Party Schools Exposed

Tufts president thinks 'face time' will cure binge drinking

Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow deserves high praise for finally going public with his concern about his binge drinking students. Apparently all it took was walking to his office at 3:3o in the afternoon and finding an unconscious student sprawled on his lawn before being taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

Pretty hard to ignore! But why wasn't he concerned about the previous 15 of his students who made the same trip to the hospital for the same reason or the 60 - SIXTY! - students who made the trip by the end of the school year? Well, at least he finally got the message. Most college presidents simply sit on their hands and ignore it. 

But his solution to the problem, as outlined in this Boston Globe article, "Presidential sobriety check"  is so outrageously arrogant that it's hard to believe. After binge drinkers return from their sojourn in the emergency room, Bacow invites them into his office for a little one-on-one session where he will personally convince them of the error of their ways. He talks to them, he says, as he would talk with his own sons.

Forget the counselors the college has hired to do this. Forget the decades of research on this problem that have been conducted a few miles away at Harvard. Forget all the efforts to meddle with the drinking age and to change the social norms of campus life. Dr. Bacow will personally solve this problem all by himself, as he tearfully told the Boston Globe reporter.

Forget it, Dr. Bacow. You can bet those kids will be right out in the streets with their red plastic cups as soon as they get the chance. Talking will not change the campus drinking culture. It took years for colleges to be recognized as a place where binge drinkers can safely practice their lifestyle with no fear of interference. In-the-know high school drinkers know they can count on colleges to cover for them while they drink themselves into oblivion.

The solution to the binge drinking problem is very simple one. Just say no! Just toss them out! The same students that Bacow singles out for his therapy sessions are the ones the president should throw out the door. Then announce what happened and why. Then add the message that if you want to engage in this kind of behavior you will have to do it somewhere else. Not here!

Why don't colleges adopt this simple solution? It's because college administrators are so concerned about "retention" of tuition paying customers that they are afraid to take any action that would damage the bottom line. Tossing out paying students, even ones that are dangerously immature, is just not an option. What if the college got a reputation as "unfriendly to drinkers"? What would that do for enrollment?

College presidents need to take a hard line on this. Until they do they can expect the problem to continue with all the dead students and failed lives that result from it.

Why send kids to college when most of them drop out?

An article this week in the New York Times spells out what I have been writing in this blog for two years now. We're sending too many unprepared and disengaged students to college for all the wrong reasons.

You can read the article here: Plan B: Skip College.

It wasn't that long ago that only the best and the brightest went to a four-year college, which prepared them to be the leaders of tomorrow. The rest of the high school graduates went to work or signed up for a trade school to learn a profession

Today, however, we send the below average and mediocre students to college as well and the result is that most of them drop out, leaving them with the student loan bills with nothing to show for them. In fact, 69 percent of high school graduates now go to college, up from 5 percent a century ago.

In fact, many college administrators think every student should go to college, a fantasy that defies any kind of logic. These people seem to think that auto repair workers should be discussing Proust in the lunch room or burger flippers should review Einstein's theory of relativity while dolloping mustard on the Big Macs. Completely out of touch with reality.

But these administrators have done an excellent sales job of convincing parents that not sending little Johnny to college is a form of child abuse. At the same time, these administrators have dumbed down their courses, inflated grades and turned their campuses into adolescent playgrounds where binge drinking is not punished and every possible perk from climbing walls to gourmet food courts to luxury condominiums are part of the sales package. Kids go to college not to learn anything but to have the time of their lives at a summer camp that lasts for six years.

If we sent only the bright kids to college, the students who are really interested in learning for learning's sake, we could afford to send them to college for free. It would be a great benefit for our country. But sending mediocre and anti-intellectual slackers to college is a waste of money and resources that reduces the required rigor and cheapens the value of a diploma. Everybody loses except the administrators who continue to add their friends to the payroll and push up their salaries into the quarter to a half million bucks a year range. That's the real reason they want to send everyone to college. More students equal more tuition which means higher salaries. It's a no-brainier!

