The Worst of Diversity

I know it's a rerun, but I'll never understand how this stuff can go on on campuses without more people than just me calling it out.

A new post will be up soon.

By Professor Doom

     It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’m just not up for listing more of the obvious fixes to higher education that are necessary. It’s the time of year for stories.

     When I first decided to go into academia, decades ago, I was warned by the knowledgeable to be wary of PC (“What’s that?” I asked, being so ignorant, and this was well before "PC" stood for “personal computer”). Political correctness was establishing a stranglehold on campuses, and I was told not to get in the way. It was fairly good advice, although truth be told, most of it was just run-of-the-mill idiocy, which is why I’ve avoided talking about it in the blog. One has to pick battles, after all, and amidst the quintessential fraud and corruption that defines higher education today, simple idiocy just isn’t worth the effort.

     That said, it’s the time of year for stories, and so allow me to share my worst experience with the consequences of political correctness. While it is the worst, it was a mere two years ago (almost to the day), so I make no assertion that this comes from a relatively ignorant past, even as I make apologies for it being the absolute worst I can come up with (the second worst isn’t too far distant, however), and so one shouldn’t take this as typical diversity sludge.

     The faculty were gathered, as it was so often the case, for a mandatory meeting, for a Diversity Training workshop. The speaker was highly esteemed, being a head of some diversity-type department (I’ll avoid naming names here), from some place up north, with over 20 years in diversity-type education, and, of course, a Ph. D. (in the subject of African History, if I recall correctly).

    He began his talk with a question:

“When were there no more European Wars in North America?”

     I’m no historian, but I responded with a cautious “1776,” supposing that with the Declaration of Independence, it would be problematic to define the wars in North America as “European.” I was wrong, and he was quick to inform me:

“No. There were never any wars between the European powers in North America.”

    I really feel that in a room full of educated people, this sort of claim would cause a small riot, if not laughter at the very least. Believing I misunderstood, I responded “Not even between France and England?” Again, my claim was wrong, although I sure seemed to remember an altercation or two.

“France and England didn’t have any wars in North America. Do you know why? Because they united to keep the black man down.”

     One faculty responded with a feeble “I don’t agree,” but I felt the need to inform the supposedly knowledgeable speaker that George Washington’s early military career was working for the British, against the French—I’m no historian, but I know a little (and, apparently, more than the many Educationists I was working with). The esteemed speaker would have none of it, merely repeating himself with emphasis:

“France and England didn’t have any wars in North America because when they got here, they united to keep the black man down. This was how they solved the problems of war, and managed to not bring the European wars to the New World.”

     While through experience I’ve learned not to pay much attention to Diversity nonsense, I actually took a whole page of notes of his gibberish—the mind has a hard time remembering gibberish with precision, and I wanted to be sure that I recalled what he said in detail. For the most part, his grasp of history was simply demented, but I trust the above gives the basic gist of it. His talk wandered, however, to the topic of education in America, and he loudly proclaimed:

 “The US Education system is the best in the world,”

     Again, I was confused at what he could possibly mean, since there is no positive standard by which the US students come out ahead, relative to basically anywhere else in the industrialized world. He explained further:

“It is the best because we have 36,000 institutions.”

     Naturally, I asked him if by “best” he meant “largest”, but nope, he honestly thought the US system is superior to the rest of the world, because size means greatness. This at least explained why he managed to achieve high rank, since administrators also believe “quality” and “size” are equal concepts. The rest of his speech on this topic was the usual “vision for excellence” pablum that make Educationists and fools nod their heads in agreement, so I was fanned by nodding heads for a while.

      At long last, he came to talking about diversity, but it was still mostly the victim-speak that isn’t particularly helpful. He then quoted someone-or-other….

 

     “Diversity without equity is meaningless.”

     I started paying attention again, since this is actually a relevant truth: equity, fairness, is the important thing. Not diversity. Apparently someone told him it was an important quote, but he didn’t understand it:

     “[The quote] means the most important thing the US needs is diversity at all levels.”

