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A recent letter from UNH President Mark W. Huddleston, emailed to persons associated with UNH, appears to be asking recipients to pressure (maybe engage and encourage is a better term) the New Hampshire legislature into restoring budget cuts made last session to the University system.
I have no issue with “Huddleston the activist” doing that on his own time, but Politicking on State University Letterhead?
That’s a no no.
There is a lovely new candidate survey being mailed out to New Hampshire candidates from the Concord Monitor. While most of the questions are loaded to demarcate the right left divide in state politics–have to make sure we know who the “TEA Party Extremists” are–one question in particular stood out.
“Do you support last year’s 50% cut in university Funding…”
The town of Durham has reported that the costs of the Obama visit–which the Obama campaign refused to pay for–cost the town $19,851.00. But it will only cost the anonymous donor around $13,000.00 because… c/o Gretyl MacAlaster -July 31st Union Leader “…town public safety officials were able to reduce local costs through careful distribution of … Read more
The problem with UNH is…it’s filled with progressives, and they love to waste your money. (Just look at the NH House from 2007-2010.)
If UNH isn’t shoveling federal dollars on cow fart research to Obama supporter and NH Democrat Party check writer Gary Herschberg, then it is busy paying professors like Ed “Flash” Larkin to do nothing for a few years on the taxpayer dime. (Original comments on that here and here.)
So why should we be surprised to see the University that cried poor expending labor and resources to maintain a Facebook page titled “UNH Presidents Commission on the Status of Women?” Can you guess the political slant of the content this page is “sharing” with the world?
I’m sure it’s hard to imagine but it’s….a little bit to the left.
New Hampshire’s white tower liberals and their advocates in state government have been adamant about their policy on College students voting in the Granite State. While we have called this voter fraud, the Democrats insist that if you go to school here, then you should be able to vote here.
But are these “New Hampshire voters” getting screwed over by these same liberal establishment types? Are the same people who insist students should be able to claim residency for the purposes of voting for Democrat candidates, denying these students the same status when it comes to the cost of their education?
Using UNH as an example, the average New Hampshire voter who applied to attend the State school from someplace outside New Hampshire, shall not be denied their “right” to affect our elections, but must still pay 110% more per year in tuition than a New Hampshire “voter” who is defined by the university as domiciled inside the state for billing purposes. And the progressives think voter ID disenfranchises the poor?
So, you think this is a new thing just because Project Veritas decided to release a video? One of the main complaints from Conservatives here in NH is that out-of-state students at our in-state Universities vote improperly. Even as the major news outlets now have “crying in their cups” politicians going “Oh, mea culpa – … Read more
Owning rental property is a daunting endeavor. With ownership comes financial challenges, legal exposure, and responsibilities not traditionally endured with single family home ownership. Add to that facet renting to college students and the task becomes a head-snapping endeavor.
Years ago, I found myself dealing with twelve units of off-campus student housing in Durham New Hampshire. In my experience, I found the cards were stacked against me. The town of Durham has never taken the steps necessary to effectively deal with their rental housing market specifically how it interfaces between the college and the town. Much of what is in place is the knee-jerk reaction of the vocal few.
College students going off to college means this is their first time away from home. They are on their own and not under the wing or the rules of Mommy and Daddy. Living off campus means having, “ones’ own place” and celebrating that first breath of new-found independence. The problem is that independence can manifest it in ways that are not positive.
Boo hoo.
Faced with a deficit, after years of a bad economy, UNH may be forced to do what many companies had to do years ago–cut more staff. I can’t tell you how bad I feel for them. The small business I work for went from 30 employees down to 12…two years ago. Of course we were not supported by taxpayers, nor did we have unions or arbitrators insisting we pay people like Ed Larkin to do nothing for five years at the staggering cost of almost half a million dollars.
At my office we streamlined down to the bare minimum needed to keep things running, and have discovered efficiencies and opportunities to be more productive with less resources. Not only are we still in business, but things are actually looking up. Yeah, it’s more work for the rest of us, and no we have not had raises in years, but we are working and providing a product and service (and paying taxes).
