Black Women’s College to Lose Accreditation

By Professor Doom

     Accreditation is mostly a slam dunk, and once you have it, the student loan scam provides such an abundance of funds that you generally keep it.

      That said, a school can lose accreditation. It’s rare, mind you, but I can’t help but notice a school can’t lose accreditation due to lack of academic integrity (hi UNC, though you’re not alone), lack of moral integrity (hi Penn State, also not alone), or lack of anything relating to education, really.

      There are only two ways a school can lose accreditation: lack of extremely expensive administrators, or lack of a way to pay those administrators. In theory, a school could lose accreditation by not paying the accreditation fees…but this is the only accreditation rule I’ve never seen a school break, for some reason (hi student loans!).

     Bennett College is what’s known as an HBCU (historically black college or university), and a particularly special one, since, “historically,” it only caters to females, the first of its kind when it became such in 1926 (though the school itself dates back to 1878). It is funny that we have to use the word “historically” when discussing this and similar schools; I doubt I’ll ever see a school try to push being “historically” white male, though many schools would honestly fit that description. I’m not advocating this should happen, mind you…but I think I catch a whiff of hypocrisy here.

     Anyway, the school is running out of money. The accreditor has been very kind to give them 2 years’ probation. To put this in context, this same accreditor, in response to UNC’s 20 year scheme of academic fraud which they demonstrably worked to cover up, got a 1 year probation; the takeaway here is clear, that the accreditor cares much less for education than money.

     To their credit, the school has improved their finances:

Bennett plans to reach out to donors in an attempt to improve its financial picture before the February hearing. Donors have already given generously, allowing the college to beat a $4 million fund-raising target set last year with $4.2 million in gifts and pledges.

The college's operating results had improved as well, with leaders reporting a surplus of $461,000 last year after a $1.1 million deficit for 2016-17. 

      Wow, a surplus of $461,000, not bad for a small school, but not enough. That’s a tiny pittance by most university standards. I find it fascinating that our Poo-Bahs bleat and bleat about how important diversity is, how necessary it is to support females in all ways…and yet none of those Poo-Bahs has seen fit to simply shower this school with money. If your typical large school has half a billion to pay in settlements for covering up yet another major sex crime conspiracy (note: not linking to Penn State), or can siphon over $175 million without anyone noticing any budgetary problems, then most any Poo-Bah could casually bail this school out without even cutting into administrative bonuses.

     Well, if any Poo-Bah believed the words coming out of his mouth this would happen.

      But, that’s not going to happen, and so the school is on the chopping block for total annihilation. I feel the need to emphasize, while most people think accreditation legitimizes the education at a school, such thoughts are rubbish. It’s about the money, and nothing else:

The college, which has undertaken significant cost-cutting and fund-raising efforts in an attempt to shore up its financial position, is appealing the decision. Its president, Phyllis Worthy Dawkins, toldthe News & Record she plans to make the college's case at a Feb. 18 hearing.

      I sure wish her luck, but if she really wants that school to survive, she should bring checks to the accreditors. It’s all that matters.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

    

Columbia: Let Students Grade Themselves. It’s Inclusive!

By Professor Doom

“Drink Brawndo. It Has Electrolytes!”

--from the movie Idiocracy, which presents an alarmingly credible look into our future. The word “inclusive” is used much like electrolytes in the movie, without considering if there’s any evidence having such things is always a good idea.

     Hey, remember last post where the Progressives had decided students can’t be trusted to evaluate their professors because RACISM? I sure do. Well, that doesn’t mean they can’t evaluate themselves:

Columbia University Seminar to Promote ‘Inclusive Grading’

       “Inclusive” is one the many code words relating to RACISM, in this case meaning a way to get around theoretical racial inequality. What’s the workaround in this case?

According to a December 6, 2017 Powerpoint presentation by the CTL, inclusive grading starts by “trusting students to assess themselves.”

