UNC’s Systemic Fraud Was A “Typo.” Shameless!

By Professor Doom

     The academic fraud at UNC was intergenerational: it went on long enough that a participant in the early days of the fraud could see his child grow up, come to this university, and also participate in the fraud.

In one exchange, regarding a basketball player, Crowder asked Boxill if a "D will do."

“I’m only asking,” Crowder wrote, “because 1. No sources. 2, it has absolutely nothing to do with the assignments for the class and 3. It seems to be a recycled paper.”

"Yes," Boxill replied, "a D will be fine; that’s all she needs."

--I too have been on a campus where you had to ask permission if you wanted to fail a student, and I’ve covered many other faculty who’ve said the same. I maintain my claim that UNC is not alone here…

     For latecomers, a quick summary of the fraud: UNC had institutionalized “paper courses” running out of the African Studies department. All a student needed to do was submit a paper, any paper (not even written by the student), and the student would get a passing grade, with “A” being pretty common.

     There are several reasons the “fake classes” went on so long. Primary was because Admin has complete power: every whistleblower found himself out of a job and career ruined (a specific shout out to Mary Willingham, who received a 6 figure settlement for being punished for whistleblowing). Since it was an academic fraud, their accreditor, SACS, should have found it in their many “accreditation reviews” over the intergenerational fraud, but the same admin who run UNC also have a guiding hand in SACS: SACS policies make it impossible to detect even the most egregious fraud, even when the whistleblower provides documentation, and SACs allows the universities to perform all self-reviews, self-affirming their own legitimacy. Because the fraud was so blatant, so widely known, there were investigations, but admin squelched them regularly.

      Eventually there was so much evidence that it was no longer possible to cover up the fraud going on there, and, finally, UNC admitted to fraud. The accreditor stepped in, and levied the biggest penalty it could: pay raises were granted to administrators, for their failure to cover up the fraud. Yes, that’s the penalty. I’m putting some spin on that interpretation but bottom line, UNC didn’t have to pay a price for their academic fraud. The admin there just had to submit some paperwork showing that they investigated themselves, and were satisfied they weren’t committing fraud anymore. SACS accepted UNC’s self-investigation, as always, and then admin gave themselves pay raises and bonuses for doing the paperwork covering up the fraud…these guys just can’t lose.

      So, no penalty for the academic fraud which UNC admitted to, and lost court cases to whistleblowers trying to stop it.

     What of the NCAA? Our college athletes are supposed to be students as well, supposed to be getting a college education in exchange for sacrificing themselves at sportsball. The NCAA exists to protect those students and see to it they’re getting a fair shake (stop laughing!). It’s also supposed to make sure everything is fair (stop laughing!), and if one school is putting the athletes in fake classes, that’s not fair to the other schools, who are assuredly working hard to make sure their student athletes are getting a legitimate education (stop laughing!). I concede it’s hard to do this with a straight face but I’m trying to take the NCAA at their word, here (stop laughing!).

     So, the NCAA should take issue with UNC’s open fraud. The UNC defended itself from the NCAA:

The university aggressively fought the NCAA's efforts to assert its authority in this case, spending roughly $18 million on legal and other fees.

      I really want the gentle reader to put things in perspective here. UNC is a state school. Your tax dollars went to support an intergenerational fraud, a fraud which no administrator lost her job over….not even one, although quite a few got pay raises and bonuses for covering it up.

      Your tax dollars also went to defend this school from the consequences of that fraud, to the tune of $18 million, raising tuition all the while.

     Classes at this school have hundreds of students in them, and are taught by sub-minimum wage adjuncts, because the taxpayers just aren’t contributing enough money to pay a decent wages to the teachers.

       But UNC has millions of dollars available, your tax dollars, when it comes time to defend themselves from their own fraud. If you think the purpose of the university is to have sportsball, it was money well spent:

But after a three-and-half-year investigation, and despite the institution even agreeing that it had engaged in academic fraud, the NCAA said it couldn’t definitively conclude that the “paper courses” in the department of African and Afro-American studies had been designed and offered as an effort to benefit athletes alone. Thus, according to the NCAA's Committee on Infractions, which adjudicates allegations of wrongdoing, they did not violate the group's rules.

