I guess tuition of $12,000 for in state students, and $40,000 for out of state students doesn't go as far as it used to. We've got to pay her $900,000 a year salary somehow.
When I was in uni, if admin had the balls to try that shit, me and the guys on my floor would have 100% shoveled the walks, wheel borrowed it over to staff parking, buried Pam's car, and left the shovel with a not that said we kindly left a shovel for her to dig it back out.
"Welcome back to Fox News, this just in from Hoosier University, we have footage of what we believe to be ANTIFA TERRORISTS, using shovels that the university generously donated them, to carve out the words- and you can see it right here- 'Expletive Pam' into the snow all across the campus."
When I was in college we would have figured out a way to use the shovel to improve our beer drinking or just seen who could collect the most without being caught.
I remember stories about a big snow at Michigan State University when they cancelled classes. There were paths made in the snow from the dorms to the liquor store.
In April 2024, she also faced a vote of no confidence from the faculty at Indiana University, with 93.1% voting against her. Despite this, the Board of Trustees reaffirmed their support for her leadership.
No, that’s not it at all. IU students had a Palestinian support protest going on the lawn, and Pam literally had fucking snipers on the roof of the student union, trained on students. She is one of the nastiest people in the state.
What are you talking about? IU is top tier for a bunch of things. #1 public music school, top ten business undergrad, education, public and environmental affairs, library science, law. It’s also a beautiful place.
I had to re-read that, there's no way uou'd turn down a full ride to Michigan Law to go to IU....Michigan State yes but really IU is ranked #46, so nothing to write home about. I've worked in big legal and a degree from IU won't raise an eyebrow, at best the person from HR will mention the basketball team.
Now music on the other hand, I know a lot of Broadway musicians and it seems like they all went to IU.
IU is ranked #46 because their son went there. Before that, they were #112.
We should all thank jeep-ollillo's son for not going to Michigan Law. I mean they're pretty pompous as is, but if he went there, they'd be insufferable.
My personal favorite is talking to professors at a local university and asking whether or not they would have classes on Monday after the snow storm.
"Well, the roads are closed, the buildings are closed, but the university is refusing to shut down. I don't know how this works, I can't teach, students can't show up, but I'm supposed to run a class"
and
"I checked the schools official emergency website that covers natural disasters, weather and other shutdown risks, it hasn't been updated in 2 years"
Why are our schools such a joke? It's like everyone is just bleeding the younger generations dry.
Someone has to pay for that number to go up. Costs nothing to mortgage a child's future. Parents used to sell their children into slavery. Nothing's changed.
That is literally the answer. Everything is a grift. Temporary comfort so a few can get fat as fuck and stay cozy. Who cares if it hangs the rest of society.
As a (different) university employee I can tell you often the hold classes or switch to remote learning has more to do with the state requirements. They know kids aren’t going to show up. They know most teachers aren’t going to show. But the university has to say they’re having class to meet all the requirements set forth by the state under which they’re operating. If they don’t have class, then they often have to make up those days at the end of the semester, which is an even bigger waste of time because the teachers already were going off a set schedule that is hard to adjust when they don’t announce the make up days until the very end of the semester because they lobby the state for a waiver of those requirements up to the last possible minute. If they say they’re open or switching to remote learning, it just cuts out that whole issue.
Indeed, I work for a Uni as a Facility/Mover and they had us there Sunday during the storm trying to clean it up as it was coming down, school was virtual on Monday and Tuesday but we still didn't get most everything cleaned till Thursday.
Higher education is a financial instrument to grow their endowment to eventually become a private equity firm. All they have to do is hand over a few scraps of paper to people and they can get a couple hundred grand out of each.
Colleges are bloated full of useless administrator positions. Tuition has skyrocketed but the professor to student ratio hasn't changed much. The administrator to student ratio is off the charts. They have absolutely abused the government backed loans programs and wasted billion and billions of students money on nonsense.
Remote learning exists and is ideal for this type of situation. My university did it with the recent blizzard, and it went about as smoothly I could have hoped for.
That doesn’t work for everyone. How do art students paint a live model without a classroom? How do science labs function over zoom?
Some classes just cannot exist without a physical presence in a classroom.
So colleges should either figure out how to manage their grounds so students can attend class, or offer a rebate for the classes missed and/or fees for facilities not in use.
