Party Schools Exposed

Parents sue fraternity and university over student's hazing death

One of the mysteries of academia that is explained in my book is why college administrators continue to tolerate,  endorse and even support financially the operation of fraternities, which are nothing more than deadly street gangs involved in gang rape, providing alcohol to minors, drug dealing and hazing deaths.

The latter was in the news this week when it was made public that the parents of Donnie Wade, a student at Prairie View A & M University in Texas, was suing the university and  Phi Beta Sigma fraternity for causing Donnie's death in an early morning hazing incident.

Readers of this blog know that this death is one of hundreds of similar deaths that have taken place over the last three years as part of fraternity hazing rituals involving forced consumption of alcohol, branding with hot coat hangers and forced exposure to hot and cold. These incidents only make the news when a student dies, but, believe me, they take place on campus all the time. And it's not just fraternities. Marching bands and athletic teams also haze their incoming members.

Hazing rituals, which are illegal in most states, are carried out by immature and irresponsible sadists who know that the college will let them get away with it. But why would administrators endorse and support organizations whose main functions consist of criminal activity and torturing students to death?

When I ask college administrators about this, they say that as long as fraternities maintain their ties to the college there is some hope of working with them to change their ways. Well, we can see how well THAT worked. If they suspended fraternities the brothers would simply move their illegal activities off campus where they would be beyond the college's reach, they say.

The real reason, however, is that fraternities serve an important function in party school culture. Many potential students whose purpose in going to college is to experience what Forbes magazine called the "country club campus" of non-stop hedonism, actually choose colleges because of the fraternities. At party schools, fraternities serve not only as illegal entertainment directors but as a potent anti-intellectual force reminding administrators and students alike that without drunken debauchery party school campuses would become ghost towns. Irresponsible students choose colleges for their entertainment value rather than educational standing and the more fraternities there are, the more likely it is to be a party school.

Since the negative publicity that hazing deaths create for colleges doesn't seem to be doing the trick, perhaps the blood money that Prairie View is now going to have to cough up to reimburse the Wade family for killing their son will have some impact.  After all, money remains on of the few things that college administrators care about these days.

Foundation Money Provides Slush Fund for College President

In what has become a familiar story to readers of this blog, yet another corrupt college president has had his personal financial dealings investigated by a newspaper and the resulting controversy has led to his resignation.

This time it's way up in Fargo, North Dakota where Joseph A. Chapman, president of North Dakota State University, handed in his resignation this week saying it "just isn't fun any more" to be a college president amid what he called "distractions."

These "distractions" include a $2 million dollar personal residence for the high rolling pres., a $22,000 trip to Washington on a charter jet with his extended family and the revelations that his wife, Gale, has a $50,000 job with the college foundation, the same group that approved the expenditures. That's on top of his $411,000 annual salary that includes a car allowance and the new college residence, the price of which ballooned from $900,000 to $2 million during the course of construction.

All of this was revealed through an investigation by the Forum newspaper, which examined the expenditures of the college foundation. You can read about it here and here.  

"Many of the events that have come to light in recent weeks are difficult, if not impossible to explain," said John Q. Paulsen, a trustee of the foundation and one of the people who were supposed to keep an eye on where the funds were going. Okay, let me spell it out for Mr. Paulsen: "C-O-R-R-U-P-T." Your president was misusing his office to enrich and amuse himself and you were picking up the tab, dummy.

The trip to Washington to attend President Obama's inauguration included Chapman, his wife, his children and even his daughter's fiancee. Because the president's personal airplane was being repaired they chartered a jet, stayed in first class hotels and charged the tab to the foundation. Compare this $22,000 junket to that of North Dakota's other president, Robert Kelley of University of North Dakota. He made the same trip, but was not too proud to purchase a regular airline ticket.  His trip cost only $2,176!

All of this comes at a time when college tuition is spiraling out of control. Parents are taking out second mortgages and emptying out their retirement accounts to pay the bills and students are going deeply into debt.  How come nobody thought of using some of the president's slush fund to hold down the cost of tuition?

