College Administrators have B.S. jobs

Funny how when colleges and universities hire professors and staff the folks in charge of the hiring want candidates with degrees, credentials, experience, intangibles...the list goes one. Yet, these college administrator jobs don't require any real expertise in a certain area, and are often filled by the friend of another administrator, or for some sort of political or social reason. Like a Dean of the College of Professional Studies. at a university. That's a job you could have landed without any relevant experience or skills. Then when there's a financial emergency you could be involved in personnel decisions like layoffs of professors and staff, without any real knowledge of the situation. Basically you can be involved in ruining an organization and treating people like disposable objects without being qualified to make those decisions. You don't even have to be man enough to tell employees to their faces about the layoffs and why they're being done; just have HR send an email after hours.. Then a year later you can quit the job and move on. You get paid a lot of money to do nothing, other than mess up the lives of people who actually make a career out of helping students. But hey, that's the life of a college administrator.

NFL Owners Get What They Deserve with Replacement Referees

I Don't Feel Bad for the Green Bay Packers….The (mostly) men who own professional sports teams are certainly a group of odd ducks. It makes one wonder how they managed to make billions of dollars in their chosen professions, before they owned a team (unless you did nothing - just inherited your money, like the late George Steinbrenner).

Here we have the illustrious National Football League, a ten billion dollar business in itself, and the Scrooge-like owners refuse to part with an additional three million dollar contribution to the referees' pension fund.

Being a game official for a sport at any level is a difficult job, and of course even experienced NFL referees make mistakes. But not as many as the replacement refs have made in only three weeks of the new season.

Why would you degrade your product like this? NFL owners are a clueless bunch. Keeping experienced referees is an important part of pro football, so the billionaires need to be a little less tight-fisted and break the piggy bank. Time to take a .025 decrease in your profit this year boys. I know it's tough but I think you can handle it.

Even Green Bay Packer fan and anti-union Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to bring back the unionized officials. Hmm, I guess this is what happens when you settle for less qualified employees, eh, Scotty?

The Lack of Leadership at American Colleges & Universities

In another post I wrote about how American are not always leaders. I don't want to only pick on them; there's other areas where a lack of leadership is clear. American colleges and universities, for one. An example of the lack of leadership from college presidents and other upper level administrators can be found in New Jersey. several years ago the state was allegedly going through a "financial" crisis, and the former brilliant governor Jon Corzine wanted to save money by asking state workers to take unpaid days off - employees were locked out, and not paid. Some unions at the state colleges agreed to have their workers take ten unpaid lockout days, while other unions agreed to take seven days. The college presidents and other managers? They took less, most only two or three. Why? They claimed that the state (governor's office) said they would have to save a "percentage" of state funds, not take a certain number of furlough days. So at higher education institutions like Montclair State University, high level administrators took only two unpaid days off.

How is this a lack of leadership?  Well, if there really was a financial "crisis" - unlikely to be actually true, as it was more the Governor and other elected officials trying to win over voters by trying to show they were "saving" tax dollars - real leadership would have been the college presidents standing up and together saying, "New Jersey is in a financial crisis; so we're all going to take ten unpaid days off to help the state save money, and we hope all other state workers do the same."  Now that would have been true leadership. What is not leadership is being a weasel and saying, well the amount of money we were asked to save was a percentage, and it only came to two days for us. Please. What a bunch of slimeballs. Only interested in serving themselves, not students or taxpayers. College presidents in the U.S. are overpaid as it is, so what would taking less pay mean for them? Come on. College presidents are almost as bad as some CEO's.