…

Fifteen of the 34 Powerpoint slides specifically encourage professors to let students grade themselves. If students can choose their own grades, the presentation asserts, then they’ll feel less stress and anxiety, and maybe even learn more productively.

     Heck, why don’t we just get rid of the professors, and just have the students do it all? It’d free up much more money for administrative pay raises. I’m there’s some lakefront property they haven’t bought yet.

     We already know GPA is ultimately worthless even in academia, but the uselessness of GPA in the “real world” has been reality for a long time. All grades are for is motivation, little different than how parents use Santa Claus to get kids to behave.

     Hey, do we have any academics advocating for how little kids should be allowed to get their own gifts for Christmas? I mean, Santa is white, so they could certainly argue RACISM is a factor here. Oh wait, there aren’t any student loan checks involved.

     Anyway, I concede I was graded with unfair harshness from time to time in school…and graded generously a few times as well. I couldn’t tell you if overall my GPA would have shifted 0.1 one way or the other, but it doesn’t matter: the false value of “grade” motivated me to work just a bit harder than I would have otherwise, and that’s the entire point of grades. Despite the inherent falseness, I would no more get rid of this system than seek to annihilate Santa from our culture.

      So, despite the fact that RACISM means students can’t be trusted to evaluate their teachers, RACISM also means students can be trusted to evaluate themselves.

      Times like these, I really appreciate being in mathematics, as such contradictory thinking would make my head hurt if chemo didn’t already do so.

 “Grades are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction” (emphasis added), the CTL states, quoting activist Jesse Stommel. “Grading is a massive co-ordinated effort to take humans out of the educational process.”

     I swear I hear the mock Russian “kyep-it-al-ist” in my head when I read “capitalist” in the above. He’s seriously saying grading takes humans out of the educational process? This truly is documenting how little faculty measure here: we don’t even register as human.

     I really want to point out the people running these seminars are Educationists, they have Ph.D. degrees in Education…and yet they don’t know grades are simply a motivational tool. Educationist training really is that atrocious.

     How can none of the academics involved in this not see obvious flaws in thinking like I’ve pointed out, above?

According to one study by Nelta Edwards, a professor at the University of Alaska, 86% of students report that “self grading is a great/good teaching method.”

     Yeah, no kidding. I suspect 86% of kids report chocolate cake for breakfast is a great/good meal. Nevertheless this type of study will be used to support these lunatic ideas.

     This is actually part of a whole series of seminars on “Inclusiveness,” which is really just another sham to try get the system to grow just a little bit more, exploiting the few parts of our population that haven’t been screwed by the worst aspects of higher education.

The “Inclusive Teaching Seminar” will be held in Spring 2018 and will host five meetings. While “inclusive” is vague, the CTL website explains that each session will be dedicated to a specific topic, such as “inclusive grading” or “preventing microaggressions.”

      I wish them luck on these kinds of seminars, I really do, but I also wish someone would show up and ask real questions about the thinking involved in the policy changes they are advocating. Seminars like these go on throughout the country on campuses all the time. They give their talk, there’s polite applause…and a few months later some Dean will be ordering community college adjuncts to have students grade themselves, cheerfully implying anyone who opposes her must be a RACIST.

      And she’ll have these nice results from Columbia backing her up…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

    

“Student Evaluations Favor White Males, So Toss Them.” Seriously?

By Professor Doom

      A few posts ago, I discussed how “aptitude” tests weren’t giving equality of outcome, so they were labeled RACIST and tossed, via a supreme court ruling which directly led to the mess we have today in higher education.

     That was 50 years ago…but not much has changed in tactics for the Progressives, as we’ll see in today’s topic.

     SETs, Student Evaluations of Teaching, have long been a sticking point for faculty. The failing students always trash you bitterly (as is their right), but the other students usually don’t care much. Bottom line, SETs are good for identifying raging fires in the classroom, but past that they’re pretty weak for identifying if a teacher is any good.

