Well, Texas actually funds their higher education- can't blame him

Scary we are worse at funding education than Texas. That said our legislature is looking at BOLD leadership. They are going to push to get rid of Daylight Savings Time in Washington.

With leadership like that in Olympia how can we fail to win? LOL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

I'm not sure I'm buying the assertion that the thing that's wrong with WA higher ed is that we don't pay the presidents of the universities enough, or that paying them $1.6 mil equals "investment". He's still going to be utterly beholden to the football coach at A&M, probably more so.

@2: Standard time or DST? I think a majority wants to have DST all year.

"...a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington."

That would be a pretty rigid and explosive staff member.

we got our insurance through washingtonhealthplanfinder last year and it was hands down the worst experience ive had in the insurance marketplace. there was an extraneous bureaucracy layer that constantly fucked up. i canceled my plan with them when i got a new job with insurance and they kept billing me. then they accidentally canceled my wifes insurance with the carrier but kept billing us and it took two months to sort out. my wife needed treatment and when we called to sort it out they got real huffy and acted like it was our fault somehow. i asked them since my wife was delaying treatment until she had the insurance we had paid for was there anything they could do for us and they told us no, repeatedly. im sure theyre overworked and understaffed but that was a huge fuck up. we ended up getting the exact same plan through the same insurance company for the same price, just cut out the extra garbage.

Thank you, Fnarf. Let the greedy old guy go make his money; there are plenty of people who would love to make $600k/yr and work in WA.

I'm down with eliminating DST, but it should be done nationally. Year-round DST, OTOH, is the dumbest idea imaginable.

To be clear, I don't think he meant to that observation to be strictly, or even primarily, about the salary for the President. Texas is going through a cycle of funding it's research universities quite well (not so much the less prestigious regionals and branch campuses), at the same time Washington is abandoning that project in all but name.

@6 = Exhibit A, folks.

@ 10, for what case?

Texans see their university system as a collection of football programs.

michael young was a trifling bureaucrat of no distinction and he will not be missed

@8 OMG no! In our northern position, daylight would be so, so wasted with no DST…especially in the eastern sections of the time zones. Summer sunrise would be a little after 4am for Seattle, and in Spokane it would be fucking 3:51am! That means usable light would start at something like 3:15am. I would much rather (and I assume most would) put up with an 8:30am winter sunrise than wasting those awesome long summer evenings.

Michael Young is Mormon and I was in the U-district last Saturday, and there were a ton of Mormons and LDS missionaries proselytizing up and down the ave near UW. Just sayin'.

@2, Yes, we need to make this state a lot more like Arizona and American Samoa. Down with DST and more "show me your papers".

Part of his job is to demonstrate that the State Legislature should invest in UW. That's not a heavy lift. Instead, he couldn't even protect his own school's monopoly on the medical school. Good riddance.

@19 also if we're calling out unrelated legislature antics, let's not forget how Texas' is doing its damnedest to functionally outlaw abortion.

Don't take his quote out of context. When he talked about investing in the system he wasn't referring to his own salary but the frustration of trying to lead a university when state funding continues to decrease. What college president wouldn't prefer to work with a healthy budget instead of constantly having to find things to cut?

It's more wanting to deal with ample funding and probably a bit of too much rain.

That said the last Al-Q story is accurate- we've known it for years - before 9-11 even

@ 17, while I'll concede the point in summer, you really have to question the wisdom of asking kids to go to school while it's still fully dark, as it would be in the winter months if year-round DST were adopted.

"One of the attractions, he said, was the amount of money Texas (Republican) lawmakers are interested in investing in the university system," reports the Seattle Times. "He expressed disappointment that Washington (Democrat) lawmakers haven’t done a better job here."

I'll believe that Texas is in favor of decent education when their school board stops trying to write creationism/ID into and Thomas Jefferson out of the nation's high school textbooks. Fuck Texas.

@24 I made the mistake of making that argument in a room full of parents, who all laughed uproariously at my quaint remembrance of kids not arriving at school until something like 8:00am. Nearly all kids are going to school before sunrise right now.

@ 27, not where I live. At least not the grade school kids who also don't have to have daycare before school starts.

@24: Kids shouldn't be going to school before 8:30 anyways, so it's win win!

@28: What's so bad about little tots going to school in the dark? They do it north of the arctic circle quite a lot!

@30, they also have an entire culture built around living up there. One which lacks impatient suburbanites racing to work in the morning.

If we're to be serious, kids should go to school later than they do. And year round DST would be less of a bad thing.

@30: The dark isn't the problem, it's the early hour. Kids don't learn well early in the morning.

@27: Most elementary schools around here start anywhere from 8:30ish to 9 a.m.

@26: commitment to quality secondary education and higher ed are, strangely enough, two different subjects. That a state fares poorly with one does not mean they necessarily fare poorly with another. This isn't terribly complicated.