Pepper Spraying Chancellor Resigns…Took 5 Years.

By Professor Doom

     Earlier I covered a public university spending a huge sum of money, over $400,000 (they’re still trying to figure out exactly how much), more than enough for full scholarships for a hundred students at a fairly priced university, instead the money was spent just to bury some minor bad press on Google.

     Obviously, the mainstream news won’t repeat scuttlebutt, but the rumor was a fat cat administrator (at the risk of being redundant) had a hand in students being pepper sprayed during some (non violent) protests on campus, and she paid firms to bury this information. Yes, my title is a little misleading since she didn’t pepper spray the students herself…bear with me.

This isn't her first terrible adventure in "reputation management." At her previous job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she forced her aides to edit her Wikipedia entry -- over their protests -- when it emerged that children of big-ticket donors were given admission preference to the university.

--it never ceases to amaze me how when administrators leave in disgrace from one university, how casually they pick up another plum job somewhere else.

      Naturally, the mainstream story is she had nothing to do with it, and she was simply paying public money to bury public information, to preserve the good name of her school. 

      After 5 years of investigations, “official news” and rumormongering, the administrator finally resigns. After years of covering for one of their own, the Poo Bah decided it was time to cut losses:

The other – put forward by UC President Janet Napolitano – was of a deeply flawed administrator who, investigators found, had shown poor judgment, violated multiple university policies and misled, even lied to, her superiors, the public and the media.

“In these circumstances, Chancellor Katehi has now offered to resign, and I have accepted that resignation,” Napolitano wrote Tuesday in a letter to the UC Davis community. “These past three months and the events leading up to them have been an unhappy chapter in the life of UC Davis. I believe it is in the best interest of the campus, the Davis community, and the University of California that we move forward.”

--yes, political wonks, it’s the same Janet Napolitano. There’s a bit of revolving door between government and higher education, because there’s so much fat loot in education.

     The nonstop fraud that goes on in higher education is truly remarkable. Because any chimpanzee can hold an administrative position, and the “ask questions and you’re fired” power they hold, the amount of nepotism and buddy-system hiring here is amazing. The Poo Bah can get away with it until it hits ridiculous levels, but this admin was already on thin ice (well, ice that can break after 5 years of screw-ups, anyway), and so the Poo Bah at UC Davis wasn’t about to let more abuses pass by:

Napolitano ordered an investigation in April in response to allegations that Katehi had violated conflict-of-interest rules in the hiring and promotion of her son and daughter-in-law at UC Davis.

      Naturally, when administrators investigate themselves, they find nothing, and for the most part, that’s what they found here (read the 100 page report with your own eyes if you like). Bottom line, people are really getting tired of the open fraud that seems to define all our institutions now, and just didn’t give a damn about yet another biased self-investigation revealing nothing.

  Katehi, the report said, also misinformed Napolitano about her $70,000-a-year board seat with the DeVry Education Group, falsely stating that she had not yet started service when she actually had attended two meetings at which she had learned that DeVry was being sued by the federal government for allegedly defrauding students…

     Isn’t it amazing that, in addition to the half-million a year she gets for being admin at UC Davis, she gets to pull in another pile of money working at another institution? How does she have time for the extra job? I again emphasize how minimal administrative jobs are.

She also failed to show “diligence and judgment” by joining the board of King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, the report said, even though she knew of allegations that it improperly inflated its research statistics.

      Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. Please understand this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and I’ve exposed many administrators in this blog double and triple dipping, raking in piles of money from multiple sources. How can we justify paying these people so frickin’ much when they’re allowed to do this?

…also had received $420,000 over three years for service with textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons. 

      Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money again. Please keep in mind, this is where the money from those super-expensive textbooks goes. It’s so funny how admin must screw students out of every dollar, must keep faculty pay as low as possible, even as they receive piles of loot from various sources because of the administrative position they hold. And then they shamelessly ask for more money “for education.” 

      Again, I’m forced to consider the good that could have been done by the money that went into this deanling’s pockets. This kind of money could have paid for the education, four year full scholarships, of dozens of students, at the finest schools. Instead, it went to someone who has zero impact on anyone’s education. 

   

In 2014, 49 of UC’s 180 senior managers reported income from outside activities, totaling a combined $1.77 million.

--she’s really not alone in double/triple/quadruple dipping. I was told that the reason I was paid so little as a professor was because I could seek contract work. Why doesn’t that work for admin, too?