     All I could do was write down; if I didn’t have it written down in my own hand, I wouldn’t believe anyone could have such confusion of ideas. This alleged scholar then wandered back to history:

    “Memphis, in North Africa, is the oldest city in the world,” 

     I again foolishly chose to interrupt him, to mention that Sumeria predates Memphis by 1,000 years. Now, I’ll grant archeologists probably have a few things wrong, and I’ve an open mind to alternative interpretations of historical evidence…but there was no evidence provided, he simply repeated himself, doubling down with, and I’m going to break this next quote down into pieces because it’s such a train wreck:

  “When Alexander the Great captured Alexandria,”

     Again, I’m no historian, but I know a thing or two. Alexander the Great was a bit of a megalomaniac, and named many cities after himself…he did this naming after he did the conquering, of course. So, I was confused when the esteemed department head said this. Again the historical evidence says Alexandria wasn’t much before Alexander came there, but this scholar had more to say…

   “When Alexander the Great captured Alexandria, it was called Memphis at the time,”

     This, of course, added more momentary confusion, since “the” Alexandria is located some distance from Memphis. Memphis, incidentally, was something of a holy city in its day, and you really, really, can’t move holy ground (not to mention, the stone temples are really tough to move). But the train wreck continues:

     “When Alexander the Great captured Alexandria, it was called Memphis at the time, he found the Great Library there,”

     Again, the historical evidence makes it pretty clear the Great Library was founded after the city was founded (and likely, well after Alexander’s death)…historians can be wrong, but a claim like this requires evidence, and none beyond confident bluster was provided. I again point out I was very lonely in what was supposed to be a room full of scholars. The train wreck continued:

     “When Alexander the Great captured Alexandria, it was called Memphis at the time, he found the Great Library there, and took the knowledge back to Greece, to form the foundations of Western Civilization.”

    I was in the front row, with what I’m certain was a look of bewildered confusion on my face. I looked around the room, to see mostly nods of agreement. There’s considerable evidence that the Great Library sought texts FROM Greece, rather than the other way around, incidentally.

    Now that he finished the train wreck, I paused from my copying it down. Again, I called him on what he said, making certain that he really was claiming Alexander the Great captured Alexandria. Yes, that’s what he meant, and he doubled down again by repeating Alexandria used to be called Memphis. Truly, he was impervious to input.

     After he gave his “lesson” on history, he asked us:
 

 “How many of you were familiar with this chronology?” 

    Nobody indicated familiarity, which under the circumstances, was understandable. I had to admit, I wasn’t, but I’m also not intimately familiar with other fictional timelines, like the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings histories, either. Again, he provided no evidence; one other faculty asked if there was a book on this, which the scholar cited. To my own shame, I haven’t tracked down the book so I could see with my own eyes that this sort of stuff is passed off as fact.

     The speaker then wandered back into victim-speak, spewing just pure silliness. For what it’s worth, my ancestry doesn’t go anywhere near Sumeria and not much near Greece (but I’m quite willing to accept that the evidence says Plato was from Greece, not Memphis, and that the wheel came from Sumeria, again not Memphis)…my own ancestors were likely conquered and enslaved by the ancient Romans. Stuff happens. By the time the speaker finished up with:

 “Hitler only persecuted the Jews because there were no black people in Germany,”

      I was covering my mouth with both hands, and yes, I was sitting in the front row. There was no reason to point out that Hitler wrote a well known book on the subject, listing his issues. Again, I admit ignorance of much of the book, but I’m pretty sure “skin not dark enough” wasn’t one of his problems with Jews (to be clear, I’m simply addressing contents, or lack therof). Perhaps I’m wrong on this, however.

      Still, it really highlights how little control faculty, real scholars, have over higher education, that someone could spout such unsubstantiated and highly questionable “information” and become head of a department with a successful career in academia. I’m all for overthrowing invalid orthodoxy…but I feel it should be done in a more civilized way than simply shouting down and ignoring other points of view.

     After the talk, one of the more spineless of the sycophants rushed up to shake the speaker's hand.

     For the most part in my blog, I’ve focused on what the corruption of higher education has done to mathematics, and so I include this story both to amuse, and to remind the gentle reader, that the entirety of the system has been devastated. It took nearly thirty years, but I still feel it can be fixed in far less time. I feel the need to point out: the cost for learning this diversity stuff in a college classroom is the same as the cost for learning about advanced calculus, or chemistry, or sexual deviancy. I also want to point out that I was warned for my lack of collegiality during this talk (but keeping my mouth shut was so hard, I really admire the lack of fortitude of my associates in being able to nod their heads in agreement to this stuff).

Good News: There Will Be Fewer Lawyers

By Professor Doom

     The student loan scam hasn’t merely inflated the cost of higher education to the point that many people can’t afford to get a degree without going into debt, it’s also warped the part of the educational system that provides professional degrees.

     Years ago, law school wasn’t just expensive, it was also not easy to get into. Law schools took pride in their graduates’ success on the bar exam, took pride in producing graduates with real ability, and took pride in only admitting the best. Law school was always expensive, because, as a professional school, they had to pay real money to get people with real job skills—it’s not like a typical community college, which focuses on useless skills to teach useless courses, because it’s so much cheaper to hire people for those courses.

