If you’ve been saving your exceeds expectation performance, this might be a good year to reprise it; since Governor Haslam says state workers will be getting a 2.5% pay raise and the DiPietro administration is keen on merit allocations rather than across the board.
As you likely know by now, President O’bama said in his State of the Union Address, that those public universities who continue to raise tuition, will see a reduction in federal allocations. If this seems unfair in light of the pressure states have been putting on us, you would be about right. It is an interesting gambit on the part of the President, I suppose to see if professors and students will occupy state houses and effect a change in attitude toward the public value of higher education. If we do not, the great squeeze is on.
You might also have caught Rick Santorium’s recent accusation that public universities were indoctrinating our young with liberal values. You may recall Socrates was accused of the same thing, so don’t despair; keep teaching the facts of evolution, that the earth is not the center of the universe, that the universe is around 14 to 15 billion years old, the earth between three and four billion years old (and not six thousand), and that the renaissance and enlightenment have given us great art and science. I suspect his concern is that the young of our land do not appear to be sufficiently inoculated against legitimate education.
