By Professor Doom
Editor:
“We’re cancelling your column.”
Me: “Why? I
thought it was very popular, to judge by reader’s comments.”
Editor: “Oh
it is, and we like it quite a bit, too. But we’re worried that you won’t be able to
continue to be as good, so we’re ending it before that happens. Sorry.”
--Back when
I wrote for magazines, back when there were magazines, this is how I lost one
of my side jobs.
The corporate
mentality is incredibly risk-averse once the corporation reaches a certain
size. It’s often a self-destructive trait, as a willingness to take risks often
was the main reason the company achieved that size in the first place.
Nevertheless, once a business gets large enough to support a middle management,
those guys do whatever they can to make sure nothing happens to shrink the
company back down to the point they don’t need middle managers any more.
In any event, this
risk aversion is a core value of our largest corporations, leading to far more
sequels than new ideas in our movies, for example, and it seems every few years
we see another large company simply obliterated because it failed to take even
a small risk by way of adapting to possible changes in the world (hi
Blockbuster!).
Stumbling over to
higher education, our administrative caste is filled with people trying to
adopt the corporate mentality. Not just in the “innovative” student-as-customer paradigm
or endless self-promotion to get more student loan loot, but also in shutting
down anything that might bring risk to campus, especially in a way
administration can’t control or profit from.
A recent example
highlights this mentality:
Penn State Lets Students Keep
Their Scuba Club, But Only After They Swear Never to Host Scuba Trips Again
So, you can join
the campus scuba club…but only if you don’t actually scuba. It’s so weird; I’ve
seen fraternities disbanded over a single hazing incident gone wrong, and we’ve
seen plenty of horrific injuries (and vicious criminal behavior) regarding
sportsball players without the teams being shut down. Surely there was some huge
accident slaughtering dozens of scuba aficionados, to justify this action?
No one at Pennsylvania State University
has ever drowned on a scuba-diving trip,…club has
existed for 50 years and has never had a safety issue.
So, nothing has actually happened in
decades of operation, admin is simply afraid something might happen at some
point, and then possibly an administrator might lose her job.
The club can still
meet, mind you, but no more trips for them. Well, to clarify:
Penn State's recreation department has promised to
organize scuba trips on behalf of interested students. These trips would happen
under administrative supervision.
Wait…what? Administrative thinking is just
so weird. We’re supposed to accept that students are responsible enough to
check a box damning them to a lifetime of student debt, but can’t organize
scuba trips, not even with a 50 year track record of being able to successfully
do so?
Why do our campuses even have
“recreation” departments, anyway? Clearly they mainly exist simply to justify
yet another administrative fiefdom, ever eager to expand its own power
regardless of how it impacts anything else.
You can bet the administratively
organized trips will be laughable—scuba diving in swimming pools, perhaps, and
certainly nothing more than 6 feet deep (if that much) in any event.
It is actually pretty generous of the university deanlings to
even allow students to get together and discuss this risky behavior all by
themselves. Other “dangerous” clubs are being disbanded entirely:
Penn State recently decreed that three student-led
outdoor adventure groups—the hiking club, the cave exploration club, and the
scuba club—would have to disband due to safety liability concerns, even though
none of the long-running clubs had ever reported a problem.
The hiking club?
Seriously? This university is admitting students so reckless that they cannot
be trusted to walk without
administrative supervision? It’d be easier to believe the university’s concerns
as legitimate if, you know, there had been an actual problem.
I feel the need
to point out that Satanists
can form clubs on campus, and there are even “After
School Satan” meetings at grade schools…but hikers can’t form a club. Too
risky, you see. Something might go wrong.
We really, really,
need to ask ourselves if the “leadership” in higher education belongs on campus.
In any event, the
scuba club had to beg permission to
still exist on this campus, which was generously granted provided they didn’t
actually do any scuba diving on their own. I suppose the other clubs had too
much pride to grovel before these self-proclaimed masters of the universe, and
kudos to them.
I remind the
gentle reader that this is happening at Penn State, notorious for “after
school” activities going on in the showers…to date, those showers are still
there, and there’s no interest in shutting down showering on campus, even
though there’s a clear liability issue.
The comments
section righteously laughs at this administrative push for more control and one
comment highlights a possibly more important issue than simple risk aversion:
it is all about Penn State's Adventure Recreation office
charging students money for trips that they used to do for free. The Scuba Club
had a sizable endowment and could pay for trips for their members. Now the
members must pay Penn State.
I concede there’s
some truth in the above, but the way how funding and pay is handled on campus
is so bizarre nowadays. The administrator who changed these clubs so that the
members will end up paying hundreds of dollars to Penn State to “organize”
things they used to do all on their own, will probably get a $20,000 pay raise
for his “bold” plan to increase revenues.
While the above is my primary explanation for
this particular bizarre behavior by our leaders at Penn State, I do concede
another possibility: lowering insurance premiums. I hate to keep referencing
what went (goes?) on in the showers at Penn State, but I suspect their
insurance company, upon finding out just how severe the corruption is there,
and rightfully suspecting the place still has many pedophiles leading to future
lawsuits, decided to raise their premiums. While I’m no fan of insurance
companies, I see their point here, as they set their original premiums
assuming, as the university puts in writing, that the university will act with
integrity. Now that it’s common knowledge that Penn State doesn’t act with
integrity, the risks for lawsuits are far higher. So, shutting down these
“risky” student organizations is a means to lowering those premiums.
And so I puzzle over the reasoning behind yet
another strange plan by the leaders in higher ed. Meanwhile, bold plans to improve
education and restore integrity to higher education are still non-existent, and
will likely continue to be so. Such a plan would risk losing all those sweet
student loan checks, after all.
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