Movie Friday: The Dark Knight Rises

After 7 weeks, The Dark Knight Rises is still in the box office top five, a fairly impressive run.  Furthermore, Rotten Tomatoes says it has a 92% favorability rating among the audience (87% with critics).  I saw it during the first weekend, and I was underwhelmed.  Perhaps I was expecting too much, after the first two films, which were excellent.  Also, I have high regard for Tom Hardy, who played the main antagonist, Bane.  But Bane was something of a mixed bag (see below).

Part of the problem is a plot with some serious holes in it.  Having all of NYC's cops march into the sewers was a highly improbable scenario.  Also, a rather severe twist near the end seemed a bit gratuitous.  Finally, the need to rework Bane's voice to make it more understandable left him sounding (according to my son) like a cross between an English butler Darth Vader and the Monopoly Guy.  Listen for yourself:

Colloquy Breaks Its Long Silence

...with two canned posts from the Acting Provost regarding new administrative appointments.  Exciting!

More with Less?

The U of A's website tells us that a record number of students will be here this fall.  This coincides with a net decrease in the University's operating budget.  I wonder how students are going to rate their educational experience in the periodic surveys by Maclean's and others.  I can only assume that we will see more and more massive lecture sections, especially in core faculties such as Science and Arts, which should serve to reinforce the overall "factory feedlot" vibe that we give so many of our entering students.  Well done.

What's Wrong With Toronto

...that they would find this guy acceptable as their mayor:

Colloquy Watch

Now four weeks and counting.

Movie Friday

I'm hoping to see Premium Rush soon.  I'm a big Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan.  (Two great recent performances were The Dark Knight Rises and 50/50, but I was especially impressed with the weird high school-noir Brick.)  The movie also stars Michael Shannon, a terrific, underrated actor who was fantastic in Take Shelter.

On the nostalgia side, I watched a big chunk of The Thin Red Line on TV this week.  What a great film.  Terrence Mallick has made only five movies in his career, but every one of them is risk-taking and engrossing.

WISEST

So I see that WISEST is celebrating its 30th anniversary.  It seems that the core mission still seems to be encouraging girls to consider going into science and engineering...though I'm not sure that encouragement is really necessary in some disciplines.  Certainly the undergraduate classes that I teach are more than 50% female, and I would estimate that about half of our entering graduate class is female as well.  Of course, other disciplines (physics, perhaps?  engineering?) may still have some ground to make up, but I feel that the appropriateness of this gender-specific program to certain fields has largely ended.

I am more interested in this stated objective:

Although we have been pursuing our goals since 1982 and representation of women in science, engineering and technology is most definitely on the rise, a gender balance at decision-making and leadership levels still needs to be reached.

I think that our university generally does pretty well in promoting women at the top--our President, Senior VP (Finance), VP (University Relations) and countless AVPs are women.  But returning to the parochial issue of my own department, I would like to see more women among the tenured faculty.  Of course, with a de facto hiring freeze, there is not much opportunity to address this problem...  But, I wonder if WISEST has sufficient resources to assist in the identification and recruitment of top female job candidates to science and engineering departments?  Sending high school girls into a lab for 6 weeks in the summer makes for some nice feel-good stories, but it's not really doing much to change the underlying culture.

Colloquy

Jeez, I thought I was an intermittent poster--Colloquy hasn't put anything up since a July 27 "mythbusting" post on the changes at Lister Hall.  That's three weeks of silence.  The difference is, people are presumably being paid, as part of their job, to keep that "blog" up to date, whereas I do this purely for my own amusement.

We're Number (101-150)!

Latest ARWU rankings place U of A in that exciting cohort, along with University of Montreal.  Unsurprisingly, Toronto, UBC and McGill all appear in the top 100.  More surprising is the appearance of McMaster (#92).  Are they really better than Alberta?

The Ever-Increasing Administration

Here is an excellent piece in the Washington Monthly on the growing share of university budgets being eaten up by administration, condensed from Benjamin Ginsberg's book.  Here is a key quote from early in the article:

Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

The article also notes how administrative spending has grew over the period from 1947-1995:

During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

There is also a nice discussion on the odious but ubiquitous "strategic plans" that are periodically promulgated by administrations as part of their make-work program, and the complete lack of oversight by boards of trustees of the lavish spending and compensation for presidents and other upper administrators.

Most infuriating were the apparently common behaviour of offering bonuses and salary increases to top administrators at universities facing budget freezes and layoffs, something we here can relate to:

In a similar vein, in February 2009, the president of the University of Vermont defended the bonuses paid to the school’s twenty-one top administrators against the backdrop of layoffs, job freezes, and program cuts at the university. The university president, Daniel Fogel, asserted that administrative bonuses were based on the principles of “extra pay for extra duties” and “pay for performance.” The president rejected a faculty member’s assertion that paying bonuses to administrators when the school faced an enormous budget deficit seemed similar to the sort of greed recently manifested by the corporate executives who paid themselves bonuses with government bailout money. Fogel said he shared the outrage of those upset at corporate greed, but maintained there was a “world of difference” between the UVM administrative bonuses and bonuses paid to corporate executives. He did not specify what that world might be.

The piece ends with a few suggestions for how to get this problem under control.  I highly recommend reading it.

(h/t Freddie deBoer)

Egotism, Egocentrism, and Victimology

As he periodically does, Jeremy has decided to be offended by something he has read, in this case an article in the Edmonton Journal about the new Dean of Science that makes mention of "egotistical" professors--something that is not attributed to Jonathan Schaeffer, but which one may choose to believe was discussed with the reporter.

Several commenters (including yours truly) have tried to make the point that a certain amount of egotism comes with the territory in pursuing an academic career.  Jeremy is having none of it, and considers it to be "...judgemental and offensive, and quite uncalled for."  While I do acknowledge that we in the university community should be vigilant about how we are being portrayed, I consider this to be almost beneath notice in a time of static budgets and clear movements towards diminishing our roles in education (e.g., e-classes) along with our compensation opportunities.

In other words, how about choosing some more significant things to be offended by?