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Home » Activism on the right: alumni power; keeping red states red

Activism on the right: alumni power; keeping red states red

The New Neo Posted on by

University alumni have been increasingly using their power of the purse to put pressure on universities to defend academic freedom of thought and expression. Note the links there to organizations supporting and helping to organize the effort.

Here’a another worthy cause:

At FEE, we know the principles and their resulting policies that create prosperity for all. But we also know not everyone has had the opportunity to gain an education in these elements. With the Fresh Start States Project, we plan to provide that information to new residents in key areas through educational mailings, an interactive website, and world-class seminars. But we need your help to make this vision a reality.

Your donation will help us get this project off the ground by funding pilot projects in two cities, Nashville and Atlanta. In the first phase, we will work to gather data on new residents and contact them with materials introducing them to FEE. These materials will cover basic “how-to’s” for keeping the cost of living, housing, and taxes low in their new home states, as well as information on factors that impact education and crime. From there, we will develop these materials into an online portal and social media content so that this project can be rolled out in cities across the US.

It’s very late and getting later, but better late than never.

Comments

Activism on the right: alumni power; keeping red states red — 37 Comments

  1. My small college has a “diversity” staff totally out of proportion to its size. The website has, right at the top, an “anti-racism” link which leads to the usual outrageous materials. We get emails and mailings saying that alumni don’t donate to the school in the same proportions as do alumni from similar institutions. When we went, ten years ago or so, to an event hosted by the Physics Department (!!), we heard political commentary entirely out of context to physics and the topics at hand.

    Their emails don’t provide a place to give honest commentary about why we don’t contribute.

  2. Kate,

    Correct me if I’m wrong but I would imagine that the top administrator’s email addresses are on a page in the ‘educational’ organization’s website. That would seem to me to be the venue for informing them of your concerns.

    If they predictably ignore yours and other like minded donor’s emails, then they’ll continue to court a terrible reckoning.

    Academia and the mass media are #1 on the most wanted traitors list for they are responsible for far more evil than even the most corrupt of politicians.

    “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.

    An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.

    But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

    For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

    He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

    A murderer is less to fear.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

  3. Geoffrey Britain, I could do that. On the other hand, conservative letters to the editor of the monthly bulletin they mail out have been treated with less than respect. We have not been donating for some years, having noticed the trend of leftist politicians being made president, one after the other. Our leverage is zero.

  4. Alumni have no power.

    One thing that might help is boards of manageable size (5-19 members) elected by alumni.

    One would have to to add a supplementary state voter registration form. On the form, the voter is asked to name each tertiary institution within the state which he attended in person for at least one academic year and from which he received a baccalaureate, master’s, first professional, or research degree. These are then entered by local boards of elections into a statewide database operated by the state board of elections. The entries are then vetted by the county board of elections where the school is located, comparing the entries to the school’s alumni records. From this, each such county board compiles a voter roll. It is from this roll that boards of trustees are elected for each institution in the state which grants baccalaureate or post-baccalaureate degrees. Some schools can apply for an receive a dispensation if (1) they are subsidiaries of a ready-made stakeholder body (e.g. members of a particular union local or religious congregation or (2) are religious institutions governed according to episcopal control (in which case a bishop, dean, abbot, prior, or other superior is the trustee).

    The elections in question would be held every four years on the fourth year of a quadrennial cycle (i.e. the year before a federal presidential election). The balloting would have to be by post, with the return address being the HQ of the board of elections where the school is located. The position of trustee would be limited to those on the electoral roll who were in a certain age range (say, 25 to 85); you’d have rotation-in-office requirements as well (say, someone who had served on the board for 14 of the last 16 years or would hit that wall during the next four years would have to stand down). Aspirants could register their candidacy at their local board of elections by filling out a form, paying a monetary deposit, and dropping off a statement of candidacy of up to 600 words. These would then be forwarded to the board of elections conducting the ballot. After the registration period closed, the board in question would assemble a booklet with all of the registered candidate’s statements and print up ballots. The order of the candidates would vary from ballot to ballot. The booklets, ballots, and return envelopes would be mailed in a package to each voter on the roll, who would fill them out and mail them back, with the drop dead date for their arrival being the 1st Tuesday after All Saints’ Day.

