… Chicago State University, bankrolled almost exclusively by taxpayers (it has vanishingly few students, and is losing them at a rate of about 20% a year, so it’s certainly not getting much in tuition), stands out. I guess it stands out because it’s a university, and most of us continue to assume that universities have more dignity or whatever than other public institutions.
It may be because of this moral/emotional over-investment of ours that a Chicago judge and jury have recently come down so very hard on outrageously corrupt and inept CSU. As Jodi Cohen reports, having found in favor of a whistle blower –
[James Crowley was] awarded $2 million in punitive damages and $480,000 in back pay after a jury decided last month that he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by university president Wayne Watson and other top officials.
– the judge has now decided to increase Crowley’s award.
Circuit Court Judge James McCarthy decided to double Crowley’s back pay, as allowed under state law. Crowley had been earning $120,000 a year when he was fired. McCarthy also Tuesday ordered Chicago State to pay $60,000 in interest on the back pay. That brings the total payout to just more than $3 million.
The judge will rule following a hearing set for May on whether Chicago State should also pay Crowley’s attorney’s fees, and on terms of reemployment.
“It is quite clear from the verdict that Mr. Crowley is to be given his employment back,” the judge said.
The term slam dunk comes to mind. The sentence Someone is really really pissed. comes to mind.
Yet why (as UD has asked more than once before on this blog) does CSU exist? Why has it not been folded into another university? Why has it not been shut down? CSU is as much of a scandalous tax syphon as any for-profit school-for-scandal.
You become a paranoid police state.
Chicago 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, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”
The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.
Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”
Shades of North Korea.
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Update: Chicago State decides it doesn’t want to be North Korea.
Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.
Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:
… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.
… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.
… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.
… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.
These are excerpts from a strong-minded article about universities with virtually non-existent graduation rates.
I’ve covered scads of scandals at two of them: Chicago State and Texas Southern.
… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.
… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.
… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.
… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.
And how, pray, will they be shut down? That is precisely the job of the accrediting agencies. In taking away accreditation, they make it impossible for the schools to operate. But they don’t remove accreditation even from Chicago State, which has a 13% graduation rate.
Shut down the accreditors. Start a new agency that’s not just as corrupt as the schools it ignores.
University Diaries has already written about the outrageously mismanaged Chicago State University, with its thieving presidents and desperate faculty and students.
Really desperate faculty. They recently begged the governor to fire the school’s entire board of trustees, in order to stop the trustees from appointing another putrid president. The governor ignored them.
But whatever else might be wrong with the new guy, he did do some auditing.
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He found out that a local politician has run off with one of CSU’s statues.
Officials from Chicago State University stopped just short of accusing State Representative Monique Davis of statue theft.
Davis, who recently made headlines because she allegedly owes $500,000 in back rent to the Chicago Board of Education, has in her possession a $25,000 statue of an African slave that belongs to Chicago State University.
And she’s refusing to give back the artwork, the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed reports.
Chicago State University Police Chief Ronnie Watson tried to collect the 400-pound bronze entitled “Defiance,” but, perhaps poetically, Davis refused to relinquish the rendering of a slave girl in shackles with whip marks on her back.
… CSU originally purchased the statue to adorn its financial aid center. They used state funds that were set aside for the school.
But that doesn’t explain how Davis ended up with the bronze. She can’t explain it either, or, rather, she declined to explain it to Sneed.
… Newly installed president Wayne Watson, who is trying to revamp the school’s management procedures, uncovered the missing statue during a financial audit.
As far as UD can make out from reading a variety of accounts of this matter, Davis simply loves the statue. She loves it madly. She loves to look at it in her office. She has bonded with it and feels it belongs to her.
A plaything of hacks, Chicago State University has apparently been kicked around one too many times for its long-suffering faculty. They’ve only just evicted President Elnora Daniel – a party girl with a penchant for long, university-subsidized Caribbean cruises – and now the school’s hopeless board of trustees wants to unload another hack on them.
It’s not every day that a faculty pulls itself together to ask the governor to remove its entire board of trustees, and to halt the appointment of its next president, but that’s what CSU’s professors have done.
Chicago State University faculty took the unusual step Tuesday of asking Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the university’s board of trustees.
The unanimous request from the Faculty Senate, which comes days before trustees plan to announce their decision on the next university leader, also asks Quinn to stop the board from hiring a president.
Chicago State faculty and students have argued they were excluded from the presidential search process and have criticized the two finalists as local political insiders. On Friday, 13 of the 15 members of the campus’ search advisory committee resigned in protest.
The finalists are Carol Adams, secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Wayne Watson, the retiring chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.
[From earlier news coverage: “Donald Pettis, president of Chicago State’s alumni association and an advisory committee member, said that only one of the 14 committee members voted for Adams. None voted for Watson…”]
Rev. Leon Finney, the Chicago State board chairman, did not respond to a request for comment…
Yeah, why comment. Really, why bother. Who cares.