     Wow, a written confession and hundreds of pages of evidence still isn’t enough to “definitively conclude” anything here. It’s demented how admin’s failure to cover up the fraud actually helped them.

     See, these paper classes, when they started up nigh 20 years ago, were intended just for athletes; it was supposed to be hush-hush, just a single student in each class, all “taught” by a compliant professor who’d keep her mouth shut. That was the plan, and with a single-student-per-class setup, it should have worked. But the fraud went on for so long that word got out; thousands of students, about half of them not athletes, were now partaking in the fraud.

      And because of admin’s failure to keep the fraudulent system private, it was ruled the system was not “an effort to benefit athletes alone,” and so the NCAA sees no need to intervene.

"The panel is troubled by UNC's shifting positions ... depending on the audience," the report states.

      Yeah, those shifting positions are pretty shameless. SACS looks the other way on this fraud because they decided it was mostly about athletes (that’s what UNC told them, after all) and so not SACS’ concern. The NCAA looks the other way on this fraud because they decided it was mostly about students (that’s what UNC told them, after all), and so it’s not the NCAA’s concern.

     The fact that the fraud was widespread saved UNC. I can’t make this stuff up.

      But it’s fraud, right, UNC even admitted to it, finally, right? Not so fast. Turns out UNC’s written admission of fraud was a typo.

 “…the panel notes that the university contended that its use of the phrase "academic fraud" was a typographical error.”

     Whoa. UNC is claiming that their lawyers accidentally typed out a confession to “academic fraud” in their confession of academic fraud, in response to a 100+ page report exhaustively detailing the academic fraud. That is one gold-plated HECK of a typo.

     You want to bet no lawyer will be fired over this “typo”? And the NCAA bought this ridiculous story?

     You betcha.

     How do these suit-wearing admin manage to sleep at night while supporting such obvious lies? How do they handle the incredible headaches from holding the cognitive dissonance of lies of this magnitude in their minds? I guess I’ll leave such questions to the philosophers, but I do want to highlight some choice comments from normal decent people (i.e., people who could never work as a college administrator or for the NCAA):

The NCAA gives the green light to "colleges" creating fake courses for athletes, so long as:

1) The "college" claims they aren't fake; and

2) the athletes get enough of their girl friends to enroll so that the majority of "students" aren't athletes

     This is a major point. Both accreditor and the NCAA have said this level of fraud is perfectly acceptable, and accepted UNC’s contradictory claims that the fraud was simultaneously exclusively for athletes and not exclusively for athletes. The gentle reader had better believe that administrators at other universities are taking notes, and realizing that even a slight patina of integrity at their schools is completely unnecessary.

It is like a dirty cop not even stepping out of the street to accept his payoff or a bank robber not even bothering to put on a mask before entering the bank. The corruption is right out in the open and they don't punish it.

     Another important detail to highlight: this corruption was wide open. Thousands of students partook. Many faculty knew about it, but were helpless to stop it. Every administrator had to know, despite their denials; there’s a nice racketeering case here if the Feds ever decide to pursue it. Granted, if they did so, UNC would be spending infinite taxpayer dollars to defend themselves from the infinite taxpayer dollars the government could spend to prosecute them, so I reckon I can see why this open racketeering is tolerated.

     Of course, the UNC would be getting a big chunk of its money for lawyers from the student loan scam…maybe we could get rid of that, and then we’ll see an iota of justice here?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

White Privilege Conferences Paid By Student Loans

By Professor Doom

    Time and again I’ve heard admin spew the most insane gibberish, things no normal person could believe, or could even imagine. I’ve looked at administrative degree programs, and while they are complete frauds, the issue there is a lack of content or requirements, not that they’re filled with insanity.

     It’s no secret that our institutions of higher education are vastly over-supplied with administrators. Mostly, they work to make the system less efficient or try to start a race riot but the simple fact is clear: we have so many of them there isn’t enough work for them to do.

