Democrats & Republicans are phonies

 It's time for Democrats to stop saying they are pro-labor and pro-union. They are not. it's also time for Republicans to stop saying they are against people's tax money being wasted. They don't care.

If politicians would spend more time overseeing what college administrators were doing on their campuses instead of letting them run amuck and do silly things that have no chance of success, then staff at colleges wouldn't have to worry about losing their jobs and how they're going to pay their bills because of a bunch of crap they knew nothing about and had nothing to do with.

For Democrats saving people's jobs should be their priority. It isn't. They would have come up with a solution instead of having layoffs, if they really were pro-labor and pro-union. But Democrats like Angela McKnight are unable to. Or they just don't want to. So stop saying you're pro-labor and pro-union.

Republicans are the ones who got rid of the NJ Department of Higher Education because they believe in less oversight. Less oversight has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being wasted at the soon to be defunct NJCU. Then you have Republican legislators like Bill Singer asking why no one was held accountable for the financial mess created by the irresponsible former president and the "leaders" in her cabinet. Well Bill, if there's no oversight, then no one is going to held accountable. Any dope can figure that out. But that is what you wanted, so stop whining.

So do layoffs and shrink the staff. When there's less staff students get less service, and less for their money, but politicians like Angela McKnight and Bill Singer don't care about that either.

Here is how to lower the cost of attending college

 If universities want to lower the cost of attending college, instead of getting rid of staff who help students or professors who teach classes they ought to do away with administrator jobs.

At NJCU the president created a job of "provost." Probably did so to make herself feel important. Having a lot of assistants must be a status symbol of some sort.

The first provost said "This is an important day" when the university opened their "confucius center" to much pomp and circumstance. Yet no one really knew what the center was for, or why any students in Jersey City would care about what it did. It unceremoniously closed down several years later after the federal government accused the centers as being propaganda for the Chinese communist party. The provost left the job four years later. I'm still not sure what he actually did, or what he accomplished.

The second provost didn't seem to do much of anything either. The job is supposed to be like a senior vice president, overseeing academics, services, and other operations. Yet, how important can the job be when she left the campus after three years to take a job in private industry? Of course, this was after the campus declared a financial emergency, so I guess she had a moral epiphany after the fact. Or maybe just didn't want to get caught up in the state's investigation.

The third provost got rid of the only staff position in career services, yet a few months later signed off on a document stating that helping students find internships, explore careers, and land "good jobs" after they graduated was a top priority. But who exactly was supposed to help these students, if you don't have any staff? If anyone knows the answer to this question, let me know.

Universities functioned fine years ago when there were maybe half the number of administrators employed as today. A lot of them have titles with words like "associate," "vice," and other prefixes, but it’s not clear what they actually do in the jobs. The reality is a lot of what these people do is useless.

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.

Crazy Job Search/Interviewing Stories, Part VI: Montclair State University

<sup>I interviewed for a few jobs at Montclair State. One director I met with had this look of shock on her face when I said I didn't reveal my salary history, that to me salary is something to be negotiated after a job offer. Another committee I met with spoke among themselves for a while before even acknowledging I was there. A stress test perhaps? Or are they just morons who have no idea how to conduct a professional job interview? I guess I'll never know for sure, unless one of them reads this and responds. Wouldn't you try to engage the candidate and try to make them feel comfortable? I would. I would want to give a positive impression. Montclair State certainly did not.

Actually for another job at Montclair State the person who interviewed me, a guy named Chuck, actually called me back afterwards, and said, "I just wanted you to know that you interviewed well, even though we picked another person." I said, OK, who did you hire, just out of curiosity? There was no sound on the phone, for a second, then Chuck said, "We hired an African American woman who worked in the President's office." Oh. Well, nice to know I had a fair shot at the job!</sup>

My crazy job search/interviewing stories, part IV: Baruch College, Union County College, Hudson County College, Ramapo College

I must have wrote good resumes; people take 15 seconds or less to view a resume and decide if they want to interview the person. I did get a number of interviews. Although at colleges, most positions go to a candidate who will fill a quota, or to someone's friend.

Anyway, it could be me, maybe it's just the way the interview process works for other people. They feel it's appropriate to turn every answer that a candidate gives into a negative, like when I interviewed at Baruch College. If I'm such as awful candidate, why did you even call me in for an interview? The guy asking the questions looked more like an actor than the director of an office. Tall, dark, and handsome. Too bad he didn't seem to know much about interviewing.

The negativity continued at Union County College; I left thinking, why would anyone want to work at this place, surrounded by these miserable people?

An interview at Hudson County College found me listening to some guy on a power trip brag about his knowledge, and lecture about what he needed in an employee. Asking interview questions? I guess he forgot about that part.

At Ramapo College I walked into the conference room where the interview was held. I was told to sit at the end of a very long conference table. Odd thing was, the five people on the search committee sat at the other end of the table. Maybe they had a bad experience with other candidates? Did their clothes smell? Did they have bad breath? Maybe the interviewers wanted to see how a candidate reacted by this seating situation? If that's the case, what kind of reaction were they looking for? What would be a positive reaction? What type of reaction would be construed as negative? Or was it that the people doing the interviewing were just morons? Hmm, I think that might be it...