Category Archives: Higher education

Darla Moore makes her voice heard, at the 5 million decibel level

When she spoke to students and others at the Russell House today (and yes, the turnout for this was SRO huge, unlike at the rally yesterday), Darla Moore acted with the class you would expect. No whining or moaning or pointless lashing out.

But boy, did she make her voice heard. You can watch the whole speech here. After thanking those present, particularly the students (and she made it clear on multiple occasions that her message was for the students rather than the media and university honchos on hand) for their “encouragement, your kind sentiments and your support,” she went on to “reaffirm my love for the USC, my support for the USC and for the state of SC,” and to speak of the “shared obligation to move this institution forward not only for ourselves but for generations to come.”

Saying she was not there to talk about “the wonder of me,” and adding, “This is also not about money,” she went on:

By your reaction, you have ignited what I believe is the collective consciousness of this state to an issue that is far more fundamental to the state’s future than any other challenge that we face. And this is about having the courage, and the singular focus to understand the critical importance of a strong, progressive and properly resourced higher education system — and I mean from technical colleges to research universities — and the role it plays in securing a bright and productive future for all of us….

We can compete at the highest level.

Just because I no longer serve on the board does not mean for one second that I will be deterred in my efforts to expand our reach for excellence.

And I’m sure y’all have noticed that I don’t need a title or a position to speak out; I just need a voice, my vision and a forum to be heard.

Just like you did this week…

Then, in her one directly defiant statement toward the governor — and by implication, toward her replacement, whom the governor said she picked because he shared her “vision,” she said:

I’ll not allow our university to become a discounted graduation mill. I want you to be proud of your degree; I want you to be first in line for the best jobs available. And I want you to stay in South Carolina, to be a part of our effort to make our state great.

Excellence is our standard, and it must be maintained even if there are those who would offer policies that would dumb us down….

Finally, she said:

This is very personal: There’s been speculation that I would take my checkbook and go home. I want you to know that my commitment to USC is as strong as ever.

She then demonstrated that by hauling off and giving another $5 million:

Ousted trustee Darla Moore told USC students today that she does not plan to take her check book and go away. Instead, Moore – removed from USC’s board by Gov. Nikki Haley – said she would give the school $5 million to start an aviation research center named after Ronald McNair, killed in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Like Moore, McNair was a native of Lake City.

USC had sought the money from the state to, it said, capitalize on Boeing’s plans to build 787 Dreamliner aircraft in Charleston.

However, House budget writers, faced with a $700 million shortfall in state money, killed the request, which Haley opposed as premature.

Moore is USC’s largest single benefactor ever. Her removal by Haley, who named a campaign donor to the USC board, has angered many USC students and graduates.

Key to photos below:

There were plenty of honchos on the front row, but Ms. Moore repeatedly said she was there to speak to, and take questions from, the students.
The view from the back of the ballroom.
The view from the front (hey, you’re not paying extra for captioning here).
Taking questions from students.
President Harris Pastides was slightly mobbed by media afterward. He was very diplomatic, as I would expect him to be. He said he appreciated that the governor called to explain her decision — which was the first time I’d heard that she had (and marks the first thing I’ve heard of her doing properly — the first thing I’ve seen of her showing respect to anyone involved — in this whole affair).
Yep, that’s Will Folks, all dressed up. I don’t recall having seen him this way. By the way, he said that while he sides with the governor on this issue, he was favorably impressed by the way Ms. Moore handled it.

Surging sea of rage (not): The ‘Reinstate Darla Moore’ rally

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Well, that was a bust. As I Tweeted when I arrived at the “Reinstate Darla Moore” rally at the State House on this sunny day:

@BradWarthen
Brad Warthen

The big protest over Darla Moore being unceremoniously dumped by Nikki Haley looks like a bit of a bust so far. They DID say noon, right?

As I said again at 12:43, it was still a bust. Which is a shame. Because Nikki Haley insulted all of the 30,000 or so students on the Columbia campus alone with her petty patronage move — not to mention the way she dissed the other 4 million of us who have a right to expect a governor to exercise some modicum of responsible stewardship at our most important state institutions. Instead of, you know, what she did.

Old New Left Activist Tom Turnipseed grumbled about these kids today who don’t know how to stage a protest: They think they do something with social media, and it’s done, he says. Well, yes — the “We Support Darla Moore” Facebook page has attracted 4,703 people who probably think they’ve made a statement by “liking” it.

But that doesn’t mean that Martha Susan Morris, the 22-year-old economic and poli sci senior who started the “Students for the Reinstatement of Miss Darla Moore” FB page, lacks seriousness in her convictions.

After all, she showed up, and spoke at the rally — once it finally got around to getting started. And she understood why she should be there, and why thousands of others should have been there with her:

Gov. Haley cited that her main reason for replacing Mrs. Moore with Mr. Cofield was the fact that Mr. Cofield’s vision was more clearly aligned with her own.