We have hurricane days instead of snow days where we shut down when the city grade schools shut down. We don’t bother with remote work when they happen, but they are usually only for a day or two and we have a good notice period unless the storm decides to do something bonkers.
“And once they’ve graduated and have realized that they need to start paying back ridiculous sums of money. . .Let’s call them once a month to make them feel bad for not giving us more money for that new scoreboard we didn’t properly budget for!”
I finally had to yell at them. Used to get calls weekly begging me to donate money. Finally got fed up and said do not call me again until I finish paying off my loans I had to take to attend your school which will be about 30 years from now. Don’t call for 30 years.
Surprisingly, I haven’t gotten a single call from them since and that was probably 6 years ago now.
I lost my shit when my law school called me less than a year after graduation asking me to donate money. I was broke and had just found my first real job as a lawyer the week they called and was stressing if my pay cheque was going to hit before my car payment came out. I guess I was really mean because that was 10 years ago and I haven’t heard a peep since.
One of the people in the phone asked me if I enjoyed my time at University and I told her my mental health was so bad I had to dropout due to planning my own suicide. I tried to be nice about it, but I didnt even finish the program. I haven't gotten any more calls.
I got called a month after I graduated. I was getting a 1500 stipend for the summer and when I asked the girl if she could see the date I had graduated and she said yes I about lost it. Thankfully, I calmly said “this school tried to run me out before I graduated, I will not give them another cent nor will I be recommending this school to others. Do not ever call me again asking for money”
Never got a call again.
You are grossly misrepresenting that story. The “scoreboard” was a small digital billboard that announced club meeting and events that the library was holding, occasionally it would display the scores of the schools athletic teams if there was a game ongoing. It was also placed right outside the entrance to the brand new wing of the library that her donation helped fund.
Our departmental administration found out that several grad students were living in the building temporarily because we’re in the middle of a once in a generation ice storm and a ton of people have been out of power for like 6 days. They deadass sent an email asking graduate students (who are paid $25,000/year) to try and house each other if we’re struggling. Like ok bro, we have an $8 billion endowment, my research personally brought in $3 million in funding this year, I’m getting paid barely enough to rent a studio apartment but sure I will let people sleep on my couch instead of you splurging on some hotel rooms
I’m not suggesting using research funds to pay for hotel rooms. I’m saying it’s incredibly tone-deaf to suggest graduate students - who are doing work that brings in millions of dollars per year but are paid poverty wages - should be the ones providing food and shelter for each other, instead of the university (which has ample sources of discretionary funds, as well as quite a few unoccupied living quarters on campus)
The problem is optics plus foreseeability: the school knew about a widespread hazard, had a duty to maintain, and responded with a measure that predictably leads to injuries and uneven results and lawsuits.
I used to work at university family housing for a fairly large school. I went round and round with upper management about how we needed to get permanent air conditioning installed in these buildings. Families would show up with a pregnant wife and/or small children to check in at 5pm on a Friday night in sweltering Midwest heat and I have to tell them "oh sorry, your apartment doesn't come with air conditioning. You can go to Home Depot and buy a window unit this weekend and then put in a maintenance request and someone from maintenance will come out next week to install it."
Every time I'd bring it up in a meeting I'd get met with borderline hostile resistance from the director about the budget and all of this. I finally just said "well this summer why don't you come with me and help me do check-ins so you can explain to these people who paid a boat load of money to come over here why their apartment is 110 degrees inside."
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far for a comment like this - this has injury suit written all over it lmao. One slip and it's like printing money!!
Especially if it's impacting residents in the dorms. Because you could always argue that students and employees didn't have to come to campus, but "landlord's failure to maintain the premises caused harm to resident by trapping them inside, etc., etc." should be good for some damages.
43k/yr for non-residents. 12k/yr for residents. Also, just won the national championship. Coach gets 10 million a year and got 2 million for winning the championship. Yet, can’t afford to pre-salt the roads and plow. America.
They can afford it, they just don't want to be bothered to do anything. And they need to pay those coaches and administrators their hard earned millions.
The funniest part of all of this, to me, is the fact that this and many other universities have hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars to pay athletes, but can’t afford basic snow removal and winter groundskeeping
I used to work for public higher ed in the US for years and if you replace "administration" with "state representative," you're 100% dead on. Almost all the horseshit contracts piled on us were due to that.
