When Doonesbury held an online poll to determine where one of the strip’s characters, Alex, would go to college, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did what one might expect of them: They used their computer skills to rig the competition.
The scheme worked, and to the chagrin of the other institutions in the running for Alex’s enrollment, Garry Trudeau’s not complaining.
The poll, which closed last week, pitted MIT against two other tech-savvy institutions — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell University. Students at both MIT and RPI quickly devised their own digital ballot-stuffing systems, but MIT’s — a Web site that allowed visitors to rack up more than a million votes in a single night — carried the day. (Cornell, which opted for the comparatively quaint practice of encouraging alumni to vote, finished a distant third.)
Doonesbury’s Web gurus weren’t fooled by the cyber-chicanery, but they weren’t bothered by it, either. According to the comic strip’s Web site:
A careful check of the applicable rulebook indicates that queering the results was not specifically prohibited. And by tradition, engineers, hackers, and techfolk will assume that in a problem-solving situation of this nature, there is no box out of which they are not expected to climb…. Ms. Doonesbury will be attending MIT.
But all is not lost for Cornell. In recognition of its electoral ethics, the university received Doonesbury’s Straw Poll Congeniality Award. (Editor & Publisher)
19 Responses to Voting Early and (Really) Often
historiann - March 31, 2012 at 6:17 pm
It’s not just Republican pols–Democrats in my state and in many others have given up the fight for public higher education. In Colorado, we have an allegedly Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, and alleged Democrats control the state senate. While I’m glad that public universities are no longer political under attack as they were a decade ago when I first moved here and the governor and both chambers of the state ledge were controlled by Republicans, my contempt for the weakness, cowardice, and moral failure of the Democrats knows no bounds.
Democrats took back the state senate and the legislative assembly in 2004, and then Dems ran the state entirely when Colorado elected a Dem governor in 2006. From 2006-2010 Dems ran the whole shebang, and did precisely fuck-all for higher ed. In fact, with the beginning of the Great Depression part deux in 2008, they proceeded to gut higher ed further. Dems lost the legislative assembly by one vote in 2010, so they still have a great deal of influence, but still higher ed is beaten up and robbed further of state funding.
University presidents have also clearly given up the ghost of public higher education. And guess what the plan is at Baa Ram U.: we’re apparently going to build a new football stadium! Yeah, that’s the ticket: do what Penn State and Ohio State did 50 years ago, and the private research dollars will just roll in. . . Now that’s a cutting-edge plan, ain’t it?
I’d rather trust my future to the Underpants Gnomes: Step 1, collect underwear; Step 2, uhhh. . . .; Step 3, PROFIT!!! (And we don’t even have to build them a shiny new stadium.)
westwoodwiz - April 1, 2012 at 3:44 pm
I’m amazed that career academics are now apoplectic to learn of the movement to starve the educational system. Seriously? You can’t understand why good, reasonable people would want to do this? It’s not as if the product, especially in the soft-sciences, is anything to brag about. I’m confident the country can do just fine without more ill-informed students conned into majoring in Ethnomusicography, Women’s Studies, Peace Studies, or Marxist Critical Theory.
The fact is many in the academy have abandoned dispassionate pursuit of knowledge in favor of a narrow political agenda. Now they’re surprised that Universities don’t wield the same level of public esteem. Take a look at the blog list that informs your thought (e.g., Affrodissent and Lesboprof). No thanks. I’ll send my money elsewhere.
This is actually a timely post when juxtaposed with the backdrop of the Obamacare vote. Many very bright and culturally hip academics are aghast to learn that someone might think there are very serious problems with new healthcare legislation. The chattering class has become prisoners of their own conceit. They don’t “get” other people, and they aren’t really interested in learning about the reasons why others, call them the unwashed, hold different values than they do.
Tenured_Radical - April 1, 2012 at 4:55 pm
“apoplectic”? “aghast”? Methinks you need to take a Valium if that’s what leaps off the page at you. The issues you raise have nothing to do with what is at stake at Rutgers Camden. But do ride your hobby horse off into the sunset.
The capacity of conservative activists to imagine the vast majority of college professors as raving lunatics, simply because they disagree with conservative thought, would be a topic of study all in itself. Any takers?
