By Professor Doom
For years I’ve
watched the Poo Bahs of Higher Ed abandon their mission of helping humanity and
instead debase higher education in exchange for growth. The Poo Bahs don’t want
growth per se, they want the massive increases to pay they get for ruling larger
institutions (truth be told, I suspect the reasons our politicians are pushing
for massive immigration are much the same).
One of the more
recent choices to hurt higher education was to pursue Social Justice
Warrior-work, to attract the mass of kids who got caught up in this violent,
irrational craze, instead of focus on the real mission of higher education. The
end result of this choice, beyond saddling a bunch of helpless kids with huge
debts, has been protests and riots, violence that doesn’t seem to end no matter
how much our spineless Poo Bahs try to appease the SJWs.
The University of
Missouri (aka Mizzou) had numerous racial riots and protests last year, leading
to a drop in the student base…a huge drop. They’re
still reeling, still confused why parents don’t want to send their kids to a
school with a reputation for violence and no reputation for education, and the
“leaders” of the institution are still unable to come up with a plan to turn
the school around. Granted, they’ve already gone off a cliff so I don’t think
they can do much; I tried to explain how they might fix things, but the ideas I
bring up repeatedly in my blog, such as integrity and scholarship, just don’t
make sense to the folks that run the schools.
So, I sit back
and watch them shrivel up:
The headline only
hints at how bad it is, so allow me another quick quote:
“The
closures bring the total number of closed residence halls to seven…”
The gentle reader
might not understand how apocalyptic this is. Much like in the olden days where
“company towns” screwed over the workers trapped in such towns (who were forced
to pay exorbitant prices on rent, food, and other necessities), the big-big money
in higher ed now is to trap students on campus, in pricey dorms. Such students
have little choice but to spend those sweet student loan checks on campus
services…believe you me, admin just lurves students who give all their money to
the campus.
Losing seven
dorms full of students is a big hit to the bottom line.
It’s beyond
hysterical listening to admin talk about the closing as anything but a well-deserved
smack in their heads that they screwed up:
--check out
that spiffy title, “Mizzou News Bureau associate director.” Guess what, Liz,
your title is twice as long as your name. Good thing Mizzou doesn’t focus on education,
or else you’d be gone, as per my guidelines for administrative positions in
schools which care about education.
Goodness, what a load
of bull. “Flexibility whether the numbers are low or high”? Gee whiz, Liz,
can’t you tell what the numbers are right now? Why can’t we hire people that
can tell if numbers are low or high? I’ll help her out: if you’re closing
dorms, the numbers are LOW. Gee, was that so hard?
If the numbers
are low, you should ask if you’re doing something to make the numbers low. I
guess that’s why it’s so hard to tell if the numbers are low…it would lead to
taking responsibility. Trouble is, until they admit responsibility, they can’t
plan a course of action.
Now time for more
laughter:
The
associate director said that despite the closures, the university plans to open
a new 279-bed hall for the 2017-2018 school year.
It takes years to
construct a building on campus. Despite obvious trends of the last decade like
online courses and changing demographics (our population is aging, which is as
hard for our administrators to predict as determining whether the numbers are
low, or high), our campuses, not just Mizzou, have been engaging in massive,
huge, insane, building sprees. Even in states with years of falling on-campus
enrollment, they’re still building and building and building. It’s easy to
understand, as there’s huge capacity for corruption in construction; not every
admin is satisfied with a splendiferous title and big salary, after all.
So, Mizzou gets
to be one of the first universities to see a building open up with no
conceivable way to put anything in the building. Don’t worry, gentle reader,
we’ll get to see lots and lots of this in the years to come.
Of course, I
don’t want to merely laugh as empty buildings get thrown up, I want to see some
comeuppance, want to see the people responsible for this mess pay the price.
It’s delusional to think any of the money that’s been stolen from the student
loan scam will ever be clawed back, but…now that Mizzou is clearly suffering
from the foolish choices of their foolish “leaders,” surely we’ll see
something?
Mizzou
leaders have until April 28 to figure out how to make up for the university’s
$20 million shortfall in the budget.
Hmm, a $20 million
shortfall. Even low level admin make $100k a year, so we’re only talking the
loss of about 200 administrators and Mizzou can be back in the black. All they
have to do is cut back on the legion of overpaid “leaders” and they’ll be fine.
Seriously, consider
this detail about the state of Missouri:
Of the top
20 highest-paid employees, 16 are with the University of Missouri-Columbia,
with Football Coach Gary Pinkel topping the list with $4.02 million in salary for the 2015-2016 school
year.
The sportsball
coach alone could single-handedly
make up 20% of the shortfall; about $13 million in Mizzou salaries comes from
that top 20 list. Wanna bet any of these guys will pay for this disaster? Not a
chance. You’ll see tuition raised, faculty let go, class sizes get larger even
as enrollment drops…but I’ll let you know if any sanity will take place at
Mizzou over this.
Far more likely,
the plundering will continue as usual.
No comments:
Post a Comment