A Radical Proposal for Re-Structuring Higher Ed

Pajamas Media has posted an article by "Publius Audax", proposing nineteen radical reforms. Publius is the pseudonym of a fellow Texas academic who sees the current budget crisis in Texas as an opportunity to remake higher education as a fundamentally market-driven enterprise. Publius proposes an end to all direct appropriations to state universities, coupled with a dramatic increase in state scholarship money going directly to students. In addition, he proposes turning departments and programs into cooperative businesses, and individual professors into entrepreneurs, by tying a large share of faculty and administrators' salaries to the number of students attracted to their courses, while enabling instructors to discount the tuition for their own courses (at their own expense). Some provocative ideas – ones that I'm sure that many NAS members will think goes to far. This forces on us the question: is there any other way to restore teaching as the fundamental mission of the academy?