Author: Michael Morris

True Story:  The Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts is in danger of losing its accreditation this fall.  The public reason for this possibility, given by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), is the school’s declining enrollment, financial insecurity, and lack of effective planning. 

Well, that’s what NECHE would like you to believe.

According to an anonymous source at Hellenic, “what’s really going on here is a celestial power play.”

Here’s the full story, as uncovered by University Life:

For the past three years Hellenic has offered an elective course entitled Trinity Plus One, which claims that the Holy Trinity is, in fact, a quartet: Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Darlene.  Darlene is not mentioned in the Bible due to the patriarchal hegemony that pervades the document.  When God the Father learned of the existence of this course in 2018 (from a Hellenic graduate student interning in Purgatory), he began lobbying NECHE vigorously to revoke the school’s accreditation.  

God the Father and Darlene had been married for nearly 7.6 million years when they divorced in 8 B.C. due to irreconcilable differences (e.g., “No matter how much I beg, the man absolutely refuses to shave.  And how about changing your robe once in a while?”)  Darlene agreed to move to another universe.  But she never did, citing transportation costs.  So, she’s still in West Heaven, occupying a spacious two-bedroom apartment in the planned community of Rapture Meadows. 

It’s an awkward situation, to be sure.  As our anonymous source put it, “it’s too bad that Hellenic College might pay the price for what amounts to a domestic dispute among the divine.  I hate to say it, but I’m afraid that God the Father is on the wrong side of history here.  Darlene is as much a Supreme Being as he is.”

Stay tuned.  The New York Times is expected to break the story within the next week.  

True Story: The President of LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee will leave office when her contract expires on September 1st.  Among other things, she has been criticized by students for “failing to deal with mold in dormitories.” 

A similar saga is unfolding at Sebaceous-Hamilton College in Blakely, Georgia, where the President, Sterling Bagby, has come under fire for failing to deal with mold on faculty members.  

According to Melanie Torpz, a junior majoring in Communications, the average age of a tenured professor at Sebaceous-Hamilton is 102.  “It’s ridiculous,” complains Torpz.  “Many of my professors just stand at the front of the classroom and lean on the lectern; their eyes are closed and they’re totally silent except for an occasional weird gurgling sound.  The other day, my Biology prof’s hand seized up during her PowerPoint presentation on evolution in the Galápagos Islands.  She clicked through 430 slides in about 90 seconds.  I learned nothing that day….just one big blur on the screen, and then the clicker started to smoke.  Shouldn’t there be a mandatory retirement age or something?

“And my History professor wears his gray Confederate army uniform to class every day.  When I asked him where he goes to participate in re-enactments of Civil War battles, he snarled at me and yelled, ‘What do you mean, RE-ENACTMENTS?’  I got really scared.”

President Bagby vigorously defends his senior faculty, claiming that they are “well-seasoned, like a good pulled-pork sandwich.”  He notes that students often think professors are asleep when they are simply using that “quiet space” as a vehicle for stimulating class participation.

But what about reports that some older faculty are literally moldy, triggering allergic reactions in vulnerable students?  

“We hose down those professors immediately,” says Bagby.  “Every classroom is equipped with a functioning fire hydrant and a teaching assistant.  And we are just as quick to handle incidents where forgetful faculty, regardless of age, show up at class with old peanuts or live scorpions in their pockets.  We hustle them out of there tout suite.

“As we like to say at Sebaceous-Hamilton, it’s not how old you are, it’s whether or not you’re carrying predatory arachnids.”  

Amen to that. 

 

True Story:  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “scholars across the country have signed an open letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum asking that it retract its June 24 statement condemning all analogies to the Holocaust.”

Sorry, scholars.  Too little, too late. 

The Museum’s condemnation of analogies has prompted a flurry of similar actions by other organizations around the nation.  Here are the most recent ones:

—  On July 3rd Major League Baseball sued the President of Colby College for his claim that the school had “hit a big league home run” in hiring a new Provost with credentials from the prestigious University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. 

According to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, “there is no evidence that Colby’s President, or any member of its Board of Trustees, has ever played professional baseball, much less hit a home run in a game.  His assertion demeans the achievements of every Major League player in history who has launched a four-bagger.  For the love of God, stop using such language, especially in praising someone who comes from a country that believes cricket is actually a sport.”

