Penn State Responds To Pedophilic Showers By Banning…Hiking.

By Professor Doom

Editor: “We’re cancelling your column.”

Me: “Why? I thought it was very popular, to judge by reader’s comments.”

Editor: “Oh it is, and we like it quite a bit, too. But we’re worried that you won’t be able to continue to be as good, so we’re ending it before that happens. Sorry.”

--Back when I wrote for magazines, back when there were magazines, this is how I lost one of my side jobs.

     The corporate mentality is incredibly risk-averse once the corporation reaches a certain size. It’s often a self-destructive trait, as a willingness to take risks often was the main reason the company achieved that size in the first place. Nevertheless, once a business gets large enough to support a middle management, those guys do whatever they can to make sure nothing happens to shrink the company back down to the point they don’t need middle managers any more.

     In any event, this risk aversion is a core value of our largest corporations, leading to far more sequels than new ideas in our movies, for example, and it seems every few years we see another large company simply obliterated because it failed to take even a small risk by way of adapting to possible changes in the world (hi Blockbuster!).

      Stumbling over to higher education, our administrative caste is filled with people trying to adopt the corporate mentality. Not just in the “innovative” student-as-customer paradigm or endless self-promotion to get more student loan loot, but also in shutting down anything that might bring risk to campus, especially in a way administration can’t control or profit from.

       A recent example highlights this mentality:

Penn State Lets Students Keep Their Scuba Club, But Only After They Swear Never to Host Scuba Trips Again

      So, you can join the campus scuba club…but only if you don’t actually scuba. It’s so weird; I’ve seen fraternities disbanded over a single hazing incident gone wrong, and we’ve seen plenty of horrific injuries (and vicious criminal behavior) regarding sportsball players without the teams being shut down. Surely there was some huge accident slaughtering dozens of scuba aficionados, to justify this action?

No one at Pennsylvania State University has ever drowned on a scuba-diving trip,…club has existed for 50 years and has never had a safety issue.

     So, nothing has actually happened in decades of operation, admin is simply afraid something might happen at some point, and then possibly an administrator might lose her job.

      The club can still meet, mind you, but no more trips for them. Well, to clarify:

Penn State's recreation department has promised to organize scuba trips on behalf of interested students. These trips would happen under administrative supervision.

     Wait…what? Administrative thinking is just so weird. We’re supposed to accept that students are responsible enough to check a box damning them to a lifetime of student debt, but can’t organize scuba trips, not even with a 50 year track record of being able to successfully do so?

      Why do our campuses even have “recreation” departments, anyway? Clearly they mainly exist simply to justify yet another administrative fiefdom, ever eager to expand its own power regardless of how it impacts anything else.

      You can bet the administratively organized trips will be laughable—scuba diving in swimming pools, perhaps, and certainly nothing more than 6 feet deep (if that much) in any event.

      It is actually pretty generous of the university deanlings to even allow students to get together and discuss this risky behavior all by themselves. Other “dangerous” clubs are being disbanded entirely:

Penn State recently decreed that three student-led outdoor adventure groups—the hiking club, the cave exploration club, and the scuba club—would have to disband due to safety liability concerns, even though none of the long-running clubs had ever reported a problem. 

      The hiking club? Seriously? This university is admitting students so reckless that they cannot be trusted to walk without administrative supervision? It’d be easier to believe the university’s concerns as legitimate if, you know, there had been an actual problem.

      I feel the need to point out that Satanists can form clubs on campus, and there are even “After School Satan” meetings at grade schools…but hikers can’t form a club. Too risky, you see. Something might go wrong.

     We really, really, need to ask ourselves if the “leadership” in higher education  belongs on campus.

      In any event, the scuba club had to beg permission to still exist on this campus, which was generously granted provided they didn’t actually do any scuba diving on their own. I suppose the other clubs had too much pride to grovel before these self-proclaimed masters of the universe, and kudos to them.

       I remind the gentle reader that this is happening at Penn State, notorious for “after school” activities going on in the showers…to date, those showers are still there, and there’s no interest in shutting down showering on campus, even though there’s a clear liability issue.

      The comments section righteously laughs at this administrative push for more control and one comment highlights a possibly more important issue than simple risk aversion:

it is all about Penn State's Adventure Recreation office charging students money for trips that they used to do for free. The Scuba Club had a sizable endowment and could pay for trips for their members. Now the members must pay Penn State.

