We all laughed at Goose and his 110-day TESC humanities BA.  But could Goose get the last laugh?  

NJ governor Chris Christie is proposing to strip TESC of its $5.6 million funding and merge it with Rutgers University.  How long before Goose updates his resume and breaks out the Scarlet Knights gear?

Goose's new resume? Wrote:BA Humanities 2001
Rutgers University
(formerly Thomas Edison State College)

Quote:New Jersey's governor on Tuesday proposed an austere budget for higher education (and most everything else), recommending a cut of about 15 percent in operating funds and a reduction of nearly 5 percent in financial aid for students. But the most stunning aspect of the governor's 2011 budget plan for public college officials was its proposal (see page 33) to strip Thomas Edison State College of $5.6 million in state funds and merge the online education institution into Rutgers University. The governor's budget plan bills the merger as a logical way to bring Rutgers's brand of classroom-based learning to Trenton, which is home to Thomas Edison, while "leveraging the two institutions' distance learning programming." Under the merger, Rutgers would also take over the State Museum and Library that Thomas Edison now oversees, for a total savings of $8.4 million. Public college officials, though, note that Trenton already has a classroom-based public institution, the College of New Jersey, and that enormous, research-oriented Rutgers would make an unlikely and discordant overseer of Thomas Edison's unusual brand of personalized education for adult students and overseas military personnel. Thomas Edison officials reportedly did not learn about the proposed merger until early Tuesday, and could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

Jumpin' Jesus!  MSCHE-accredited Cornell is the gold standard for suicide!  (Yes, that's Ms. Che, or the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.)  

Now you can have both RA and No Way in one easy federally-funded transaction!

When the only Ivy League school that will accept a loser like you is an ag school and Keith Olbermann's alma mater, there's only one solution...a swan dive into Fall Creek Gorge.  

Will Dr. Jack Kevorkian be signing on soon as adjunct faculty?  

A 'Suicide School'?

Quote:March 16, 2010

Of all the things Cornell University wants to be known for, suicide isn’t among them. And yet, after years of trying to shake the image that it’s a “suicide school,” as one official called it Monday, recent deaths have made it difficult not to associate the upstate New York institution with an above-average suicide rate.

Last Thursday, police recovered the body of William Sinclair, a sophomore engineering major, from near a bridge that traverses one of the gorges that cut through the Ithaca campus. Matthew Zika, a junior also studying engineering, jumped to his death from another bridge the next day, police reported, though his body has not been found.

The two apparent suicides, coming in such rapid succession, would have alarmed any campus -- or, as Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academic services, put it in a video posted on the university’s Web site Saturday, they made for “an especially painful week.”

Coming as they do on the heels of another student suicide off a bridge in February and three more suicides during the fall semester -- as well as five other student deaths caused by illness or accidents -- the deaths have shaken the campus. “The cumulative effect of this loss of life is palpable in our community,” Murphy said.

The university has stationed police officers and security guards on all of the bridges that cross Cornell’s gorges, and extended the hours of several campus counseling options. Over the weekend, staff members knocked on the door of every on-campus residence to check on students. Faculty members have been told to be especially sensitive to students’ needs and “to help put the academic rigor that we know is part of Cornell in proper perspective,” Murphy said.

The half-dozen suicides in the current academic year mark the first instances of student suicides at Cornell since 2005. Stepped-up efforts to help students with mental health issues that began in 2002 and intensified after David J. Skorton became Cornell’s president in 2007 are “at least anecdotally … helping people,” said Simeon Moss, a university spokesman.

...

In November 1994, after two student deaths in the gorges in the span of two weeks, The New York Times quoted an administrator who sought to play down Cornell’s suicidal reputation. “There is a myth surrounding the number of suicides here,” said David I. Stewart, then-director of community relations. “There is not a larger-than-average number of suicides on the Cornell campus.”

In a Web cast streamed live Monday morning, Gregory Eells, director of counseling and psychological services, and Timothy Marchell, director of mental health initiatives, again tried to quell that myth.

“It’s well known that Cornell has a reputation as a ‘suicide school,’ which is not consistent with the reality of the statistics,” Marchell said. “And so we’ve asked ourselves, well, what leads to this, what contributes to that misperception?”