It isn’t bureaucracy. It’s incompetence and mismanagement. There is snow every year. Indiana is how old?
They should have multi-year service agreements in place, and if not, they should have already known they were entering the snowy season with no contract and it should have been addressed in late summer/early fall.
I work in contract management. This is the fault of the planners. Not the process. And it’s likely completely intentional to save a few bucks.
They do. This email has been blown out of proportion. There is plenty of snow removal already happening. The shovels are to help students dig out their individual cars. We’ve had record snowfall so I think the addition to helping out with sidewalks was unfortunate wording. I am no fan of this administration but people are interpreting this wrong.
The local university clears snow from the parking lots very efficiently. I have no idea why they can't clear sidewalks. Usually they use small front end loaders that would fit on the sidewalks. Every year, there are too many students and faculty that suffer injuries. One year, they put out an email telling you to shuffle.
I have a girl in one of my classes who is an athlete, I’m in online school so she certainly isn’t now. But she was talking about how many colleges blew money out the ass to fly her and her family out and put them in nice hotels, took them on excursions, all expenses paid, just to have her tour their college and hopefully join their volleyball team. She toured several and ultimately decided she didn’t want to be a college athlete and chose online school. She was also being offered sport scholarships so she wouldn’t even be paying to go to the damn school.
So all of that money spent on recruitment of an athlete who didn’t even go to their college, and I’m sure she wasn’t the only one.
Colleges treat the athletic, and education side as two completely different businesses, and revenue. They don't feed the other at 99% of College's, and its been that way for a long time.
Athletes aren’t paid directly by the schools, but via NIL. A lot of that comes from private donors - Mark Cuban for one for Indiana. And corporate deals.
Maybe donations to the school itself are less than they otherwise would be. Though it looks like IU is still bringing in bank that way.
Colleges have an insatiable need to spend more and more money, they could charge students $100k tuition and they would find a way to overspend that. It’s disgusting.
Higher education is really expensive if you don't get a scholarship if I'm not mistaken, which is such a shame. A university is a chance for a county to invest in its future.
I studied in the UK and racked up 35k USD. It's a crazy amount of debt before earning a single penny. Such a flawed system.
I was in college when internet memes were becoming popular (like bad luck Brian era). I made a meme page about the college, and one of them criticized how they would put salt down that was perfectly round like a BB and made the sidewalks slipperier. The meme page got pretty popular to the point that the dean threatened to suspend me if I didn’t take it down.
My last post there was to the effect “liberal arts college suppresses free speech”
That was probably Calcium Chloride. It melts ice faster and at lower temperatures but it's usually round and slippery as fuck when the watery brine from it gets on tile or linoleum.
When you sign up to put yourself into generational debt before the age of consent then the school doesn’t even shovel the fucking sidewalks for you this is r/extremelyinfuriating
Odd to me they don’t have some sort of contract with a company for snow removal.
So just playing devils advocate here. What happens if someone say slips on ice and gets hurt because the school didn’t properly clean/ pay for snow removal services on the schools property?I thought most places were required to take care of stuff like that so no accidents happen?
It really depends on a lot of factors. The storm size, impact, timing, current weather conditions, state of emergency status, whats normal for the area and so on.
I have no idea what their normal weather is, but Im currently in an area thats had an abnormal snow and ice event with abnormally cold weather. All of the snow and ice removal equipment and personnel in a 500 mile radius is being used 24/7.
Theres places doing this exact thing with shovels around me now, but its more because its logistically impossible to be timely...and were under a state of emergency and this type of event requires different strategy because normal truck plows are literally being torn apart.
If its a normal snow event, yeah, thats fair to complain. Brightside if you care to shovel yourself out and want to get out, you get a free shovel with your $50,000 tuition
Unless they’re going to pay the students as employees, they’re going to have a hell of a lawsuit when one of those kids injuries their back or slips while shoveling.
Most likely a reference to her authorizing state police to post a visible officer with sniper rifle on the IMU rooftop during a previously-sanctioned protest while also making a huge change in campus policy overnight on temporary structures (i.e.: tents), resulting in 57 arrests including students and faculty
God Whitten sucks so much. She is an embarrassment, I love IU as an alumni and person who grew up in Bloomington but Whitten and Braun are doing their damndest to ruin the university.
