You can follow her many posts about this staggeringly pointless institution by typing South Carolina State University in her search engine. She has often wondered aloud, on this blog, why the chump taxpayers of that state don’t en masse refuse to pay up until SCSU, with its virtually non-existent student body and its corrupt leadership, is shut down.
Now a state subcommittee has indeed voted to close the money pit, though higher level votes are needed to really make this happen. As proposed, the closure would be temporary; but the measure would almost certainly hasten the natural evolution of the campus toward extinction. You cannot function without students and without money. Taxing citizens year after year in order to transfer revenue to an empty outstretched hand is insane.
And speaking of transfer: Under the plan, SCSU students with respectable GPAs would be free to transfer to other state campuses. They may thus have an actual shot at an education.
February 11th, 2015 at 6:33AM
As a resident of SC for almost 12 years now, I suspect the Rasputin-like staying power of SCSU is at least in part due to the fact that it’s an HBU — the only public one in the state. Because this is South Carolina, efforts to clean up the mess in Orangeburg will inevitably become racial issues. “It may be a sham, but it’s our sham.” That’s understandable, but unfortunate.
February 11th, 2015 at 7:08AM
Mondo: Yes. But almost no one applies to SCSU anymore – they’re losing students by the hundreds. This adds an intriguing element to the cultural reality underlying SCSU: Will the state continue to pay for it to operate as a campus with almost no students, almost no classes?
February 11th, 2015 at 8:07AM
I’m sure Mondo is right, bearing in mind that “racial” is also “political.” States do wasteful things all the time for political reasons. The Southern-UNO merger looks like a no-brainer – until you glance at LSU’s board. I know of a case in the northeast where a college that was set to be merged (the details had been negotiated) was “saved” because it happened to have a minority president.
February 11th, 2015 at 8:37AM
On top of that, SCSU is also strongly linked to the civil rights movement down here. Two of the three kids killed in the Orangeburg Massacre (1968) were SCSU students.
(Indeed, I see that at least one SCSU supporter at another institution has played the Massacre card and tied the whole mess to the “Black Lives Matter” meme: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/11/legislators-seek-2-year-closure-south-carolina-state-u)