 |
 |
 |
 |
MONTHLY UPDATE
UPDATE CONTD 1
UPDATE CONTD 2
UPDATE CONTD 3
UPDATE CONTD 4
UPDATE CONTD 5
UPDATE CONTD 6
UPDATE CONTD 7
UPDATE CONTD 8
STUDENTS SPEAK
QUALIFICATIONS
EVALUATION FORM
LINKS
MEMOS
May 23 1994
Sept 6 1995
March 20 1997
April 3 1997
Jan 5 1998
March 31 1998
Sept 15 1999
May 17 2000
Sept 11 2000
Oct 16 2000
Nov 14 2000
Nov 15 2000
Feb 10 2001
March 15 2001
March 19 2001
June 9 2003
April 17 2006
Sept 18 2006
Sept 27 2006
Oct 23 2006
Dec 9 2007
Dec 16 2007
| Update Continued 7 |
) DEAN OF DUMBING-DOWN 97. (2/1/08) REALITY CHECK Prez Mellow's penchant for trumpeting LaGuardia as one of the top 3 community colleges on the planet, or some such similar nonsense, didn't strike us as quite credible - so we checked around on Google and found Washington Monthly's list of the 30 top community colleges in the nation. Yikes! - ole LaG is not among them! See the following: www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0709.ccrankings.html *************** 98. (4/12/08) 120,000 VISITS LaGuardiacorruption.com, the website that attempts to stanch the torrent of BS that flows continuously from LaGuardia's bosses and their cronies, celebrated its 120,000th visit yesterday. This comes to an average of about 47 visits per day during the past seven years - a mere finger in the dike, but it's all we've got folks. Please continue to address your comments, criticisms and words of encouragement to our guestbook and to mingala1@aol.com. *************** 99. (7/2/08) MELLOW DISSOLVES COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPT In her latest psychotic outburst, Prez Mellow has settled her years-old vendetta against the CIS Dept by dissolving the Dept! The CIS Dept has officially ceased to exist and its tenured faculty members have been dispersed to other Depts, where they will not be warmly welcomed. With this vicious act, LaGuardia's Queen and her cronies once again demonstrate their fanatical need to maintain absolute power and their utter disregard for the rights of faculty and students. As per usual at these atrocities, not a word of protest was heard from the Faculty of Walking Dead or their union. *************** 100. (7/29/08) PRESERVING TRADITION There are old-timers who maintain that LaGuardia's first President, Joe Shenker, was a thoroughgoing lowlife who was asked to depart in disgrace under a cloud of alleged corruption and mismanagement, not to mention workplace alcoholism and scandalous sexual misconduct involving several female faculty members. These allegations may or may not be true. Nonetheless, on Aug. 14 we will rename LaGuardia’s Main Building in his honor. How utterly appropriate! What's next? Will the E Building become the Elvin Escano Institute for Ethical Studies? *************** 101. (10/28/08) POSTED ON OUR MESSAGE BOARD YESTERDAY Is there a page like this for BMCC? The purging of the most competent and popular professors -and the tenuring and promotion of stool pigeons- is also common practice at Borough of Manhattan Community College. We live in a profoundly racist society, and educational institutions that "serve" predominantly Black and Hispanic students are normally run this way. In addition to student somnolence, a huge part of the problem at CUNY is the union, PSC-CUNY. Its elderly white "leaders" are in bed with the bosses, and until they are replaced by union militants willing to engage in class struggle, things are only going to get worse and worse. *************** 102. (11/29/09) PROF. MILLMAN'S FAREWELL TO LAGUARDIA Dear Colleagues, Greetings to the LaGuardia gulag from a blissful retiree! Faculty may rest assured that Laguardiacorruption.com will continue to broadcast your plight as loudly as ever to the worldwide higher-ed community. Most encouragingly, today Google ranks the website #4 out of 198,000 hits when one searches “LaGuardia Community College”. So, sure, it’s a long shot, but LaGuardia may yet one day come to resemble a college. Best wishes to those who have the wisdom to recognize the corrupt administrative morass that prevents this and to those with the courage to do something about it. Good luck also to the delightful, if naive, students whom I have always adored. And finally, Gail, sweetheart, all the best in your meteoric rise to obscurity. M. Millman *************** 103. (12/19/08) CUNY'S DECEITFUL TRICKS CUNY’s “open admissions” policy means that thousands of very poorly educated students are admitted to its colleges each year. How are these students to be educated and granted college degrees? This next-to-impossible task is addressed in two different, equally dishonest, ways - one at the community college level and one at the senior college level. We will use Mathematics as an example. Similar remarks apply to English. At the community colleges, students are required to pass the “Compass” exam in remedial arithmetic and elementary algebra before proceeding to college level math courses. However, while the average passing