By the way, the day someone doe send money to this blog will be a joy indeed. But if you are dying to spend money on a blogger go over to Althouse and buy a new copy of the Bell Curve through Amazon.
elie_s_dad - April 1, 2012 at 5:25 pm
I am trying to understand the justification of the title of this article. I googled Rutgers Football Stadium and don’t see anything related to the building of a new football stadium. So I guess the title is based on what the author of the above has seen in his crystal ball?
I am a Rutgers student. I think the plan to sever Camden is bad enough that one can explain it on its own (lack of) merits without resorting to inflammatory and divisive rhetorical gamesmanship.
If the plan is halted it will be because people sat in the same room with people they disagreed with and persuaded them of its flaws.
Tenured_Radical - April 1, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Nonsense. Inflammatory and rhetorical gamesmanship is always a plus in the blogosphere. And yes it is the crystal ball prediction: I will bet you $100 that if the merger goes through this will happen, and that they will put the stadium in Camden framed as economic development. Good luck with the persuasion — I wish you well.
physioprof - April 1, 2012 at 6:44 pm
Tenured Radical, in light of this woefully deficient blog post–most egregiously, your failure to arrive at the same undeniably correct conclusions that I have–I am very concerned about the welfare of your students. Do their parents know that their tuition dollars are paying for their intellectual and moral demise in your classroom?
Tenured_Radical - April 1, 2012 at 7:41 pm
It’s horrible. Their brains run out of their ears and into the gutter.
pcooke - April 2, 2012 at 12:02 am
I would ask that you check some of your facts regarding Douglass. As a current student, I can attest to the fact that the annual traditions of Douglass are still intact.
graddirector - April 2, 2012 at 7:22 am
As someone subjected dally to the press over Rutgers Camden, I am puzzled by this post. The complaint that I keep hearing in the press is that Rutgers Camden will lose prestige if it is merged with Rowan. This is because it is currently basking in the reflected “glory” of Rutgers New Brunswick.
Every time I hear that argument I cringe. I had the novel experience of interviewing for a faculty position at Rutgers Camden many years ago now. As I posted on another article, this was my top job interview from hell, with the Dean and department chair shouting at each other over dinner about whether the requirements for tenure at Rutgers Camden were the same as the New Brunswick campus.
Rutgers Camden is an important university as it sits in an intercity location and largely educates first generation college students. It has always received way fewer resources than the main campus from the state but at least at that time, faculty were being told that they had to meet the same scholarship standards for tenure as other Rutgers campuses even though they had larger teaching loads than the main campus, no Ph.D. program and few other scholarly resources either. This is because it was a Rutgers campus and this seemed reasonable to the Rutgers board of trustees. However, it has no way to be as “good of a school” as Rutgers New Brunswick and the graduates of Camden are not getting the same education as the flagship campus. Resources do matter here, particularly when working with a challenging student population. The state of New Jersey has never given sufficient resources to this school, even before the current budget angst, to make the impact on the Camden area that it could be capable of. This is not something that can be blamed on the Republicans either, this was true when New Jersey was a Democratic bastion as well, Rutgers Camden has always gotten the leavings from the Rutgers System, it has never been a priority.
Rowan is a much more similar school to Rutgers Camden than Rutgers New Brunswick is. It is a teaching intensive university that is in in much closer proximity to Camden than New Brunswick. From everything I have heard in the press and tenured radicial’s article, I still don’t see any real cause for complaint except for this school losing “prestige” that it really does not have on its own.. Now, the actually right answer is that Camden should have been given the state resources necessary to really make an impact on Camden over the past decades to present. Since that is not happening or likely to happen, moving it over to Rowan, one of the “second tier” state schools in New Jersey, is not some nefarious plot, just a bow to reality.
Tenured_Radical - April 2, 2012 at 8:21 am
I stand corrected: they don’t show up in a formal search of the website but I did a second search going through the site item by item and finally found them in the alumnae section. I’ll edit the article to reflect that.
Tenured_Radical - April 2, 2012 at 9:10 am
I think your focus on prestige misses the point. First, Rutgers Camden fears the actual closure of its campus — that isn’t a small thing for the city of Camden, or for the community and departments that have been built on that campus. Second, real jobs are at stake when you take resources from one campus and direct them to another, failing campus; or when you “consolidate” campuses in the name of “efficiency.”
