More images Jerry Sandusky, Football coach, Gerald
Arthur "Jerry" Sandusky is a retired American football coach and
convicted serial child molester. Sandusky served as an assistant coach
for his entire career, mostly at Pennsylvania State University under Joe
Paterno. Wikipedia
Administrative Corruption Part 1 of Many By Professor Doom 9-15-13
To
take the Educational Research Methods course as a guideline, the
following summarizes a graduate degree in administration: pay a large
sum of money ($100,000 or more) to an institution for courses (plus
additional fees if you need “help”), courses where there will
quite conceivably be no actual learning of anything, then write a
thesis supported by questionable statistics (again, “help” is
standing by), and that’s it. The successful customer for these
courses already has an administration position, and is basically
paying off the institution to get a piece of paper, the better to
qualify for vastly more pay and a promotion. So many administrators
have these types of degrees that none of them look too closely at the
supposed skills, lest their own bogus degrees are examined.
In
terms of personal growth, I can respect that someone, especially
someone with much cash to blow, might want to “learn” this stuff
in detail, even if I question the possibility of doing so in online
formats. But administrators are paid quite well for having these
advanced degrees, which seem to serve as nothing more than
indoctrination into an educationist point of view. No student coming
to an institution really cares if the administrators have excellent
teaching and research skills, any more than they care if their
McDonald’s cashier has excellent teaching and research skills.
Considering
the observed high proportion of customers looking for someone to
write papers in Education or Administration, it’s no longer so odd
that administrators don’t take a dim view of cheating, or have much
respect for education…only the end goal of completing the program
matters, not the means to the end.
An
entire culture was lured by the myths of higher education, little
suspecting it was a system controlled top to bottom and beginning to
end by an exclusive caste of rulers with no particular interest or
respect for education, rulers that are in at least some cases holders
of degrees achieved without learning anything, rulers who mutated
higher education into their own image. Rulers paid very, very, well
if they can but trap the culture into their own vision of education.
Before
moving on to examine tuition, I thought it best to list examples of
outrageous administrative corruption suggested by how Administration
programs operate. The Fall of the Faculty, by Benjamin
Ginsburg, lists page after page of examples…at least 70 pages of
examples, most only lightly discussed in a line or two, but I’m
going to take some to time to write and examine a few of these in
detail.
First,
I need to explain why this corruption is so easy, and why so many
examples go on over the course of many years. There is no “check
and balance” in the education system, due to a quirk of
accreditation. Accreditation procedures, initially written by faculty
over a century ago, don’t address behavior of administrators—back
then, faculty and administrators were the same people, with even high
positions held by faculty members that had years of experience as
faculty before becoming an administrator, and often intended to
administrate for but a few years before returning to teaching and
research, the primary goals of institutions of higher education (at
least, before the administrative takeover).
When
administrators took over accreditation, they saw no reason to put
rules on themselves…faculty have rules regarding inappropriate
behavior, but not administrators. As an example I gave before showed,
an administrator with bogus credentials won’t even be fired…while
faculty with bogus credentials is removed from campus immediately.
But
it gets much worse. As you read these examples, realize, these are
just the things that have been discovered. Much as it is almost
certain the Sandusky Affair involved the rape of far more children
than those specifically mentioned by witnesses in the trial, one
should realize, due to the egregious nature of the examples given,
that administrative corruption is almost certainly far, far, worse
than I’m indicating, and this are not merely some long list of
isolated examples.
I
begin with perhaps the weirdest case, that of Cecilia Chang, a Dean
at St. John’s University in New York. Being a Dean, about the
lowest level on the administrative rung, she made but a miserly
$120,000 a year, over quadruple the average salary of a faculty
member (at least when you factor in the low paid adjuncts). It wasn’t
enough for her.
To
offset her crappy pay, she had St. John’s pony up $14,000 for her
daughter’s wedding. St. John’s also coughed up her son’s law
school tuition (meanwhile, an initiative for faculty to get tuition
at their own institutions still dies every year….); her son also
got a credit card, bills paid by the university.
She
wasn’t simply a loving mother, she also gave extravagant gifts to
her superiors, at least $10,000 a year went to bribes
gifts to keep her superiors looking the other way happy.
Many of these things, including a Caribbean vacation, were clearly
billed to the University…the weirdness of these bills somehow
overlooked by the same type of financial officers that can’t find
funds to replace light bulbs in our projectors.
She
gave the new University president, her new boss, an envelope full of
$100 bills. To his credit, he returned the money (the first
envelope, anyway…), although once again there’s something between
the lines that the new president missed: the only way she could have
thought such a “gift” was appropriate for someone she’d never
met was if she’d been doing the sort for quite some time. I’ve
been in academia for decades and I’ve never had a stranger hand me
an envelope full of $100 bills, and those rare occasions where I,
possibly, might have been offered a bribe were so circumspect (and so
firmly turned down on my part) that I could never be certain.
Bribery
went both ways, of course, and Chang arranged for businessmen to
receive “honorary” doctorates in exchange for donations.
One
the key themes of Ginsberg’s book is how administrators set up
their own fiefdoms, and Chang is a great example of this—according
to reports, she rarely even set foot on campus the last few decades
of her 30 years “at” the institution. I guess administrators were
too busy opening their gifts, and engaging in their own corruption,
to notice something was odd, here.
What
really sets her over the top, however, was her scholarship program.
Somehow, this administrator with no respect or appreciation for
education (Chang had “assistance” in writing her doctoral
dissertation in Education) was in control of awarding scholarships.
She awarded these to the children of friends and acquaintances, with
the obligation that they had to work 20 hours a week. This work was
basically as her personal servants, from washing her car and
household chores, to assisting in falsifying bills.
“It’s
nearly impossible to believe that she was able to behave this way
without at least a wink and a nod from some at the school who
benefited from her ‘generosity,’ ”
said Alan Abramson, another of her attorneys.
Finally,
it was noticed that Chang’s fiefdom was costing around $350,000 a
year (not counting her “scholarships for personal servants”
program), wiping out whatever alleged money she was bringing in as a
fundraiser. Finally, Change was brought to trial for extensive fraud;
when it was clear she would lose, she went home, and committed
suicide in November, 2012.
Now,
one might look at this as just a really weird case, but consider the
decades she was allowed to openly engage in fraudulent behavior,
think of her “scholars” washing her car…and consider how few
questions were raised, even as her superiors were receiving cases
of expensive wine on a yearly basis.
Much
as with the Sandusky Affair, a few brave souls did think it odd, but
not enough. Chang probably committed an act of fraud every day for at
least a decade before getting caught. What do you think the chances
are of getting away with it for administrators that only commit fraud
once a week?
Think
about it.
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