Criticize Safe Spacers = Family Endangered

By Professor Doom

     Higher education has been, for the most part, demented beyond recognition. Yes, there’s always been a distinct party-goer element to college (hi fraternities!), but the “free checks for all” of the loan scam opened up campus to an even wider array of kids that really, really, had no interest in or idea of higher education.

      The free checks atmosphere, combined with the “student as customer” paradigm enforced by admin, created a huge part of the student population that honestly felt that higher education had nothing to do with education, and instead thought the easy money, climbing walls, lazy rivers and such meant that campus was supposed to be a “safe space” and nothing more.

      Don’t get me wrong, campuses should be safe places from violence (but often aren’t, due to the “growth uber alles” paradigm, perhaps I’ll discuss this detail later), but now we have students demanding protection from opposing ideas.

      There’s a curious asymmetry in the Left vs Right divisions spreading across the country—the Right seems far more willing to tolerate dissent up to a point (Hello Mr. Trump!), where the Left seems to be far more vicious about responding to even tiny acts of dissension.

     On campus, I’ve never seen conservative-thinkers dogpile on someone, although I admit that may be merely because on campus, conservatives are such a tiny minority that it isn’t possible—it’s tough to use pack tactics when there’s not enough to form a pack. Still I suspect it has much to do with the independent mind-set of the conservative—why gang up on someone, let a dispute be resolved person to person.

     On the other hand, Left-wingers stand together, and honestly feel any means is acceptable for their ends. The rise of the Social Justice Warrior movement has shown pack tactics can be very effective at destroying individuals, although Gamergate (that’s a link to Wiki—check out the talk page if you have around 40 hours to devote to reading behind the scenes for this topic) shows it’s possible to stand up against them, to some effect…but only by sticking together and meeting irrational zealotry with, alas, zealotry.

      Bottom line, though, these guys are mean, more than willing to engage in vicious tactics to silence dissent. How mean?

A student at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) got his parents targeted for harassment after he had the temerity to tweet about the antics of liberal protesters on campus.

     Seriously, targeting someone’s loved ones is pure evil, but doing so over some tweets? These people are just too sensitive. The protests this time around were by Safe Spacers, who just couldn’t handle the thought of someone on campus giving voice to wrongthink:

The mess for Pitt senior Doug Steeber started earlier this week when Pitt’s College Republicans invited writer Milo Yiannopoulos to give a lecture on the subject of free speech. The event aroused a storm of controversy, with students complaining it triggered them and made them feel physically unsafe (though there was no violence and the event was observed by local police).
 

     I don’t understand how the followers of what used to be the tolerant side of the political spectrum don’t simply walk away now that the Left stands for violent intolerance.

      I really want to point out the tweets were hardly offensive. Here’s about the worst of the lot:

“Guy complaining about lack of diversity as the African American Dean of Student Affairs stands behind him. I’m confused.”

--I’m glad to not be the only one to notice the weird hiring policies on many campuses.

    

     These tweets resulted in students shouting at him, and quite possibly some level of physical altercation. Hey, look, emotions can run wild, kids do silly things. Nobody was hurt, after the speaker was done and the tweeting stopped, that should have been the end of it. Of course not:

But that was only the beginning of Steeber’s problems. Early Thursday morning, he said, he received a notification from Facebook warning somebody appeared to be trying to impersonate him on Facebook. The spoof account had the same name and photo as him. Steeber had the account deleted, but the spoofers proceeded to create another account, avoiding automatic detection by changing his name to “Douglas Steeb” and inverting his profile picture.

     Again, I’ll try to pass this off as just kids being stupid. Harmless prank, nobody hurt, let it go, yadda yadda. But there’s cause for fear here:

This spoof account, notably, also listed the home address of his parents, which is not listed on Steeber’s regular account.

     Now we’ve hit a new level: this guy’s tweet accounts lead to him being stalked. I think he’s justified in being a little worried. Again, perhaps this is just a wild random threat, and could be ignored, though it strikes me as risky to do so.

