Racist Banana = Spend $121,000,000 On Diversity

By Professor Doom

    

     The student loan scam had led to a deluge of money raining down on our campuses. There seems to be nothing stopping our leaders in higher ed from pouring that money on a wide array of useless expenditures.

      I know, Social Justice Warrior lunatics have taken control of many of our campuses and they want that money spent on their ideology but…sometimes I wonder if the emphasis on faux “Diversity” is just being used as a cover to splash more money into administrative pockets.

      A recent incident at American University demonstrates what I’m talking about:

American University says bananas are racist threats, launches police investigation

     The link above has pictures, but the story above basically says some chucklehead is hanging bananas from “nooses” (I’m serious, that’s the word they use) on campus, and it’s being taken as a racial incident. I really feel the need to point out how most of these RACIST cases are just hoaxes, perpetrated by the very people who are claiming to be “oppressed” by such things as bananas. Because they’re hoaxes, admin sees to it that they don’t spend much time in the news (as increased scrutiny endangers the hoax being revealed). It’s important to understand these hoaxes are to admin’s benefit, and they’ll get rewarded with millions of student loan money for “addressing” the “problem.”

…telling students to get angry about a murky incident – and perhaps renew their racial demands of the administration – but not pay too much attention if American hides the results of its investigation.

     A clown hangs bananas and admin buries the investigation, all the while screaming about how they have a problem with racism. How shall they ever deal with this horrid crime of suspended fruit?

University to spend $121 million on diversity efforts – and maybe more in two years

     Wow, $121,000,000 because a banana is racist. Imagine if, instead of pissing away this money on several dozen Vice Presidents of Diversity, each with another dozen support staff, and a glorious block of palaces housing it all, the university spent that money on scholarships for a roughly 20,000 students?

      There I go, thinking like an educator. Instead of helping education, the school will spend the money on a stupid Vision For Excellence plan:

The private university in Washington, D.C., plans to shell out $121 million in the next two years on its “Plan for Inclusive Excellence.”

--the link doesn’t seem to work. Just as well, I’ve killed way too many brain cells examining these plans.

     One big part of the plan is to rip out more of the “General Education” requirement that used to be part of an education. Instead of students learning something academic like mathematics or history, what will they get instead?

That includes a mandatory full-year course for all freshmen starting this fall, The American University Experience.

     Holy navel gazing! A year of courses with the university’s name in the title! I bet you’re curious what will go on in this garbage scholarly course, so let’s follow the link and see.

The American University Experience (AUx) is a full-year graded General Education course specially designed for students transitioning into their first year of college at AU. AUx will become a mandatory course for all first-year students in the fall of 2018 as part of the new AU Core Curriculum.

--emphasis added.

     I often use the word “lunatics” after the word “Leftist,” but this probably isn’t fair. They know their ideas are terrible and no sane person would follow them, which is why once they have power, they make following their rules mandatory.

     Yes, it’s a bit hypocritical of me to criticize this new course’s mandatory requirement, since often students have mandatory math classes to take…but we’ve watered down the mandatory math courses to the 9^th grade level. I think a college graduate should master the content of a 9^th grader, so I rationalize,  I guess, that mandatory mathematics isn’t so bad. What kind of content are we talking about in this insult pair of courses? Let’s examine the first in detail:

The American University Experience I (AUx1): Drawing on many academic disciplines including student development theory,…

     I’ve been in higher education all my life and will be satisfied if I end it doing honorable work there. I’ve never heard of “student development theory” as an “academic discipline.” They’re obviously obfuscating here, and so I can’t help but suspect this is a mandatory indoctrination course. The rest of the course description is the usual student orientation stuff that used to be covered in a few hours, given optionally for all incoming freshman (as opposed to this mandatory four month course). Buried at the very end of the course description:

…and diversity, bias, and privilege.

         So, 90% of the course description is what’s covered in the first week of class, at most, and hidden in the back of the description is what the course is really about, with months of mandatory indoctrination. Yuck.