Martha Susan Morris

And we the students ask ‘What vision?’ What vision is not aligning with Gov. Haley…?… Mrs. Moore’s vision for years has been one of high expectations, increased educational funding, and increased standards for universities, research and development in our state…. and we could not be more grateful to her…

Our university is on the upswing, and we want her to be a part of it. She’s been an amazing benefactor… since she was appointed to the board in 1999…

Amen to that, Martha Susan. She said afterward that she started the FB page at 4 a.m. after having hearing about Ms. Moore being dumped. When she next looked at the page later that morning, there were 400 fans. There are now 2,495.

Too bad more of them didn’t show up. Because although we know Nikki Haley loves her some Facebook, she’d have been a tad more impressed to look out her window and see some folks show up to protest her action. Not that she’d have changed her mind, but it would have made an impression.

One of the people I chatted with before leaving was Candace Romero, communications director of the South Carolina House Democratic Caucus, who observed how much of the crowd were media types, and she complained that that there was no media turnout like that for the “Rally for a Moral Budget” back on March 12. (I asked her, and her Senate counterpart Phil Bailey, whether they were in any way involved in this rally. No, and no. They had just dropped by. That’s the answer I got from all the usual suspect-types I found.)

Well. As one who didn’t even thinking about going downtown on a Saturday for that particular quixotic gesture, I must accept service. But I will add that good-government-type rallies tend not to draw multitudes. Have it about something people get passionate about, such as the Confederate flag, and you can get a crowd (5,000 or so if it’s pro, as many as 60,000 if it’s anti).

Which is a shame. Today’s rally was for good government — or at least, against grossly irresponsible government. (I enjoyed hearing a speaker who followed Martha Susan say he and his fellow protesters were there to “change the usual business of government.” You know, what Nikki Haley is always saying she wants to do — right before she does something as old-line political Business-As-Usual as dumping a highly respected board member in favor of someone whose only known qualification is having contributed to her campaign.)

But it was a bust.

Oh, one more thing — it was announced, late in the rally, that Darla Moore herself will address students “in a town-hall meeting at 12:15 p.m. Thursday, March 24, in the Russell House.”

I wonder whether that will be better-attended.

: Martha Susan Morris

The “polls” (such as they are) run against Nikki’s “idiotic” move to replace Darla

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First and foremost, a thing where you go online and click “yes” or “no” to a current-events question is not a POLL, in any meaningful sense. It has no statistical significance. If you don’t have a properly constructed sample, with the right elements of randomness and screening questions (“are you the head of household, etc.”), you cannot extrapolate that the result you obtain indicates what you would get if the entire population, or electorate, answered the question.

A self-selected sample doesn’t cut it, not by a long shot. It’s a great way to invite readers/viewers to sound off — they like that — but it doesn’t generally give you much, if anything, to base conclusions on.

Still… my eyebrows raised when I saw this “poll” result over at the WLTX Facebook page:

Yeah, I know — 244 respondents, which makes a self-selected survey even MORE meaningless. But it still surprised me. Because for the last few days, any time someone says “This is going to cost her,” I say they are totally wrong, that Nikki made the calculation that her base wouldn’t care (or would even applaud, being so anti-elitist), and therefore she’s fine — from her perspective (certainly not from South Carolina’s).

It’s one thing for all the folks I run into at the Capital City Club to be shocked and appalled. One expects that, and Nikki Haley couldn’t care less. But this kind of populist thing should draw out the Haley fan club. For that matter, particularly with such low participation, it would be so easy to stack (which is the biggest reason you don’t regard self-selected “polls” as serious).

This result has NO statistical significance, but it’s SO lopsided. At the very least, it indicates a lack of eagerness on the part of her peeps to jump out and defend her. (I mean, did even ardent fan Eleanor Kitzman vote?) The way they rushed to back her on the WACH-Fox thing. What happened to that default mode of “If the elites and the media say it about our gal, it’s WRONG! And we’re gonna run out and shout it!”?

By the way, for what it’s worth… the latest WLTX nonpoll asked, “Should the U.S. have used force in Libya?” So far, this is how it’s going:

Yep, a dead heat. So far. And I figured that would be a blowout on the “yes” side. Because, you know, that’s something it looked like we had some consensus on before we went in. Of course, that consensus was among elites — including leading liberals who might otherwise oppose military action — and this is far from that. But that’s the factor that I thought would help Nikki on such a “poll” — at least to even things out for her. And it didn’t.

Once again, you can throw all of this out and you will have lost nothing of value — no methodology, tiny numbers. But it DID strike me as interesting, because it was such a blowout. And that’s all it is — interesting.

So I greeted this item from Columbia Regional Business Report in much the same spirit:

Staff Report
Published March 21, 2011

Gov. Nikki Haley made a grave misstep by removing philanthropist Darla Moore from the University of South Carolina’s board of trustees, said a vast majority of the people who responded to a two-day poll on the Daily Report.

Haley had few supporters of her move with only 7.1% saying they approve of her decision to replace Moore with Lexington attorney Tommy Cofield, who financially supported Haley’s campaign.

