Administration Explains Resource Allocation Reflects Student Demand Which Is Higher For New Departments
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report, with higher education context from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, that Columbia University has announced the creation of four new interdisciplinary studies centers — the Center for Embodied Knowledge and Lived Experience, the Institute for Structural Analysis of Cultural Production, the Program in Sonic Identities and Acoustic Justice, and the Center for Temporality Studies — while simultaneously announcing the consolidation of two physics laboratory facilities and the reduction of laboratory operating hours at two chemistry facilities, citing “a resource allocation process that prioritizes areas of demonstrated student demand and donor interest.” The announcement described the new centers as “reflecting Columbia’s commitment to the full range of human intellectual inquiry” and the laboratory consolidations as “operational efficiencies that maintain research capacity while addressing budget realities,” which is a sentence that the physics faculty has described in departmental communications as “not how we would describe it.”
The resource allocation decision reflects a genuine pattern in American research university economics: interdisciplinary studies centers require a director, administrative support, and programming; they attract donors who want to fund something culturally aligned with their values; they generate enrollment that produces tuition revenue; and they cost significantly less per square foot and per student than the physical laboratories that STEM disciplines require for actual research. A new physics laboratory with equipment appropriate for competitive experimental research costs $30-50 million to build and equip. A new center with four affiliated faculty, a director, and a seminar space costs approximately $3-5 million in endowment to establish. The enrollment numbers are similar. The economics are not.
The University’s Response To Its Own Pattern
Columbia’s administration, in the announcement, noted that the university’s research output in physics and chemistry remains strong, that the laboratory consolidations affect administrative overhead rather than research capacity, and that the new centers are additive to Columbia’s intellectual mission rather than substitutional for existing programs. The physics faculty’s departmental response noted that “administrative overhead” in a physics laboratory means “the operating hours during which experiments can be run,” which is not overhead but research capacity, and that the administration’s description of the consolidations as affecting overhead reflected either a misunderstanding of laboratory operations or a communication decision about how to describe the consolidations, and they were not sure which was more concerning.
The Sonic Identities Center
It launches in September. The physics labs close at 8 p.m. For academic satire at The Onion.
New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition
New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.
Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/