The answer is that party schools like North Dakota State treat students like cash machines who do little more than provide the operating funds to allow corrupt administrators like Chapman to ride high on the hog, living like robber barons on money that was supposed to be used for eduction.

According to the Associated Press, Chapman plans to write a book about his experiences. We have a suggestion for a title: "Greed is Good: How I hoodwinked parents and taxpayers into paying for my lavish lifestyle."

Professor refuses order to fix grades for crackhead hoopster

One of my new heroes is Sally Dear, an adjunct at Binghamton University in New York, who took a stand against corrupt college administrators who ordered her to fix the grades of a college basketball player with a spotty attendance record who was later arrested for selling and using crack cocaine.

With 11 years of experience teaching human development, Sally didn't set out to be a whistle blower, but when the New York Times asked her the question, she decided to answer it honestly.  Yes, she said, she had been ordered to give the athletes higher grades than they deserved. As a result of telling the truth, she was fired.

"I'm being fired for being ethical," she told the New York Times. "I have no doubt about that whatsoever."

While Binghamton claimed her dismissal was due to "budget cuts," absolutely no one is falling for that whopper. Now that the door is open, Sally is spilling the beans that many of Binghamton's athletically gifted but academically challenged hoopsters were funneled into the human development program because it was known to favor the basketball program. According to Sally, the department has not been holding the hoopsters to the same standard as other students. Hoopsters who were not passing were given "independent studies" to carry them through, she said.

As a former college teacher, I can tell you that "independent studies" are a well-known dodge to keep students in school who are too dumb to pass the regular courses or who have serious attendance problems caused by failure to get up before noon.

Now the SUNY chancellor has ordered Sally to be reinstated and ordered an outside investigation to focus on issues of "academic integrity" in addition to an ongoing investigation of the collapse of the team after six players were dismissed. The athletic director also resigned.

"It's no secret to anyone that the president's desire to get to the NCAA championship trumped everything else," Sally told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I got caught right in the middle of it."

So one lowly adjunct tells the truth and the whole corrupt system falls apart. College presidents like Binghamton's Lois B. DeFleur who care more about NCAA championships than they do about academic standards are exposed for the unethical creeps that they really are. Binghamton administrators are no doubt staying up late these days feeding the paper shredders to cover up the truth.

Sally thinks there are hundreds of professors like her around the country who are fed up with the dumbed down classes and inflated grades that administrators are forcing on them in order to improve their retention rates and keep the millions in tuition money flowing from student loans into the college coffers.

"They're not willing to talk to anyone," she said. "They're scared of their jobs."

When an industry that brags about its academic freedom intimidates its employees by punishing those who speak out about abuses, its time for a full scale housecleaning.   We could start by kicking out corrupt, overpaid college administrators like Lois B. DeFleur.

Body Counts Mount in North Carolina State Corruption Probe

The scandal at North Carolina State regarding the hiring of the ex-governor's wife to a $170,000-per-year job has led to the resignation of the college's chancellor, a member of the board of trustees and the firing of the gubernatorial spouse herself.

Mary Easley, the wife of former governor Michael F. Easley, was hired to run a campus lecture series and to teach law courses. Her initial salary of $80,000 was later raised to $170,000. Documents have now come to light showing that the job was created at Michael Easley's request.

This only came to light because Michael Easley is being investigated by the FBI and a shelf full of documents provided by the university have become public. The chancellor, James L. Oblinger, resigned this week without admitting any wrongdoing, following the resignation two weeks ago of trustee W. McQueen Campbell, who apparently brought the former governor's job request to the board.

You can follow the coverage of the story in the Raleigh News and Observer. The story is still unfolding and likely to get even more juicy before it ends.

The latest development is the release of a series of e-mails between Oblinger and Campbell in which they discussed various ways of finding a job for Mrs. Easley in the university.

Longtime readers of this blog will not be so surprised by this kind of unethical behavior by college administrators. Similar things have happened in Florida and West Virginia. The reason they happen is that colleges, which are less carefully scrutinized by investigators and the press, are convenient places to hide political corruption.