     Alas, the Leftists cannot tolerate dissent, and so can’t let it end with a shouting match at the speech, or with the bogus Facebook accounts, or the stalking.

 There’s more:

“…a flier posted at Pitt. The flier shows a photo of Steeber, denounces him for “making fun of sexual assault survivors,” and gives the name and phone number of his parents with the suggestion that people call them. The flier also warns that its maker (or makers) are hard at work to identify others at the student government meeting so they can be harassed in the same way. So far, Steeber said, his parents have received a few calls from people who immediately hang up, but nothing more menacing thus far…”

     Are we over the top, yet? The flyer really is doing all it can to set up this kid or his family for a severe beating or worse…just for a few tweets.

     Again, I can write this off a little as perhaps the actions of just a few demented people in a movement that has gone wildly astray. That said, this is criminal behavior, recklessly endangering innocents. But here’s the issue that really frightens me.

      Let’s consider the response by admin over the harassment of this student with a different point of view:

(this line intentionally left blank)

     I’m serious; the University has nothing to say. Whenever there’s the slightest social justice issue like “hate crimes” or whatnot (even when it’s blatantly a hoax), I can find deanlings and Poo Bahs rushing to the microphone to blather about how they’re against it, how they’ll punish the offenders, and so on. 

     This harassment happened weeks ago, I’ve waited for a response, and…nothing. Is administration in on the criminal harassment? Or are they afraid of being targeted as well?

      It’s a sign of how corrupted the leadership of higher education is today, that both questions of the previous paragraph are valid. If administration is in on it, that would make them dangerous lunatics…and I’m hard pressed to believe that’s not possible, having documented so much administratively-supported lunacy in this blog. On the other hand, if administration fears being targeted, that would make them spineless incompetents…and my blog presents considerable evidence for this as well.

     Is there an option I’ve missed?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

   

The Everyday Hoaxes of Higher Ed

By Professor Doom

      In my blog I’ve mostly focused on the immense educational fraud of higher education today: I can’t help it, this is what is most important to me. The fake classes, fake students, and fake degrees of our leadership is very troubling to someone who sincerely wants to live an honest life and also work in higher ed.

     The fake leadership is a big part of the problem: despite the self-awarded spiffy titles, fancy degrees, cadres of sycophants and freakish salaries, these guys have no particular skill at what they do. Oh sure, they’ll bleat about how their leadership is responsible for the immense growth of higher education in the last few decades, but the student loan scam totally changed the business model.

     Before the loan scam, the way an institution grew was to attract the best people, who would come based on the strength and reputation of the institution. The “best” people, by definition, can’t be 100% of the population. It took real talent to grow an institution under these conditions.

     After the student loan scam, the way an institution grew was to offer “free money” to anything with an opposable thumb. Any chucklehead can grow a business if “customer” is simply “someone who wants money.” I can’t even begin to count the number of “leaders” I’ve worked under who’ve taken credit (and huge cash bonuses) for growth that, obviously, they bore no responsibility for. My workload doubles, their pay quadruples, and then they move on to another institution. There’s no accountability for any of it.

     And so higher education is loaded down with leaders with wildly varying levels of competency, with a marked skewing towards “incompetent.” Because of this, frauds, wide open frauds, operate on many campuses now. Students often see the obvious frauds and think, with some level of accuracy: “If these chuckleheads can’t notice half the classes on campus are fake, they can’t notice a bunch of other things are fake, either,” and try to get away with something.

     Many campuses are supposedly tense with racial tension, but this tension is wildly over-exaggerated. Don’t get me wrong, there have always been racial divides...anyone with eyeballs can pop down to the student union or the like and note that, if you pick a table, the people sitting around that table generally have the same skin color.

     But…that’s all it’s ever been on every campus I’ve been to. Nevertheless, the students see all the other frauds on campus, and figure admin just doesn’t care, or just can’t tell the difference, and decide “hey, maybe we too can hoax something and get stuff for it!”

