Why Did The Women’s College Die?

By Professor Doom

     I’m looking at the downfall of Sweet Briar College, a fine women’s school with a stellar reputation, which, without warning, announced it was closing its doors tout-suite, no need to ask where the money went, or so admin advises.

     I think asking about the money is a good idea, but faculty rarely are blessed with true information. Luckily, a trustee of the school is willing to discuss some of what went on behind the scenes. So let’s get on with the trustee’s version of events:

“During the five-year term of the Presidency of Jo Ellen Parker, rather than none, all critical decisions were made by a small subset of the Executive Committee of which Ms. Dalton was a part.

--Dalton was on the board of directors and chair of the governance committee.

    So, the board of trustees was quickly whittled down. I can’t help but suspect that the trustees that had integrity and were indeed trustworthy were not on the Executive Plundering Committee. I know, that sounds cynical, but with close to $100,000,000 missing and obvious mismanagement, I have to be a bit suspicious.

   “  Dalton is correct that no board member was ‘fired’ per se, although I was asked to resign (and did so in June 2014) by the Chairman for unspecified reasons, and his decision was ratified by the Executive Committee.

“Five other members resigned over the previous two years out of frustration at the ham-handed, myopic and dictatorial way board affairs were conducted.

“…As far as senior staff positions are concerned, during President Parker’s term, the vice president of finance resigned. The academic dean of the faculty resigned. The director of development resigned. Two successive deans of admissions resigned. Two successive directors of marketing resigned… 

…In short, every senior staff position was replaced, some twice, in a five-year period.”

     I’ve mentioned before how you can tell when a school is being plundered—shady deals, no-confidence votes by faculty, and huge Poo Bah pay are obvious signs, as well as bloating administration and dwindling faculty. I forgot another sign: high turnover of administration and faculty.

      In the two years where my state school transformed from legitimate to bogus (after receiving accreditation), we lost a Chief Financial Officer, Vice Chancellor, Marketing Officer, and several other administrators, in addition to at least five faculty…this is high turnover for a small school. When you see this many people scrambling to escape,  it’s a sign that the people with integrity are seeing the ship sinking, and making prudent plans.

      The people that remain are usually pretty desperate for their jobs…they won’t make waves as the pirates plunder away.

     The other signs of plundering are here as well:

Contrary to Ms. Dalton’s recollection, no administrative positions were eliminated but an additional one was created, that of chief of staff.

We did have a planned program, introduced by Parker, to reduce faculty over a five-year period from a ratio of 8 to 1 to 10 to 1.

     --I again want to point out, removing just a few administrators would have offset the decline in the student base. And…shouldn’t you need less facilitators for the students when there are less students?

      Again, growth in administration, reduction in faculty…these are not rare signs in higher education. Our leaders in higher education work hard to justify their useless but highly paid jobs, and Sweet Briar was no exception:

The “Plan for Sustainable Excellence” (only the third strategic plan in seven years) did involve the entire college over a two-year period and it was, in fact, endorsed by the full board, some of whom were just happy to not hear any more platitudinous fluff replete with unrealistic numbers.

     Ah, the Vision for Excellence idiocy I’ve written of before. Administrators spend collectively thousands of hours on insane, grandiose, ridiculous plans, which they roll out every few years. Then they shelve them, never to show them again, and work on another insane, grandiose, ridiculous plan. 

 

     Most students and faculty never get to see all the details of the plan, but I was lucky enough to get to look at one in detail (I asked a lot of questions before leaving that school…). To give just one example, my own school’s Vision for Excellence plan involved multiple playing fields, and a stadium that could hold 5,000 people. The school had less than 1,000 students on campus…and the town the school was in had a population of 1,200…it was sheer gibbering madness to believe we’d ever fill a stadium of that size, particularly since the school has no sports in any form (and still doesn’t…). I’ll spare the gentle reader the rest of the details, and re-assert that these plans are grandiose to the point of ridiculousness. Administrators don’t care, they just need a plan to justify their jobs.

     This is what all those administrators spend much of their time on, making Sweet Briar’s “leadership” so busy it was unable to deal with a 2% loss per year of the student base, over the course of 5 years, a loss that could have been compensated by paring down the administration a tad.