      I concede there’s some truth in the above, but the way how funding and pay is handled on campus is so bizarre nowadays. The administrator who changed these clubs so that the members will end up paying hundreds of dollars to Penn State to “organize” things they used to do all on their own, will probably get a $20,000 pay raise for his “bold” plan to increase revenues.

      While the above is my primary explanation for this particular bizarre behavior by our leaders at Penn State, I do concede another possibility: lowering insurance premiums. I hate to keep referencing what went (goes?) on in the showers at Penn State, but I suspect their insurance company, upon finding out just how severe the corruption is there, and rightfully suspecting the place still has many pedophiles leading to future lawsuits, decided to raise their premiums. While I’m no fan of insurance companies, I see their point here, as they set their original premiums assuming, as the university puts in writing, that the university will act with integrity. Now that it’s common knowledge that Penn State doesn’t act with integrity, the risks for lawsuits are far higher. So, shutting down these “risky” student organizations is a means to lowering those premiums.

      And so I puzzle over the reasoning behind yet another strange plan by the leaders in higher ed. Meanwhile, bold plans to improve education and restore integrity to higher education are still non-existent, and will likely continue to be so. Such a plan would risk losing all those sweet student loan checks, after all.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

           

Wyoming Best Practices: Destroy Higher Ed

By Professor Doom

     A few years back, I called attention to changes to the way how higher education in Wisconsin was being run. Namely, they were introducing new rules which potentially could eliminate tenure, annihilate academics, and reorganize higher education into a jobs training program. Naturally, the politicos making the changes said that the “potential” was just pure paranoia, that academics had nothing to fear from the new rules, which would just allow for better education, somehow.

      Three years later, Wisconsin went ahead and used the new rules to eliminate tenure, annihilate academics, and reorganize higher education into jobs training.

       Now, I’ve nothing against jobs training, and if you’re going to spend $100,000 on “education,” you absolutely should get educated in something which justifies that sort of expense (especially if you’re taking out a loan). Trouble is, the people running higher ed degraded education, far too often, instilling indoctrination over education. The only thing that slowed down this degradation was the academics…with them removed, why would anyone think the jobs training will be legitimate?

      “Legitimacy” is seldom discussed in higher ed. “Best practices,” on the other hand, is. Time and again I’ve seen it: some Poo Bah finds a new way to loot student loan money away from the poor kids stumbling onto campus, and then other schools use “best practices” to do the same thing…ethics, much less legitimacy, isn’t part of the decision making process.

        Now that Wisconsin has established that even “lifelong” contracts can be casually changed at a whim, it was only a matter of time, in this case weeks, for other places to adopt these “best practices”:

Wisconsin in Wyoming?

Proposed changes to shared governance at the University of Wyoming recall those passed in Wisconsin. Professors in Wyoming say tenure would exist in name only if their governing board gets what it wants.

      Maybe the professors “say” that because it’s true? Naturally, faculty are generally against this. For what it’s worth, faculty aren’t much for protesting. Yes, we teach quite a bit, but we also do our research in the summer, and that usually requires travel. Still, we’ll protest the destruction of our jobs if we can.

      Gosh, what would be the best way to keep faculty protests to a minimum?

 “…the new planned board vote in July -- when far fewer faculty members will be on campus or even in the state.”

     One of the reasons “best practices” is considered a good way to do things is because it does make sense to simply copy ideas and actions which have been used successfully before. It’s the same thing with skullduggery, alas.

     It’s very clear Wyoming will be following Wisconsin’s lead:

“…that university regulations may be “adopted, changed or amended at any regular or special meeting of the trustees without prior formal notice.”

      So, they can just change the rules whenever they feel like it, and they can do so without anyone even knowing what’s going on. Yeah, there’s “potential” there for higher education to be simply stripped down to nothing but what the plunderers at the top want it to be. Why is it such a stretch to think the plunderers will take this opportunity to engage in more plunder?

“…such a change effectively means “the end of shared governance. Without even consulting the faculty, they could do whatever they wanted -- with no prior notice, even on a phone call, at any time.”

       Again, I point out the only thing that’s kept even a minimal amount of education in our universities is the tenured faculty, who are in a position to fight hard to keep some respectability there. At the community college level, tenure doesn’t exist, which is why you can commonly find 3^rd grade material being taught there, assuming the classes have any material at all.

“All efforts would be made to preserve full-time faculty positions, but they wouldn't be guaranteed.”

