http://californiaeducationalreform.blogspot.com/
Saturday, October 2, 2010
More Management by Kleptocracy... Thanks, Governor Schwarzeneggar!
He did it again! He yet again vetoed legislation authored by Leland Yee that would have ensured that the financial and other documents of the auxiliary organizations of the UC and CSU would have fallen under the oversight of the California Public Records Act .
Last year when he vetoed it, his argument was that Yee's legislation -- which received fairly substantial bi-partisan legislative support -- would have inhibited large scale donors to universities who wished to remain anonymous from making donations because their names would have become subject to the Public Records Act.
So, this year, Yee changed the language of the bill just to make Arnie happy. Problem is, Der Gropenführer was simply lying. He simply supports government by kleptocracy at the CSU and UC systems.
Let me remind of you of a few key facts: These auxiliary organizations that fought the legislation control a good 20% of any given institution's budget. That's scary. Management salaries have gone up 25% in the same period that saw faculty salaries rise only about 5%. While the UC alone laid off 30,000 part-time instructors.
As another blogger has noted of the bill, Editorial boards from newspapers across the state had urged the governor to sign the bill including: the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Fresno Bee, Long Beach Press-Telegram and many others, which you can read about here.
As Yee's press release notes with some hope, Fortunately, we will soon have a new governor.
Last year when he vetoed it, his argument was that Yee's legislation -- which received fairly substantial bi-partisan legislative support -- would have inhibited large scale donors to universities who wished to remain anonymous from making donations because their names would have become subject to the Public Records Act.
So, this year, Yee changed the language of the bill just to make Arnie happy. Problem is, Der Gropenführer was simply lying. He simply supports government by kleptocracy at the CSU and UC systems.
Let me remind of you of a few key facts: These auxiliary organizations that fought the legislation control a good 20% of any given institution's budget. That's scary. Management salaries have gone up 25% in the same period that saw faculty salaries rise only about 5%. While the UC alone laid off 30,000 part-time instructors.
As another blogger has noted of the bill, Editorial boards from newspapers across the state had urged the governor to sign the bill including: the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Fresno Bee, Long Beach Press-Telegram and many others, which you can read about here.
As Yee's press release notes with some hope, Fortunately, we will soon have a new governor.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
And it's not just Higher Education...
Schools spending money ‘in secret’ on legal bills?
So, I have this friend of mine who is a school board trustee. His district is an elementary district. And he estimates that on a monthly basis, his board is handed a bill for between $40,000 and $50,000 for completely undefined "legal expenses" that his superintendent won't disclose to his board even in closed session.
What that means, is that we also no way of knowing if that money is being spent to defend a teacher against a lawsuit, the district against a frivolous (or not!) suit brought by the parent of a student, or whether it's being spent on hookers, booze, or RNC-style entertainment practices.
And there are reportedly more than 1,000 school districts in the state of California. Do the math:
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The CSU and Management by Kleptocracy
CSU Stanislaus and one of its auxiliary foundations have been in the news of late for their hiring of Sarah Palin to speak at a fundraiser, as well as for their refusal to tell the public how much she is being paid for this speaking engagement. State Senator Leland Yee, a longtime critic of CSU management policies, last year authored a bill which would have placed the documents of such state university auxiliary organizations under the purview of the California Public Records Act. This bill was passed by the California Legislature and was poised to ensure that the public could inspect documents such as the Palin-Stanislaus contract and thus bring transparency to the operations of the CSU.
Seems fairly reasonable. Such auxiliary organizations operate on state facilities and not infrequently with the assistance of state employees in one capacity or another. They raise funds on behalf of and in the name of the state, commonly promising scholarship assistance, enhanced instructional materials and discipline-specific necessities that the state, in its current financial state, claims to be unable to afford. It stands to reason that they can do this job much more effectively when the public is able to independently confirm that such funds being raised are, indeed, being spent on those things instead of on hookers, booze and RNC-style social activities.
We do not know how much Stanislaus' auxiliary organization is paying Palin, though it is common knowledge that she commands up to $100,000 per speaking engagement. We don't know how much the state qua the CSU Stanislaus auxiliary organization is paying her because they refuse to say... and because we, the paying public, are refused access to the auxiliary's financial documents. And that is because California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar refused to sign Leland Yee's bill. He also vetoed another of Yee's bills, one that would have prohibited CSU & UC management pay increases in the sorts of difficult financial times that see student enrollment caps, tuition increases, and massive layoffs of such frontline rank and file employees as part-time lecturers in favor of bringing back retired professors who cost the state much more than the laid-off part-timers. Oh, and did I mention that a bill to protect UC whistleblowers also got Schwarzeneggared?
And thus do the wheels on the kleptocracy bus turn round and round... Except that this time, Yee has requested -- and received -- the investigatory powers of the California Attorney General and current gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown. Critics of his involvement point out that auxiliaries are audited and surely any corruption that may exist is the exception and not the rule.
Except that it's really the other way around, and Yee knows it. The UC and CSU operate under an invasive and subsequently pervasive management culture of kleptocracy that hides its dirty deeds behind the skirts of its auxiliary organizations and with the protection of our governor; their daily operations are no longer a question of what is right and what is wrong, but rather what can they get away with:
• At Sonoma State, a $1.25 million loan was issued by an auxiliary foundation to one of its former foundation board members two days after he resigned. He has since defaulted, leaving less money in the foundation’s endowment for scholarships and other more important causes.
• At Fresno State, a no-bid managing contract was given to a foundation member for a theatre complex in which he held a financial interest(!). In addition, the Fresno Bee newspaper was denied information in 2001, specifically concerning the identity of individuals and companies that received luxury suites at the Save Mart Center arena. The denial resulted in CSU v. Superior Court (McClatchy Company), in which the Court opined that although it recognized university auxiliaries ought to be covered by the CPRA and that its ruling was counter to the obvious legislative intent of the CPRA, the rewriting of the statute was a legislative responsibility.
