Terrell Strayhorn (He/Him) is a professor of education at Virginia Union University, following a career bouncing around Illinois State University, LeMoyne-Owen College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Tennessee.
Among the more important tragedies here for education are the kids who sacrifice time and sleep and money to get an education because they really do want one, and encounter a puffed-up moron like this and become either discouraged at the mediocrity found in their institutions, or, because of their limited exposure to good teaching, think this guy has something useful to impart.
A really good teacher/mentor can save someone worth saving. A bad one of course...
" the DEI-industrial complex has evolved into a lucrative venture for intellectual lightweights, exploiting noble ideals for personal gain. "
The only thing I would disagree with is "has evolved into" as opposed to "pretty much always was." Once there stopped being consequences the sky was the limit, and this sort of nonsense has even fewer consequences than most bs companies. You don't even have to produce a product, because the product is "fancy people telling you your ideology is correct."
I know this is a fairly simplistic comment, but I know there is essential truth to it.
The governance of non-profits is deeply flawed. They sit on a pile of untaxed cash that has no direct owner. The trustees have the ability to make decisions that don’t affect any owner’s wealth, thus they are free to do what is in the collective non-pecuniary interest of the trustees, rarely with consequences. And, we see this behavior over and over again in the non-profit world.
I believe you are correct. There is an underlying understanding that these organizations are there to do the altruistic work of their mission statements, but rarely is there ever a reckoning like the kind that for-profits regularly receive. Only if they make targets of themselves, like BLM or NRA, or agregeious actions are leaked by angry insiders like United Way, do they awaken the ire of people who will take a deeper dive into how those piles of cash are being spent.
I worked as the office indentured servant-type for a grantmaking foundation for almost 13 years. When I started there, the then-octogenarian son-in-law of the founder was President, and the Executive Director was in his 70s, and they were both smart and wise. Then the President moved to emeritus status and the Executive Director was encouraged to retire, and a board member became President/Executive Director and though she'd been successful in her own PR business she was a naive moron about many things, and she hired as new Program Officer a wretched spawn of a robber baron line and he was just a moron.
And these days, per their annual report, with the great-grandchildren of the founder on the board and a tripling of staff, the foundation is now just a tiresome clone of every other.
The problem is, without an independent standard for survival such as the profit motive in the private sector or the need for victories in sports organizations, incompetent management can survive indefinitely.
FWIW, I once told off a grad student with whom I worked closely because I felt his PhD thesis plagiarized our collaborative work (not as verbatim copy and paste, but in terms of ideas). A simple citation or acknowledgment would have fixed the problem. This was in the hard sciences.
I was peeved and never followed up on whether a revision was made to the thesis. Oh well.
The fundamental problem of people like Claudine and Terrell is that their academic subject is basically tautological. The field exists to justify itself. I suspect climate science also attracts its share of loud mouths who have trouble thinking and writing deeply. Plagiarism would be the result.
It's always endlessly amusing to me that the exact same class of society's "elite" who constantly sneer down their noses at the police or military for cover-ups, both of whom face grave consequences for their actions ranging from serious physical injury to death and jail, themselves engage in the same conduct without any consequences apparently.
And I'm NOT arguing that the corrupt in military or law enforcement shouldn't face appropriate consequences, but it is amazing that the loudest voices calling for accountability and transparency show exactly zero awareness that they do the same thing.
I’m constantly amazed at the lack of accountability across society in nearly every aspect. Whether it’s a repeated pattern of unethical behavior all the way to violent crime, it all gets greeted with a shrug of apathy. Remember all the Wall Street tycoons who walked away with impunity after torching the economy? People really do get way with figurative murder consistently, and the old saying about the rarity of an honest man is more true each year. The only “crimes” with consequence is wrongthink or wrongspeak. I wish I could offer a solution, but I don’t even quite understand the phenomenon.
I hope so, although there just doesn't seem to be any response from schools on this matter. The hiring committees (faculty after admin gate keeping) seem to care more about ideological purity than actual accomplishment, the latter of which is just used as justification later. Until PhDs start getting revoked for plagiarized dissertations, or schools start cracking down on false publications and blackballing candidates, or better yet firing professors found to be committing fraud, I don't see anything changing. I mean, how hard is it to do a quick Google Scholar check on the submitted CVs of people you are thinking of flying in for a round of interviews? You could have grad students or even undergrad assistants do it, just to check and see if any of those publications are true. Apparently schools can't even be bothered to call up other schools to see if someone actually got the degrees listed.
