As you may have heard, Columbia, the faculty of SEAS is not happy with Dean Peña-Mora. The New York Times published a letter yesterday that was signed by seven of the nine SEAS department chairs and a large number of tenured professors who requested that the dean be removed from office. The letter included complaints about Peña-Mora's decision to double graduate class sizes in the hopes of increasing revenue to pay the salaries of more top professors. Hiring top professors is a way to improve the graduate school's U.S. News & World Report Ranking, but the increase in class sizes came when the dean had already hired an outside consulting firm "to reclaim 25% of the school's space for other purposes." As a result, according to the letter, some grad students are now forced to sit on the floor or in the hall during class.
The general gist of the complaints seem to be that the dean has been sacrificing everything in the name of short-term profits, which in turn are meant to improve the school's ranking.
