.bsky.social wrote about standards-based assessment models rolled out in (I think) a grade school system in Chicago that showed good results. I tend to agree with you that assessment model seems like the least problematic way forward (though some, like Alfie Kohn, disagree).

This article is compelling. I remember reading the medical education has been taking strides to alleviate burnout, and this seems to do that. But the results seem less certain about learning.

It just remembers and regurgitates. The lowest tier on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.

Google can remember it. ChatGPT can probably formulate a paragraph or two about the date that pulls other readily available information (like who was involved in the founding or how it impacted the US Congress), but it’s can’t analyze that information. It can draw connections or suggest importance.

For example, I *know* Illinois recently celebrated its statehood on Dec 3. Does that mean I know why that is significant? Do I know the context for that information? Can I explain why anyone should care about that date or the relevance of that information? No. It’s just a date assigned to a concept.

You got here just in time for Chicago to sink into a deep freeze.

It was a lot of fun! We’ll have to have you in the Spring.

I think you're right that it would be almost impossible to judge someone's abuse without being terribly invasive, but because the hurdles to get accommodations are not insignificant, I feel pretty confident that no one is abusing it.

But even students who use the accommodations do so sparingly and with intentionality. No one has ever been pushy or demanding with their accommodations. There has never even been the suspicion in my mind that what flexibility a student has gotten wasn't needed and warranted.