His answer: the gorges. “Suicide that occurs in most communities is not something that happens in public, is not visible,” he said, noting that news media often don’t report on suicides because they happen privately and there are often concerns about copycat suicides.

But, “when a death occurs at Cornell in one of our gorges, it’s a very public experience,” he said. “It’s observed by people, many people hear about it, whether or not it is in fact a suicide, and the reality is that when it becomes visible it can create the sense of a higher frequency than it actually is. And so over the years, that has contributed to this perception. And part of that picture is that when non-Cornell-members die in the gorges, it’s sometimes perceived as a Cornell death when it may in fact not be.”

In the fall of 2008, a 1998 Cornell graduate was found dead in one of the gorges on campus. A woman unaffiliated with the university committed suicide from another bridge last summer.

It's unclear whether the university considers the rash of suicides as working out to about average over the last few suicide-free years, or an indication that something is systemically wrong at Cornell. ...

Bill Grover is back with some news about SATS. Bill has always been a gentleman who usually ends up being taken advantage of by Gollin and his crew.

Gover returns to DD

The Democrats Won’t Talk About This Provision

Quote:Mona Charen
March 12, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The House version of the health-care bill mandates racial and gender quotas — in perpetuity.
  

On March 9, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said:

Quote:You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future. . . . We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.

Pity the Democrats. They just can’t get their message out. Not with a charismatic president (who has delivered 52 speeches on the subject), control of both houses of Congress, the gooey enthusiasm of 90 percent of the press, and more than a year of ceaseless agitation. Their efforts have been thwarted, as they imagine it, by “misinformation,” “distortion,” and the “special interests.” So influential are these dark forces that the leadership cannot shout over them. Speaker Pelosi must pass the grossly unpopular bill in order to get the peace and quiet she needs to explain its virtues.

In fact, on this legislation’s most important variable — cost — Americans see through the optimistic projections. Asked by Rasmussen whether the health-care plan will cost more than currently estimated, 81 percent of voters said yes and 66 percent said it was “very likely” to exceed projections. Doubtless the Democrats can explain that Americans believe this only because they’ve been duped by lies and clever ad campaigns, not because 60 years of recent history demonstrate conclusively that government programs, particularly open-ended entitlements, nearly always exceed projected costs. In 1966, Medicare cost taxpayers $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990, we might be spending as much as $12 billion. The actual 1990 figure: $107 billion. In 1987, Congress estimated that the Medicaid DSH (disproportionate share hospital) costs would be less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost: $17 billion.

But since Speaker Pelosi is so eager for us to know the details, let’s indulge her. Among the specifications of the House bill that passed last November are several sections that mandate racial and ethnic quotas for medical schools and other federal contractors. As Allan Favish reported in The American Thinker, the bill specifies that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, “in awarding grants or contracts under this section . . . shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of . . . training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

This, along with other provisions, is broad enough to cover every medical, nursing, and dental school and teaching hospital in the country and guarantees the institutionalization of racial, sex, and ethnic quotas in perpetuity (though the use of the word “underrepresented” before “minority” ensures that the quotas will not apply to Asians or Jews).

The rationale for these quotas, insofar as there is one, is that African-Americans and Hispanics have, on average, poorer health than other groups. Liberals assume that these disparities are the result of discrimination or lack of access to health care rather than other factors like poverty, eating habits, heredity, and fitness. If medical and dental schools are required to admit more minority applicants, newly minted minority professionals will tend to those “underserved” populations.

Of course, medical and dental schools have been practicing affirmative action for decades, but they’ve had trouble recruiting large numbers of minorities. Part of the problem is that African-Americans do not tend to gravitate to math and science (the solution to which is to be found in families and schools). Still, for the past few decades, less qualified minorities have been offered spots in medical schools, with the result that: 1) those minority professionals who would have qualified without affirmative action bear a stigma, and 2) less qualified minority graduates fail licensing exams at much higher rates than their classmates. Is it a service to the African-American or Hispanic communities to provide them with physicians and dentists who are less capable than others? Will it improve health outcomes for them to be treated by less qualified professionals?

