by Professor Doom
Our schools are bloated down with administrative staff. They call themselves "leaders" in education but having worked closely with quite a few of them, having studied carefully the true nature of their jobs...I've often wondered what, exactly, they did to justify their very high paying and extremely cushy jobs.
Primarily what they did is acquire an advanced degree, a doctorate, in "Educational Leadership." Being curious how people could get such a degree and still know basically nothing of any field of academia and only marginally capable of doing anything useful, I enrolled in a doctoral program; I document an 8000 level course, the most advanced material in this "field," in this blog and in my book.
Today I'll mention an old story, demonstrating that you don't even need a college degree, much less an advanced (and bogus) administrative degree, to have a long career as an administrator in higher ed:
Dean at M.I.T. Resigns, Ending a 28-Year Lie
I emphasize this happened at MIT, a top school by any measure of the word, and not a for-profit (which commonly has very questionable people running them), or even a typically poorly run state community college.
Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.
That one snippet has much in it of interest.
The most important: it's very, very, easy to lie about your degree and get away with it. How does an employer check you actually have a degree? Well, he'd have to take the time to track down the school, possibly pay a fee...when jobs have hundreds of applicants, that's just not going to happen. Not even at a prestigious school like MIT, apparently.
Incidentally, accreditation charges a high fee to check on the degrees of faculty, but not of admin (a holdover from the days when admin WAS faculty, and so there was no need to clarify).
How easy it is to fake a degree is particularly good to know when your degree is utterly irrelevant to your job. This is increasingly common in the modern world. Granted, college degrees were never intended to be job training, this "application" of a degree has only become mandatory after government tried to help defray the cost of degrees with easy loans, and the commensurate (and very predictable) dramatic rise in tuition thereby. Even supposed "jobs training" degrees are questionable in many fields; it takes 10 years to set up a degree program, and in fast-changing fields (eg, anything relating to computers, which is most fields today), 10 year old information is nearly useless.
In this case, it's clear administrative degrees (or any degree) is completely useless to working as an administrator in higher ed.
The above Dean was Dean of Admissions, she was influential in rejecting the many applications MIT received. She didn't even have a college degree, had almost no direct experience in college coursework, and yet was in the position of determining the caliber of the coursework of kids applying to MIT.
Time and again my career had to allow people with no understanding of any mathematics, freely willing to admit it even, sit in judgment over my ability to teach mathematics, over my ability to write mathematics. That they were getting paid three to ten times as much as me to perform a job duty they were utterly unqualified to perform didn't bother them...and I was in no position to explain to them what was happening was wrong.
Keep in mind our schools are now staffed with legions of people like this, who, clearly have no business doing what they do. Diversity Institutes in particular are filled with extremely highly paid people who quite possibly don't even have a degree, or have a degree requiring little, if any, knowledge to attain.
Before the student loan scam, administrative positions were no big deal on campus, your dean was likely to just be the chemistry professor doing the job for an extra thousand bucks or so. These never were full time jobs, really, and weren't considered as such. Now they're full-timers, earning ridiculous bucks and working in palaces dedicated to their comfort. Has the professionalization of college administrators (and the de-professionalization of faculty) helped education? No.
As this MIT dean shows, anyone can do that job, and do it well.
On the campus, where Ms. Jones was widely admired, almost revered, for her humor, outspokenness and common sense, students and faculty members alike seemed both saddened and shocked.
It's really wrong how so many jobs "require" a college degree, even though the working of the job requires no such knowledge. Yes, she lied about her education but...she could do the job well. I strongly suspect the real reason they got rid of her (technically, she resigned) is because keeping her would be admitting their own jobs don't require degrees or ridiculously high pay, either.
It's even more wrong that our schools are run by people who know full well the "educations" they sell so exorbitantly is all too often of no value whatsoever.
www.professorconfess.blogspot.com
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Friday, October 18, 2019
Trump To End Obama’s Anti-White Campus Policies
By Professor Doom
It’s really
interesting just how much changed during the Obama era, from health insurance
to “acceptable” corruption like Biden, to campus policies.
One such policy
concerned encouragement of colleges to admit students strictly based on
“Diversity” concerns, so that more “minorities” would be admitted even if,
purely based on academics, other students were more deserving. I put “minority”
in quotes because Asians never benefit from this, despite being as much, or
more, of a minority in many schools.
Like so many Obama
policies, Trump seems determined to reverse it:
The article I’ve
linked to above has a helpful chart showing academic readiness for Michigan in
various subjects, broken down by what we refer to as “race”:
--Like I said, Asians really get the short end
of the stick by not getting “minority” status.
