The University of Last Resort: The Story of a College That Has No Class

By Michelangelo Schwartz PhD

This is the manuscript as it was submitted to a New York publisher. It arrived in a brown paper wrapper tied with string and wrapped in Scotch tape. It was soggy and battered, and the return address and half the cover letter were missing. For this reason, we did not know who the author actually was An extensive search has convinced us that the name Michelangelo Schwartz is a nom de plume meant to shield him from the wrath of his friends and colleagues. And make no mistake about it, wrath there will be.

Join us for a roller coaster ride across American higher education that takes us from the top graduate schools to an online university whose motto is Welcome to a college that has no class.

Meet Dr. Michelangelo Schwartz, a drunken and philandering Dante scholar who descends into the same circles of hell he bored his students with.

Meet Sister Bill, the dean of discipline at a Catholic womens college. The good sister carries a metal rulerand is not afraid to use it.

Meet Jim Bob Rules, president of Lee Harvey Oswald Community College in Sheets, Texas, who only has the job because his father-in-law is chairman of the board.

Meet Senator Brandon Stubblefield, who wants to clean up higher educationthat is, until he finds himself in a sticky situation.

If you ever wondered why so many people are mad at higher education, wonder no more. Enjoy your stay at The University of Last Resort.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462040957

Michelangelo Schwartz PhD

Michelangelo Schwartz took his PhD in Dante and worked in higher education administration. He is the author of numerous essays on pop culture, including “Babe Ruth’s Response to Prohibition” and “Pope Pius XII and Curly Howard: An Unlikely Friendship.”

Book preview

Contents

Foreword and Introduction

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

THE UNIVERSITY OF LAST RESORT

In the first book to show from the inside what is wrong with modern higher education, you will meet a cast of characters who will live alongside Scarlett O’Hara and Captain Ahab. Meet Dr. Michelangelo Schwartz, a drunken and philandering Dante scholar who descends into the same circles of hell he bored his students with. Meet Sister Bill, the dean of Discipline at a Catholic women’s college, who carries a metal ruler and is not afraid to use it. Meet Jim Bob Rules, president of Lee Harvey Oswald Community College in Sheets, Texas, who only has the job because his father-in-law is chairman of the board. Meet Senator Brandon Stubblefield, who wants to clean up higher education until he finds himself in a sticky situation.

Join us for a roller coaster ride across American higher education that takes us from the top graduate schools to an online university whose motto is Welcome to a college that has no class. If you ever wondered why so many people are mad at higher education, wonder no more. Enjoy your stay at the University of Last Resort.

Clark Kerr, the legendary president of the University of California, is credited with having joked that the purposes of the university were to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

—The Chronicle of Higher Education

March 4, 2011

And I say to you, gentlemen, that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.

—Groucho Marx as President Wagstaff of Huxley College in the movie Horsefeathers.

Milk the cow till its dry, and then make hamburgers and wallets.

—Mortie Fineman from the film The Independent.

Foreword and Introduction

BY Maurice Shaftsbury Pinkerton

PhD, EdD, JD, MFA

Fellow of the Royal Society and

Executive Director of the

Ancient Council of Learned Academic Societies

Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England

Foreword

Let’s face it: college isn’t what it used to be. College libraries that once stayed open to 1:00 a.m. so that nattily attired students could improve their Latin syntax or conjugate Greek verbs are empty now as students have retreated to their well-appointed dorm rooms to download illegal music files and watch reality stars have sex on YouTube. The decline of higher education has been the subject of countless studies, but here are a few facts to make it plain: In a recent study, eighty percent of college students thought Peoria was the Russian word for freedom. Seventy-eight percent thought the Pietà was something you whacked blindfolded after twenty Coronas on Cinco de Mayo. Now some skills of college students have improved. A 1956 survey showed that eighty-one percent of college freshmen were virgins. By 2011, the majority of college freshmen were proficient at sexual acts that weren’t discovered until the late sixties. Today’s college students may no longer know their French and physics, but they can cheat on video games, reprogram their iPhones, get Dave Matthews concert tickets before they go on sale to the public, and tell the difference between the Audi A4 and the A6.

