Pizzagate Rabbithole: Who Feeds The Pigs?

By Professor Doom

     A recent “suicide” leads me to write again of things besides higher education, and seeing as it’s Friday, let’s have a little thought experiment:

Mark Salling committed suicide and his cause of death was asphyxia by hanging, coroner’s report reveals

     This is the second Glee actor to commit suicide. This particular guy was under investigation for pedophilia, and was mere days away from providing a list of names regarding how he got his pictures and stuff. Man, what a lucky break for those other pedophiles. In following these types of stories, I see these kinds of lucky breaks where people commit suicide right before testifying against the bad guys happen often.

It had earlier been revealed that the man's corpse had been found in a riverbed.

     Wait…what? Apparently, after hanging himself, he decided to take a walk, eventually coming to a riverbed where, realizing he was dead, he stopped. And, yet, this is a suicide. I’m not a doctor, but my understanding of how death works is you generally don’t go for walks after you die. But since it’s ruled a suicide, there won’t be much of a murder investigation.

      The site I’m quoting from doesn’t allow comments, so I can’t get a feel for how other readers are buying this story, but I do find myself wondering just how many times the public will get the “we’re calling this a suicide and there’s nothing you can do it about because we’re the law…IN YOUR FACE!” line before a large segment of the public outright riots at the insult to their collective intelligence.

     I have a different sausage to fry today, if you’ll forgive the mangled metaphor.

He was arrested in December 2015 and was found to have downloaded more than 50,000 images and videos of child abuse to his computer and another 4,000 on his flash drive.

    The gentle reader should understand that this “suicide right before turning state’s evidence” is very common, so common that it’s very difficult to understand why these important witnesses to horrific crimes are not provided some measure of protection…almost as though those who should be providing that protection are the same as those who keep deciding these are suicides are the same as those who are involved in the crimes, somehow.

     Ok, that’s a little conspiratorial and it’s considered bad form to do much beyond worship law enforcement, so let’s just call the consistently strange suicides and consistent lack of prudent protection coincidental.

     So, enough theorizing, let’s consider a quantitative detail:

…50,000 images…

     The above is the part that I want to address. In many pedo cases, the suspect is found to have tens of thousands of pedophilic pictures and videos on his computer.

     Tens of thousands. Even the most famous porn stars with long careers only have hundreds of videos, and one would suspect the career of a child in this situation to be very brief.

     This suicide had a typical stash compared to other, similar arrests, and it’s a safe bet that he didn’t have a complete collection of every single pedo pic/video in existence.

    Maybe it’s just a wild conspiracy theory about the suicides, but you don’t produce tens of thousands of videos from some guy with a Polaroid camera molesting his kid in a garage. You don’t distribute tens of thousands of videos by word of mouth, selling one copy at a time in the alley behind the adult bookstore.

     It’s very, very clear that there must be an infrastructure, a large and professional industry, manufacturing and distributing these. Now, in order for tens of thousands of these things to be manufactured and distributed, you must get a large supply of child victims. Where are they getting the kids?

According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 465,676 NCIC entries for missing children. Similarly, in 2015, the total number of missing children entries into NCIC was 460,699.

     Now, only a fool takes government numbers at face value. The above numbers are almost certainly inflated—a kid runs away twice in the same year, and you have two reports, for example. Many of the above are likely “kidnapped” by family members in court disputes…there are many reasons for a missing person report that don’t have anything to do with the sex industry. Let’s get a better feel for what’s going on:

Of the nearly 25,000 runaways reported to NCMEC in 2017, one in seven were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Of those, 88 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing.

--hmm, 88% of child trafficking sex victims are provided by the same government that determines the suicides of people about to turn state’s evidence. A coincidence, I’m sure.

     So here was have a “small” sample of about 25,000 runaways, and over 3,000 of them were likely involved in sex trafficking, and that’s just in one year. So, absolutely we have enough kids right here in this country.

      These pics and videos were on the computer so almost certainly relatively recent. That said, for there to be tens of thousands of such videos, it’s safe to assume it’s been going on for years.

    I think it likely many of these sorts of pics and videos were created in the last 5 years, or at least have been around for 5 years, and with thousands of kids involved, we should have loads of witnesses, victims of this sick sex industry, who have aged into adulthood, or at least too old to be of much value to the pedo-industry.

