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  3. Workers at Augusta State University in Georgia are spending the summer putting up new signs, redesigning the school’s website, a

Workers at Augusta State University in Georgia are spending the summer putting up new signs, redesigning the school’s website, a

admin2015-03-25  85
问题     Workers at Augusta State University in Georgia are spending the summer putting up new signs, redesigning the school’s website, and carting furniture and files among offices. What was known as Augusta State when those students arrived as freshmen has been combined with the neighboring Georgia Health Sciences University to form Georgia Regents University. It’s a kind of corporate-style consolidation that is becoming increasingly common not only for public institutions, but also for nonprofit, private ones that can pool their resources for marketing, fundraising, purchasing and information technology in a time of falling budgets. "Size matters, even in academia," said Ricardo Azziz, President of the new, 10,000-student unified school, which he said cut administrative costs by 3% in just its first few weeks. "A lot of times we talk about students preferring small colleges, and that may be true, but it is much more costly to maintain all of the moving parts at a small college than at a larger university. "
    There have been a few mergers of colleges and universities in the past, but the pace of such consolidations is picking up. It’s not necessarily that there’s a surplus of colleges and universities, though it is true that demand is down while supply is up; the number of students slipped 1. 8% last fall and another 2. 3% this spring, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. But the cost of running all these separate institutions at a time of spiraling tuition and reduced state funding, and the appeal of adding services without duplicating expenses is pushing many schools to merge. In addition to Augusta State and Georgia Health Sciences University, Georgia has consolidated six other institutions into three, reducing the total number in its public system to 31, and reorganized 15 of the state’s technical colleges, saving an estimated $6.7 million a year on overhead.
    But while combining colleges and universities to reduce duplication may be logical, it isn’t easy. Legislators who like having higher-education institutions in their districts often resist consolidations. So do students and alumni, who have loyalty to their schools, and faculty and staff who fear losing their jobs. Where consolidations have been successful, they’ve been handled carefully. One way of doing this, say consolidation advocates, is to point out that it can not only cut costs, but improve quality while attracting more research funding. With its new connection to a medical school, for example, Georgia Regents has launched joint MD/MBA and BS/MD programs. And one of the arguments for bringing together the College Park and Baltimore campuses in Maryland was that they ranked 41st and 52nd, respectively, in research spending; combined, they would have jumped to ninth, which proponents of the merger said would have strengthened their position to attract even more money for research. Perks aside, the biggest reason for consolidations remains lower costs. "There’s been a general sense that academia is not a business, which I certainly agree with. But it does have to follow business principles more closely than people would like to admit," said Azziz.  
What is the author’s attitude towards the combination of universities?
选项 A、Approval.
B、Passionate.
C、Impartial.
D、Skeptical.
答案C
解析 观点态度题。该题需要根据文章整体内容来判断。文章以Augusta State University开头，引出大学合并变得日益普遍的现状；接下来，通过数字、引用等方式讲述了合并的益处和可能带来的问题，并且作者还指出，虽然合并看上去好处不少，但归根结底，商业因素在其中所起到的影响很大。综合判断，作者对大学合并这一现象并没有表现出明显的好恶，仅仅是公正客观地阐述了这一事实，并加以分析，因此选[C]。[A]“赞成的”、[B]“有激情的”和[D]“怀疑的”与文章基调不符，故排除。
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