By Professor Doom
Alabama is
removing tenure, but before I get to that, I feel the need to give some
background:
The degeneration
of higher education, slowly increasing over the last few decades, is now
visible to the casual observer. The free-fall reduction of standards to the
point that social
promotion is unimpeded in college, to the point that you can find
graduates that can neither read nor write nor perform arithmetic any better
than before they set foot on college—much less at all!—is turning our higher
educational system into a joke, and why we’ve slid from the top country to the
11th in higher education, in less than a generation.
Key to this
destruction is the student loan scam; any school that is accredited qualifies
for these student loans. As accreditation cares nothing for education, this has
provided a huge sum of money to any institution willing to give a tiny fraction
of that loan money to the accreditor. Would you give $250,000 to an accreditor
in exchange for a billion dollars in loan money which you don’t have to pay
back? It’s not tough to see the opportunity for profit here.
For-profit
schools have reaped tremendous rewards from the loan scam…with blind
accreditation, there was nothing to stop this. I’ve covered these places in
detail already, however.
We’ve had immense
growth in our public institutions. Our universities, even our community
colleges, have grown to the size of townships, with many campuses now
supporting tens of thousands of students. Standards fell to accommodate the
size, but only to a point. Accreditation has failed in every way, but the
faculty at the old schools insisted upon at least minimal standards. With
tenure protecting the faculty, rapacious Poo-Bahs had real limits to their pay
and the growth of the institution, and they hate that.
Thus community
college systems sprang up rapidly in the last twenty years. Community, or “two
year” or “junior” colleges are a relatively new phenomenon (relative to the
thousands year old idea of the university). They first became relevant around
1920, but only recently, the last few decades, have become huge things dwarfing
university campuses. While we take them for granted in the United States, the
rest of the world has nothing much like the plague of community colleges.
The new community
colleges are very different from the older ones. A century ago, community
colleges were built with the universities as a template: faculty could get
tenure, and both scholarship and standards were relevant. While I’ve documented
and seen with my own eyes incredible
levels of fraud, incompetence, corruption, and unprofessionalism at community
colleges, there are some legitimate community colleges out there,
mainly these remnants are from the first days of the community colleges.
In the last few
decades, as the debasement has accelerated, more recent community college
“systems” have been slapped up. These don’t use universities as a model,
instead they follow the for-profit model. These “modern” schools are staffed by
deeply exploited and powerless adjuncts, who generally can barely feed
themselves on their pay, despite their advanced degrees. The profits generated,
instead of going to shareholders and CEOs like in a for-profit school, are
funneled to a huge and hugely overpaid administrative caste.
Alas, the fraud of
these new schools has become established, and “best practices” means that the
older schools can follow suit, to become little more than milking factories,
draining out the loan money from warm bodies before spitting them out on the
street.
But wait…the old
schools can’t become completely debased so quickly, as those tenured faculty
still think there should be some sort of standard to higher education. How to
respond to this problem?
Alabama will solve
the problem by removing tenure:
And just like
that, whatever legitimacy community colleges in Alabama had is snuffed out. It’s
so weird, our higher education system is the epicenter of leftist dogma, and
yet all we see here are the workers being screwed while the ones on top make
out like bandits. Ok, any student of history won’t find that so surprising…maybe
it’s not a coincidence history is no longer taught in schools?
So what’s the new
plan for community colleges in Alabama?
“…make the Alabama Community College System a
corporation…and establish discipline and termination procedures.”
--emphasis
added
How much more
clear could it be that Alabama will adopt the same model as the for-profit
education system, a system
that is fundamentally known as corrupt and invalid?
Look, I understand
tenure has real potential for exploitation, and I have mixed feelings about it,
at best. The fact is, however, every plan that has come from our “leaders” in
higher education has been about giving them more power, and every plan that’s
been executed has made education worse. This means that, in general, if our
leaders in higher education want it, a person of integrity needs to be against
it on principle alone.
Thus at this point
I’m forced to cast aside my ambivalence towards tenure: admin wants to get rid
of it, therefore it would be better for higher education to keep it. It’s that
simple anymore.
Without faculty, educators, making decisions and setting
standards about education, who will do it?
“The way I
see it, giving the community colleges more autonomy is good if you have good strong board members and a strong chancellor who are setting good
policies — that’s a good thing,”
--emphasis
added
I find this
point of view about education absolutely fascinating. To heck with scholarship,
to heck with education, what is wanted is strength. How
demented do you have to be to honestly believe strength is the most important
thing about education?
That’s right, get rid of the faculty, and
let a strongman take over. It’s so weird to watch our campuses all turn into
microcosms of Marxist utopias: incredible wealth for the people with power at
the top, everyone else starves.
There’s essentially
no chance standards will be maintained in the new system:
She also
said the change would give the community colleges more uniformity for deciding
things like a remediation requirement for incoming students.
Ah, here it comes.
Please understand remediation has been a disaster for higher education, a huge
fraud fleecing our citizens out of incredible sums of money while enriching the
administrative caste of our bloated campuses. Over 90% of
community college is non-college material now, and only the deathgrip
of the tenured faculty has kept even a little college on community college
campuses.
I promise you, the
strongman will kill that last 10% in exchange for even greater growth
profits.
“She also said current salary schedules for instructors
would be null and void under the legislation.”
And just like
that, the teachers making over $20,000 a year will find their pay halved, if
not worse…while the strongman at the top gets a huge pay raise. Bottom line,
this is a power grab for the last bit of loot in a doomed system, nothing more.
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