—  Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard V. Spencer called out the Chancellor of the University of Tennessee on July 10th for her comment that the school “was waging an all-out war against budget cuts to higher education by the state legislature.” 

Speaking at a hastily called press conference, Spencer maintained that “the draft-dodging faculty at this ivory-tower cupcake of a university wouldn’t know how to mount a strategic military initiative if the Pentagon gave them an instruction manual using nothing but one-syllable words.  In war, Dear Chancellor, people get shot, they bleed, and they die.  They live in trenches and foxholes for weeks at a time, stink to high heaven, and eat beef jerky for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  When’s the last time you did anything like that?  The day you’re prepared to drop the Big One on the state capitol building while the legislature is in session, you can talk to me about waging war.  Until then, stand down and shut up!”

—  Finally, there is the beyond-embarrassing episode at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where the UNLV President characterized a recent 3-hour meeting of the Faculty Senate as a “clusterf**k in which absolutely nothing worthwhile was accomplished.” 

In a July 15th letter to the President, the Executive Director of the Nevada Association of Brothel Owners (NABO) indicated that “we are deeply offended  by your use of the term in question to describe a dysfunctional faculty gathering.  NABO takes pride in furnishing its customers with reasonably priced activities bearing the name that you trashed.  Indeed, these services at our facilities consistently receive yelp ratings that average 4.85 or higher on a 5-point scale.  You have taken a perfectly good word and smeared it.  If you want to criticize the way your faculty run their meetings, by all means do so, but not at our expense.  Thank you.”

A point well taken. 

Things got a bit embarrassing for Naomi Wolf a couple of months ago when an interviewer informed her, during a live radio broadcast, of a substantive error in Outrages, her most recent book.  

As distressing as this episode was for Ms. Wolf, it pales in comparison with what a number of other authors have experienced when confronted with mistakes in their research.  A sampling:

— Duncan Fife-Prell, a professor at Middlebury College, claimed that Liechtenstein, not Germany, was the primary aggressor during World War II in his two-volume work, Tiny Terror: Liechtenstein and the Quest for World Domination.  Fife-Prell learned of his blunder when he attended a book signing at VFW Post No. 782 in Burlington, Vermont and was punched in the face by a veteran whose parents had emigrated to the United States from the small principality in 1910.  The author later acknowledged that he had been doing “serious amounts of cocaine” while working on the book. 

—  In Munch, his 2018 history of snack foods, Rutgers University Culinary Science professor Seth Halogen asserted that Slim Jims pre-dated Twizzlers.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Twizzlers were first produced in 1845, while Slim Jims did not appear until 1929, over 80 years later.

Halogen’s mistake was revealed on the PBS Newshour by anchor Judy Woodruff during a segment on “Chewing and Identity Politics.”  Dr. Halogen has not been seen since the show aired on June 26th, but his car was discovered three days later.  It was parked next to a Häagen-Dazs production facility in Bayonne, New Jersey that contained industrial vats of molten dark chocolate.  A sneaker was found floating in Vat No. 7.  There was no note. 

—  Finally, there is the case of Millicent Frittata, unauthorized biographer of the rich and famous.  In her 2019 book, You Don’t Know Jack!, she maintains that movie star Jack Lemmon was transgender.  As it turns out, Ms. Frittata had seen the raucous 1959 comedy “Some Like It Hot,” where Mr. Lemmon is often dressed as a woman, and thought the film was a documentary.  When questioned by a Washington Post reporter, she offered a half-hearted apology: “Okay, okay, but I still think there may be something going on there.”

Authors, take note: Fact-checking never goes out of style.  

 

The title of a recent Inside Higher Ed article asked, “Who’s doing the heavy lifting in terms of diversity and inclusion work?”  The unsurprising answer is that faculty members who engage the most in this arena are likely to be non-white, non-male, or first-generation college attendees. 

Some schools are now attempting to distribute the lifting more evenly.  Unfortunately, not everyone is equally prepared to hoist.

Consider what happened at the University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI), which is located in northern Maine near the Canadian border. 

According to a UMPI administrator who wishes to remain anonymous, the University wanted to establish a cadre of white professors who could serve as mentors to the small number of black students on campus.  A multiple-choice test was developed to assess the professors’ fundamental knowledge of black history.  Of the 52 faculty members who took the test, only 3 passed, and 2 of those individuals were later found to have cheated.  

