Curtailgating 101

Rubrics were used religiously… but as Forrest Gump is famous for saying, “stupid is as stupid does”.

If you don’t know the materials, the rubric isn’t going to help you.

I think we’re agreeing here. The “bad-press” for-profits give a bad name to the schools that are accomplishing good things at the for-profit level. However, we never get to hear about the “good” non-profits. But I suppose we can blame this on the sensationalistic quality that news has taken on these days. Who wants to hear about the community service or service derived programs developed by students at my school? They’re much more interested in default rates at schools with television commercials of students in their pjs.

I hope you could tell by my tone that I was being somewhat lighthearted.  I don’t really get personally offended when people ask me how my summer/break was; but I do think a lack of understanding about each others’ roles (faculty/staff) is not helpful to the overall working relationship, so I was attempting to shed some light on that. 

Personally, students are my work, and even though I have tons of paperwork, I feel like I want to bang my head against the computer after a whole day of nothing but.  I prefer having the students here!  :-)

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I really hate it when people correct one’s grammar and spelling.  It is not a frickin dissertation.  It is a hastily written blog. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Families have 17 years to plan for college; it doesn’t show up by surprise. When Seymour was a baby they should have started a college fund and that’s what they should bring to the table instead of throwing themselves on the mercy of the college. What began as assistance is now an expectation though, and there’s a perception that families are “punished” if they save for college. I’ve actually heard parents lament bitterly that their child’s college was counting their college savings account as an asset, even though that’s what they started it for in the first place.
A friend of mine who was once a financial aid officer heard from a parent who complained that our college’s FA package was too small. He had just bought a speed boat, you see…
It’s a crazy world and sometimes, as the wise and wizened Rolling Stones one said, “you can’t always get what you want.”

Ron Suskind’s recently published book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, as well as earlier documentaries about America’s financial crises point to another looming crisis in higher education that mirrors the economic meltdowns. Here’s the story.  

Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist,  provides deep insights into the principal players in a calamitous affair—how Wall Street strayed from long-standing principles of transparency, accountability, and fair dealing to generate stunning profits but only to fail just prior to the 2008 election to the presidency of a woefully inexperienced manager.  

Suskind’s revelations should come as no surprise to those who have viewed the documentaries “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the powerful energy company whose downfall forever changed the landscape of the business world and “Inside Job” that reveals the true architects of the economic meltdown that hit America starting in 2008—exposing most of the same players named by Suskind.  

Taken together, Suskind’s book and the documentaries provide a telling lesson in the potential trappings of arrogance, dishonesty, incompetence (inexperience), greed, and unethical behavior plaguing, to varying degrees,  not only corporate America, but our government as well. We see that a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center’s twin towers,  grievous harm to the U. S. and world economies has been achieved by Americans—such harm was one of the key objectives of the 9/11 attack that failed in this regard. Devastating economic harm was not accomplished by a memorable catastrophic event, but over time via a combination of greed and arrogance, as well as a profound lack of appropriate regulation and oversight by U. S. governments led by ill-advised presidents who, in turn, exercised poor judgment.  

Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were held accountable for the 9/11 attack and duly punished. However, no one has been sent to jail or otherwise held accountable for the economic crisis orchestrated by the confidence men who served on Wall Street and in the federal government.

Unfortunately, another unheralded crisis is brewing—mirroring the economic debacles in many ways.  It involves one of America’s biggest business sectors—higher education. Many of America’s colleges and universities are experiencing serious financial problems as well as troubles with proliferating scandals in their professional sports entertainment businesses that are led by their own brand of confidence men—officials at the NCAA cartel (NCAA and its member institutions) and conferences, as well as wealthy boosters and trustees.  

The schools have become academically adrift in a sea of sports—with graduates that have not developed the skills and knowledge they need to become our next generation of leaders and good citizens. Their graduates lack foundational knowledge in core subjects such as math, science & technology, economics, communications (written and verbal), civics, and history.  

The schools’ crowd-pleasing sports-entertainment businesses exhibit undisguised contempt of academic integrity and are not only accompanied by injustices to college athletes, but massive corruption as well. Corruption has, over time, warped academic missions as athletics have been prioritized over academics with dire unintended consequences, to wit: the loss of economic competitiveness, deterioration of America’s well being, as well as the erosion of its leadership position on the world stage.  

Today, there is no meaningful oversight of the NCAA cartel as it is not only self-reporting and self-regulating, but self-enforcing as well. Furthermore, the cheating and corruption that enables the cartel to maintain its tax-exempt status—while fielding professional teams with their conferences serving as the minor leagues for the NFL and NBA—are rooted in the same types of cronyism and cozy relationships that were instrumental in bringing about today’s financial crises   

Notwithstanding the NCAA Board’s recent approval of tougher academic rules and announcements such as reported by Sander and others, serious questions remain about the willingness and ability of the NCAA cartel and conference officials to reform their operations. The reason is simply that these officials have conflicting interests as promoters of their professional sports businesses and enforcers of rules that can curtail the viability of these businesses.  

Nonetheless, as with AIG and the big banks, government officials consider these businesses too big to fail and too popular with constituents (a political ‘third rail’). As a consequence, they are reluctant to require corrective action, such as imposing requirements for transparency, accountability and oversight that would not only assure compliance with federal conditions for the cartel’s tax-exempt status, but expose its secretive operations to disinfecting sunshine as well.

Recent calls for congressional action by Congressmen Bobby Rush (D, IL) and John Conyers (D, MI) to address the proliferation of scandals in collegiate athletics may lead to an exception to this general rule.

Sadly, the nation stands in denial.  There is no one to blame but ourselves with our addiction to 24/7 sports entertainment and tolerance of a political class that seemingly prioritizes re-election above all else. When will we ever earn?  

Perhaps much of this will be the subject of a future Suskind book and truth-telling documentaries, possibly co-authored with fellow Pulitzer-Prize-winner Taylor Branch, author of the cover story, “The Shame of College Sports,” in the October 2011, issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Hopefully, the book and documentaries will not be histories of another calamitous affair, but rather a story about how we are going about resolving related problems to come back as the world leader we once were.

Frank G. Splitt is a former McCormick Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Indeed it is, Mr. Lanscot.  And this week the epic college football game is not at Ithaca College, even further above Cayuga’s waters than that other college in Ithaca, but in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And we shall learn whether the LSU Chinese Bandits can, unlike King Canute, hold back the Tide.

But no deprecation of the Ithaca v Copurtland intended. One can see some good football at small colleges around the country and their Alma Maters mean as much to them as to those of us on the rolling plains of Dixie or where stately oaks and broad magnolias shade inspiring halls, not to mention that finishing school in Tuscaloosa.

a big part of the problem is who runs these programs for the universities.  I have noticed that colleges ask for international higher ed experience when they advertise these positions… then you see someone hired that has never even been abroad– then they go abroad and cannot manage the culture shock or know how to negotiate their way in a foreign environment.  An an American educator that has worked abroad for two decades I can tell you that this is a BIG part of the problem.  Maybe external oversight needs to begin with examining the credentials and job performance of those running the programs.

The only objective way in which internationalization should be “a goal” for any university is to keep those international students in/near their campuses. Who are these bureaucrats setting the goals for these universities???