randy_byers: (2009-05-10)
1990ish Graduations Office Halloween webres.jpg


I just got a call from my HR rep saying that Friday is my last day as a University of Washington employee. I'm feeling slightly shocked, not only because I was expecting more warning than that, but because it's the official end of a major part of my life. I worked at the UW for 26 (nearly 27) years, starting in February 1989 (not counting a year of temping for what they still called the Steno Pool before that). Not quite half my life, but pretty damn close. I've known it was over for at least a year, but now that it's come, I feel suddenly naked somehow. Not that anybody ever understood when they asked me what I did and I tried to explain.

I did a lot of things over the years: graduations, residence classification (for tuition purposes: are you in-state or not? A job I hated, because people would actually cry if we denied their applications), a brief attempt at supervising (fail!!), implementing the degree audit reporting system (huge success!), and finally various flavors of data management (widespread fame and acclaim!). Anyway, above is a photo from more innocent times (circa 1990, and a Halloween, whichever year it was) with the old Graduation Office, which has gone through a number of name and personnel changes since then. On the left is Fred (who tried to call me just as I was starting this round of chemo, so I haven't gotten back to him yet), Virjean (the supervisor), Barbara, Pat, and me. I haven't missed work one iota, but I'm feeling a pang now.

Since I know she follows this LJ, I just wanted to thank Virjean for hiring me, mentoring me, and putting me to good use over the decades. With apologies to Matt S., you'll always be my favorite boss, not to mention a fine human being.

This probably deserves a deeper dive at some point, but I wanted to spread the news.

P.S. Notice the dumb terminal and the IBM Selectric on the right side of us, both of them mine. To my left, but hidden from the photo, was a PC running DOS 6.0, as I recall.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
I'm doing statistics for the International Student Services office, and I'm always fascinated by where our international students come from. We have students from 112 different countries. The top countries are all Asian, except for Canada:

1. People's Republic of China (3324)
2. Republic of Korea (630)
3. Taiwan (ROC) (426)
4. India (354)
5. Hong Kong (209)
6. Indonesia (196)
7. Japan (154)
8. Canada (141)
9. Thailand (123)
10. Vietnam (88)
11. Malaysia (86)

Singapore comes in 13th at 59 students, but what's also interesting is that there are two Middle Eastern countries before we get to our first European country: Saudi Arabia (85) and Iran (55). Then we get to Germany (48) and the UK (46).

We don't seem to draw very strongly from Latin America, with Mexico being the top one at 21 students, and then Chile at 19 and Brazil at 18. Only 27 from Australia and 19 from New Zealand.

Countries that have only sent us one student: Albania, Botswana, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Mozambique, Rwanda, Syria, Trinidad & Tobago, and Yugoslavia.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
I feel that because I've written in recent years about horrific budget news at the University of Washington, I should mention that the latest state budget adjustment, for yet another revenue shortfall, resulted in no further cuts to the university budget. Or as UW President Michael Young announced in an e-mail to the campus on Wednesday:

Those among you who watch what transpires in Olympia know that early this morning, the Legislature completed its work and adopted a supplemental budget for the second year of the current biennium. The very good news is that for the first time in three years, funding for higher education and the University of Washington has not been further reduced. For far too long, part of the equation of balancing the state budget in times of fiscal duress has been the erosion of state support for higher education. The hemorrhaging has stopped, thanks to a great many people, including key leadership on both sides of the aisle in the Legislature, the Governor, editorial voices from our state’s newspapers — led prominently by The Seattle Times and its Greater good Campaign — and thousands of alumni, friends, students, faculty, staff, and citizens.


I do have to give credit to the Seattle Times for keeping up the drumbeat on their editorial page against further cuts to higher education, even as they were idiotically railing at the Democrats in the legislature for trying to prevent cuts anywhere by borrowing against the future. There were shenanigans around this supplemental budget involving a Republican "coup" in the Senate (with three Dems crossing the aisle) that caused a protracted stalemate. The Seattle Times cheered the Republicans on, and I'm not sure how all that worked out in the compromises.

In any event, I hope the economy is recovering enough that revenue will start to rise again. I will also be curious to see how the discussion about funding of higher education proceeds from here. State support for the UW went from 60% to 30% just in the past three years, and 60% was already down from twenty years ago. Are taxpayers ready to start investing in higher education again? The Seattle Times, at least, has started to make the argument that the UW is a major driver of the state economy.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
Early in 1861 Arthur and Mary Denny, Charles and Mary Terry, and Edward Lander donated land on a forested 10-acre knoll overlooking Elliott Bay. The University was established there, on the site of what is now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel on University Street in downtown Seattle.

The Territorial University of Washington opened November 4, 1861. The fledgling University was little more than a backwoods school, which closed for lack of funds several times during its earliest years. The first faculty consisted of one professor who taught a curriculum that included Latin, Greek, English, history, algebra, and physiology.