      To appease protesters, the front page will show that the university will totally disavow the behavior of the supposed “rogue” administrator:

      “Chancellor Katehi has engaged in a pattern of misrepresentations, … has repeatedly exercised poor judgment when confronted with challenges, has consistently disregarded the impact of her actions on the campus and the university as a whole and has failed to mitigate troubling management practices,” said UC spokeswoman Dianne KIein. “This behavior is not fit for a UC chancellor or anyone in a leadership position.”

     This is, of course, crap, and it doesn’t take much digging to see she’ll be well taken care of, because she knows too much. The deanling will receive rich, rich rewards for keeping her mouth shut:

Under the settlement, Katehi will remain on administrative leave for a year as chancellor emeritus, receiving her $424,360 annual pay… 

     That’s right, she gets a year of paid leave, paid an amount faculty, or most any American, could only dream of. Of extraordinary insult is the tile of “chancellor emeritus,” meaning “chancellor out of merit.” That’s what will go up on a magnificent golden plaque in one of the gorgeous halls in one of the lavishly decorated administrative palaces at UC Davis.

      Years from now, all anyone will know is she was a chancellor of merit. The rest of the news concerning her behavior will be buried as much as possible. 

      One more insult:

…with the promise that she will return as a faculty member.

      That’s right, she’ll be a tenured faculty member (the article I’ve linked misses this detail), probably won’t have to even teach. Tenure has been denied to most professors now, and if professors step even a little out of line, they’re fired, quickly. Meanwhile, administration has no problem awarding it to themselves, even when caught red-handed engaging in outrageously foul behavior. I’m sure the reason this admin got her tenured position is much the same reason the Poo Bah who oversaw the cover up of the Sandusky affair at Penn State received a $600,000 a year tenure position: to keep quiet about the true, universal level of fraud going on.

      Please, gentle reader, put this in perspective: it took 5 years of serious investigation to get even a glimpse of the kinds of things administrators do, and the admin gets full pay and a golden parachute on the way out. Even a tenured faculty can find himself on “leave without pay” for a year or more, just on the basis of a blog post. I can’t emphasis strongly enough how the administrative takeover of campuses has not been good for anyone but admin.

Sweetheart settlement! Im sure it will remind other UC officials that unscrupulous conduct will be severely rewarded!!

--From the comments section.

     Ultimately, the reward for all this nefarious behavior is a tenured position where she’ll probably never have to do another thing until the day she dies. That’s…not what tenure was supposed to be for, but as long as administrators, and not educators, control higher education, that’s all it means now.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

    

Mandela Effect Rising?

By Professor Doom

     I’m in the mood to talk about something besides higher education (it does happen), and something recently just blew my mind. The Mandela Effect is a relatively recent (or at least recently defined) phenomenon, where a certain proportion of the population doesn’t remember what is considered “accepted” reality, instead recalling things slightly differently.

     It comes from when it was (more or less) first reported, by people that swore Nelson Mandela died in the 80s, instead of in 2013…so this all started a few years ago, or so it seems.

      I too, am a victim of the Mandela effect, but not with Nelson. 

      First issue for me, was C-3PO. I saw Star Wars when it came out, and I had the toys, including C-3PO, a robot with a shiny gold colored casing. At, least that’s how I remember it, and I played with C-3PO and R2-D2 quite a bit; I doubt I’m the only kid who stuck a firecracker in R2-D2’s convenient firecracker-sized opening.

      Anyway, C-3PO is not solid gold, although lots of folks besides just me remember it that way. He has a silver leg. Perhaps my memory failed…childhood memories can be quite unreliable, and I must have just missed it when I saw the movie again and again as well as on my toy.

     There’s a famous line in Star Wars, said by the iconic villain Darth Vader: “Luke, I am your father!” James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth, remembers the line, you can even see him saying it on video in interviews.

     But, he never said that line. Instead, the line was “No, I am your father.” Now, I was never a hard core fan, but there are people who have seen the movies hundreds of times, freaking out because they don’t remember the line not having “Luke” in it. Again, I can see misremembering a line, but I know Star Wars fanatics that don’t just memorize the lines, they memorize the lightsaber duels well enough to simulate them while the soundtrack plays…that’s some weird misremembering, there.

       There are many whispers on the internet, but it’s so weird how much I don’t remember exactly the same way the videos say it is.