      One of the things admin do to entertain themselves is go to “training seminars,” where they learn ridiculous things…which they then take back to campus. Next comes a mandatory meeting for faculty who must attend and listen to the concentrated idiocy the administrator acquired on her taxpayer-funded adventure.

     Let’s take a look at one of these:

      White Privilege Conference 19

     This big conference, supposedly an academic conference, will be held April 4^th through 7^th of next year. Could they be any more blatant about whom this is for? I mean, if you’re an actual academic, you’re likely teaching classes April 4^th through 7^th. If there was going to be legitimate academics here, then why would it be held at a time excluding most academics? They’ll just be spewing garbage here, and they know it.

      While faculty certainly can't go, our campuses are loaded down with administrators who serve no purpose, who can easily take a week off during the semester to go to this thing.

      What is “white privilege” anyway? Their website helpfully attempts to answer the question with a choice quote:

“White Privilege is the other side of racism. Unless we name it, we are in danger of wallowing in guilt or moral outrage with no idea of how to move beyond them. It is often easier to deplore racism and its effects than to take responsibility for the privileges some of us receive as a result of it… once we understand how white privilege operates, we can begin addressing it on an individual and institutional basis.” ~Paula Rothenberg

     I trust the gentle reader is no more illuminated by the above than I am. The “other side of racism”? The opposite of racism, then? Isn’t that a good thing? Unfortunately, this type of training obviously isn’t working, since time and again I’ve seen admin use racist (and sexist) hiring policies.

     With such a bizarre definition, I concede I might be confused here. The site gives some examples:

Being able to…

·         assume that most of the people you or your children study in history classes and textbooks will be of the same race, gender, or sexual orientation as you are

     You know, in China, I rather expect the students there study primarily Chinese history, filled with Chinese people. I don’t consider them privileged, and I certainly don’t think they owe me anything for it…and it’s the same for pretty much every country.

     My family came to this country in the late 19^th century (to the best of my understanding), and not from England/Germany/France. I’m not offended that when I studied history in school, I almost entirely studied people from a different nation than that of my forefathers…nobody owes me anything for that, either. My great-grandparents made that choice for me, and I’m fine with it (assuming I even put much thought into it).

     As far as gender goes, well, again, reality is a factor here. Genetically, males are a bit of a mess. Most murderers are male. Most drug addicts are male. Most schizophrenics are male. Pretty much every “bad” thing happens more often to males than females.

     Most morons are male, too. Due to quirks in our genetics, males tend to be more vulnerable to everything…they also tend to be more variable in everything. Part of that variation is intelligence. So, “most morons are male” is statistically equivalent to “most geniuses are male.”

      As far as history goes, you have to be a standout to make it into the history books—we generally don’t study Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Standard House, Plainsville, Everystate, who worked common jobs, ate common foods, and raised 2.4 kids.

     History is filled with the special people…and geniuses tend to be special. So, yeah, there are lot more males than females in the history books. That’s reality, it has nothing to with privilege, unless dying 8 years younger than females is also considered a male “privilege.”

     Sexual orientation is similarly a function of reality. It’s a fact that around 96% or so of the population is heterosexual. So, yeah, if you’re studying history, it’s reasonable to conjecture that you’re mostly going to be studying the actions of heterosexual people (that said, because non-heterosexuals tend to be special, they’re over-represented in the history books…just not a majority). Truth be told, I don't understand sexual orientation as a "white privilege" thing...I'm pretty sure not all whites are heterosexual, and it's sad that the the people at this conference are so bigoted as to advocate such a thing.

     The conference dances around things here, but the key, unspoken, concept is whites have privileges that blacks don’t.

     It’s not my fault that there no two story buildings in sub-Saharan Africa dating from before Europeans arrived. There were no enduring written languages from that part of the world, either. With no documents or architecture extant, I can understand why I didn’t learn much of southern Africa in school.