      So many classic signs that something was going on here, it’s a shame the trustee, like most trustees, has never served as faculty at a school. If so, he could have seen what was coming:

“…all board members were specifically instructed not to contact a member of the Senior Staff without first obtaining permission of the relevant committee chair and the president. They even brought in a coach from the Association of Governing Boards (AGB), an organization solely funded by the presidential budgets of our nation’s colleges, to reinforce this stifling of involvement.

“As I can personally attest, those who even accidentally violated this rule were reprimanded by the president.”

     Ah, the seal of silence, and again, I’ve written of this before. The primary purpose of the seal of silence is to allow lies to be told, with nobody in a position to correct them, lest they risk breaking that seal. As soon as you hear “ok, stop talking to other people” you know that there are some lies going around, lies that could be quickly resolved if people were allowed to talk openly to each other.

      The former trustee believes the school could have been saved but for the poor leadership of the Poo Bah, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I hope some independent investigators will take a long hard look at where the money went, and I’ll certainly suggest looking at the finances of the Poo Bah and the Executive Board, because much like with another plundered school, the numbers just don’t add up. 

     No discussion of a school’s failure is complete without mentioning how accreditation failed. Every single fraud, every single scandal, every single failure in higher education always has the “if accreditors did their job, this wouldn’t have happened” clause:

Regardless of board size, the SACS--which accredits Sweet Briar and other southern colleges and schools--has as one of its "core requirements" that "The board is not controlled by a minority of board members..." What Mr. Leslie describes is a board that had, indeed, evolved into a body that was controlled by a minority of its members. I think a case might be made that this board as it was operating when Mr. Leslie resigned was in violation of that accreditation requirement.

      I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve identified the useless, bogus, nature of accreditation as a hugely contributing factor to the decay of higher education. Could Sweet Briar be saved by attentive accreditation? A moot point, as there are no penalties for violating accreditation anyway (probably why I’ve seen every accreditation rule violated with impunity, except payment of accrediting fees).

      One last comment that gives a fair assessment of what happened to Sweet Briar:

700 women can't support enough administrators, so it's time to close.  
 
Very sad.

     I can’t help but think of my friend, a former faculty of Sweet Briar; he only dropped hints of what he saw, but it was enough for him to throw his mathematics Ph.D. in the trash and get away from higher education. He was obviously much smarter than I am, and I should have followed his example. Staying in higher education may well have been a big mistake for me, but I’ll accept my mistake and go down swinging all the same.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

First Year Class Resigns Rather Than Take More Debt

By Professor Doom

     Last time around I was looking at the entire first year graduate class of a (soon to be formerly) top art school who resigned, rather than continue to deal with administration, which contemptuously posted a dean with no experience in visual fine arts to oversee the visual fine arts program—extremely insulting considering the salary involved for the dean (but, again, both high salary and lack of qualifications are very common in administration of higher education).

     The despairing decision by the students was only taken after trying, very hard, to negotiate with administration to keep their promises.

“…In a slew of unproductive, confounding and contradictory meetings with the Dean and other assorted members of the Roski administration in early 2015,…”

     I have to laugh at this complaint; the students don’t realize how much administrators love these sorts of meetings, not realizing how often administrators embarrass themselves with their chuckleheaded ignorance, an ignorance that would be forgivable (because they’re totally unqualified for their positions) but for their massive egos and personal sense of papal infallibility.

     Administrators, of course, don’t care how they look, they care that there were meetings. To justify their jobs, they need to document that they are *doing* something. The poor MFA students didn’t even realize that every pointless meeting actually made admin stronger, because, at the end of the year, the deans here will show to the higher ups that “we went to lots of meetings, so we need more support staff.” That the meetings accomplished nothing, and would be unnecessary except for the deans’ incompetence, just isn’t a factor. It truly is fascinating how administration in higher education works: administration doesn’t even want to accomplish anything with a meeting, that would be counter-productive from their point of view.