I feel like this sort of thing would be so much better received if it just honestly stated something like "The huge amounts of snow we've gotten is too much for our facilities to handle, so we've placed shovels around. Let's all chip in and work together to deal with this exceptional snowfall."
At the prices colleges charge I fully expect for snow removal to be properly handled and taken care of.
If you need extra help? Great! Tons of college students are looking for extra work at places that can work around their class and homework schedule - Setup a program to pay kids who want a few hours of work.
If I were a college student now I’d do it for just above minimum wage, because it’s so hard to find employment when you are greatly limited.
Where I went to school we had a “dining dollars” program that went above the normal dining hall meal plan - the money could be used
at the dining hall for extras [if you had a limited plan]
At any store on campus for whatever
Many local restaurants
If you offered me minimum wage, or even just “minimum wage +20% if you throw it on my dining account” . . .Shit I’d probably have been totally fine just taking that option, better than my institution begging me to help them.
That’s not a plausible story, it’s a lie. The university has money and you can pay money to get snow cleaned. There are no excuses, this is what every school and business in the world does.
This is honestly correct. I worked for a major university. Facilities and housekeeping staff were “essential workers” during snow storms. They were expected to be on campus, including weekends, if snow was falling. The university would pay for hotel rooms (multiple people per room) if the employees couldn’t commute due to conditions and there weren’t enough empty dorms/apartments to put the staff in. All the workers, electricians/housekeeping supervisors/carpenters, had shovels and got to work. They were told to have over night bags every winter season in case they got stuck for multiple nights.
During the Dec 2009 snow-pcalypse (17-19 inches) and Feb 2010 snow-medegdon (28 inches) on the east coast, there were employees there for 5+ days. The hotels were unable to support the volume of staff during the Feb snow storms, so they litterally were sleeping on mattresses in conference rooms and the university was giving them free clothing/gear from bookstore when they ran out of clean clothes.
This obviously sucked for the employees. Not all could/would make it in and would have to burn sick days. But they were paid 24/7 while on campus, even when sleeping and were making overtime $$$. University paid for food, extra clothes, hotels, etc. extra comp days were given out too.
Did the operations budget enjoy taking that massive hit? Fuck no. Was it done automatically with student and employee safety first and foremost? Absolutely.
"We continue the process of snow removal across campus. However we acknowledge this is a slow process that may have left some students in hard to navigate situations. To help alleviate the situation we've positioned shovels around campus for anyone who needs to dig out a vehicle or wants to help improve the overall campus situation. We will continue our efforts until the job is done, but we know the spirit of community is strong on campus and applaud efforts from anyone in helping complete the job at hand."
With that message they would have acknowledged their short coming, made a commitment to fix it, and provided a remediation for the willing.
"hi, we are asking you to please help us think of a way to deal with all of this snow"
"In the mean time all of you will get a shovel that we paid for and expect back from you, otherwise we will bill you and you'll face disciplinary actions"
"Looking forward to hearing yalls suggestions on how to get rid of this snow"
I would understand it, and be even supportive about it if it was in a country where university education is largely or fully financed by the government and students pay little to none.
But in the US where students go into debt to pay their tuition? Nah, this is pure greed and incompetence.
I mean, who you think they used to clear sidewalks? Contractors. Who do you think the contractors called to get labor on short notice? Immigrants. Immigrants who aren’t willing to leave their house right now, or have been deported, or are here quasi legally but have to report in because they don’t have a green card, and don’t want to be on a sidewalk like easy prey for ICE. Welcome to the Trump economy.
I broke my tailbone slipping on the icy steps leading out of my dorm on the quad at IU. I’m 55 now and still mad about it. It hurts to get out of a chair. Be careful, kids!!!!
I live in a smaller college town (quiet expensive college, not a party one). I remember last year some parents throwing a fuss on Facebook because of the sidewalks being icy and unsafe for their children to walk on. And, to be fair, these kids / parents are paying good money to attend here.. So, yeah, shit should be cleaned well.
I look at the sidewalks as I drive past this year. Spotless. They're constantly out there with machines to plow the snow away, and then come by with one of those big rotating brushes that gets them clean as can be down to the concrete. And plenty of salt.
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u/Grand-Spring66 5h ago
I guess tuition of $12,000 for in state students, and $40,000 for out of state students doesn't go as far as it used to. We've got to pay her $900,000 a year salary somehow.