     You know, when I watch a sporting event, I don’t see many people of my color. Once again, I don’t feel penalized by this, or think anyone owes me anything for it. I’m no genius, but if I accept these claims of white privilege, I should also see that there’s a “black privilege” to watching sporting events…how is it that nobody in 19 iterations of this conference could see it? That, again, is the hint that this is a bogus event filled with pseudo-knowledge.

     In any event, this 4 day conference is packed with meeting after meeting filled with one-sided, incredibly biased, points of view. To even call this stuff pseudoscience is quite generous.

     To truly get an idea of shallow the people involved in this crap are, please look at the company store for this event, filled with many very ugly “Got Privilege” t-shirts…and only two books, at $100 apiece, no less. I assure the gentle reader, academics are more into books than t-shirts.

     The price of the books is also telling. Whoa, $100 for a book filled with ideology? Do the attendees really spend their own money on this? Of course not, and this leads to my real issue with this bogus conference.

     Our tax dollars go to pay to send hundreds of our redundant administrators to fake conferences like this.  They’re given expense accounts to pay for the hotel, meals, and, yes, overpriced books.

     But wait, there’s more.

     Then they come back, and force actual academics to listen to whatever garbage they heard at the conference, wasting the time of actual scholars who are in no position to challenge the rubbish they hear.

     But wait, there’s more.

     This garbage counts as actual training. So that that means that these $150,000 a year administrators are now entitled to a pay raise, which could be 10%, 20%, and even 50% isn’t out of the question here…for listening to drivel and forcing it down the throats of faculty.

     But wait, there’s more.

     Enough of this nonsensical training and these guys will get a big promotion…where they’ll even have even more time to go to even more of these conferences, and rake in even more money in the process.

     And it’s all paid for by the student loan scam. If we could just kill off this source of money pouring into higher education, many of these corrupt cycles could finally end.

      I suspect such an idea will never be advanced at any conference, ever…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Feds: College Enrollment To Grow 15% By 2025. LOL!

By Professor Doom

     Government predictions are always a hoot. I remember the government predicting how the USSR would grow and grow and grow and become ever more powerful…and those predictions came out every month, right up until the USSR collapsed because it was simply too weak to continue functioning. It was clear afterwards that the USSR had been withering, dying, for decades. Anyone with eyeballs could go to the USSR and see those predictions were absolute rubbish, and yet we continuously expanded our military to match their “growing” threat.

     Similarly, our government is hysterically bad at making predictions for our own economy; every stock market crash is a complete surprise to all those very highly paid economists with supposedly great skill at predicting such things.

     Partly why these ridiculously terrible predictions go wrong is the government makes wildly unrealistic assumptions; for example, predicting a million jobs will magically appear in the next few months. They do this every year, but for some reason some people still pay attention to this idiocy.

     It is, of course, the same when predicting the weather, with forecasts clearly more about politics than reality. It’s nuts that a 3 day forecast for a hurricane’s path has a 1,000 mile cone of possible routes, but we’re supposed to accept the government’s 100 year temperature forecast for the planet as accurate within 0.5 of a degree.

     Turning over to higher ed, making enrollment predictions for the country should be easy enough that even the government can do it. I mean, college enrollments have been dropping for 5 straight years. That’s not a prediction, that’s a statement of fact, an observation of a clear trend.

     When considering how many college age students we’ll have in 2025, it’s a prediction, but not much of one. For example, to be 18 in 2025, you’ll need to be 10 years old in 2017—getting 8 years older over the course of 8 years is a pretty safe prediction. The demographics are perfectly clear: we simply won’t have as many college age citizens in 2025 as we have today.

      So, we have an established downward trend of enrollment, and a demographic wall that should further exacerbate the trend. A legitimate government report would predict further falling enrollment, and that’s not even factoring in current issues like race riots, Leftist riots, skyrocketing student debt, and a population which, honestly, is beginning to realize a college degree really isn’t worth anything near what’s being charged for it.

      Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that would indicate college enrollments will be up in 8 years. If they’re the same in 2025 as today, that’d be a miracle.