     Yeah…anyone who thinks anything less than a guarantee is worth much is a fool. Granted, even a guarantee isn’t worth much anymore, since the previous rules were guaranteed, with the only caveat being that they might be changed later, under certain restrictions. They’re changing the rules, and eliminating the restrictions on further changes, and it’s that elimination which ultimately will result in the mass destruction of higher ed.

     I grant that right now it’s all being “discussed,” but hey, it’s my blog. I’ll discuss it again in a few years (or less) when it all becomes reality.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Computer Scientist “Shortage”

By Professor Doom

     Although there is a Ph.D. glut for much of higher education, there is one field where there’s something of a shortage: computer science.  A recent article on Inside Higher Ed highlights the immense cluelessness of the “leaders” which led to this situation, although the author of the article seems to miss this detail:

System Crash

Computer science students on a number of campuses complain that their departments can't meet demand. 

  Many campuses have responded to this shortage by simply closing down their computer science departments, or greatly reducing course offerings so they can’t meet student demand. It’s a strange response, considering our schools otherwise bend over backwards to satisfy student demands, whether it be installing crying closets, building climbing walls and lazy rivers, providing puppies and Play Doh for stressed students…or a host of other silly things.

      But those things all merely require spending a bit of money, as opposed to providing job skills. Doing the actual work of building and keeping a department full of computer science scholars? No way, better to just close it all down, student and job market demands are irrelevant next to the idea of our admins doing work.

Students at Harvey Mudd and Pomona Collegesalso recently have expressed public frustration with what they describe as inadequate administrative responses to the growth of their computer science departments.

      Keep in mind, this shortage has been around for years, and the shortage, such as it is, is simply student demand has risen sharply for this field, while faculty positions have remained flat. The only things that have increased are administrative positions, but none of these very highly paid leaders could see this coming, could make any decisions to change things twenty years ago when it started happening, so that we wouldn’t be at this point today.

Then there is relatively low entry into academe among those computer scientists who do obtain doctorates: just 29 percent, including nonteaching jobs, due to their ability to earn up to five times more in industry on average, according to some estimates.

      So…let’s take a look at this problem. The current advertisement for this faculty position is the following:

 “We’ll pay you 20% of the market salary, and give you a job where you’ll report to a dozen bosses making 5 times as much as you but knowing 5% as much as you, at best. When class sizes get larger increasing your work load, they’ll make even more, but your pay will not change, ever. You’ll have minimal job security, and we’ll replace you just as soon as you train someone who will work for less, or simply fire you without recourse for any number of ridiculous reasons that have nothing to do with your job. Also, there will be mandatory ideological indoctrination.”

     Could this job description be a factor in why Ph.D.’s in this field tend to flee academia? How is it that our leaders in higher ed complain about the shortage rather than actually address why there’s a shortage?

     Ok, I grant that the ideological indoctrination happens in the tech world often enough (Hi Google! Say, does anyone else worry about their tag line of “Don’t be evil”? If I saw a guy walking around mumbling “don’t rape children,” I’d rather worry he’d done something bad to a child. But Google goes around reminding itself to not be evil…), but the above is the job description for a computer science faculty member on most campuses today, and is almost certainly a reason they’ve avoiding campus.

      Now, money is a great equalizer, so if higher ed wanted to fix the shortage, they could just, you know, offer appropriate pay. Too bad faculty pay hasn’t risen anywhere near as much as tuition or administrative pay. To judge by the endless multimillion dollar golden parachutes being awarded in higher ed, the money really is there for an extra $100,000 a year. That’s still much less money than you’ll spend on yet another Vice President of Diversity.

Stanford…the department has lost twice as many faculty members to other opportunities in the last decade as it has in the previous 40 years.

     Even when people come in to serve as faculty, they take a good look at the job situation and say “no.” They leave, and you can bet they don’t come back if they have any choice in the matter. If a job at a top school like Stanford isn’t good enough, maybe admin could ask themselves some questions about what they’ve done to make working conditions in higher ed so vile?

A computer science professor involved in hiring at a liberal arts college who did not want to be identified by name or institution…

     Speaking of working conditions, maybe the culture of fear could be a factor here? I’ve cited dozens of faculty in higher ed who are willing to point out problems in higher ed, provided they’re anonymous—they’re afraid of retaliation from our out-of-control administrative caste. Here we have a computer science professor, and despite the situation in computer science, he’s still terrified to speak openly.