     But we don’t have nearly so many survivors. Oh, there are a few people saying they were victimized by a system when they were children…but I could find only a handful when poking around online. There should be thousands. I don’t reckon they all commit suicide, but I’ve been to enough rodeos to guess the physical status of these victims who are telling no tales.

     Where might the bodies go? We’re talking thousands of victims here, I just don’t accept someone’s digging many graves or burning them all. Simply dumping them randomly in the countryside or ocean just wouldn’t work, as those bodies would turn up eventually (we already regularly find bodies in the woods, and body parts washing ashore)…and we’re talking thousands here, with no reports of a bunch of kid’s bodies found in the woods or at low tide.

     Let’s summarize:

First, it’s absolute fact that pedos are being caught with large quantities of pedophilic material, so large that there must be industrial level production of that material.

Second, we’re missing so many kids that it’s quite reasonable, and supported by data, to assume that thousands of them are involved in the industrial level production of that material.

Third, this has been going on long enough, with enough kids involved, that we should have hundreds, more likely thousands, of victims, if they were alive, coming forward to say they were victimized.

Fourth, we don’t even have dozens of victims coming forward.

      We definitely have an industry, we definitely have thousands of victims. The most straightforward explanation for the lack of living witness is they aren’t living any more so, again, where might the bodies be?

Some Hot Dogs, Sausages Studied Contain Human DNA, Says New Report

     The above report made the rounds a few years ago, and the evidence was passed off as “skin flakes.” Yeah, maybe. If this explanation held true, then we’d have similar studies for chicken and beef.

    We don’t. And the bodies are disappearing somehow.

     Now, hot dogs and sausages are ground up meat, typically pig meat, so it’s possible that the meat packing plants are part of a big conspiracy here—the workers would absolutely notice a shipment of dead kids coming in to be made into sausages. Besides, the percentages found were pretty low…I don’t buy this.

     But the bodies are disappearing somehow. How else might human DNA be getting into our sausages and hot dogs? Cows and chickens have no real chance of eating human beings, but pigs might…maybe it’s just coincidence that we’re only finding human DNA in pig meat products.

      Can pigs really eat humans?

Hungry hogs eat Oregon farmer in grisly scene

…the swine — weighing about 700 pounds each — may have knocked Garner down, overwhelming him before killing him, authorities said….

     Most people think of pigs as cute little pink things waddling around, but they can easily grow quite large. They’re quite capable of eating vulnerable humans, and there are a number of criminal examples of bodies being fed to pigs.

14 lactating sows would be enough to disappear a grown man in an hour or two.

-theoretically, I hope. From the above estimate, you’d only need around 50 pigs to get rid of a 1,000 bodies a year.

     Now, obviously this is all speculation on my part, and, sure, Pizzagate investigators have made similar guesses:

What do Alefantis, Pig Farms and Podesta all have in common?

     Now, absolutely, it’s possible that mainstream media is right about Pizzagate just being a huge hoax—considering how many things they’ve been dead wrong about, I concede they’ve got to be right about something, at some point.

      But I again want to look at the big picture. There must be a huge industry, there must be thousands of victims, these victims are disappearing. It’s clearly possible to check to see if a pig has been eating humans, and it’s clearly possible that one way to get rid of a human corpse is to feed it to pigs. It seems prudent to check the pigs.

      We have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. Mainstream media assures me repeatedly this collusion is not a hoax, despite the lack of evidence or even coherent arguments explaining why this collusion must exist.

      On the other hand, we have evidence and a reasonable argument to lead us to believe that a huge industry exists which kills off large numbers of children…why is there no money to investigate the pig farms and see if anything can be found?

      Something worries me even more. I’m not particularly bright, I managed to connect the dots of “40,000 pics/videos,” “thousands of victims,” and “insufficient living witnesses” to arrive at “where are the bodies?”…and yet we have police detectives and Federal investigators by the tens of thousands across this country.

      Why have none of them been able to see that there’s something wrong on a large scale here? Are they the same ones that keep telling us a man can hang himself and then go for a walk?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Educators Should NOT Take Education Classes

By Professor Doom

      When I was at a fake community college, every semester someone with a Ph.D. in Education would come in and lecture us on “how to teach.” It was either basic advice that anyone with 3 months of experience would know (“Make sure more than 1 answer in a multiple choice question is at least reasonable,” and yes, that is a quote) or total garbage (“Put book reports in your math classes,” among many other examples) or a pure waste of time (“If you give more extra credit, your students will have higher grades”—I point out that admin paid real money for an Educationist to give us this advice).