score on this standardized test in colleges across the country is 44, the passing score at CUNY colleges is 30! How, then, are those who barely pass the Compass exam able to cope with ensuing college level courses? Simple. Course contents are watered down to the barest essentials, requiring only rote memorization of basic rules by students, and exams are “dumbed down” to a level that makes an honest Prof. blush. For good measure, grade inflation is rampant. Naïve graduates are thereby deceived into believing they have been prepared to enter either a senior college or the workforce. In reality, they receive little education and a practically worthless degree. At the senior college level, ill-prepared students who have nevertheless obtained a rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic and elementary algebra in high school are deceived in a different way. Here, an attempt is made to give the appearance of high academic standards. Course contents are rigorous, and exams are the real thing. For example, sample Calculus final exams appearing on the Queens College (CUNY’s “flagship” senior college) Mathematics Department website would give an MIT student pause. In the real world, the vast majority of math students at CUNY institutions would have no hope of passing such courses. However, at CUNY senior colleges, grades are “curved” (euphemism for "inflated"), so that a majority of students pass the courses. Again, degrees are awarded but little education occurs. Most young New Yorkers today see a college degree as the doorway to a better job and a brighter future, and they are right. So why can’t CUNY supply these degrees in an honest way rather than resorting to the deceitful tricks described above? The answer may very well be that such a goal is impossible, at least within the time constraints of traditional two and four-year colleges. Perhaps we need a new kind of school - a one year post high school institution interposed between high school graduation and college entrance - that would patch up the damage caused by New York’s pitiful, but ingrained, secondary education system. Since the advent of open admissions almost forty years ago, similar ideas have been considered occasionally but have never been taken seriously. One thing, however, is certain: requiring New York taxpayers to help finance CUNY's fraud, particularly in these troubled economic times, is unconscionable. *************** 104. (12/23/08) YESTERDAY'S GUESTBOOK POST Name: Community College Mathematican Email Address: philoponus6@hotmail.com Homepage URL: Title of Homepage: City: Upstate State: NY Country: United States Site Rating: Excellent Referred By: Friend Comments: Not a whole lot new here. Community colleges in general have bloated, egocentric administrations, and are enrollment driven. People are put into positions of power that the egocentric administrations can control, and promotions are passed out based strictly on enrollment considerations. This is too bad, because community colleges have a unique opportunity to be great places of higher learning, and to be a genuine gateway to higher ed for those that have been kept out in the past. Instead, they often chase after quick $$$, and subsequently offer a substandard, pseudo education that is a gateway to nowhere. Keep up the good work! *************** 105. (4/14/09) EMAIL FROM A READER As despicable as the practices described in the article [i.e., website] are, I think they are not unique to LaGuardia Community College. In fact, they are more widespread in academia than one might think (particularly the practices of cronyism, promotion of incompetent faculty and administrators who are part of the "old boy" network, and grade inflation). Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, is a case in point. It has a respectable reputation, but many of the practices described in the article are standard procedure there. *************** 106. (5/22/09) EMAIL FROM ANOTHER READER Very interesting situation. Unfortunately, based on my experience, this kind of academic fraud and corruption is becoming more of the rule than the exception at the "non-prestige" universities around the country. And, unfortunately for me, I have a habit of pointing out the lack of clothes on the Emperor before getting tenure. The good side of that is that it has provided me with opportunities to see how broken the higher ed system is in the U.S., at both private and public schools, and in several geographic areas. I am thinking very strongly about writing a book about it after I either get tenure or retire. Keep up the good fight--I'll be forwarding info about LaGuardia to several of my colleagues who have similar interests. Dr. XX Asst. Professor, Communications XX State University *************** 107. (8/26/09) LAGUARDIA SQUANDERS ANOTHER $26,000 OF TAXPAYER MONEY The inept and politically crippled Math department decided not to rehire two adjuncts last year. These men were actually