     And the poor kids actually thought these meetings were going to change anything:

“…Throughout this grueling process of attempting to reason with the institution, …”

     Ah, yes, trying to reason with admin, a hopeless task. I still recall spending years trying to convince them that the majority of votes of “5, 5, 5, 5, and 0” is “5,” but they insisted it was “4,” and nothing I said, no dictionary I cited, could convince them.

      You can’t reason with them. It’s that simple.

“…the Roski School and University administration used manipulative tactics of delaying decisions, blaming others, contradicting each other’s stated policies, and attempting to force a wedge of silence between faculty and students…”

     Ah yes, the “seal of silence.” I’ve dealt with this many a time. Administrators basically tell whatever lie they want to whoever they want, and count on people not talking to each other, so nobody realizes what lies are told. Underlings are threatened with termination if they tell anyone what administration told them. These threats come so often that it becomes pretty wise policy to just not talk, to anyone, ever. The ivory towers are pretty quiet nowadays, although discussions still occur off campus, among friends.

      Admin can’t realize these tactics don’t work if you have a trusted friend (and, gee, you’re in a department filled with people who share the same obsessive interests as you…having at least one friend there seems likely, though not to the reptilian administrative mind, which can’t wrap itself around the concept of “friend.”). So, you and your friend do talk, and figure out how and when the administration is lying, again…not that faculty can do anything about it.

     These students trusted each other more than they did administration, and talked amongst themselves to figure out the lies, doubtless a big factor in why admin couldn’t railroad them.

“…we have no idea what MFA faculty we’d be working with for the coming year; we have no idea what the curriculum would be, other than that it will be different from what it was when we enrolled and is currently being implemented by administrators outside of our field of study; and finally, we have no idea whether we’d graduate with twice the amount of debt we thought we would graduate with….”

     Isn’t it neat that administrators with no knowledge or understanding have now taken it upon themselves to set up programs? Please understand that not only are such programs likely to be wildly inadequate, but also the cheapest possible option will be taken every step of the way. This is why, for example, at one school I taught, even though we needed people in our IT department, we wouldn’t dare hire our computer science graduates—we knew full well the program was far too bogus to qualify them for even an entry level position working with computers.

      Now, at the undergraduate level, you can screw students like this—they’re undergraduates, and so just trust the administration (oops!) that they’ll be treated fairly and are getting a legitimate education. Graduate students aren’t necessarily so naïve, and after working with administration, the MFA students knew these people were not to be trusted:

“…Perhaps the University imagined that we would suffer any amount of lies, manipulations, and mistreatment for those shiny degrees…”

      That’s a reasonable conjecture by the MFA students. Hey, these tactics worked for administration when dealing with faculty and undergraduates, why not expect the same with grad students?

     They were told they were entering a good program, and wouldn’t have to graduate with much debt. After they were accepted, the rules changed. Again, this is typical of administrators.

     This kind of bait-and-switch fraud is not tolerated in any other industry. If you buy a 3 bedroom, two bath, brick house, and then find out you’re getting a sinkhole in the middle of a toxic dump, you’d be entitled for not just a refund, but compensation for the fraud, right? You’d have more recourse than just walk away from it….but that’s all the MFA students can do.

      For some reason, higher education gets a pass for this sort of behavior, and so bait-and-switches all the time. University of Phoenix and other for-profit institutions make billions telling people about how their wonderful degrees were worth something in the jobs marketplace, even though the for-profits know their degrees are laughable slips of paper. Much like the MFA students that were defrauded, those students will never get a refund of their tuition, even when it’s clearly taken under false pretenses, even when the Federal government shuts down the institution in the middle of the students’ degree program, much less get compensation for the year or more of their life that was wasted due to the deceptions of the administration. The very, very, highly paid administration.

      These MFA students really do seem to understand what’s going on:

“Let’s not forget about the larger system of inequity that we paid into to try to get our degrees. USC tuition has increased an astounding 92% since 2001¹, compensation for USC’s top 8 executives has more than tripled since 2001², and Department of Education data shows that “administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009”³. Adjunct faculty, the jobs that freshly-­minted MFAs usually get—­ if they’re lucky —­ are paid at a rate that often does not even reach the federal minimum wage⁴, while paying off tens of thousands of dollars of student-­loan debt. USC follows this trend of supporting a bloated administration with whom students have minimal contact to the diminishment of everyone else…. Meanwhile, faculty voices are silenced and adjunct faculty expands, affecting their overall ability to advocate⁵, for students”

--I want to emphasize 75% of the faculty at this institution are minimally paid adjuncts. There are not enough permanent faculty there to assure students get a legitimate education, so students just get, at best, isolated courses from adjuncts that pop on campus and then leave, not coordinating their courses with others to make a coherent degree…and these students know that. Hmm, wonder if there’s a way so that the undergraduate students could learn that as well….

