Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I wish I could share your optimism, Stevan, but we just published 
a book about Rutgers (by an English professor there) that shows 
that the Rutgers administration, pressured by the sports boosters 
on its board of trustees, are quite happy to spend lots of money 
on upgrading the football stadium and ensuring that the team will 
rank in the top ten while the academic infrastructure of the 
school, including classrooms, literally crumbles into disrepair. 
Is this "rational"? Not to my mind, but it is happening in many 
places these days. "A lot of e-mails and phone calls" from not 
only their faculty but students and alumni as well have had no 
effect on the university's determination to sacrifice its 
academic reputation at the altar of big-time sports-so much for 
faculty power and the "dead-obvious solution" to the university's 
$34 million budget deficit.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in questionis
> just a one-step deduction (which I think universityadminstrators,
> even with their atrophied neurons, should still becapable of making,
> if they are still capable of getting up in themorning at all), the
> dance-step will be mastered: Faced with thequestion "Do we use the
> newfound windfall cancellation savingsfrom our former publication
> buy-in to pay for the newfoundpublication costs of our research
> publication output, or forsomething else, letting our research
> output fend for itself?"they will -- under the pressure of logic,
> necessity,practicality, self-interest, and a lot of emails and phone
> callsfrom their research-publishing faculty -- find their way to
> thedead-obvious solution...
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Stevan Harnad