However, 78.8% want Moore back on the board; 44.2% of the respondents said Haley needs to admit her mistake and reinstate Moore, while 34.6% said the General Assembly should rectify the situation and by electing Moore to the board.

The remaining 14.1% asked who Tommy Cofield is.

Comments were fairly consistent, with the majority saying the move was “idiotic.”…

There was no methodology mentioned, so I figured this was an informal survey. I double-checked with CRBR Publisher Bob Bouyea, and he confirmed, “Informal poll.” Of course. No one in SC media has money to run real polls on the spur of the moment these days.

But I did find some of the comments interesting. Of course, they were fairly typical of what I’ve been hearing among the business movers and shakers, which is the same circle CRBR moves in.

As I say, interesting. Thought you might find it all interesting, too.

Nikki Haley dumps Darla Moore: A plain case of old-fashioned naked patronage

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It’s really hard to keep up with all the petty outrages (both “petty” and “outrageous” — yes, that seems about right) that our new young governor keeps pumping out.

I’m a busy guy — working, blogging, trying to grab a little sleep at night — and sometimes find myself momentarily out of the loop. Particularly when there are so many far more important things going on in the world. Let’s see, the Japan earthquake, Qaddafi (I’ve gotten to where I just spell his name with the first combination of letters that my fingers hit, so I hope that suits) moving to crush the rebellion while the world is distracted with Japan, Saudis intervening in Bahrain and people getting killed… And sometimes you have to put even that aside, and do other stuff…

So when I finish my Virtual Front Page and close the laptop, I sometimes don’t see any new developments until 7ish the next morning. Which is why I was taken aback at the very first Tweet I saw this morning:

@nettie_bNettie Britts

Explain Darla Moore to me.

I replied, “Well, she’s this rich lady from South Carolina who tries to give back to her home state. That’s the Twitter version, I guess…” And I went on to breakfast. There, the grill room at the Capital City Club was buzzing with what I didn’t know about, since I hadn’t sat down to read the paper yet (don’t ask me why it wasn’t on thestate.com when I was doing the Virtual Front Page yesterday; maybe it was and I just missed it). The state and community leaders weren’t going, “Did you hear about Darla?” It was more like, “What do you think of the news?” Period.

Yep, this stuff happens to me, too. Not often, but sometimes.

So I sat down, and I read the paper. And I Tweeted this out:

@BradWarthen Brad Warthen

Nikki Haley dumping Darla Moore is classic case of naked, arbitrary exercise of patronage power….http://tinyurl.com/4nu4of8

You can congratulate me later for having gotten a link, an editorial point, “Nikki Haley,” “Darla Moore,” and “naked” into the Twitter format (with 14 characters of room left!). Let’s move on to the substance.

And the substance is… well, what I just said. It just doesn’t get any more blatant, plain, slap-in-the-face, I-don’t-care-what-you’ve-done-for-our-state-or-this-institution-I’ve-got-my-own-guy than this. Just bald, plain, take-it-for-what-it-is. Although I do have to hand it to Haley staffer Rob Godfrey for managing to twist the knife a bit with this bit of sarcastic insouciance:

Asked why the appointment was not announced, he said: “Given that there are over 1,000 appointments to boards and commissions the governor can make, we never intended to have a press conference for each one.”

Because, you know, Darla Moore isn’t any more important than that.

At the Cap City Club this morning, one of the regular movers and shakers made a rather naive and innocent remark (sometimes movers and shakers can surprise you that way), honestly asking, “How do you just brush aside someone who’s given $100 million to South Carolina?” (Yeah, I know she’s only pledged $70 million to USC and $10 million to Clemson, according to the story, but I guess he was rounding.)

I replied, patiently, here’s what Nikki Haley would say to that (were she brutally honest, of course): “She didn’t give ME a hundred million dollars. Tommy over here gave me $3,500. I don’t understand the question.” That’s Tommy Cofield, by the way, a Lexington attorney.

People who are not movers and shakers (and who in fact have a sort of visceral aversion to movers and shakers) can say some naive things, too. Over in a previous comment, our own Doug said “Are we assuming that Sheheen wouldn’t have replaced anyone he didn’t like?”

To that, I responded once again with the painfully obvious: “No, Vincent would not have replaced Darla Moore with an unknown, minor campaign contributor in such a prestigious post. If that’s what you’re asking.” Of course, I should have added, “without a reason.” By that, I would mean a valid reason, one that takes South Carolina’s and USC’s legitimate interests into account, one that is not just arbitrary.

Oh she GAVE what I suppose some folks (probably including Doug, believing as he does that there is nothing so deleterious to society as experience and commitment to the public weal) will regard as a reason: “As is the case with many of our appointees, the governor looked for a fresh set of eyes to put in a critical leadership position…”

That’s it.

And if you are one of the people who takes Nikki Haley at face value, as her supporters tend to do, and you don’t know or care about Darla Moore or the University of South Carolina — you just like to cheer on your Nikki — that will suffice. In with the new, out with the old. She will feel in no way obligated to explain what was wrong with Darla Moore’s service on the board, or to cite any of the exciting new ideas that her appointee brings to the table that were previously missing. No one will expect that of her; it probably wouldn’t even occur to her to think about it. The governor will skate on this with these people — this is something that is core to her whole approach to politics ever since she transformed herself into the darling of the Tea Party in preparation for her run for this office for which she was so unprepared.