Let’s start with delight: One of UD‘s heroes, Steven Pinker, has started a defense of free speech group among faculty there. Everyone’s got an eye on Stanford and Oberlin and multiple other stagers of politically coercive campus melodrama, and all self-respecting centers of free inquiry need to take an explicit stand against these enemies of freedom. UD’s beloved University of Chicago is a pioneer here; Harvard and other schools follow UC in strong unmitigated statements, rules, and organizations deployed to resist right and left ideologues – some of whom, grotesquely, were hired by these same universities – who are always trying to shut/shout down free thought and free expression. Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom (which includes econ prof Jason Furman, whose Cambridge house UD knows well, because for years it was owned by her buddy Peter Galbraith) rightly anticipates, and readies itself to fight, mindless and destructive fanaticism.
On the disgust front, there’s yet another greedy egomaniac who can’t think of anything to do with three hundred million dollars other than give it to an institution worth significantly more than fifty billion dollars in order to get his name on a building and get some tax benefits. Vomit.
Not to mention.
‘A Round-Up of
Attempted Massacres:
Another Monday in the United States of America.’
Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.
Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.
One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…
This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:
We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.
Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.
Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.
It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.
Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.
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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.
Starting tomorrow, Les UDs will be (where else?) in Rehoboth Beach, haunt of current presidents. Their leave-taking preparations, after many three-hour drives to the Bay Bridge and the long Delaware flats, feature the now-classic Can’t you take the dog to the kennel yourself? Why do you need me to ride along?, How bad do you think it will it be on the Bay Bridge?, Where’s the orange beach chair with the wide armrests that I like?, and (even though we’ve stayed there for decades) When is check-in time at the condo?
One distinctive element of this trip is the presence at the beach of tons of friends and family. Traditional Rehoboth involves much quiet gazing out to sea and to the container ships on the horizon, followed by twosomes along the boardwalk. This time, while our first week will be relatively quiet (various Garrett Park neighbors; Di and Steve Elkin), the week around Memorial Day will be a real blowout, with both of UD‘s sisters, various cousins, and gobs of buddies. UD is thrilled, but worries about crowd control, plus the difficulty of dinner reservations.
Nu, these are problems anybody would want. As is also traditional, UD‘s gratitude for life having rigged up something spectacular for her is at the full.
She will, as ever, blog from the shore.
“Shamima Begum should not be banished – banishing people belongs in the dark ages, not 21st-century Britain,” complains a person who thinks keeping Begum – a veteran ISIS member – out of England is a bad idea. But the British courts have now ruled unanimously that she can’t come back; she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, they point out, and should go and claim it. That ain’t banishment.
And anyway – England’s full of sharia law councils, and their decisions are way dark ages — at least for women! The more power England gives sharia courts, the darker the ages right in your own home town, hon. So no lecturing us about 21st-century Britain. To be sure, we ain’t in the ninth century – the century in which Begum opted to live – but, as the Council of Europe notes, we’re definitely backsliding.
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UPDATE: And here’s how not to argue that Begum belongs back in England. Let’s take a close look at Aina Khan’s argument.
Headline: Shamima Begum is a product of Britain. She should face justice here.
What’s the logic of this? In an ecstasy of violence Begum repudiated England and joined the Islamic State. Just because the origins she rejected were British, she has to be tried in Britain? No. No reasonable trial can in any case be conducted, since no records exist of her activities in ISIS territory.
She’s a victim of child grooming by a death cult. And her banishment tells all ethnic minorities that they’re not seen as fully British.
Who says? Pure speculation, the bit about grooming. I mean, so she was a teenager. That doesn’t mean she was, in Khan’s word, “naive.” Richard Loeb was 18 when he murdered Bobby Franks. He wasn’t treated like a naive victim of grooming. The bit about her fate sealing the dire fate of all ethnic minorities in famously tolerant Britain is just bullshit. Fear mongering.
Khan says the public was “dismayed” when in an interview Begum boasted of feeling nothing when she saw severed heads. Let’s look at some sentences from the Cambridge Dictionary which use the word dismay.
She discovered, to her dismay, that she had locked her keys inside her car.
They enjoyed the meal but were dismayed by how much it cost.
She discovered, to her dismay, that her exam was a whole month earlier than she’d expected.
We discovered, to our dismay, that the ISIS member was fine with severed heads.
Last one doesn’t quite work, does it? Not quite strong enough.
[W]e need to know why a straight-A teenager from east London would willingly leave Britain to embrace a death cult.
Richard Loeb was a brilliant, straight-A teenager at the University of Chicago. Like straight-A Shamima, he felt great curiosity about/attraction to sadistically killing people. Smart doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, does it? Is it possible Aina Khan doesn’t know this? Is it also possible she’s unaware of the contradiction involved in arguing that Begum was super-smart and au même moment so sub-basement stupid as to find an ISIS come-on irresistibly seductive? Weawy?
The rest of her opinion piece is more insistence that the Begum precedent means that if Khan, as a minority, jaywalks, she could be sent back to the country where her grandparents were born. Gevalt.