     So, let’s take a peek at current government projections for college enrollment:

Projections of Education Statistics to 2025

     It sure is nice of our government to make these reports public; we all could use a laugh, after all. The government starts out with, more or less, my assessment regarding demographics:

     You’d have to squint to read the chart precisely, but there’s minimal growth in the grades 9-12 line in the 2017-2025 range, and it’s right around the 16 million mark. With no growth in college age students, it's tough to believe there'll be growth in college students.

      Let’s flip ahead 20 pages and get to higher education. Here’s an interesting chart:

  

                                                     

     (note: this report is from September 2017, but it takes a few years to compile the data, so the most recent statistics are for 2014)

     It agrees that enrollments have been dropping the last few years of their data. Laughably, the report is already invalid, as it’s “prediction” for the years 2014-2017 doesn’t match the reality of enrollments continuing to drop; it says we’d have around 20 million students today, unlike the reality of around 18 million.

     How do you justify the idiocy of projecting growth here? The government knows our higher education system is dropping fast from the world stage, from first to eleventh. This is a trend that has no reason to change anytime soon. We’re not going to get growth from the rest of the world sending their best and brightest here. Much like with all other data we have, one would expect enrollment from this source to drop.

     The main claim of the report justifying the bizarre prediction of growth is that we’re going to start having much older students (25 and up) in college, magically.

     Rubbish.

      The 25 year olds in 2035 are around 17 today…if they’re smart enough not to go to college next year, they’re smart enough not to go in 8 years. They won’t be dumber in 8 years, after all.

Recruiter: “Son, I can’t take you. Your score on the intelligence test is just too low.”

Prospect: “That’s ok. I go to college instead.”

--an army recruiter acquaintance told me he has a conversation like this pretty much every week. College administrators have lowered standards to the point that people not intelligent enough for the Army can still easily get into college. Honest, the words “exploitation” and “predatory” apply when discussing college administrators. College graduate IQ is dropping to below 100 because they're exploiting the most vulnerable now.

     Look, it’s one thing to sucker a kid right out of high school into signing up for $100,000 of debt…they don’t know any better, and our ruthless administrators in higher ed have exploited them all they can. Our predatory community college system actually targets kids from families with no college experience, because those are the most vulnerable to being suckered into going to fake colleges (there’s nobody in the family to warn them, after all).

      An 18 year old is easy to trick, but 25? At this stage, the “student” probably has a child or two, and has likely been taking care of himself in the real world for a few years. He’s going to know about the internet as a ready source of knowledge, and know just how viciously exploitative our higher education system has been…this might not be completely common knowledge today, but this information should be very common knowledge by 2025 (unless Google can bury it).

     I just don’t see growth happening, not without incredible changes to how our higher education system is run, changes that aren’t even being remotely discussed today, much less planned to be implemented by 2025. I’ve spent a  lifetime in higher ed, so trust me: you can’t completely overhaul this system in under 8 years. For good reason, it was designed for such to be impossible. It took decades of control by a corrupt administrative caste to get it at this point, it’ll take at least a decade to get it back to being mostly respectable…and even then there still wouldn’t be a bunch of 25 year olds clamoring to get in.

      There’s chart after chart in this report, projecting inexplicable growth in higher ed, and it’s all laughable. Just one more joke of a chart, as much more would be piling on:

      Just look at that steady growth of first time freshmen! Both males and females, even though it's well known males are fleeing our masculinity-loathing colleges. But this same report has already told me that we won’t have growth in our high schools, our primary source of freshmen…where oh where could that growth come from?

     Now comes the insidious aspect to this report. Across the country, for decades, our institutions of higher education have been on insane building sprees, erecting palace after palace to our self-proclaimed titans of industry, the administrative caste.

     Those administrators will look at this report, and will use it to justify erecting even more monuments to their greatness—“We’re going to have crazy growth in the next 8 years, we need to start building NOW. It’s just good LEADERSHIP. Now gimme more money!”