If Governor Easley had tried to put his wife into a state office, it would have been exposed immediately. Colleges, however, are not as much in the public eye and, besides, naive reporters still think they are above this type of thing. So when governors are looking for someone to grant phony diplomas, or looking for a job for a relative or for a place to fund an aide's pet building project, colleges are a convenient alternative.

Also, since most colleges are flush with cash through tuition that can be increased easily and regularly, it's not difficult to find $170,000 to pay the governor's wife for her minimal services. What colleges get in return, of course, is a cozy relationship with the state government, which not only provides them with taxpayer money but also serve to regulate them. It works out for everyone until some outsider sticks his nose into it and notices that foul smell of corruption.

Another interesting aspect of this is the roundabout way these scandals are exposed. It's never someone on the inside blowing the whistle and never an education reporter asking tough questions. It's always a side product of another investigation. Here the feds were looking at other charges against Easley and just happened to stumble on his wife's sweetheart job with North Carolina State. What would happen if journalists really took a close look at colleges' finances?

Academics forced to limit wine purchases to $75 per bottle

Hey, times are hard! Auto company presidents are leaving their corporate jets at home. On Wall Street, bankers who lost 80 gazillion dollars last year have to settle for million-dollar bonuses.

That's why the University of California at San Francisco, which is facing record declines in state aid and a 9 percent increase in tuition, has put its collective foot down. From now on, faculty and administrators will have to limit their college-reimbursed wine purchases to $75 a bottle. No more Mr. Nice Guy!

You can read the story, which was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, here. 

Doug Levy, a spokesman for the college said overdoing it on the wine list doesn't happen very often but "every now and then people forget that it's university money." What Doug doesn't mention is that this money comes from stressed-out taxpayers and parents who are taking out second mortgages and raiding their retirement funds to pay the tuition to send Junior to college. I bet they are greatly relieved that colleges are now spending their money wisely.  

I think this is another sign that college administrators just don't get it. It's like the AIG executives who took handouts from the government and then went to luxury spas for some down time. To those of us working stiffs who can't afford $75 bottles of wine, this sounds a lot like "Let them eat cake!" Only, in this case, it's more like "Let the students pay for it. All they need to do is take out more loans!"

Thanks to T.K for sending me this little gem!

College administrators take kickbacks from predatory lenders

People often ask me, "Could college administrators really do all this nasty stuff to the students that parents trust them to take care of?"  Now, thanks to Alan Michael Collinge, I can simply hand them a copy of his new book, The Student Loan Scam,  and let them read the gruesome tales for themselves.

Collinge himself is part of the story. After graduation he was caught up in the student    loan trap and defaulted on a loan. The loan sharks at Sallie Mae soon jacked up his rates and hit him with penalties until he was being asked to pay more than he made at two jobs. Unlike most students caught up in this scam, he fought back, setting up a lobbying group and writing the book.

It's a real page turner! Collinge shows how the predatory student loan companies made contributions to highly placed Republicans like John Boehner and Buck McKeon. What the legislators did in return was remove student loans from all the protections that Congress placed on other kinds of loans, like the Truth in Lending act. Then they changed the bankruptcy regulations so students could never escape their loans, even if they declared bankruptcy. With crippling rates and even worse penalties, students became slaves to the loan sharks. Collinge even found some who attempted suicide and ran off to other countries to escape the bill collectors.

And then they made some deals with college administrators. Describing this part of the scam takes an entire chapter called "The Corruption of the Universities" and corruption it is. In exchange for colleges endorsing the predatory lenders as "preferred lenders," college administrators were taken on elaborate vacations and given gifts like golf vacations, expensive wine and dinners. Then there were the good old fashioned kickbacks where cash was simply given to the administrators in exchange for their immortal souls.

The administrators sold the colleges' logos to the predators and set up call centers for them. When parents would call a university with a question about loans, the college would transfer them to a salesman from the loan companies, who would pretend to be a college official. All pretty neat and it would continue to this day except for investigations by Congress and the attorney general's office in New York State.  Half a dozen college administrators were forced to resign. Were these obscure, out-of-the-way colleges? Nope. How about the University of Texas, Columbia and Johns Hopkins. 