      Again, having plundered all they can from faculty, administration is now beginning to loot the graduate programs, and students are walking out. How much longer will it be until an entire year’s worth of students walks out of undergraduate programs? Not too much longer if people start reading my blog, I suspect. When it happens, you can bet this broad genus of schools will go extinct.

www.professorconfess.blogspotcom

¹ “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System”, Final Release Data,National Center for Education Statistics, accessed January 2, 2015.

² IRS 990 Forms FY 2001-­2007, Part 2, Item 25, and Schedule III and IRS 990 Forms FY 2008-­2012, Part IX, Line 5

³ “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much”, Campos, Paul F. The New York Times, April 4th 2015.

⁴ http://www.adjunct.chronicle.com

⁵ 75% of USC faculty is contingent

Sanity For Campus Rape Claims?

By Professor Doom

     Most people don’t realize that our campuses have a “private” court system on them. Whenever there’s a claim of wrongdoing, from minor quibbles over policy to brutal gang rape, quirks in our laws allow the campus to handle it.

Faculty (proudly): “So, after the defendant finished his defense, I was secretly escorted in to the committee to provide additional testimony and evidence, and I didn’t leave until I was certain the committee would convict. The defendant never knew what hit him!”

Me: “Say…don’t you teach legal courses on this campus?”

Faculty (puffing): “Of course I do. I’m a lawyer and have a Juris Doctorate...”

--not exaggerating. The gentle reader should consider which is worse, that our system is this rigged, or that our law teachers are this ignorant of the concept of Due Process.

      I’ve done what I can to expose the wild incompetence of the rulers of our campuses, and I assure the gentle reader that this incompetence encompasses our kangaroo campus court system. This corrupted system has created atrocities in both directions, punishing the obviously innocent (when it’s a vulnerable white male), or giving rape-y administrators a free pass, depending, apparently, on which would be most foul at the moment.

     The Federal government, pouring as it does insane amounts of student loan money on campus, got mildly irked at the corruption (it hates competition, after all) and so attached some (more) strings to the money, with a piece of legislation referred to often as “Title IX.” Part of Title IX involves sex crimes, and it formalizes how administration should pursue alleged sex crimes on campus.

     Now, absolutely admin will still give themselves a free pass when it comes to sex crimes, so all they’ve done with the new regulation is turned the kangaroo court system into a chamber of horrors for students, particularly male students, who find themselves punished outrageously on the basis of thin accusations at best.

      And along comes Trump.

     Once again, while the mainstream media pours endless hate on everything he does (some of it even justified), yet another of his actions does provide a dash of hope. He appointed Betsy DeVos Secretary of Education; there was, of course, a primal howl of incandescent rage over this, but considering how the Department of Education has a track record of 100% failure since inception, I (and, I imagine, any rational person) was hard pressed to worry how the “completely unqualified” (as the press described her, endlessly) DeVos could possibly make things worse.

      So, what’s she been doing?

Betsy DeVos: The Era of Weaponized Title IX in Campus Rape Cases Is Over

"Through intimidation and coercion, the failed system has clearly pushed schools to overreach," says DeVos.

     Apparently, only a female can step in to save males from the incredible abuses of the Title IX kangaroo court system. Bottom line, the Title IX “guidelines” were making the rigged system even more rigged:

The new guidance encourages—and in some cases requires—university administrators to neglect the rights of accused students. It specifies, for instance, that colleges should use a "preponderance of the evidence" standard for determining guilt; officials need only be 51 percent sure an accusation is credible to expel an accused perpetrator. It also discourages officials from allowing students to cross-examine each other, because that might be too traumatizing for a survivor of sexual assault…

     Goodness, how could anyone look at the above and not see how this was going to cause problems? DeVos was slammed repeatedly by the press for her lack of credentials, and supposed lack of ability to make good decisions over a department which had not made one good decision in its 40 year history, despite, supposedly all the previous leaders of this department having great credentials and the ability to make good decisions.