      “My Ph.D. thesis, the only thesis that was shown to be true, was that students who study tend to learn more in a measureable way.”

--the smartest Educationist to come and tell us how to teach. I still don’t believe this is a particularly strong thesis, however. Do note the implication: even a false thesis would still merit a Ph.D., because that’s how Education rolls. “Different ways of knowing” is their battle cry.

      That’s how the teachers are trained at fake schools (if they’re trained at all). At a legitimate school, teacher training is handled far more intelligently. An actual specialist in the subject actually comes in an watches me teach the course, afterwards telling me ways to improve—it’s valid advice, and even after 30 years I still am monitored, and do the same, as well as watch grad students teach and help them.

     I was told time and again how Education courses help with teaching, and I saw many mathematics positions being taken over by people with Math Education degrees. Wanting to learn their secrets, I sat in on their courses, only to learn they’re not good teachers, and in fact don’t even know what they’re talking about (for the most part); Educationists simply pass more students because they grade easy and remove all difficult material from the course.

     “All I learned my last two years of Education courses was how not to get sued.”

--recent Bachelors in Education graduate explaining his teacher training.

      Generally on campus, the Education students are cloistered from the other students. They don’t take “normal” classes like College Algebra, taught by mathematics professors. Instead, they take “Math for Education Majors” taught by Education professors, along with “Chemistry for Education Majors,” “Art for Education Majors,” and so on.

     “We learn about social justice, racial inequality, stuff like that.”

--recent Master’s in Education graduate explaining her more advanced teacher training.

     Now, it’s only natural for a person studying a subject to think everyone should know about it—I concede my own bias towards mathematics in this regard. So naturally I take the following type of article with a huge grain of salt:

Why Don’t Educators in Higher Ed Take Education Classes?

      People often think Education courses make better teachers, but one would think someone taking the courses would know better. I even took a graduate level Education course…my fake community college wouldn’t accept it as continuing education (and the course was offered at a state university, fully accredited).  I didn’t press the point even as yet another Educationist took over yet another formerly legitimate faculty position.

While I have yet to take a class “on teaching,” the depth of understanding I have gained about the practices of teaching and learning in my education classes is immeasurable.

     Gee whiz, you’ve yet to take a class on teaching, and yet you somehow think it’s a good idea for teachers to take these courses? Granted, considering other confusions of ideas I’ve seen from Educationists, this isn’t so bad, but it’s weird this sort of article is worthy of publication.

…the suggestion that I might need to improve my teaching somehow hits below the belt. 

     One of the weird things about Educationists is their amazing arrogance. I see the author here is fairly typical in that regard. Even after decades, I’m trying to find better ways to explain concepts…when a hardworking student misses exacty one question the whole semester, I ask myself long and hard how I failed to teach that one question properly.

Maybe it is this fear of perceived weakness that prevents many postsecondary faculty members from ever taking a class about teaching.

     How feckless do you have to be in an Education department to think “fear of perceived weakness” is the reason other faculty avoid Education classes? How about “Education departments are viewed as a joke on many campuses” as a reason? How about “Education departments take classes away from your department and teach watered down versions of your subject to their own students” as a reason? How about “You guys condescend to us at every opportunity, and yet have failed to actually improve learning in human beings, and the evidence is very strong that you’re making things worse” as a reason? Yeah, “fear of weakness” is pretty low on the list of reasons we stay away.

Similarly, professors at a university are typically required to wear two hats: one hat as a researcher and another as a teacher. But only the researcher hat is fashionable. It brings in money for the university, it looks good on a curriculum vitae and it promotes the climb up the academic latter.

 

      I’m quoting an article from Inside Higher Ed, here, a site that knows quite a bit about how higher education works. Yes, research brings in money for the university, but surely someone at the site could have pointed out the glaring, blindingly glaring, error in this article here.

     On most campuses, tuition money (more accurately, student loan money) represents a huge income stream, far more than research money. That the author does not know this is forgivable, but why doesn’t Inside Higher Ed know? Student loan debt runs around 1.4 trillion dollars now…that comes from students, not research.

     While the comments are generally supportive of this piece, one actually provides an intelligent answer to the question so abysmally answered by the article’s title:

I am a director of faculty development. My experience has been that many faculty do want to improve their teaching. The barrier is not lack of desire or interest. Rather, it is the faculty rewards system that acts as a disincentive for faculty… there are no incentives for improving your teaching.

