April 21, 2016
Rising Red Tide At Mizzou and SLU
Timothy Birdnow
Graduate students at the University of Missouri system have voted to unionize, despite the fact that they aren't employees of the University system.
KTVI Fox 2 has the story:
"The Columbia Missourian reports about 84 percent of the 795 graduate students who voted were in favor of allowing the Coalition of Graduate Workers to represent them in collective bargaining. Voting took place on Monday and Tuesday.
University administrators still must recognize the union before negotiations can occur."
End excerpt.
This is interesting because my brother Brian worked for the UM system at UMSL as an adjunct professor, and he was called by a union organizer and pressured to sign the petition months ago - before the eruption of racial animosity on the Mizzou campus. At the time Brian told the young lass who called him at home that this would have the effect of reducing the number of adjunct positions and cut hours, which are not guaranteed in un-tenured positions. He subsequently received a cut in the number of classes he was contracted to teach - then laid off entirely when the Mizzou protests erupted.
And now we have this. Strange, don't you think?
The Socialist Worker discussed this last fall:
"FGR quickly issued a list of demands, including immediate reinstatement of insurance subsidies, the provision of affordable graduate housing, the return of free on-campus child care facilities, a reduction in supplemental fees, and a "guarantee that no graduate student employee be paid at a rate below the individual poverty line regardless of their appointment status, department or college." (The minimum subsidy for a graduate employee at Mizzou is about $12,000 per year).
Graduate employees gave the administration until August 26 to meet these demands or face a university-wide walkout by graduate employees."
(Editor's note; most "graduate employees" are actually receiving tuition remission and other aid in return for volunteer labor. They are not employees in any real sense.)
Here's more:
"More than a thousand red-clad graduate employees, faculty and supporters gathered at Mizzou's iconic columns for a march to Traditions Plaza. Demonstrators chanted "M-I-Z-Shame on you!" and "Grads do!" and held signs pleading, "We need a union!""
End excerpt.
So, better red than fed seems to be the motto at Mizzou. Let us continue:
"Combined with the reduction of resources for public universities is the steady increase in the number of highly paid administrators, outpacing the growth of full-time faculty by about 35 percent since the 1960s. It's not uncommon for upper-level administrators at large research institutions to be paid in excess of $250,000 per year. In fact, many university "CEOs" (the title says it all) are compensated as much as $500,000 per year.
Wage increases for this technocratic administrative class have greatly outpaced the modest gains for professors and graduate workers, who actually perform the core function of the university: educating students.
Since 1980, the cost of college tuition in the U.S. has increased by about 260 percent, translating to a leap from an average annual cost of $9,438 for a four-year post-secondary institution to $23,872. During that time, the amount of student loan debt has skyrocketed to a sickening $1.2 trillion."
End excerpt.
Sooo...
Seems there is trouble in paradise as all are equal but some more equal than others. But one must ask who is driving this? Certainly not the professors or grad students, who have much to lose if they make too many waves. In point of fact these administrators are joining with the tenured professors to promote this idea. Why? Well, for starters, they no doubt believe they can squeeze more funding out of the government, meaning the taxpayers.
Here is where my brother Brian comes in:
"AS PART of their mission to cut costs from the bottom, university managers have increasingly replaced full-time tenured faculty with adjuncts, who work for the university on a part-time basis, are paid by the course and receive no benefits.
In 1975, tenure-track faculty accounted for roughly 45 percent of university teaching staff. Since 1975, that percentage has declined to less than one-quarter. Part-time faculty now account for more than 40 percent of university instructors. Teaching jobs in higher education have become increasingly precarious, and often fail to provide anything close to a livable wage"
End excerpt.
This is absolutely true; the '60's radicals took over the university system and have closed it to new blood, parity out of pure selfishness but also to keep new blood from coming in to undo the work they have done. Brian is a classic example of this; a sharp conservative thinker, he has been blackballed for years from getting any sort of tenure-track position, despite being eminently qualified,, with several books published an numerous scholarly articles. His students always praise him highly on class reviews, and yet he can't receive so much as the time of the day when he applies for positions. Actually that isn't quite true; sometimes he hears back from a lazy administrator who failed to run a Google search on him and he is courted like a supermodel - until the inevitable day when they stop communicating with him. They've pulled up his file and found he didn't meet the qualifications of political thought. No conservative is going to get a tenured position in modern academia.
This is why the universities have gone so much to adjuncts; they need the labor, and the professors are lazy, wanting to dump the grunt work on others, but they don't want new blood to undo what they have done. It really is like the communist party has taken over academia; nobody but a communist is going to be on the ballot.