      Really, maybe the working conditions in higher ed right now are a factor.

“In years past, we’ve had hundreds of applications; now it’s tens of applications for a tenure-track job,” 

      Wait. “Tens” of applications? So they can fill the positions, they just don’t have the massive glut like for other subjects. The issue isn’t really lack of supply, then, it’s that our administration of higher ed has simply failed to account for the growth, failed to use their highly self-touted and even more highly self-rewarded “leadership” to open up new faculty positions. Toss in working conditions which cause prospective faculty to eagerly leave even our top schools in favor of anything else, and yes, we have a bit of a problem.

     Ten faculty are enough for a decent department, so any school getting “tens” of applications could fill a department in short order. Trouble is, they’ll come in, realize the working conditions are ridiculous, and leave, and then admin would have to hire a new crew all over again. Admin have no time for that, it would cut into shopping for more lakefront property for themselves.

       The real shortage we have here? We don’t have enough (more likely, any) “leaders” in higher ed willing to do the work of building a department, or creating a less hostile work environment so that people with a choice would stay on campus as opposed to any other job option.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Another Uni Sex Scandal, With Resignations and $Multimillion Parachutes

By Professor Doom

     One of the most infuriating things about higher education is how, when the people at the top are exposed, there are no criminal charges, and they get huge bonuses, even when they resign their positions. Time and again we hand millions over to these “leaders” in higher education, and this situation is so common that it barely makes the news anymore…but I feel the need to highlight it all the same.

Baylor Paid Art Briles $15.1M, Ken Starr $4.5M After Sexual Assault Scandal

--yep, that Ken Starr. It’s weird how political lawyers end up as Poo Bahs.

      Baylor is a decent enough sized university, with some 17,000 students and a billion dollar endowment. I doubt most readers have even heard of it, beyond their football program. Football is something of a blight on higher education for many reasons, not least of which is it’s often responsible for academic and sex scandals. Football also sucks up huge amounts of that student loan money despite football having little impact on anyone’s education, but today it’s about the sex scandals.

      The coach (Art Briles) and Starr didn’t really participate in the scandal directly, which involved sexual assaults by football players. The scandal mostly involved a serial rapist on the football team, with enough victims to generate a 20 year prison sentence, as well as a few other players engaging in rape. Horrible, of course, but let’s talk about the scandal leading to the resignations of the Poo Bah and end of the coach of the university.

      I’ll say it again later, but I want to emphasize: they lost their jobs under a huge cloud. This netted them nearly 20 million dollars in golden parachute money. Ken Starr actually resigned, quit the position, and still received $4.5 million for his role in the scandal. By all means, if any of my gentle readers know of any other jobs where you can quit and receive millions of dollars for doing so, please use the contact form to let me know how I can apply for it so I can change careers immediately. You needn’t worry I’ll hold the position long, of course.

      So how were these “leaders” involved in the scandal? Well, quirks in our laws allow universities considerable leeway in how to investigate allegations of criminal behavior, at least if they happen on campus. So, when the coach and Poo Bah were presented with the knowledge of a football player raping kids on their campus, they did what any responsible leader in higher education, the best we can find to judge by their pay, would do: they covered it up and protected the football player. There’s no reason to let a raped female negatively impact the team’s record, after all.

     In a report released by Sue Ambrose and David Tarrant of the Dallas Morning News, some within the Baylor community criticize Starr for being silent about rape and sexual offenses on school grounds and for how the school puts football above crime victims.

      The allegations of cover-up go on for years, and I’ve only included a snippet above…interested readers can see a timeline here, but there’s enough of a pattern over a long enough period of time that it’s hard to believe the coach and Poo Bah didn’t know what was going on and thus had no reason to take steps to protect their other students at least a little from the kind of people they had on their football team.

      Well, one more snippet from this extensive timeline:

…who sent messages attacking Tracy.^[101] The same day, Randy Cross, a College Football Hall of Fame inductee, voices his disgust for the scandal. He said, "I thought (the NCAA) should have stepped in (and punished Baylor for the sexual-assault scandal). I thought Art Briles should have gotten a show-cause. This whole idea that he can be back in coaching, I think, is an embarrassment. It’s not only that; it’s a travesty to those 17 women that have accused these kids of doing what they did."^[102]

     Hey, I get that some people really love their college football, and that this is the justification our leaders use for covering up crime by the football players…but honest, higher education isn’t supposed to be about protecting rapists and thugs. Our leaders think differently, of course.

