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I am also curious as to what number of white males currently serve as President of either our Ivy League elite large endowment private schools, or high-ranking flagships? I don't have a count, but it seems like every time I turn around the president of a college i see has a woman and/or minority president.  I fully applaud the appointments when the candidates are equally qualified.

But I happened to a quick count of our Federal cabinet members (15-18 ish)   I counted 4 white males who are not openly gay and those 4 had none of the most powerful jobs.  Does this new really "look like "America?" in terms of percentage?   I recall this Clinton mantra from Donna Shalala etc. and understood it as a fair point. But has the pendulum swung so far that ratios are nearly a caracature of the idea.

It's absolutely frightening how far they have indoctrinated their students.  The reality is that the Ivy school grads are always going to have a first shot at great jobs in government and higher education, not because they are wiser or smarter, but because they have a an alumni career network and pedigree.

Congress is now posing a tax on their endowments so that they are accountable to reality.  Right now elite Ivies are insulated from reality due to endowment funding and its market growth.  State universities at least are accountable for budget help from their legislatures. If people pay capital gains, why not claim some of the tax-sheltered growth of vast wealth. Go get it and do it retroactively to 2008 when the market starting flying upward!

As Valpopal says, there is no allowance for differing opinion. Any past colonizing requires apology and and asks people who weren't living to disadvantage themselves and destroy their own country. Yet this poorly educated cohort somehow (in full reading of history) missed the memo on the holocaust?  Such an embarrassment.  In the same way as our self-defeating national border actions and refusal to use our own cheap energy, the Chinese are just laughing themselves to death and wondering why this is so easy.

U.S. Rep Stefanik:

"Until they act on it (their shouts of genocide)?....You mean it's not harassment until they act on Genocide??"   

Just wow. Even Joe, Mika, and Willie piled on top of that trio of elitist educators. It depends on the context. 

The major dollar impacts are not achieved by cutting and slicing faculty departments. You're picking on easy targets that don't add up to that much.

To get real, what is the 10-year trend in total dollars spent on administrators' salaries vs.total dollars spent on total faculty salaries?

Agreed on all points.  Those are the basics! 

But as shown by the dire title of this thread and 2025 enrollment cliff, I think they are trying to stop the bleeding and save the patient. Once the patient is stabilized, then he can learn better behavior.   

Naturally RPK will be charged with financial recommendations and only secondarily at product nuances.  But to have any credibility, they certainly use some consultants whose careers were educators.

If you plan to stay in your historic mission of a residential bachelors degree that offers both arts and science emphases, you need to cut a major emphasis or add a LOT of revenue.  Hopefully one charge to RPK is to evaluate assets which could be sold and the recommend investments from new sustained revenue. You can't keep owning a lake house if you are underwater every year in your family budget. or maybe you can if your credit cards have high limits? 

How fast does it need to be sold?  They have to consolidate in terms of land. Could we convert the cavernous library or union into  high rent apartments and/or turn a large section of the huge campus into a retirement complex? That's where the growth is.

Okay I could not stay away until Christmas.  Davidson had a $700+ million endowment already several years ago.  That size is over twice ours.  And they have a very wealthy "old money" consistency of parents and alumni that has been solid for a long time.  Probably some tobacco money.

The much closer parallels to Valpo are Bradley, Drake and Evansville in terms of endowment, midwestern location, and risks of deep discounting of tuition. The structural problems at Bradley and Drake are very similar, especially at Bradley. I have posted Bradley budget links and you can google those two words easily.  The threats are high in our size category.

Like Bradley and Drake, Butler is an obvious comp in size and midwest location, but maybe the pharmacy school injects strong cash and maybe butler has a stronger parent/alumni base in terms of wealth. They are also in a dynamic growing city, located well for student life off campus.

I thought the ruling said that the Brauer and the law prof had no standing to sue.  In that case they strategic planning rationale had nothing to do with it.

Awesome stories.  I got a "Day of Giving" preview email that had a bunch of alumni stories packed into one email. 

This one probably has more impact than most of them.  So it seems like a great one for the "next" email.  Hopefully more of those go out more often.  This hints at a lead up strategy of more emails. I would applaud these. Ideally shorter than yesterday's and more frequent. I think it might be the first one I have seen in several weeks. But I may be wrong.

Facebook is great for quick breaking stories that fade quickly over a few weeks.  But you are preaching to the "choir" of dedicated alumni already.  To reach out farther you have to use email and mail to pull them into Facebook.

Well let's enjoy the holiday season and the start of basketball!  I will see everybody in January.

Hopefully the New Year will ring in (or have rung in) good news on two topics:

1)  Tuition income (rather than just the  of students) came in better than hoped in fall 2023.  The # of students only half the story.