       These administrators will rake in millions in “bonuses” (more accurately called “kickbacks”) from the money spent on new construction. The taxpayers will get the bill for these, and, if there’s any complaint about such idiotic decision-making as to build when every legitimate indicator says enrollments are falling and will continue to fall, admin will just point to this report and say:

     “Hey, it’s not our fault, we had a government report predicting steady growth.” Then they’ll cry all the way to the bank.

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Vice Chancellor Pay To Infinity

By Professor Doom

     It’s so saddening to watch higher education in the UK go the same route as it is here in the US. One of first big changes was restructuring of higher education into a royal (and royally paid) caste of “leaders” getting everything, while reducing scholars to peasants, barely scraping by.

     This process is finished in the US, but in the UK it’s still ongoing:

Vice-chancellors may be winning big from tuition fees – but academics aren't

     It’s just so bizarre looking at the salaries the folks at the top get. The low pay of academics is somewhat justified because technically we only work 9 months of the year (yes, we do our research over the summer, I’m only talking technically here). But admin don’t have to do much  when classes are not in session, or at least don’t have to do anything important. They blow their summers traveling to Leadership Retreats and working on irrelevant Vision for Excellence plans.

While the high financial compensation of the upper echelons in academia might shock the general public, the low pay received by its junior members is the real scandal.

     Yes, the UK is starving out the academics, but asking for more money “for the starving academics” will fail. We have huge streams of money flowing into higher ed, the solution won’t be more money, because the issue isn’t lack of money. The issue is the predatory caste at the top, sucking it all up.

While Lord Adonis was quick to quip that increased tuition fees have neatly mirrored increases in vice chancellor’s salaries, I can assure his lordship that junior academics are certainly not beneficiaries of such tuition fee increases, and instead are the recipients of some £50,000 of student debt.

      The academic making these observations is doing so anonymously, because he’s afraid. Is he afraid of lack of money? No, he’s afraid that the leaders will punish him for complaining about the reality of higher ed. Yet again: it’s the leadership, not the low pay, that’s harming academia.

On announcing her departure from academia, she was met with derision from senior figures. She now loves her job, earns easily thrice my salary (before her bonus), never works at weekends and is truly done with work at the end of the day. I find myself asking: which of us is the real clever one?

      The end result of such an exploitative system is what I’ve seen before: the smart people are getting away from academia. It starts are the top, of course, the Ph.D. recipients, but I assure the gentle reader, as the plundering continues, it’ll affect all students, until, much like in the US, having a college degree will mean you have below average intelligence. Will it be one decade, or two? Hard to say, information travels so quickly now, perhaps their kids will learn about this scam more readily than in the US.

      The vice chancellors are scoring 6 figures salaries, and the first number isn’t even a “1.” Not content at astronomical pay, it keeps going up:

Dozens of university vice-chancellors getting pay rises over 20%, figures show

      It must be so nice to get consistent and generous raises like this. There are complaints of course, so soon the UK will learn to hide the transfer of wealth like we do here in the US, with huge, massive perks like “loans” of a million dollars or more which are then forgiven.

Of the 57 universities that had the same vice-chancellor in place throughout the five-year period, eight saw their pay go up by more than a third in cash terms, while three of those saw overall remuneration rise more than half in cash terms.

…the three universities where overall remuneration packages rose by more than half in cash terms were Huddersfield, where vice-chancellor Bob Cryan saw a 67% increase over five years to £364,564 in 2015/16; Bournemouth, where John Vinney saw a 53% rise to £305,000, and Roehampton where Paul O’Prey saw a 52% rise to £342,000…

--emphasis added, because the article glosses over the relevance of this detail.

     Granted, 50% pay raises are pretty common in the US as well (with, again, more like 100% once sweet perks are factored in). The article doesn’t notice it, but one of the many problems with our “leaders” in higher ed is how all they do is loot, and then move up in the system to another school. The study the article uses looked at 114 schools over a 5 year period…but only half of them could actually hang on to the same vice chancellor for that amount of time.

