UD didn’t think Chicago State University, with its long history of negligence, corruption, and graduation rates barely above ten percent, had any more surprises in store for her (she’s chronicled its disgraceful ways for years on this blog), but now there’s this:
Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed “for poor scholarship,” but records obtained by [the Chicago Tribune] show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as zero. Meanwhile, President Wayne Watson was touting increased retention and graduation rates as evidence that the institution was improving after years marked by widespread financial mismanagement, scathing audits and a failure to graduate students.
Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.
July 28th, 2011 at 9:06AM
ah increased retention, have there ever been any organized/union efforts by faculty (in general not just at CS) on issues related to teaching standards/authority (not freedom of speech) like grade-inflation?
July 28th, 2011 at 3:09PM
I cannot speak for my colleagues at Chicago State. I do know that a member of the Northern Illinois faculty senate did ask a representative of the administration’s task force on retention whether lowering academic standards to meet retention goals was being considered. (No.)
The position of a tenured faculty member (if any are left at Chicago State) is probably not conducive to resisting the administration … given that university’s place in the academic food chain, a lot of people might be trying to publish their way out, or they might be grateful simply to be holding any kind of tenured slot at all.
April 6th, 2012 at 9:56AM
[…] State University – graduation rate barely above ten percent – has just issued an email to its faculty: In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, […]
February 26th, 2014 at 3:34PM
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