Here is the test in its entirety:

1.  Who founded Motown Records?

A.  Berry Gordy

B.  Halle Berry

C.  Boysen Berry

2.  Which of the following does not belong?

A.  Count Basie

B.  Duke Ellington

C.  King Tut

3.  A seminal jazz album recorded by Miles Davis is:

A.  Kind of Blue

B.  Sort of Green

C.  Somewhere between Teal and Turquoise

4.  James Baldwin and Alec Baldwin are:

A.  brothers.

B.  father and son.

C.  probably not related.  

5.  Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech was written and delivered by:

A.  Carol King

B.  Martin Luther King

C.  Martin Luther

6.  Harriet Tubman is best known for her work with:

A.  the Underground Railroad.

B.  the Velvet Underground, an iconic 1960’s rock band.

C.  Amtrak, which she founded. 

7.  Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel:

A.  Fifty Shades of Grey.

B.  Beloved.

C.  Star Wars.

8.  Neil deGrasse Tyson is:

A.  an astrophysicist.

B.  a point guard for the Miami Heat.

C.  Trick question:  There is no person named Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

“What is particularly embarrassing is that you only needed to get five questions right to pass the test and become a mentor,” says the UMPI source.  “This result is simply unacceptable.  These are the same professors who can identify an L. L. Bean Duck Boot from over 200 yards away…at night…in the fog!  Give me a break!”

On a more positive note, in May 2019 the UMPI Martial Arts Squad (nicknamed The Wakandans, although 6 of its 7 members are white) defeated student teams from Bryn Mawr College and Oberlin College in the Aroostook County Moose-Wrestling Invitational, an annual competition between the three schools.  UMPI has won this event for the past 12 years.  During that time, no moose has ever been successfully pinned by a Bryn Mawr or Oberlin team member.  

Moral of the Story?  Play to your strengths, UMPI, play to your strengths.  

 

Should the final stages of searches for college and university presidents be characterized by secrecy, with the names of the candidates only known to the search committee and a few others?  This topic has been getting an increasing amount of attention lately, as many faculty members grumble that they should not be deprived of learning, in advance, the identity of the person they will be burning in effigy six months later. 

Undaunted by this controversy, Auburn University’s Board of Trustees has taken the concept of the “secret search” to the next level.  Not only will their search for Auburn’s new President be conducted “under the radar,” the name of the successful candidate will not be shared even after the individual takes office.  Indeed, the University plans to keep secret the identity of the President for the entire duration of his or her term in office.

According to Board Chair Clement Gravenstone, the logic underlying this decision is straightforward:

“For at least the past decade college presidents have been lightning rods for negative publicity.  Hell, a president can get in trouble these days for just hugging the school mascot.  It’s ridiculous! 

“Well, you can’t get in trouble if no one knows who you are.  Our next President will function fully incognito.  The individual we hire will not have an office on campus.  The President will operate out of an underground bunker in an undisclosed location in Lee County that was once used by the Army to monitor A-Bomb tests and the CIA to put LSD in our water supply.  

“The President will never appear in public, but will hold monthly audio-only press conferences using an encrypted voice-alteration device.  All Presidential decisions will be implemented by the Provost or Campus Police, depending on the issue.  

“We realize that some folks might see the actions we are taking as inconsistent with a free and open society, and they would be right.  But the time has come for administrative leadership at Auburn to ‘go dark’, as it were, in the name of more ambitious goals.  Transparency had its day at our university, however briefly, and what did we get in return?  A victory over Purdue in the 2018 Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tennessee, that’s what we got.  Pathetic.  Simply pathetic.  We can — and must — do better.  Our alumni and current students deserve nothing less.   

“Interviews for the position of President at Auburn University will begin…..sometime……somewhere.   Details about the search will be communicated at the appropriate time to those who need to know.  If you don’t hear anything from us, rest assured that you don’t need to know.  

“When a final decision is reached, white smoke will billow from the chimney of Samford Hall.  This is the only notification that the University community and the public will receive.”

Interested parties are invited to log in to Auburn’s PrezCam, a surveillance camera that monitors the chimney 24 hours a day.  

