Dining With Hitler

     In 2012 Morris Berger graduated from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri with a Bachelor's Degree in History. After his college graduation he taught history at a Missouri high school where he was also on the football coaching staff. Mr. Berger, more interested in coaching than history, took an assistant coaching position at Missouri Western State University in St. Josephs. He next joined the coaching staff at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater before moving on to Texas State University in San Marcos.

     In January 2020 Morris Berger was named the offensive coordinator at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Shortly after the 29-year-old joined the coaching staff, Kellen Voss, the sports editor of the college newspaper The Grand Valley Lanthorn interviewed him. The question-and-answer article, entitled "Inside the Mind of GVSU's Newest Offensive Coordinator" and published on January 23, 2020 was intended as the typical mindless sports piece. It didn't turn out that way.

     Kellen Voss, knowing that the new coach had an undergraduate degree in history, asked him to name a historical figure with whom he'd like to have dinner. Instead of responding to this puff-piece question with a typically safe answer like Jesus, Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, Coach Berger stepped on a public relations landmine by saying he'd like to dine with, of all people, Adolph Hitler.

     Before justifying why he had picked the fascist who started World War Two and oversaw the murder of six million Jews as a dinner date, Coach acknowledged that his selection may not get "a good review" from readers. Talk about understatement.

     In reference to Hitler's legacy of massive world-wide death and destruction, Coach Berger the historian said, "It was obviously very sad and he had bad motives, but the way he was able to lead was second-to-none. How he rallied a group and a following, I want to know how he did that. Bad intentions of course, but you can't deny he was a great leader."

    One might argue that Hitler, who led his country to devastating and total defeat before killing himself, was not a good leader nor an appropriate role model for the profession of coaching. And when a football team has a bad season the head coach doesn't kill himself. They just fire him. 

     Coach Morris Berger probably meant no harm in hypothetically asking Adolph Hitler to dinner for advice on leadership. He did, however, manage to do something that was almost impossible: He turned a sports piece in an obscure college newspaper into a national news item.

     Four days after Coach Berger's public relations fiasco the school suspended him. On January 30, 2020 he "resigned." In a prepared statement released by the school, Morris Berger wrote: "In the past 11 years I have taken great pride in the responsibility and privilege of being a teacher, coach, mentor and valued member of the community. I was excited and proud to be at Grand Valley, and am disappointed that I will not get the opportunity to help these players in 2020. However, I do not want to be a distraction to these kids, this great university or Coach Mitchell as they begin preparation for the upcoming season."

College Enrollment Decline Pre-COVID-19

     The fall 2019 postsecondary enrollment numbers [revealed] that overall, enrollments decreased by 1.3 percent, a drop of more that 231,000 students from 2018. [That's equivalent to four of the country's largest universities.]...

     For the first time this decade, the nation's fall semester's enrollments dipped below 18 million, a decline of more than 2 million students since its peak in 201l...

     If anyone needed further proof that higher education continues to battle strong headwinds, these enrollment numbers should suffice. A shrinking population of high school graduates combined with a spate of institutional scandals, widespread anxiety about the costs of college and mountains of student debt, increasing skepticism about the value and necessity of college, growing concerns about the fairness of the admissions process, and the widening partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over whether colleges are politically biased, has taken a toll on American's perceptions--and their participation--in college.

Michael T. Nietzel, "College Enrollment Declines Again," NPR, December 16, 2019

Banning Homeschooling: Are They Your Children or Children of the State?

     Due to the coronavirus pandemic, 50 million children are not attending school. Many of them are being homeschooled by their parents or guardians.

     In the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, in her eighty-page article entitled "Homeschooling: Parents Rights vs Child Rights to Education and Protection," asserts that giving parents more access to their children through homeschooling is harmful to them. "I think it's always dangerous, she writes, "to put powerful people [parents, not teachers] in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority." For this reason Professor Bartholet wants to ban homeschooling.

     The professor argues that in normal times--when the vast majority of children are being taught in public schools--teachers are the ones who most frequently report child abuse to child protective services. According to Bartholet's thinking, mass homeschooling will increase incidents of child abuse, noting that none of the fifty states requires homeschooling parents to be checked for prior reports of abusive behavior. "The issue is," she writes, "do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages 0 to 18?"

     In Bartholet's concern for protecting America's children from their parents, the Ivy League professor doesn't seem bothered by the mediocracy of public education. Moreover, she fails to acknowledge how corrupt teacher's unions exert their power to protect pedophile teachers and coaches. Instead of firing sexual predators, and alerting the police, school administrators, under the influence of teacher's unions, simply transfer these sex offenders to other schools. This practice is so common it even has a name: "passing the trash."

     Journalist Kelly Marcum, in an April 23, 2020 article in The Federalist, wrote that behind Professor Bartholet's "veneer of concern for children's welfare," lies her real agenda: "disdain for Christians and conservatives."

     According to Kelly Marcum, Professor Bartholet is not concerned about failing school systems and the serious problem of student bullying. Academic curricula and bullying are the principal reasons most parents cite for pulling  their children out of public schools. And she is obviously not concerned about the intense left-wing political indoctrination students are exposed to in lieu of a straightforward education.

     In authoritarian societies, children are essentially raised and indoctrinated by the state. Parents have little control over how their children are brought up. These kids are treated as children of the state. If parents in these countries dare contradict the political teachings of the government, they are often turned in to the state by their own children. In America, this form of collectivism, outside of academia, is rejected by citizens who want to maintain control of their children. Parents want to have a say over what is being taught in government run schools. Many believe that over the years in America, parents have been losing control of their children to a massive and powerful public education bureaucracy.

     For "social justice" collectivists like Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet, when it comes to teaching and indoctrinating America's children, the state knows best. 

Professor Chika Nwankpa's Spending Spree

     By 2017, 55-year-old Chika Nwankpa, the head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Drexel University in Philadelphia, had acquired, during his 27-year career, $10 million in federal research grants.

     In October 2017, auditors at Drexel University discovered that since 2007, Professor Nwankpa had misappropriated $185,000 in grant money provided by the U. S. Navy, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. During this ten-year period, the professor had allegedly spent $96,000 of grant money at strip clubs and sports bars. He also stood accused of spending federal grand funds on iTune purchases and meals at expensive restaurants. 

     In January 2020, a prosecutor with the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, charged Chika Nwankpa with several counts of unlawful taking and theft by deception. Following the charges, Nwankpa resigned from the university and agreed to return $53,328 of the grant money. 

     Following his arrest, Chika Nwankpa posted his $25,000 bond and was released from jail. He could be sentenced up to a maximum of 14 years in prison. Since Larry Krasner, the district attorney of Philadelphia, is a prosecutor well known for going easy on criminals, one can reasonably predict a plea bargain with no prison time for Mr. Nwankpa. (If I were Mr. Nwankpa's attorney, I'd argue that what my client did is no different than what politicians do every day.)