      All the leaders in higher education care about is getting the money, the huge sums of money from the student loan scam being a primary source. Only accredited schools can get that money, and so perhaps the accreditor can step in here and say “look, protecting rapists and thugs on your campus should be discouraged, and so we’ll do something about that.” Any luck with that?

Accrediting committee recommends no punishment for Baylor over sexual assault scandal

    The reader might find this shocking, but there are no prescribed penalties for violating any aspect of accreditation. My blog has highlighted this time and again, of course, but bottom line this is why our leaders honestly don’t care about protecting rapists and thugs on their campus. Accreditation doesn’t care, they just want the checks, too.

Briles apologizes for his part in the school’s scandal, saying "I made mistakes. I did wrong, but I'm not doing this trying to make myself feel better for apologizing. I understand I made some mistakes. There was some bad things that went on under my watch. I was the captain of this ship. The captain of the ship goes down with it." ^[81]

^----to clarify, he means “the captain of the ship goes down with a huge golden parachute,” at the risk of mixing metaphors for the sake of honesty.

     Now, to be fair, the coach’s $15 million payout wasn’t due to a resignation, it was to cover the rest of his contract. One might hope that there’s a “for cause” clause in that contract, however. We really, really, need to ask why “the best” people in higher education aren’t smart enough to put prudent clauses in their contracts so they can fire people for protecting thugs and rapists, without awarding millions of dollars like this.

“…part of widespread leadership changes at Baylor following the scandal. Board of Regents chair Richard Willis said in the May 2016 announcement the school was "horrified" by findings from an independent review handled by the Law Firm of Pepper Hamilton…”

--the review has, so far, not been released to the public. Of course.

     We need to understand there’s a whole infrastructure, a completely corrupted infrastructure, which is allowing these sorts of scandals to be everyday events on campus, to take place over a decade or more before any of it comes to light. This isn’t just about the head coach and the Poo Bah, any more than it’s about “a few bad apples” on the football team.

      Make all the leadership changes you want, as long as they’re paid millions for covering up horrible crimes, it won’t make any difference as to what the leaders will do when confronted with horrible crimes.

Grobe…states that Baylor’s issues are common to every school.

--Grobe is another football coach at Baylor.

      Moreover, we need to understand that as long as the people at the top are not penalized, are actually rewarded with millions of dollars for covering up the scandal, and would get absolutely nothing for ripping out the corrupted infrastructure, these scandals will happen, and as the coach hints at above, are almost certainly in progress at many other schools.

      In the meantime, perhaps we could stop the student loan money going to at least the football schools? I mean, if football really is so important that rape is acceptable behavior, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind giving up all that money…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Higher Ed To Lower Standards (More!)

By Professor Doom

     Anyone looking at the numbers realizes, even if the student loan scam continues, higher ed is going to be in big trouble. We’ve overbuilt, massively, to the point that we could, if we put our minds to it, slam every citizen into higher education today.

“98% of our students have been accepted into college!”

--a local principal, proudly announcing the ‘success’ of his high school. According to Leap tests, well below 10% of his high school graduates are at the 9^th grade of proficiency or higher. We should probably ask some questions about how so many kids who are demonstrably not ready for college are nevertheless going to college.

     The only way our overbuilt system can survive is if it continues to grow, continues to suck in every student possible, hopefully right as the kid comes out of high school so that he has as little chance as possible to escape the debt trap our college administrators have laid out for him.

      Our “high school to college” debt trap is reaching ever higher levels of efficiency, but this won’t be good enough. There’s a huge problem dooming most of our schools to the dustbin of history.

       So what’s the problem? Demographics. We simply aren’t “producing” enough kids to sustain our system, much less provide the growth necessary to allow all our deanlings to purchase lakefront property and get million dollar parachutes when they quit (the true purpose of many of our colleges and universities, empirically speaking). All the accounting legerdemain in the world can’t change this reality. The for-profit schools saw this and are doing the intelligent thing: closing up shop or scaling back operations, like University of Phoenix (which has reduced their student rolls by hundreds of thousands). Our state schools can’t do this.

      Standards have already been lowered to the point that much of college work is little different than 9^th grade material; this is perfectly understandable since most high school graduates, over 60%, aren’t ready for college level work.

     The reality of “not enough students” is particularly bad for colleges which still have some vague standards, like standardized tests, which clearly indicate when students have no chance of success at college. How do our arrogant leaders respond to a test giving bad news? Get rid of the test, of course.

