As I said, I’m not well-informed as to what’s been happening at the University of Missouri, so can anybody tell me if the following list of demands is for real:
Number four is especially cute but the rest are also lots of fun. What students are seeking is an explosive bureaucratization of campus life that will require even more resources being diverted from academics to maintaining a bunch of useless paper-pushers on campus.
As I keep saying, things don’t happen unless people want them. We cut programs, stuff crazy numbers of students into each classroom, defund research, exploit adjuncts in order to pour the money into hiring armies of paper pushers who create strategic plans, calculate retention rates, and increase awareness. And we do all this because that what everybody – save for a few grumpy folks like me – wants.
My university has finally – finally! – decided to get rid of 13 of our own such awareness-raising, strategic plan-writing bureaucrats. And who do you think is opposed to the measure? Professors, of course. How come the university has money to pay for travel to research conferences, they ask, when 13 of these entirely useless secretaries are being let go?
Clarissa's Blog 
Alas, it’s very real — and being highly praised on “progressive” websites.
LikeLike
Subjunctive, anyone?
LikeLike
Yeah, whoever wrote these demands obviously wasn’t an English major…
LikeLike
Yeah. . . I always wish students brought as much passion into studying.
LikeLike
The only demand I like is that the President be fired. And he was.
I thought Number 4 was cuter. An apology delivered in his own writing, in which the President acknowledges his white male privilege. I just can’t stop laughing. But then I remind myself these guys are only a couple of years removed from their teens.
LikeLike
Number 1, not Number 4.
LikeLike
It’s great that this useless administrator was kicked out. But the university will hire another one who’ll be just the same because they all are useless. I hope the new one will not be strengthened with an additional army of mission statement creators.
LikeLike
They got the president’s head, and that will end the threat of a football team boycott.
So the school will appoint a new president who will say the right words about how things are going to change on campus, and who will make some conciliatory but mostly symbolic gestures, and it will pretty much be business as usual.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s a shame that the protesting students at Yale (re: “Needy at Yale” post) couldn’t get Yale’s football team on their side, or they could’ve gotten Professor Christakis and his wife fired. 🙂
LikeLike
I doubt the Yale football team is good enough to have that kind of leverage.
LikeLike
Well, I don’t follow football very much, so I don’t know the team’s record.
LikeLike
I’ll only watch college sports when they start paying the athletes, so yeah, I don’t know much about college football either. Just making an educated guess.
LikeLike
Honest question: You don’t think that full scholarships to expensive universities for players who are athletically gifted but academically average at best aren’t a form of payment for services?
LikeLike
So these students don’t get paid for playing??? This is disgusting.
LikeLike
They get paid a FULL scholarship to very expensive universities for playing football — which is very profitable to the universities — while being given passing grades regardless of their academic ability.
That’s how capitalism works at the academic level — and I think that it’s a fair trade.
LikeLike
Athletes in Ivy League universities are like physicians in the all-voluntary U.S. military. We were (are) needed so badly that we could get away with almost anything, from bad haircuts to insubordination to you-name-it. 🙂
I’m not saying this is right (in the moral, i.e., nonsensical) sense of the word — just that that’s how life works.
LikeLike
Yale is not a Division I school and football isn’t a huge part of the alums’ conception of the university. Football doesn’t make money for Yale. Yale’s football coach isn’t one of the highest paid employees. I’m not sure how well the football boycott at Mizzou would have worked if the coach didn’t say he backed it.
Now if we’re talking about OSU/Michigan State/Penn State, the football team absolutely will have that kind of leverage.
LikeLike
Give them a shrubbery and see if they’ll properly sod off …
[yes, you must have more Monty Python in your life now] 🙂
LikeLike
“That’s how capitalism works at the academic level ”
That is not an argument. Why are the mechanisms of capitalism available to the college and the NCAA cartel but not the athletes? You have instances of athletes getting their scholarships taken away for accepting a free dinner from a fan. Yet, coaches make millions of dollars in salaries and endorsements, and the universities make tens of millions in TV deals and apparel/shoe endorsements off the backs of those unpaid athletes.
Why would anyone who believes in capitalism support this cartel is beyond my understanding.
http://deadspin.com/ole-miss-qb-says-players-go-to-bed-hungry-1607359894
A lot of guys go to bed hungry at night. That’s real,” Wallace told CBSSports.com from Thursday’s SEC Media Days session. “We have our breakfast and lunch. Our cafe is open, so you can go and swipe your card, but dinner you have to pay for it…We need more compensation for that just to be able to survive. If I didn’t have my parents I don’t know what I would do. A lot of these kids don’t have the same things that I have. I know that their struggle is something terrible. The cost of attendance, if they could just give us that, I think everybody would be OK.”
Wallace even wonders how players with minimal resources pay for the suits and ties they must wear to media days. Schools can tap into a special assistance fund for help cover player expenses for special events. “A lot of guys don’t have the money to go pay for it,” he said.
LikeLike
I do not see how this particular cartel is significantly worse than any other one. What makes it worse than CEOs getting 100 times more than the regular workers? Why should “anyone who believes in capitalism” be particularly appalled?
If one does not believe in capitalism – then it is completely different story…
Besides, suppose we change the system, and the player of the university team gets 100K/year but no academic free pass. How many would agree to play in these conditions?
LikeLike
“Besides, suppose we change the system, and the player of the university team gets 100K/year but no academic free pass. How many would agree to play in these conditions?”
LikeLike
You are forgetting that they will have to study too – this is by definition a university team. So my question was tricky – will the people capable of earning 100K by playing football or baseball, or wahtever agree to pretend being the students and fail at their studies?
LikeLike
If that’s the only way to make the 100K, then why not?
In my experience, though, the proverbially dumb athletes can only be found at the Ivies. At my current university, students who came to us on athletic scholarships are our best students.
LikeLike
Ugly incidents this school year include racial slurs directed to a black student who is president of the Missouri Students Association, racial epithets hurled at the Legion of Black Collegians as they rehearsed for a performance and the discovery of a swastika drawn with human feces in the restroom of a residence hall.
LikeLike
“I do not see how this particular cartel is significantly worse than any other one.”
No, this particular cartel isn’t any worse from any other cartel.
What makes it worse than CEOs getting 100 times more than the regular workers?”
It’s bad, but it’s not a cartel. I think a cartel is a specific term describing collusion, anti-trust, and price-fixing. My point was that nobody believing in ‘free’ markets could possibly support cartel-like behavior.
LikeLike
Thanks to Clarissa and to all the commenters! You’re an island of sanity in an academic ocean of craziness.
LikeLike
I like this compliment. 🙂
LikeLike