I remind the gentle reader that roughly 70% of high school graduates
immediately move on to college. If colleges were really operating honestly,
this high a percentage could not be possible.
According to the report, the Trump administration argues that the 2011
and 2016 Obama guidelines—which give universities the right to select black and
Hispanic applicants with lower scores before whites with similar or higher
scores—serve to “mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative
action are simpler to achieve than the law allows.”
I must also point out that these racist policies are not really helping
the supposedly disadvantaged among us. Around 50,000,000 have student loans
now, loans which cannot be paid off by students who went to college despite
having little academic ability at best. The phrase “Democratic Plantation”
exists for a reason, as this policy (among many others) really seems to exist
to trap kids into a form of slavery, in this case debt slavery.
Of course, the lower scores are merely a
reflection of racial differences in IQ and ability, and have nothing to do with
“white racism,” as the fact that many Asians in America score as high, if not
higher, than whites, and they are also excluded from the “affirmative action”
program even though they are not white.
Not many sites dare to say things like the above, as it contradicts the
narrative that anything besides racism could possibly be responsible. Asians
spend far more time studying, after all, so there is an explanation here beyond
the ever-so-contentious “intelligence.”
Asians, incidentally, have been fighting the racist admissions policies,
especially at top tier schools. It’s something of a tough lawsuit, but a
plausible one since Obama’s policies contradict established law:
In fact, the Justice Department has recently been
investigating a complaint by more than 60 “Asian-American” organizations that
say Harvard University’s policies are discriminatory because they limit the
acceptance of Asian students on precisely this basis.
The Justice Department joined Students for Fair Admissions, the
group behind the case, which has urged the disclosure of “powerful” evidence
showing that Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard is violating Title VI of
the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the
basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving
federal financial assistance.
I wish them luck in their case, but it’s a distraction. The question for
me isn’t Obama’s policy per se, but why didn’t our schools respond with outrage
at being encouraged to violate the Civil Rights Act? The primary answer as I
see it is the “leaders” of our system saw this as an opportunity to grow, grow,
grow, the schools some more—at the expense of saddling certain minorities with
crushing debt.
The
Supreme Court most recently addressed affirmative action admissions policies
in a 2016 case, voting 4 to 3 to uphold what it called a “race-conscious”
program at the University of Texas at Austin—but which was in fact just another
anti-white program.
That’s a narrow, narrow, victory for racism…I can see why a certain
party is very concerned at the change in make-up of our Supreme Court.
Another odd trend in higher education (and daresay the media) is the
pro-Islam movement. Trump seems to be working to end that as well:
Now, I’ve nothing against Islam any more than I have what’s being
defined as “minorities,” but it’s clear something fishy is going on here:
According to
the Department of Education, the program offers very few, “if any,”
programs focused on the historic discrimination against religious
minorities in the Middle East, and lacks balance, focusing on the “positive
aspects of Islam” while having an “absolute absence” of a similar focus on the
positive aspects of Christianity and Judaism.
Much
as I noted courses on Marxism focus on the utopian promises while
“de-emphasizing” (an understatement) any discussion of what invariably happens
under Marxist regimes, it seems a similar modus operandi is in effect here. Of
course, I again wonder how such one-sided discussion became part of an
education (as opposed to indoctrination).
That
said, I’m not real wild about government offering direction on how things
should be taught. The protest against government interference here, which I
would normally support, tells me that Trump’s administration has the right of
it, as much as I hate making such an admission:
Henry Reichman, the chairman
of a committee on academic freedom for the American Association of University
Professors, reacted to the Education Department’s letter by referring to it as,
ironically, “political correctness” enacted by the “right-wing.”
“Is the government now going
to judge funding programs based on the opinions of instructors or the approach
of each course?” asked Reichman. “The odor of right wing political
correctness that comes through this definitely could have a chilling effect.”
Oh,
stop being coy here, just call him a NAZI and be done with it. There’s an
informal rule that all internet arguments eventually devolve into one side
calling the other a nazi. An important corollary to that rule is that whosoever
cries NAZI first automatically loses the argument.
I
trust that soon the rule, and the key corollary, will soon be extended to the
cry of “right wing” as well. It can’t happen soon enough for me.
The
key issue here is taxpayer dollars are being blown on “education” into a system
which taxpayers themselves don’t want. If Trump can indeed shut this down, this
gives hope that perhaps, someday, student loan money won’t continue to flow to
schools far more interested in indoctrination than education. This, too, can’t
happen soon enough for me.
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