• At San Francisco City College, a campus executive was indicted for using San Francisco City College Foundation money for personal and political purposes.
• At San Jose/Evergreen Community College, the Chancellor was found to have engaged in lavish travel and other examples of financial impropriety that prompted her resignation. Since local community college campus auxiliaries are already subject to the CPRA, these instances of waste and abuse have lead to the parties being held to account.
• Sacramento State President Alexander Gonzalez recently acknowledged his campus is being investigated by the Attorney General in relation to inappropriate expenditures of campus auxiliary money, including $200,000 to remodel President Gonzalez’ kitchen in 2007. Additionally at Sacramento State, $6.3 million of public funds was transferred to University Enterprises Inc., a campus auxiliary, to backfill losses from a property acquisition.
• Campus leadership at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo appears to be under the influence of a well-heeled donor. In October, Cal Poly eliminated a guest lecture at the request of executives from the Harris Ranch Beef Company, who threatened to withhold $500,000 in support for a new campus meat-processing center. Emails recently obtained by the San Luis Obispo Tribune also found that Harris Ranch may have also forced the resignation of a faculty member who taught a course on sustainable farming. Harris officials are now requesting a meeting with Cal Poly administrators to determine whether or not they will continue with their donation. (SOURCE: Senator Yee).
• Remember Sac State's President Gonzalez' $200,000 kitchen remodel? Not his first interesting encounter with public finances... The California State Auditor's report found what it termed "questionable reimbursements of relocation costs" for Gonzalez when the new president relocated from CSU, San Marcos, to Sacramento in August 2003, including $65,000 in closing costs, $19,000 for moving expenses, $27,000 for remodeling the president's kitchen (there's that damned kitchen again... what is he, a 5-star chef?!), and $233,000 in loans, at a 1.697 percent interest rate, to cover escrow costs and mortgage payments. The California State Auditor's report described these as "questionable reimbursements of relocation costs" that occurred during a period in which compensation for top CSU executives had grown 25 percent over the previous five years, while faculty salaries had risen a mere 5.6 percent. (SOURCE.)
• A CSU campus foundation gave more than $6,000 to a new athletic coach in San Diego to pay his tax liability in connection with his move to California. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• A former CSU management employee received a total of $102,000 over nearly seven years without performing any services for the university - an arrangement approved by the chancellor. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• An assistant vice chancellor for information technology services was provided $15,947 for entertainment expenses in 2006-2007. (San Francisco Chronicle) Nonprofit campus foundations, whose spending and fundraising activities are often shielded from public view, provided some of these payments. Other payments came out of the university's general fund or special accounts. (San Francisco Chronicle) For this and the two above findings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that CSU Board Chair Roberta Achtenberg was generally unapologetic about perceived abuse. (SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on a California State Auditor report).
• A 2006 State Auditor's Report on CSU Fullerton and its operations found that, Cal State Fullerton's business operations were rife with mismanagement and waste, including an instance in which husband and wife administrators oversaw millions of dollars in spending involving a corporation he owned stock in... "waste and abuse," poor record-keeping, shoddy business practices and financial mismanagement. The audit found that employees feared retaliation if they reported waste, fraud or abuse... The university has a budget of more than $230 million and a history of fiscal problems. A 1999 audit accused the university of mismanaging funds, spending scholarship money on meals, entertainment and carwashes and circumventing hiring and contracting procedures to give work to friends. A 2001 report found thousands of dollars were inappropriately spent on items such as wedding and baby showers, a retirement dinner and sympathy flowers, according to the Los Angeles Times. Incidentally, in one of these cases, I knew one of the glorified fundraiser employees of the CSU Fullerton Foundation. When the State Auditor was brought in, Foundation employees were requested to meet with them and answer their questions. CSU Fullerton's President refused to speak with them, but my acquaintance did as she was requested to do. For this, she was fired, a termination she only learned about the day campus police abruptly showed up in her office, gave her 20 minutes to clear out her desk, and escorted her off campus grounds. Your public dollars proudly at "work," covering up corruption.
And this is only the stuff that somehow became public; one can only imagine how much corruption goes on free and clear of public scrutiny. When questioned by Yee and others regarding the Palin deal, Stanislaus officials claimed that they had "no relevant documents". Clearly, however, they did, and it speaks volumes that, getting wind of Yee's solicitation of the Attorney General, Stanislaus officials decided to sidestep the public finding anything else out about the Palin deal by furtively getting together on their furlough day to shred all documents associated with the engagement. They did this on your dime. And the incompetent fools couldn't even get that right -- several pages of the contract were deposited in campus dumpsters intact, only to be discovered by students who had heard rumors of the planned document destruction party. Pity those students: The CSU isn't kind to whistleblowers of any kind.
Back to Rancho Kleptocracy... why is it standard operating procedure in the CSU? While the current conservative element is pleased with the state pouring more money into prisons than into higher education, proclaiming that higher education is not an entitlement, the real firmly-held sense of entitlement seems to be ensconced in CSU management, whose members are among the highest-paid public employees in the state. Consider CSU Fullerton, for example. Its president, Milton A. Gordon, makes in excess of $300,000 per year. Why so much? The traditional argument favoring such exorbitantly-high pay for CSU presidents is that they need this level of public largesse because of the high cost of housing in California. And anyone who's ever tried to buy a house can likely vouch for the high cost of housing in California. But it makes absolutely no sense to pay Gordon an obscene salary -- which included increases this year as tuition went up and his own employees were laid off -- for housing costs when in fact he lives rent and mortgage-free in a $3.5 million dollar mansion given to the state. Oh, and the President's Assistant also gets to live there, similarly rent-free. Donated by the wealthy Orange County Chapman family with the stipulation that it be used to house the CSUF President and be maintained at the public's expense (this was done just before Gordon was hired... hmmmm.....), one must sympathize with the blogger who points out that:
It would have been nice if the Chapmans would have sold the property out-right and used the proceeds for a scholarship endowment. The money would go to those who need it the most.