But my greatest objection to writing the organizing going on in Camden as status anxiety is — why shouldn’t students and faculty at Rutgers Camden worry about loss of prestige? Is it only those of us who work at and attend “traditionally” prestigious schools who are entitled to the benefits of prestige? Why wouldn’t you take a promising satellite campus and pump money into it so that it could deliver the same education as the flagship campus? Most important, in our current political environment, loss of prestige then becomes a reason — not to give schools the resources they need to improve — but to write them off, cut their funding, blame them for “poor outcomes” and take private money to re-shape them to the needs of the corporate world.
Saying you have a Rutgers degree matters: it isn’t just an affectation (hence the cash-cow extension programs and the “global” campuses that are run by Ivy League schools.) Just because you have excelled at a teaching intensive, satellite campus doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have access to the benefits that someone who did less well at the main campus as. People often attend satellite campuses because the are working, living at home, and a variety of other reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence or academic excellence.
margaretmarsh - April 2, 2012 at 10:27 am
I suspect, “graddirector,” that it was indeed many years ago that you interviewed for a position at Rutgers—Camden. The campus has a terrific faculty who’ve made the choice to take positions here. The campus enrolls close to 6700 hundred students, having grown by more than 35% over the course of the past decade. Since 2007, Rutgers-Camden has inaugurated Ph.D. programs. Its first Ph.D. program, in Childhood Studies, was the first Ph.D. program in this field in North America. It has developed an international reputation and draws students and faculty from around the world. The campus added two others in 2010 with more in the planning stages. Enrollment in the Graduate School increased by more than seventy percent, and the number of graduate programs doubled, over that same decade.
The School of Business has grown significantly and the campus just added a School of Nursing. The Rutgers Law School at Camden is highly regarded nationally, and several of its programs are top-ranked. One example — its Legal Research and Writing program is ranked among the nation’s best by U.S. News & World Report. Our students choose to come here because we offer a Rutgers education and the prestige of the Rutgers name.
Every year Rutgers University – the entire university, not one campus – selects several alumni to be inducted into the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni. This year, three of the five alumni so honored graduated from Rutgers-Camden.
As it has grown into a Ph.D.-granting institution, Rutgers-Camden has become a more full-fledged research university. Further, the Rutgers name has allowed the campus to attract and retain internationally-recognized faculty. Increasing investment in higher education significantly in Southern New Jersey is something all of us who live in this region support wholeheartedly, but there is no good reason why such an investment should include the takeover of Rutgers-Camden and the abandonment of its Rutgers identity.
graddirector - April 2, 2012 at 11:09 am
I said nothing against Rutgers Camden , its students or the faculty that work there. However, it has been hugely under resourced for years and still is compared to the main flagship campus. While the merger could cut their funding, it could also increase it simply because it would be a strong partner with Rowan, not simply the under resourced stepchild it has been for decades under both Democratic and Republic administrations. How sure is it that this will be a negative outside of the perceived loss of the Rutgers name? None of the voluminous reports on this in the news that I have seen have said anything about closure of the campus, cutting of funding or any of the other concerns mentioned.
willynilly - April 2, 2012 at 11:58 am
It hasn’t happened all that frequently, thank God, but whenever a NJ Governor has decided to screw around with the structure and organization of the state’s higher education system, the results have always been a complete disaster. I would hope that a review of this history would cause this Governor to back off – but I doubt it. He doesn’t seem to be a very bright man.
ruworried - April 2, 2012 at 3:07 pm
graddirector, no one argues the funding disparity. What RU-C people are saying, though, is that it would cost the state much less to fix THAT problem than to sever the Camden campus from Rutgers and force a merger with Rowan. People rightly fear the closure of the Camden campus as a result of the departure of talented faculty, students guaranteed a Rutgers degree graduating, and the fact that many RU-Camden students live closer to Glassboro than to a city repeatedly on the Nation’s Most Dangerous Cities list. What is the incentive to drive to or live in Camden for a degree with the same name as one from a “safe” suburb? What will draw international and law students to Camden without the name Rutgers? Students who want a degree respected nationally will go to a college whose name is known nationally, be it in Philadelphia, Delaware or New Brunswick. Students who want a Rowan degree will go to Glassboro, and the 500 students already enrolled at Rowan’s Camden campus will, in a few short years, likely be the size of the campus that used to be Rutgers-Camden.
jiminnc - April 3, 2012 at 8:01 am
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/08/22/In-Depth/Budgets.aspx
“A majority of schools have increased their [athletic] budgets by double-digit percentages from fiscal years 2010 to 2012, according to information obtained by SportsBusiness Journal from schools in the six major conferences. Of the 52 schools that provided annual budgets, 30 have increased their spending by 10 percent or more in the last three years. Seventeen of them, or a third, have increased spending by 15 percent or more.”