Sorority "formal" includes vandalism, theft and public urination

When they learn that their daughters are attending a sorority "formal" event, parents probably imagine ball gowns, corsages and escorts in tuxedos. They are not aware that times have changed as newspaper reports from Ohio found last week.

What goes on at a sorority "formal" in the age of party schools? Public urination, public sex, leaving piles of feces on the carpet, tearing sinks off the bathroom walls and jumping over the bar to steal alcohol. One student was stopped as he was attempting to urinate on an exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Museum.

You can read the New York Daily News article here and a longer piece by the local newspaper here. It should be an eye-opener for parents who think their tuition money is being used to educate the youth of tomorrow. This kind of behavior is beyond childish and more like barnyard animals.

And what punishments do the colleges dole out for this behavior? The sororities were suspended for two years. I bet they are all shrinking in fear. The reality is that these suspensions are often reduced to time served once the media attention goes away. Colleges are not about to turn away paying customers just because they act like animals. This kind of behavior is quite common among college students, but colleges are experts at keeping it from the public.

Any other kind of organization would boot these imbeciles out the door. Can you imagine if a group of accountants, public servants or Boy Scouts acted this way? How long would they last? The message that Greeks get from these minimal punishments is quite clear. Go right ahead and have fun!  Just make sure your tuition is paid and we'll cover for you.

The administrators quoted in these articles say they are embarrassed and shocked by the stories and apologize profusely, yet there is nothing new about these reports and what rock have they been hiding under for the past decade while these reports eventually leak out to the public? Are they embarrassed by their students' behavior or embarrassed that the press reported them?

And what of Greeks themselves? Take a look at this quote:

“I don’t think their actions were responsible at all,” said Katey Clark, a 2006 Miami graduate and Alpha Xi Delta member. “But they’re making it sound like they burned the place down ... with the hype it’s getting. This has been going on for years now. I just didn’t appreciate how these two sororities were targeted. They acted like these students were criminals.”

Earth to Katey Clark: vandalism is a crime, defecating in a museum is a crime. People who commit crimes are called..."criminals" even if it has been going on for years now and party school students think they are entitled to this kind of behavior. If you can gone to a real college, Katy, you would have learned that in your classes.

Misbehaving college students target women and younger professors

Today's "student-friendly" party school classrooms permit students to misbehave in ways that would have led to expulsion a decade ago. Students sleep, eat their lunches, text on their cell phones, listen to their I-pods, engage in hour-long conversations with their friends and participate in other activities that send a clear message to the professor and their classmates: "I don't give a shit."

But woe to the professor who attempts to correct this behavior. The reaction can be strong and immediate. Professors are told to mind their own business, go to hell, and my favorite, "We pay your salary so we can do what we want."

Perhaps nothing points out party schools' waste of money and everyone's time than a simple peek behind the party school classroom door. Billions of dollars are being wasted in this country attempting to teach immature party animals who have absolutely no intention or desire to learn anything at all. The students are there for the party: free food, free condo, all the sex drugs and rock and roll you want, and plenty of alcohol to wash it all down with.

It's an adolescent resort, a five-year party and no one cares if you learn anything at all. Such a waste! No wonder students love it!

Now a new study has shown that abusive students target women and younger professors more than older ones and suggests that students realize that professors up for tenure are more easily manipulated and vulnerable to abuse than older ones. You can read the report in the Chronicle of Higher Education here.

But what happens if the professor files a complaint? For most of my 12-year teaching career I simply dealt with these misguided adolescents on my own, but once I decided to write my book I tried an experiment. The next time a student called me an asshole, I filed charges with the judicial board just to see how the party school I worked for handled this kind of thing. I was not disappointed.

The student never even showed up for the hearing, so I got to vent about what happened all on my own. At the end, I asked the administrator what would happen to the student. Expulsion? Suspension? Hardly. The student would have some "disciplinary points" added to her record.

How many? I asked.  Sorry that's confidential.

How many points would she have to accumulate before some action was taken? Sorry confidential.

