Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the order of adjectives here – isn’t childish a bit weaker than ugly, kitsch, ridiculous? Those are stronger words, and I think you should build up to your stronger words to avoid a letdown at the end of a sentence. SOS might have started the list with childish and then continued by means of ascending number of syllables:
kitsch (1)
ugly (2)
ridiculous (4)
“Childish, kitsch, ugly, and rather ridiculous.” Or drop the rather. “Childish, kitsch, ugly, and ridiculous.”
The ur-text for thinking about the style and content of lists is The Importance of Being Earnest:
ALGERNON. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.
CECILY. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?
Doesn’t make much sense and is, again, a bit of a letdown.
In the case of practically bankrupt Louisiana State University finding money to buy “a ‘lazy river’ on the LSU campus in the shape of the letters L-S-U,” it doesn’t really matter how the LSU Faculty Senate president organized his list – the remarkable nature of the construction certainly comes across. Students whose campus is in the tank will soon be literally in the tank, paddling while Rome burns.
May 11th, 2015 at 10:59AM
If I’m reading this correctly, LSU’s student body president is defending the construction of the Lazy River because the students voted to increase tuition in order to pay for it. That, despite the fact that state functionaries’ solution to their flagship’s default is firing tenured professors and closing departments. Substantial elements of the schools shut down, a water park created so that students can float off hangovers. No further comment…..
May 11th, 2015 at 11:18AM
charlie: I think you’re reading that right.
May 11th, 2015 at 4:48PM
Voted to increase student fees, not tuition, but same idea.
May 11th, 2015 at 4:52PM
Thanks, anon.
May 12th, 2015 at 9:01AM
Cope and the student body prez are both right. But the complaints are coming awfully late in the game. It was four years ago that the students approved the fee dedicated to this particular project. (Thus most of the students who voted for it will never get to enjoy it, and most of those who might now regret the project never had a chance to vote on it.)
Also, if construction is underway right now, it might well have been contracted a year or more ago. Even if those contracts could somehow be canceled without incurring huge penalties, the savings couldn’t be used to shore up the university budget. Mixing student fee and general fund money is quite rightly verboten.
May 12th, 2015 at 10:45AM
@Doctorstein, point taken. But how is it that in a time of decreasing state contributions to public education and increasing rates of student loan defaults, that Lazy Rivers get built in the first place? LSU t’aint the only one that has one;
http://www.nytimes.com/…/fashion/college…and-river-rides.html
Uni admins justify this nonsense by claiming that they’re only delivering what students demand. They’re probably right, students don’t seem concerned about academic rigor or the quality of the education received. But, as LSU is proving out, it’s unsustainable. LSU’s bankruptcy was sparked because of a falling credit rating, meaning, the bond rating agencies are losing faith in the admins’ business plan. LSU isn’t singular, they’re not run any differently than any other public uni, meaning, they’ve all premised their existence on the debt based/greater fool model of college administration. If we’re to believe Moody’s, colleges are running out of both. Whether higher tuition or student fees are used to pay for any Lazy River, ultimately, the money primarily comes from student loans, the aggregate amount is approaching $1.5 trillion. The solution isn’t to increase that total to $3 trillion, unfortunately, the solution will be more public and private unis going out of business.
May 12th, 2015 at 1:32PM
You’re right on all counts, Charlie. But since you’ve got me started, hang on cuz here goes…. It might just be that we’re starting to taste the fruits of the “market model” of higher education. I’m old enough to remember the 1980s-era debates about this stuff in my own state. The ideology back of the market model promised that competition between institutions would improve the quality of education, just as market competition improves the quality of other widgets. But as we’ve seen, competition in higher ed has focused more on tangible amenities than on abstractions like academics. One result is that the higher-ed experience has indeed improved — in a Club Med sort of way — but academic results have not. Sad as it may be, the fact is that consumer choice is simply not driven by academics. Another result is what we’re seeing at LSU: a large university verging on bankruptcy. Market ideology only makes sense in a world where some businesses really do get driven out by other, better-managed businesses. One could argue that the eventual failure of at least some universities was baked into the model. (Maybe Bobby Jindal will propose selling the LSU campus to Corinthian. Oh, too late for that — maybe Kaplan?)
The alternative to the market model is that of the cooperative state university system. In this model, a state doesn’t put its own institutions in competition with one another; it recognizes the fundamental commonality of purpose of the entire system — to serve the state’s citizens collectively — and tries to manage that system, as a system, as efficiently as possible. If Branch Campus U is losing students, and thus under-utilizing its faculty and physical facilities, and Flagship U is growing so fast as to soon require new capital investment, the “system” model responds differently than the market model. The market approach says to Branch Campus, “Screw you if you and your crappy Rec Center can’t compete,” and then lets that campus wither on the vine (and considers this a good thing). The system model might say, “Let’s start turning some marginally admitted students away from Flagship, and offer those students some incentives to attend Campus B instead — say, a guaranteed transfer back to Flagship after two years of 3.5 GPA work at Branch.” In this model, Branch’s allure is not its amenities but its pathway back to Flagship. In this model, not only is Flagship able to improve its selectivity and slow down spending on classrooms and labs, but Branch can more efficiently use its existing faculty and facilities (and also get a welcome infusion of what, for it, are very academically qualified students).
What if the entire system starts losing students to private colleges or out-of-state institutions? The “system” model suggests increasing state appropriations to lower tuition. But this will only happen in states that consider higher education a public rather than a private good. Louisiana is not such a state.