      Figuring out if a teacher is any good is a tough business, and honestly the only way to do it is put another teacher in the classroom and observe (as nerve-wracking as that is for the observed). This would be very time-consuming, but effective and useful work. We have loads and loads of administrators to do that now, but they’re not teachers, so they take the lazy route and just use the SETs to determine who the good teachers are. Clever teachers learn that the easy way to look good on the SETs is to fail nobody—only the failing students ever put down nasty reviews, after all.

      SETs can easily represent the make-or-break of a faculty member getting a permanent position, and many campuses use them as the de-facto deciding factor all hiring/tenure positions, even if on paper they’ll say something different.

      While I acknowledge their minimal usefulness, overall I’d be ok if they weren’t a deciding factor in any big decisions. That said, this guy is nuts:

Berkeley prof wants to nix student evals after white male profs score higher

      I find this thinking infuriating on two levels.

     First, much like with that supreme court ruling, we see the same structure of foolish interpretation of results—we don’t get equality of outcome, so things must change, even if such changes can damn tens of millions to eternal debt slavery, at least that was the end result of the supreme court ruling. Before we wholesale toss the SETs, we really need to think things through here, and we would, but that insanity rules our campuses.

       Far more infuriating? Whenever there’s a study that shows students prefer, say, a female or person of color in an administrative position, instantly and irrevocably the campus moves to make sure to hire the appropriate genitals/skin color to parade in front of the students. Never is “sexism” or “racism” used to explain the results of the study.

       Here we have a study saying students prefer white male faculty. Instead of admin tripping over themselves to hire white male faculty, we have the cry of “sexism” or “patriarchy” or whatever used to justify tossing the study.

       But…the fact remains. The study says students prefer white male faculty, and it’s hardly the only study with such a result. I can respect ignoring the study (since it’s all supposed to be about education, not making students happy), but this wild mis-interpretation of the results of the study just to advance the lunatic Progressive Agenda of equality of outcome for everyone (except white males) is vilely offensive.

“Instructor race is also associated with SET…” DeLay said in a follow-up tweet, referencing the study’s finding that minority professors tend to receive, on average, “significantly lower” scores than their white, male counterparts. He goes on to mention the study’s claim that “age, charisma, and physical attractiveness” also factor into evaluations. “

     Seriously, charisma, likeability, is a factor in how well students like the professor? The guy is reaching quite a bit to reinforce his point. He never addresses why we can’t take the study at face value, and accept, bare minimum, that students prefer white male professors, much less—heresy!—address the possibility that white male professors tend to be better at their jobs (a reasonable interpretation of the results of the study, although I again say we shouldn’t read too much into this).

     A few comments reinforce how tone-deaf the professor’s claims are:

Hmmm...woman professors score lower, while 60% of college graduate are now female. I think the lesson here is two-fold: 1) Female professors must objectively suck compared to male professors; and 2) we clearly need to get more men into universities,

      The solid majority of students on campus are female…and still male professors are coming out on top. A more natural question then is it really that females are this self-hating, or do we really have superiority for a certain gender of professor? Instead of asking a real question, we simply have shouts of “SEXIST!” Maybe pointy-headed academics are asking too many obscure questions, but honest that’s what higher ed is supposed to be, instead of shouting slurs and simply refuting studies which don’t yield the desired results.

If the results were inverse, they would be using them as justification to genocide white males.

     Agreed; maybe not the genocide bit, but ultimately it’s the error of omission that will eventually cause studies like this to be tossed and ignored, while, yes, every study that shows even the most minimal advantage going to a female or “protected minority” gets shoved to the forefront and used to justify ever more destructive policies.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Hungary Bans Gender Studies…Not An Academic Subject

By Professor Doom

    We really are coming to a crossroads in higher ed. A few decades ago, the possibility that a whole department, based on an entire academic subject, would be tossed as “not useful knowledge” would be considered inconceivable.