 

 

 

Sometimes it’s just hard to find a middle ground.

True Story:  Last week the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) removed a sign celebrating Gay Pride Month from outside its campus library.  The sign’s message: Being gay is like glitter.  It never goes away. — Lady Gaga.

University Life has learned that this action followed weeks of negotiation between UCA and gay-rights advocates that had ended in a stalemate.  According to a high-level administrator at the school, UCA had proposed an alternative Gay Pride sign for the library: Being gay is evil. You’ll go to hell for sure. — God.  A second alternative put forward by UCA: Gay? No way!

The administrator maintains that “the gay-rights advocates were not willing to compromise, so that left us no choice.  We had to move the sign.  This is Conway, Arkansas, for Pete’s sake!  We’re not a major metropolis like Little Rock or Fayetteville, where nobody thinks twice about wearing a rainbow bandana in public.”

The original sign now resides in front of a 24-hour convenience store on U.S. Highway 71 in De Queen, Arkansas, a town in the state’s southwestern, far-left corner.  “We thought this location would be a much better fit,” the administrator claims.  “The store’s beef jerky aisle also serves as a satellite campus for our MBA program, so at least some UCA students will see the sign when they come to class.”  

Not a perfect solution, to be sure.  But it’s a beginning. 

 

 

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently announced the termination of its resident MBA program as the school shifts its MBA focus to online education (no joke).

But hold on to your hats and tighten the drawstrings of your pajama bottoms, ladies and gents, because that’s only the beginning.  In September 2019 the University’s Medical School will also become a fully online operation.  No, you’re not hallucinating.  According to Wendell “Skip” Carrion, Dean of Medicine and Associate Vice President for Information Technology, this transformation will save the University and its students “a ton of money, with no loss in quality.”  

Carrion explains:

“So let’s talk about cadavers.  An intact human cadaver suitable for training purposes can cost as much as $2,000 plus a delivery fee.  On the other hand, you can make a perfectly decent proxy cadaver at home for less than $30 a pop using a 3D printer, heavy-duty construction paper, soybean paste, and a little dog fur.  It’s a no-brainer.

“Or consider medical residencies.   Currently, a typical residency lasts at least three years.  They’re stressful and exhausting for the trainees, leading to patients being treated by sleep-deprived physicians who mistake a pancreas for a spleen, an Adam’s apple for an elbow, or a plantar wart for a testicle.  In our four-month residency program, E-Z MedPass, freshly minted M.D.’s will stay at home and stream the first 10 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and all nine seasons of Scrubs.  Everything a practicing physician needs to know is in those shows.  You just have to pay attention.  Residents won’t need to spend countless hours in a hospital, where they are likely to be exposed to all sorts of germs and blood and oozing fluids, which can be incredibly sticky and gross.”

How will online students develop the interpersonal skills that are crucial for providing compassionate care to patients?  “No problemo, amigo,” says Carrion.  “Our YouTube library of adorable kitten videos is the largest in the Western hemisphere.  I promise you that our graduates will be unsurpassed at using a laser pointer to distract patients from their medical troubles, no matter how serious.  (‘So, you’ve developed a dry, hacking cough that just won’t go away?  That doesn’t sound……..Oooh, look!!!  There’s a red dot on the wall that keeps jumping around!!!  Let’s catch it!!!’).”

In a related announcement, the Dean indicated that in 2020 the accreditation of the University of Illinois Medical School will be switched from the American Medical Association to Yelp.  And the school will begin exploring the feasibility of offering a Twitter-based master’s degree in osteopathic medicine.

You know, this could work. 

 

 

So here’s the deal.  The College Board, which oversees the SAT, now calculates an “Adversity Score” for each test-taker.  The score incorporates data such as the crime rate, median income, and educational attainment of residents in the student’s neighborhood.  The higher your Adversity Score is on a scale of 1 to 100, the more disadvantaged you are presumed to be.  The reason for doing all this is to help colleges and universities interpret any given student’s SAT score.

But this week the stakes went up.  ACT, Inc., the College Board’s rival that administers its own standardized test for college aspirants, has developed the Impaired Performance Indicator (IPI), which reflects events that could affect a student’s state of mind in the 24 hours immediately preceding his or her taking the test.  