The real back story here is that "student-friendly" party schools  aren't going to make students unhappy just because they call their professors assholes. That might make the customers unhappy and they might transfer to a more student-friendly college. The students know that and correctly interpret it as a license to do whatever they want in the classroom.

Why don't students study anymore?

A new study by two economists has found that the number of hours students spend studying each week declined by 10 hours between 1961 and 2003, but does not explain why that happened.

Never fear, Tom Bartlett, one of the best writers for the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers his own suggestions here. Among the reasons he suggests are that students are lazier these days, classes are easier and students have more distractions today.

All of that is true, but the biggest reason is that colleges no longer require hard work to obtain a degree. That was back in 1961 when colleges' prime mission was "education." Today "education" has been replaced by the buzz word you hear every day at academic meetings: "retention."  And the two are mutually exclusive.

Making students study makes them unhappy and encourages them to drop out rather than hit the books. In 1961, students who said they would rather not study were shown the door. Today, students who don't want to study simply complain to the administration that the classes are too hard. They are then dumbed down in the name of retention so you don't have to study. Grade inflation helps a lot too!

Studying and working hard used to be what college was about. Today, college is an adolescent theme park where only chumps waste time studying, or even reading the textbook or even buying the textbook.  Students text their way through classes while listening to their Ipods and if the professor dares give them anything lower than a B, they complain to the administration that the professor is not playing the game by the modern rules. Sooner or later the professor gets the message: dumb down or die.

So in our century only half of colleges graduates are literate enough to understand the difference between opposing newspaper editorials. In an age of deliberate data falsification on television, these leaders of tomorrow are going to have a very hard time deciding whether or not space aliens control the government or if their president is really a socialist born in Africa. Being able to read should be the bottom line for elementary school graduates, high school graduates or even college graduates. But that attitude is so 1961.

At party schools, only brave teachers award low grades

You may have read about the brave biology professor at Louisiana State University who dared to award low test scores for students who failed her tests, but you might not understand the reasons this happened.

In case you missed it, you can read the USA Today story about this here.

In party school culture, "retention" has become the primary mission, replacing the old mission of educating students. Students pay the high costs of tuition and in return they demand  good grades. As one of my students once told me, "I pay a lot of money to come here and I deserve a better grade than this."

Education and honestly evaluating what students  know, which used to be the prime mission of colleges and universities, has generally been forgotten in favor of the new prime directive of  purchasing degrees at the diploma mart.

What happened to Dominique G. Hornberger is that she seemed to have fallen into a time warp and dared to give students the failing grades they deserved for flunking the tests. Students complained and some of them dropped her class. This set off the "retention" alarms in the administrative offices. Danger! Students are unhappy! Take immediate action!

And lo and behold Hornberger was removed from the class and was replaced by a more appropriate party school professor whose first act was to raise student grades across the board. Students now happy. Retention mission accomplished. Problem solved.

Fine, except many professors still consider grading their turf and consider what the LSU administration did to Hornberger a serious breech of etiquette and it set off a national fire storm of protest. Just read some of the comments on the story above.

It's pretty clear that Hornberger was in the right here and the administration was wrong. But all of this just goes to show one more time that education is no longer the top priority and has long been replaced with the prime mission of keeping the customers satisfied so they can continue to pay their high tuition.

College president files fraudulent expense reports -- for 10 years

Readers of this blog should not be surprised that college administrators often get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. After all, their quarter-million-dollar salaries and free housing makes it hard for them to make ends meet. Besides they can always just jack up the tuition price whenever they need some extra cash.

But Karen Pletz seems to be in a category all her own.  

The former president of the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, who was fired last year under mysterious circumstances, is now being sued by the college for fraud and making millions of dollars worth of false claims on her expense account.

The college is asking Pletz to return millions of dollars of fraudulent claims, many for meals with people that she never shared with anyone. This includes $10 lunches at McDonalds all the way up to expensive eateries.  About 70 percent of her claims over the past decade were found to be fraudulent.

You can read the full story in the Kansas City Star.