     How’s that working out?

New study finds that ending SAT and ACT requirements results in more applications and more diversity -- without any decline in graduation rates.

     It always is amazing how every proposed initiative in education always works, and here we have the benefit of “more diversity.” I really have to ask: where’s the study which says more diversity is a good thing? That aside, let’s take a look at how success is generated:

Just this week, Augsburg University in Minnesota made such a shift. The university's announcement said that the policy had strong faculty support and was seen as likely to boost the diversity of the student body.

 

     “Strong faculty support”? Uh huh. I’m sorry, no faculty says he wants more students so disinterested in academics that they can’t be bothered to demonstrate how skilled they are on a test. That’s just not how it works. The “strong support” comes from the fact any faculty who spoke out against this destructive decision would be fired. That’s today’s higher ed system, after all.

     Similarly, graduation rates don’t need to change, because admin simply tells the faculty, “pass these students or you’re fired.” I remind the gentle reader this is eyewitness testimony on my part, as when I was at a state university, overnight our pass rates went from 50% to 85%, because admin told us that was the new grading policy we were to use. Or else.

     So, yes, we do have a study which says a way to promote growth and diversity is to eliminate more standards. Who wrote this report?

“The report, which generally supports test-optional policies, is by Steve Syverson, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management…”

--Emphasis added, and that’s just the assistant! Honest, just eliminate all administrative positions with overblown titles and higher education will be able to afford to have standards again.

      Once again we have a deanling with a title more than twice as long as his name, and so by my guideline, this position can be safely eliminated and have no impact on education. More accurately, of course, it’s clear these grandiosely titled positions are hurting education, lowering the bar ever further in an education system already scraping the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to get more growth.

      I feel the need to point out this guy is merely the ASSISTANT Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management. Thus there is also a full Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management, and possibly a Chancellor for Enrollment Management…these guys have a support staff, and quite possibly their own administrative palace on campus. Does anyone see a conflict of interest here in them promoting a policy which might get more growth?

     One of the key results of the study:

First-year grades were slightly lower for nonsubmitters, but they ended up highly successful, graduating at equivalent rates or -- at some institutions -- slightly higher rates than did those who submitted test scores. This, the report says, is "the ultimate proof of success."

--emphasis added.

     Wow, “proof”? I can’t help but be very bothered by such strong language from people who should be professional researchers and know no such proof can come from a statistical study. These people are supposed to be experienced in higher education…how is it they have no idea how statistics works, much less how simple administrative fiat could be a factor in these alleged higher graduation rates?

      Like I said, every proposed initiative in higher ed is shown to be successful from studies…studies from people with a severe conflict of interest and no real understanding of how research works.

      I assure the gentle reader, on the basis of this study, other schools will likewise be lowering their standards further. It helps diversity you see, and that’s a good thing. It is known.

    The article I’ve quoted from and the comments sections points out the many issues with this study, and fairly laughs at the conclusion but…this is irrelevant. If a Poo Bah sees this study, he’ll call a mandatory meeting, say “We’re getting rid of admissions standards because it helps diversity. Only RACISTS are against diversity. Is anyone here against diversity?”

      You better believe not a single faculty member will stand up and say he’s against the new proposal, or dare to identify any of the obvious problems with the study. And then another school will announce their “bold” plan to eliminate more standards, using the lack of faculty opposition as “strong support from faculty.”

      Bottom line, however, neither this plan, nor any other plan, will work. Our student base is going to shrink in the upcoming years, because our population of student-aged citizens is shrinking. The only intelligent plan would be start getting rid of all the excess administrative positions and start shrinking our system to something more appropriate to our population.

      Too bad that idea can’t come from an Assistant Vice Chancellor of Student Appeasement, Diversity, and Common Sense Business Ideas, because it would both violate the self-interest which guides all administrative positions, and, more importantly, this is about the only title that doesn’t exist on campus.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

U Of Texas: Masculinity Is A Mental Health Issue

By Professor Doom

     One of the many problems on campus today is how males are targeted to the point of being second class citizens. As faculty, I’ve been warned against giving homework and tests, because these things discourage students…but admin doesn’t understand how creating a climate of hatred against males is discouraging male students from coming to campus (60% of graduates are female for reasons, after all).

      It’s isn’t just the endless “we need more females in STEM” promotions on our campuses, the systemic sexism on our campuses really does make males think they are the problem.

