Poo Bah’s Home For Sale

By Professor Doom

     It really is interesting how the other half lives, particularly when it comes to the Poo Bahs who rule over our institutions. Their lives are just so…different. I worry about losing my job, because that would be a major problem for me. 

      I want to move closer to my university, but it’s a major risk: I’m not exactly paid enough to buy a house near the place, so if I lose my job soon after moving, I’ll be really hurt, financially.  It’s a big gamble.

      Poo Bahs don’t worry about such mundane things. I’ve mentioned before how, when a Poo Bah is fired, he gets a fat check no matter how horrible he or she did the job. Over the course of even a wildly incompetent career, a Poo Bah can rake in a $1,000,000 or more just by getting fired repeatedly.

      But that’s not why Poo Bahs don’t worry about buying a house, because the institution actually provides a house for them. I’ve been to administrative palaces, and these residences are magnificent. I grant that I’m not much for interior decorating, my personal style is basically “late 20^th century cardboard box” but the interior (and exterior) of an administrative mansion is gorgeous. The reason why these amazing homes have such beautiful decoration is because, like the house, the Poo Bah doesn’t actually pay for it.

      As luck would have it, a Poo Bah’s residence is for sale. Let’s look at some of the features these guys get, courtesy of the tax dollars provided via the student loan scam:

The 7,600-square-foot home…

     Wow. Every house/apartment I’ve lived in my entire life, put together, doesn’t add up to that square footage. Perhaps I haven’t moved around as much as others, but that’s one huge house. The decadence continues:

five bedrooms, six bathrooms, two half-baths…

      What is wrong with these people? Have any of my gentle readers ever lived in a place with more bathrooms than bedrooms, and two half-baths to share? To be in a house where half a dozen people can simultaneously take individual showers is pretty nuts. 

     Why is the house on sale? Well, the Poo Bah got into a bit of a scandal, seeing as the university blew nearly $1,000,000 on renovations of the palace. Goodness, I have something of an imagination, but I’m hard pressed to think of how to spend that kind of money, just on decorations. If I ruled over a university and had that much of the university’s money to blow on whatever I wanted, I’d have spent it on scholarships and continued to use a cardboard box as a coffee table….there I go again, thinking like an educator, it’s probably why I’ll never be a Poo Bah.

     One strange decoration drew particular ire:

A $556 olive jar in Scarborough's bedroom became a flashpoint for students and employees upset at the cost of renovations at a time when 161 employees lost their jobs.

      The olive jar is actually a planter (so no actual olives—I could see the cost justified if filled with olives, I guess). The planter is dun and not covered in gold foil or anything. I’ve seen the like at Wal-Mart for around 1/10 of the price…and I still can’t justify spending my own money on such a thing. I get by with cardboard boxes well enough.

      Anyway, the scandal of tossing such a huge sum of money away while over a hundred employees had to be fired for lack of money, among other issues, caused the Poo Bah to resign in disgrace, but no, the gentle readers need not feel much in the way of pity. As always, a golden parachute awaits the Poo Bah:

a contractual buyout of about a year's salary - $450,000. 

      Hey, want to be ticked off some more? That $450,000 award for being fired comes after less than two years of “service.” It must be so sweet living the lives of the 1%. I’ve put a decade into an institution and got nothing on the way out, and I suspect many of my readers get the same treatment. Did I mention this is at a public university? Our students are going into debt for this.

      As Poo Bah you get the use of a free house, luxuriously renovated, and a half-million dollar check when you’re fired. Just do that every two years, and you’d be pretty set after a handful of years, right?

     Once a Poo Bah moves out, a new Poo Bah comes in. Mercifully, this institution did things a bit differently:

This time around, the school has not hired a search firm, and it also hadn’t started a national search,

     It’s amazing how things work for these guys. The university actually hires a search firm (paying tens of thousands of dollars) to get candidates, and makes a national search to find “the right person.” After the list of names is put together, a bunch of 6-figure administrators spend a great deal of time in interviews and parties deciding who will be the best. Then the new Poo Bah is anointed.

       And time and again, these guys get fired after a handful of years, grabbing a golden parachute on the way out. 

      The university this time decided to be clever (amazing!) and hire someone besides another wandering plunderer who’ll ride off in a few years, saddlebags stuffed with loot. This time they decided to pick someone from inside the institution. I hope it works out; at least there’s some reason to believe it’ll be someone who actually cares a little for the place.

     Too bad most administrative positions aren’t normally chosen so sanely.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

25% Of College Students on (Legal) Drugs

By Professor Doom

     “Are you on drugs?”

--common response to an individual exhibiting strange behavior. It seems a fair question to ask most students on campus today.

     Every day we get to see another example of insanity on campus, and while I usually blame it on the student loan scam, another explanation comes to mind:

More than 25 percent of college students have been diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition within the past year.

