The College Fix

The College Fix presents a roundup of the top scandals, screw-ups, and stupid decisions involving college campuses. This week, madness ensues on one college campus, and the Occupiers have no idea what they are protesting. But first…

3). This is the second week in a row that some idiot students have worked up hysterical frenzies on their respective campuses by fabricating racist threats. Last week, a black student at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside who wanted revenge on university administrators made up a fake hit list with the names of black students, including herself. The police caught on to her act because the only name she could spell correctly was her own.

But this week, two students at Montclair State University in New Jersey upped the stupid ante. Two black female students spray-painted racist graffiti across their own dorm room door, in a possible attempt to make themselves look like victims of a hate crime. And as I said last week, they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.

2). All hell broke lose at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. It was revealed that hundreds of Chinese transfer students had been awarded degrees they hadn’t earned. The dean of the college with a large proportion of the fake graduates is believed to have killed himself in response to the controversy. While it’s still unclear how so much could have gone wrong, administrators, multicultural affairs officers, and other deans could be at fault.

1). TCF’s dear friends, the Occupy folk, had a characteristically melodramatic week, punctuated by occasional embarrassment. First, the embarrassment: Occupiers who arrived to protest the Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C. had no idea what they were agitating against. They came because labor unions paid them. Now that, friends, is astroturfing.

More sincere members of the Occupy moment showed their dedication to abolishing income inequality by opposing a downsizing of the most wealthy and elite establishment in all of higher education: Harvard. The college of the 1% is attempting to weed out some of the 930 full-time employees at its libraries, but Harvard Occupiers oppose any effort to cut down administrative bloat. They are showing “solidarity” with local libraries, they say:

“I hope that it will raise awareness that the Occupy movement is alive and growing. I hope it will connect the local struggle of library layoffs to larger issues of inequality and workers rights globally.”

I suppose it’s fine for super mega rich kids to protest cuts to the super mega rich library at their super mega rich elite university, but trying to connect the dots between this bourgeoisie hissy fit and issues like poverty and joblessness and workers’ rights in other countries is as preposterous as it is offensive. This is Harvard we’re talking about, not Uganda.

Like The College Fix on Facebook.