     Much like with what happened in the rest of higher education, administration realized “Hey, if we got rid of standards and didn’t care about quality, we could rake in far more off the student loan scam than we can get by being a legitimate school.”

    And so, open enrollment became as much a standard at law schools as it did with community college. Fair enough, I suppose, but it eventually got out that the result of open enrollment was a tremendous screwing-over of students: there simply was no need for so many people with law degrees. And so, much like with the rest of higher education, there were many graduates that had no way to get jobs with their degrees…with the important exception that law degrees are much, much, more expensive. This led to students with truly horrific student loan debts, and no way to pay them.

     Now that word’s out about what a waste of time most law degrees are, students are not applying. It’s not just art students who are realizing that going deep into debt for worthless degrees is a bad idea. Law school enrollments are dropping:

This means we can estimate this fall's entering class will be roughly around 35,300 1Ls, down from 52,500 just five years ago.  Somewhere between 85% to 90% of those people will end up graduating, depending on various assumptions (Given the radical slashing of admissions standards at so many schools, it seems reasonable to assume drop out/flunk out rates may rise.

     Now, the legitimate schools aren’t bearing the brunt of this: being legitimate really is an advantage, even with the immense pressure of the student loan scam destroying higher education.

    Accreditation is just as bogus for law schools as for the rest of higher education, so allow me to look at particularly unpleasant law school, to further illustrate the parallels:

I guess firing 70 of your 119 full-time faculty in one fell swoop in the kind of gust of creative destruction that’s necessary to protect those precious non-profit margins, that allowed the school to pay President for Life LeDuc $675,626 last year, and kicking $373,550 to the school’s founder Thomas Brennan, for what the school estimated to be five hours of “work” per week, while still maintaining a net surplus of $2.5 million in revenues over expenses. 

     Hmm, huge sums go to the untouchable caste of administration, while full time workers eliminated, to be replaced with part time workers. Nope, not much difference there between that and what’s going on at our state universities and other institutions.

    The bogus schools are hurting, not that anyone should care:

The biggest of all the scam factories, Thomas Cooley, fired nearly 60% of its faculty last August. Thomas Jefferson had to give its shiny new building to its creditors, and limps along on life support. Hamline is effectively ceasing to exist, after a face-saving (for its parent university) "merger" with William Mitchell, that will leave the combined institutions with the same number of law students Mitchell had last year.  And after a hurricane of bad publicity, the Infilaw scamsters are on the run.

     So, good news: in the years to come, there will be fewer lawyers. Unfortunately, it’ll take years before the glut of lawyers is fully resolved, but at least there’s hope.

     In a similar vein, we’re starting to finally see a trend towards people waking up and realizing that taking on huge debts for worthless professional degrees is a bad idea. At the undergraduate level, there has been a slight reduction in student enrollments the last few years, although you certainly can’t tell it from all the construction on campus…nor will you see administrator pay being reduced. It’s another weird thing about higher education. When enrollments go up, administrators make more, and when enrollments go down, faculty get fired.

     So in the near term, we’ll have fewer lawyers, but soon we’ll have fewer BA Psychology Degrees, fewer BA Gender Studies Degrees, and quite a few other fields that, while of use, have been grossly overproduced in the administrative quest for growth, growth, growth.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

     

Why Not Default on Student Loans?

By Professor Doom

     Roughly twice as many people have student loans as there are college students. It’s tough to list all the reasons for this, but I’ll hit the highlights:

     First, higher education is, in many cases, wildly overpriced. Second, most jobs you can get with “generic” degrees can’t pay off the loans. Third, most loans are for four years, while degrees take six years—it’s easy to spend years in college and exit with nothing to show for it but debt and no degree to help pay it off. Fourth, loans go to anyone who can click a box saying he wants a degree, so lots of folks are being loaned money for no good reason. Fifth, college administrators, eager for growth, have annihilated standards so that it’s easy to get into a college, so more people are taking loans. Sixth, accreditation, which is supposed to restrict loans just to schools which are interested in education, has been subverted by college administrators so that there’s nothing stopping a bogus school from raking in billions in loan money. Those are just off the top of my head, but then there’s the big reason:

     No matter how desperate your financial situation, the only way to be rid of your student loans is to pay them off. There’s no bankruptcy protection against student loans. Pay them off, or keep paying what you can until the day you die. These loans are forever, for many people lured into this system.

     That said, there are a plethora of loan deferment programs that let you put off when you need to start paying, or to pay less now for bigger payments later, or whatever. However, many people see their minimum wage (or less) paychecks, look at the expected monthly payment on the student loan for the education that is only worth minimum wage, and say “this is ridiculous, I’m just not going to pay.”

