By Professor
Doom
When covering the fraud of higher
education, I repeatedly get amazed by the systemic fraud at community colleges.
Yes, universities totally have their scandals, but community colleges have all
the scandals of universities…and then more. Part of this likely is because
universities are set up as individual institutions—there is no one grand high
Poo Bah that rules over, say, USF and UFS and FSU, or LSU and USL and SLU (yes,
those are all acronyms of universities). On the other hand, community colleges are
part of a system, a system that has been created from the top down to suck
student loan and grant money into administrative pockets provide low cost
education to citizens in individual states. Each university in a state is a
distinct entity, while the community colleges in a state can be controlled as a
unit.
Because community colleges are created by
politicians, and not educators, there’s a heart of corruption there which seems
to lead to community colleges being far more corrupt than they have any right
to be.
In addition to the massive corruption,
there’s another common theme: everyone on campus seems to know about it. When
people tell me large conspiracy theories are impossible because there’s just no
way that hundreds of people can keep their mouth shut, I need only recall a
certain community college campus I was on, which supposedly had over a thousand
students attending its night courses.
All these students, attending courses at
night. And yet, anyone with eyeballs could see the parking lots were almost
completely empty. Hundreds of people pretending to come to class, dozens of
faculty pretending to hold class, and scores of administrators in bed in their
mansions, paid for because they supposedly filled up those classes that
everyone pretends exist.
And not a peep from anyone, not the fake
students, not the abused faculty, and certainly not the very well paid
administration. Over 1,000 people involved in the conspiracy, and nobody
talked.
Ok, that’s not accurate. I alone complained
(as a response to students complaining because I was actually holding class)…but
it accomplished nothing, I was simply punished for it, “business” continued as
usual, and what I had to say was squelched. I hold no illusion that my
community college was special:
“…I had taught at the community
college level for around 40 years. I have heard about what the administrators
were doing in the district almost from the time I began teaching. One of the
things I could never understand is why there were more than 20 administrators
at a community college and many of them doing literally nothing but getting
paid at least 3x what a professor makes. In all, there are something like 150
administrators throughout the district..”
--a community college professor from
California
I really doesn’t take much to realize
something wrong is going on. Like the professor above, I too was on a campus
where administration grotesquely outnumbered faculty—because of growth, we
needed more faculty, but we couldn’t hire more, because state rules capped the
number of employees at the institution at 100. We had 27 faculty (we all met in
one classroom), to give some idea of the numbers involved.
The retired professor continues:
One of the first things I heard about
was how the district administrators would take brand new in-the-box computer
home as soon as they came in. These computers were supposed to go to the
different colleges for classrooms or for office personnel.
I suspect this type of plundering
doesn’t occur as often nowadays. Not because administration has gained more
integrity, but because they’re paid so much that looting computers is just
small potatoes. Again, anyone with eyeballs can go look at the administrative
parking lots and see vehicles that cost more than the homes that faculty live
in.
I knew an administrator who was also
a teacher. He told me that at one of the administrator's meetings he offered a
suggestion. He was bluntly told, "You aren't being paid to make
suggestions." I recall going to lunch with a department administrator one
day. He told me that there is a lot of illegal maneuvering going on at the
district office and he'd "...like to say something about it but it would
mean my job."
I’ve often suggested that if just went
back to having educators also perform administrative duties, there’d be less
fraud. I make no assertion of utopia, but stories like the above make it very
clear that educators really do see things differently than administrators.
It had constantly amazed me why the district office had to be on some of
THE MOST EXPENSIVE REAL ESTATE IN THE COUNTRY. The district was offered
land that was cheaper and in a better position more centrally located but
they insisted on this place…
Again, I’ve covered quite a few real
estate scandals. Once again, anyone with eyeballs can see administrative
offices are positively palatial, and often in pricey locations (administrators
would much rather spend the money on themselves than on education)…but nobody
is in a position to do anything about it, much less even ask why administrators
can’t have the “cubicle warehouse” accommodations that only the lucky faculty
get (the unlucky faculty use the trunk of their car as office space).
I am
appalled that more people who have retired haven't come forward to say
something. There are many who know a lot more than I. In fact, one of my
colleagues became a state legislator and later a U.S. Representative and never
said anything.
It is interesting that more people who
have retired from the system haven’t come forward to say something. It’s easy,
for example, to find retired scientists that will
explain global warming is a sham. Once your paycheck isn’t on the line, hey, suddenly telling
the truth is easier, or so it would seem.
Of course, retiring from higher education
is, um, problematic. How do you do that nowadays? If you have tenure, you need
never retire, and if you don’t have tenure, chances are you’re not paid enough
to ever be able to afford to retire.
The community college system doesn’t
offer nearly as much opportunity for retirement as a university, so, once
again, we have yet another reason for the wide open corruption that seems so
much more common at community colleges.
The Scandal That Was an Open Secret: Community College Bond Money Abuses
Editor’s Note: Nearly all scandals in the public sector have something
in common: Many good people look the other way in the face of abuses and even
those who try to stop the corruption are confronted by a power structure...LACCD
Faculty Senate leaders tried to blow the whistle and now expect retaliation
from officials…
What,
faculty that try to blow the whistle expect retaliation? Yeah, no kidding, I’ve
experienced it and documented it enough times in my blog. Across the country,
community colleges are looting and plundering away. It isn’t just that everyone
on the inside can tell you of the frauds going on, anyone with eyeballs who
chooses to look can see it for himself.
Is it
still a fraud if everyone knows about it? Somehow, I suspect it is, since
ultimately the tax dollars are being raised for education, and spent on
fattening wallets of the people at the top. Fraud or no, there are plenty of
open secrets on community college campuses today, as I’ve
discussed before.
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