      But today, in the United States, this sort of thing is common. Shakespeare is being tossed in exchange for a lesbian author. Computer science departments are being shut down, leading to a shortage of computer scientists where the world really needs people who understand computers. Even mathematics is turning into a boiler room operation on many campuses, focusing on passing students over academics.

     With all the academics being removed from campus, what to replace it with? Many campuses are throwing in ever more Education courses, knowing they are frauds any student can ace without effort. We know they are frauds because they’re not quite politically protected: we can inspect what goes on in their classes, and since their graduates often go off to teach, we can judge the quality of the coursework by the quality of the graduates, for the most part.

     Another new branch of “academic” courses has been affecting our campuses, Gender Studies, and unlike Education, these courses are becoming mandatory. Now, the graduates of these fields aren’t nearly so vulnerable as in Education, and so it’s not so easy to criticize their uselessness by examining how they succeed in the (non-existent) job market. Across the country, these courses, despite their clear lack of educational value, are springing up, detracting from the education our students receive.

     Well, across THIS country, yes, but it’s clear not every country is subjecting itself to this madness:

Hungary To Remove Gender Studies From Universities, Says Courses Based On 'Ideology Rather Than Science'

     I grant Hungary isn’t the higher educational capital of the world, but at least, finally, some place is fighting back.

To be fair, just two universities in the country even offer the program at the graduate level, and only 13 students total enrolled in them this year.

      While, yes it’s fair to say the above, it’s also fair to say the Gender Studies blighting our campuses were small programs too, years ago…kudos to Hungary for nipping this abomination in the bud. Did they have more specific reasons beyond the perfectly justifiable “this is not an academic subject”?

“There is no economic rationale for studies such as these,” he said, as the degree does not “furnish students with skills that can be readily and directly converted on the labour market." He added that the programs aren’t sustainable and "take away valuable resources from other programs, deteriorating the economic stability of universities.”

      That’s a pretty thorough takedown. While “economically useless” is all a state school can really understand, the fact that these courses are taking away from the time students can spend learning real academics is all the justification necessary for elimination of these wasteful and irrelevant courses.

       In not necessarily unrelated news, Hungary has also put up a border fence, cutting down illegal immigration by some 97%.

      It’s a shame America is far too arrogant to take advice and learn from other countries, but if that posture should ever change, I hope it takes a peek at Hungary which clearly has something to say we should heed.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Electronics Journal Secretly Retracts 29 Articles

By Professor Doom

    Our “peer review” system of publishing research is clearly highly flawed. In less objective fields like psychology, past half of such published research has been shown to be not reproducible. Some of this research has been foundational to psychology, such as the famous Stanford Prison Experiment…despite the fame, it’s a fraud.

     In medicine, we also have this problem, and even wide swaths of cancer research are probably fraudulent. Of course, I have a front row seat to how unpredictable cancer can be.

      Even hard sciences are obviously vulnerable, as shocking as that sounds. Today I’m looking at events at an electronics journal…surely peer review could check whether the research claims are valid? Perhaps not, but there’s something even more interesting here:

Journal Retracts 29 Articles, Explaining Little

Violations of policies on peer review are cited, without saying what the violations were.

     Ok, clearly they found a serious peer review policy violation here. If I were to conjecture, I would suppose that the “peers” reviewing the papers were a loaded bunch, possibly just one guy posing as a half dozen or more guys. That’s just a guess, and it doesn’t matter, the journal found violations and reacted appropriately.

For now, the IEEE said that "three volunteer editors identified during the investigation as involved in the misconduct have been permanently excluded from IEEE membership.

--IEEE is the organization which publishes the journal

     Being a journal editor, a legitimate one, is a thankless job. Often you hire “assistant” journal editors to help with the work, for no pay (I’ve done this a few times). And so the game was fixed to get certain articles published with scant oversight. Fair enough.

      But wait, there’s more:

Inside Higher Ed asked IEEE a series of questions about which papers were retracted, which editors had been barred from working with the group, how they violated peer-review rules and whether the papers had flaws that had been identified or were being retracted solely because of problems with the peer-review process. IEEE declined to answer any of those questions.