People are too beaten down by regulatory paperwork and really stupid administrative meetings, so that a lot of them don't care about the quality anymore. They're phoning it in and collecting a check. I worked alongside a completely unlicensed colleague for a few weeks, because my manager forgot to check to see if this person had a valid license to practice.
Students could definitely get a leg up on their professors and school administrators by checking up on their credentials and publications. Could prove useful as leverage for all sorts of things, such as cancelling the wokism.
It is time to take apart academia, which overall is not delivering a service that's worth what they're charging.
Terrell is a low rent version of Claudine Gay and in a sane world he would be an event organizer for a legitimate business or maybe even own a catering business or something to do with entertainment. He has the ability and the hustle to make it work, but society allows him and encourages him to make his living as a professional liar.
"I spoke to one professor who said he had seen a thesis retroactively corrected before, but he was unable to point to any specific instances."
I suspect that the prof you cited lied to you about not recalling the case where he'd seen a thesis retroactively corrected. If, as he claimed, this only happened once in his entire career, he'd damned well remember the thesis and its "author." Otherwise, he lied about having seen this before, and wanted to make it seem like it wasn't such a big deal. Either way, he was lying.
"I spoke to one professor who said he had seen a thesis retroactively corrected before, but he was unable to point to any specific instances."
I suspect that the prof you cited lied to you about not recalling the case where he'd seen a thesis retroactively corrected. If, as he claimed, this only happened once in his entire career, he'd damned well remember the thesis and its "author." Otherwise, he lied about having seen this before, and wanted to make it seem like it wasn't such a big deal. Either way, he was lying.
I note that even your corrected count (~120 refereed journal articles and book chapters) is almost an order of magnitude more than the productivity of C Gay. I do wonder how many of those 120 are original work and not copypasta-ed plagiarism though
Among the more important tragedies here for education are the kids who sacrifice time and sleep and money to get an education because they really do want one, and encounter a puffed-up moron like this and become either discouraged at the mediocrity found in their institutions, or, because of their limited exposure to good teaching, think this guy has something useful to impart.
A really good teacher/mentor can save someone worth saving. A bad one of course...
" the DEI-industrial complex has evolved into a lucrative venture for intellectual lightweights, exploiting noble ideals for personal gain. "
The only thing I would disagree with is "has evolved into" as opposed to "pretty much always was." Once there stopped being consequences the sky was the limit, and this sort of nonsense has even fewer consequences than most bs companies. You don't even have to produce a product, because the product is "fancy people telling you your ideology is correct."
I know this is a fairly simplistic comment, but I know there is essential truth to it.
The governance of non-profits is deeply flawed. They sit on a pile of untaxed cash that has no direct owner. The trustees have the ability to make decisions that don’t affect any owner’s wealth, thus they are free to do what is in the collective non-pecuniary interest of the trustees, rarely with consequences. And, we see this behavior over and over again in the non-profit world.
I believe you are correct. There is an underlying understanding that these organizations are there to do the altruistic work of their mission statements, but rarely is there ever a reckoning like the kind that for-profits regularly receive. Only if they make targets of themselves, like BLM or NRA, or agregeious actions are leaked by angry insiders like United Way, do they awaken the ire of people who will take a deeper dive into how those piles of cash are being spent.
That's just another observation related to the Friedman maxim about other people's money - https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-four-different-ways-to-spend-money-by-milton-friedman/
In everything there's good leadership or bad.
I worked as the office indentured servant-type for a grantmaking foundation for almost 13 years. When I started there, the then-octogenarian son-in-law of the founder was President, and the Executive Director was in his 70s, and they were both smart and wise. Then the President moved to emeritus status and the Executive Director was encouraged to retire, and a board member became President/Executive Director and though she'd been successful in her own PR business she was a naive moron about many things, and she hired as new Program Officer a wretched spawn of a robber baron line and he was just a moron.
And these days, per their annual report, with the great-grandchildren of the founder on the board and a tripling of staff, the foundation is now just a tiresome clone of every other.
The problem is, without an independent standard for survival such as the profit motive in the private sector or the need for victories in sports organizations, incompetent management can survive indefinitely.
Story of life on earth.
FWIW, I once told off a grad student with whom I worked closely because I felt his PhD thesis plagiarized our collaborative work (not as verbatim copy and paste, but in terms of ideas). A simple citation or acknowledgment would have fixed the problem. This was in the hard sciences.