Now, dear reader, how we got from the sacred halls of academe to whatever the hell is happening at 10:00 p.m. at a nearby shopping mall sponsored by your local community college is a sad story—but relate it we must.

While there have been countless scholarly studies chronicling the decline in math scores and engineering degrees and the loss of foreign languages, none of these works have had an impact on higher education. There is a simple reason for this. If college is not working and the readers of these volumes are college educated, it may be they are written in language that is over our heads. Our aim here, dear reader, is to show the decline in higher education in a more personal and easy-to-follow narrative. Just as the basic skills of college students have declined, it would be correct to infer that our national ability to read and comprehend is not what it used to be. So it is natural that the most influential and revolutionary book about higher education should not be written in a scholarly fashion. Our author, whom we shall meet shortly, has avoided distracting footnotes, pie charts, and citations. Admit it, dear reader, and stop lying to yourself. In the age of cell phones and instant messaging, your attention span is too short for footnotes. So we will dispense with all the appetizers and get right to the main course.

What follows is not just another data sample that can be disputed, or numbers that can be recalculated by conniving academics bent on keeping their jobs despite zero evidence their students have been educated. This will be no sample whose validity can be questioned or scholarly survey instrument that has some hidden flaw. No, this is the story of one man and his long spiral down. This is the story of a Dante scholar lost in the business of higher education. It is through his bloodshot eyes we will clearly see, for the first time, dear reader, what went wrong with higher education.

If we made a graph of reading and math scores for college students over the last twenty years, you would see it as a slope so steep that an Olympic gold medalist could not ski down it. At the same time, if you looked at a graph of the costs of attending college, it would look like the trajectory of a missile. You may ask, how could the quality sink like a stone while the costs have skyrocketed? Why has the American public tolerated higher prices and less results? It is much like the evolution of the Milky Way candy bar. The price has gone up fourfold, and there is half the caramel.

Do you want to know why the academy is flogged daily in the press? Do you want to know why college professors are consistently ranked the least trusted among all professionals (dentists are more popular)? Do you know why senators and congressmen are holding investigations into how higher education is accredited and how its costs have run amok? Do you ask why research shows us that students spend four years in college, build up a quarter of a million dollars in debt, and come out knowing less than what they went in with? Keep reading. We will show you that Toto is about to pull back the curtain on the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.

We will make our case by following the narrative of one professor (if we can dignify him with that term) named Dr. Michelangelo Schwartz, Dante scholar, philanderer, and ersatz wine aficionado.

Who, you may ask, is our academic everyman on a confused journey through the minefield we call American higher education? He is exactly what you might expect. His appearance is slightly disheveled. He is overly fond of paisley and corduroy, even though he has not been able to purchase them anywhere but the Goodwill store for the last twenty years. He has an addiction to mediocre wines, and he has been in bed with more female graduate students than three-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets.

From the hallowed halls of a Catholic woman’s college to the Wild West world of for-profit online education, he’s seen it all, and this is his story. Names and locations have been altered, not to protect the innocent but to protect us from the litigious.

Like the circles of hell he bored his students with, Dr. Michelangelo Schwartz himself metaphorically descended the academic ladder from the heights of a great graduate school to an online for-profit university in the mountains of Arkansas that later came to be known as the University of Last Resort.

Just as James Joyce recasts Ulysses on a single day, June 16, in a walk around Dublin, we again find brave Ulysses reincarnated in the character of Michelangelo Schwartz, PhD. Only this time he is not the consort of the goddess but schtupping a grad student in the coat closet of a darkened classroom. We find him, not in the war council of Greek kings outside the walls of Troy, but doodling mindlessly during a faculty senate meeting run by Robert’s Rules of Order, in which the motion to amend the motion, which was a friendly amendment to the original motion, was defeated because they realized most faculty had drifted out of the room and they no longer had a quorum. Our modern Ulysses makes his living teaching the great books to business majors who can’t wait for the class to end. We find him smoking a pipe in a world where tobacco use is seen as a sign of moral weakness. But our hero has an inkling of his fallen state. We find a bottle of bad scotch in his desk drawer, and that drawer is opened earlier and earlier each day. We find him looking out the window lustfully at seventeen-year-old co-eds scantily clad on the first hot day of spring, and twisting his overgrown gray eyebrows in a lecherous gesture. For our modern Ulysses, it is not the cyclops but a transgender professor of woman’s studies who blocks his way and frustrates his desires.