     Keep in mind, these guys have spent 20 years or more in higher ed. Their resumes consistently show them spending 2 years at one place, 3 years at another, 2 more years at another, perhaps 6 months at one place, and so on. In the “real world” a resume like that would be a huge flag that the employee was unreliable and a questionable candidate for even a minimum wage job. How do guys with such tainted resumes still manage quarter of a million (or more) dollar jobs so easily? I don’t know, and the article can’t answer it either. Let’s get back to the money for these useless jobs.

…on average vice-chancellor pay has gone up by 15% (7% in real terms) in five years; rank-and-file academic staff in contrast have lost out over the same period and have seen their salaries drop in real terms by 2.8%, and in the case of professors by 3.1%...

     Like every other county on the planet with a fiat money system, the UK is struggling hard with massive debts. But the guys at the top just keep raking it in. How do they justify this level of plundering?

      Let’s look at the guy with a 67% pay raise:

The university said there had been a “sustained high-level performance” and Cryan’s salary had increased to a level “commensurate with the significant transformation of the university and the associated peer recognition in terms of the many accolades received”.

     “Sustained high level performance”? Neat. Can the gentle reader tell me his school? Tell me of his academic accomplishments? Tell me anything at all about this guy? You can win national awards for scholarly work and get almost nothing for it. You can do almost nothing as an administrator and get salary enough to live like a king.

      “Peer recognition”? This stuff always makes me grit my teeth, because I’ve had a long close look at how it works: a bunch of Poo Bahs get together, and they form a bunch of organizations and committees. These committees then create awards, which they then award to each other. Then they use those awards to justify astronomical pay raises. It’s little different than when they send themselves on leadership retreats to luxury villas across the world, and then use that “leadership training” to justify even more pay.

     Then comes another way they justify their pay:

The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, last week defended her £350,000 salary saying universities now operated in a “global marketplace” and were competing with high remuneration packages offered at institutions overseas. According to THE, the average pay for an equivalent university leader in the US was £398,00, and in Australia £546,000.

---incidentally, this shows how the UK is catching up to the corrupted US system: they’re only about 10% behind us. I’ve mentioned the Australian system before.

     No less foul than using self-generated awards and self-awarded vacations to justify pay raises, they also use the fact that “other guys are getting paid more” to give themselves more pay. How demented to you have to be to point at another system’s corruption to justify the corruption of your own system? They literally bootstrap each other up and up and up, crowing all the while about how important they are to education…even as no student, no faculty, can identify a single positive thing they’ve done for education.

      And this ultimately is my problem: these guys are only in it for the money, and every decision they make causes only more harm to our kids trapped in the system. If we could just move them off campus and increase their pay to infinity, maybe then we go back to focusing on education and research?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

More Bad News For Female Teachers

By Professor Doom

     I post in forums, and it’s so weird when politicized topics come up. For example, I mentioned how Google modifies its search engine to steer searches away from information detrimental to Hillary Clinton (this was during the last election, although what Amazon is doing with Hillary’s book today is no different). I’m called a conspiracy theorist and a  liar, so I provide a link, detailing how you can just type searches into Google and get results completely different (and more favorable to Hillary) than if you use any other search engine.

       My link is attacked, and I’m called more names for using such a terrible source.

      I argue that the name calling is irrelevant, and attacking the source is irrelevant, because you can just type into Google and see it with your own eyes. I  could gamely provide half a dozen other sources, with other examples of Google’s (coincidental, I’m sure) gentle treatment of Hillary-related searches, but I've seen what happens when you do that:

       I'd be dismissed entirely, because I must be insane to obsess so much over this “weird conspiracy theory.” Further attempts to get readers to simply use Google and verify the claims would be pointless, since I’m obviously a nut.

     I’ve seen it time and again, and not just with me: if one source is provided, attack and dismiss the source. If multiple sources are provided, attack and dismiss the provider of the source.

     At least on my own blog I can advance unpopular theories without such issues.

     Some time back I mentioned an interesting study: students don’t like female professors. The study was attacked, of course, and nobody should base much decision-making on a lone statistical analysis. That said, it’s weird how the study was assumed to be all about bias, and the things the study actually said were ignored.