In my state the two biggest state schools saw their athletic budgets go up nearly 17 and 24%, during a time the legislature has slashed academic budgets.
joejoe1 - April 3, 2012 at 1:44 pm
“Guess what the current revenue from athletics supports at Rutgers? Athletics. That’s all: not books, faculty, financial aid (except for athletes), tuition reductions, housing or labs. $26.6 million in, $26.6 million out (actually the athletic department finished the year $2.00 in the red.) That doesn’t count the $130 million football stadium, the $16 million upgrade, or the maintenance costs of a stadium that was supposed to take Rutgers to the Promised Land when the university revamped its programs in the 1990s. Nor does that budget count the actual cost of educating the athletes brought to Rutgers on scholarship (usually around twice the official number cited for tuition, fees and housing.)”
—THIS deserves its own article.
Essentially college sports work like a mini version of the pros. The costs are dumped onto the taxpayer and the profits are grabbed by the team and the league.
Rutgers students and parents are paying for a football team (stadium & upgrades) and football players (education, housing, special bennies) and getting nothing in return–not a cent–in profits. I wonder how many parents are aware of this. Add that to the March Madness profits that go directly to the NCAA, and you’ll see the whole system is one big leech on the university.
Of course, that’s nothing compared to pro teams in some cities, like my own, where the city council has guaranteed the local NFL team that municipal government will buy, with taxpayer money, all tickets that do not get sold. Imagine a business that can get the taxpayers to buy it a building, take on additional tax costs associated with that business (tax breaks) and then buy up that business’s product if it doesn’t sell on the free market.
calends - April 5, 2012 at 1:57 pm
I always get a little disturbed when college professors can’t see something that’s so glaring, so obviously present that it’s a real “elephant in the room.” It makes me wonder what a PhD is worth these days; it pushes me towards extreme skepticism with regards to the efficacy of the educational system in actually teaching critical thinking.
Here at Temple University the best compliment I can give about the education is there’s a good amount of diversity, but that’s where it ends. I have never been so aware of educational groupthink, the “echochamber,” political/worldview indoctrination, political correctness above critical thinking, and whatever else…ever. It’s almost so obvious that it borders on hilarity, a farce that professors perpetuate with a religious sort of conviction. When you can do this:
“The capacity of conservative activists to imagine the vast majority of
college professors as raving lunatics, simply because they disagree with
conservative thought, would be a topic of study all in itself”
and dismiss very serious issues with a quick swipe of sarcasm, really says something about the state of education. Just because someone criticizes the mode of “higher” education these days (perhaps it’s not just ‘these days,’ maybe it will *always* be the operation of the ‘educated’ class to indoctrinated ‘the lower’) doesn’t make them a “conservative activist.” By using the loaded word “activist” you are appealing to emotion and authority – they’re on the fringe, they’re radical, they’re *religious fundamentalists,* they’re *uneducated,* they are full of ad hominem.
And still the issue stagnates, gets ignored.
