… nothing makes you happier than scandals involving religious universities, places that often wear their piety on a very self-righteous sleeve. Obviously it’s more fun when those places (rather than yucky secular schools like the University of Miami) turn out to be fraud-ridden hellholes run by sordid people of the cloth. Think back over our posts covering Yeshiva University, Baylor, Seton Hall, St. John’s, St. Louis, Southern Methodist…
Schools that have never hidden their trashy nature – Liberty, for instance – don’t make the list because they’re so overtly icky that they don’t even qualify for hypocritical. (Put the names of any of these schools in my search engine for wonderfully stomach-churning details.)
Wheeling Jesuit, or whatever the wreck is calling itself these days, has a real place of honor on the Gruesome Godly list, having for years been run by a dissolute cabal headed by jacked up jesuit AND HEAD OF THE ENTIRE WEST VIRGINIA CATHOLIC CHURCH Michael Bransfield. The details of his depravity – in the article I just linked to – are, even by church standards, pretty remarkable. But as I’ve endlessly pointed out, whether it’s Jewish Yeshiva or Catholic Wheeling, you don’t get there without large all-male incredibly parochial boards of trustees and boosters making the world safe for the very vilest among us.
December 30th, 2019 at 12:01PM
So the contractor, who did the renovations, is a Mass attending catholic, who is sickened by the bishop’s depravity. Nevertheless, he still financially supports an institution he knows is corrupt. None of this nonsense could persist if adults grew up and stopped believing deranged mythology….
December 30th, 2019 at 3:24PM
Isn’t this just the trough that Byrd filled running dry?
https://www.corporations.org/welfare/inquirer5.html
December 31st, 2019 at 10:31AM
Ravi: Wow. Had no idea about that history. But it’s such a familiar story.
December 31st, 2019 at 11:05AM
Technology has been saving education forever and Wheeling has been going out of business just as long. But, once the faculty are fired, the majors reduced, and the mission revectored the brand may still survive – the cat isn’t gone as long as the smile remains. Is this one of those simulacrum/postmodern moments where craft and intrigue save the day?
December 31st, 2019 at 12:55PM
Ravi: I followed one school years ago where vanishingly few students applied – I think it must have been Chicago State… Here’s the post! And I considered just what you’re considering: Can a university that’s basically nothingness continue to function? And my answer was a resounding YES.
December 31st, 2019 at 1:31PM
They can come back as Wheeling Jesuitical University, then.
I’ll show myself out.
December 31st, 2019 at 1:46PM
The late David Noble wrote extensively regarding technology and worker displacement. The phenomena isn’t limited to production/blue collar work. In “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Rducation,” he chronicled the corporate obsession with replacing professors with computers that delivered the professors own curriculum. In other words, a teacher’s knowledge, research, experience, no longer belonged to the human being, but was usurped by the institution, to be utilized for whatever profitable method available. In essence, the uni becomes a cipher of a school, and instead, becomes a method of profit extraction…
January 1st, 2020 at 2:41PM
Whirling Jesuitical?