-- Historic Overview - University of Washington

Today we're celebrating the 150th birthday of the University of Washington. 1861 was also the year the U.S. Civil War began, and on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog they've been discussing how "two old ladies back-to-back" gets you back to an era when it was legal to own a human being in this country. In a similar vein, we were talking at a meeting yesterday about how somebody who has worked at the UW for thirty years (there were two at the table) has worked here for a fifth of the existence of the university. So I guess we're still young, and the history is still fresh. It only took 150 years to evolve from a backwoods school with a single professor to a world class research university.

Happy birthday, University of Washington!

Update: Good stuff from the Seattle Times, "UW began 150 years ago in audacious manner":

"Education throughout the Sound district is in an extremely backward condition," wrote William Barnard, the second president of the university, shortly after he resigned from his post in 1866.

"As an illustration: Not one of the misses attending the university, the first quarter after our arrival, could accurately repeat the multiplication table," Barnard wrote.

"Society is also greatly disorganized; drunkenness, licentiousness, profanity, and Sabbath desecration are the striking characteristics of our people," said Barnard, who counted "two distilleries, 11 drinking establishments, one bawdy house (brothel)" — and gambling going on just about everywhere.


It's worth remembering that the first settlers arrived in Seattle in 1851, and there were only 250 settlers and no high schools in the settlement when the UW was founded ten years later. Why build up to a university? Full speed ahead.
randy_byers: (small randy animal)
It has just been announced that all budget cuts and layoffs at the University have been decided, "but there are technological problems within the Human Resources Office that are so severe they have not been able to move forward with the decisions." This whole situation makes me angry and sick to my stomach. It's bad enough that none of this is happening because the University is performing badly, and that we are ultimately paying for the idiocy of the financial geniuses who run this country. Now they have to prolong the uncertainty because of technological problems? It's maddening.

QOTD

Jun. 29th, 2011 01:42 pm
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
'Over the past three years, the amount of money the UW receives from the state has fallen 50 percent. ... In the early 1990s, the state Legislature picked up about 80 percent of the cost of educating each student; in 2011, the state will pick up about 30 percent.'

-- Seattle Times, "UW regents set to approve biggest-ever tuition increase"
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
University of Washington professor of Atmospheric Sciences and rock-star weather blogger, Cliff Mass, gives his perspective on the gradual privatization of the UW. Short version: he's for it. This is in response to the continuing brouhaha in the wake of the Seattle Times article about the UW reduction in the number of slots reserved for in-state students. I wrote about the controversy last week.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
On Sunday the Seattle Times published a story with the provocative headline, "Why straight-A's may not get you into UW this year". I haven't read the story, but the gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that the UW is cutting the number of freshman slots reserved for in-state students by 150 this year. They admitted 4017 in-state freshmen last year and have a goal of 3850 this year, increasing the out-of-state/international students from 1480 to 1800. The UW says they will cut the number of in-state freshman slots by 500 next year. The reason is the budget crisis. Non-resident students pay around $25,000 in tuition as compared to around $9,000 for resident students plus a state subsidy of $7,000. More out-of-state and international students means more money for the budget.

In today's Seattle Times Danny Westneat has a good response to those folks who are understandably angry that it has gotten even tougher for their children to get into the UW: "UW gives us what we asked for". The nut of the argument is that 25 years ago the state subsidized in-state students by 85%. Today the state subsidy is only 45%. Less state support is leading directly to fewer state students. It's really that simple. The UW is in the process of becoming a private school with no responsibility to cater to local students.

I think it's a crying shame that tax-payers aren't willing to subsidize higher education to a greater degree, but that's the way it is. I haven't been able to find the article since I read it, but the Seattle Times also published a story in the past year about local business leaders becoming concerned about the budget-cuts being imposed on the UW and looking at ways to create a trust fund or some other funding source outside the state-funding structure. This seems utterly bass-ackwards to me (why not fight to increase the state-subsidy?), but if that's the way we're really going, then it really is another sign of impending privatization.

I'm not clear on what's going on at the other state schools. A co-worker who went to WSU said they are increasing the number of in-state students to compensate for the budget cuts, but that doesn't make sense to me, since the state caps the number of slots it will subsidize at each school.

In any event, the privatization of the UW long predates the current budget crisis. It's been an ongoing trend since at least the '90s and Tim Eyman's first initiatives to reduce taxes. It's simply being accelerated now.
randy_byers: (small randy animal)
I hadn't known until last week that Obama's mother once took classes at the University of Washington. I didn't know until today that the fucking Birthers have been clamoring for her UW transcript, because she started taking classes a month after Obama was born. Googling the current Registrar's name takes you to this pathetic piece of "research" parsing an e-mail exchange with the Registrar that decisively proves that Obama's mother started classes at the UW in September 1961, not, as has widely been reported elsewhere, in August 1961. This is very important, because Obama was born in August 1961. I made the mistake of clicking through to the home page of this site, which is a sea of Birther sewage. "Live free or die," my fucking ass.