     Again, most every campus I’ve been on has had such hoaxes come up regularly. Usually, these things are so stupidly executed that they don’t hold up under scrutiny…and the hoax is quietly buried. Other than a few faculty paying attention, nobody on campus knows, and it hardly makes the news, if at all.

     Sometimes, a Poo Bah or political hack tries to use a hoax for gain; this can fail spectacularly such as the Duke lacrosse case.  Granted, the Duke case only failed because it was open to scrutiny to the general public. Usually, admin gets a lockdown on information, and can use even a blatant hoax for incredible personal gain—such as U. of Delaware, which will spend $1,000,000 a year until the end of time, in response to a hate crime everyone agrees didn’t happen.

      Students pick up on this stuff, and figure “I can have a payday, too.” These hoaxes really are common, more common than the average person realizes, so I thought I’d highlight a few more.

UAlbany students who faked racist bus attack to be charged

     Much like at Duke, the students screwed up by claiming an actual crime happened: that got the police and investigators involved. Of course, when everything is on camera, it doesn’t help:

Security footage showed that the incident actually occurred in the opposite manner that the students initially claimed.

 

      Where do you reckon the students got the idea that, as a group, they could say the exact opposite of the truth and it would work out fine? I maintain that students walking around on campus, and seeing lie after lie being told as truth, has something to do with it.

      If it weren’t for the footage, I suspect the students would have had an easier time with it. The Poo Bah certainly was unwilling to miss this opportunity to spew the usual blather:

“This is a good opportunity for all members of the University to teach each other and to learn from each other. Let us engage even more deeply. Let us listen even more carefully. And let us see each other even more clearly.”

     Admin won’t bother expelling these students—that would cut into growth. I suspect if admin had the guts to come down on fraudsters, the hoaxes would be less common.

     It isn’t just faux-racism that gets hoaxed. The rise of the Social Justice Warrior  (SJW) movement (and the “lies are truth if you shout them loud enough, and you’re the right gender/orientation” mantra which seems key to the ideology) has also created people who honestly believe that blatant lies are perfectly acceptable:

Lesbian Professor Cold-Cocked HER OWN FACE Then Swore Random Guy Beat Her Up At Toby Keith Concert

 

      Again, unlike at U of Delaware, this was open to public scrutiny, and so the hoax is known as such. While students are motivated by self-interest, the SJW is also motivated by obvious self-interest perpetrates the hoax for the greater good:

Poindexter made up the story and cold-cocked herself in her own right eye “because she wanted to raise awareness about the social hardships of people in the LGBTQ+ community,” according to court documents.

     Seriously, at this stage, it’s clear the worst social hardship of “people in the LGBTQ+ community” is the real risk they might punch themselves in the eye. Honest, gay hate crime hoaxes on campus are just that common. Ok, I grant such hoaxes are common off-campus too…but the point I want to make is the leadership on campus is so clueless/spineless that fakers get away with it quite often on campus—the whole kangaroo campus court system makes it very easy.

     Because our institutions of higher education are such frauds, perpetrated by the professional fraudsters that run the systems, amateurs will continue to be inspired to try the same—much like physical fights tend to break out after boxing and wrestling matches, lies seem to inspire more lies.

      So, in conclusion, I ask the read to consider the following, and ask how likely this is legit:

Jewish frat covered in anti-Semitic graffiti at Brown University

 

     They’re actually claiming a history of anti-Semitism at Brown U but…what? Seriously if we got rid of the student loan scam, our institutions would only have people that cared about education on them, and would, likely, be run by people with actual competence (because it does take some ability to run legitimate institutions, instead of huge money-laundering schemes). Wouldn’t being legitimate be better than the huge laughingstocks that are so many of our campuses today?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Tuition Raise Every Year = Free Cars for Admin Every Year

By Professor Doom

     I don’t mean to harp on the fraud of community college in particular, but it seems like every week another sign of how much of a rip-off these places are gets tossed in my face. I’m starting to get picky about these frauds, because there are other issues in higher ed besides these questionable “cheap” schools that trap around half of college students…but today’s fraud really highlights how many of these places are far more about looting tax and loan dollars than education.