And these socialists don't want to open the system either, but simply intend to use the crisis they themselves have created to further the leftist cause. It is the typical Hegelian tactic.
What should interest everyone is the timing of this. And isn't it strange that this is something straight from the Obama playbook. Barack Obama would have been down there at Mizzou organizing had he not been in the White House.
Where is the money coming from the fund this campaign? I wonder.
In a related story we find that a private exchange between St. Louis University baseball players has started a firestorm on campus; the allegedly racist comments were "accidentally" discovered by a black student, who then forego any action for the better part of six months before finally succumbing to his better nature and making the insults public.
From The U. News, SLU's student newspaper:
"The conversation took place in a pitchers-only GroupMe, a group messaging application, while the team was on a trip to Washington D.C. The thread of messages included insensitive racial comments and stereotypes.
One player took a photograph of the messages and sent it to his roommate, Brenden Twomey, an African-American senior at SLU and former manager of the baseball team. Twomey viewed the message, but he kept the photograph to himself for almost a year."
[...]
"According to the bias-related incident-report log, the investigation into the incident was closed on April 7 and referred to Dr. Jonathan Smith, the Special Assistant to President Pestello for Diversity and Inclusion. It was also labeled not applicable for disciplinary action.
Due to the nature of the incident, since it was a private conversation rather than a message directed at one person, Hicks did not believe that it met the criteria for adjudication.
"If I were to directly state to you, ‘You suck because of all of your social identities that God gave you.’ That would be wrong. That would require some adjudication,†said Hicks. "We also need to respect laws. This was a private conversation, or at least the perception of private between in-group parties.â€
Since the messages went public, the baseball team met with Hicks, Smith and other administrators to discuss the incident and the steps that would follow. The individual players involved and Head Coach Darin Hendrickson could not be reached for comment. However, the baseball team, collectively, has taken responsibility for the messages."
[...]
"The baseball team has agreed to participate in a restorative justice process to make amends for the messages. This process will require the team, as well as the affected individuals, Morgan and Twomey, as well members of BSA, to engage in a facilitated dialogue.
"In this instance, we want to bring together parties that have been responsible for degree of harm with parties that have been harmed. In a restorative justice process, we bring those groups together to decide both what the nature of the harm is and what needs to be done in order for the community to be restored and in order for justice to be attained,†said Smith."
End excerpts.
Interesting; this whole incident marked the implementation of the "Clocktower Accords" that President Pestello agreed to impose on the University as part of his settlement with "Occupy SLU", the trespassers who invaded the SLU campus last year after the Vonderrit Myers shooting in the Shaw neighborhood (an adjunct of the Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson.) In point of fact I smell a rat here; SLU is not some hillbilly hotbed of racism,, and IF this were actually an incident rather than a faked hate speech then it still should fall under the First Amendment, which hasn't been repealed as far as I am aware. It was not directed, as the article notes, at a particular person but was a private conversation. This still is America, isn't it?
Do you doubt me that this is a setup of some sort? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gives the offending chat:
""I heard they got a colored running the country.. This Tru?â€
"Unfortunately, it is,†responds another player.
"(Expletive) watermelon eatin baboon,†reads the following text."
End excerpt.
This offensive commentary stinks; no white people speak this way, but it may be the way a black person THINKS a white racist would speak. And Obama has been President since 2008, so it makes absolutely no sense. The world "colored" has been out of use since the 1970's.
Does anybody believe this is a real incident? I don't.
This is allowing the implementation of the Clocktower Accord. See the details [/link=http://tbirdnow.mee.nu/liberalism_destroying_colleges]here.
There appears to be a concerted, sustained effort to drive societal change through upheaval at the Universities. Pestello, the first non-Jesuit President of St. Louis University and a former Sociology professor, sent out a letter to alumni saying the Ferguson riots were in line with Jesuit values, and SLU actively promoted "participation" in them, even giving safety tips and helping arrange transportation to the "events". Now we have this "proof" that SLU is eaten away by racist whites.
Right.
Truth is the first mission of the University, not social justice, not fairness, not inclusiveness. Truth. American universities have lost sight of that mission, preferring to push a social gospel of Marx onto students who must pay huge amounts to attend. The University of Missouri system has lost large sums of money and has empty dorms thanks to the Young Pioneer tactics employed there, and SLU is probably going to see a drop-off in donations and attendance as well.
But it may be too little too late; so much damage has been done, so many young minds have been twisted and distorted by the lies and propaganda of the Left.
In Philippians the Apostle Paul says:
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
Sadly the Bible is out, truth is out, purity is out, justice is out, virtue is out on our modern socialist college campuses. Relativism is very in. So are lies, deceit, ugliness, and hatred are very in. Why should our kids think on those things?