     A recent NY Times piece discusses one person’s journey into deciding to simply default on the loans:

Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face…

I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.

     Now, I’m not necessarily recommending this. “This’ll ruin your credit,” is the most common threat against defaulting, but I’m not so sure this is much of a penalty. If you have a massive debt hanging over your head, your credit isn’t that good anyway. At least, in theory.

      There’s a moral issue to not repaying loans, but student loans are a very different matter than other consumer loans. Much like cigarette addiction, these loans are generally inflicted on the young, who simply don’t realize what they’re signing up for. Just as tobacco company executives are viewed with disdain for targeting children for their product, so too can a case be made that college administration’s efforts to trap people into these inescapable debts is also immoral. In many cases the infliction of these loans has been unconscionable, so defaulting on these loans is no more immoral than being addicted to smoking.

     The person who’s decided to default, by the way, is no kid, and has made the decision to give up on paying off the loans after careful deliberation:

Forty years after I took out my first student loan, and 30 years after getting my last, the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance. My mother, who co-signed some of the loans, is dead. The banks that made them have all gone under. I doubt that anyone can even find the promissory notes. The accrued interest, combined with the collection agencies’ opulent fees, is now several times the principal.

     Imagine, 40 years of trying to pay off debts for an education that very clearly hasn’t paid off. Please, gentle reader, remember this author’s story the next time another administrator smugly assures that “education is worth” the price he’s charging for it. 40 years of paying, and this guy is deeper in debt than when he started.

     And now here comes advice for defaulting on student loans:

You might want to follow these steps: Get as many credit cards as you can before your credit is ruined. Find a stable housing situation. Pay your rent on time so that you have a good record in that area when you do have to move. Live with or marry someone with good credit…

    It is, indeed, easy to get credit cards when your credit is good, and hard to lose credit cards (as long as you keep making payments) even if your credit is bad. Sponging off someone else’s good credit is not exactly good advice—yeah, it works, but finding that someone can be problematic, and I think you’d be better off finding someone who makes you happy than someone with a good credit rating.

     For what it’s worth, credit card debt can be cleared via bankruptcy. If you wish to ruin your credit in a different way, and your student loan debt isn’t too hideous, you could max out your credit card payments in cash advances, and use that money to pay off the debt…then go bankrupt. This would be immoral, of course, essentially robbing a legitimate Peter (the credit card company, and it’s only legitimate compared to higher education) to pay an illegitimate Paul (whatever school suckered you into debt), so a bad idea all around. I don’t recommend this at all, but mention just to discuss how queer student debt is different than other debt…money is money, right? Apparently not.

     Anyway, the author’s advice is good. If you intend to not pay the monsters that got you into student loan debt, make sure the human beings that you intend to deal with have some reason to think you can be trusted.

The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent. The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game.

     Again, this is an excellent point: subprime lending for the big purchases of life (house and car) is so common now that it’s not that big a deal if you just walk away from the student subprime lending. You’ll still have a decent chance for the big purchases, if you really want more debt.

     Imagine if everyone defaulted on student loans, would it be so bad? Yes, the banks would lose 1.2 trillion dollars…but the banks have already been bailed out for many multiples of that, our own Federal government throws away that much money every few months now, and this time around the money would be spent on its own citizens for a change. With 40 million loan defaulters, I suspect an entire industry of lenders would spring up specializing in “we loan money to people that were screwed over by unscrupulous higher education administrators.”

      I just don’t see this as being a big deal, not compared to the wide variety of other credit defaults that go on every day in our deeply economically disturbed world. Heck, maybe some of the loan money would be “claw backed” from the administrators who stole it…but I reckon that’s just crazy talk.

     The author agrees:

The collection agencies retained by the Department of Education would be exposed as the greedy vultures that they are. The government would get out of the loan-making and the loan-enforcement business. Congress might even explore a special, universal education tax that would make higher education affordable.

There would be a national shaming of colleges and universities for charging soaring tuition rates that are reaching lunatic levels. 

     I suspect that higher education would be more affordable if government weren’t involved at all (higher education was more affordable before government got involved, after all). I don’t know if there’d be a national shaming of higher education…but there should be.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

A Philosopher Looks At Today’s Higher Education

By Professor Doom

     I’ve certainly given the mathematician’s perspective on what’s going on higher education, and I’ve also provided the English professor’s perspective, and the Liberal professor’s perspective. Despite our disparate fields, we’ve independently come to the same conclusions regarding higher education today.