dedicated and effective instructors, each having almost 20 years of basic-skills teaching experience at LaGuardia. They sued on the issue of ageism and recently settled for $13,000 each. This type of routine bungling at CUNY is the combined result of frightfully idiotic academic decision-making and a legal team composed exclusively of alumni of East Cowflop Law School. *************** 108. (11/19/09) LAGUARDIACORRUPTION.COM HITS ALL-TIME HIGH ON GOOGLE Today's search for "LaGuardia Community College" on Google showed us ranked 3rd out of 138,000 hits, placing us ahead of the LaGuardia library website as well as nine other official LaGuardia websites. This, combined with recent record numbers of complimentary e-mails, assures us that our efforts to expose corruption at LaGuardia over the years have been successful well beyond expectations. *************** 109. (11/29/09) COMMENTS ON A RADIO INTERVIEW OF PREZ MELLOW Wish [they] had done some research about what goes on behind the scenes at LaGuardia CC. I taught for decades in the Mathematics Department there. Its full-time faculty in the majority does not even know basic high-school math (trigonometry, etc.), having received their degrees from diploma mills. Qualified faculty are driven out of the department. It's been turned into a racial battle zone. The new chair is trying to turn it around, but is facing constant resistance from the entrenched powers represented by Mellow. The computer science department was liquidated by fiat by Mellow. This is no great loss--many of them know nothing about computers at all, but got their degree from diploma mills. Many other CUNY community colleges function on the same woefully low level. BMCC is a prime example of this. Kingsborough CC is a country club, very little education goes on there. Queensborough CC functions much better, which is not to say particularly well. The same for Bronx CC. The other question is, why is job-creation, funneling seed money into businesses, the province of a community college? The answer: It's all about the money. If there's grant money to be had, you know Mellow will run after it, no matter how tangential it is to the community college's real mission. Airhead in chief Jail Mellow on the Brian Lehrer show, gobbling down the grant money from Goldman Sachs. I'd love to see how the money is actually spent. But... there is no mention of real education in this segment. Maybe because LaGuardia's mission is not education after all. *************** 110. (12/27/09) CORRUPTION GALORE I am a whistle blower at C.S.I. [CUNY College of Staten Island] - spoke up against theft of time, of services, of false reports, and the no shows that were in our office ala Susan Bruno - who was allowed by RFCUNY to do nothing, and retaliation against anyone who questioned authority about it. A President stepped down, The Head of Grants and Research needed to leave, The Provost, and The Head of Finance now the Secretary of State in the Albany Senate - all left at CSI - coincidence? NO.... Go to The RFCUNY Web and you will see a whistle blowers hotline established that reports fraud sof 12/23/05 - ain't no coincidence. Not a word or document I presented can be denied - and the threats such as "Shut up or else" had witnesses, and "I warn you what WE will do" had witnesses the college refused to look into. Freedom of speech has been replaced by fear of reprisal and it is not just at LaGuardia. The $409,000 NYU fraud joke from one department in just one college is an awful lot of tuition increases, Hundreds of Millions in California at one University where when questioned The Dean - a former head of the food and drug administration was terminated, same as The I.G. at CUNY for questioning 16 million, Zeller in Boston - all terminated when they spoke up. Moskenko, Stempel, Stein - those that speak up and if listened to can lower tuition. Those students at NYU that requested accountability are the true heroes - and it took a student not the paid well accountants on staff to realize that $409,000 dollars worth of 13,000 invoices were from a liquor store. But Susan Bruno - the daughter of Joe is the cake - false and doctored resumes for a position that pays dividends long after she is gone, or the $500,000 economic development center on campus that has no employees, no tax filings and no assistance to the community. And sometimes employees as outline in e-mail from Albany all too real, and the need to be creative in their spending in the future regarding grant money adds new meaning to the word creative. Thank you and have a great holiday, Robert Stein *************** 111. (12/28/09) E-MAIL FROM HUNTER COLLEGE Good luck! It's the same at Hunter College where students are forced to buy books with programs they don't need and don't work (Alex software), new editions every semester... and, where adjunct professors admit, they are forced to require certain books to meet sales... Sebastian *************** 112. (1/1/10) YESTERDAY'S