But, of course, that's not what the CSU is about anymore; it's about over-paid public "servants" who have zero interest in public service, fleecing its paying public, and trashing what little remains of the state's higher education system; completely and utterly indifferent to the financial crisis it not only faces but perpetuates. Even now CSU Fullerton is casting its eyes on expensive rental property in hideously expensive Irvine because it made the poor choice of accepting a short-term lease of lands on the former El Toro Marine Air Corps Station to construct classroom facilities that the campus knew it would be introducing to the wrecking ball within the decade. That swoosh! sound you hear is CSUF flushing an untold number of public dollars down the proverbial toilet and, this, at the same time that it couldn't find the financial or other means for nearly an entire semester to restore running water to its complex of Engineering buildings at the main campus. But, hey -- fire code compliance is for wimps, not CSU executives who, I might add, do not lack running water like engineering students did or hot running water, which CSU Fullerton's computer science faculty, staff and students have never had.
This is the Twilight Zone occupied by CSU management: they may talk the talk and publicly bemoan cutbacks to education, but when you're not paying your own mortgage, when you're not constantly faced with looming layoffs that are picking off your colleagues around you like flies, when you're not faced with up to 33% increases in tuition every other year, and your well-apportioned office is nice and toasty in the winter, cool in the summer, and your toilets all flush, it's easy to look down on all the little people who are facing these things.
CSU management is worried about being able to continue hiring their friends to do next to nothing; CSU faculty and staff are worried about having a job period, and CSU students are worried that they may never get a job if they are unable graduate due to class cuts and tuition increases while the auxiliary organizations that promise to raise scholarship funds for them are instead remodeling campus president's kitchens and giving low interest loans to people who don't really need them.
Regrettably, the CSU, and CSU Fullerton, in particular have a long, ignominious history of incompetence and corruption. I've written previously how another CSU Fullerton President did the incomprehensible in passing on hosting the U.S. Presidential Library it had spent a decade and more courting... So that the campus could get the City of Fullerton and the Marriott Corporation to build a football stadium for one of the worst teams in the nation and, like other university athletic programs around the nation, not only didn't it make the campus any money but, indeed, sucked away funding from other areas of campus life (in CSUF's case, they twisted the arm of student government and employed the dubious accounting practice of kiting). Year after year after year. It's worth noting that, time and again, the California Faculty Association and the California State Student Association (umbrella group for all student government auxiliary organizations in the CSU) came together to jointly request that the CSU Trustees audit intercollegiate athletics system-wide, and, that, each time, CSU management resolutely refused to do so.
Much of the CSU's financial shenanigans take place within their auxiliary foundations, whose budgets control up to 20% of the university's funding. Athletics usually has theirs, the campus bookstore monopolies typically controlled by another... They control vast segments of student and other life on campus, dictating whether and who can hold coffee sales and other fundraisers. As a student many years ago, I and other students were threatened with legal action by our campus foundation over our plans to operate a used textbook co-op. A planned community Seder sponsored by a student organization and free to the public was told what it could and couldn't offer to the public (matzo ball soup was okay, any other chicken and they would shut down the club's campus celebration). These groups see absolutely nothing wrong with giving jobs to their friends and below-market loans to people who make so much that they surely should qualify for a real legit loan on their own merits, while they threaten hapless student organizations who are using the university a a social learning lab to learn something about public service.
As a CSU student, for a good decade or more, I was also heavily involved in student government. CSU student government entities are in fact CSU auxiliary foundations but, unlike the ones noted above, are specifically subject to transparency in operations and documents as state agencies. Still, what I saw during that period, how student governments and their multi-million dollar budgets were abused and misused, was enough to give me some insights into why state auxiliaries with even less public oversight go even more awry. I saw signed legal contracts for services be unconscionably delayed or go unpaid altogether simply to punish students who made complaints about CSU management. I watched as supposedly credible accounting firms signed-off on quite possibly illegal accounting practices to favor intercollegiate athletics and its ever-present financial black hole. I received credible evidence indicating that the state employee manager of student government funds might well be operating a tax preparation business on the side, on state property, during his working hours, and possibly giving himself loans of student funds. When a student group took these concerns to the university president, said university president saw to it that the concerns were never investigated. When those same students requested the assistance of whatever bozo was then attorney general, said attorney general declined to investigate, stating that, in essence, the CSU was free to police itself. I think we can see what a good idea that has turned out to be.
These quasi-public/quasi-private (depending upon which suits them at the moment) organizations possess too much power and control too much of our public institutions' budgets to be able to have the convenience of picking and choosing which information is good for public consumption: it is all necessary for public consumption! And complete transparency regarding these organizations' finances and operating procedures is necessary to restore the CSU to sanity and its former glory.
http://www.calnews.com/badcal.htm
Seems fairly reasonable. Such auxiliary organizations operate on state facilities and not infrequently with the assistance of state employees in one capacity or another. They raise funds on behalf of and in the name of the state, commonly promising scholarship assistance, enhanced instructional materials and discipline-specific necessities that the state, in its current financial state, claims to be unable to afford. It stands to reason that they can do this job much more effectively when the public is able to independently confirm that such funds being raised are, indeed, being spent on those things instead of on hookers, booze and RNC-style social activities.
