Posted on 12/09/2014 1:56:17 AM PST by abb
Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, said all the right things when fraternity members at her school were accused of gang rape: she followed the PC playbook and nobody could fault her for missing her lines. She automatically assumed guilt, and was fast off the mark to let everyone know that the university opposed rape and stood with rape survivors (as if that was ever in doubt).
She didn't wait for the facts, she dropped the presumption of innocence, and ran with the hounds.
The wrongs described in Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us to reexamine our responsibility to this community. Rape is an abhorrent crime that has no place in the world...
When the accusations turned out to be false, she didn't explain ("never apologize, never explain"), and as of this writing she hasn't apologized. She simply blithely continued with the appropriate narrative:
Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today's news must not alter this.
This was the same course taken by Duke University President Richard Brodhead in 2006, when members of Duke's lacrosse team were falsely accused of gang-rape. The similarities are so striking one has to wonder if there isn't a template for this sort of thing in a Guidebook for University Presidents:
snip
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
ping
Sullivan....most people may not realize....was about to be fired in September of 2012. She was originally hired and given a list of priorities to realign the school with cost-savings and bring in modern technology (more on-line courses), and given a time-frame to show progress. By summer of 2012...she was showing almost no progress and the university council decided to dump her and move on.
The professors at the college engaged....got student involvement, and some state newspapers to go along with their agenda....thus keeping Sullivan on. As far as I know...cost-savings have yet to be demonstrated.
In this case, and many other universities around the US...you simply don’t have the dynamic characters to look at budget issues and university happenings...dispensing justice, budget cuts, and wisdom. You need a non-academic in charge....like some Army General...who is looking out for the student, rather than everyone else.
At many, if not most, universities the mission of educating young people is not the primary focus.
They’ve turned into a high-class “jobs program” that focuses on padded payrolls, fat retirement benefits, and secure positions that require no real work.
If Colleges and Universities want Federal dollars and loans (their life blood), they had to enact draconian system to punish and demonize men, especially if the men were not guilty.
That’s good. Real good.
One word: liability
Teresa Sullivan followed the basic Liberal Lie, to wit, “All males are evil and capable of everything imaginable. All females are imbued with the light of Gaia.” Everything else follows.
The Iron Law of Bueaucracy is firmly in effect at most universities.
In general, universities reflexively try to bury scandal, and don't care about the victims. The illusion about universities and ‘social justice’ is just that - an illusion. The amount of disgusting things that happen at universities, and the lengths universities go to in order to hide these things or ‘make them go away’ would shock most on this forum - guaranteed.
I understand entirely your point about the type of people who should be running universities, but it's actually significantly worse than you might think. Ethics in business very often is at a much higher level than it is at too many of our universities, and what happens within universities is generally much less transparent than would be tolerated at publicly traded businesses.
Universities are corporations, with their bottom line being the size of their endowment. Harvard's endowment is ~$36.4 billion, Yale's $24 billion, Princeton $21 billion, Standford's 21.4 billion, etc. The University of Virginia endowment is ~$7 billion. The growth of their endowment is one of the primary missions of many universities (I would say the majority of private universities), and while the returns on their endowment portfolio might be >20% (as it was in multiple universities this year), tuition continues to go up concomitantly - and thus the growing wealth of these universities clearly doesn't get passed on to students in lower tuition etc.
At the same time that their endowments are growing, many of these universities (private universities often more than public ones) are receiving bucket loads of taxpayer dollars, and are tax exempt. This article from the Atlantic just touches the tip of the iceberg on this:
It is the propagation of the institution, not education, and clearly not ‘justice’ that is the focus of the administrations of these institutions. The higher the ‘stature’ of any particular person within the hierarchy, and/or the more money that person brings in (grants, donations, etc) the more likely it is that a university will try to bury any scandal involving them.
Private universities are controlled by their corporate boards, and to be a member of a major university corporate board you have to donate a significant amount of money, or be highly visible/famous, or both. This includes multiple CEOs and politicians. If you don't bring big money to the board, then you have to have ‘pedigree’. This propagates an elitist mentality that now permeates private higher education.
University presidents are part of the corporate structure (a step below the corporate board), their primary job being to do the bidding of the corporate board, to fund raise, to help in recruiting highly visible people to positions of power, and to avoid doing anything that could endanger the cache of the university and thus negatively affect the endowment. For this they get paid handsomely, and often live in a university owned mansion (’the president's house).
Think about all of this when you are putting money away for your child's education, or when you are writing a check for tuition. The system is broken.
Some college presidents are being honest and getting slammed for it. Donald Eastman, president of Eckerd College, recently blamed alcohol and the hook-up culture. The reaction was rapid and predictable. By the way, Eckerd is a very liberal, liberal-arts college.
I'm not defending Sullivan's PC response to the Rolling Stone article, but she would have been subjected to vicious attack by the usual suspects if she had spoken the common sense truth about binge drinking and widespread promiscuity on the Grounds. But there is little a university president can do about these things other than preach risk management, which is interpreted as “blaming the victim.”. The old doctrine of in loco parentis was abandoned 50 years ago on college campuses, and local law enforcement turns a blind eye to underage drinking and sexual violence.
This past summer, I had to fly back into the US and ended up at a car rental shop at a small airport in the south. It was late at night, and only one person at the counter....the manager. Things went quick and a light chat occurred. She was early twenties and quick to punch in all the data. The conversation drifted around to the local university, and she admitted she was a recent graduate. I didn’t say much over this....but it’s odd to me....a college graduate now to manage some car rental shop at the airport?
Back in the early 90’s...it would have been a fifty-year old person, with a high school diploma....maybe one year of some business college or community college.
We’ve now elevated marginal jobs with no real requirements to the point of requiring a four-year degree person to manage. I’m not really buying into this....I think it’s a major waste of education. The problem is...we are merely pumping these people out and not asking ourselves what exactly they will do later in life.
It’s like the environmental science idiots. We probably maxed out in the mid-80’s with enough graduates to what real jobs existed, so we invented more fake environmental jobs for them.
The IT crowd? Same thing....we now have four-year IT graduates doing work that a guy with one year of community college/certificate ought to be doing.
We have PhD folks who are hired to fill a roll with gov’t contract, but honestly....they mostly sit there and make one remarkable comment per week to really fill their job/position.
Yeah, something is broke. But at least we haven’t gotten around to making the burger-kid’s job at Burger King a job that requires two years of college. At least, not yet.
“The problem is...we are merely pumping these people out and not asking ourselves what exactly they will do later in life.”
Absolutely true, and if the hierarchy of our major universities truly cared about this they would change a lot of things. Unfortunately, they don’t, and they won’t.
I went back last year...researching class choices in the mid-1800s at a smaller university in America, and wrote a blog over the topics offered.
You had to take debate as a class each year, and show some talents in the art to graduate. You had to study some of the Roman/Latin classics. You had to take a basic class in geography/geometry. The difference between a 2014 listing and a 1800’s listing....is significant. A kid graduating from years ago could actually think, debate, and ponder. I doubt if you could get that out of ten-percent of the kids who graduate today.
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