     Seriously, they won’t say which articles have been un-published due to fraud? Should a scientist then play it safe by disregarding all articles in this journal?

     This behavior raises many questions, questions unasked by the article I’m quoting from. Chief among them? WHY are they protecting the fraudulent editors? If they did the decent thing and revealed which articles are unpublished, it wouldn’t take much to backtrack to figure out who the associated editors are.

     Instead, we have a mysterious 29 unpublished papers…already published in physical documents. Can’t tell you what they are, or course.

     This, ultimately, brings up the real problem in our journal and peer review process: lack of integrity. There is simply no way a journal with integrity would protect fraudsters, quite possibly allowing them to commit the same fraud at a different journal. These people committed a crime against hard science, and the journal will cover for them. Yeah, “why” is a fair question to ask, shame I’m alone in being curious why they’d do that.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

     

Anonymous Pamphleteer Mocks University “Queen”

By Professor Doom

     I’m hardly the only “anonymous” critic of higher ed out there, and the reason there are so many of us is pretty simple: the rulers of higher ed hold such incredible power, that concepts such as “free speech” or “academic freedom” don’t provide even a patina of protection from those on high.

     My criticisms on my blog are probably unknown to most of the leaders I’ve mentioned even though my blog has been around 5 years; I’m fine with that, as I’m more about letting people know what kind of “leaders” our campuses often sport than attacking the leaders themselves.

     One anonymous critic is making very sure the target of his concern knows about it:

A series of anonymous pamphlets roils Long Island University's Post campus, portraying its president as out of touch and overpaid in a time of budget cuts.

     These pamphlets are modeled after the Common Sense pamphlets, which were certainly a factor in starting the Revolutionary War. A quick primer on those:

The broadsides borrow the title of revolutionary-era author Thomas Paine’s 1776 treatise: “Common Sense.”…Paine argued -- anonymously at first -- that the colonies should fight for independence from King George III.

     The author is old school here, distributing copies of hand-lettered pamphlets throughout the campus.

…the anonymous pamphleteer portrays LIU president Kimberly Cline…000as “Queen Kimmy,” an out-of-touch royal who draws a “fat” $800,000 salary even as enrollment falters. (For the record, LIU’s latest IRS filings show Cline’s base salary at $761,066, with another $24,578 in “other reportable compensation.”)

     To be fair, the pamphlets are a little biased, but, much like the example above, only exaggerate a little. LIU, Long Island University, sports less than 20,000 students and bills itself as a non-profit. Doesn’t $800,000 a year (if you’ll forgive the exaggeration) strike the gentle reader as pretty excessive pay? It’d be like going to McDonald’s, and having $40 tacked onto your bill just to pay the CEO. Keep in mind, the queen Poo Bah here is serviced by a wide array of administrative support staff, each paid with similar exorbitance.

      So, she’s overpaid. Any other criticisms?

The so-called Friday Night Massacre calls out Cline’s Oct. 12 decision to enact what the pamphleteer calls “massive cuts” to spring 2019 classes. The pamphlets also note the distribution of 30 “death letters” to faculty, informing them that they’ll be out of a job after the spring semester. (A faculty representative told Inside Higher Ed that the total number of instructors subject to impending layoffs or tenure denials is about 16 to 18.)

     Hmm, the pamphleteer refers to “faculty,” which the university mouthpiece refers to “instructors.” I can’t help but wonder if the narrative is being shaped to make the pamphleteer look dishonest…I’m suspicious that’s the case.

       In addition to twisting things around, the university is going full-on with character attacks:

LIU spokesman Gordon Tepper told Inside Higher Ed that the author or authors of the “anonymous, factually incorrect, disrespectful, and sexist trash should be ashamed of themselves. The fact that the author refers to a distinguished university president as 'Queen' or 'Royal Majesty' on no fewer than 20 occasions in this unsourced rant speaks to a disturbed individual who clearly has issues with women in authority.”

     “Sexist trash”? “Disturbed”? “Issues with women in authority”? May as well just call him deplorable and call it a day.

     To be fair, the queen isn’t all bad:

In interviews, [queen] Cline has said…the university’s endowment has grown 267 percent, from $86 million to about $230 million.

     Gosh, with that kind of money, she could have kept the faculty, and then the school could boast of smaller classes. The school now has a bigger pot of money to be eventually looted, so there’s that.

     The queen’s greatest “crime” was merging the athletic programs; for some Byzantine reason, the school was simultaneously fielding Division I and Division II teams. So, she got rid of the latter. Hey, I’m all for cutting back on sportsball on campus. Trouble is, those Division II players came to campus because they were offered athletic scholarships, and to get one last chance to improve their skills enough to be professional.

     Athletes only have a limited time to get the most out of their careers. At the very least, she could give them fair warning to clear out by next year.

      Well, no, she just basically had her subjects listen to her decree:

Athletes learned about the move after being called out of class to watch her Oct. 3 news conference…thrown into turmoil the educational plans of hundreds of students. The planned merger would force athletes -- many of whom attend on scholarship -- to compete for a shrinking number of starting positions. Consolidating LIU Post and LIU Brooklyn’s athletics departments also puts many students’ futures in limbo,

     Yeah, that could have been handled with a bit more decency and much less arrogance—seriously, pulling students out of class to watch a speech?  Still, to her credit, she’ll honor all scholarship promises regardless of future athletic participation. Handled poorly and arrogantly…but some decency here all the same.

And Cline’s admissions operation “has failed since the day they got here,” he said, with declining numbers of incoming students most years. Post's first-year enrollment, which reached nearly 900 a decade ago, now sits at under 600.

     This is kind of cherry-picking, as the school has several campuses. So, sure, one campus, Post, isn’t doing so well. That said, the queen gets her pay based on the growth, growth, growth. Perhaps we should consider cutting back the pay when the performance isn’t so good. Gee, that’s what faculty are often faced with.

The university has clashed with faculty as well. In 2016, LIU locked out faculty from its Brooklyn campus over contract disputes. A year later, in 2017, Fevola said the university hadn’t laid off “a single faculty member,” adding, “we’re promoting people and granting tenure.”

     The gentle reader is probably wondering how a university spokesperson can say the above and present it as truth, when they’ve already said they got rid of some instructors, above.

      First, let’s talk about that “granting tenure” thing, because that’s key to the legerdemain here:

He said seven or eight faculty members who were up for tenure last spring were denied. Another nine or 10 probationary faculty received termination letters last spring. These instructors’ last employment date: Aug. 31, 2019. So faculty members will likely lose their jobs through contracts that aren't being renewed.

     If you apply for tenure, and are denied, you’re not fired but…you contract isn’t renewed. So, the guy’s out of a job, but not fired. Absolutely you can get rid of a few dozen faculty a year this way, and still stand in front of a camera, smile and say “we’re not firing anyone.”

      Only one comment bears counter-comment by me:

Ok, so the president is being criticized for taking home $800k/year while making severe budget cuts, and apparently mishandling the whole thing pretty badly. What part of [criticizing] that is sexist?

     I assure the gentle reader, if the queen here were some sort of minority, then the RACIST card would have been played as well…these guys are both predictable and limited in how they respond to criticism, after all.

       The most important war this country ever had was ignited, in part, by a pamphleteer. It may be too much to hope that LIU’s pamphleteer can accomplish nearly so much, but even if all he gets is a tiny revolution on one campus, I’ll certainly call it a win. If nothing else, at least he has style.

www.pofessorconfess.blogspot.com

The Master’s of Arts Degree Exposed

By Professor Doom

“I’ll get my graduate degree!”

--it’s weird how there’s always a personal pronoun, in this case “my,” in these types of statements.

     Quite a number of college graduates get their spiffy degree, go out into the real world…and find out their degree is worthless. Trouble is, even with a worthless degree, they’ll still have to pay off the student loan debt, and doing so on a barista’s pay is daunting, if not impossible.

     But if you go back to school, to get that ever so precious “graduate degree,” you don’t have to make payments on your undergraduate debts. So now we have throngs of people filing in to graduate school.

      Now grad school tuition is much higher, and accreditations says even less about graduate education than it does about undergraduate education. So we have a huge profit motive, and a huge potential for corruption.

       I’ve noted that Administration grad school is a joke, and of course I’ve shown Education grad school is a joke. To be fair, you generally don’t fail graduate courses no matter how little or how poorly you do in them (my own eyeballs saw it enough times in grad school), so retention and other stats look good. On the other hand, actually getting the mathematics MA requires passing some tests outside of the classes being took—this allows the department to satisfy administrative demands, while still preserving the integrity of the degree.

     But those are only the degree programs I can discuss in any detail. One of the most common graduate degree programs is a Master’s in Communication. Because the basic Communication degree is worth so little (because it demands so little), there’s an extra demand for a “better” Communication degree.

       A YouTube video gives a first hand account of what an MA Communication degree entails. This is important because, much like with community college coursework, it’s reasonable suspect that what’s printed in the catalogue is unhinged from the reality of the actual courses.

Exposing Grad School (My M.A. experience)

     A typical Master’s degree runs around a dozen courses, taking three a semester for two years, though some places offer a “super-convenient” 1 year Master’s program. What were her courses like?

“…people who go into Communication tend to be vapid…”

     Good to see she knows her degree isn’t actually a brain-strainer.

“…as we go around the room on the room…sinking feeling…research interests are queer studies…Marxism…more Marxism…”

     Wait, so now Communication is now about ideology, too? That’s a shame.

      Her conservative leanings quickly led her to being attacked by the other students; I sure don’t recall anyone in Math grad school caring about politics. We were too busy trying to understand mathematics.

“Cultural Analysis…I gave a presentation on (the British) Empire, and showed them a clip…

--I apologize for a weak transcription. The clip is a balanced discussion of the British Empire, pointing out both its cruelties and its accomplishments.

      After her presentation, she had a discussion with the class about the balanced discussion of the effects of the British Empire upon the world.

“The Professor of the course posted on Facebook how I’m a defender of colonialism…”

      Hey, remember when a professor caught heat for publicly supporting a student who believed in heterosexual marriage as a good thing? I won’t be holding my breath to see if the professor here will get the same rough treatment.

“…in this course we read the original texts of Marx…”

--Seriously. I can’t make this stuff up. I remind the reader this graduate study in Communication.

     The grad student then goes on to list course after course of simply ideological indoctrination. I concede I don’t know exactly what should go into a graduate level Communications program but…it seems like it would involve how to operate at least some of the modern communications equipment which is so critical to every aspect of the modern world.

      I would have never suspected Communication was mostly about ideology.

“…in one of their classes they just meditated…”

      I point out, these students are paying many thousands of dollars for such “material.” Meditation is fine, mind you but…why pay so much? Honest, you can meditate at home.

“…I wrote a lot of reflection papers….”

      A reflection paper is just a short essay giving an opinion on something…you can’t do this wrong (great retention!), but is this really worth the graduate level tuition?

“…this was mostly a nothing class…”

     Bottom line, these guys pour out of grad school after taking a dozen or more courses, filled with ideology, nothing, or, at best, meditation.

     This student waited until after she graduated before spilling the beans on what her grad school experience was like, so she’s obviously clever, even as she’s annihilated her chances at a career in academia. She’s something of a celebrity, but her identity isn’t the issue here. It’ll be a long time before the fraud of (much of) graduate school is exposed, I admit, since we’re not even close to revealing the fraud of (much of) higher ed in general.

      But that day, like the day I’m finally done with cancer treatments, is coming. I sure hope to live to see it.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com