     So, here goes:

Maricopa County Community College District students have been hit with three tuition hikes since 2012, but that hasn't stopped top system administrators from enjoying increasingly costly perks…

--a tuition increase, every year…administrators are paid a fortune, but can’t seem to figure out how to budget.

     The whole point of community college is the community, local taxpayers, have agreed to use their tax dollars to put up a “low rent” college, one that can provide at least the first two years of university-type education, cheaply. Unfortunately, these schools have a top-down structure, and are controlled by an administration that has no interest in education. The end result is education at these places is the lowest priority—you can click here if you want the run-down of how much a joke most community colleges are, academically. Today we’re going to talk about the plundering.

     So, the cheap school gets more expensive every year, and “no money” perpetually cries the administration, so pathetically. Now, it takes no effort to learn that overhead costs are flat at an institution with tax-free land and other subsidies, and ever-doubling class sizes and the temp-worker wages for the professors means costs to actually “educate” the student is minimal. Much of the education is paid for by the Pell Grant scam…so why no money? 

     Because admin keeps taking it all, granting themselves huge salaries and increasingly ludicrous perks. How ridiculous are these perks? Let me count the ways:

“…vehicle stipends large enough to buy a new car annually…”

     When I taught an off-campus course for a community college, I had to fill out forms in quintuplicate to get a few dollars of gas money back. Meanwhile, the folks running this place, in addition to their huge salaries, get enough money to buy a new car every year. Why isn’t there rioting at this level of open plunder of the system? While the typical community college teacher is paid so little as to qualify for welfare and food bank access, the administrators are handing out free cars to each other.

    Naturally, most of the money goes to the Poo Bah:

Recently retired Chancellor Rufus Glasper's $408,017 compensation package included at least $55,000 in special allowances in 2015. That included a $32,500 spending or discretionary allowance and a $22,400 auto allowance.

     Ok, I grant that $22,400 doesn’t buy an amazing car…but if he can just restrain his greed for a year, he’ll have around $45,000 to buy a fine new car next year. Does Donald Trump buy a new car every year for his personal use? I dunno, but this is some 4-star pay for a “cheap” school system.

      It isn’t just the Poo Bah who gets the loot for cars:

Fourteen [administrators] had car allowances of $18,000 each, with 11 of those having been raised 76 percent since 2012

     It is isn’t just cars. The plundering is widespread, particularly obnoxious considering the last three consecutive years of tuition raises:

At least 19 district executives were given spending allowances of $800 to $32,500 last year. Thirteen had allowances of $9,600 each, and 12 had their allowances roughly tripled since 2012…There are no restrictions on how the funds are spent.

“…other perks such as cellphone and iPad allowances, and life insurance coverage, are included.”

      I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but the printer in my office? I pay for the ink. The fee for me to park on campus in a mud/gravel lot half a mile away from the math building? It’s taken directly out of my paycheck. I sure don’t get a free cellphone, iPad, or life insurance. Ok, maybe I am whining a bit, but professors get billed to pay for their workplace because we’re told there’s just no money in the system for minor education costs. Meanwhile, the administrators get around $10,000 every year to spend on anything they want (and never on education, because administrators have nothing to do with that), and get all sorts of free benefits. 

     I’m honestly not asking for more money…I just don’t like the bosses getting so much while telling me I’m worth so little.

      It just never ends when you start looking at the rapaciousness of these guys:

Three executives used their $2,000 executive "wellness benefit allowance" for massages. Each of the three is paid at least $198,000 a year. One college president, who made at least $222,300 last year, received massages…

     Across the country, community colleges are looting like this. The public is told “let’s raise your taxes so we can provide a local source of higher education.” The grim reality is the education at these places is all too often sub-high school level and the community college does nothing for the kids but waste a few years of their life.