       I have no hope that the second course in the sequence will be any better:

The American University Experience II (AUx2): Race and social identity-which include but are not limited to ethnicity, gender and sexual expression, class, disability, and religion-are…

     Yuck, again. It’s so funny, courses in a sequence are that way because you can’t possibly get through the second course without mastering the material in the first course. That was back when education was run by scholars. Now it’s run by people who are simply seeking power; there’s nothing in the second course that requires any prior knowledge to understand, just ideological crud.

      Sure looks like a waste of time to me, but naturally the university believes otherwise and already has a study to show it:

Assessment by university researchers demonstrates how AUx helps students thrive in college. In 2016 and 2017, researchers found that AUx helped students to better navigate university resources, feel included on campus, and identify mentors… 

     As I’ve identified before, every idea proposed by our “leaders” in higher education always works according to their own studies; they control the research at all levels and have far too much vested interest to have any other result.

      But look carefully at what’s being achieved above. The actual purpose of higher education is to prepare students for more. All this course sequence does is prepare students to be servants of the campus, and gives them no education in any measureable way.

       Is this all about indoctrination? Or is it all about putting more money into administrative pockets? More likely it’s a merger of corporate and state interests on campus, which I believe is best described as our new word for the day:

      Edu-fascism: the molding of higher education to enhance both administrative profits and ideological training.

     I suppose we can argue if edu-fascism properly describes what our student loan money is being used for but, bottom line, it’s not being used for education. End the student loan scam.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The American Honors College Scam

By Professor Doom

     There has always been a multi-tier system in higher education. Everyone knows that, for example, a Harvard education isn’t quite the same thing as State U. On the other hand, fewer people know that within a typical state university, there is also a multi-tier system. There’s a mini-system just for athletes (the UNC scandal was more about this system spilling over into the general student population than anything else), a similar but slightly more passable system for the minimal students, existing only to suck out the student loan and grant money, and then, a small system of legitimate education, for the real academic students. On top of that, most campuses have some sort of Honors College, or Honors program, to really differentiate the top tier of students (not like you can use GPA for this, thanks to massive grade inflation).

     That’s at the university level. At the community college level, well, things have been unhinged for quite some time, to the point that laughable fraud is now an everyday event on those campuses. Again, yes, there can be honors courses on a community college campus, but with so much fraud, these programs can have some trouble being accepted. While the previous link addresses things in detail, the short discussion is thoroughly fraudulent community college campuses are now pretty common to the point that having community colleges is almost as reasonable as having screen doors on a submarine.

University Admin, explaining how community college students can transfer to his university: “Well, we don’t care what the transcript says, and, assuming they can pass the placement tests—even the 4.0 students generally can’t—then we’ll transfer in their coursework, with two or three of their courses counting as one course on this campus…”

--When I was at a community college, so many students complained to me about the uselessness of trying to transfer their coursework (despite what accreditation and my bosses were saying), that I decided to follow up personally to find out why transferring was so difficult. I agree the university should be allowed to give entrance exams but…community colleges really should tell their students about the true transferability of their courses. Few, if any, do because acting with that sort of integrity would cut into growth…community colleges are unhinged for a reason.

     Did the gentle reader notice my stress of the word “almost” before? It’s an important qualifier. Despite that much of community college courses are unhinged from what they say they do on paper (using bogus syllabi and fake textbooks to “fool” an accreditation system that doesn’t even care), despite the simple fact that community colleges are a huge fraud in general, the simple fact is a small percentage of students do use them successfully. Much like there is gold in seawater, there is legitimacy in community colleges, and some students benefit.These students use the system as it was intended: as a cheap way to prepare for an advanced education. Even though these students represent a tiny percentage of the suckers students on community college campus, they deserve fair treatment.

     They often don’t get it. 

