“The more com­pli­cated cause is the rel­a­tive dif­fi­culty of increas­ing ‘pro­duc­tiv­ity’ when the ‘prod­uct’ itself is mea­sured in time. Other than increas­ing tuition, increas­ing class size, or decreas­ing pay, how do you improve the eco­nomic ‘pro­duc­tiv­ity’ of some­one teach­ing 45 hours a semes­ter? When most of the rest of the econ­omy real­izes pro­duc­tiv­ity gains every sin­gle year and we don’t real­ize any for decades, a fund­ing crunch is utterly pre­dictable. Unless we get away from the ‘seat time’ model, we’ll be stuck in a work-​​speedup/​cost-​​runup cycle until we sim­ply break the mar­ket. Which we’re per­ilously close to doing now.”

“Com­mu­ni­cate, com­mu­ni­cate, com­mu­ni­cate. If you don’t tell your story, some­one else will. Vickie Elmer has been inter­view­ing peo­ple for an arti­cle about changes at The News that’s sched­uled to run in the Jan­u­ary edi­tion of The Ann Arbor Observer – it’s prob­a­bly already being deliv­ered to local house­holds. If The News itself had been frank about what’s hap­pen­ing there, she wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. And I would be writ­ing a much dif­fer­ent col­umn than the one you’re read­ing today.”