My own state went to the market-competition model. State subsidies have steadily declined and tuition has steadily gone up. Funding is, as we say, “enrollment-driven.” Our flagship campus, with its party-town atmosphere and Club Med facilities, can pretty much optimize its funding by tweaking its admissions criteria, which are supposedly set by law but in practice are always fuzzy enough to allow many hundreds of marginal admits in a pinch — students who would otherwise attend one of the struggling campuses. The result has been lower taxes, higher tuition and loan rates, and branch campuses that perpetually limp along and have no incentive to improve academically. (The incentive instead is to scrape up as many new students as possible from the bottom of the barrel. Enrollment equals funding.)
The original promise included both lower taxes and improved education; we got only lower taxes. We became less like Massachusetts and more like Alabama.
May 12th, 2015 at 9:16PM
@Doctorstein, EXACTLY!!! Sorry for the extra exclamation points, but your analysis is so right on. I have a colleague who graduated from Bama about the same time I did, late 80’s. The debate we had was regarding University of Alabama, Birmingham dropping football. His point was that the Tuscaloosa flagship never gave enough money to the subsidiary to have a productive football team. What I pointed out to him was that UAB wasn’t supposed to ever compete with the flaghsip, that wasn’t the role it was to play. UAB was/is one of the better biomedical research unis in the South, and a fine medical school. Playing championship football wasn’t anywhere near its priority, so why would anyone think that the satellite would get the same resources? Two different mandates, and two different types of students, as well.
The same can be seen with the UC’s. UC Berkeley is the flagship, UCLA’s current campus was built in the late 20’s, early 30’s. For years, it wasn’t called UC Los Angeles, but UC Southern Branch, to emphasize its role in the system. In fact, no on campus football stadium was built at UCLA, whereas the Berkeley has a 100k seater. That wasn’t an oversight, UCLA wasn’t going to compete athletically, nor in any other way, with the Big Brother. As the population of Socal out-striped that of Norcal, UCLA has become a regional powerhouse, my dad attended and played baseball for the Bruins before and after the War, and always spoke of the rivalry between the two. But, CA grew at such a rate, and had a progressive tax policy, including having far greater corporate tax burdens than today, that all UC’s didn’t need to squabble too much about resource allocation. I’m guessing that’s all changing.
As you noted, public unis now are competing with each other, not only for funding, but for students, as well. One of the policies for recruiting is looking for out of state students because the pay nearly three times more tuition than in state. All of that tuition is the collateral for the bonds needed to build nonsense, such as Lazy Rivers. This has nothing to do with pedagogy, but everything to do with the Corporate Business Model, which nearly every school has taken on. Coopers Union abandoned its non-tuition status, primarily due to their taking on tens of millions of dollars in debt to build on campus buildings, that had little to do with teaching. But, man, it was sure a nice pay day for whatever Wall Street bond palace did the underwriting.
blogs.reuters.com/…/2013/04/29/the-tragedy-of-cooper-union
It’s all coming to an end. Just today, Chicago’s bond rating fell to near junk status. The state of IL has severe problems with its deficits. LSU is only the start, it will get far worse….
May 13th, 2015 at 5:47AM
Charlie, Dr_Doctorstein: do either of you see a role for exemplary prosecutions of some universities under RICO or state laws to correct what’s wrong? (BTW-I’m not a lawyer.)
May 13th, 2015 at 9:18AM
Jack/OH: I doubt it. I’m not a lawyer either, but it seems to me that, at least in my own system, most of the stupid/wrong/counterproductive things we do are honest attempts to implement bad state law and policy — a matter of obeying the law rather than breaking it. Most of what’s wrong is done either with the explicit approval of our accreditors and our overseers at the state department of higher ed, or at their explicit request/demand. And it’s all voluminously documented at multiple levels. Asses are well covered.
Of course, it’s quite possible that individual cases involve lawbreaking. Louisiana being Louisiana, I wouldn’t be surprised if the lazy river contracting process was pretty shady. But that’s a different issue. Even if they’re squeaky-clean, lazy rivers are still a bad idea. Or rather, in terms of a consumerist system that has created bad incentives, they’re a good idea. That’s the “crime” here. It’s a problem for the legislature, not the judiciary.
May 13th, 2015 at 10:46PM
@Jack/OH, I’m not a lawyer, but given t fact that the same actors, meaning admins, Wall Street and politically connected construction magnates, are complicit in building these things, it sure does seem to be a conspiracy. I don’t know enough about RICO to tell you if it’s applicable, though….
May 14th, 2015 at 4:35AM
Charlie, Dr_Doctorstein, thanks. Our local Podunk Tech has experienced two “interventions” in campus criminal matters the past decade. One resulted in investigations by state officials, the FBI, IRS, and federal education people if my memory of published accounts is okay.
I’m picturing a junior federal prosecutor looking to make his mark asking questions about what’s really going on at our Podunk and other Podunks. That’s why I asked about RICO.
May 14th, 2015 at 8:29PM
Jack, here’s a case you might want to follow:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fbi-agents-take-ipad-documents-from-la-school-district-20141202-story.html
It involves K-12 instead of higher ed, but still. Looks very much like a sweetheart deal between Apple, Pearson, and the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District to spend $1.3 billion — one thousand and three hundred millions of dollars! — on iPads and Pearson software. There’s evidence of collusion before the bidding, and apparently the money involved came from a bond issue dedicated to capital construction, not educational materials. The FBI is on the case.
It’s hard to see how an education scandal could be bigger than this one. LAUSD is the biggest school system in the country, while Apple and Pearson are two of the biggest players in ed-tech. And the former superintendent, John Deasy, was considered a rising star of the education-reform movement. (UD will be pleased to hear he has a rather questionable doctoral degree.)
As these guys always seem to do, Deasy has landed on his feet; he’s got a new job lined up with the Broad Academy for the (ahem) Management of School Systems.