|
If
"war is too important to be left to the
generals", then certainly "higher
education is too important to be left to the
educrats".
Generals need civilian authority to set
the political goals for wars.
Likewise, the goals for Virginia’s
colleges and universities need legislative
authority. Education,
not indoctrination, requires
accountability to elected representatives of
the people.
Accountability
may get lost if the General Assembly is not
very careful in crafting any "charter"
college law, which is designed mainly to
ensure a steady stream of money
to Virginia’s colleges and universities.
During
the hysterical 2002-04 budget biennium, when tax
revenue reflected the Clinton
recession/9-11 financial shock,
state spending grew more than four percent, or
$2 billion.
Medicaid mandates accounted for much of that
growth, although the
Governor and the General Assembly managed to
increase
spending modestly in almost every department of
state government. Only
Higher Education was schwacked with real cuts.
It
was tough to balance the school’s books in a
few months after real hits.
Virginia’s colleges and universities
came back with higher tuition and fees and
made it up in two years.
But they don’t want that to happen
again. It
makes afternoon sherry drinking so depressing.
The
need for a steady income stream to make long
range planning less chaotic can be fixed with
a "rainy day" fund.
A real one.
If there are other, true, encumbrances
to managing Higher Education, then those may
be addressed with specific legislation.
But, be careful, very careful indeed,
before you, the people, give educrats charters
to run your colleges and universities as they
please.
The
excellence of Virginia’s Higher Education is in jeopardy.
Not because of money.
The jeopardy is dumbing-down the
curriculum, re-instituting racism, rejecting
the fruit of the Enlightenment--rational
empiricism--wasteful socialism, and
indoctrination in Human Secular
Totalitarianism replete with speech codes
worthy of Big Brother.
Ask
your legislators to show you how a Charter
bill will effect these issues:
State
Enrollment. Will
the educrats be allowed to decrease the number
(and per cent) of Virginia
students accepted?
Out-of-state kids bring more money in
higher out of state tuition.
Illegal Aliens.
Will the educrats be able to offer
scholarships to illegal aliens?
Will they act as scofflaws to enroll
more illegal aliens and not report them to
immigration authorities?
Reverse
Racism. Last
year, an Assistant Dean for Minorities at the
University of Virginia threw the white
students out of a meeting he held. If a dean had kicked out black kids, it
would’ve made national news. Check out how many administrators have
jobs based on race or gender.
Also,
UVa has separate, but certainly equal, breakfasts
for parents of 1st Year (freshmen)
students for Blacks, Hispanics, Asian, and
other parents. Will
the educrats be able to continue, or worsen,
their practice of accepting kids, based on
race, with lower standards for "diversity".
Diversity. Will
the educrats be able to cleanse their faculty
and deny promotion of ideological diversity?
Look closing at the hiring, promotion,
tenure, firing details.
Sodomy. Will
the educrats be able to give benefits to
homosexual partners, just like married people,
when homosexual marriage is illegal in Virginia? When I
was adjunct faculty at William and Mary, I was
the told the only thing I could not say
was anything against homosexuality.
I was shocked.
What would I possibly say about
homosexuality in a class on Politics of the
Cold War? That
was 1993.
Socialist
Waste. UVa pays
not a "minimum wage" to
workers but a higher "living wage".
The university can afford that as long as capitalist
Virginia
keeps pumping money into its socialist
paradise. When
and why where workers ever fired at Virginia
colleges
and universities?
Look at the jobs and pay scales.
UVa has about 1.7 persons on the
payroll for each student attending.
Liberal
OneThink. Look
at the mandatory classes, like the 1st
Year seminar on Conflict Resolution taught by
pacifists at UVa.
Can you get an "A" if you say
the best resolution of conflict is victory in
war? What
are the speech and behavior codes?
Virginia’s
colleges and universities are branches of the
Western Civilization’s higher education
dating back to the Middle Ages. There have been ups and downs over the
centuries of progress and corruption for great
institutions of higher learning. Our excellence in education
in Virginia
can become the façade of just a fine old
name. Intelligent
voters must keep the educrats accountable.
Please do.
--
February
14, 2005
|