What's amazing about the paranoid mindset is how the profusion of "facts" just manages to confuse it even more, because the facts don't comport with the paranoia. So we must have more facts! Surely if we have more facts the truth we desire will emerge! The earnest attempts to piece together "what really happened" is almost heart-breaking in its intentional blindness.

Ultimately I think Birtherism is a distraction. They're not going to change anything with their beliefs. They're not going to force Obama out of office. They're not going to cause anybody who might vote for him to not vote for him. They will only appeal to the committed minority of True Believers. And yet it still infuriates me. And I think that might be my problem, not theirs. Let the nuts be nuts. They only do damage to their own ability to shape events.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
One of the cynical jokes in our office for the past decade or so has been that every department on campus wants to put "environment" or "information" in their names in order to sound modern and relevant. The most recent example of this is the School of Marine Affairs, which just changed its name to the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.

In fact, the SMEA is these days part of a new college called the College of the Environment that was formed within the university in Autumn 2009. This was a merger of the College of Forest Resources and the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences (of which the School of Marine Affairs was part) with several other departments, including Atmospheric Sciences, Earth and Space Sciences (formerly Geology and Geophysics), and the interdisciplinary Program on the Environment. "Spanning the forests to the seas, from the depths of the earth to the edges of the solar system, the College is an unrivaled constellation of environmental research, education, and application." At the time the college was proposed, it was claimed that it was the first of its kind nationally, although Google tells me that other universities have similar colleges, including Western Washington University, Wesleyan University, and University or Rhode Island (where it's called the College of the Environment and Life Sciences). I don't know who really started the trend.

One of the things I find interesting about the College of the Environment is that it folds in two programs that began as adjuncts of extractive industries: Forest Resources and Fishery Science. The fact that these programs are now finding shelter under the environmental umbrella is an indicator of how much those industries have shrunk in importance in the Pacific Northwest economy, I think. I am reminded of my cousin's husband -- the CEO of a large lumber company -- who commented that the UW's forest resources program no longer produces people of any use to his company. On the other hand, one of the other changes within the School of Forest Resources (as it is now called) is that the Paper Science and Engineering program changed its name to the Bioresource Science and Engineering program, which I assume is a reflection of the interest in products such as biofuels these days, so it still isn't all tree-hugging down there. Then again, I notice my cousin's husband's company's webpage touts "Sustainability" first thing upon arrival, and goes on to tell us that wood sequesters carbon.

Well, it's been longer ago than all this that the School of Library and Information Science became the zippy Information School offering a zippy new Bachelor of Science in Informatics as well as the more traditional Master of Library and Information Science. Stay tuned for further mergers. The College of Environmental Informatics is still a possibility. It might even actually make sense in these changing times.
randy_byers: (Default)
The University has finally learned what the budget cut is going to be this biennium. The state is cutting its contribution to the budget by 26%, but it is allowing the University to raise tuition enough that the actual reduction of the budget will be 12%. This is obviously still a massive cut, and there will be layoffs. Administrative units such as the one I work in will be hit harder than academic units.

I don't really know how I will be affected by this. I don't expect that I will lose my job (I've got twenty years of seniority), but it's possible I'll take a pay cut. The Registrar told us this morning that if anyone wants to voluntarily look at reducing their hours, now's the time to step forward. One of my co-workers died of lupus earlier this year, and she had been out for months. Her position will not be filled, and we've known that since last Fall and have already restructured the work in our office around that. Someone in the other office my boss manages is retiring at the end of the month, and her position won't be filled either.

Hm. I guess this is just an anxiety post. No particular point to it, except now we know the size of the budget shortfall. Later in the week we will start getting a more concrete sense of what it all means on the ground here.
randy_byers: (Default)
There was a shooting on campus earlier this morning. Looks like a guy was stalking his ex-girlfriend who had gone through a number of maneuvers, both logistical and legal, to keep him away from her. She was, rightly, afraid for her life. He killed her and then killed himself. Why don't these asshole losers just kill themselves? It makes me sick to my stomach.
randy_byers: (Default)
I kept my eye on the big trees on the walk to work today, because the wind was blowing so hard I was afraid I was going to get brained by a falling limb. When I got to Schmitz Hall, I couldn't open the door at first, because the wind was stronger than I was while it gusted. Good thing it wasn't raining, because umbrellas ... well, the verb marypoppins comes to mind. (You've all seen the Scary Mary trailer, right?)

Speaking of my subject-line, the day before yesterday featured an impressive cloudburst and flashflood in the afternoon, which was followed by an all too brief period of blue skies and sunshine. I hurried out on my break to walk in the sun, and as the circuit brought me around to Red Square (a large plaza on campus) I was brought up short by the sight of a half-dozen scattered people pointing their cellphones at the sky behind me. What the ...? I turned to look up, and there was a beautiful full rainbow arching over the Quad. Ah.

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