     On the other hand, the community college does a great deal for the bank accounts of the administration running the places. Time and again I’ve seen these jerks rulers of higher education give themselves awards for their “service,” read the plaques for such awards mounted on the walls of their spacious offices before scurrying back to my cubicle, wondering: ”What’s going to happen when people find out how much of a rip-off these places are?”

      So far, nothing, I know, but I suspect the day will come when people won’t simply just take it. The gentle reader needs to understand that the administrators that I’ve highlighted above? They won’t serve a day in prison for their plundering, and they’ll even get golden parachutes for their years of “service” to higher education, someday.

     You know, there was a time when being an administrator in higher education was a service. Seriously! Back then, it was because the administrator was actually a professor, putting in extra hours for little or no money. The student loan scam (bet you thought I wasn’t going to get back to that, eh?) allowed our institutions to grow to huge size, huge enough to justify hiring a full time  administrator mercenary to handle the administrative duties. 

      Obviously, faculty screwed up in allowing it to get this far, because these guys are just mercenaries, raking in the loot while still crowing about their public service.

“…the benefits are in line with total compensation paid to administrators at peer institutions, which are among the country's largest community-college systems…”

--what’s really nuts about this is as each system rips off more money, the other systems use the example of theft to justify even bigger thefts.

     I don’t wonder anymore about what’s going to happen, because even though scandals like this are popping up almost every week, in almost every state…nothing is happening at all, there’s not even a movement to curtail the plundering, even a little.

     But maybe if I just keep writing, it’ll make a tiny difference?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

Yield To Progressive Demands = College Destroyed

By Professor Doom

Admin: “To facilitate student demands, we’re creating a fake algebra course that will satisfy the math requirement…”

--Yes, faculty protested. No, we didn’t have the power to stop this. Yes, we told admin that doing this would shut too many students out of useful degree programs, to no avail. Now we have millions of waiters with college degrees.

     I can’t tell you when higher education went off the rails, but, tie by tie, the engine of progress that is education has gone off the tracks.

Admin: “To facilitate student demands, we’re moving the drop date from the second week of classes, to the 14^th week of classes. Also, students can now drop an infinite number of times for a degree program, instead of just three times.”

--Yes, faculty protested. Yes, we explained that moving the drop date so late and allowing casual drops would only have students take classes less seriously, leading to students taking much longer to finish their degree program. Our explanations counted for nothing. Now it takes more like 6 years to get the 4 year degree.

     Step by step, the higher education system developed over centuries has been dismantled by self-proclaimed “leaders” in higher education, who didn’t care about the lessons of the yesterday, and only wanted those student loan checks today.

Admin: “Too many students can’t handle the advanced coursework, and are taking too long to get degrees. So we’re going to create useless degree programs, like UFOlogy, Queer Musicology, and others, just to move them out.”

--Yes, faculty tried to explain that printing out a slew of crazy degree certificates would ultimately debase the people with actual degrees. Now graduates with engineering degrees can’t get jobs, so they work as waiters, too.

      Students eventually caught on: they were customers now, and the university was held in no more respect than the local fast food store. The student complaints got ever more outlandish, and administration complied, fearful of losing those checks.

Admin: “The student complained that you didn’t say “good evening” in a timely manner. Please correct yourself.”

--I’m serious, and this official, written complaint was passed on to me by a deanling after going through layers of bureaucracy.

     The childish incompetence of admin has led to today’s higher education system: instead of student protests about the draft, about war, about the unfairness of segregation, about things that really matter in the world like decades ago, we have student protests demanding “safe spaces” where students can hide on campus and not be exposed to ideas counter to their ideology, we have student protests demanding to re-install segregation, we have student protests to be just handed college credit despite doing no work.

      Faculty, of course, have tried to speak up, tried to explain that exposure to alternative points of view is what leads to growth, that institutional “separate but equal”  has risks without benefits, that a college degree’s value comes from the work necessary to achieve it.

      But faculty are irrelevant to higher education now. Administration does whatever they think will bring in more checks.