       All that against her, but DeVos “gets it”:

"The notion that a school must diminish due process rights to better serve the 'victim' only creates more victims," DeVos' speech says.

     This really is the heart of all government programs: create more dependence upon the programs. It’s why our welfare rolls keep growing, our prison population keeps growing, our wars get ever more widespread, and yes, why now we’ve broadened our definition of victim, above, to include anyone whose claims wouldn’t hold up under even the slightest cross-examination.

      DeVos further reinforces confidence in her abilities by giving her speech against the horrors of the latest Title IX interpretations on just the right campus:

On that front, DeVos couldn't have picked a better campus to deliver her speech: A GMU student, "John Doe," was expelled for engaging in BDSM sex that the university judged nonconsensual. He later sued GMU and won, since it was obvious to a Virginia district court that the administration's investigation was biased against Doe and had deprived him of his due process rights.

     Time and again I’ve shown how kangaroo campus court rulings, despite being “unanimous” amongst the entire committee, are shown to be utter rubbish when taken to the (corrupt, but still more) legitimate court system the rest of the country uses. Much as my “legal expert” anecdote at the beginning of this essay shows, many of the practices of the kangaroo campus court system are hysterically inappropriate for a system interested in any level of fairness for the accused. The truly funny part is how shockingly unaware admin is that their actions are inappropriate; they always have complete confidence they’re in the right…right up until the judge (and real lawyers) explain to them just how much they’re going to have to pay in damages for screwing up so horribly.

Thankfully, DeVos' speech signals that she intends to do what the Education Department should have done in the first place, six and a half years ago: subject its guidance to public scrutiny.

     YES! Public scrutiny is needed. A huge part of why the campus courts have gotten away with so much is because of the Seal of Silence over the whole thing. Any faculty involved are threatened with termination if they expose any of the wrongdoing (sometimes they’re threatened with termination if don’t rule the way admin tells them to…and, again, admin doesn’t see how this might not hold up in a real court).

She'll no doubt take flak for it, but DeVos is right to criticize the Obama administration's approach to college sexual assault, and she's right to reform an utterly dysfunctional system.

      The article I’m quoting from is in Reason Magazine, obviously not a mainstream site (it uses reason, after all). To clarify the above: she’ll take flak from the Leftwing hate media which will cast aspersions on any attempt to fix even a tiny aspect of the massive mess this country is in.

       Incidentally, my favorite joke regarding how bizarre mainstream media is today involves the hypothetical of Trump personally curing cancer. The CNN headline covering this would be “Shockingly, Trump declares WAR on oncologists!”

      In any event, the whole Title IX debacle can be fixed quickly, since it only applies to schools taking Federal money:

     End the Federal student loan scam.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Students, Not Admin, Complain About Cheating

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written many times how extraordinary the cheating is in higher education today. While certainly we can point at the students as responsible, a big reason for why it’s so out of control is administration actually encourages cheating.

      I’ve seen professors lose their jobs over catching cheaters, and certainly losing pay is quite possible for professors so boneheaded as to catch cheaters. Random checks for cheating usually show 20% to 50% of the class is cheating, in many classes…but faculty (usually) don’t dare do anything about it: catching cheaters leads to the cheaters complaining to admin, and admin comes down on faculty students complain about. Throw in that cheaters are seldom removed from class, and get to “evaluate” the professor (and thus influence whether the professor will be allowed to continue doing his job), and students get the message pretty clearly: cheating is a perfectly acceptable way to get through college.

     The whole system is set up to make it all but impossible to do anything about cheaters, simply because getting rid of cheaters cuts into the only thing admin cares about: growth of the institution. Rather than risk the ire of the irresponsible administration that runs our institutions, most professors just look the other way now.