Temple forces all incoming freshman to take two types of classes: two “Race and Diversity” classified courses, and two “Mosaic” classified courses. I had to take one of each, even though I had way too many humanities (for a science major). It didn’t matter that I showed them how broad my “liberal education” was – there was no way I was getting out of these classes. In my Mosaic class Marx was required reading. Not a problem of course. The problem came when the professor obviously *did not* know how to interpret Marx and yet felt qualified to make some very outlandish statements (I read over the book multiple times and I couldn’t decipher some of the more esoteric statements). Simple questions would literally be ignored, such as: “Marx wrote this (particular point) when there was little competition between companies and very little regulation, does it even still apply? Crickets. Non-answers. Evasions. Not ONCE was there a mention of the fact that there have been tens of millions of deaths caused by the supposed followers of forms of Marxist ideology. You’d think they’d at least try to soften the blow and refer to them as Not-True-Marxists, or provide an argument as to why Marxism isn’t necessarily violent. The professor said that the financial crises vindicated the idea of a Marxist collapse and the rise of the proletariat, which of course is an absolute joke. Other Mosaic classes include reading of Richard Dawkins, which is absurd in a class that is supposed to be liberal arts based. None of the literature professors can understand Dawkins, and neither can students, especially when he shifts into ideology-mode from science-mode (he does this rather effortlessly); but of course that’s what they want. They want something the student can’t understand so they have to look to the professor to provide the “facts” while simultaneously disregarding critical thinking as “conservative activism” or “outside of the mainstream.” I asked a friend if there was any discussion about the deeper philosophy ingrained in the book, she said “not really, the professor just taught us what the book means.” How could you teach a class that is supposedly about “learning different viewpoints” and NOT critically discuss a controversial figure like Dawkins? It’s unbelievable.
My Mosaic class was no worse for wear. I thought I was going to genuinely enjoy a “real and honest” discussion on “Race in America” (the title of the class). Instead we read ideologically driven books whose main points culminated into one final conclusion: “The white race is so thoroughly racist, capitalist, and Eurocentrist that there seems to be no end in sight.” Instead we had NO honest discussion about race issues, just regurgitated, biased “facts.” The absolutely worst part of the class was that a huge opportunity to unite all sorts of different races and ethnicities was not exploited. For example: when talking about how the slave traders got their slaves from Africa the professor said “the strong kingdom (I forget which one) present on Africa wouldn’t allow the slave traders onto the mainland. That was it. He mentioned which great kingdom it was and why it was great, but nothing else. Of course there was one glaring question: How on earth did the traders get the slaves then?! I asked the question and the reply was: The Africans sold them (and wouldn’t let the traders on the mainland to steal their commodity). This would normally be a good point to bring up slavery on a world-scale to mention that slavery has been embedded in human civilization since its inception, and then give a brief overview of how the slavery in the Americas changed into racism of which ANY CULTURE could have embraced due to those historical circumstances (this of course does not remove the wrongness and violation of conscience but levels the playing field and turns the discussion into a scientific one). There was no discussion on how races can work together in churches, community organizations. There was no hope, no unification, no “ways to understand each other.” The only unification the professor desired was of a political sort – by painting racism as a natural outcome of capitalism and taking swipes at Republicans. Of course racism, for a very ideologically driven, politically left, professor, is a rather difficult thing to discuss without injecting some sort of political and/or religious bias into the mix. Still, it was a wasted opportunity. The professor, to his credit, was really kind though. He also admitted that out of the hundred or so history department professors at Temple he didn’t know a single non-liberal.
I once had a Sociology class at a community college (Kalamazoo Valley Community College). I was young at the time, probably 20 years old, and I just didn’t care about any of this. I just wanted to get the class over with. Years later and looking back I realize the teacher’s only goal was philosophical indoctrination of a relativist/leftist viewpoint. An example of how bad it was – on the top and bottom of EVERY test in very bold, hand written, lettering (all of his tests were hand written) was his favorite phrase that we had to memorize “All is relative!” Not a single student questioned the professor on this. Supposedly the professor was retiring that year, maybe he decided to go out with a bang and go into full-board indoctrination mode. I’m guessing his “retirement” coincided with a huge outcry over his incredibly dishonest teaching.
I have never had a professor that taught me how to critically think about issues. A professor that challenged students to contradict what he/she was saying with facts. A professor that presented both sides of an issue and gave the best possible argument for the “other side,” even if they were just going to attack it.
But keep spinning your wheels and being sarcastic about non-issues. Obviously it’s working.
Tenured_Radical - April 5, 2012 at 4:26 pm
I always get a little disturbed when college professors can’t see
something that’s so glaring, so obviously present that it’s a real
“elephant in the room.”
I don’t get it what “the issue” is that you think I should be talking about — your criticisms about your coursework at Temple may or may not represent them fairly, but what does any of this have to do with the Rutgers/Rowan merger? And I don’t teach at Temple,so what does this have to do with me as a critical thinker?
Is this just your way of saying that I am an ideologically-driven dumb a$$? If so — look! I said it in one sentence!