    For those schools with a different stakeholder body, they’d pay a fee to the board of elections in question to draw up an authoritative voter roll via taking a census of the stakeholder body in question. Otherwise, the procedure would be the same.

    Again, that’s step one.

  5. It’s a great idea. The Normals have to exert their power over the people in university who simply surrender to the latest ideology. Go along to get along. The schools need to realize that capitulation has a price.

  6. On the diversity staff issue (I may have mentioned this before?): presuming that they have been around for a while — then they have either
    1) achieved their goal of establishing the “correct” culture at their institution, in which case they are no longer needed and should be terminated, with thanks; or
    2) failed to achieve a proper atmosphere at said institution, in which case they should be fired for incompetence.

    I used to think that alumni pressure and/or restructuring of the board of trustees could make a meaningful difference in a university’s behavior and practices, but alumni, and thus the boards they might elect, would also be diverse. I now favor a path of political action by taxpayers (at least for state supported schools) via their state legislatures to force a realignment of personnel and behavior that they help to fund.

    Another fulcrum will be the lapse in reputation for quality of the formerly “better” schools, such that graduates of those schools will no longer obtain the choicest employment slots they believe themselves worthy of and entitled to obtain.
    A counter argument to this is that poorly educated graduates are still hired into HR or other non-productive slots (NGO’s, etc.) by the mediocre graduates who preceded them.
    If I were still a hiring manager today, I would have to think twice and thrice before hiring graduates from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oberlin, Berkley, Cornell, etc.

  7. “conservative letters to the editor of the monthly bulletin they mail out have been treated with less than respect.” Kate

    Then it’s a waste of time and their willful blindness to the consequences of their obstinacy, seals their fate. Support for tyranny is and will be their legacy.

    “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson

    Art Deco,

    The elaborate scenario you suggest rests upon principled people conducting it. That seems highly unlikely. Especially as each succeeding generation of alumni are composed of a higher percentage of those with the mindset that the ends justify the means.

  8. Neo’s first link leads to this site.
    https://alumnifreespeechalliance.com/
    “The Alliance provides a mechanism for the exchange of information among its members on substantive and organizational issues. A priority for the Alliance is to encourage the creation of alumni free speech groups for other colleges and universities, and the Alliance will create tools to help new alumni groups organize. We believe the number of alumni groups supporting free speech on their campuses will grow.”

    There are only 5 schools listed so far, but more are being added. Be the first on your block to sign up!

    @ Kate – I noticed the left-sliding at my alma mater sometime in the 1990s; hadn’t really paid attention before that, as it seemed normal that a college would be more liberal than the world outside the hedges (although I dated the president of the Young Republicans for awhile).

    However, it soon became inescapable.
    They didn’t want any of our kids, thank goodness (although we were disappointed at the time), so we didn’t send them our money either.

  12. @ Barry > “Related sardonic/serious post on the bizarre (if widespread) cultic practices of the True Believers(TM):”

    Okay, it’s all your fault I’m up this late.
    Just read through about 7 of Claire Wolfe’s posts.
    Highly recommended to those who are of the “past time to prep for the apocalypse” state of mind.
    And very witty as well as shrewd.

  14. Um, er, profuse apologies…

    And as long as I’m at it, I suppose I should also apologize for this little morsel…from the “Accidents-Will-Happen” files….
    https://justthenews.com/nation/crime/faa-releases-documents-more-700-epstein-flights

    Re Jussie Smollett, it doesn’t seem that he’s getting the best of advice. (Either that he’s simply suffering from a terrible memory…or even a paucity of gray matter.)

    Still, always entertaining….

  15. …though it’s always possible that Smollett could always use the “Attackers-Didn’t-Follow-The-Script” defense, I suppose…

    (No doubt his lawyers gave that one a lot of thought and consideration. Perhaps Jussie’ll sue them for malpractice!?)