"By 2000, " Collinge wrote, "it became apparent that some schools had all but abandoned even the pretense of concern for students' financial well-being and were entering into agreements with lenders for the purpose of making additional money from students."  In other words, Goodbye Mr. Chips. Hello Tony Soprano.

The colleges "viewed their preferred lenders lists as bargaining chips, using them not only to secure payments for the universities, but also to reap their own personal benefits." It became impossible to tell where the universities ended and the predatory lenders began. 

And the problem continues today. In 2007 the U.S. Department of Education revealed that students at 1,412 universities had 85 percent of their student loans from a single lender. Hmmm could be a coincidence?  I think not. Of those colleges. 531 were found to have 100 percent of their student loans through a single lender. And hey, what do you want to bet that these are the "preferred lenders?" Nice touch!

So, if you are planning to send a kid to college or have a kid in college or know anyone who is sending a kid to college, this book is essential reading. Spending $22.95 could save you tens of thousands of dollars. Also, you will never be able to look a college administrator in the face the same way again. If they are willing to sell your kid into student loan hell, what other devious, greedy schemes are they hiding? I don't know about you, but when I meet with a college administrator, I always check my wallet before I leave.  Picture Tony Soprano with a Ph.D hanging on the wall. "Hey, youse guys, was in it for me?" Turns out, plenty!

Arkansas College Trustees got 80% Discounts on Kids' Tuition

I have nothing against giving scholarship money to help out students in need. No kid smart enough to go to college should be denied an education because of a lack of funds. But scholarships for the children of bank presidents and robber baron tycoons? No way!

That's why the Associated Press checked into complaints that the children of the college trustees at the University of Central Arkansas were getting 80 percent scholarships just because their parents sat on the board. There is no written policy on this and the AP had to file freedom of information requests to track this down.

It turns out that the children of five of the trustees received the discounts. College trustees, of course, are not middle class people generally and are usually expected to pay their own way. So instead of needy students, the college gave the benefits to wealthy, connected people who just happened to be on the college board.

You can read the story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette here.  Apparently this is not illegal, but it is so unfair and unethical that the state's highest education chief said he believed the college should stop the practice.

The good news here is that the press is finally paying attention to the unethical shenanigans that go on at colleges because no one apparently pays much attention most of the time.  Like other kinds of public officials, they are often tempted to reach into the till and take home a little extra cash. What is needed is a watchdog to life up the lid and take a look at what crawls out.

All over the country reporters are finding high paid administrators with no-show jobs, nepotism in the ranks of administrators and all kinds of kickbacks. Not to mention, of course, the recent run of college presidents convicted of drunk driving. A reporter who took a few weeks off to report on this stuff could win a Pulitzer prize.

List of binge drinking college presidents continues to grow

Darnell Cole of Milwaukee Area Technical College recently became the latest in a series of Midwestern college presidents convicted of drunk driving. By my count he is the fourth since last July. Read it here.

While one of the drunken presidents managed to keep his job by promising to go into rehab, two others were forced to quit and Cole was fired.

So what is going on here?  You may recall that the current school year began with the Amethyst Initiative attempting to get college presidents to sign onto a petition to change the drinking age to 18. You hear virtually nothing about that idea anymore, but why are so many college presidents adopting the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach to binge drinking?

Why are these supposedly smart guys with salaries in the $250,000 to $500,000 range committing career suicide by getting shit faced and tearing down the highway in their college-donated cars, forcing other drivers off the road? As far as I know, none of them have really explained it. Maybe there is something in the water at colleges that turns people into binge drinkers?

Perhaps they have heard the "we're only here to party" slogan so often that they found it irresistible? Who knows. But it is a very strange phenomenon and yet another sign that things are totally out of control at America's party schools.

Two more wacky college administrators exposed as crooks

I know many of you readers are tired of reading about college administrators who commit crimes, but I still find it fascinating that someone who is appointed to a high position in higher education can fall prey to criminal temptations.

