It's been a busy week

• The Daily Wildcat announced that a faculty-run blog (UA Defender) is speaking out against the transformation process,
  
• Pres. Shelton sent out a memo a few days later that could be interpreted as some kind of response to the criticism in said blog,
  
• the state budget finally got at least partially figured out (meaning that UA employees will not have to be furloughed this year),
  
• ASUA and GPSC began the process of 'bridgefication,'
  
• ASUA finally voted to put their budget online (here's hoping they'll do the same with their meeting minutes),
  
• and Regents Professor Oscar Martinez wrote in the AZ Star that 'poor leadership and funding are bringing down the UA.'

Sallygradstudent has now talked to several undergraduates that are taking the Mega-classes, many of whom did not feel that they had a choice since they were the only classes with open seats. The general consensus is that awesome as the teachers may be, Mega-classes suck. Please feel free to view our previous posting from this summer on the specifics of why they suck. Evan Lisull of the Desert Lamp defends the move to put more classes online, but we still have our doubts, and it's not because we're squares and don't want to deal with technology. While you can have a good experience in an online class, we think they're certainly not for everyone, or for every subject. The risks also abound. Consider the discovery that local magnet school K12 was found to be outsourcing its grading to India. One thing is certain: if more online courses are offered, they should be by the design of educators, not administrators.

While Pres. Shelton's memo from Sept. 9 seems like a partial response to the concerns of the UA Defender blog (although, of course, he doesn't make any reference to the blog in the memo), it again fails to address real issues raised by concerned faculty. As Prof. Martinez stated in the AZ Star, Shelton again positions Sciences and Humanities (and SBS and whatever falls into that category) as somehow opposed to each other. Shelton claims that COS (Sciences) has sustained heavy losses of faculty in the last year. Martinez refutes this with the number of faculty lost in the Humanities. It all comes down to a major difference in perspective: Shelton and Hay seem to value science more than other fields. It has to be protected because it brings in research dollars (but don't ask Shelton how much it costs the university to maintain those grants because we actually lose money on a lot of them.)

So it comes down to this: Yeah, classes like Agricultural Sciences teach students skills and do research that benefit the state as a whole...and English teaches them to read and write analytically so that they can actually be of use in the workplace! It's time to stop considering science and engineering as the only valuable colleges on this campus and start insisting that our "World-class" university actually include the world we live in.

Also, Sallygradstudent has decided that the only way for the transformation process to gain any credibility in our eyes is for the upper administration to take a voluntary pay cut. Sometimes the tough choices have to be made in one's own glass house.

Special thanks to the Desert Lamp blog for giving a shout-out to Sallygradstudent: "PS: Readers interested in the UA Defender should also check out Sally Gradstudent, who has done similar work for almost a year now from a graduate student’s perspective." We may not always agree with the Lamp, but that's half the fun of blogging, and if they weren't out there it would be a lot harder to keep track of the ASUA. And also thanks to the UA Defender for calling Sally Gradstudent "ferocious."