Interesting piece here in the Washington Post on efforts by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and other conservative groups and think tanks, to run the state’s public universities more like businesses.

[Perry] summoned the governing boards of the state’s six university systems to a hotel ballroom four blocks from the state capitol in Austin for what was billed as “Governor Perry’s Higher Education Summit.”

That day marked the beginning of an effort — spearheaded by the governor, one of his six-figure campaign donors and a conservative think tank — to re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability.

The initiative stayed pretty much under the radar until last fall, when it became public that Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University, had compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations.

And a group of state legislators here in Arkansas wants this guy to be president.

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