Parents who have children with disabilities or behavioral problems and parents who care about their kids’ education but can’t afford one of Phoenix’s two staggeringly expensive good private schools have been using the right-wingers’ vouchers to send their kids to charter schools or less expensive private schools. Our legislators are about to get rid of vouchers, too. So if you’re in the middle or working class, you will be forced to send your kids to schools where teachers have been fired for because some nut has complained they were witches, where classes are huge, where disabled kids have little or no help, where gangs rule, where the buildings look like prison cellblocks, where the pop machines are locked behind bars to protect them from marauding thugs, and where any kid can buy as much dope or booze as her little heart desires.

And whose graduates think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain State. Who knows where they think Utah is. Someplace in China, maybe?

What is strange is that these are the same bozos who will complain bitterly if they have a nurse from the Phillipines for a health care provider, and wonder why there aren’t any “Amurricans” to fill the job.

Deans who are being described as “dismissed” actually have been demoted back to teaching faculty. They have not lost their t/tt jobs. The policy that allowed faculty who served as administrators to keep their elevated salaries when they returned to f/t teaching was abolished some years ago; higher pay for chairs, deans, and vice-presidents is now accomplished by way of stipends, so that when you return to the classroom, you get a pay cut. Naturally.

Are any administrators being cut? At my school, over the last few years, the College of Arts and Sciences was split into 2 colleges; there is now a College of Basic Studies (formerly known as the remedial courses in math and English); there is also a Vice-President for can’t remember title (off-campus courses). And I know what you mean about unnecessary programs (I wonder if we would agree on which ones!). Meanwhile, the instructors are quaking in their low-paid boots.

After Katrina, New Orleans area colleges declared financial exigency and did what they pleased.

Good luck to you (and to me!)