Your tax dollars are directly and indirectly funding things like this at American Universities:
- The $6 million Irwin Academic Services Center which serves athletes – about 550 of the total of 37,000 students on campus.
- Framingham State College plans to spend $191,000 building a two-car garage and stone patio for its state-owned president’s house … the college budget is facing a potential $2 million cut.
- The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey spent $80,000 in 2005 to shuttle the head of a volunteer advisory board from her home in the Poconos to the Newark campus.
- At IU of Pennsylvania, students can play in a golf simulator
- The People’s School of Berkeley gave 16 employees severance checks and then rehired them. One employee was fired on April 30th, hired on May 1st and received a severance check of $100,202.
There’s much more of course. That is from Andrew Gillen.
Every time I pass a local government school and see large LCD signs outside the school, huge campuses, college-style weight rooms, deluxe lit tennis courts, huge new auditoriums and performing arts centers, etc. then get home and hear about how they are so out of money, while at the same time turning out an increasingly ignorant product, I just shake my head.
IU of Pennsylvania must have been a typo, Wintercow — U of P.
But nevertheless revolting. The golf simulator must be one of those contraptions where they hook you up in a dry suit with laser reflectors. Some people I know, including one of your fellow marshals (not my wife) did it, but paid for it with after-tax dollars.
My local school district just bought artificial turf for its football field, and football practice field, for $1.2 million. The coaches were complaining about dust during practice, so we ripped up sod that would probably go for $8 per square yard. It is supposed to reduce maintenance costs, although the employee driving the $6,000 mower has yet to be identified for a layoff. I just wish they would build a nice public golf practice facility nearby. This is a modest demand, and it’s for the kids, who should not be deprived.