     They get their community college degree, but all they have to show for it is the same 4.0 GPA and slip of paper everyone else has. They try to transfer to university, and, even if they took care to take the legitimate courses at the community college, find out that the 2 year degree might not open any doors.

      The Poo Bahs that run community colleges don’t care, and certainly aren’t going to work to make their community college coursework legitimate (that would cut into growth). But, as always, private enterprise gives a solution, the only solution that the Poo Bahs can support: one that gives the Poo Bahs even more money.

      That solution: American Honors. The regular reader might recall I’ve mentioned one of the most important flags for determining if a school is bogus: it has a confusing name. So, much like a for-profit school calling itself “Massachusetts Institute of Techno” is almost certainly a rip-off, similarly, American Honors raises a flag for me. Schools already have honors programs, already referred to as such…an educational “service” whose very name makes it easy to confuse with an honors program tells me these guys intend to blow smoke.

     Like many frauds happening on our campuses, everyone involved knows it’s a fraud:

“…charges more tuition for "American Honors" classes and that extra tuition pays for the program.  Which consists of having an American Honors students only lounge (converted conference room--they hung up college flags and put in some extra chairs, but its seldom used) and seminars where they are taught to fill out college applications and how/where to apply for scholarships.  Like, shouldn't we be offering that to all our students free of charge?”

--faculty explaining the program on campus…but not to the students, since doing so invites termination.

     So, American Honors gets the institution to charge extra for Honors classes, classes that are not honors classes (the former are classes with the program, the latter are honors classes in the usual sense…I trust the gentle reader can see some possible confusion there). It splits this money with the Poo Bahs. The Poo Bahs smile, because they simply don’t care that the students are being ripped.

      The students themselves pay extra, to get some help in filling out forms, help that, yes, they should already be getting. The whole justification for the administrative bloat on our campuses is because, supposedly, the administrators are there to help students. Students thus pay a great deal more tuition than they used to, in exchange for this help, help they don’t get, unless they pay even more because admin doesn’t really want to help students.

     Yikes.

      Still, American Honors promises to hook people up with their system, which they claim is  “a national transfer network. Top 4-year colleges and universities make special agreements that ease the transfer process for qualified American Honors students.” A look at their website shows some successes; curiously, their biggest success has a student going to an Ivy League school not in their network (and thus, no thanks to American Honors, though they’ll still take credit).

      This sure begs the question: since community colleges already say they help students transfer, why do we need American Honors? If our community colleges were generally legitimate, American Honors would make as much sense as a system that, for a fee, makes sure your groceries are in your bag as you leave the supermarket. There’s no such system, of course, because supermarkets are generally legitimate, and have no interest in cheating their customers out of what their customers already paid for.

     Similarly, American Honors makes no sense for community college students, charging them (again) for services those students have already paid for, and been cheated out of, at their community college. That American Honors makes even more money for the community college is just icing on the crap cake here, to the point that I won’t even waste time considering if American Honors even does a decent job of what they claim to do.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Professor: Grading and Grammar Are Racist

By Professor Doom

     Our institutions of higher learning are massively oversized. While in general I disagree with the levels of growth which allowed this to happen there is one benefit to a large institution: resistance to change. Back when our institutions were merely huge, this benefit occurred quite often as the universities tended to not fall into fad “learning” scams like “new math” or “common core” or whatever, but somehow along the way to achieving truly immense size the institutional resistance to change vanished.

       The reason for this, of course, relates to the student loan scam, which made size, and not education, relevant to a school’s status. This led to the worst sorts of people getting control of our universities, and these kind of people, edu-fascists, concentrated power. Just as the Emperors of Rome could single-handedly achieve broad changes in society with an edict, so too can a university Poo-Bah dramatically change the character of an institution.

       The concept of “best practices” allows other Poo-Bahs to follow suit, and quickly, and so whenever some institution changes its rules to cause even further growth beyond all reason, the other “leaders” quickly follow to do the same.