Graduate students at the University of Missouri system have voted to unionize, despite the fact that they aren't employees of the University system.
KTVI Fox 2 has the story:
"The Columbia Missourian reports about 84 percent of the 795 graduate students who voted were in favor of allowing the Coalition of Graduate Workers to represent them in collective bargaining. Voting took place on Monday and Tuesday.
University administrators still must recognize the union before negotiations can occur."
End excerpt.
This is interesting because my brother Brian worked for the UM system at UMSL as an adjunct professor, and he was called by a union organizer and pressured to sign the petition months ago - before the eruption of racial animosity on the Mizzou campus. At the time Brian told the young lass who called him at home that this would have the effect of reducing the number of adjunct positions and cut hours, which are not guaranteed in un-tenured positions. He subsequently received a cut in the number of classes he was contracted to teach - then laid off entirely when the Mizzou protests erupted.
And now we have this. Strange, don't you think?
The Socialist Worker discussed this last fall:
"FGR quickly issued a list of demands, including immediate reinstatement of insurance subsidies, the provision of affordable graduate housing, the return of free on-campus child care facilities, a reduction in supplemental fees, and a "guarantee that no graduate student employee be paid at a rate below the individual poverty line regardless of their appointment status, department or college." (The minimum subsidy for a graduate employee at Mizzou is about $12,000 per year).
Graduate employees gave the administration until August 26 to meet these demands or face a university-wide walkout by graduate employees."
(Editor's note; most "graduate employees" are actually receiving tuition remission and other aid in return for volunteer labor. They are not employees in any real sense.)
Here's more:
"More than a thousand red-clad graduate employees, faculty and supporters gathered at Mizzou's iconic columns for a march to Traditions Plaza. Demonstrators chanted "M-I-Z-Shame on you!" and "Grads do!" and held signs pleading, "We need a union!""
End excerpt.
So, better red than fed seems to be the motto at Mizzou. Let us continue:
"Combined with the reduction of resources for public universities is the steady increase in the number of highly paid administrators, outpacing the growth of full-time faculty by about 35 percent since the 1960s. It's not uncommon for upper-level administrators at large research institutions to be paid in excess of $250,000 per year. In fact, many university "CEOs" (the title says it all) are compensated as much as $500,000 per year.
Wage increases for this technocratic administrative class have greatly outpaced the modest gains for professors and graduate workers, who actually perform the core function of the university: educating students.
Since 1980, the cost of college tuition in the U.S. has increased by about 260 percent, translating to a leap from an average annual cost of $9,438 for a four-year post-secondary institution to $23,872. During that time, the amount of student loan debt has skyrocketed to a sickening $1.2 trillion."
End excerpt.
Sooo...
Seems there is trouble in paradise as all are equal but some more equal than others. But one must ask who is driving this? Certainly not the professors or grad students, who have much to lose if they make too many waves. In point of fact these administrators are joining with the tenured professors to promote this idea. Why? Well, for starters, they no doubt believe they can squeeze more funding out of the government, meaning the taxpayers.
Here is where my brother Brian comes in:
"AS PART of their mission to cut costs from the bottom, university managers have increasingly replaced full-time tenured faculty with adjuncts, who work for the university on a part-time basis, are paid by the course and receive no benefits.
In 1975, tenure-track faculty accounted for roughly 45 percent of university teaching staff. Since 1975, that percentage has declined to less than one-quarter. Part-time faculty now account for more than 40 percent of university instructors. Teaching jobs in higher education have become increasingly precarious, and often fail to provide anything close to a livable wage"
End excerpt.
This is absolutely true; the '60's radicals took over the university system and have closed it to new blood, parity out of pure selfishness but also to keep new blood from coming in to undo the work they have done. Brian is a classic example of this; a sharp conservative thinker, he has been blackballed for years from getting any sort of tenure-track position, despite being eminently qualified,, with several books published an numerous scholarly articles. His students always praise him highly on class reviews, and yet he can't receive so much as the time of the day when he applies for positions. Actually that isn't quite true; sometimes he hears back from a lazy administrator who failed to run a Google search on him and he is courted like a supermodel - until the inevitable day when they stop communicating with him. They've pulled up his file and found he didn't meet the qualifications of political thought. No conservative is going to get a tenured position in modern academia.
This is why the universities have gone so much to adjuncts; they need the labor, and the professors are lazy, wanting to dump the grunt work on others, but they don't want new blood to undo what they have done. It really is like the communist party has taken over academia; nobody but a communist is going to be on the ballot.
And these socialists don't want to open the system either, but simply intend to use the crisis they themselves have created to further the leftist cause. It is the typical Hegelian tactic.