Here is a partial list of factors included in the IPI, along with their point values:

—  Falling face-down on a sidewalk due to intoxication: 62 points

—  Shattering one’s smartphone in the fall: 232 points

—  Experiencing a tsunami bowel disturbance as a result of food poisoning (e.g., spoiled burritos, tainted scallops, rancid Buffalo wings, Peeps of any variety): 30 points

—  Death of a pet (dog: 50 points; cat: 5 points; all others: 25 points)

—  Discovering that you or your significant other is pregnant (you: 612 points; significant other: 17 points)

—  Termination of a romantic relationship (initiated by you: 24 points; initiated by other party: 53 points; initiated by other party after you’ve dropped several hints: 6 points)

—  Your favorite sports team loses (last-minute defeat: 42 points; game wasn’t close: 9 points; you had borrowed money from someone with a homicide conviction to bet on the game: 154 points)

—  Your parents inform you they’re getting divorced (72 points)

—  Your parents inform you they’re getting married (72 points)

—  You find out that Blanche — your disagreeable older cousin in Topeka — is actually your mom (894 points)

—  You come to the sobering realization that human existence is nothing more than soul-crushing injustice sprinkled with random, senseless tragedy (500 points, reduced by 45 points if realization occurs while smoking marijuana)

According to an ACT spokesperson, the IPI is an infinitely more valuable tool for evaluating an individual’s standardized test scores than “the SAT’s silly little Adversity number.  It’s a slam dunk.  Game over.”

If you listen carefully, you can still hear the backboard rattling.

 

 

True Story:  Rhonda E. Davis, a 60-year-old grandmother of 11 who resided in the dorms at Cheyney University, recently graduated from the Pennsylvania school as its valedictorian.  As one Cheyney official put it, “She’s such an inspiration, not only to the students, but to all of us.  The students follow her around like Mother Goose.”

The lesson to be learned here has not been lost on enrollment-challenged campuses around the country.  They are now scrambling to recruit uplifting role models who might motivate potential students to attend their institutions.  Three examples:

— Bismarck State College (North Dakota):  In September 2019 the iconic crooners Michael Bublé and Josh Groban will begin their freshman year at Bismarck, majoring in Fine Arts.  According to Daphne Permafrost, BSC’s Vice President for Enrollment Management, “too many high school seniors in our state are convinced that they must attend college in New York City or California in order to break into the music business.  With Mr. Bublé and Mr. Groban on our campus,  we hope that North Dakota teenagers who awaken at 4:30 every morning to harvest baby Ski-Doo’s on their parents’ snowmobile farms in Osnabrock and Walhalla will think of us as they belt out tunes from The Great American Songbook in the barn.  We expect the presence of these two gentlemen will also generate a spike in the number of middle-aged housewives who matriculate at BSC.”

— Oral Roberts University (Oklahoma):  In January 2020 Jesus of Nazareth will enroll as a second-semester freshman, accompanied by 15 Advanced Placement credits in Religion and Theology. “Jesus is a natural for us,” says Dean of Admissions Hasgood Crell. “He’s well-known, super-inspirational, and never went to college.  The competition to get him was fierce!  Liberty University offered him Birkenstock sandals for eternity.  Bob Jones University promised to let his Mom live in a furnished apartment on the edge of the campus; she and Joseph separated three years ago.  But the Advanced Placement credits apparently did the trick.  Jesus wants to graduate in three years.  There aren’t many folks, or deities, who are keen on spending four years in Tulsa.”

Jesus will be majoring in Criminal Justice, which Crell says “is not surprising, given everything he went through with Pontius Pilate.”

— City College of New York (NYC):  This summer, Country House, the thoroughbred racehorse who won the 2019 Kentucky Derby, will become a Special Student at City College.  “It’s a stroke of genius,” claims CCNY Provost Charleston Cravat.  “Our students are often uncertain of their ability to succeed in college, and feel that the odds are against them.  Well, the odds of Country House winning the Derby were 65 to 1, and look what happened!  Of course, he’ll need help with his writing skills at the beginning of the semester, so we’re building a stall for him right in the middle of our Center for Learning Resources and hired a Certified Horse Whisperer who’s also an English Composition tutor.  Undergraduates are going to look at them working together and think, ‘if Country House can do this, so can I’!”  

Rhonda Davis, what hath thou wrought?