We do not know how much Stanislaus' auxiliary organization is paying Palin, though it is common knowledge that she commands up to $100,000 per speaking engagement. We don't know how much the state qua the CSU Stanislaus auxiliary organization is paying her because they refuse to say... and because we, the paying public, are refused access to the auxiliary's financial documents. And that is because California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar refused to sign Leland Yee's bill. He also vetoed another of Yee's bills, one that would have prohibited CSU & UC management pay increases in the sorts of difficult financial times that see student enrollment caps, tuition increases, and massive layoffs of such frontline rank and file employees as part-time lecturers in favor of bringing back retired professors who cost the state much more than the laid-off part-timers. Oh, and did I mention that a bill to protect UC whistleblowers also got Schwarzeneggared?
And thus do the wheels on the kleptocracy bus turn round and round... Except that this time, Yee has requested -- and received -- the investigatory powers of the California Attorney General and current gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown. Critics of his involvement point out that auxiliaries are audited and surely any corruption that may exist is the exception and not the rule.
Except that it's really the other way around, and Yee knows it. The UC and CSU operate under an invasive and subsequently pervasive management culture of kleptocracy that hides its dirty deeds behind the skirts of its auxiliary organizations and with the protection of our governor; their daily operations are no longer a question of what is right and what is wrong, but rather what can they get away with:
• At Sonoma State, a $1.25 million loan was issued by an auxiliary foundation to one of its former foundation board members two days after he resigned. He has since defaulted, leaving less money in the foundation’s endowment for scholarships and other more important causes.
• At Fresno State, a no-bid managing contract was given to a foundation member for a theatre complex in which he held a financial interest(!). In addition, the Fresno Bee newspaper was denied information in 2001, specifically concerning the identity of individuals and companies that received luxury suites at the Save Mart Center arena. The denial resulted in CSU v. Superior Court (McClatchy Company), in which the Court opined that although it recognized university auxiliaries ought to be covered by the CPRA and that its ruling was counter to the obvious legislative intent of the CPRA, the rewriting of the statute was a legislative responsibility.
• At San Francisco City College, a campus executive was indicted for using San Francisco City College Foundation money for personal and political purposes.
• At San Jose/Evergreen Community College, the Chancellor was found to have engaged in lavish travel and other examples of financial impropriety that prompted her resignation. Since local community college campus auxiliaries are already subject to the CPRA, these instances of waste and abuse have lead to the parties being held to account.
• Sacramento State President Alexander Gonzalez recently acknowledged his campus is being investigated by the Attorney General in relation to inappropriate expenditures of campus auxiliary money, including $200,000 to remodel President Gonzalez’ kitchen in 2007. Additionally at Sacramento State, $6.3 million of public funds was transferred to University Enterprises Inc., a campus auxiliary, to backfill losses from a property acquisition.
• Campus leadership at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo appears to be under the influence of a well-heeled donor. In October, Cal Poly eliminated a guest lecture at the request of executives from the Harris Ranch Beef Company, who threatened to withhold $500,000 in support for a new campus meat-processing center. Emails recently obtained by the San Luis Obispo Tribune also found that Harris Ranch may have also forced the resignation of a faculty member who taught a course on sustainable farming. Harris officials are now requesting a meeting with Cal Poly administrators to determine whether or not they will continue with their donation. (SOURCE: Senator Yee).
• Remember Sac State's President Gonzalez' $200,000 kitchen remodel? Not his first interesting encounter with public finances... The California State Auditor's report found what it termed "questionable reimbursements of relocation costs" for Gonzalez when the new president relocated from CSU, San Marcos, to Sacramento in August 2003, including $65,000 in closing costs, $19,000 for moving expenses, $27,000 for remodeling the president's kitchen (there's that damned kitchen again... what is he, a 5-star chef?!), and $233,000 in loans, at a 1.697 percent interest rate, to cover escrow costs and mortgage payments. The California State Auditor's report described these as "questionable reimbursements of relocation costs" that occurred during a period in which compensation for top CSU executives had grown 25 percent over the previous five years, while faculty salaries had risen a mere 5.6 percent. (SOURCE.)
• A CSU campus foundation gave more than $6,000 to a new athletic coach in San Diego to pay his tax liability in connection with his move to California. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• A former CSU management employee received a total of $102,000 over nearly seven years without performing any services for the university - an arrangement approved by the chancellor. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• An assistant vice chancellor for information technology services was provided $15,947 for entertainment expenses in 2006-2007. (San Francisco Chronicle) Nonprofit campus foundations, whose spending and fundraising activities are often shielded from public view, provided some of these payments. Other payments came out of the university's general fund or special accounts. (San Francisco Chronicle) For this and the two above findings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that CSU Board Chair Roberta Achtenberg was generally unapologetic about perceived abuse. (SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on a California State Auditor report).
• A 2006 State Auditor's Report on CSU Fullerton and its operations found that, Cal State Fullerton's business operations were rife with mismanagement and waste, including an instance in which husband and wife administrators oversaw millions of dollars in spending involving a corporation he owned stock in... "waste and abuse," poor record-keeping, shoddy business practices and financial mismanagement. The audit found that employees feared retaliation if they reported waste, fraud or abuse... The university has a budget of more than $230 million and a history of fiscal problems. A 1999 audit accused the university of mismanaging funds, spending scholarship money on meals, entertainment and carwashes and circumventing hiring and contracting procedures to give work to friends. A 2001 report found thousands of dollars were inappropriately spent on items such as wedding and baby showers, a retirement dinner and sympathy flowers, according to the Los Angeles Times. Incidentally, in one of these cases, I knew one of the glorified fundraiser employees of the CSU Fullerton Foundation. When the State Auditor was brought in, Foundation employees were requested to meet with them and answer their questions. CSU Fullerton's President refused to speak with them, but my acquaintance did as she was requested to do. For this, she was fired, a termination she only learned about the day campus police abruptly showed up in her office, gave her 20 minutes to clear out her desk, and escorted her off campus grounds. Your public dollars proudly at "work," covering up corruption.