2)  Paintings get sold for a high price, and that the dorm can be built to get on-line by July 2025.  But with some detective work, smart buyer agents will have the leverage because the school needs to sell on that timeline.   

Can you send a link without requiring drop box?

Well said, '62.  There are layers of nuance in the whole issue of the British land grant 9148 to the Jews and the historic rationale. We can debate that rationale reasonably and consider the two-state solutions.

But.... SADLY again,...U.S. and European students and their idiotic teachers digest world events into "oppressors and oppressed."  In this very difficult Israeli history, those words could be reasonably used at points in their 1948-2023 history.   Current universities and their 1960s radical professor types have cheapened those two terms so badly in contrived problems that students fail to see a difference between murder and disagreement. 

Oh, you are right.  Kudos to Baylor, Notre Dame for leading as FOUNDERS! Arizona, ASU, and Miami, FL are notable public flagships! 

And yes, thank you re the CCCU. The membership has Wheaton and the LCMS Concordias.  But Valparaiso is NOT nor are any of the  ELCA colleges.  Like their pastors and churches, they have chosen the route of DEI envy and social grievance as a cause to exist.  Mysteriously, no one is attending their churches anymore.

Coalition Founders (alphabetical order)

Ari Berman, President, Yeshiva University
Terrence Cheng, Chancellor, Connecticut State Colleges and Universities
Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University
Rochelle L. Ford, President, Dillard University
Julio Frenk, President, University of Miami
E. Gordon Gee, President, West Virginia University
Shirley Hoogstra, President, Council for Christian Colleges, and Universities
John I. Jenkins, President, University of Notre Dame
Kenneth A. Jessell, President, Florida International University
Alan Kadish, President, Touro University
John B. King, Chancellor, The State University of New York (SUNY)
Ronald D. Liebowitz, President, Brandeis University
Linda Livingstone, President, Baylor University
Michael L. Lomax, President, United Negro College Fund
Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor, The City University of New York (CUNY)
Marty Meehan, President, University of Massachusetts
Robert C. Robbins, President, University of Arizona
R. Gerald Turner, President, SMU

What did you really expect if we are already ashamed of the name "Crusaders" for actions taken 800 years ago.

It's not quite as prevalent as it sounds in calling it "100 universities."   There are over a dozen SUNYs (not Sunnis), and nearly all of the schools very small. Not coincidentally, they probably don't rely on enrolling a lot of students who despite Israel. 

Notably I see no Lutheran schools of any kind.  I didn't see at a glance any major flagships.  I didn't see any elite or ivy privates. That should be no surprise.  Those schools are reaping what they have sown in teaching that grievance is virtue and protesting signals that virtue. If you really want virtue points you enforce a faculty clause to reflexively seek out minorities and presume their virtue. When you do, you create oppressed people as an industry and that teaching now takes on a life of its own. Hard to feel sorry for them now.  Good luck to Cornell, Columbia, and Penn working with their mega-donors.  MLK tried to go in the direction that all are equal and need to be viewed as individuals. But the DEI and grievance industry took root, finding its most fertile soil on campus and media.

Breaking news:  Ohio State and  Rutgers fed stolen signs to Purdue prior to their 2022 Big Ten Championship game. 

We will see some blood on the field in Ann Arbor when they host the Buckeyes. My bet is on the Wolverines.

It's a sarcastic reference to our old "Mid-Continent" conference of 1994-2004.  Many older posters dating back into the  early 2000s will our recall our vigilant drumbeat, a true "Crusade" to leave this horrific conference. Many blamed Pres. Harre, who later turned to be a strong advocate for moving up to the Horizon. 

So, I sought the true MIDDLE OF THE CONTINENT (yes..Rugby, ND) from which to launch my formidable sarcastic and data-guided missles along with many other posters.  The Mid-Con cities spanned from Youngstown State in eastern Ohio to Southern Utah, several hours from Vegas.  The massive footprint later added Centenary in Shreveport, LA as an impressive "Where's Waldo" addition.

For those newer to the board, Valpo won its tournament and the NCAA bid in 1996, 1997, 1998, and then in 2000, 2002, and 2004 (under Scott).  Then LaBarbera was hired as the new AD and got us into the Horizon League quickly in 2005. At the time and through 2012 or so, it had Butler. UW-M had also won NCAA games.  That 7 year delay in moving up to play Butler and horizon teams cost us dearly and quandered the publicity boon we gained from "The Shot" in 1998'

On my quick read, I don't see any signal of "free" either.  The clue to me is that it requires that you receive a Pell grant.  By requiring a Pell grant Valpo is able to immediately screen for student need and they immediately have a source of income.  Whether the student pays a cost above the Pell grant is something I don't know.

