Thursday, November 12, 2009

Who Exactly Does Marquette Hire?

In light of today's Marquette Tribune article regarding the cost of going to private universities in the United States, I have decided to analyze the number of people in a variety of departments at Marquette, in order to gain a better understanding of where all of our tuition money is going. The largest single collection of staff at Marquette is the Dental School which has 301 professors and staffers. This makes sense given that MU has the only dental school in Wisconsin. Other departments seem to have an excessive number of staff. 157 people work for University Advancement, apparently attempting to "advance" the state of Marquette by raising more money to be sent to the endowment and the basketball team, while the rest of us eat crappy dorm food and pay $28,000 a year to go here. Speaking of the basketball team, 91 people work for Intercollegiate Athletics, aka the Athletic Department. Given the massive salary of "Buzz" Williams, one can easily conclude that this department receives a lot more funding than say, the History Department with its paltry staff of 54, which by the way includes the graduate students. The fact that twice as many people work on raising money than teach history is questionable to say the least. Another questionable staff decision is to have 94 people work for DPS, and only 50 in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Apparently we need two fake cops for every language teacher at MU, rather than, for example, hiring new language professors and teaching more than a handful of languages here. The president of MU and the senior vice president each have 4 staffers, yet only two people work at MU press, and you wonder why no one gets their books published at MU. Wouldn't it make sense to combine the staffers for the President and the Senior Vice President, and spend the other money on creating a legitimate University Press? No, that would make MU an academic institution, rather than being a for profit venture. MU also has 7 full time staff in the "Office of the University Architect" and 9 in the "Office of the General Consul". Apparently MU needs 7 architects and 9 lawyers on hand for all of the building projects and lawsuits. Or MU could just hire an architect when it needs one, for example, if it ever built a humanities building, and could have one or two lawyers on hand in case it needed to deal with an issue. The unnecessary bureaucracy at MU is the reason that tuition is so high. Top heavy departments which do little or no good, or like DPS just commit felonies, keep the university from spending money on professors which would make it a better institution. The misguided belief that building new buildings will make MU a great school is absurd. How about hiring some new professors, keeping the good ones that we have, and creating a legitimate university press? Maybe if Fr. Wild spent more time focusing on academics and less time caring about the basketball team MU would be a real school. Until then I hope that eveyrone likes paying $28,000 a year to be part of a for profit venutre which has a company basketball team.