      This growth has been achieved by allowing a great number of people to come on campus who have little interest in learning, and are merely there to collect their share of student loan money (after the university takes quite a bit more than lion’s share, of course). Trouble is, these students do tend to fail classes, and do tend to drop out after so many failures. In the last few decades, the rules have long since been changed so that failing doesn’t occur quite so much, and that dropouts due to failure are likewise less common than before.

      But, we still have students failing and dropping out. Whatever shall we do? Cry RACISM, of course:

Professor says grading, good grammar are examples of white supremacy

     The professor referenced above, I covered before at American University. It’s the same spiel as always:

‘Grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools’

      Before going further, I must highlight how incredibly stupid the above is, and give the reader fair time to laugh. Please, gentle readers, call friends and family members over to whatever device you use to read this, and call their attention to the above quote. They deserve a good laugh as well.

      Now that this lunatic professor has infected American University with this madness, he’s travelling the country spreading it to other schools, with Ball State University next.  He gives his speech there, hosted by the Office of Inclusive Excellence (I can’t make these names up, and our schools are bloated with such goofy-named fiefdoms).

       When I was at a corrupt community college, every semester we had people coming in telling us basically the same thing as this professor, at least in terms of results: don’t fail students. The only difference is this guy’s rhetoric plays the race card more often than the Kentucky Derby:

We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation…“This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said.
“This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”


     If I was in China, taking a course in Mandarin, I would fully expect the teacher of that course to grade my use of Mandarin. It wouldn’t occur to me that this would be “supremacist,” I would expect a “monolingual” standard for a country. Yes, I know China has many native languages, but despite this reality it still mandates “one language” that all educated people there must know. Bottom line, mandating a proper use of a single language isn’t “white supremacist,” it’s a matter of nationalism, and our planet has seen endless countries arrange themselves linguistic lines far more than along physical characteristics.

     There is absolutely no winning with these people, who are never satisfied:

“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”

      It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re still vulnerable to the RACIST charge. This suits both sides of the edu-fascist cabals running our schools: admin is happy to add yet another fiefdom to rule over, and the ideologues are thrilled to be ever in pursuit of ever louder virtue signaling.

During his presentation at Ball State University, Inoue said that in order to succeed in even the most liberal and forward-thinking institutions of higher education today, a person of color has to act, think and sound white to some degree.

     Rubbish. Honest, there are universities in China where “sounding white” will not help you at all, and in many institutions in Africa, sounding white could easily be a detriment.

      Ultimately, it comes down to one selling point:

      …writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”

      The above is the primary reason this professor gets so much traction with his ideas. He’s advocating for course grades not to be about quality or knowledge, but simply a claim of effort. Much as admin continuously brought in educationists to “suggest” I allow more cheating in my classes (because that keeps more students on campus and provides admin with bigger checks), the professor’s above advice is given for different reasons to be sure, but is promoted for the same reason as other educationists.

       While the educationists pumping this crud decades ago could only have a low impact on schools with tenured faculty who weren’t going to change their ways, the classes of today are largely taught by de-professionalized faculty who have no choice but to follow the Poo-Bah’s whims or be dismissed.

        And so I assure the gentle reader that Ball State will become converged and achieve educational irrelevance in short order as this professor’s ideas are followed. The only question which remains is what school will be destroyed next?

       The comments section is filled with people who rightfully laugh with scorn at the professor’s racist ideas, but they’re not the edu-fascists running the schools, alas.

      The double-lung surgery failed, and finding that out was delayed a few weeks because they ignored my reminder to do a tumor marker test.  MDA's biopsy shows I have a met to my femur. So, next thing is surgery. They told me to wait for the call from the surgeon's office for set up the meeting to get the go-ahead for the surgery appointment.
   
       It's been a week waiting for that phone call. MDA in Houston is the #1 cancer treatment center, and one thing I can say from this ordeal: the #2 cancer treatment place must be absolutely wretched.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com