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Meeting at the White House the State Tax Initiative and the UC Regents

On March 27th, I made a presentation at the White House on how to control tuitin increases at American research universities. My first major point was that any attempt to contain tuition at public universities has to deal with state budget cuts for higher ed. I was told that the administration is aware of this issue, and they have been meeting with the presidents of several public universities to come up with a way to motivate states to stabilize higher ed funding.

My second major point was that while President Obama has been stressing affordability and access, he also has to focus on the quality of instruction. To make this point, I discussed how universities have been increasing the sizes of their classes and their dependence on under-supported non-tenure-track faculty to drive down the costs of instruction; meanwhile, the cost of administration, athletics, and construction has continued to increase. As I argue in my forthcoming book, the only way to control costs in higher education is to focus on providing quality instruction and research, but there are no incentives to make universities concentrate on their core missions.

One possible way of changing how universities spend their funds is to rank and rate universities based, in part, on the percentage of their budget that they spend on direct instructional costs (faculty salaries and benefits). I suggested to the administration that they add to their new College Scorecard statistics on how much of a university’s budget is spent on direct instructional costs and what percentage of their student credit hours are taught by full-time faculty. If universities had to report on these factors, they would need to commit more attention and funding to their core mission.

We also discussed President Obama’s fight to stop student loan interest rates from doubling this summer. I mentioned that in California, we are trying to freeze tuition by increasing the taxes on the wealthy, but we still need the federal government to combine the current emphasis on access and affordability with a focus on educational quality. Moreover, in the case of the UC system, it is clear that we have to force the governor and the legislature to dedicate new tax revenue to higher education. In fact, at the recent Regents meeting, several of the regents said that they do not think they can support the governor’s tax initiative if it does not dedicate funds directly to the UC in order to prevent another tuition increase. I have been meeting with people from the governor’s office and key legislators to push for a major increase in UC funding, but so far, no one has committed to guaranteeing UC funding and tying the higher education budget to the new tax initiative. We all need to work together now to push the governor and the legislature to provide enough funding to roll back recent tuition increases.

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Miniature Entry Life at Sea

At present I am aboard the Cunard liner Queen Victoria, sailing from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale via the Panama Canal.

If youve been reading for a long time you know I love Cunard ships, past and present. I am supposed to be having (on doctors orders) a complete rest from work but of course you know I wasn’t going to climb aboard without any knitting.

So Ive taken to doing a little in the Winter Garden, in the mornings. As you would expect, its a surefire conversation starter. The passengers are in the main fairly elderly. I wouldnt be surprised if a few of them knew Queen Victoria personally. When she was a little girl. I couldnt be happier–this is my crowd. We tend to like the same music and the same movies.

I was clicking away a few mornings ago as we headed for Costa Rica and a flurry of tropical print hove into view. The person in the print stopped, then dropped into the next chair. She was English, ambiguously eighty-ish, artfully preserved.

"That," she said, pointing at my knitting, "is very impressive work. My father was a knitter, so I know."

Whereupon we started chatting.

She is doing the World Cruise, Southampton to Southampton. This is something like her forty-fourth Cunard voyage. (The brand breeds loyalty.)

"Of course my favorite is and forever shall be the QE2," she said. "Theyll never build another like her."

I nodded. I never sailed in her, mind you. I only saw her, once, back when I was on the Minerva II and she docked beside us in Malta. I remember that seeing C-U-N-A-R-D on the side of ship for the first time gave me chills.

"But may I say something? Im going to say something."

She leant toward me and through her dark round sunglasses I could feel her glare. "You young* people," she said firmly, "have absolutely no stamina and no idea how to have a good time. No. Idea."

I raised my eyebrows.

She pointed towards the windows above us, which belong to Hemispheres–the ships disco. "They will close that bar tonight at one oclock and you will all go to sleep. Ridiculous. Ridiculous! On the QE2 we never dreamt of bed before sunrise. A party every night. Until sunrise. We knew how to have a good time. You young people, I dont know whats wrong with you."

"Well," I said, "the seventies were different, weren’t they? All that cocaine would keep anybody awake."

This time her eyebrows went up. She leant even closer.

"Youd better believe it, kid," she whispered. "Youd better believe it."

 *Yes, on this ship Im young. Im quite possibly the youngest person aboard not scrubbing pots or being looked after by the Cunard nannies.

Note: The lady in the photograph is not the lady in the story. Shes another lady, with whom I danced rather madly one evening.

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Mock Objects In Action at the Agile 2009 conference

How can mock objects help you design your system better? Want to know how mocking saved hours of work? We focus on establishing best practices based on examples with mock objects. We cover design of classes, using mock objects to understand and test interaction between objects of the system. By the end of the session it should become clear how mocking, when applied correctly helps with system design, improves testability by reducing cost of change. An explicit part of this session is dedicated to the Mocking top offenders. We talk with examples about bad usage of Mocks, and its consequences.

Sudhindra Rao and I will be presenting the Mock Objects in Action session at the Agile 2009 conference.

History of this session

I started conducting a session on mocking and testing when we was coaching a few developers. That session then turned into a training session conducted at ThoughtWorks internal training and was quite appreciated for its practicality. After a few additions to that sessions and adding mockito to the mix Sudhindra and I presented it at a couple of conferences. It was received with a lot of enthusiasm.

Recommended readings

Below is the list of recommended readings that I give to the session attendees. Please let me know what you would add to this list.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html
http://xunitpatterns.com/Mock%20Object.html
http://developer-in-test.blogspot.com/
http://misko.hevery.com/code-reviewers-guide/
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2006/01/10/136407.aspx
http://www.jmock.org/oopsla2004.pdf


The demo code for this session will be available at: http://code.google.com/p/mocksamples/

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