By Professor Doom
I don’t really
mean to pick on community colleges…or maybe I do. It just seems like the frauds
and hijinks going on there are so consistently over the top, so out of
proportion to the around 50% of kids trapped in that system, that it’s just too
easy to come up with yet another scandal.
Let’s look at the
community college du jour:
Yes, universities
totally have their scandals, big ones, but there’s a Keystone Cops factor to
community colleges that just makes them more fun. Ultimately, the real
separating factor is community colleges aren’t actually colleges, with 90% or
more of the coursework explicitly not college level, and their ridiculously low
graduation rates, to the
point that 0.6% is considered successful, highlight how community colleges are
scams first and foremost, often without even barest lip service to education.
One
concerns Orikaye Brown-West, RCC’s security chief until 2006. The report details
several alleged instances of sexually threatening behavior on his part. The
college dismissed him after he made coercive advances on a female student, but
administrators never told the board of the matter, nor did they report
allegations against him to the federal Department of Education.
--this
administrative predator lurked on campus for years, really scaring students;
one student was paid off.
The article cited above is old; in the year
previous to the 2013 article the Poo Bah was forced to resign—with a
meager $100,000 parachute (plus an additional undisclosed amount)--in the
wake of a set of scandals…it’s just nuts how community colleges are designed to
promote fraud. Even though this is a fairly small school (less than 2500
students), it’s still big enough to have consistent ongoing shenanigans. As an
added bonus, consider the parachute this guy gets compared to the size of the
school--imagine if corporate CEOs got to take a few months of company revenue
with them when they leave, to put this in perspective…
It also
says that the school’s Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center has no
documentation for many years of cash income from ticket sales, a discrepancy
likely to concern state auditors who are investigating allegations that some
facility employees have taken cuts for themselves.
Seriously, how
cheeseball is that? The guy selling you the ticket is just pocketing the money
and walking away. Does anyone really suspect nobody in admin was asking about
the ticket sales revenue? I suspect envelopes full of $100 bills were passed
around to avoid such questions, it’s
happened enough times before. I was often stunned by the lack
of competence, of professionalism, at the community college I worked at…but
it’s clear my college was not particularly special in that regard.
The board
plans to require legal and ethical training for administrators, to strengthen
security policies, to create a new position of compliance officer, and to
tighten oversight at the athletic center and the college.
Isn’t it
hysterical that these guys get paid 6 figure salaries, and then need “legal and
ethical training”? I’ve been forced to sit through many hours of such training—it’s
just stupid videos. Let’s just call such training completely laughable. Honest,
the kind of people that cheerfully cover up rapes and bribe whistleblowers
aren’t going to be swayed by a 45 minute video. Too bad nobody up there has
that level of common sense…or maybe I’m wrong.
Anyway, that was
nearly three years ago. Let’s take a look at how well all that ethical training
is working out:
Didn’t those
ethics videos had something in them about awarding multimillion dollar no-bid
contracts in straight up violation of the law and common sense? I again want to
mention…this is a small school,
smaller than my high school; you need perhaps two dozen faculty, and (in a
legitimate system) perhaps five administrators/staff to run it all. And 3.4
million bucks was sloshing around on a side contract…there are what, a hundred
computers on this campus, at most? I was at a modern community college with
about 2500 students, and that’s the amount of computers we had. Roxbury CC is
spending millions on maintenance of a
$100,000 worth of computers…that kind of money is enough to just buy all new
computers every month for years.
Ok to be fair,
this wasn’t a short contract, although admin, as always, tried to lie about it:
The college
originally said that skipping a process to review other proposals was needed
because this was an interim contract
--in fact, the contract
was through 2019. Again, enough money to buy whole new systems every month. For
years.
In addition to
lining their own pockets, the contract shenanigans was also union busting—the
community college fired all their old IT staff, and was going to rehire new
staff, at a lower price (and a huge kickback for admin, I’ll conjecture…these
guys are insatiable). Across the
country, community colleges have done that with the professors—fired them all,
and replaced them with low-paid adjuncts. This college was just trying to repeat
the process with the IT staff, pocketing the difference. Heck, “pocketing”
doesn’t do justice to what was going on here, as this kind of money wouldn’t
fit in just a pocket…wheelbarrowing the difference, perhaps?
It’s nice that
this “potential” conflict of interest was caught, but realize the only reason
it happened is that Roxbury has such a long history of criminal behavior that
it merited extra scrutiny. The current set of rulers might be fired, but it
means nothing. Even as the school turns over another set of administrators, it’ll
just dismiss the previous generation with another truckload of golden parachutes—it
really is a revolving door in higher education, most of these administrators
will just move on down the road to plunder anew. I’m surprised the former Poo
Bah isn’t still around, but with his 40 year history of “leadership” I suspect
he’ll just take his pile of money and retire.
It almost worked,
but the failure is only a minor setback for the plunderers running our schools.
Even if the admin responsible for this underhandedness are forced to resign,
even if the administrators are forced to watch two, or even three, more videos
on integrity, the gentle reader needs to understand: the way how community
colleges are set up, the way how accreditation is set up, these places will
perpetually be places of scandal and ill repute.
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