MESSAGE BOARD POST General Comments (msg 186 of 186) posted by James Magliano from IP address 173.3.200.117 on 12/31/09 17:51:43 I'm amazed. I started reading the site earlier today, and didn't stop until I was done. I've taught mathematics at a community college in New Jersey for 35 years, and I thought I'd seen it all. Even if only a small fraction of what it states is true the conditions at LaGuardia are unbearable. I can tell you where at least some of the Jews who couldn't get jobs at LaGuardia are too. They've come across the river to NJ, giving our students the benefit of their expertise and experience. We even have one mathematics department member who used to work at LaGuardia. Our students deserve better than this! Our country deserves better than this! *************** 113. (1/19/10) TODAY'S E-MAIL I taught at Lehman and was the graduate director there for two years and they would not even interview me for the tenure track job despite all the work I did in their grad program and I did an excellent job. Then they had the nerve to ask me to stay. I told them to shove it. They are just as corrupt in my opinion. I think CUNY is crazy and I have refused all job offers from the system since I left Lehman. There is something terribly wrong with them. Part of it is that we as a country are trying to accomodate students who should not be in college at all. I have a friend who just quit a job in NJ because the college changed a grade of his from an F to a C- because the student has taken the class four times. As mentioned in your many memos, if they do not have the basic skills in place then they will not be able to complete the rest of their course work. We just keep compromising and our degrees mean nothing anymore. It's pathetic. I'm on your side. What has become of us? Suzan Russell English Dept. Montclair U., NJ *************** 114. (1/22/10) RECENT E-MAILS Corruption at LaGuardia, and at CUNY in general, is recognized even at the highest levels of academe: From: ebogan@Princeton.EDU Date: Fri, Jan 22, 2010 12:05 pm Good luck with your fight. Beth Bogan Date: Wed Jan 20, 2010 11:25:31 AM From: Joseph S. Salemi Email Address: js51@nyu.edu Thank God for your site. Its existence is a testament to the survival of both sanity and courage in a few small corners of a nearly totally corrupt and benighted academia. La Guardia Community College has been an open latrine for a very long time now. Its current President is only one in a long line of vicious jackasses, and the English Department in particular has a city-wide reputation for generalized incompetence. I taught as an adjunct in the college's English Department one summer thirty years ago, and just that brief experience left me appalled and disgusted. The students were hard-working and committed to the task of learning better prose style, but the English Department itself was composed of flaky New-Age twits who constantly placed obstacles in the path of good teaching and learning. There was no interest whatsoever on the part of the full-time English faculty to improve student writing -- only to implement silly theories and compel the use of trendy textbooks. *************** 115. (2/13/10) E-MAIL FROM A LAW SCHOLAR When you have an open-admissions system, what do you expect other than grade inflation? Do you expect the faculty to fail out a high proportion of the students? This is what excessive egalitarianism always yields. Kevin R C Gutzman, JD, PhD Associate Professor of History Western Connecticut State University ************ 116. (4/14/10) GETTING SCREWED BY RED TAPE - A NOT UNCOMMON EVENT AT LA GUARDIA (A RECENT MESSAGE BOARD POST) Graduation Rates (msg 196 of 196) posted by liz from IP address 64.131.237.204 on 03/06/10 20:49:59 as a reply to message 186 I was invited to give a student's perspective on the low graduation rates at La Guardia last semester as part of 'Achieving the Dream', a national initiative to help community college students succeed and to boost graduation rates at community colleges. I am an honor student, and very serious about my goal of getting my degree from La Guardia in a timely manner. I was due to graduate and to transition to a senior college after Spring II of this year. Alas, this is not going to happen, because La Guardia has decided at the last minute to cancel a class that is required for my major. I've looked for the same class in other CUNY schools so I can take it there through epermit, but since the spring semester is about to start, all the classes are closed. This all feels like a cruel joke! Pres. Mellow was all smiles and encouragement at the Achieving the Dream meeting. She seemed interested in discussing and implementing ways the school can help boost its graduation rates, but now I know that it was all an act, much like everything else in La Guardia. It's all pretend. La Guardia is not a learning institution, it is a farce! |
 Sign Guestbook |
 View Guestbook |
| Visitors: 02513 |