     As I said before, you get no credit for good teaching in higher education. What you do get credit for is handing out high grades, and passing everyone who signed up for the course. It’s why Educationists are considered such great teachers, after all, because they’ve figured out these two critical duties of the job, at least from an administrative point of view.

     Since these are the two secrets of Education as a field, there’s no need to take any courses, as this knowledge can be taught in a matter of seconds.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Academic Rigor is “White Privilege”

By Professor Doom

     During the last election, the cry of “RACIST,” the great weapon of the Left for decades, was finally blunted after being bashed into the head of everyone the Left considers an enemy…basically half the country had this weapon smashed into their heads for voting for Trump, so it’s no small wonder the weapon doesn’t work as well as it used to.

      They’re casting about for a new weapon, and one of the big candidates is the cry of “PRIVILEGE.” This is, of course, a code word for RACIST, and can be used almost interchangeably. Much like with racism, almost everything can be blamed on privilege, and it’s already being used excessively:

A Purdue University engineering professor recently lamented the emphasis on academic "rigor," calling it a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.”

     Academic rigor is not merely making a claim, but backing up that claim with facts and coherent arguments. For what it’s worth, a mathematically rigorous argument generally isn’t open to debate--pretty much by definition, if a mathematical assertion is open to debate, it’s not rigorous. Other fields aren’t so objective, and so a part of more qualitative arguments is debating and discussing the assertions.

     I’d noticed long ago that certain fields (Hi African Studies!) generally don’t do debate and discussion. Any challenge to an assertion made there is either shouted down, responded to with a cry of RACISM, or both.

     I’m inclined to believe academic rigor is a good thing, and the proper way to generate new, valid, knowledge. Lack of rigor, lack of discussion, is only good for spreading ideology. At best.

     The one making this claim about the “privilege” of academic rigor heads an Engineering department. How could an engineering professor argue that rigor is unimportant? Buildings and bridges don’t remain standing because you yell at them or threaten to call them RACIST, after all.

Defining rigor as “the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality,” Riley asserts that “rigor is used to maintain disciplinary boundaries, with exclusionary implications for marginalized groups and marginalized ways of knowing.”

     Ok, so let’s go with this definition of rigor. When was quality determined to be a bad thing? When was rigor used to maintain boundaries? These seem natural questions to ask, but no argument is provided to answer them.

      “Ways of knowing”? What? Gravity is pretty hard rule not to follow…it’s not “white” to obey and understand the rules of gravity, and I’m unaware of alternative “ways of knowing” how to adhere to those gravity laws. Similarly, there are many broad rules of engineering (eg, Newton’s Laws) where there only is one way of knowing the facts of how reality works. I assure the gentle reader that great minds have considered getting around those laws, because doing so would be a tremendous advancement in human knowledge.

      But you have to actually know the laws before you can try to work around them. It’s not a white thing (I’ll never understand why the nuts making these sorts of claims just ignore China), nor is it a male thing (the professor making these claims identifies as female, which may or not be the same thing as actually being female anymore).

Riley also argues that academic rigor can be used to exclude women and minorities, saying, “Rigor may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.”

     Can someone get this person a mirror? She was head of the Department of Engineering at Purdue for over a decade. And yet she’s arguing the system kept her from rising to the top. I have to wonder a bit about what sort of engineer she is:

Riley is the author of…Engineering and Social Justice…Riley earned…a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Engineering and Public Policy. 

     Yes, she has an undergraduate degree in engineering, but she didn't become department head based on her undergraduate degree, it's her Administration degree which has put her in a position to run this engineering department. We need to ask questions about whether this sort of hiring is a good idea, honest.

    The reality is she’s a Social Justice Warrior with an Administration degree, and she’s head of a school of Engineering Education…not exactly a school of Engineering.

     Let that sink in: this department is not being run by an engineer. She got a Ph.D. in Administration, not engineering.

To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being….

     Is anybody else a bit worried about driving over a bridge built by engineers from this school? Would Riley really want her children on such a bridge? I suspect her tolerance for “other ways of knowing” would diminish markedly if her or her children’s life hung in the balance. Gravity, schmavity, right?

      I’m really hard pressed to believe she actually believes these things she’s saying.

Campus Reform reached out to Riley multiple times for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.  