President Obama asked this week whether anyone could oppose “holding insurance companies accountable” and “bringing down costs for everyone.” Funny, he doesn’t ask whether we object to this: a provision on “maintaining, collecting and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity” in order to “facilitate and coordinate identification and monitoring . . . of health disparities to inform program and policy efforts to reduce such disparities.” That’s an engraved invitation to social engineering.

But then, even to mention it is probably contributing to the “fog of controversy.”

In today’s spam…

From scenic Cleveland, home of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame, it’s Chancellor University, offering DL MBAs through its Jack Welch Management Institute.

Never heard of it.  I decided to do some checking, lest I fall prey to some unprincipled diploma mill operation.  Turns out Chancellor University is (for the moment) NCACS accredited, and formerly known as Myers University, formerly Dyke College.  

Also, formerly (inter alia) Folsom's Business College and Folsom Mercantile College, where in 1855 no less than John D. Rockefeller (at age 15) attended a ten week (or six month, depending on your source) course “where he learned single and double-entry bookkeeping, penmanship, commercial history, mercantile customs, banking and exchange.”  http://voteview.ucsd.edu/entrejdr.htm

Another illustrious alum is Harvey Firestone, of Firestone Tire fame.

Unfortunately, the school’s modern history is not quite so glamorous:

Quote: Following the 2005 comprehensive evaluation visit, the Commission was monitoring enrollment and finances at Myers when the institution signaled that it might close. An infusion of capital allowed the institution to operate for another year; however, a 2007 focused evaluation team raised substantive concerns that warranted a recommendation for an On Notice sanction.  

Before the Board acted on the team recommendation, the institution announced its closure.  That announcement led to intervention by the Court of Common Pleas in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which effectively placed the University under control of a Special Master assigned by the court.

In February 2008, the Board notified Myers that it was considering withdrawing accreditation.  The Board initiated a series of due process procedures to allow the institution to respond to these concerns.  During these proceedings, representatives of Myers, with the support of the court, planned a change of ownership that was intended to address the primary concerns of the Commission.  The Board of Trustees approved the change of ownership in August 2008, subject to further documentation and a focused evaluation visit.  With the change of ownership, the institution became Chancellor University, and changed from nonprofit to for-profit status.

In October 2008, based on the finding that the University was in danger of not meeting Criterion One and Criterion Two, the Board placed Chancellor University on the sanction of Probation and set the next comprehensive visit for Fall 2009.

On February 22, 2010, following a comprehensive visit to the University on October 5-7, 2009, the Board issued a Show-Cause Order to the University, thereby removing the sanction of Probation.

Quote: The Show-Cause Report must be in the Commission office by December 1, 2010. Following receipt of the Report the Commission will send an Evaluation Team in early January to the institution to validate the contents of the Show-Cause Report and determine if each of the concerns identified by the Board has been fully ameliorated. The Show-Cause Order will remain in effect until the Board reviews the Show-Cause Team Report, the University’s Show-Cause Report, and its response to the Show-Cause Team Report at its February 2011 meeting.  

Should the institution not file the Show-Cause Report or be unable to establish to the satisfaction of the Board that the institution meets each of the Criteria for Accreditation, the Board will move to withdraw accreditation of the institution.

Not the legal kind judges can agree need to stay in, but the illegal kind any judge would outlaw. It has been shown in past cases that judges have seen selling a degree a criminal act. Blot out the outright degree sellers, life experience scams, etc. on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the problem is gone.

Surely the combined power of the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. can compel judges to request, show significant evidence of harm, and compel such three entities to stop making them a National Security Issue.

I believe Google does reserve the power to regulate at least a little of the internet. Google China does. If the lawsuits come, just dismiss and begone on issues of National Security as judges already do on behalf of Google and Co.

Poof, Gone!

Top down measures are the first step. If the second kind of phony remains, as it will, they'll be more ambiguous compared to tens of thousands of other such legitimate colleges. They'll be forced to turn into competency based approaches or whatever, maybe even allowing them to pass and fail, as it seems some of the more ethical operators do, and it will actually be a legitimate, legal, degree.