       I used to watch Sex in the City (guilty pleasure), at least for a season or two. I called it “Sluts in the City” because the show was about these four females copulating with darn near everything IN the city, all the time. The show was never about the city. I even watched it when it came on “normal” TV, over a decade ago, I can still hear the actress’ voice saying “Sex in the City will be right back.”

      A few years ago, I saw a licensed slot machine in a casino, called “Sex and the City.” I thought that there was probably some licensing issue, and they had to change things slightly (this sort of stuff happens all the time, perhaps I’ll someday rant about how Intellectual Property Law will probably be the ultimate cause of the collapse of civilization).

      Anyway, I was wrong. There’s no such show called “Sex in the City.” It’s always been “Sex and the City.” I’ve always gotten it wrong, and everyone I watched the show with got it wrong too? Huh. It’s possible, I guess, it’s a tiny detail, although I was an adult when I watched it, so less prone to missing details than when child-me saw Star Wars.

     Ok, how about another one.

     I was a big fan of James Bond films. One of my favorite villains was Jaws—as iconic for Bond as Vader is for Star Wars. I sort of resemble him, except he had garish, shark-like, metal teeth, which he would use to bite people, even a steel cable.

      Before killing his targets, he would smile…and it was a toothy grin that would strike fear into victim’s hearts as he killed yet again.

      In one of his final scenes, he narrowly escapes Bond (every bit as much a killer, incidentally), and runs into a girl in a German costume. She helps him a little, and he smiles at her.

       She’s not afraid of that horrible smile, and I remember being confused at that, momentarily.  It was only a moment, because she immediately smiles back at him, and my confusion evaporated: she has a set of braces on her teeth.

       Except, actually, she doesn’t. Those braces don’t exist. She smiles a perfect smile at him, and is unafraid of his grin because? Well, the scene doesn’t even make sense now. But, how do I argue with the film? She clearly doesn’t have braces, and my memory has failed yet again.

      Now, the previous Mandela effects on me I can attribute to a faulty memory, I’m willing to concede that. But how do I “remember” something that never happened? I’m hardly alone, at least, as others also distinctly remember the girl with braces who humanized the otherwise monstrous Jaws.

       Another? Sure.

      I can close my eyes and recall a picture of Henry VIII, with a large drumstick in one hand. I can describe his clothes…and this description is the same as others have given.

       No such picture exists. What the hell? How are people I’ve only recently met, raised in a different part of the country than me, able to describe the same picture that I remember, if that picture never existed?

     There are even Bible quotes that people are claiming have changed…you can dismiss the Star Wars people as geeks, but Bible people tend be real particular about remembering Bible quotes (I was paid money to memorize them, as a child).

     The double slit experiment does indicate that human consciousness has a bit more influence on “reality” than we might want to believe. That said, I completely respect that, maybe, this is all just “mass hallucination” or a bunch of people missing some detail, but such explanations strike me as unsatisfactory when I and people I’ve never met share memories of things that never happened.

      That these “mass hallucinations” seem to be occurring more often, is yet another problem with dismissing it all. The internet has been around a few decades, film and books have existed for a very long time…it seems like the Mandela effect would have existed many decades ago. Even if it is complete bunk, the question of “why now?” is still valid.

     I encourage the reader to check out a few YouTube (or is it YouToob?) videos and see for himself if anything strikes a chord…it sure is weird, and explanations provided, from dismissal to advanced physics experiments altering our shared reality, aren’t particularly satisfying.

      Oh well, classes start soon, and I’ll back to doing honest work and asking questions about things I see with my own eyes every day, instead of my apparently very unreliable memory.

     But do any gentle readers have any Mandela effects?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Parents Must Protect Students, Higher Ed Won’t

By Professor Doom

      So I’m looking at a post by a reader, explain how she’s helping her child not become a victim of predatory higher education. It’s disturbing that so much effort must be made to protect a child from administrators that prey on the innocent and vulnerable in much the same way pedophiles and tobacco companies do.

      Like so many, she’s realized that higher education doesn’t quite make as much sense as it used to:

My husband and I are in our 50's and went to college before the internet. Back then, college was the best way to gain knowledge. Today, college no longer holds the monopoly on knowledge that it once had. As a secondary teacher, college is also not the only way to make a decent living. In fact, many trades pay better than the jobs the more liberal arts type of majors end up working.