  16. A “nation of Davids” (coined way back by Glenn Reynolds) morphs into a “nation of Joan of Arcs”…
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/loudoun-county-moms-set-out-to-protect-their-children-now-theyre-trying-to-save-america_4127724.html
    Key grafs:
    “…A few months later, her daughter, while working on a school project for Black History Month, asked Cooper why people would say that there would be “no justice, no peace” until every white person was slaughtered…. She also started asking questions about whether she should be making friends based on skin color.
    “This crossed the line for Cooper.
    “Our world went upside down when we had to explain to our daughter what was going on,” she told The Epoch Times.
    “There’s nothing wrong with seeing through someone else’s lens. But to deceive someone into thinking that you are bad because of the color of your skin; because of your color, we are going to cut you some slack,” she said. “I will not teach my children that.”

  17. The elaborate scenario you suggest rests upon principled people conducting it. That seems highly unlikely.

    Eeyores are a waste of space.

    You can’t actually hold an in person ballot if the electorate is aspatial. Postal balloting is the best you can do. It’s no more insecure than conventional absentee balloting.

  18. I now favor a path of political action by taxpayers (at least for state supported schools) via their state legislatures to force a realignment of personnel and behavior that they help to fund.

    The corporate organization of both public and private institutions is delineated in state law, thus the means by which the board of trustees is constituted and also the powers to be exercised by the board. There are other measures you can take:

    1. Amendments to state labor law and the state law on public employment which limit continuous tenure to a fixed % of FTE faculty (say, 38%), debar grants of tenure to any faculty member under the age of 45 or with less than 12 years of FTE service at various institutions, and require that any tenured faculty member retire once he was eligible for full Social Security and Medicare and had (as a faculty member at various institutions) paid into TIAA-CREF for 35 years (FTE). Emeritus faculty could be re-called to teach spot (where you had a vacancy or faculty on leave) and retain certain perquisites, but would have no regular teaching schedule and would be paid by the course. In this situation, tenured faculty would be, with few exceptions, between the ages of 55 and 70. The remainder of the faculty would be on renewable contracts of one to twelve semesters in length. Terminal contracts might be a function of the number of years of service at a given institution, so if you teach at an institution for (say) 15 years, you teach for an additional year and then receive severance equal to the discounted present value of (say) three years of total compensation.

    2. A glossary enacted by law which would dictate the permissible degree and concentration programs at tertiary institutions in the state. It would contain both the name of each program to be used and a capsule description thereof.

    3. Shuttering particular public institutions. That would include the teachers’ college and school of social work at every institution in a given state and whole institutions which have proved to be particularly corrupted. (Two examples, Evergreen State College in Washington and the CUNY Law School in Queens).

    4. Insisting as a matter of law that salaried employees in higher education be personally liable for torts committed at work. Some dean loses his house, they’ll quit with the try-every-door non-compliance.

    5. Requiring as a matter of law that public and private institutions disclose the demographic profile of their student body, their faculty, and their other employees, stock and flow. In particular, they’d have to publish the board and achievement test scores of the coarse categories of their student body (means and standard deviations). The disclosure would have to be verified by an outside auditor chosen at random from an approved state list; lying institutions and lying officials thereof would face criminal prosecution.

    6. Set up a state admissions office and limit the function of admissions staff at public institution to assembling financial aid packages. Admissions by law would be according to a vector equation which included as arguments board scores, achievement test scores, high school gpa, and gpa at other tertiary institutions.

    7. Ending all state aid to private institutions. The closest you’d get to state aid would be Medicaid re-imbursements to university hospitals run by private institutions.

    8. Ending discretionary legislative appropriations for public institutions. Instead, public institutions would be financed by voucher redemptions. The admitted student would purchase the vouchers from the state treasurey (for a price to be determined by the residence history of his family) and then submit them to the school, who would in turn submit them to dedicated funds of the state government. The dedicated funds would be financed by a simple income tax whose architecture and rates would be fixed by the state constitution. The annual quota of admissions would be a function of the revenue haul each year and the dimensions of the young adult population. All schools would be incorporated affiliates of the state government, would borrow strictly on their own account, and would be subject to re-organization and liquidation in bankruptcy court should they fail.

  19. Related (pushing CRT—and more—in the schools):
    https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/11/29/the-war-for-our-childrens-minds/
    (This is a terrific site, BTW….)
    Key grafs:
    “Recent press reporting has revealed California teachers discussing not just how to push concepts like Critical Race Theory and gender fluidity on their students but how to prevent parents from learning about their activities. According to the Epoch Times, during a recent California Teachers Association (CTA) conference teachers mocked parents and discussed how to use LGBTQ clubs, known as Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs to recruit children and push the doctrine of gender fluidity.
    “…The overarching theme of the conference was to instruct teachers on how to push the LGBTQ+ curriculum without alerting parents. Teachers were told they should push to charge parents with child abuse if they refused to use made-up pronouns for their children that teachers had assigned.
    “Teachers were taught that in order to make it harder to scrutinize their activities, they should avoid creating any written records of their activities. Teachers in a workshop called “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities” advised, “Because we are not official, we have no club roster. We keep no record. In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming, we’re like, yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came.“
    “GSA clubs are not confined to California. They exist all over the nation. …”

    Time for a little exposure on this.
    Time to get the message out.
    Time for an in-depth interview with Randi Weingarten (by interviewers who ask REAL questions)!!

  22. I disagree with getting the state election boards involved at all. More effective would be for the next mailing to alum for money to be responded by no money or pledge, but instead a forthright statement that the policies of the university are unacceptably ideological.
    Take a photo of that statement, and post it on social media with #NoCash4Leftists tag, and the university’s #, too.
    Then mail it – at THEIR expense, using the enclosed return envelope.
    It should make the next alum event more interesting.

  23. Art Deco:

    Traditional absentee ballots are far more secure than the type of universal mail-in voting that was instituted in some states years ago and in many others in 2020 as a result of COVID. Just to take one example, many states mail out ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. That never never ever occurred with traditional absentee ballots. In addition, a lot of other safeguards were dropped for 2020, some of them regarding signature verification, others regarding when a ballot must arrive in comparison to voting day. And there were others, depending on the state.

  24. Traditional absentee ballots are far more secure

    I’m quite aware of that. I was once involved in street-level politics in New York.

    Since I suggested that a voter roll be constructed from conventional registration forms cross-checked by board of elections clerks against schools’ alumni records, the system differs from conventional absentee ballot application only in that the voter sets up a standing order rather than applying for such a ballot every year. (An annual application for such a ballot presumes that voting in person is the default; voting in person is not a practical option when your electorate is scattered in dribs and drabs over 60 counties). Mr. Britain’s complaint was non sequitur.

  25. I disagree with getting the state election boards involved at all.

    Why?

    More effective would be for the next mailing to alum for money to be responded by no money or pledge,

    Won’t do a damned thing.

  26. I read today another article about rich folks relocating from California to Austin, TX because, well, you know why. I am encouraged that an organization such as FEE is undertaking this initiative. Although it might be too late, Austin would be a good place to target. I have a daughter who lives there. It also reminds me of Roger Simon’s article from a couple of years ago in which he comments that Nashville has largely adopted the left-leaning thought he attempted to escape by relocating from California. Pretty sad situation when people don’t understand that the way they vote matters to their immediate situation.

  27. @ T-Rex > “Pretty sad situation when people don’t understand that the way they vote matters to their immediate situation.”

    One of my most enduring memories of the fall-out after Obamacare finally got rolling was a Democrat waving his latest premium bill and saying, “Sure, I want people to have free health care, but I didn’t think I would have to pay for it!”

  28. ArtDeco’s program for reforming tertiary education is a good one.

    It’s basically what the CCP does in China to ensure that feminism, gay and tranny worship, pomo nihilism, and other aspects of the Vile Poz do not creep in to their universities from the West. Obviously it works because look who’s winning and who’s losing.

    You can’t fight wicked ideas with just good ideas. Muh Agora FFS. You have to do unpleasant things to wicked people who refuse to stop promoting wicked ideas.

    If a few doctoral candidates in A A Milne Studies are collateral damage, well you can’t make an omelette without…

  29. @ Barry > “A “nation of Davids” (coined way back by Glenn Reynolds) morphs into a “nation of Joan of Arcs” -”

    The post from Epoch Times is an excellent summation of all the events in Loudoun County VA that we have been watching for a year, possibly the best I’ve seen. It also has an important lesson for the rest of the country.

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/loudoun-county-moms-set-out-to-pr
    otect-their-children-now-theyre-trying-to-save-america_4127724.html

    Over nearly a year and a half of challenging the school board’s initiatives, Fight for Schools’ Mendez had doubted the utility of making public comments at meetings because the board wasn’t listening.

    “I had it all wrong. It wasn’t the school board members who needed to hear us, it was everyone at home. It was the parents, grandparents, and neighbors,” she told The Epoch Times at Youngkin’s rally on Nov. 13.

    Indeed, people far and wide have been listening.

    Scott Mineo, founder of local advocacy group Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT), previously told The Epoch Times that other counties in Virginia and across the United States have contacted him for help addressing this issue in their own communities.

    The grassroots efforts in Loudoun County have emerged as a template movement to be exported across the country. And there’s already a new term for it.

    “We are going to ‘Loudounize’ this country because it doesn’t stop here,” Tiffany Polifko, PACT’s vice president of education and outreach, told the Loudoun school board members during the Nov. 9 meeting.

    Tigges, who also founded the Patriot Pub Alliance, a digital platform for secure collaboration and communication for parents and teachers, has drafted a business plan to replicate what Loudoun residents have done in other counties.

    “We’re encouraging local communities to start meeting together face-to-face, grow in trust, and form a coalition united in purpose,” he previously told The Epoch Times.
    …
    [Xi] Now, more than one year into their quest for a greater say in their children’s education, the Loudoun parents say there’s no turning back.

    Van Fleet acknowledged the “selfish” reasons for her fight.

    “I understand that if America falls, there is no place for me to go. My whole life is for this moment,” she said.

    Fight for Schools’ Mendez echoed that sentiment.

    “I always say we are in the fight of our lives. A lot of people don’t understand. But we feel strongly about what we’re doing.”

    It’s about “maintaining our democracy and maintaining our way of life,” and communism will be fended off as a natural result, she says.

    Just when they thought they had everything sewn up, The Left made the mistake of coming out in the open among people who had the motivation, the resources and the character to fight back.

    Since the in-home classes instituted to “fight Covid” were in large part supported (if not instigated) by the education unions, it really counts as an own-goal.

    https://tenor.com/view/soccer-own-goal-facepalm-whoops-gif-13155418

  30. Art Deco —

    Alumni refusing to donate won’t touch the hedge funds with a college on the side, like Harvard and Yale and my alma mater Williams.

    But a lot of less well-established schools that don’t make their money from football are much more dependent on donations. It might make a difference there.

  32. But a lot of less well-established schools that don’t make their money from football are much more dependent on donations. It might make a difference there.

    The institutional faction most likely to be influenced would be in the finance division. They’re not the source of institutional decay. The next-to-last people to be inconvenienced by declining financial flows would be the faculty. The last would be the institutional inner ring. If you want the attention of the faculty and the student affairs apparat, you have to get medieval with them. The only way you do that is if at the top of the heap, you have a board which will make them feel pain.

  33. Art Deco. “ If you want the attention of the faculty and the student affairs apparat, you have to get medieval with them. The only way you do that is if at the top of the heap, you have a board which will make them feel pain.“

    What does this mean? Burn them at the stake?

    You have been saying other people’s solutions won’t work. What is your solution?

  34. You have been saying other people’s solutions won’t work. What is your solution?

    1. Replace the president, the provost, the dean of students, and the personnel director. Carefully vet their replacements, making sure to hire the president from the ranks of experienced managers outside academe.

    2. The immediate dismissal of anyone in the office of the provost, of the dean of students, or of the personnel director whose work is devoted to race patronage &c.

    3. Close the admissions office, dismissing every salaried employee therein.

    4. Hire a new admissions staff who have some stats chops, and hand them a sketch of a new admissions method for them to elaborate upon. In essence, all those who apply are to be rank ordered according to a vector equation which has board scores, achievement test scores, and high school GPA as arguments. Consequent to information obtained in supplementary questionnaires, calculate for each applicant a figure for the discount advisable to induce the student to attend. A hypothetical assignment of proceeds from dedicated funds will be distributed to qualifying applicants according to the rank-order until there is no more to assign. Following this, a hypothetical assignment of the general financial aid budget among the general run of applicants will take place according to the rank order. You make an admission and discount offer to the top portion of your rank-order and place the remainder on a wait-list.

    5. In the arts and sciences faculty, discontinue all interdisciplinary programs and all victimology programs. Discharge any faculty member without an appointment in a department with a conventional discipline.

    6. Close the teacher’s college and discharge its faculty.

    7. Close the social work program and discharge its faculty.

    8. Assign the sociology and anthropology faculty to three newly incorporated departments. One department is composed of people who have published in the realm of archaeology, palaeoanthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology of primitive peoples. One department is composed of people whose research relies on quantitative methods. The residue are in the 3d department.

    9. After a year, shutter that 3d department and discharge its faculty.

    10, Sort the history department into two newly incorporated departments: conventional history and race-class-gender studies.

    11. After a year, close the race-class-gender department and fire its faculty.

    12. Establish new teaching certificate programs which consist of a menu of methods courses, an internship, and an apprenticeship. And nothing else. Seek accreditation from an agency other than NCATE. Recruit the faculty from the ranks of tests-and-measurements psychologists.

    13. Place undersubscribed programs on a diet – 3.2 FTE professors and no more. Physics department, I’m looking at you. Let the faculty census in these programs fall via attrition.

    14a. End distribution requirements. In lieu of same, institute a core curriculum whose requirements cannot be met through transfer credits. The core would consist of about 15 credits of history, 9 credits of philosophy, and 6 credits of statistics and research methods. All students would take it. Students identified as marginal would be assigned to the writing center or the mathematics center to work with tutors to get up to speed in order to be able to handle the material.

    14b. Let’s posit your school has an incoming frosh class of 1,200. Some will be assigned to remedial work while some sophomores and transfers would be assigned to take the core as they had not yet. Your body of around 1,200 students gets assigned to one of 5 or 6 section. Each section is assigned a lecturer. Every lecturer prepares three 50 minute lectures per week. Some lecturers take one section, some more than one. Each section has two or three seminar masters. The students sit through three lectures a week and then a seminar discussing the contents of the lectures. (The seminar masters may ask questions of the lecturers on behalf of their students, who are silent during the lectures). A typical seminar will consist of about 15 students and the masters will offer 7 or 8 seminars per week along with office hours. The composition of tests, paper assignments, evaluation of student work, and office hours will be the responsibility of the seminar masters, who are a part of the permanent faculty. The lecturers are late career or emeritus faculty who are on multi-year contracts and are handsomely paid for about 25 hours per week work during the academic year. They have calibration meetings with their seminar masters and design the syllabus, but are in charge of nothing else. The history portion of the curriculum will consist of 15 one credit portions which consist of about 12 lectures, an examination and a short paper; it’s a survey of all the world civilizations, ancient medieval, and modern. The philosophy portion will consist of courses in logic, epistemology, and aesthetics. The statistics and research methods portion would be as described, with some seminars devoted to computer lab.