This WORKS for her. She skates on this, just as — with the voters she cares about — she will skate on apparently having told a prospective employer in 2007 that she was making $125,000 a year when she was telling the IRS that she made $22,000. This will matter not. People are just picking at her. The nasty, powerful, status quo people — those people who hang out at the Capital City Club! — are picking at Nikki because they’re mean, you see. (By the way, on the “petty” vs. “outrageous” spectrum, the thing on the job application is more the typical “petty” violation of her alleged principles that we have come to expect; the Darla Moore thing, dealing as it does with the leadership of such an important state institution, is more of an “outrage.” If you’re keeping score.)

She will not only skate, but her supporters — or at least, this is what the governor banks on — will continue, in spite of all evidence, to see her as a champion of transparency, a reformer, a nemesis of “politics as usual” and patron saint of Good Government. Which just, you know, boggles the mind if you’re the sensible sort who thinks about things.

That’s the plan, anyway. And that’s why she did this, and really doesn’t care if you, or the university, or the business community, or Darla Moore don’t like it.

Just to say something you don’t hear all that often

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The quixotic demonstration at the State House yesterday by citizens sick of seeing our state’s infrastructure rapidly eroding under the stewardship of shortsighted politicians was of course an exercise in futility.

But I’m no stranger to that. A few minutes ago, looking for a link for a previous post that needed one, I went back to the last week of posts on my old blog I had at the paper, and ran across this forgotten item — which, as it happens, was day after the post in which I announced that I had been laid off:

Good job rejecting the tuition caps

This might sound strange coming from a guy who was already counting pennies (or quarters, anyway — I miscounted how many I had this morning in my truck, and ended up with a parking ticket because I didn’t have enough for the meter), with my two youngest daughters still in college. And now I’m about to be unemployed.

But I’m glad the House rejected tuition caps at S.C. colleges and universities. I have an anecdote to share about that.

Remember the recent day when college students wandered the State House lobbying lawmakers on behalf of their institutions. They wanted the state to invest in higher education the way North Carolina and Georgia have. Either that day, or the day after, I had lunch with Clemson President James Barker, and he told me an anecdote he had witnessed: He said the students were pressing a lawmaker NOT to support the tuition caps, because they were worried about their institutions being even more underfunded — they hardly get anything from the state — some are down below 20 percent funding by the state, and the rest has to come from such sources as tuition, federal research grants and private gifts. Eliminate the ability to raise tuition, and the institution’s ability to provide an excellent education is significantly curtailed. If we want lower tuitions, the state should go back to funding higher percentages of the schools’ budgets, the way our neighboring states with better higher ed systems do.

The lawmaker listened to the kids, and then said with great condescension, maybe you kids don’t care if tuition goes up, but I’ll bet your parents would like a cap. He thought he had them there, but the kids set him straight: None of their parents were paying the bills. These kids were working their way through schools and paying for it all themselves. And they didn’t want to see the quality of what they were working so hard to pay for be degraded by an artificial cap on tuition. The lawmaker had not counted on getting that answer.

I wish I had been there to see it, because I’ve been in a similar place before. Back in 95 or 96, Speaker Wilkins had brought his committee chairs to see us, and I started challenging the wisdom of their massive rollback of property taxes paid for school.One of them allowed as how he bet I was glad to get that couple of hundred dollars I didn’t have to pay. And I answered him that I was ashamed that I was paying so little through my property tax to support schools that I knew needed more resources. He said smugly that he was sure I wouldn’t want to give it back. I told him I didn’t see as how there was any channel for doing that, but if he could point me to the right person who would take my money and see it gets to the right place, I would pay the difference. He didn’t have a good answer for that.

It would be great if our lawmakers would stop assuming that all of us in South Carolina are so greedily shortsighted that we can’t see past our personal desire to pay less money, and that we are corruptible by a scheme to starve colleges of reasonable support.

Reading that now, with all that’s happened since — the rise of the Tea Party, the eagerness of Republicans, demoralized after their 2008 defeat, to embrace destructive extremism (and of course, what happens to the Republican Party as happens to South Carolina, which it dominates), the election of Nikki Haley over more experienced, less extreme candidates of both parties — it reads like thoughts from another century. And, of course, another place.

Imagine, even dreaming of our state caring enough about education to invest in it the way our neighboring states have, much less suggesting that we do so. How anachronistic can one get? All that’s happened since then is that South Carolina has run, faster every day, in the opposite direction — with out elected leaders firmly convinced that that is not only the right direction in which to run, but the only one.

“What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness”

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Isn’t that a great headline?

Stan Dubinsky sends out a lot of cool stuff to read via e-mail. You should ask to be on his list — if you’ve got time to read the stuff. I don’t really, but I do tend to glance at the headlines to see if anything draws me in (which, Journalism 101 here, is what headlines are for). And “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness” definitely did the job.