      A philosopher has provided his viewpoints as well, in a post entitled “The University as a Money Funnel.” One can guess from the title what he has to say, but it’s interesting that a philosopher, not exactly a practitioner of what is considered a seriously pragmatic discipline, still manages to connect the dots on the reality of higher education today.

      Let’s take a look at what he has to say:

What seems to be the major factor contributing to costs is the ever-expanding administrative class at universities. This expansion occurs in terms of both individual salaries and overall numbers. From 2000 to 2010 the median salary for the top public university administrators increased by 39%. The top administrators, the university presidents, enjoyed a 75% increase. In stark contrast, the salaries for full-time professors increased by almost 19%.

     While can read from that last line that faculty pay has been increasing, realize that 19%, over the course of a decade, doesn’t keep up with inflation. Realize also he’s qualified that increase with “full time professors,” a dying breed on campus, and not the ones doing most of the teaching. While professors are dying out, administrators are thriving.

     The philosopher considers this:

From 1978 to 2014 administrative positions skyrocketed 369%. This time period also marked a major shift in the nature of faculty. The number of part-time faculty (the analogues of temp workers in the corporate world) increased by 286%. The use of adjuncts is justified on the grounds that doing so saves money. While adjunct salaries vary, the typical adjunct makes $20,000-25,000.

     Realistically, then, if by “professor” one means “teacher at a college or university,” then the professor pay has dropped, while administrative pay has skyrocketed.

     Full-time professors are undesirable now:

There was also a push to reduce (and eliminate) tenured positions which resulted in an increase in full time, non-tenure earning positions by 259%. Full time tenure and tenure-track positions increased by only 23%. Ohio State University provides an excellent (or awful) example of this A&A Strategy: the majority of those hired by OSU were Adjuncts and Administrators. To be specific, OSU hired 498 adjunct instructors and 670 administrators. 45 full-time, permanent faculty were hired.

     To put those numbers in perspective, for every full time professor hired, there are 15 administrators hired, the latter being individually paid much more than the professor. There were also 11 adjuncts hired, for a tiny fraction of the cost. The philosopher doesn’t delve into details, but many of these professor positions are filled not through academic need (that’s what adjuncts are for), but as political patronage.

      One can hardly fault the philosopher’s pragmatism here: he’s clearly looking at the numbers, and coming to the same result any other decent faculty member can reach:

Someone more cynical than I might note that the university seems to no longer have education as its primary function. Rather, it is crafted to funnel money from the “customer” and the tax payer (in the form of federal student aid) to the top while minimizing pay for those who do the actual work.

     No, it’s not cynicism, it’s empiricism. It’s a simple fact that the university now spends most of its money on the administrative caste, while leaving the students and faculty—the ones that would be important if education were on the agenda—to pay the price.

     I’m fairly ambivalent about tenure, since I see much potential for abuse there. While philosophers tend to be far more ambivalent about things than mathematicians, curiously, this philosopher sees only advantages of tenure:

Tenure has been a target in recent years because tenure provides faculty with protection against being fired without cause (tenured faculty can be fired—it is not a magic shield). This is regarded by some as a problem for a variety of reasons. One is that tenured faculty cannot be let go simply to replace them with vastly lower paid adjuncts. This, obviously enough, means less money flowing from students and the state to administrators. Another is that the protection provided by tenure allows a faculty member to be critical of what is happening to the university system of the United States without running a high risk of simply being let go as a trouble maker.

     This is indeed the truth: only the tenured faculty feel like they can speak up now. I was at one university, over half a century old, that had only one tenured professor in a large department, and he did speak up, did try to stop the debasement of the state institution into little more than a trap to lure in students, suck their loan money away, and spit them back out.

     Tenure protected him from being fired, it is true, but the nonstop harassment by admin, combined with constant “betrayals” from the non-permanent faculty who had little choice but to betray him or be fired, wore him down. So while tenure does protect, a little, from the debasement of higher education, tenured faculty are such a minority now that this benefit is questionable.

     On the other hand, I totally understand, and agree with the philosopher, tenure is a problem for the plundering, mercenary caste of administration who rules now: every dollar that goes into a tenured faculty’s pocket is a dollar that’s not going into administration’s pocket, and that, from their point of view, is bad.

     Of course, the philosopher may have a good reason for approving of tenure:

As you might guess, I am a tenured full-professor. So, I can use my freedom of speech with rather less fear of being fired. I also enjoy the dubious protection afforded by the fact that people rarely take philosophers seriously.

      Careful, professor, I’ve documented and seen plenty of administrative retaliation against tenured faculty for daring to speak out. Even if administration doesn’t take you seriously (not that I’m implying that they are necessarily people), they’re more than petty enough to do you all the harm they can, as a show of power if nothing else.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com