And this is only the stuff that somehow became public; one can only imagine how much corruption goes on free and clear of public scrutiny. When questioned by Yee and others regarding the Palin deal, Stanislaus officials claimed that they had "no relevant documents". Clearly, however, they did, and it speaks volumes that, getting wind of Yee's solicitation of the Attorney General, Stanislaus officials decided to sidestep the public finding anything else out about the Palin deal by furtively getting together on their furlough day to shred all documents associated with the engagement. They did this on your dime. And the incompetent fools couldn't even get that right -- several pages of the contract were deposited in campus dumpsters intact, only to be discovered by students who had heard rumors of the planned document destruction party. Pity those students: The CSU isn't kind to whistleblowers of any kind.
Back to Rancho Kleptocracy... why is it standard operating procedure in the CSU? While the current conservative element is pleased with the state pouring more money into prisons than into higher education, proclaiming that higher education is not an entitlement, the real firmly-held sense of entitlement seems to be ensconced in CSU management, whose members are among the highest-paid public employees in the state. Consider CSU Fullerton, for example. Its president, Milton A. Gordon, makes in excess of $300,000 per year. Why so much? The traditional argument favoring such exorbitantly-high pay for CSU presidents is that they need this level of public largesse because of the high cost of housing in California. And anyone who's ever tried to buy a house can likely vouch for the high cost of housing in California. But it makes absolutely no sense to pay Gordon an obscene salary -- which included increases this year as tuition went up and his own employees were laid off -- for housing costs when in fact he lives rent and mortgage-free in a $3.5 million dollar mansion given to the state. Oh, and the President's Assistant also gets to live there, similarly rent-free. Donated by the wealthy Orange County Chapman family with the stipulation that it be used to house the CSUF President and be maintained at the public's expense (this was done just before Gordon was hired... hmmmm.....), one must sympathize with the blogger who points out that:
It would have been nice if the Chapmans would have sold the property out-right and used the proceeds for a scholarship endowment. The money would go to those who need it the most.
But, of course, that's not what the CSU is about anymore; it's about over-paid public "servants" who have zero interest in public service, fleecing its paying public, and trashing what little remains of the state's higher education system; completely and utterly indifferent to the financial crisis it not only faces but perpetuates. Even now CSU Fullerton is casting its eyes on expensive rental property in hideously expensive Irvine because it made the poor choice of accepting a short-term lease of lands on the former El Toro Marine Air Corps Station to construct classroom facilities that the campus knew it would be introducing to the wrecking ball within the decade. That swoosh! sound you hear is CSUF flushing an untold number of public dollars down the proverbial toilet and, this, at the same time that it couldn't find the financial or other means for nearly an entire semester to restore running water to its complex of Engineering buildings at the main campus. But, hey -- fire code compliance is for wimps, not CSU executives who, I might add, do not lack running water like engineering students did or hot running water, which CSU Fullerton's computer science faculty, staff and students have never had.
This is the Twilight Zone occupied by CSU management: they may talk the talk and publicly bemoan cutbacks to education, but when you're not paying your own mortgage, when you're not constantly faced with looming layoffs that are picking off your colleagues around you like flies, when you're not faced with up to 33% increases in tuition every other year, and your well-apportioned office is nice and toasty in the winter, cool in the summer, and your toilets all flush, it's easy to look down on all the little people who are facing these things.
CSU management is worried about being able to continue hiring their friends to do next to nothing; CSU faculty and staff are worried about having a job period, and CSU students are worried that they may never get a job if they are unable graduate due to class cuts and tuition increases while the auxiliary organizations that promise to raise scholarship funds for them are instead remodeling campus president's kitchens and giving low interest loans to people who don't really need them.
Regrettably, the CSU, and CSU Fullerton, in particular have a long, ignominious history of incompetence and corruption. I've written previously how another CSU Fullerton President did the incomprehensible in passing on hosting the U.S. Presidential Library it had spent a decade and more courting... So that the campus could get the City of Fullerton and the Marriott Corporation to build a football stadium for one of the worst teams in the nation and, like other university athletic programs around the nation, not only didn't it make the campus any money but, indeed, sucked away funding from other areas of campus life (in CSUF's case, they twisted the arm of student government and employed the dubious accounting practice of kiting). Year after year after year. It's worth noting that, time and again, the California Faculty Association and the California State Student Association (umbrella group for all student government auxiliary organizations in the CSU) came together to jointly request that the CSU Trustees audit intercollegiate athletics system-wide, and, that, each time, CSU management resolutely refused to do so.
Much of the CSU's financial shenanigans take place within their auxiliary foundations, whose budgets control up to 20% of the university's funding. Athletics usually has theirs, the campus bookstore monopolies typically controlled by another... They control vast segments of student and other life on campus, dictating whether and who can hold coffee sales and other fundraisers. As a student many years ago, I and other students were threatened with legal action by our campus foundation over our plans to operate a used textbook co-op. A planned community Seder sponsored by a student organization and free to the public was told what it could and couldn't offer to the public (matzo ball soup was okay, any other chicken and they would shut down the club's campus celebration). These groups see absolutely nothing wrong with giving jobs to their friends and below-market loans to people who make so much that they surely should qualify for a real legit loan on their own merits, while they threaten hapless student organizations who are using the university a a social learning lab to learn something about public service.