And the piece was worth reading. An excerpt:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985….

Undergraduates… seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness….

We all note, and many of us decry, what social media have done to (and for; there’s an upside as well) effective and elegant use of language. But I found this piece interesting because it went far beyond that, and identified an insidious enemy not only to communication, but to clear thought as well.

That enemy is Vagueness.

For real accountability in higher ed, here’s the first number Haley should look at: 10.9 percent

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Just read this item over at thestate.com:

Gov. Nikki Haley and higher education leaders said today they are working together on ways to objectively measure the performance of South Carolina’s public colleges and universities.

School officials said Tuesday they will provide the governor with data including class sizes, the number of in-state and out-of-state students, classroom spending and their economic development impact. The goal, Haley said, is to determine which schools were getting the best results from their budgets.

State spending on higher education has been cut in recent years, and, with the state facing an $830 million budget deficit, public colleges likely face more cuts…

College officials said they welcomed the opportunity to show their value.

“Accountability and transparency and quality can all coexist,” said Clemson University president James Barker.

Barker said he had not had a similar meeting with former Gov. Mark Sanford, who targeted rising higher education costs.

“It felt very different,” Barker said.

I’m with President Barker on this: It’s great that Nikki Haley even cares enough to talk to the public higher ed institutions. Her predecessor’s lack of interest was deafening.

But as she presumes to decide the institution’s fiscal fate (suddenly, I’m flashing on Rowan and Martin: the Fickle Finger of Fiscal Fate), there’s one number I hope she absorbs before any other: 10.9 percent.

That’s how much of the USC system’s total budget is provided by state appropriations. For USC Columbia, it’s 10.3 percent. (I don’t have the numbers for the other institutions in front of me at the moment.) It used to be more like 90.

The college administrators are too polite, and too politic to say it (personally, I’d be tempted to say to everybody at the State House, “Yeah, and I’m going to care about you and your opinion of what I’m doing, oh, about 10.9 percent.”), and I suspect they are truly pleased that Nikki wants to work with them at all. It’s a nice change. But it would be good if politicos who want to call the tune for these institutions were a little more cognizant of just how little they are paying to the piper.

“The Brad Show” is BACK! Our guest — Caroline Whitson

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Well, I told you it was coming back, and here it is!

After a well-received pilot episode, “The Brad Show” got put on the back burner — not by network twits like the ones who canceled “Firefly” (and who will no doubt go to the “special hell” that Shepherd Book preached about) — but by me, because I was way busy trying to keep a blog going while working a new job.

But now it’s back, and it has cool new intro and theme music, compliments of ADCO Interactive’s Jay Barry. I told Jay I wanted something sort of NPRish, or Dick Cavettesque, and with that crystal-clear direction, this is what he came up with.

Watch, enjoy, and be edified. Not by me, but by my guest, the president of Columbia College, and leader in the effort to pass the penny sales tax for transportation — which is what we talked about.

We also talked about Caroline’s plans to don a Catwoman-like costume for the Ludie Bowl festivities over the weekend. She promises pictures, which I’m looking forward to seeing, and posting…

Buddy, can you spare a scholarship?

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Got this from Stan Dubinsky. I got it without any context, so I don’t know who produced it, or anything else about the campaign it’s a part of (help me out, Stan — do you have a link?).

Most of the way through it, I was thinking, “You’ll never get anywhere with this.” That’s because the kinds of people who are the reasons higher education was never funded at a competitive level in South Carolina, and has been incredibly slashed from the already-low levels to a fraction of those levels, really don’t give a damn about the considerations depicted in the video. When the video asks the viewer to imagine “no social workers,” I’m thinking that the Tea Party types are going, “Hell, yes! Sounds great to me!” (And no, historically the “Tea Party” has not been a factor, by that name. But the mentality that it represents has long held sway in our state, and is one of the main reasons we lag economically behind much of the rest of the country. )

But then I get to the end and realize, this little film isn’t aimed at them. Or at me. It’s aimed at people in a position to give private dollars to prop up the institution. The makers of this video assume that the public conversation is long ago finished, and lost. In this piece, they’ve moved on.

And well they should. Several rounds of cuts back, the Legislature was only funding between 12-15 percent of the cost of running our supposedly “public” institutions of higher learning. I don’t know where the percentage is now. These formerly state institutions now look to the state as one of many, many donors it has to line up.

And this video is one way of doing that.

Did Janette pen “world’s haughtiest e-mail?”

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Many of you know Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist who for years has run the “Caught in the Creative Act” seminar at USC.

Yesterday, a reader called my attention to a piece over at Gawker, but when I got there I didn’t read the thing I was being directed to, because I got distracted by this item claiming that the Australian writer had written the “world’s haughtiest e-mail” back to her former students here in Colatown:

Janette Turner Hospital is the author of Orpheus Lost and other books, and a professor at Columbia. She sent MFA students at her old school, the University of South Carolina, the following note about their inferiority. It is amazing.

