Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Email

Loyalty is everything at UCF where it is okay to be incompetent as long as you have proven your allegiance to the higher ups. For example, David Mealor is a useless idiot, but he has shown loyalty to his immediate boss and Hitt and Hickey. If he hadn’t been loyal to them, his thieving would have been dealt with entirely differently.

I get interesting email, and in the future I’d like this blog to rely more on material from the readers. If you send an email, you need to let me know if I can anonymously quote all or part of it. Otherwise, I’ll probably be too concerned for your career to do anything with it.

The email is ucflovesmoney@yahoo.com

Monday, August 25, 2008

Happy First Day of Classes

UCF’s enrollment could have increased to 50,000. Because of budget cuts and bad priorities, this may result in even larger than usual class sizes.

In related news, U.S. News & World Report's college rankings have come out and Rollins gets a lot more love than UCF. I’m not a huge fan of Rollins. It has always struck me as a post secondary playpen for the dumb children of the very rich (Bret Easton Ellis takes a great dig at Rollins in his novel American Psycho). However, to give Rollins credit, they do seem to make the most of their small class sizes. Their students have homework, multiple papers, and lots of interaction with the instructors. In contrast, UCF’s students often have large lecture classes with only a few multiple choice exams. Although it is a question of opinion, it seems almost indisputable that the former is a better method of education than the latter.

The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. If Hitt had not had such a boner for growth at the expense of everything else, he could have been presiding over a still large school where students attend reasonably sized classes at an academically respected university.

Friday, August 1, 2008

FIU Loves Money

FIU hires the outgoing Speaker of the Florida House to teach two courses a year. For this part time job, they are going to pay him 69 grand a year.

Preemptive Strike

As a rule, I don’t print rumors. However, I want to keep this one from happening. People are saying that David Mealor is in line to get an administrative promotion. If this promotion just involves more responsibility, then let him have it because the results will certainly be entertaining. However, this promotion should not include a salary increase. He stole from UCF and is being allowed to pay it back slowly without appropriate interest and penalties. If he is given a raise, it mitigates the already lenient penalty for his crimes against students and taxpayers.