 

     It is nothing less than astonishing how much the world has changed in the last 30 years. I can ask the most obscure trivia question in the classroom, and dozens of students will whip out their phones and get the answer for me in seconds. Knowledge probably needs to be measured differently today, and I concede maybe we should consider having more job skills taught in higher education. 

      No administrator will consider this, however, since selling that mandatory “gen ed” coursework generates such sweet student loan loot.

We also want her to come out with some real job skills based on her preferences. She had no idea what she wants to do other than write children's mystery books, but has decided that she wants to work regular day hours and be seated most of the time, so a business certificate it is.

 

      Note the above carefully. The parent actually asks the child what she wants, and puts together a plan for that goal. This is so “old school.” Every semester when I was in college, I was asked about my major by my advisor, had to consider what I wanted (I was a chemistry major and almost a computer science major before settling on mathematics)…and had to register for courses towards that specific goal.

     In today’s higher education, administration screws the students. “Just take these bogus courses for a few years and figure it out yourself” is the primary “planning” that administration gives students. I’ve had countless students, years into their degree programs, “just one semester away from graduation”  the students tell me, who still haven’t taken even the introductory courses for their major yet.

      Again: parents need to work with their children now to figure out what they want, as administration has no more interest in helping kids succeed than a pedophile or a tobacco company executive.

     Our administrative caste in higher education has expanded, and expanded, and expanded. The entire purpose of our college system is education and research, supporting students and faculty. What are administrators for?

      Faculty loathe them, because all too often, administration makes things more difficult for faculty. It’s very clear these guys aren’t there for the faculty.

       Our students are getting deeper in debt than ever before, take longer to graduate than ever before, and are dropping out more as well. It’s very clear the administrators aren’t there for the students, either.

      The reader describes her own experience in higher education:
    

I am a graduate of a JC in California. It allowed me to save a boatload of money. I transferred 69 units after two years going both summers. I was a very motivated student and the transfer system worked well for me.

 

      I’m hard on community colleges (also called Junior Colleges, or JCs) because I’ve seen firsthand how they’re rife with corruption and incompetence, and how integrity among the faculty there is penalized to an alarming degree. That said, I admit it’s possible to use a JC in the way it’s intended, to get a good budget education. It’s rare for a student to really benefit in these places, however, as administration puts up so many roadblocks to student success.

      How did she get so lucky?

However, my father had gone to college and sat down with me and showed me in the college catalog EXACTLY what I needed to do and how general ed worked (regarding transferring AND earning an AA/AS). He explained what regional accreditation was and what did and did not transfer from junior college to a 4 year institution. I did not get this info from the JC; I was fortunate enough to get it at home.

     Her father knew what the college system actually was and walked her through it. Sadly, this explains why our predatory “leaders” in higher education, especially at the community college level, are so motivated to hunt down kids from families with no college experience: they’re much easier to exploit, because their parents can’t warn them of the traps.

     The mother finishes up by mentioning her old JC is now being plundered:

San Francisco's JC recently almost lost its accreditation because it DID NOT HAVE ENOUGH ADMINISTRATORS!!!!!! I kid you not. Jerry Brown, our governor played hard ball and threatened to pull all 111 of California's JC out of WASC. I am not sure what happened, but if he hadn't stood up to them, the 90,000 student at SF's JC would have been failed by WASC.

       I’ve covered this school before, showing how accreditation actually helped plunder the school. Accreditation, instead of assuring the legitimacy of an institution, is now in on the fraud. The people running our institutions are the same ones that run accreditation, so it’s little wonder the whole system is set up for fraud on ever increasing levels.

       Higher education used to be about education, but thanks to the student loan scam, it now has a need to be about job skills instead. This is a shame, but with so much money on the table, I respect albeit dislike this reality.

       Higher education used to be about integrity, but, again thanks to the loan scam, there is little integrity. Administration’s avarice exponentially expanded into integrity’s absence. No more can you count on the institutions to treat our kids fairly…instead it’s up to the parents to watch over them some more.

       Please, gentle readers, if your kids or a neighbor’s kids are just starting out in college this year, or the next, or the next…consider exposing them to this blog, or my book (which addresses the higher education system in detail, with documentation).  Please, help them, do what you can to keep them out of acquiring deep debts for useless course credits.

      A higher education system with integrity would do as I ask of the gentle reader, but that system is fading fast. It’s up to you now.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com