Hospital sent this note to all of the MFA students on the University of South Carolina listserv. More than one of them forwarded it to us. “We’re all enraged,” one MFA grad from USC tells us. “She is nuts!” says another. Indeed. What’s your favorite part? The personal revelations? The breathtaking undertone of insult towards those in South Carolina? Her special pet name for the Upper West Side? This is fertile ground…

After that build-up, I actually found the e-mail to be not quite as bad as advertised. After all, she says nothing BAD about USC, she just … gushes… to a rather odd extent about NYC. But she would not be the first to have her head turned a bit by the tall buildings, or the Starbucks on every corner. I’m rather fond of the city myself — as a place to visit. Follow the link and see what you think. Or if you’re too lazy to click, here’s an excerpt:

As for news from this very different MFA planet, I’m in seventh heaven teaching here, and not only because I have Orhan Pamuk (whom I hope to bring to USC for Caught in the Creative Act), Oliver Sacks, Simon Schama, Richard Howard, Margo Jefferson, etc., etc., as colleagues, though that is obviously part of it.

My students also live and move and write in seventh heaven and in a fever of creative excitement. Columbia’s MFA is rigorous and competitive but students don’t just have publication as a goal – they take that for granted, since about half the graduating class has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation – so they have their sights set on Pulitzers.

This program is huge, the largest in the country. It’s a 3-year degree, with 300 students enrolled at a given time. Each year, 100 are admitted (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction) with fiction by far the largest segment. But 600+ apply, so the 100 who get in are the cream of the cream…

And then there are all the peripheral pleasures of living on Manhattan: we’ve seen the Matisse exhibition at MOMA, have tickets for the opening of Don Pasquale at the Met Opera, have tickets to see Al Pacino on stage as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, etc etc. Plus I’m just 15 minutes walking distance from Columbia and from all the sidewalk bistros on Broadway, and 3 minutes from Central Park where we join the joggers every morning. This is Cloud Nine living on the Upper West Side (which is known to my agent and my Norton editor, who live in Greenwich Village, as “Upstate Manhattan.” ) We love it.

What do you think? I mean, I’m glad Janette’s having a good time, and maybe she’s a bit carried away. But I guess I’m too used to the excessive rhetoric of political e-mails to be too appalled.

Or maybe my self-esteem as a South Carolinian has been so battered by the attention we’ve garnered because of the Confederate flag, Mark Sanford, Alvin Greene and Nikki Haley that I’m too numb to be insulted further.

Oh, in case you’re wondering if I’m giving her a break unduly — Ms. Hospital is an acquaintance, but we don’t know each other well. A couple of years back when Salman Rushdie was in town for her program, she asked me to moderate a panel discussion in connection with his appearance (which was flattering, but a little scary, since I hadn’t read any of his books), and I met Mr. Rushdie at a reception afterward. That’s about all I can think of to disclose.

Another step into the Innovista…

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Mike Fitts chronicles this latest step toward achieving the potential of Innovista:

A company based on the engineering smarts at USC — in students and faculty — has been launched to commercialize that prowess.

SysEDA, a 10-employee company that provides engineering software, is moving into the USC Columbia Technology Incubator.

SysEDA’s software has been developed over the years principally by Roger Dougal, professor of electrical engineering at USC. Dougal estimates that about 50 students in the past 15 years have provided refinements to it, and many students in the engineering school use it regularly as part of the their work.

The software, called a Virtual Test Bed, is designed to simulate the inner workings of electrical engines. Once it is offered in the Internet “cloud,” it will allow different engineers from around the world to see how their proposed modifications to an engine affect the entire system before a prototype is built….

The company already has a client: the Office of Naval Research.

Dougal has worked with the Navy for more than a decade as it has explored electric power options for its ships. Now SysEDA has a $2.4 million contract to work with global engine giant ABB on such engines and design systems.

SysEDA is working with the incubator and is also receiving mentoring from Bang! Technologies, a company that specializes in boosting tech companies through their growth phases…

Congratulations to all involved as they take one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such steps that need to be taken for the Innovista to realize its potential over the next decade or two.

Privacy gone mad (again)

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In a book review in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal — of The Five-Year Party, by Craig Brandon — there was a passage about yet another weird path down which our national obsession with, and perversion of, the notion of “privacy” has led us:

Mr. Brandon is especially bothered by colleges’ obsession with secrecy and by what he sees as their misuse of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which Congress passed in 1974. Ferpa made student grade reports off-limits to parents. But many colleges have adopted an expansive view of Ferpa, claiming that the law applies to all student records. Schools are reluctant to give parents any information about their children, even when it concerns academic, disciplinary and health matters that might help mom and dad nip a problem in the bud.

Such policies can have tragic consequences, as was the case with a University of Kansas student who died of alcohol poisoning in 2009 and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who committed suicide in 2000. In both instances there were warning signs, but the parents were not notified. Ferpa’s most notorious failure was Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally ill Virginia Tech student who murdered 32 people and wounded 25 others during a daylong rampage in 2007. Cho’s high school did not alert Virginia Tech to Cho’s violent behavior, professors were barred from conferring with one another about Cho, and the university did not inform Cho’s parents about their son’s troubles—all on the basis of an excessively expansive interpretation of Ferpa, Mr. Brandon says. He recommends that parents have their child sign a Ferpa release form before heading off to college.