As a CSU student, for a good decade or more, I was also heavily involved in student government. CSU student government entities are in fact CSU auxiliary foundations but, unlike the ones noted above, are specifically subject to transparency in operations and documents as state agencies. Still, what I saw during that period, how student governments and their multi-million dollar budgets were abused and misused, was enough to give me some insights into why state auxiliaries with even less public oversight go even more awry. I saw signed legal contracts for services be unconscionably delayed or go unpaid altogether simply to punish students who made complaints about CSU management. I watched as supposedly credible accounting firms signed-off on quite possibly illegal accounting practices to favor intercollegiate athletics and its ever-present financial black hole. I received credible evidence indicating that the state employee manager of student government funds might well be operating a tax preparation business on the side, on state property, during his working hours, and possibly giving himself loans of student funds. When a student group took these concerns to the university president, said university president saw to it that the concerns were never investigated. When those same students requested the assistance of whatever bozo was then attorney general, said attorney general declined to investigate, stating that, in essence, the CSU was free to police itself. I think we can see what a good idea that has turned out to be.
These quasi-public/quasi-private (depending upon which suits them at the moment) organizations possess too much power and control too much of our public institutions' budgets to be able to have the convenience of picking and choosing which information is good for public consumption: it is all necessary for public consumption! And complete transparency regarding these organizations' finances and operating procedures is necessary to restore the CSU to sanity and its former glory.
http://www.calnews.com/badcal.htm
Saturday, February 6, 2010
We're hiring management, killing off degree programs... AND we rejected hosting a U.S. Presidential Library!
Fun little update to the last post: The same campus that can afford to build new parking structures and buildings (but apparently NOT the new Children's Center, funded by students, that was approved probably 2 or more decades ago), to bulldoze buildings not 10 years old, and to hire management-level fundraisers cannot afford its degree programs in French, German and Portuguese and will likely kill them off because not very many students major in these programs. Can Physics, Mathematics, Engineering or Computer Science be far behind?
The university sells a book by history professor Lawrence de Graf entitled The Fullerton Way. Pity nobody thought to ask any rank-and-file employees at CSUF how they have have always used that phrase: codespeak for the incredible level of incompetent and corrupt management of Orange County's "premier CSU" (another stupid phrase of CSUF's, as CSUF has always been and still is Orange County's only CSU). Someday when my blood pressure has returned from the stratosphere, I'll have to read the book. But I digress.
Okay, forget about the book... I have this KILLER idea in terms of fundraising and CSUF: host a US Presidential library. I wonder how much money such a puppy would rake in... Perhaps some kind soul can check in with the nearby Richard Nixon Presidential Library in neighboring Yorba Linda, a few minutes bus ride away from CSUF. I'm kinda betting it's not chump change.
Seem like a far-fetched idea? If so, then perhaps someone can explain to me exactly why it was that CSUF in fact REJECTED a proposal that it originally authored, to host the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on CSUF grounds, despite having invested in the development of what by 1988 would be a massive 200 volume effort that also was "the only such collection on him [Nixon] that is complete and open to the public," namely, the Nixon Oral History Project and having previously been actively campaigning to be the repository of Nixon's archives and library since the 1970s. CSUF History Professor B. Carmon Hardy, who was involved in the negotiations, noted that the acquisition of the Nixon archives would result in CSUF being:
"a matchless source location for the study of American society during the significant, tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s... one of the most auspicious academic events to occur in the history of this institution."
Except that, per The Fullerton Way, it was an auspicious event that never happened. You might think you know the answer -- you know, those dastardly liberal professors who were looking for the opportunity to stick it to a Republican president. Except that the campus' governing Faculty Council voted 35-1 to endorse hosting the library, with Political Science Professor James P. Pfiffner noting that:
"refusal to accept the archives because somehow we disapproved of Richard Nixon or his policies would be like rejecting an institute for the study of cancer because we somehow disapproved of that disease."
You think?! Okay, so, maybe it was a group of student radicals who killed it... Oh, except that the student government's governing board voted UNANIMOUSLY to recommend hosting the library. Ooops. So, what monumental monstrosity occured which resulted in CSUF NOT hosting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library?
It's monumentally short-sighted chief officer, then-University President Jewel Plummer Cobb, who personally and single-handedly saw to it that Orange County's premier CSU would never achieve academic luminosity. As sickening as it is to realize this, the rationale was even worse: due to a scarcity of land at CSUF, Cobb wanted that land to be handed over to the City of Fullerton for a truly nominal amount of money, for the city to sublease to a major hotel corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, all to put a second rate hotel on university property. Why exactly did the university "need" a hotel so much more than it needed a presidential library? It was so that the City would help fund a stadium for what was at the time the single worst university football team in its league in the nation. Why she trusted the City of Fullerton is entirely unclear, as time and time again the City would threaten to weasel out of its promised obligation to co-fund the university's celebrated Arboretum (the rest of the funding coming from years and years of CSUF students themselves).
And now? CSUF has an empty stadium that's not even used during commencement (just as well inasmuch as, contrary to ADA law, its elevators have NEVER worked), no presidential library and no football team (well, the last is a silver lining at least). It's stupid decisions like this that have helped put the CSU in the predicament it's in.
The university sells a book by history professor Lawrence de Graf entitled The Fullerton Way. Pity nobody thought to ask any rank-and-file employees at CSUF how they have have always used that phrase: codespeak for the incredible level of incompetent and corrupt management of Orange County's "premier CSU" (another stupid phrase of CSUF's, as CSUF has always been and still is Orange County's only CSU). Someday when my blood pressure has returned from the stratosphere, I'll have to read the book. But I digress.