University of Texas to Treat Masculinity as a 'Mental Health' Issue

     To be fair, these sorts of initiations don’t simultaneously come from all departments. There’s usually a specific origin:

The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched a new program to help male students “take control over their gender identity and develop a healthy sense of masculinity.”

--emphasis added.

     I really do remember a time when campuses were all about education and research, and campuses were composed of departments, each focusing on particular academic fields. Today, campuses are spit up into little fiefdoms, each filled with assorted Vice Presidents determined to find something to do; academic departments are now an afterthought, a mere curlicue on the new university mission of supporting the administrative fiefdoms.

     So it is that instead of Pyschology Departments handling this sort of thing, we have “Counseling and Mental Health Centers” doing what no university would consider doing a generation ago.

The program is predicated on a critique of so-called “restrictive masculinity.” Men, the program argues, suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or when they are encouraged to fulfill traditional gender roles, such as being “successful” or “the breadwinner.”

     Seriously, what’s happened to us as a people that being successful, acquiring enough resources to raise a family, are considered bad things, goals which are problematic for a man to pursue? Imagine being raised in a normal home environment where these goals are encouraged, and then coming to campus and being told that what you’ve learned in your family is wrongthink? Having this new point of view given to you by a $150,000 a year Vice President of Man-Hating is going to give a mixed, confusing message to be sure.

Though you might enjoy “taking care of people” or being “active,” MasculinUT warns that many of these attributes are actually dangerous,

     Holy cow. If I were the suspicious sort (though I guess I am), I could interpret the above as saying “you shouldn’t take care of people, let the government do it” and “don’t be active, become a couch potato, sit home and trust your government-supplied news, and get your health care from the government…”. 

   

     Perhaps that’s a bit paranoid, but for thousands of years, it was understood that a proper male did indeed take care of the people he loved, and engaged in rigorous physical activity—a gymnasium was a place both for exercise and intellectual pursuit in the ancient world, after all. Today a gymnasium is just for exercise, and they don’t want males doing even that.

      Why are our universities now teaching the exact opposite of the wisdom humanity accumulated over thousands of years? A healthy body really does contribute to a healthy mind, and we’ve known this for a very long time…but the university is negating this belief, for some reason.

“If you are a male student at UT reading this right now, we hope that learning about this helps you not to feel guilty about having participated in these definitions of masculinity, and instead feel empowered to break the cycle!” the program offers.

     Males need help to not feel guilty? Break the cycle of life which has created the most advanced civilization this planet has ever produced? If we’re really going to reject thousands of years of knowledge, shouldn’t we do so for a good reason beyond “maybe the students aren’t happy with this wisdom”? Seriously, is there nobody on campus cognitively able to question this new initiative?

The program is currently without leadership, but not for long. The school is in the process of hiring a “healthy masculinities coordinator” to run the program…

     Am I truly alone in thinking it ridiculous that “leadership” is defined as “mindlessly following the new narrative”? Is there truly nobody who finds the title “Healthy Masculinities Coordinator” a bit Orwellian in that this coordinator will be promoting the exact opposite of what “healthy masculinity” has meant for thousands of years? Does anyone think maybe this is a strange title to find on a university campus?

While many schools now have similar programs, this appears to be the first run directly out of a Counseling and Mental Health Center.

     As the article a bit too subtly points out, this isn’t just a problem at University of Texas. Many of our schools are now pursuing social engineering, tearing down the foundations which allowed us to build a great society in the past.

There is no evidence that masculinity itself contributes to violence. Universities that run similar programs, such as UNC-Chapel Hill and Northwestern, have admitted that their programming isn’t supported by any evidence.

     Yes, this destroying of the foundations of our culture is unsupported by any evidence…and yet our schools are still doing it. It’s a shame none of our “leaders” in higher education can ask “why?” but allow me to offer a very simple answer.

     Our schools are drowning in fiefdoms filled with very highly paid administrators, far, far, far, more than could ever be justified for the university missions of education and research. These guys have to give themselves a job to do, and they do not care if there’s no reason for it, no evidence indicating their job is necessary. If it turns out what they’re doing is a disaster, that’s a bonus—you’ll just establish another fiefdom to fix the problems created by the anti-masculinity fiefdom.

       And so again I come to the student loan scam, which provides the money for these people who’ve given themselves the job of destroying a system which has created so much wealth it can pay them, exorbitantly, to do it. Just end the student loan scam already.

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