Good advice. Those of you who argue with me about curfews and bar closings and the like may side with those who gave us this situation. But I have a parent’s perspective. I want to know what’s going on with my kids. And moreover, I have a right to know — one that in a rational world would easily supersede any imagined “rights” granted by FERPA.

No. 1 on the field, No. 1 in the classroom

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Two quick items on the National Champion USC Gamecocks baseball team:

First, the picture above of the Gamecock flag flying on the State House dome, taken today by my ADCO colleague Lora Prill with the iPhone 4 of which she is inordinately proud. That’s certainly infinitely better than the flag that used to fly in that third position. This one is one we can all be proud of.

Second, I was talking to my friend Jack Van Loan today, and he mentioned hearing something at the big welcome-home rally for the team yesterday (pictured below, taken by another ADCO colleague): That of the eight teams who went to Omaha for the CWS, the Gamecocks had the highest GPA, at 3.18. (I tried to check this out, and did not find that number. I found that for the most recent semester, though, they had a GPA of 3.07, which ain’t shabby. Maybe the number Jack heard was for the whole year; I don’t know.)

Jack was sufficiently impressed with that that he wrote to the athletic director at his alma mater up in Oregon to say, why doesn’t your team have a GPA like this.

As Jack said “Number One on the field, number one in the classroom.” That’s another reason for South Carolina to be proud.

Finally. Finally! The whole nation knows that SOUTH CAROLINA IS THE BEST!

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Finally, something not just positive, but SUPERLATIVE for South Carolina on the national stage.

Tonight, America sees us as the BEST!

For so long, we’ve been last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last, the punch line of far too many national jokes. I’ve grown so weary of typing it.

Not any more. Not after tonight. The Gamecocks just changed all that. We can do anything now. We’re not only the best in the country at something, but at the National Pastime, no less!

It would be sweet to see this happen with any major sport, but having it happen with baseball makes it SO much more awesome.

Congratulations, Ray Tanner! Glad we built that new ballpark for you — you’ve made good use of it. (You know, the ballpark in the Innovista.)

Congratulations, Harris Pastides, and Eric Hyman, and all the coaches.

But congratulations most of all to the kids who won it, the Gamecock nine, South Carolina’s finest!

You’ve made us all proud…

House overrides ETV and tech school vetoes

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Went over to the State House after lunch, but when you’re trying to follow something like this all-day march through the governor’s vetoes, you can’t just drop in in the middle and know what’s going on.

Modern irony: As I sat there, listening first to Jerry Govan orate about S.C. State, and then to Glenn McConnell showing off his parliamentary razzle-dazzle, I found that I learned more about what was happening from Twitter than I did from being there, such as this Tweet from James Smith:

Vetoes of ETV, DHEC, tech schools archives have thankfully been overridden – rural health, technology incubator EEDA – sadly sustained.

And this one from Nathan Ballentine:

voted to override 1, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31,33 (Tech Board, ETV, Library, Museum)

… both of which I reTweeted while I was there.

And then when I got back to my laptop, I saw that my buddy Mike Fitts had put out a comprehensive report of what had happened thus far. From that, and other sources, I learned that the House overrode the governor on:

the technical college system
S.C. ETV
public libraries
the Arts Commission

Mind you, the Senate must ALSO garner two-thirds for the governor to be overridden. I’m not sure where the Senate is on things at the moment. I do know that the House plans to work into the night and not be in session tomorrow, while the Senate will have a Thursday session.

Meanwhile the House has UPHELD the governor’s vetoes of the following, which means the Senate doesn’t have to act, because the governor wins (and, in most cases, South Carolina loses):

The Small Business Center at the University of South Carolina
Innovista research funding
Education programs known as High Schools That Work and Making Middle Grades Work.
the Education and Economic Development Act, which ecodevo types have relied on as a critical tool in readying youth for the working world

Rep. Smith: Democrats WILL vote to override all 107 Sanford vetoes

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Not as a bloc, mind you, because as you know, Democrats don’t do blocs. But according to Rep. James Smith, who called me a few minutes ago to set me straight (thereby saving me a call to him or Minority Leader Harry Ott), it will be the official House Democratic leadership position that ALL of Gov. Sanford’s 107 vetoes should be overridden. And he hopes they will be — but of course that will depend on the Republicans doing their duty by South Carolina — which James suggests the Tea Party has made GOP lawmakers scared to do.

James called me because a lot of y’all were calling him, egged on to do so by this blog (in the absence of really helpful coverage of the

Rep. James Smith

budget vetoes by the MSM). I urge y’all to keep on calling your lawmakers, Democrats and especially Republicans (since there’s more of them) to tell them what you think. And if you’ve forgotten who your lawmakers are, or how to contact them, here are instructions on enabling yourself.