     Now, much of what goes on in higher education today is pretty irrelevant. Standards have been reduced to the point that many courses no longer require any reading or writing, much less have tests that require any effort to pass, as is well documented. Even if the course requires effort, nobody really cares if the student cheats his way through Gender Studies, Communication, African Studies, or quite a few other fields, because it just doesn’t matter.

      But the culture of cheating created by admin is spreading now to the “real” majors, the ones where people can actually die if the practitioner has no clue what he’s doing. A recent scandal at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) really highlights the situation:

The warnings and directives came after the newspaper learned last month of allegations that two students with ties to high-ranking public officials were brought before the Honor Council. 

The Honor Council recommended that the students be expelled,… 

     On many campuses, professors no longer make the decisions about cheating accusations. Instead, admin has set up “Honor Councils” which use a high, high, standard of proof before actually calling a student a cheater. I’ve dealt with these, and while I totally respect reluctance to convict someone innocent, you basically need a signed confession of cheating by the student before the Honors Council will actually determine the student is actually cheating.

     I exaggerate, perhaps, but the bottom line is, if the Honors Council is agreeing the students should be punted from the school, you better believe the evidence is perfectly convincing.

      Great, the Honors Council does the job that the course professor used to do. We’re done, right? Not so fast:    

“…but a dean overruled its decision, sources told the newspaper. “

     Administration is out of control on campus because they literally can do whatever they want. Yes, there are hundreds of pages of rules and regulations but, bottom line, there’s no way to stop an administrator from doing as he pleases (except possibly another administrator, but good luck with that).

 

     As always, the Seal of Silence comes down, to protect the obvious skullduggery going on here:

“In a follow-up letter Sept. 8 to Sausser and the newspaper’s publisher, Drachman warned Sausser not to contact Honor Council members, who are “not permitted to disclose information about those proceedings.” Drachman also is the Honor Council’s attorney.”

     As a public institution, many of the records involving the case are, at least technically, public information. Admin responds the only way it can, with lies:

In a letter Sept. 1, MUSC attorney Annette Drachman said the university would not turn over any documents related to the Honor Council or any reports and emails related to test-cheating allegations. She cited state and federal privacy laws.

She also said an email search would “be unduly burdensome and may cost in excess of $275,000. In addition, a search of this nature would take several months to accomplish.” Drachman then said the university would do the search “upon receipt of payment.” 

      Wait, what? Now you have to pay a huge sum of money just to see the public records? It’s going to take months? This lie is so obvious on the face of it. This wasn’t the OJ Simpson trial here, we’re talking a few dozen pages at absolute most. Maybe the university is using a Fred Flinstone bird to peck out the words on a block of stone? Many printers take less than 2 seconds a page, if we offer to pay for the printer, can that speed up the process?

     It would if they were telling the truth.

      Anyway, administrators undermining the integrity of the school, lying, and threatening people not to talk are hardly news, that’s just everyday business in higher education today. Here’s the real news:

MUSC students livid over handling of cheating inquiry

     I really want to point out, while students are protesting the acts of this one administrator...there are no administrators saying "yeah, this is corrupt, we should stop this." Perhaps what we're seeing in our presidential election, where the "rank and file" have had enough of a thoroughly corrupt establishment, is being reflected at this school?

    MUSC is a medical school, you see, and so the other students realize if the school has a crap reputation, it’ll hurt them. Admin doesn’t care in the least about hurting students, of course:

Fielding a barrage of angry questions from medical students Monday night after an alleged cheating scandal, the dean of the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine said that the case in question is closed

     The whole point of having an Honors Council was so that one biased faculty member couldn’t unfairly hurt a student with a false cheating charge. And now we have a single administrator stepping in and unfairly hurting the entire student body by covering up true cheating charges. How is this any better?

One medical school student who attended the meeting but asked not to be named said his classmates were agitated and “couldn’t wait to ask questions.” Most of them “walked out angry,” he said. More than 100 students attended the meeting, but nearly half had walked out by the time it was finished.

     Of course they walked out, once they realized they were just going be stonewalled, that the integrity of their degrees was being annihilated and there was nothing they could do about it, they walked away.

      You better believe students planning to go to MUSC are likewise walking away, in search of an institution with integrity. 

     I wish them luck in finding one.

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com