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It gets worse. At least Khan bothers arguing her case. This dude doesn’t even try. Way to come across like a scolding, arrogant, elitist.
Three generations of them grace this land of ours – the grandfather, who established a dirty chain of nursing homes in Chicago; the son, who committed the biggest Medicare fraud in American history; and the grandson, whose admission to U Penn came about because of Esformes money paid to its basketball coach (now convicted of bribery). Read all about it.
Having spent every waking moment of his entire life breaking almost every known law, the son’s contrition in front of the judge today lacked a certain…
The son got twenty years, and might have gotten fewer if he’d been willing to say to the judge, in that contrition thing, exactly what he’d done …
At a critical juncture before he imposed Esformes’ punishment, the judge seemed willing to lower his final sentence by four years if the defendant agreed to elaborate on his “acceptance of responsibility” in his original statement to Scola. The judge said he would only acknowledge Esformes’ acceptance if he specifically admitted he paid bribes and committed other crimes. But … Esformes’ legal team chose not to go that route because it would have precluded their appeal of his trial convictions.
That’s it, babe. An Esformes to the bitter end. Might fuck up his appeal.
This was, you recall, Mike Royko’s famous proposed motto (Where’s Mine?) for the incredibly corrupt city of Chicago; it now clearly stands for the tragic city of Baltimore, whose already-hapless mayor has revealed not only her personal corruption, but – along the way – the corruption of the University of Maryland medical system board of trustees.
Tragicomic, really, since the latest confirmation of the link between urban collapse and systemic corruption comes from sales – make that non-sales – of children’s books the mayor wrote (maybe – maybe someone else wrote them for her), self-published, and then sold in bulk for permanent storage in a warehouse to the same UM med system on whose board of trustees she sat.
Nothing unusual about that arrangement, though — huge numbers of trustees were self-dealing through the hospital system. The head of the UMMS board of trustees is doing mucho harrumphing about “managed conflicts,” but the phrase managed conflict has about the same persuasiveness as the phrase managed massage in the mouth of Robert Kraft.
I mean, it’s better than the cake. The developing story of the latest fake hate assault has much more drama than the mere addition of some anti-gay icing. Yet it’s the same contemptible attention- and money-seeking behavior (the cake guy sued Whole Foods; once WF proved he homophobed himself, it countersued), and UD has learned over the course of this blog that the business of staging things is sickeningly common. And of course incredibly destructive to efforts to take seriously actual hate crimes.
All the way back in 2004, UD covered the Professor Kerri Dunn business, when she spray-painted her car with swastikas etc. and everyone at Claremont McKenna rallied on her behalf and worried about incipient fascism until the guys who happened to be taking a walk nearby at the time she did it told the police about watching her paint her car. An education professor at Columbia University, under threat of dismissal for plagiarism (of her students!) hung a noose on her office door and claimed to be the victim of a hate crime. A conservative student at Princeton wrote himself some really nasty, anti-conservative letters and enjoyed right-wing martyrdom until he had to admit the truth…. Croyez-moi, I could go on! And on!
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UPDATE: Now this I really don’t get. Washington Post, headline:
I DOUBTED JUSSIE SMOLLET. IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT I MIGHT BE RIGHT
Heartbreak is ridiculous. Anger’s the ticket. The Post editor continues:
I tried telling myself that it is possible that two assailants were walking around downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in January in 10-degree weather, waiting for a black victim. In addition to that, they were stalking around with a bottle of bleach and a rope. And ultimately, the prey they selected was an actor on a show that they must’ve been somewhat familiar with, because they were able to not only name the show but also know that he played a gay character. Never mind the fact that he was likely bundled up because again: Chicago, January, 10 degrees. Also, after he fought to get away, he left the rope around his neck until he got to the hospital.
This ain’t doubt; it’s close to certain knowledge he was bullshitting. And he wasn’t new to bullshitting. Mature political actors – people like newspaper editors – don’t go into denial when people do bad, illegal, and destructive things; nor do they enter into heartbreak when what seemed obviously the case turns out to have been the case. When weirdly flagrant and flagrantly weird events occur, serious people respond with skepticism.
This is more like it:
Commentator Kmele Foster put it this way on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday: “Two in the morning, almost the coldest night of the year, you were attacked and someone conveniently had a rope? My heart goes out to anyone who gets attacked, but it’s totally appropriate to exercise a bit of skepticism and to exercise a bit of patience in waiting for the facts to develop around this story.”
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As for the legal implications:
Attorney and CBS2/KCAL9 Legal Analyst Steve Meister says every state penalizes fabricating a crime and the trouble this case has caused is serious.
“That’s felony conduct because you caused a lot of people a lot of problems and you cost the city a lot of money and you took time away from what cops could have been doing to solve real crimes.” Meister says.
He says every state’s laws vary as do the penalties. In California a felony conviction for lying to a police officer is punishable by up to three years in prison.
UPDATE:
This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots.