Dartmouth Vows to Curb Student Misbehavior.
I saw this on GMA this morning and it reminded me of an article I read in Rolling Stone about a student that was considered a whistle-blower on the fraternities there. He wasn't squeaky clean himself and also a Republican. Apparently enrollment is down...link to the RS article below...it angered me. I didn't know Paulson and Geithner went there until I read RS.
Dartmouth College president Philip J. Hanlon is declaring that the university must fundamentally change its student culture to combat a litany of harmful behaviors — including binge drinking, sexual assault, hazing, and anonymous online vitriol — that have kept the school in the headlines and limited its advancement.
“Dartmouth’s promise is being hijacked by extreme and harmful behaviors, often masked by its perpetrators as fun,” Hanlon said in an interview Wednesday. “But in fact this is a barrier to Dartmouth achieving its potential and promise, and we cannot allow this to continue.”
Hanlon’s message — which he planned to deliver to a group of student leaders, faculty, and alumni Wednesday night — is an extraordinarily rare acknowledgment by a university president of a dysfunctional campus culture.
Link:http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/16/dartmouth-president-says-ivy-league-school-being-hijacked-drinking-assault-and-other-social-ills/jRZkfsqVSGqbelGK28yIlM/story.html
RS link: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328
= new reply since forum marked as read
perhaps because its fundamental business model is now hollow.
What are colleges actually selling these days? Their highest paid employees are their football coaches, with salaries going to over $5 million per year, next up is the Chancellors, averaging $421,000 per year. The set-up of a college class is virtually unchanged from almost 200 year ago -- one lecturer, 40 to 900 students listening and taking notes, mid terms, finals. About the only thing that has changed in that scenario is the addition of electric lighting, maybe a PA and the blackboard has become a white board or projection screen.
Early colleges offered only degrees in law and medicine, they now offer pretty much everything. You can create your own Major and your own course of studies. The college gets paid the same amount whether you get a good job after leaving or not. They have almost no stake at all in your future and what they are selling is the past: goofy rituals that involve square hats and tassels, a curled up piece of paper like the charlatan in the Wizard of Oz gave out, and the secret societies and handshakes of the Greek (frat and sorority) system.
The simplistic view of college in the 1950s said that men went to get their reserved spot in the middle class and women went to get a husband. Colleges were all segregated by gender and race, now they are more open but far from perfect. If anything the above chart shows what the customers think college is selling to them: a bulwark against race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But the colleges themselves embody a hyper consciousness of race and gender as they refer to rape as "non-consensual sex" and leave their hired athletes without pay and without a real opportunity to get the education that an athletic scholarship supposedly includes.
Courts have ruled that NCAA athletes are employees of the university since their presence at the schools is dependent on them spending around 70 hours per week working for the professional sports programs of the colleges. NCAA has fired back with a sad irony -- 'players aren't employees because they don't get paid.' And they don't. There is a term for that...working 70 hours a week without pay...it was supposed to end in 1865.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2014/03/26/nlrb-rules-college-athletes-are-employees-can-form-unions/NcgoJZ7XxzjEaBhUdQpEBJ/story.html
When the news of top athletes going hungry while the colleges make millions off of them came out last week, the NCAA responded by proposing unlimited meals:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2014/04/15/the-ncaa-approves-unlimited-meals-for-division-i-athletes-after-shabazz-napier-complains-of-going-hungry-the-lesson-for-other-college-athletes/