     University of Missouri has caved in repeatedly to the student protests, doing so in the most ineffectual, incompetent way possible. Yes, I covered this already, but now we look at the aftermath.

      Gee, what could be the effect of making it known, in a very public way, that the education at University of Missouri is bogus, that everything is abandoned in the pursuit of happy customers? To clarify, would future students be willing to spend time and a great deal of money getting a degree that would be treated as a joke?

     Again, faculty would have been happy to explain this to admin, that if admin continues to disrespect education and behave without integrity, then an education from Mizzou would be worthless, not just in the sense that it would represent nothing (which admin doesn’t care about anyway), but in a sense that admin does care about: nobody will be willing to go deep into debt to get it.

     Shocker: After Caving To Protests, Mizzou Has HUGE Budget Gap

     Yeah, no kidding. The real surprise is enrollments have only dropped around 25%. Seriously, only a completely unworthy parent would send his child to such a broken institution.

      What’s interesting is the size of the budget shortfall based on the loss of students:

The University of Missouri (MU) is losing about 1500 students and is facing a huge $32 million budget shortfall 

     I just can’t help but do the math, here: every lost student “costs” Missou over $20,000. Admin is doing what they can survive the consequences of their own incompetence:

Because of the abrupt and unexpected nature of the shortfall, Foley is taking immediate and severe steps to fix the situation: The school budget is being cut 5 percent across the board, all hiring is being frozen (barring exceptional circumstances), and annual raises have been canceled. 

--I have to chuckle here, part 1. “Abrupt and unexpected”! That’s right, admin had no clue that such a total and public debasement of education might have consequences…I bet every faculty member on campus could have told admin, but these guys are clueless, despite their Administration/Education Ph.Ds.

--I have to chuckle a little here, part 2. I’ve received 2 “annual raises” in over 25 years of teaching. It really must be nice to be admin to actually be able to count on such things. What’s really fascinating here is that in times of hardship, the cuts affect faculty and admin equally: admin honestly thinks they’re just as important as faculty, thus failure should be shared equally. In times of plenty, all the extra loot goes to admin and admin alone because they claim all responsibility for that…

     Certainly, cutting back expenses is a solution, but it once again underscores the grave lack of imagination, or even competence, of our “leaders” in higher education. This is the best they can come up with, reinforcing the fact of their own incompetence, despite a legion of them trying to figure out how to save Mizzou. I’m just one guy, and here are some real ideas off the top of my head that go beyond the simple knee-jerk reactions:

1.     You’re losing 25% of your incoming students…maybe cut down 25% of your administrators? *Bam* budget problem solved. Heck, just close down your totally demonstrated as useless Diversity Initiative Department (staffed by 8 females and one token black male, incidentally. I can’t make this stuff up! Click on the link and see it with your own eyes, they’ve got pictures…this kind of bigoted hiring has been going on in education for decades now), and solve much of your budget shortfall in one stroke.

 2.     Don’t cut back on faculty, instead focus on how Mizzou has small class sizes, making it a place more focused on education than the “huge lecture hall and PowerPoint presentations” that dominate the sellout schools. Grow some balls, mention the sellout schools by name and how the other schools have classes with 500 students in them, while Mizzou doesn’t.

3.      Revert to the “old school” education ideas. Get rid of fake degrees and reverse every “student as customer” policy change of the last ten years. Make the school a place to be proud of for going back to successful traditions, instead of a place notorious for sellout policies that change with the political winds.

4.     You’ve got fewer students now? Then that means you may as well institute admission requirements, put in real entrance exams, make Mizzou a place for people that want to be there to get an education, instead of a place for more violence, stress, and protests. Not only will you directly cut down on the protests over ridiculous things, you’ll again put the school on a path to becoming a legitimate institution.

      It took me all of five minutes to come up with the above, but the best the “leaders” at Mizzou can do is come up with a plan that let’s all administrators keep their cushy jobs, while the education there degrades even further.

    Gee, wonder what the future will hold for Mizzou on the path they’ve chosen…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

     I