What should interest everyone is the timing of this. And isn't it strange that this is something straight from the Obama playbook. Barack Obama would have been down there at Mizzou organizing had he not been in the White House.
Where is the money coming from the fund this campaign? I wonder.
In a related story we find that a private exchange between St. Louis University baseball players has started a firestorm on campus; the allegedly racist comments were "accidentally" discovered by a black student, who then forego any action for the better part of six months before finally succumbing to his better nature and making the insults public.
From The U. News, SLU's student newspaper:
"The conversation took place in a pitchers-only GroupMe, a group messaging application, while the team was on a trip to Washington D.C. The thread of messages included insensitive racial comments and stereotypes.
One player took a photograph of the messages and sent it to his roommate, Brenden Twomey, an African-American senior at SLU and former manager of the baseball team. Twomey viewed the message, but he kept the photograph to himself for almost a year."
[...]
"According to the bias-related incident-report log, the investigation into the incident was closed on April 7 and referred to Dr. Jonathan Smith, the Special Assistant to President Pestello for Diversity and Inclusion. It was also labeled not applicable for disciplinary action.
Due to the nature of the incident, since it was a private conversation rather than a message directed at one person, Hicks did not believe that it met the criteria for adjudication.
"If I were to directly state to you, ‘You suck because of all of your social identities that God gave you.’ That would be wrong. That would require some adjudication,†said Hicks. "We also need to respect laws. This was a private conversation, or at least the perception of private between in-group parties.â€
Since the messages went public, the baseball team met with Hicks, Smith and other administrators to discuss the incident and the steps that would follow. The individual players involved and Head Coach Darin Hendrickson could not be reached for comment. However, the baseball team, collectively, has taken responsibility for the messages."
[...]
"The baseball team has agreed to participate in a restorative justice process to make amends for the messages. This process will require the team, as well as the affected individuals, Morgan and Twomey, as well members of BSA, to engage in a facilitated dialogue.
"In this instance, we want to bring together parties that have been responsible for degree of harm with parties that have been harmed. In a restorative justice process, we bring those groups together to decide both what the nature of the harm is and what needs to be done in order for the community to be restored and in order for justice to be attained,†said Smith."
End excerpts.
Interesting; this whole incident marked the implementation of the "Clocktower Accords" that President Pestello agreed to impose on the University as part of his settlement with "Occupy SLU", the trespassers who invaded the SLU campus last year after the Vonderrit Myers shooting in the Shaw neighborhood (an adjunct of the Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson.) In point of fact I smell a rat here; SLU is not some hillbilly hotbed of racism,, and IF this were actually an incident rather than a faked hate speech then it still should fall under the First Amendment, which hasn't been repealed as far as I am aware. It was not directed, as the article notes, at a particular person but was a private conversation. This still is America, isn't it?
Do you doubt me that this is a setup of some sort? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gives the offending chat:
""I heard they got a colored running the country.. This Tru?â€
"Unfortunately, it is,†responds another player.
"(Expletive) watermelon eatin baboon,†reads the following text."
End excerpt.
This offensive commentary stinks; no white people speak this way, but it may be the way a black person THINKS a white racist would speak. And Obama has been President since 2008, so it makes absolutely no sense. The world "colored" has been out of use since the 1970's.
Does anybody believe this is a real incident? I don't.
This is allowing the implementation of the Clocktower Accord. See the details [/link=http://tbirdnow.mee.nu/liberalism_destroying_colleges]here.
There appears to be a concerted, sustained effort to drive societal change through upheaval at the Universities. Pestello, the first non-Jesuit President of St. Louis University and a former Sociology professor, sent out a letter to alumni saying the Ferguson riots were in line with Jesuit values, and SLU actively promoted "participation" in them, even giving safety tips and helping arrange transportation to the "events". Now we have this "proof" that SLU is eaten away by racist whites.
Right.
Truth is the first mission of the University, not social justice, not fairness, not inclusiveness. Truth. American universities have lost sight of that mission, preferring to push a social gospel of Marx onto students who must pay huge amounts to attend. The University of Missouri system has lost large sums of money and has empty dorms thanks to the Young Pioneer tactics employed there, and SLU is probably going to see a drop-off in donations and attendance as well.
But it may be too little too late; so much damage has been done, so many young minds have been twisted and distorted by the lies and propaganda of the Left.
In Philippians the Apostle Paul says:
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
Sadly the Bible is out, truth is out, purity is out, justice is out, virtue is out on our modern socialist college campuses. Relativism is very in. So are lies, deceit, ugliness, and hatred are very in. Why should our kids think on those things?
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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