Valpo was always looking for football players on Pell grants because they couldn't give athletics scholarship.  The Pell grants brought actual money to the school.

Interesting.

isn't that similar to what VU is doing with Valpo Access or Access Valpo?  I haven't paid attention to the details of it.

Again, it is pointless to draw conclusions from tiny .01 statistics of violent crime. They are random whether in Beverly Hills or in Appalachia and typically have a mental illness element.  The media needs a fixation every 24 hour news cycle and naturally shuts down all other stories to keep eyes on their cable channel versus others who are playing it round the clock.  But to contradict my point just a bit, you likely could demonstrate with stats that you are less safe off campus at Marquette or Saint Louis U.

I forgot to include in my last post other random gun incidents in Highland Park, Waukesha, and the Indianapolis mall in the last two years. The elements of mental illness there are more marginal, but certainly present. Sadly it is inevitable that more illness will pop up. And they will be random so please don't try to draw causal links from coincidences. 

I didn't do well in statistics but I do recall one very serous point.  It is called the "standard deviation."  There is a burden of proof on wiser and objective scientific method to use a sufficient quantity and prove a notable trend. 

Nearly all media reports are guilty of seeking out motives for killings by obviously mentally ill people.   In 90% of multiple murders or random ones, the largest and most proximate cause element is the delusional state of the person.  If you dig deeper into nearly all these stories there are flashings signs of a mental illness months or years before the killing(s.)  Unfortunately perception is reality. But the focus on a root motive by media is harmful with collateral damage to many.

Bottom line, this Valpo killing was 98% likely to have been random.  Now it is true that a paranoia can grow out of a delusion that fixates on a grievance of some kind.  But perfectly sane people, especially men, can very sadly be hit rapidly with the illnesses.  The media just loves to run with the grievance when it fits a claim of wide ranging bias and prejudice.  Some of the obvious examples are the Maine shooter in October, Gabby Giffords, Sandy Hook, Florida HS, Highland Park, the long ago Denver movie shooter, Virginia Tech shooter, Northern Illinois shooter. And of course there are weekly stories of people attacking police, and many others I can't recall off hand. 

Buffalo and the El Paso Wal-Mart clearly were racial. And yet the proximate trigger might have been a severe mental break.  But the Gifford shooting had zero to do with politics as they combed his writings. But the media never circled back as they liked the narrative.

As an aside the purposeful kllings in the name of Islam generally do not dwell on the motives even when the killer shouts Allah akbar as he shoots.   

That GCU-GCE relationships sure does sound dubious.  I think we all know that non-profit status doesn't mean you have to spend out all surplus every year.  You just can't have any direct compensation relationship of that surplus to officers. Performance bonusses are a gray area sometimes. They can be given, but I think it has to be autonomous each year and not contractual. 

What kind of services does GCE provide as a public company?

I had the chance to visit GCU a few years ago, maybe 2017 or 2018.  It is virtually all newly built and beautiful. It is bustling with undergraduate walking traffic between all the buildings and the amenities are cutting edge such as the GCU home arena. The new buildings do raise the question of how they could be built so quickly. It sure looks like the U. of Phoenix was essentially a for-profit like GCE and stacked up the money to build it. How can Mueller lead both within IRS law ? 

The PhD program does seem like a hook for the government to grab.

GCU used a charter for a small baptist university as a base to build a giant not-for-profit. They raised cash through public stock. That cash gave them a huge ability to build a brand new campus. Naturally tuition revenue flowed fast into the operation generating major cash. Now, due to the on-line courses market drying up, they want to use their cash to compete with non-profit colleges. That is unfair and not what a college charter is intended to achieve. It's certainly not the "spirit" of the law and is very likely not fully legal.

If GCU has a loophole legally I guess it will be okay. But it does like dicey.  But I do HATE compensating buyers for contract language they simply didn't read. Or compensate them with my tax money because same folks didn't look into PhD cost factors.  David81 et al know that realm better. Cordray is all into over-protection of consumer ignorance, jeopardizing contract law and creating moral hazard.   

Great.  Whether good or bad, at least we have clarity at long last.   

The big question now is whether a new dorms can feasibly open by Fall 2024?  Doubtful, but maybe all is set on the design side to bid it and go.  They will battle winter during early phase.  I am guessing Fall 2025 is more realistic.  But I don't know that industry. So I can't judge whether the lawsuit cost us a full year of student recruitment promises.

It's too bad Homecoming can't move all the way back to the start of Hoops practice, but I don't think weather would be a good bet on October 15. 

Even without that date, could something be organized around basketball without stepping all over volleyball and football that weekend? It's a hard line to walk I guess. 

Everything I hear about Powell is hard work, focus, outreach and energy.   I consider that very good news.

I hope we get a faster pace of good news than October brought to this thread.