Tag: college

Overhead

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I was reading an article about how at one particular college, from 1990 to 2022 the number of tenured faculty decreased.  But during that same period the administrative staff increased 500%.  So, let’s say there were a thousand administrators at the college in 1990.  That would mean that there were six thousand in 2022.  Think about that.  They must have had to build out the campus enormously just to provide desk space for that many new people.  And try to imagine how these non-teaching employees made learning better at this college.

Obviously, this is absurd.  During those thirty-two years automation has made all of these “administrators” worse than useless.  Whate they really are is a drain on society.  All they do is attach more mouths to the government trough that pays for all those enormous loans that colleges manufacture as their primary product.  So, most of the increase in college costs over the last thirty years has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of educating college students.  Certainly since 2020 a new component of this scam is the DEI infrastructure.  Whole wings of college buildings must be crammed with bureaucratic activists writing propaganda papers and issuing edicts to force ever more oppressive requirements on students and teachers to pay homage to the holy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What is wrong with this picture?

Well, it’s two-fold.  Most importantly, it’s eveil.  It’s harmful, toxic and stupid.  We’re damaging the students who are being propagandized with this stuff and we’re warping society with these lies.

But in the second place, we can’t afford this waste.  America is the most affluent society that has ever existed on the face of the Earth.  But we’ve drained the well dry.  Everywhere you look people are drowning in debt and can’t pay their bills.  And worst of all are all the college students and graduates staring at six figure student loan debt.  And a lot of them can’t find any jobs better than Starbuck’s barista and will have to move back into mom’s basement because rent just doubled.

And colleges aren’t the only bureaucracies staggering under the weight of administration inflation.  Federal, state, municipal and local bureaucracies are full of libraries, schools and other offices that have grown their own bureaucracies where expansion is a constant state and no one ever gets laid off.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have grown the bureaucracies with single-minded intent.  Every one of those administrators or whatever they call these civil servants vote Democrat, every time they can.  It’s not even a question.

Every red state governor should make it his highest priority to eliminate all of the DEI and other leftist headcount in all government agencies and especially in state colleges.  But if Trump gets back in the White House his first priority should be to drain the swamp.  And whereas the most strategic departments to empty out must be the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, nevertheless, right afterwards it behooves him to make a general purge of all the agencies that perform affirmative action and all the other DEI related damage.  And then if I were he, I’d write executive orders that would mandate colleges to bring their finances in line with a more reasonable overhead.  No more $50,000 or $100,000 a year tuition bills.  Tell them the government can only afford $10,000 a year.  I’ll bet there’ll be a whole lot of Associate Directors of DEI slinging coffee at Starbuck’s that next year.

So that’s my idea.

DeSantis Appoints Conservatives to a College Board of Trustees

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Finally, finally.

A red state governor FINALLY did something to change the orientation of hyper-leftwing colleges.

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday made six new appointments to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, including Manhattan Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo.

Rufo’s work has been featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television and has been notable for challenging critical race theory.

The New College of Florida in Sarasota, is a top-ranked public liberal arts college and is the designated honors college of the state university system.

DeSantis’ news press secretary Bryan Griffin sent a statement to Fox News Digital claiming that the academic institution has been “captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”

“All of these appointees have a firsthand understanding of the Florida education system as a product of their work with us and the Florida Department of Education on other important initiatives. We are grateful to them for lending their time and expertise to the benefit of Florida’s students,” the DeSantis office told Fox News Digital.

“The New College of Florida is a public institution with a statutorily stated mission of ‘provid[ing] a quality education.’ Unfortunately, like so many colleges and universities in America, this institution has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”

The statement added, “In particular, New College of Florida has reached a moment of critical mass, wherein low student enrollment and other financial stresses have emerged from its skewed focus and impractical course offerings.””

It’s about damn time!  Sure this is one college in something like 3,200 colleges in America.  Sure there will be battles from day one and the feds will punish the college every chance it gets.  But it’s a step in the right damn direction.  Now every other red state governor should do the exact same thing over and over again.

This DeSantis guy is pretty good.  He’s doing the right things.  He’s thinking clearly about how things can be changed and he’s reaching out to good people to do those things.  He’s making Florida a much better place.  That’s got to be a good thing.  Whether he should be president or vice president is a different question.  Maybe he should stay as governor of Florida and maybe end up the de facto leader of the red state coalition.  But any way you look at it he’s making a real difference.  Bravo.

Another Small Step Toward Holding Woke Organizations Accountable

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First the Ohio Appeals Court Upholds $31 Million Award Against Oberlin College for calling innocent people racists.  Now another Ohio college has to pay a professor $400,000 for trying to force him to kowtow to the “pronoun” speech dictates of delusional students.  What is it with Ohio colleges?