It is here in the ninth circle of Dante’s hell that we will find him, our hero, who has borne the suffering for all of us. We find him a hard-drinking, sexist professor lost in the fun house hall of mirrors we call political correctness and equal opportunity. Like the goat on whose head the sins of village were laid before he was slain in sacrifice, we find him accused of every crime the university condemns.

Now I must warn you before you proceed: caveat emptor—let the buyer beware. Our protagonist is sexist, not politically correct, and to put it mildly, a pig. In the college world where left-wing ideology rules with an iron fist with no velvet glove, he is a throwback, an anathema, or, to quote one of his former department chairs, a freaking Neanderthal. He is, after all, much like the slave owners of the antebellum South and the most enthusiastic of the Nazi youth: a child of his times. He means well but fails to measure up. He is a simple man, frustrated by the complexity of the modern age. In another time he may have had more of a grip on life, although as you read on, you may doubt that as well.

In editing the Schwartz manuscript, we have kept the chapters short, as he intended them, so as not to tax your attention. This work takes a bird’s eye view of the college campus. And as the pigeon eventually soils the bronze bust at the entrance to every great college, this book too will leave its mark on higher education in America.

Introduction

This is the manuscript as it was submitted to a New York publisher. It arrived in a brown paper wrapper tied with string and wrapped in Scotch tape. It was soggy and battered, and the return address and half the cover letter were missing. For this reason, we did not know who the author actually was, where it was mailed from, and what liberties he took with the text. An extensive search has convinced us that the name Michelangelo Schwartz is a nom de plume meant to shield him from the wrath of his friends and colleagues. And make no mistake about it, wrath there will be. For this is a manuscript that spills the beans on the inner workings of higher education in America and exposes the whole mess. Much like the Valachi Papers or the Pentagon Papers, this is a dangerous work that reveals that which is best hidden from the light.

It will not surprise the most sophisticated and jaded among you that the manuscript was immediately rejected at the publisher. While the senior editor-in-chief normally does not read manuscripts till after they have been vetted, this soggy and tattered document caught his eye. After just a few hours of reading, he sent it to two other editors with this simple note scrawled on the front.

"In all of my years of editing texts, I have never come across a manuscript so improbable and so oddly written. First of all, the prose is wooden. The author can’t seem decide if this book (if I can be so kind to dignify it with that word) is an adventure story, a comedy, or a serious critique of higher education. The main character seems not quite believable, and the character development is atrocious, to say the least. I would use the word egregious, but that word might get me in trouble. As bad as it is, the last fifty pages are truly astonishing. But I do not mean astonishing in any sense that involves satisfaction or happiness. It is the kind of astonishment one gets when one comes home at the end of a long day, puts the key in the lock, and finds in one’s kitchen three government agents in dark suits, sun glasses, and ear pieces with their guns drawn. Unless you violently disagree with my assessment, send this out with the trash. Although I consider it an insult to the wrapper of my tuna sandwich that it must share a receptacle with this expose!"

At the end of the day, the manuscript was tossed into the trash that was emptied by a newly hired office boy. This young man got any job he could in a publishing house as he was a lover of books and was looking to, as we say, get his foot in the door. Discovering the manuscript, he pulled it out, dripping with tuna and coffee stains, and brought it home to his apartment in Brooklyn. As he read it, he became fascinated. By coincidence (or, dear reader, was it fate?), the boy’s uncle was a professor of educational history at Columbia University and a prominent critic of higher education. The lad gave the manuscript to his uncle, who, after a careful reading, then made copies. The manuscript was passed hand-to-hand among a small group of New York intellectuals with a conservative bent, who recognized its value and the unique way it told its story. Shortly afterward, it was shared with some of the more conservative think-tanks in Washington, DC, and they agreed that for the first time a single work captured the essence of the problems of higher education in America.

They placed ads in The New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, hoping the author of the