Got to get down to it, janitors are gunning us down.  Should have been done long ago.....

Ooops, sorry, a flashback to my misspent youth.  I'm sure Neil Young will be writing a song about this, the latest murderous rampage on an RA gold standard campus.  

Another shooting in a "gun free zone"?   Maybe they should pass more laws and put up more signs, so the mental cases know it's really, really bad to go around shooting people.  That should solve the problem.


Nathaniel Brown
RA Gold Standard employee

Suspect kills self in Ohio State shooting, police say

Quote:March 9, 2010 2:10 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- A man apparently angry over a poor performance evaluation entered a [regionally accredited] Ohio State University maintenance building early Tuesday and opened fire, killing a manager before turning the gun on himself, police said.

Larry Wallington, 48, a building services manager at the OSU Maintenance Building, was pronounced dead at the scene of the 3:30 a.m. ET shooting, Ohio State University Police Chief Paul Denton said. Wallington was a 10-year university employee, he said.

Authorities found suspect Nathaniel Brown, 51, a custodial worker, suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot at the scene, Denton said. He was transported to the Ohio State University Medical Center, where he was dead on arrival.

Police believe Brown -- a probational employee since October who had received a poor performance review -- entered the building dressed in dark clothing carrying two handguns and began firing into an office suite, Denton said. Officials would not say when Brown received the review, who gave it to him or provide further details, citing the ongoing investigation.

A third person, Henry Butler, 60, an operations shift leader, also was shot. He was in stable condition at the OSU Medical Center, Denton said.

Police earlier Tuesday had said that two people were wounded and one killed and that the alleged shooter was in custody.

About a half-dozen employees were at the building when the shooting occurred, and some witnessed it, authorities said.

Ohio State's Web site said the building where the shooting occurred was secured, and some traffic restrictions remained in place Tuesday morning. "The university continues normal operations," the school said. "Classes will be held and normal work schedules are in effect."

E-mail alerts were sent to students warning them about the shooting, the university said.

The shooting comes after the university issued e-mail alerts last week about two alleged sexual assaults and an attempted assault on campus, Ohio State's student newspaper reported.

The student newspaper, The Lantern, published an article Sunday saying that students were questioning the effectiveness of such e-mail alerts after three serious crimes last week.

Students are allowed to choose if they want to receive the e-mail alerts. On the campus of 50,000-plus students, a little more than 2,600 people receive the e-mails, police told the student paper.

A university committee was scheduled to meet this week to determine if changes needed to be made to the notification system, The Lantern reported.

Quote:By Ben Rooney, staff reporterJanuary 18, 2010: 1:57 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Ohio State University is No. 1 again, but not in football or basketball. For the second year in a row, the school's president was the highest paid public university executive in the United States, according to a study published Monday.

The Chronicle of Higher Education said E. Gordon Gee, Ohio State's president, took home $1.6 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008.

Mark Emmert, president of the University of Washington, was the second highest paid executive in the survey, with total compensation of more than $900,000 last year. Patrick Harker, president of the University of Delaware, came in third with more than $810,000 in total income.

...Meanwhile, the survey found that compensation for public university executives overall increased at a much smaller rate in 2009 than in recent years. The median total compensation for chief executives last year was $436,111, up 2.3% from 2008. After adjusting for inflation, however, compensation rose 1.1%.

That compares with total compensation rising between 7.6% and 18.9% each year since 2005.

But as the economy soured and many public universities were forced to hike tuition and eliminate courses, the issue of executive compensation became a sore spot for many schools, said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle.

"Steadily rising pay packages of public university chiefs riled parents, students and politicians, especially as tuition increases also had been hefty from year to year," Selingo said in a statement.

...The Chronicle also surveyed compensation at 64 community colleges nationwide and identified Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, as the highest paid.

Padrón's pay package totaled nearly $550,000 last year. He was followed by Michael McCall, president of the Kentucky Community College and Technical College System, at roughly $532,000.

It looks like Rich Douglas has decided to toot his own horn and give himself a pat on the back. I'm suitably impressed.

DD thread