Okay, forget about the book... I have this KILLER idea in terms of fundraising and CSUF: host a US Presidential library. I wonder how much money such a puppy would rake in... Perhaps some kind soul can check in with the nearby Richard Nixon Presidential Library in neighboring Yorba Linda, a few minutes bus ride away from CSUF. I'm kinda betting it's not chump change.
Seem like a far-fetched idea? If so, then perhaps someone can explain to me exactly why it was that CSUF in fact REJECTED a proposal that it originally authored, to host the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on CSUF grounds, despite having invested in the development of what by 1988 would be a massive 200 volume effort that also was "the only such collection on him [Nixon] that is complete and open to the public," namely, the Nixon Oral History Project and having previously been actively campaigning to be the repository of Nixon's archives and library since the 1970s. CSUF History Professor B. Carmon Hardy, who was involved in the negotiations, noted that the acquisition of the Nixon archives would result in CSUF being:
"a matchless source location for the study of American society during the significant, tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s... one of the most auspicious academic events to occur in the history of this institution."
Except that, per The Fullerton Way, it was an auspicious event that never happened. You might think you know the answer -- you know, those dastardly liberal professors who were looking for the opportunity to stick it to a Republican president. Except that the campus' governing Faculty Council voted 35-1 to endorse hosting the library, with Political Science Professor James P. Pfiffner noting that:
"refusal to accept the archives because somehow we disapproved of Richard Nixon or his policies would be like rejecting an institute for the study of cancer because we somehow disapproved of that disease."
You think?! Okay, so, maybe it was a group of student radicals who killed it... Oh, except that the student government's governing board voted UNANIMOUSLY to recommend hosting the library. Ooops. So, what monumental monstrosity occured which resulted in CSUF NOT hosting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library?
It's monumentally short-sighted chief officer, then-University President Jewel Plummer Cobb, who personally and single-handedly saw to it that Orange County's premier CSU would never achieve academic luminosity. As sickening as it is to realize this, the rationale was even worse: due to a scarcity of land at CSUF, Cobb wanted that land to be handed over to the City of Fullerton for a truly nominal amount of money, for the city to sublease to a major hotel corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, all to put a second rate hotel on university property. Why exactly did the university "need" a hotel so much more than it needed a presidential library? It was so that the City would help fund a stadium for what was at the time the single worst university football team in its league in the nation. Why she trusted the City of Fullerton is entirely unclear, as time and time again the City would threaten to weasel out of its promised obligation to co-fund the university's celebrated Arboretum (the rest of the funding coming from years and years of CSUF students themselves).
And now? CSUF has an empty stadium that's not even used during commencement (just as well inasmuch as, contrary to ADA law, its elevators have NEVER worked), no presidential library and no football team (well, the last is a silver lining at least). It's stupid decisions like this that have helped put the CSU in the predicament it's in.
Friday, February 5, 2010
The CSU is _STILL_ Hiring Fundraiser Execs!
I kid you not. After the UC laid off 30,000 part-time instructional workers, some of whom were longtime employed by the UC, and the considerably larger CSU did likewise, I am shocked to find out that CSU Fullerton continues to hire executive fundraisers while laying off lecturers, janitors, failing to fix for months on end important safety features like the fire sprinklers and restrooms and electrical problems in Engineering, and making department secretaries work in 53° F conditions with elevators that slip, lock in teachers at 10:30 at night, or outright don't work at all.
Oh, and have I mentioned that the restrooms and other water facilities in the Computer Science building have never, EVER had hot running water? For a nice little pictorial essay, see here. I'm betting the fundraisers have nice, warm, toasty offices in winter, cool ones in summer, fire sprinklers, hot running water and functioning restrooms. I'm betting they don't lose computer workstations to meltdown because they're not allowed to run the AC in the summers. I'm fairly certain that their secretaries don't have to worry about frostbite.
The State of California and the management of the CSU in particular have badly sold out California's future. While management continues to hire its own and let go the people on the instructional and basic student services front-line, they continue to construct more and larger ivory towers from within which to ignore the fact that their front-line people and students basically struggle to achieve the state's so-called educational mandate in third-world conditions, despite residing in one of the state's richest counties in itself one of the world's top-ten economies. I literally know people in NIGERIA who have better access to university computer networks than my classes had, semester after semester, at the South County/El Toro/Irvine/Whatever Makes Us Look Good This Term campus.
Imagine double-clicking the little Explorer icon... only to have it take A FULL THREE MINUTES TO CONNECT TO THE NETWORK. Enter a search term. ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Get a Google list; click one; ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Multiply that by the number of machines in the classroom, and then make a few adjustements for the always-present fact that up to 25% of the machines in the classroom SIMPLY WOULDN'T BOOT AT ALL, week after week after week. Call in IT, right? Yeah... they came in, looked at the machines, and said, "Yup; they don't boot alright." Need ink cartridge replacements in your office? Do it yourself. Nice.
And, you know what? Those IT people? I'll bet they could tell similar horror stories; I'm especially envisioning the scene in which people who spend zero time in the classroom interacting with zero students sat around in copious meetings on the state's dime deciding to construct classroom facilities on land we didn't own, KNOWING that they knew we'd be bulldozing in under a decade saying, 'screw it; why invest in the infrastructure since we're not staying there?' I'll bet those IT people's jobs well and truly sucked as well. But it's a tough thing to sell to your students who only know that their classroom labs suck, that it sucks that there isn't the same software in the open labs as in the classrooms, that "supported software" changes wildly from one semester to the next without instructor notification, and that THEY ARE PAYING AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THIS and receiving incredibly shoddy service. No wonder so many of them honestly believe they are paying for a (mostly worthless) piece of paper rather than for a life-long edifying educational experience.