This needs to happen more and more.  After enough colleges are bankrupted through lawsuits, they’ll start towing the line.  If the spineless “conservatives” on the Supreme Court were not mostly useless they’d spend the next year clearing out all the unconstitutional things going on in the country and rid us of our woke masters.  But in the meantime, it looks like the solution is more lawyers who know how to hit these people where it hurts, in the wallet.  Although I have to confess, I’d prefer if these were criminal cases where the perpetrators could go to prison for a decade or two.

What I really wish is that I lived in a state like Florida where they are addressing these problems head on with laws and government actions against the perpetrators.  Keep it up people.  If enough action is taken, we’ll start seeing this stuff rolled back.

The Maddening Stupidity and Weakness of This Generation Throwing Away the Legacy of America

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To anyone born before about 1965 it must seem like an evil miracle that everyone born after that time was brought up thinking that America was not the greatest place to live in the present world and at anytime in history.  It just seemed self-evident that compared to all other places and times, here was almost a heaven on earth.  And not just for the rich and talented.  A ditch digger in the United States of the second half of the 20th century lived better than any Emperor of Rome or even the Emperor of the British Empire right up till when that term stopped having meaning.

We enjoyed unlimited freedom and practically unlimited opportunity to enrich ourselves and our children and to enjoy health and leisure and command inventions like an automobile and telephony that simply didn’t exist even fifty years earlier.  Even the so-called downtrodden black minority enjoyed health and wealth that their ancestors in Africa and even their cousins in present Africa would trade their right arm and leg to possess.  Whatever social injustices and legal injuries some of them suffered, these paled in comparison to the horrors of places like Zimbabwe or Rwanda even today.  By and large anyone who said he would trade living in this country for any other place on Earth that would take him was lying either to himself or to the world at large or to both.

So, can you imagine the irony of someone like me contemplating leaving that place?  Think of what a diminution of those former freedoms we must have suffered for places like Hungary and Poland and even Chile to look like attractive alternatives.  These are places which in their past have been enormously repressive and lacked fundamental rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion.  But now they seem almost like bastions of freedom and islands of sanity in a sea of madness.

And the worst part of it is knowing this generation succumbed to the poison that their teachers and professors indoctrinated them with while my generation had to pay them to do this damage.  My property taxes and my college tuition payments subsidized this poisoning of the following generation of American youth.  As parents we would have been better off burning Harvard and Yale and every other college in this country to the ground and thereby unemployed those sociopaths that indoctrinated the present generation of helpless fools.

Well, if this was the inevitable outcome of American democracy then it was a fool’s paradise.  Maybe there can’t be a Heaven on Earth.  Maybe it’s impossible to raise people up.  Stupidity seems to be the endemic condition of most people and the only way they learn anything is for reality to slap them in the face, minute by minute.  So be it.

It will be interesting to see if some remnant of realistic people in this country push back against the pathetic losers that accept all this nonsense that is being perpetrated by the Left against us.  There are some small beginnings.  DeSantis in Florida.  Some other places down south.  If they decide to make a stand maybe something will be done.  But it is surely discouraging to hear what passes for the official history of the United States.  The lies and stupidity and irrationality of their version of American history is so false and one-sided that it staggers the imagination to know how feeble are the minds of those believing it.

Well, this is just a rant for a Sunday afternoon.  I’d better get back to doing something useful like cutting the grass and putting away the summer gardening equipment.  It does give me some ideas for stories though.  I’ll invent some characters who are brave enough to fight back.  That will be fun.

Interacting in the Brave New World – Part 4

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For the fourth part of this essay I wanted to talk about talking to young people.  My kids are grown and I realize after the fact that I didn’t know that I needed to protect them from school.  But I do now.  Grammar school, high school and college have become gulags where our children are propagandized and bullied by terrible people.  But how do you help them?  I guess you have to tell them the truth.  That school is a soviet style re-education camp.  And unless you can home school your kids, you are essentially sending them into the belly of the beast.  So, I guess you have to tell them to hide their true beliefs and pretend.  But you have to make sure they don’t become beaten down by the system.

Interestingly, I just started advertising on Captain Capitalism and I was looking at one of his videos advice-cappy-wouldve-given-himself-in high school and discovered that it’s pretty much what you should tell a high school freshman.  Now, some of the emphasis is debatable.  Skipping high school, getting a GED and going direct to college or a trade school is unorthodox but listening to how he describes the waste of time high school is, makes it pretty compelling.  Plus, he provides advice if you do go to high school but want to get a better experience out of it.  And afterward he stresses, very amusingly, the stupidity of getting a liberal arts degree.  I found myself agreeing with almost every idea he presents.  His discussion about how boys can best spend their time to prepare them for finding a girlfriend is sensible.  And his advice for women is equally sane.  I highly recommend viewing this video.  Even if you want to modify the delivery for your own family ethos there are a number of very useful ideas and concepts that will help you talk to young people about thriving in a confusing and hostile world.

So, I’m cheating here.  I just recommend you watch the video and then think of how you relate it to your family and friends.  Thank you, Captain Capitalism.