     Well, it is clear from the above she does believe her own work should not be open to debate, or even comment, but luckily the article I’m quoting from has a few comments from readers, uniformly dismissive of this “other ways of knowing” nonsense.

At some point companies will not recruit Purdue. This happened at Stanford. If an engineering product is defective people die…

      The above comment shows I’m not alone in thinking that engineering is one of the many things in the modern world which should be pursued rigorously. Another comment asks the question I’ve been dancing around:

Wow I thought that engineering was about designing and building things , all this time it’s been another white haven, but why are there so many Asian and Indian engineers? More importantly why does this woman have a job?

     When SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) take over a campus, they put themselves in “leadership” positions, from which they can enforce their lunacy. I can’t help but suspect that’s what happened here. From her position as department head, you can bet she pressures her underlings to follow her SJW ideals…or else. You can also bet she makes certain that all future hires are SJWs only.

      Eventually, you’ll have a whole department of people with pseudo-engineering degrees, yet allegedly teaching engineers. I’ve seen it happen in math, so I can easily conceive it happening elsewhere.

     In any event, Purdue has just nuked the credibility of their engineering degrees.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Taking A Gender Studies Course So You Don’t Have To

By Professor Doom

     YouTube is such a fine resource, even if a bit tainted. Before getting to today’s discussion, I want to discuss that taint.

      For years there have been complaints that YouTube promotes pedophilia. I know, that sort of accusation is all the rage right now, but it was funny how despite the fact that anyone could see many channels that were, well, “iffy,” nothing was ever done.

      “Freedom of Speech” rings thin here, since YouTube has been on a crusade to shut down conservative thought, or any thought not in line with their way of thinking. PragerU is even bringing a lawsuit against them,  because even Prager’s very tame, 5 minute videos on the Constitution of the United States are being censored by YouTube, and many, many other representatives of the alternative media have likewise been censored.

      Meanwhile, videos of lightly dressed children, with phone numbers and contact information in the description box, are untouched…YouTube just doesn’t have time to shut down such questionable activity, even as brief discussions of legal details on the founding of this country receive scrutiny and censorship.

     Stefan Molyneux finally had enough of it, and demonstrated just how bad the pedophilia on YouTube was. He showed that their search engine, if you typed in “How to have sex…” would autocomplete with a variety of pedophilic activity options. (I’d link if I could find the video, but what I have linked might be close enough.) In response to the query, the engine would provide videos which in turn have ordering information and such.

     The gentle reader should understand that the search engine was autocompleting that way because that’s what it had been asked, many times before.

     Now, Molyneux is a pretty big figure, and within hours of his posting that video, many thousands of viewers got to see with their own eyes that YouTube, “for some reason,” just didn’t seem to care about pedophilic videos on their channel, even though it had been brought to their attention many times before. 

      After Molyneux’s reveal, YouTube had no choice but to, very reluctantly I’m sure, do the right thing. They shut down over 50,000 channels--YES, channels—that were very clearly pedophile related, less than 48 hours after the knowledge became just too public. YouTube clearly could have done so at any time, it was only the publicity that was the problem. Keep in mind that YouTube does not want conservative ideas discussed, but has no problem with pedophilia unless it becomes too well known to be ignored…they had many months to do the right thing before Molyneux’s video after all.

     We really should consider what’s happening in this country that major companies can support pedophilia like this, and moreover can do so without legal repercussions.

      Anyway, despite YouTube’s pedophilic predilections, and censorship of non-Leftist ideas (does anyone else worry that these two things are related in some way?), it’s still an amazing source of knowledge, if you sift carefully through the videos (and realize that the “good stuff” will never appear in the “trending” section even if everyone on the planet is watching it).

      One video has a student discussing her experiences taking a Gender Studies course. As always, I have a few comments to add.

I Took a Gender Studies Course So You Don't Have To

     One thing she says early on about Gender Studies courses is very striking:

“…have to take in order to graduate.”

     I admit I’m a bit morally conflicted about “mandatory” college courses. I realize that many students would not take mathematics in college but for this, and that, quite possibly, my job only exists because of it. I rationalize that it’s justified because when I went to college I was forced to take a wide range of courses in philosophy, English, science, and other subjects…I believe I’m being intellectually honest when I say that an educated person should know at least a little about many things, even as I acknowledge a possible conflict of interest clouding my opinion.