I should be happy for the person who just got this exec job. He's a former student-mate; we both served in student government together. While we perhaps didn't often agree, I always thought and still believe him to be a person of conscience and integrity. I should be happy for him. But I can't ignore the price society will pay for this, the people who have already had to pay and those who will continue to pay for the system's complete indifference to what really should be important in these years of lean economic circumstances. Student tuition has seen unconscionable increases, locking many native Californians out of a college education, leaving behind a perhaps permanent undereducated, underemployed underclass of California residents; massive layoffs have deprived loyal state employees of their livelihoods and drive unimaginable increases in student-to-faculty ratios (I was invited to apply to teach the same class I had been teaching, only with THREE TIMES the student enrollment; needless to say, I wasn't very sad not to have gotten the course); enrollment is capped; and yet we still continue to hire non-essential management-level personnel while it takes longer and longer for the fewer and fewer to graduate.
Oh, and have I mentioned that the restrooms and other water facilities in the Computer Science building have never, EVER had hot running water? For a nice little pictorial essay, see here. I'm betting the fundraisers have nice, warm, toasty offices in winter, cool ones in summer, fire sprinklers, hot running water and functioning restrooms. I'm betting they don't lose computer workstations to meltdown because they're not allowed to run the AC in the summers. I'm fairly certain that their secretaries don't have to worry about frostbite.
The State of California and the management of the CSU in particular have badly sold out California's future. While management continues to hire its own and let go the people on the instructional and basic student services front-line, they continue to construct more and larger ivory towers from within which to ignore the fact that their front-line people and students basically struggle to achieve the state's so-called educational mandate in third-world conditions, despite residing in one of the state's richest counties in itself one of the world's top-ten economies. I literally know people in NIGERIA who have better access to university computer networks than my classes had, semester after semester, at the South County/El Toro/Irvine/Whatever Makes Us Look Good This Term campus.
Imagine double-clicking the little Explorer icon... only to have it take A FULL THREE MINUTES TO CONNECT TO THE NETWORK. Enter a search term. ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Get a Google list; click one; ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Multiply that by the number of machines in the classroom, and then make a few adjustements for the always-present fact that up to 25% of the machines in the classroom SIMPLY WOULDN'T BOOT AT ALL, week after week after week. Call in IT, right? Yeah... they came in, looked at the machines, and said, "Yup; they don't boot alright." Need ink cartridge replacements in your office? Do it yourself. Nice.
And, you know what? Those IT people? I'll bet they could tell similar horror stories; I'm especially envisioning the scene in which people who spend zero time in the classroom interacting with zero students sat around in copious meetings on the state's dime deciding to construct classroom facilities on land we didn't own, KNOWING that they knew we'd be bulldozing in under a decade saying, 'screw it; why invest in the infrastructure since we're not staying there?' I'll bet those IT people's jobs well and truly sucked as well. But it's a tough thing to sell to your students who only know that their classroom labs suck, that it sucks that there isn't the same software in the open labs as in the classrooms, that "supported software" changes wildly from one semester to the next without instructor notification, and that THEY ARE PAYING AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THIS and receiving incredibly shoddy service. No wonder so many of them honestly believe they are paying for a (mostly worthless) piece of paper rather than for a life-long edifying educational experience.
I should be happy for the person who just got this exec job. He's a former student-mate; we both served in student government together. While we perhaps didn't often agree, I always thought and still believe him to be a person of conscience and integrity. I should be happy for him. But I can't ignore the price society will pay for this, the people who have already had to pay and those who will continue to pay for the system's complete indifference to what really should be important in these years of lean economic circumstances. Student tuition has seen unconscionable increases, locking many native Californians out of a college education, leaving behind a perhaps permanent undereducated, underemployed underclass of California residents; massive layoffs have deprived loyal state employees of their livelihoods and drive unimaginable increases in student-to-faculty ratios (I was invited to apply to teach the same class I had been teaching, only with THREE TIMES the student enrollment; needless to say, I wasn't very sad not to have gotten the course); enrollment is capped; and yet we still continue to hire non-essential management-level personnel while it takes longer and longer for the fewer and fewer to graduate.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Why Our CopyWrong Laws Suck (so does Ralph Lauren)!
Okay, it's bad enough that Steamboat Willie, a cartoon released by Disney in 1928 is still under copyright protection 43 years after the death of old Walt, and not scheduled to enter the public domain until nearly 100 years after its release. Increasing political and financial pressures have convinced western governments to all but ensure that nothing ever will pass into the public domain, which is a problem for educators seeking content to use in the course of their work.
This Ralph Lauren ad, if it had been around when I was teaching the "Computer Impact on Society" course, would most definitely have been part of my presentation. In that course I have a unit on captology, or the study of the computer as a persuasive device. For this we zero in on the subject of what happens when you can no longer believe your eyes because AP news photographers fudge, stage and/or Photoshop their images? How is it that Marilyn Monroe was considered attractive 50 years ago but today would be sent to a fat farm? Why is it that eating disorders are occurring as early as the elementary school years (my own son likes to taunt his twin sister, 8 years of age, with the charge that she is "fat")?
I believe part of the answer is the irresponsible ad images projected by companies like Ralph Lauren and this ad in particular. But what happens when you point this out as a fair use defense of reproducing the image for public consumption for the purposes of criticism? Ralph Lauren threatens your ISP with a DCMA take-down notice.
Cory Doctorow, who writes compellingly of the repressive uses of new technologies against the individual and against individual freedoms (see in particular Little Brother) notes of the Ralph Lauren threat, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them... So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better..
It's nice to know that not all companies are as reprehensible. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty produced this very nice video and apparently has not issued any DCMA takedown notices to YouTube for posting it!
UPDATE
Ralph Lauren issues apology the next day.
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