    15. Institutional requirements for majors set as follows and binding on all departments: (1) a minimum of 42 credits with D credits excluded from consideration; a minimum of 19 credits above the 100 level, 8 credits above the 200 level, and 3 credits above the 300 level. Individual departments may elaborate on this, defining the core and electives pattern among the courses, sorting their course lists into Chinese menus, and determining which courses earn credits for which concentrations within the major; (2) a minimum of 24 credits (D’s excluded) for concentrations within a major; any concentration program erected must be drawn from a conventional list approved by the board of trustees. In the arts and sciences faculty, a concentration in addition to a major will be an option in some departments (economics, computer science, English) and mandatory in others, provided the faculty is large enough to sustain such specialities (psychology, biology, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, geography). For heterogenous disciplines with small faculties, all courses are to be from one speciality.

    16. Require 120 credits for a baccalaureate degree, presupposing 15 credits per semester. Again, 30 credits would consist of the core curriculum, a minimum of 42 credits would have to apply to your major, and a maximum of 48 credits would consist of filler. An elected faculty board would develop and maintain a policy manual on transfer credits suitable for filler and would act as an appeals board. From among the schools and disciplines for which general filler is acceptable, each department would develop a policy manual which specifies which schools and sources are acceptable in re credits to be applied to a major. Each individual student seeking transfer credit assigned would have to submit it to a departmental committee which would make the determination based on how the courses sought for transfer dovetail with the department’s pedagogy.

    17. Insist the faculty stay in their lane. Limit faculty governance to the following: faculty hiring, faculty promotions, and the assignment of transfer credits. Otherwise, they are salaried employees. Except for a faculty rathskellar, offer them no perquisites not available to every other employee, salaried and hourly.

    18. End gimmicks like study abroad programs. Dispense with any requirement students live in campus housing.

    19. Have some serious counseling, including occupational testing, to assist students in choosing a major. Consultation with departmental faculty would be permissible and advisable, but their role would be secondary.

    20. Provide that allegations of criminal activity by students be investigated by campus security who make referrals to the local police and collaborate with them. The disciplinary program of the student affairs division should be limited to questions of academic dishonesty and disputes between students, between students and faculty, and between students and other employees which do not implicate the penal code.

    21. Have two provosts, one for academics and the arts and one for occupational faculties. The provosts are chosen by the president for three year terms from among those faculty who have served as instructional deans. The instructional deans are chosen by the president from among those faculty who have served as department heads. The position of department head is passed around like a dead muskrat among the full professors within each department, with each serving a three year term. If there is only one full professor, he’s the permanent chairman. If there’s a multiplicity of choices for the role, the instructional dean makes the choice. If a critical mass of the departmental faculty so petition, the instructional dean can inhibit a troublesome faculty member from taking the role.

    22. The academic / artistic side will have three instructional deans – one for the core curriculum, one for the academic arts and sciences, and one for the performing and studio arts. The occupational side will have deans for each conventional training program offered: business, teacher-training, nursing, general technology, athletics (physical education, exercise science &c), engineering, agriculture, clinical laboratory sciences, police and security services, non-business administration, public policy.

    23. Hiring new faculty will be done by a vote of the extant departmental faculty with the dean and provost vetting. Promotions will be according to the vote of faculty of the equivalent or superior rank or (if there be only one such) the dean and the provost. Continuous tenure may only be offered with the approval of the provost and a committee of deans, which the board might veto.

    24. Offers of continuous tenure will be made only to faculty who have been in service at various institutions for at least 12 years (pro-rating p/t work) and are at least 45 years of age. Tenured faculty are to constitute no more than 38% of all faculty (FTE), so will generally be over 55. Tenured faculty are mandated to retire when they are eligible for certain benefits.

    24. Other faculty will be on renewable contracts. Instructors are on contracts of 1-6 semesters and lecturers 6-12 semesters. Professors have continuous tenure.

    25. Ordinary faculty compensation in all instructional units will be calculated according to the same formula. Arguments in the formula will vary from department to department. All faculty in a given department will be paid according to the same scale unless they have an endowed chair or were offered a special hire-to-tenure deal. Compensation does not vary according to rank or seniority. In every department, faculty receive foundational compensation in the form of fringes appended to which is some cash, a second layer calculated according to their standard teaching load, a third layer (which may be positive or negative in value) which is calculated according to the difference between their actual teaching load in the previous semester (preparations, additional sections, and enrollment) and their anticipated teaching load, and a fourth layer which incorporates the increment to their compensation specified in the deed to their endowed chair or their hire-to-tenure contract.