I was peeved and never followed up on whether a revision was made to the thesis. Oh well.
The fundamental problem of people like Claudine and Terrell is that their academic subject is basically tautological. The field exists to justify itself. I suspect climate science also attracts its share of loud mouths who have trouble thinking and writing deeply. Plagiarism would be the result.
All of his alleged misdeeds are surely due to systemic racism, or Vladimir Putin.
It's always endlessly amusing to me that the exact same class of society's "elite" who constantly sneer down their noses at the police or military for cover-ups, both of whom face grave consequences for their actions ranging from serious physical injury to death and jail, themselves engage in the same conduct without any consequences apparently.
And I'm NOT arguing that the corrupt in military or law enforcement shouldn't face appropriate consequences, but it is amazing that the loudest voices calling for accountability and transparency show exactly zero awareness that they do the same thing.
I’m constantly amazed at the lack of accountability across society in nearly every aspect. Whether it’s a repeated pattern of unethical behavior all the way to violent crime, it all gets greeted with a shrug of apathy. Remember all the Wall Street tycoons who walked away with impunity after torching the economy? People really do get way with figurative murder consistently, and the old saying about the rarity of an honest man is more true each year. The only “crimes” with consequence is wrongthink or wrongspeak. I wish I could offer a solution, but I don’t even quite understand the phenomenon.
With this new, highly effective “Roto-Rooter” of academia, I see much more modest CVs becoming the future trend.
I hope so, although there just doesn't seem to be any response from schools on this matter. The hiring committees (faculty after admin gate keeping) seem to care more about ideological purity than actual accomplishment, the latter of which is just used as justification later. Until PhDs start getting revoked for plagiarized dissertations, or schools start cracking down on false publications and blackballing candidates, or better yet firing professors found to be committing fraud, I don't see anything changing. I mean, how hard is it to do a quick Google Scholar check on the submitted CVs of people you are thinking of flying in for a round of interviews? You could have grad students or even undergrad assistants do it, just to check and see if any of those publications are true. Apparently schools can't even be bothered to call up other schools to see if someone actually got the degrees listed.
People are too beaten down by regulatory paperwork and really stupid administrative meetings, so that a lot of them don't care about the quality anymore. They're phoning it in and collecting a check. I worked alongside a completely unlicensed colleague for a few weeks, because my manager forgot to check to see if this person had a valid license to practice.
Students could definitely get a leg up on their professors and school administrators by checking up on their credentials and publications. Could prove useful as leverage for all sorts of things, such as cancelling the wokism.
It is time to take apart academia, which overall is not delivering a service that's worth what they're charging.
Amyl Nitrate and curriculum vitae drafting don't mix.
Of course, he's laughing all the way to the bank.
DEI is a grift and always has been.
Terrell is a low rent version of Claudine Gay and in a sane world he would be an event organizer for a legitimate business or maybe even own a catering business or something to do with entertainment. He has the ability and the hustle to make it work, but society allows him and encourages him to make his living as a professional liar.
"I spoke to one professor who said he had seen a thesis retroactively corrected before, but he was unable to point to any specific instances."
I suspect that the prof you cited lied to you about not recalling the case where he'd seen a thesis retroactively corrected. If, as he claimed, this only happened once in his entire career, he'd damned well remember the thesis and its "author." Otherwise, he lied about having seen this before, and wanted to make it seem like it wasn't such a big deal. Either way, he was lying.
MLK, Terrel Strayhorn, Claudine gay....
I don't know what it is but i'm beginning to see a pattern here.
"I spoke to one professor who said he had seen a thesis retroactively corrected before, but he was unable to point to any specific instances."
I suspect that the prof you cited lied to you about not recalling the case where he'd seen a thesis retroactively corrected. If, as he claimed, this only happened once in his entire career, he'd damned well remember the thesis and its "author." Otherwise, he lied about having seen this before, and wanted to make it seem like it wasn't such a big deal. Either way, he was lying.
I note that even your corrected count (~120 refereed journal articles and book chapters) is almost an order of magnitude more than the productivity of C Gay. I do wonder how many of those 120 are original work and not copypasta-ed plagiarism though
With a name like "Strayhorn", I'd expect a stream of bastards, not academic fraud. Guess all the bastardry got kept inside, instead.
could be Gay too who knows