The only reason I can think of is that these people think they live in a kind of Valhalla where they are above the rules of decency and ethics that the rest of us feel compelled to follow. In that way they are a lot like Wall Street bankers who persist in flying their corporate jets and going on junkets while accepting handouts from the poor taxpayers from whom they stole countless millions.  

Remember that college administrators' salaries often reach into the stratospheric levels. Some are paid more than a million dollars a year and it's not uncommon for lower level administrators to make in excess of $250,000, not to mention perks like free houses, free cars, lots of college-paid junkets and lots of time off. And where does this money come from?  Nearly all of it comes directly from tuition! Administrative salary increases are a major factor in why college tuition is increasing at nearly three times the inflation rate! At public colleges some of this money comes from taxes, but it all comes out of consumers' pockets one way or another.

So today I would like to introduce yet another pair of certified administrative crooks. The first is yet another college president convicted of driving drunk and a college vice president who makes over $300,000 a year who was forced to resign for stealing a student's $100 bicycle!

The Oxford-educated bicycle thief is Abdul Rao, a deputy assistant vice president at the University of South Florida. (Why do so many wacky administrators come from Florida?) You can read the latest story at the Tampa Tribune's web page, which has links to his photo and its previous articles about him. Make sure you read the comments about this wack job. He claims he appropriated the bike to give to a homeless person. (I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.) Also, make sure you check the link to the YouTube video of the perp prof in action! Priceless. And remember this is your tuition money at work!

This week's second prof perp is Darnell Cole, president of the Milwaukee Area Technical College who apparently thought he could get arrested for drunk driving and return to work and think no one would notice.  At first his college board thought there was no reason to call a special meeting. (The nerve of these guys is amazing!) Public opinion forced them to change their minds.

You can read the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's coverage of this story here and you can also read comments by their columnist Jim Stingl here. It looks like Cole thinks he is going to get away with it after police found him on the side of the road with slurred speech and glassy eyes. At the cop shop he blew a number equal to twice the legal limit for intoxication. Just another day for a happy, happy president in party school land. "I apologized, what else do you want?," he says.  Your job, clearly, President Cole. We know you think you are a resident of Valhalla and way above the law, but there are still people who think drunken college presidents just might be a poor role model for the binge-drinking minions. "Don't do what I do," says Cole, "do what I say." Thankfully there still seem to be people with enough sense to know this guy should get the boot as soon as possible and appoint someone with a little more integrity to the job.

College vice president fired and sued for molesting students

Any organization can get stuck with a sexual predator as an employee. They are usually pretty crafty about seeming like regular persons. It's what happens after one is exposed that shows how seriously the group really cares about victims.

When East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania found out it had a predator who befriended black men with from single-family households, took them out in his car and fondled and forced them to perform fellatio, they could have fired him. Instead, according to a lawsuit filed by his victims, the college covered up his crimes, even to the point of destroying records of complaints dating back several years.

In this case the defendant was Issac Sanders, who held the title of Vice President of Advancement, which was supposed to deal with raising funds, not making advances against students. He was a black administrator who offered to become a mentor for black financially troubled students. He'd find scholarships for them and then hit them up for sexual favors. You can read the Pocono Press story about this sordid tale here. There are also links to their previous stories about the case. Excellent reading for parents considering sending their children to college.

Complaints had built up over the years but the college refused to take any action and covered up evidence of previous complaints. It wasn't until the local newspaper, the Pocono Press, investigated the problem that Sanders was finally fired. Now, however, the college, the president, the trustees and Sanders are all being sued by the victims.

What parents should learn from this is that any time there is a scandal at a college, the first response is to cover it up. It's because colleges are allowed to exist in a closed off, separate world that they think they can get away with covering up the mess instead of fixing it. It also shows that when student welfare runs counter to the college's image, guess which course the college follows?

We have an administrator who is a molester? the president asks. How do we cover it up? Instead of How can we get rid of the guy to protect our students? The only solution to this is to open up college activities to the public. Make all of their actions transparent. Open up the board meetings where issues are discussed. This would make colleges operate more like other taxpayer-funded public bodies.