     Let’s talk about some more studies:

Female teachers are 'bossy'. Male teachers are 'awesome'

An interactive tool reviewing date from RateMyProfessors.com exposes gender biases in how students describe their teachers

     And now we have more evidence that male teachers, at the college level, are favored by students. Now, again, the claim of bias could be advanced but…every other decision at the college level, no matter how vile or detrimental to education, is made with the intent to make students happy. Who cares if there’s bias, if it makes students happy? There’s hypocrisy here.

      Why have I never seen a push for more male faculty? Time and again I’ve seen sexist hiring policies favoring females, but never the other way around. I grant that our culture really, really, trashes males. Every day I see or hear at least one representation of “males are stupid and goofy, females are wiser by far.” Even Harry Potter has this effect, with Ron being reduced to useless comic relief, while Hermione was transformed (from the books) into a flawless goddess of supreme ability. You can’t even have female Minions because our society won’t allow it, apparently---Minions are too stupid to be female.

      Now, if I went to my Dean and told her female-preferential hiring practices are (in addition to being of questionable legality) making the students unhappy, she’d blow me off. I could show her the above study, but she’d just tell me the study was weak and of no value, probably without even reading it.

      I wouldn’t press the point. Education isn’t about making students happy, it’s about pushing them to become better. So, it shouldn’t matter what gender the teacher is, what matters is teacher effectiveness. How does the gender of the teacher affect that?

A key reason boys lag behind in the classroom is revealed for the first time - female teachers.

Research shows that boys lower their sights if they think their work is going to be marked by a woman because they believe their results will be worse.

     Now we have a study saying males don’t work as hard when their teachers are female. While the study is pre-college, it’s reasonable to conjecture that it would hold for older males as well.

     Again, we can claim sexism here—the boys don’t work as hard because they don’t think they’re getting a fair shake. But it’s just sexism, right?

It also shows their suspicions are correct - female teachers did, on average, award lower marks to boys than unidentified external examiners

     Once again we have a problem here, as the evidence shows we’re better off with male teachers. That wouldn’t be fair to the females, right?

It also revealed that girls tried harder if they had a male teacher because they believed they would get better marks.

      So…both males and females will work harder with a male teacher. I should point out that, in our elementary and high schools, most teachers are female, by a wide margin. Where are all the programs luring males into getting teaching degrees? I mean, we have evidence that male teachers are better at motivating students to study, shouldn’t that count for something?

     Now, I’m mostly talking about public school here, where it’s very clear that there’s a gender bias in grading—male teachers give boys better grades, while female teachers give girls better grades. I’d like to think there’s no such bias at the college level—I know when I grade a test, the name is the last thing I look at, and I’m too lazy to change a grade after I see the name.

Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found. He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.

      In any event, boys don’t do as well as girls in school, that’s been the conventional wisdom for decades. For centuries, boys were top of the class. These days, girls are scoring higher grades. What changed? Shamefully, it lines up with when females started to be the primary gender of teacher by a wide margin, when school started to be more and more about touchy-feely topics. In fact, when you subtract the gender bias, children of both genders are far closer to being about the same in terms of grades.

The problem of boys’ underachievement in primary and secondary school follows them into their later lives. Research from 2006 has tracked the decline in male academic performance over the same period as the rise of feminist-dominated ideologies in academia and policymaking.

      Males are trapped in our public school system, but once they get to college, they’re walking away by a wide margin compared to females, because it’s more of the same hostile environment for them. I’ve seen education debased and debased and debased again in the name of “retention,” and it’s clear encouraging more male teachers, even at the college level, would help, but in the face of this evidence there are no changes.

      Next big meeting on campus, I’m sure to see yet another program to hire more female faculty, can't recall a time when it didn't happen.

     Sure, I can go to the Dean and show her study after study I’ve linked above, showing that sexist hiring policies, in addition to being legally questionable, are hurting our students…but she’d just label me an obsessive nut and get me fired.

     I really don’t like that higher education is this way, but at least I can still post anonymously about the existence of problems.

     For now.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com