     All that said, the courses I was forced to take were academic courses, topics that took humanity a thousand years or more to develop and understand. Scholars decided that an educated person should know such things. Even changing the contents of these courses used to require a committee of scholars to discuss and decide if a few pages here or there need to be changed…this process worked for literally centuries.

     However, on campuses where the Leftist/SJW takeover has occurred, now scholarship has been tossed out the window, and instead of educating people in legitimate topics, students are forced to sit in gender studies/indoctrination courses. A degree can be composed  of only so much material, so some academic course must have been removed. What scholarly knowledge was abandoned in exchange for this?

      Insult to injury, of course, is that now our campuses are being forced to support all the Gender Studies faculty to teach all the mandatory courses. What scholars were kicked to the curb over this?

     Forced indoctrination is bad, but putting our students into debt for the indoctrination is just ridiculous. The student explains that, being impressionable, she initially bought into the dogma as though it were the same as legitimate scholarship:

     “I was barely 17, and I was really just a dumb kid…”

     I really need to emphasize why we should have scholars, and not ideologues, guiding these kids in their education. I know I’m biased, but I nevertheless honestly believe knowledge of and belief in calculus will do far less harm to a child than forcing ideology down his or her throat.

      “The Ethnic Studies course I took…was maybe about a 300 person lecture.”

     In addition to the abomination of a 300 person lecture, doubtless “taught” via mindless PowerPoint lectures and Scantron tests, I want to point out how empty this course must be. I’ve never taken a Biology course, but I can hazard a guess at what’s in it. Can the gentle reader even imagine what is in “Ethnic Studies”? I sure can’t. Perhaps it’s just as well it’s a bogus course on the face of it.

     The student helpfully discusses the topics in this mystery course…there’s plenty of sex, of course, but I bet few readers could have guessed that from the title. There’s also discussion of serious social problems. None of these problems took humanity thousands of years to understand…and none of them will be solved sitting in a classroom getting angry about them.

     “One of the most ridiculous parts of the class…”

     I won’t go into the ridiculous part but…isn’t it odd that the class has multiple ridiculous parts to it, enough that they can be ranked? Seriously, I can’t recall one of my classes having “ridiculous” parts to it. Maybe we should reconsider pseudo-academic courses filled with ridiculous bits? It’d be nice if that were an option.

      “At least I agreed with the him [the Ethnic Studies professor] twice…”

      Again, it’s so bizarre that there are courses like this. I can’t recall a single mathematics course where I honestly disagreed with the professor, and I only had quibbles with other professors (my Poli Sci professor who insisted Nixon was the most intelligent president we ever had, for example, though I acknowledge I may be a bit ignorant on the topic…).

      The student goes on to discuss how her courses taught were about “Whiteness” and “Privilege” and all the other ideological buzzwords that mean nothing but are used to justify more hate and violence.

      Bottom line, it’s only a 7 minute video, but she does a fine job of telling the interested viewer what a waste of time this 4 month long course is.

      Even if YouTube is run by pedophiles, we can get still get use out of it, as the video about these fake, mandatory, courses clogging up our campuses is far more educational than the actual courses are.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Another Disgraceful Resignation, Another Golden Parachute

By Professor Doom

     One of the most infuriating things about higher education is how my bosses are perpetually receiving promotions and pay raises no matter how foul and incompetently they perform my job.

     Stacked on top of this issue is, when finally their incompetence and or corruption is revealed as so extraordinary that they must be fired (or allowed to resign), they then get a magnificent golden parachute. Bosses commonly get half a million dollars or more when fired in this manner, even if they’ve only been at the institution a year or less.

      Meanwhile, scholars can only qualify for a 2% pay raise after five years or more of flawless work…and if a scholar resigns from an institution of higher education, he gets absolutely nothing, as the times I’ve resigned from corrupt institution easily demonstrated it enough to my own eyes.

     I’ve often wondered why there’s little attempt to ever claw back these magnificently unearned resignation bonuses, but I take heart that finally, at least at one school, there’s an effort being made:

NIU is sued over president's lucrative severance

     Before discussing the severance, let’s set the scene a little at this school, some 60 miles away from Chicago.