But State run enterprises, or those who have become dependent on tax payer prop-ups, have little or no incentive to make those hard choices.
In the fall of 2009 UNH Professor Ed ‘Flash’ Larkin was put on paid leave for exposing his genitals to a young lady and her mother in the Milford Market Basket Parking lot. (My earlier remarks here.) As of October of last year, the plan was to let him go, but it looks like the Union and an arbitrator have stepped in and Flash still has a job.
Ed “Flash” Larkin has, to the best of my knowledge, continuously collected his $87,375.00 per year UNH salary, since the incident.
Under the terms of his probation, as reported in the Sunday Union Leader, he will remain on the UNH staff for another three years before being permitted to meet with students. That restriction prevents him from teaching during that time. We can only assume that a University that pays full salary during an investigation does likewise when they are told they cannot terminate said employee. Without knowing any other details, this amounts to five years worth of salary at a state supported university, to a German Language professor, for what? Exposing himself in public.
Talk about a government jobs program. Show some strangers your “little professor” at the grocery store parking lot and we’ll give you $436,875.00 over five years.
But you get forced out of your job if you just expose yourself on Twitter? I bet Anthony Weiner is pissed.
A funny thing happened on the way to the ‘off-hand comment’ on the Merrimack TEA facebook page. I was accused of not using "real and accurate data" and that my "rhetoric was not doing anyone any good."
Nothing surprising there I suppose but to stay on point–what was it I said that earned me such a response?
I announced that if you took the total Merrimack School budget and divided it by the total student enrollment that it cost more than sending your kid to UNH. This appears to have riled some people up. In fact someone sent me a nice itemized list of the "costs" of sending your kid to UNH for a year just to prove I was wrong, and to justify how Merrimack’s cost per child wasn’t as much.
Riding in on the heels of the UNH/Hirshberg cow fart research we have other news from the research front of which is just begging to be made fun.
Someone has discovered that oral sex is a gateway drug to intercourse among teenagers. A three-year study determined that teens who have oral sex are more likely to have intercourse than teens who do not. And if you ask the Baptists they will tell you that intercourse leads to dancing, or was that the other way around?
“I see most of the health policies out there and guidelines for preventive services talking about sex generally, but they do not specify oral sex. That is an important distinction because teens don’t consider oral sex to be sex, and many are not aware of the risks involved,” Halpern-Felsher said.
So oral sex leads to intercourse and intercourse leads to unwanted pregnancy. Who is surprised? The experts, of course.
So maybe the 700,000 taxpayer dollars given to UNH to advance the study of “organic farming” was not just a left wing exercise in global warming alarmist advocacy. Maybe, just maybe, it was not meant to study cow farts.
On the front page of this mornings Union Leader reporter Clyntnon Mamuo covers negotiations between the University of New Hampshire, and some 630 professors over their new contract. As is often the case with such things, there is some disparity between what the University feels is economically feasible and what the white-tower and it’s union representatives actually want.
Keep in mind that the article quotes inflation at around 0.5%, and we know that over the past few years the government method of calculating inflation overall have shown it almost flat. Using these figures along with what we know about pension issues and what Obamacare is doing to the cost of health insurance ‘the smartest people in the state’…
"…proposed a 12.5 percent pay increase, one percent of which would be merit-based, and no increase in health insurance premiums."
So the education establishment liberals in the university system think like the establishment progressives who ran up the state budget in the past four years. Screw the economy we deserve a huge raise. (The progressive political class gets their reward through a larger public sector union, which gives them money to try and keep them in office so they can rinse, lather and repeat.) And it is no surprise that they, democrats and educators, are fiscally (and ideologically) co-dependent.
Dr. Edward Larkin gave a pair of women at the Milford Market Basket More for their Dollar last November when he approached them in the Supermarket parking lot with his “franks and beans” exposed. It turned out to be an unadvertised special, but one that New Hampshire taxpayers continue to pay for. The UNH professor, placed on leave after the incident, is still on the University payroll, collecting $87,375 per year while we wait for the bureaucracy to remember how it is exactly that you fire a State university professor doing nothing on the taxpayer dole.