     Wow! Please understand, when you go to these kinds of doctors (more accurately called “drug dealers”), the primary thing they’re going to do is give you a prescription for drugs. It’s not complicated—these drugs are almost certainly addictive, so prescribing these drugs is a great way to make a lifelong customer. Many of my students have told me of how they jump through hoop after hoop to get “their” drugs that they “need,” whether it be Adderall, Paxil, Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin…or a host of others.

      So, yes, if 25% of our college students have been diagnosed for a mental health condition, then they’ve almost certainly taken drugs that (supposedly) treat that condition. Does anyone else think something is very wrong here? 50 years ago, these drugs didn’t exist. Back then, did we honestly lose 25% of our population to mental illness because we didn’t have these drugs? If these drugs are truly necessary at this level, how did we not notice 25% of our population consistently going bonkers before the drugs were invented?

     The report I’m snipping from has a bunch of little cited factoids, but just one more for now:

Almost 73 percent of students living with a mental health condition experienced a mental health crisis on campus

      I concede 20ish is a stressful time…but I really wish we gave our kids better guidance than “go see a doctor and take drugs for it.” Allow me to digress a moment with a couple of short anecdotes.

Student: (clunk)

      One time I was passing out algebra tests, and a student just passed out as I handed it to her. She was most petite, you could have given her cement shoes and she still wouldn’t have weighed much past 100 lbs. The problem was, she’d just donated blood to the bloodmobile on campus (in violation of their donation guidelines). The first thing she said when she came to her senses?

Student: “But I drank my Slim-Fast this morning!”

     I don’t think she needs drugs, and I don’t think the drugs she was taking was helping (and for what it’s worth, I never had much luck with Slim-Fast, I got up to 6 of those shakes a day and still never lost a pound).

      Another quick anecdote from me passing out tests, in vector calculus:

Student: (runs away, in tears)

     I thought I’d be up for the Math Professor Hall of Fame for breaking a student so quickly…she apologized later, it was some personal problem that just happened at a bad time, relative to test day. I doubt she went on drugs over it, and sure hope not.

     The main problem I have with all these drugs being passed out, to 25% of our students (and by extension, a like amount of our population) is they go on the drugs for life. I know plenty of people who take these drugs (because, hey, I know plenty of people), and I think I know exactly one person who’s managed to get off them—and I’m being optimistic.

       So, what are these drugs for, anyway?

Source.

     So, depression is the primary thing being treated. I sure don’t want people to be sad, of course I want them to be happy. Maybe it’s a valid solution is to get 25% or more of the population addicted to drugs…it might be a fair price to pay for happiness, I admit.

      Now, I’m very suspicious about the pharmaceutical industry, I really don’t think many of these drugs are as efficacious as claimed. I mean, I know they’re addictive, I know they have side effects, so it’s possible they’re not utterly useless, and might be helpful. That said, I know how trivial it is to jigger the numbers in a statistical study to show a drug is powerful…so I know it’s trivial to make a completely ineffectual drug look like it’s good for something. With such huge profit margins on these drugs, I see a motive to get lots of people addicted to them.

      I wonder if I can use statistics to show these drugs are useless?

     Hmm, we’ve been passing out these pills for decades, and mostly for depression. Hey, what symptom of depression is impossible to hide, and really hard to bury with statistics? Suicide. It’s hard to fake being alive when you’re dead, and deaths have to show up somewhere. Hmm, don’t we track suicide rates? Yes, we track them very carefully.

      What have the suicide rates been like for 15 years of hardcore drugging of our population, mostly for depression?

From 1999 to 2014, suicide rates in the United States rose among most age groups. Men and women from 45 to 64 had a sharp increase. Rates fell among those age 75 and older.

     Only one ethnic group experienced a decent decline in the above study: black men. That, unsurprisingly is not a dominant group on campus, and, I suspect, not a group likely to go to get drugs from a psychiatrist.

     Now, studies are trying to spin the huge psychiatric drug problem of our students in the obvious way: to say we need to set up more fiefdoms to track and care for our students’ mental health. 

     Rubbish.

     I don’t give a damn about yet another peer reviewed study showing that these pharmaceuticals are actually useful for depression. There have been plenty of “independent” studies showing these drugs are worthless…the people doing such studies are inevitably attacked, and discounted because “they have an axe to grind” with the pharmaceutical industry.

     I’m certainly no doctor, but it seems quite obvious to me that if the drugs we’re giving to prevent suicide are empirically leading to an increase in suicide…we should stop using those drugs, and we should strongly, strongly, question whether the drugs are doing more good than harm.

      Instead, the response to strong evidence we’re addicting 25% of our kids to useless (at best) drugs is “we should set up more fiefdoms to take care of our drug addicts on campus.” Why not instead ask some questions about these drugs, in light of the easily available evidence?

      Even more importantly, why don’t any of the people in power ask this question?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com