     Northern University is a small-ish school by modern standards, with around 14,000 students (down from close to 20,000 a few years ago). Tuition runs around $14,000 a year (up from $10,000 a few years ago), plus another $10,000 for room and board, plus another $10,000 if you’re out-of-state. They claim the median starting salary of alumni is $48,000, but I have to be a little suspicious (that’s not my salary after 30 years of honorable work with no black marks, and well above the national median salary). Their most notable alumni is the guy who does the voice of Homer Simpson, though I suspect very little the guy learned on this campus actually helps him in his current position.

     Anyway, the Poo Bah here is a failure, because growth, the only thing that matters to these people, has been quite negative at this school…if Poo Bahs get huge bonuses as rewards for growing the school, shrinking the school should count against them. It never does.

     He’s also failed to keep tuition and other college expenses down; granted this is a very, very, low priority for admin in higher education.

     The Poo Bah resigned after 4 years at the school. Again, for mere mortals, spending this amount of time at a single place of employment hardly counts for anything.

     So far, so not good. Like most Poo Bahs, as soon as he came in he started hiring cronies and paying them exorbitant salaries. Somehow, he was caught after only a few years (usually this sort of thing takes a decade or so to sort out):

The inspector general launched the inquiry into Northern Illinois' hiring practices in 2014 following several anonymous tips. Illinois law requires state agencies to publicly bid out contracts for professional services from an independent contractor worth more than $20,000.

But the report found that the university hired nine employees between June 2013 and May 2015, paying them all more than $20,000, but never solicited bids for those jobs.

In all, investigators wrote, Northern Illinois spent more than $1 million on the five highest-paid of those employees.

     Let’s see here, a million bucks on 2 years’ pay for 5 cronies…so their salary was around $100,000 a year just for being buddies with the Poo Bah. Again, this is so typical I’m surprised anyone noticed. That kind of money is standard pay for even the lowest level bureaucrats in the system, and I’ve seen campuses load up with admin holding do-nothing jobs more than enough times I’m certainly not doubting the report, only wondering how it even registered.

      So, let’s summarize. The Poo Bah failed at growth, failed to keep expenses down, hadn’t been at the school much time at all, and was as corrupt as, well, many Poo Bahs—most important to this, I’m sure, is that he was caught at the corruption.

     The Poo Bah resigns. I encourage you to think back from jobs where you’ve said “I quit” to compare what you received to the Poo Bah’s bonus for quitting:

 …a total package including a one-time payment of $450,000, equal to a year of his salary; a lump-sum payment of $137,500, which is in exchange for resigning his tenured position in the College of Business; and up to $30,000 for his "reasonable, unpaid expenses for legal counsel" relating to his time at the university…

--Isn’t it neat how admin get to award themselves tenured positions like that? It’s funny how admin hate tenure…except when it’s theirs.

     He gets well past half a million dollars for saying “I quit.” Having reviewed other Poo Bah careers, I’ve learned that by quitting every few years, most Poo Bahs get more in golden parachutes than average citizens will see in their entire lives. I really want to emphasize that what he received here is typical, standard practice in higher education today, and certainly is a part of why tuition is so ridiculously high.

     Wonder of wonders, however, there’s an attempt to claw back the money, or at least challenge the luxurious-but-standard boon the Poo Bah received for quitting his job:

The suit contends that the trustees violated the state Open Meetings Act by not notifying the public that it intended to reach an agreement with Baker, and then at the meeting by not giving the public an opportunity to comment on the terms of the deal.

    While this could be viewed as a challenge, realistically this means nothing. Quite possibly, by reaching the agreement in a closed meeting, the Board of Trustees (sic) violated policy, and, yes, violation of that policy could well void that wonderful golden parachute.

     But this is irrelevant.

     Nobody has any influence over what the Board does, so if this suit is successful, there’s absolutely nothing to stop the Board from holding another meeting, making it as open as the law says it should be…and going on ahead and awarding the exact same pile of money as before.

     Even if there was, somehow, a way to challenge the Board’s award after the open meeting, such a challenge would go nowhere. Why? Because the Poo Bah’s golden parachute for quitting is comparable to the bonuses other Poo Bah’s received for quitting despite extraordinary failure and corruption. The board will defend their decision as a ‘best practices’ decision.

     Higher education really is at the stage where the corruption and incompetence is so pervasive that you can use the claim of being corrupt and incompetent as legal justification to continue being corrupt and incompetent.

     I will, of course, point out that the student loan scam is paying for these golden parachutes, and since there is no way to legally stop this type of plundering from continuing, our best bet, as always, is easy:

     Stop the student loan scam.

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