    26. Occupational faculties have both ‘regular’ and ‘clinical’ faculty. The latter are working professionals in the field or retired professionals who make their primary living doing things other than teaching. The former are those for whom teaching is their business (though they may have consulting income). Clinical faculty may be part-time or full-time at the discretion of the department or dean provided the department is within its budget. As for regular faculty, each unsegmented department is permitted one p/t faculty member and each segmented department one per segment.

    27. In academics and the arts, only the performing and studio arts faculties have clinical faculty. Lecturers in the core are compensated as if they were full time. Academic departments are permitted few p/t faculty – just one per departmental segment.

    28. Unless yours is a research institution, all courses are taught by faculty. There are no teaching assistants. There is a category of quasi-faculty who teach but do not teach full dress courses. These include laboratory instructors, athletic coaches, remedial tutors, music tutors, and workshop instructors in the library and IT service.

    29. The student affairs division will consist of the admissions office, the housing assignments office, the registrar, the advising and counseling apparat (including liaison to parents), the disciplinary office, the medical clinic, the psych clinic, the career services office, and a student activities office manned by a couple of office managers. It will also have a liaison to local church congregations who will offer shuttles to their services or send their clergy to minister at campus chapels.

    30. Any extra-curricular club can register at the student activities office and receive a mail pigeonhole, access to copiers, and assistance in setting up a business bank account according to spec. There are no student activities fees, no distributions of any kind out of institutional budgets, and no student governments. The only clubs refused registration would be criminal organizations. However, any club could be subject to an audit by the institutional comptroller.

    31. Semesters run to about 15 weeks each (105 working days total) and classes are offered from 8 to 5 six days per week. Classroom space is allocated accordingly. The fall semester runs from September to December and the spring from January to April. School’s out for three work days around Thanksgiving, three work days around Easter, and about 8 work days around Christmas and New Year’s. Remedial programs, sideline income sources, the administrative and support staff, and faculty doing research occupy the campus during the summer.

    32. The board can exercise veto power over hires at its discretion.

  35. 33. The use of institutional funds to compensate outside speakers is debarred. Students, faculty, and alumni are free to form speaker’s bureaux and make and solicit voluntary contributions thereto.

    34. The penalty for preventing an institutional employee or a guest on the campus from speaking when so recognized and engaged is expulsion when done by students, dismissal when done by employees.

    35. Again, students are free to live off campus. Those so living will not be charged room and board. Institutional housing consists of dormitories and apartment buildings. Fraternity houses are privately owned, off campus, and unregulated.

  36. 36. No athletic scholarships are to be granted to any student whose composite score on the admissions matrix (SATs, achievement tests, high school GPA) place him above the 32d percentile of his cohort. If the terms of an endowment insist otherwise, said endowment must be returned to the donor or his estate. The franchise to play anything other than club sports and the maintenance of the athletic scholarship is contingent on the student maintaining a GPA above the 32d percentile of the student body.

  37. Art Deco –
    Not a bad idea for a liberal arts school, but unworkable for STEM.

    Time to pull Chem and Physics out of the LA side. Math, probably. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, but, in general, state schools separate them by campus. Example: Liberal Arts (Univ of Oregon), Engr and Ag (Oregon State). Move Phy and Chem, etc to “State”.

    1/3rd of credits in major? Even if you don’t count the 8 credits of Inorganic chem and 11 credits of physics and 18 credits of math, my EE degree required about 45% of my credits in my major, plus additional cross-discipline courses, like Strength of Materials out of the Civil Engineering school. Useful vs “broadening” courses were probably in a 75/25 ratio, and I’m including freshman English comp as useful.

    Given the insistence of the woke multitudes in academia for affirmative action grading and curricula, it’s time for STEM disciplines to go on their own, before they are dragged down to uselessness.

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