The reason this happens over and over again is that too many people think college administrators are essentially altruistic individuals who put their personal integrity above personal gain. Unfortunately as colleges turned themselves into businesses, the CEOs transformed themselves into Gordon Gekko. "Greed is Good" is the new college motto.

Unfortunately, no one is keeping an eye on these crooks and they get away with robbing the store year after year. States need to step in and audit the books of colleges and their administrators. But part of the blame also goes to the members of the press, who seem to have taken higher education off their lists of things to check. Instead of "keeping them honest" as Anderson Cooper likes to say, newspapers have declined to do even the most basic reporting about how much college administrators get paid and how the numbers of administrative jobs  skyrocket each year.

Are college presidents really worth their $436,000 paychecks?

The news this week from the Chronicle of Higher Education's annual report  is that the huge pay raises doled out to college presidents are beginning to level off -- at least for now. Still, in an age where parents take out second mortgages and raid their retirement accounts to come up with tuition money, it's hard to justify the top guy bringing home enough cash to cover the tuitions of a whole classroom full of students.

The job descriptions of college presidents show they have very little to do with learning, running the college or setting priorities. Those jobs all fall to vice presidents. What college presidents do can be summed up in two words: raise money.

They spend a lot of their time hobnobbing with the rich and famous on golf courses and fancy parties and make deals like promising to name a campus building after a local tycoon if he will take a moment to sign a million-dollar check. For this, presidents get to live in a college-owned mansion, often with a corps of servants. The college buys them a car and in some cases even provides an airplane. They get golden parachute plans when they leave.

Presidents justify these luxuries by producing a bottom line sheet showing that for the $436,000 they bring in ten times that much in donations and there is no denying that. But why can't these expensive executives take a lead in fixing the serious problems in higher education that this blog has described?

College presidents could be powerful voices against the relentless dumbing down of classes and grade inflation. They could overhaul campus justice systems that refuse to deal honestly and openly with the campus crime wave. They could be leaders for the reforms necessary to restore rigor and professionalism to campus life. It's hard to believe they are not aware of these things, yet they do nothing. Why is that? I can only suppose that calling any kind of attention to campus problems would reduce their effectiveness in raising cash. Who would want to give money to a dysfunctional  institution?

The way this could be done, however, is for presidents to start a fund raising effort specifically to address campus problems. Why not start the "Program to Restore Credibility to College Degrees" or the "Campaign to Eliminate Grade Inflation" or "Project to Protect Students from Rape"?

I don't really expect that to happen, but as the public becomes aware of how dysfunctional and dishonest colleges have become, it might be possible in the future.

Why higher education gets stuck with crooks like Harold Raveche

An editorial in today's New York Times notes that "disputes about financial management of college and universities have become increasingly commonplace," but it does not give a reason why this is happening.

Readers of this blog, however, understand that during the 1990s colleges changed their primary mission from education to making money, a disastrous decision that not only dumbed down college classes in the name of "retention" of customers but invited in a whole crop of CEO-wannabe administrators who understood that there was endless money to be made. No one was watching while they stuffed huge quantities of cash into their pockets.

In the case of Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, one of the new breed of administrators who looked a lot more like Gordon Gecko than John Dewey, began relentlessly stuffing his pockets. To make sure no one noticed he got rid of the more frugal members of the college board and replaced them with his friends, who knew when to look the other way while the coffers were looted.

As outlined in  this story in the Times, the New Jersey Attorney General has accused Harold Raveche, the president of the college,  with plundering the college's endowment fund. The college loaned him $1.8 million in illegal low interest loans, some of which were forgiven. For this bit of mischief the college reimbursed him with a $1.1 million salary.

Parents who want to know why their tuition is so high need look no farther. Who do you think pays for all of this? Why is it that colleges seem unable to control their costs and raise tuition at three times the inflation rate? Could it be that there are even more crooks lurking behind the ivy-covered walls? It used to be unthinkable that those nerdy college administrators with their tweed jackets and elbow patches were in it for the dough. But as crooks like Raveche are finally hauled into court the public will soon begin to question those high tuition payments and demand a thorough housecleaning. It's coming soon, folks.

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.