If you’ll recall, House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham told me over the weekend (“Lawmakers will uphold most of Sanford’s vetoes“), the governor is likely to prevail on most of his vetoes of funding for such things as public libraries, the State Museum, technical colleges, SC ETV, the Arts Commission and the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in part because Democrats can’t be relied upon to vote to override. He based this on the lack of support he got from Democrats on some key votes on the budget.

James says that was then, this is now.

Indeed Democrats were divided on some things such as court fees. But that has nothing to do with these budget vetoes. If the Legislature fails to override, says the former Minority Leader, it won’t be because of lack of Democratic votes. And of the governor’s 107 vetoes, “I have yet to find one that we would not override.”

And while Kenny is worried, James still hopes “to be successful in overriding them.”

If the Democrats can indeed stick together tomorrow, that means the fate of these vetoes will lie in the bitter rivalry between regular mainstream Republicans and the Sanford fringe — a fringe that was emboldened by Nikki Haley’s near victory in the primary last Tuesday. All Sanford and Haley and their allies need is to drum up a third of either the House or the Senate for Mark Sanford to have his biggest victory in his eight sorry years in office.

So once again, folks, rather than merely refer you to a link, here are the instructions on how to contact your legislator, as we used to say at the bottoms of editorials:

To find out who your legislators are and how to contact them, go to www.scstatehouse.net and select “Find your legislator” on the left. Or call Project Vote Smart at 1-888-VOTE-SMART.

Tech system funding, by the numbers

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A little more perspective on the governor’s three vetoes of Technical College operational funding, courtesy of Midlands Tech President Sonny White, who spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club this afternoon. (He only mentioned the vetoes in passing; I got the rest from him in an interview afterward.)

When the Technical College system was founded at the behest of Gov. Fritz Hollings (who got the Legislature to go along by buying Sen. Edgar Brown a bottle of bourbon and helping him drink it, which shows that in an altered state of consciousness at least, our lawmakers can be forward looking), the system was paid for thusly:

70 percent of funding came from the state
10 percent came from the counties served by the 16 schools — this went to physical plant and other local operating costs
10 percent came from students — which made sense, since this was about providing a bright future to folks who did not already have good income
10 percent came from auxiliary services such as bookstores and the like

In the 2011 fiscal year, the breakdown will be:

70 percent will come from students — some of it from Pell Grants and lottery-funded scholarships, but it will still be up to the students to find the way to come up with it
10 percent from the state — which is just so many different kinds of pitiful that it defies words
10 percent from counties — Sonny expressed his appreciation that counties have at least kept their part of the bargain over the years.
10 percent from auxiliary services.

Oh, and by the way, the technical system has seen a 20 percent increase in enrollment during this period in which unemployment has hovered around 12 percent.

So now you know.

Some background on Sanford’s tech system vetoes

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You may have seen a piece in The State today by Otie Rawl regarding governor’s vetoes of funding for the S.C. Technical College system. (This may be the only place you’ve seen mention of this in the MSM).

Let me give you some numbers to add to your perspective on this particular outrage of the governor’s.

Basically, the governor was looking for $4 million. What he wanted to do initially was ReadySC. As Sonny White, Midlands Tech president, ‘splained to me this afternoon, ReadySC is the entity at the heart of South Carolina’s ability to tell industrial prospects — the example he gave was Boeing — that yes, we’ll be able to train your workforce for you. To explain to you what the governor apparently doesn’t understand, here’s what ReadySC does:

As an integral part of the SC Technical College System, The Center for Accelerated Technology Training and its readySC™ program work together with the 16 Technical Colleges to prepare South Carolina’s workforce to meet the needs of your company.

Established in 1961, readySC™ is one of the oldest and most experienced workforce training programs in the United States. We are ready to bring this experience and expertise to work for your company.

We are ready to quickly and successfully start up your new facility.

We are ready to help you seamlessly expand your existing facility.

We are ready to discover the skills, knowledge and abilities needed at your facility.

We are ready to design new and innovative training solutions customized specifically for your needs.

We are ready to respond to your time frames and deadlines no matter how tight.

We are ready to deliver world-class training and project management.

The Center’s new moniker — readySC™ — sums up perfectly our message to

companies that are considering a relocation or expansion in South Carolina.

We are ready!

As Sonny explained to me, the problem is that the governor simply doesn’t believe that the technical colleges should be involved in economic development. Let me say that again: Our governor (Nikki Haley’s guiding light) does not believe that the technical college system — which was created under Gov. Fritz Hollings as an economic development tool — should be involved in economic development.

The good news is that Sanford was talked out of this, by ecodevo types like Otie Rawl, according to Dr. White.

But the governor still wanted his $4 million. Fine. So he took it out of administration for the 16 technical colleges. He said that the three biggest colleges — Midlands Tech being one — should provide administrative services for the other 13.

Fine, says Sonny. But there’s no plan to do that, no authorizing legislation, no nothing — except the governor’s airy wish that it come into being.

bradwarthen.com

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