Bérubé pontificates on Academic Freedom
Read it.
I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted chasing down the false allegation of the the "bio instructor who showed a Michael Moore movie in class" last year, this issue is not just one of principle for academia, it is a matter of pragmatism, these idiots can smother a university for months by a single lie.
A colleague of mine likes to calculate the opportunity cost of administrative task; if you figure a mean cost of ~ $50 per faculty per hour then a committee of 8 people meeting for two hours four times in a semester is an effective cost to the institution of $3200 just in the time lost.
That is one way to spend our students' tuition.
More like this
People keep sending me links to this, so I'll make a short post about it.
Walter ReMine (an anti-evolutionist who ardently believes that "Haldane's Dilemma" is a real problem for evolution) recently updated the entry for "Haldane's Dilemma" at the CreationWiki.
During his State of the Union address, President Obama spent more time talking about education than about healthcare, which he mentioned only passing.
At a recent conference (pdf), I heard Dr. Rebecca Roberts describe the economic cost of antibiotic resistant infections at Cook County's Stroger Hospital. In a nutshell, it's terrifying.