In response to the recession, Lehigh has decided to launch a $20 million study to find ways to reduce wasteful spending.

“Alumni and students alike have urged us to exercise fiscal restraint in these tough times. For them, I am proud to present this new plan,” said the newly appointed Director of the Office of Fiscal Responsibility, Mark Simonson. The newly created Office employs 50 experts full time to monitor all costs at Lehigh. “Our purpose is to spend every dollar we get to find ways to save money,” Simonson remarked.

Instead of using available office space around campus, the plan provides for a special addition to the Alumni Memorial Building to house the new Office. Due to poor weather and an unreliable construction company, the project is already millions over budget, but that doesn’t deter the bright spirit of Simonson. “To properly do our work, we need a special, stress free environment and quite simply that just doesn’t exist on campus right now. But I am confident once we get to work then we quickly start cutting costs.” Currently, the staff of the Office is on university payroll but cannot begin work till the addition is completed, as stipulated by their contract.

In addition to monitoring all University expenditures, the plan entails interviews with every member of the teaching and administrative staff. The records from these interviews will then be destroyed and the interviews run again. “We’re hoping that the first round of interviews will be like a ‘trial run’ and the second time we will get more accurate results,” Simonson explained. “It is really important to be thorough, and that means sparing no expense to find ways to make the campus and overall education experience more affordable for the average student.”

Though most people expected the savings from this study to aid tuition costs for struggling families, Simonson assured the administration that this was not so in an open meeting between Simonson and the rest of the department heads last week. “Students can obviously meet the demands of a tuition that puts them in a life time of debt or they wouldn’t be here, why would we change that?” When asked what the hypothetical savings would go towards, Simonson did say there were some definite options on the table. “Right now Lehigh is really struggling with ways to pay for the new monolithic STEPS building which is running at least $7 million over budget at $62.1 million. We are also looking at ways to fund this study because right now we are running way over budget. The truth is, despite Lehigh’s award winning endowment and above average tuition, we simply do not have the money for simple things like a 135,000 square foot building such as STEPS.”

Despite Lehigh’s current policy of raising tuition at least three percent every year, many students are convinced the University has their best interest in mind and will lower tuition. “I’m glad the University is doing this study,” one sophomore said. “The University is going to save tons of money and tuition will have to go down. It’s simple economics.”

Parents are equally excited by the new study. “I took out a second mortgage on my house to help pay for my son’s education, so I am relieved to see that it is going towards a good cause,” said one parent. Another parent remarked, “I am always agitated when I hear more money is being spent on stupid things like financial aid and scholarships. This is finally something that has a practical application for us normal people.”

Though formal meetings are pending on the completion of their office, Simonson claims he and his associates have several ideas for cost-saving measures. “One of the biggest expenditures comes from residence hall’s power usage so it was obvious to us to start there. Right now we are looking at cutting supply power to the residence areas during quiet hours. That saves energy, saves money, and helps to enforce quiet hours: win, win, win. It’s progressive ideas such as that one that we are aiming for in this study.”

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_654237.html

Whether they want to admit it or not, the supporters of alternative energy rely on the threat of oil scarcity to sway people who really do not care if the Earth’s average temperature rises 1°F in 100 years.  This article purports that the claim our oil wells will dry up in about 1o to 30 years is not only unfounded but also has been repeated for the last 80 years.

 This reminds me of the conspiracy theory that oil is not limited but instead is constantly being created deep in the Earth and oozes up from tectonic plates. Since that science is a little shaky, I’ll do my best to stay away from that and other conspiracy theories.

Our world runs on oil, gas, and coal. To deny that is ignorant. I do not suggest we drop all research into alternative energy, but to set unreachable goals for “energy independence” (double talk for non-fossil fuels; true energy independence would be domestic drilling) is foolish.

More people are demanding more energy than ever before and the “green” technology is not affordable or efficient. With the leaked CRU documents putting conciderable doubt on anthropogenic global warming and new, large oil deposits continuously being found with improving technology, I wonder why we are allocating so much tax money to alternative energy. For example, GE got billions from TARP and other federal sources to make wind turbines (Made in China) and install them. Wait, aren’t GE and Obama best friends?

Right, no conspiracy theories.

Upon reading this editorial in the Washington Examiner, I was genuinely surprised about recent polls released about women’s views on health care. The bottom line is that more women would oppose a large health care overhaul with a public option than support it.

Keep in mind that women typically vote Democratic and the woman vote was not insignificant in Obama’s move to the White House.

Between having more medical procedures done and a typical man’s refusal to see a doctor even after a finger or two are missing, women have more exposure to the health care system. The poll revealed that women would prefer private options opposed to one public option, whether because of a fall in quality or a rise in price. Most are happy with what they have and worry that funding a public option would fall on their children’s shoulders.

According to the poll, women do want a decrease in the cost of insurance (who doesn’t) and a reduction of “artificial roadblocks to a more competitive and efficient private health care system.”

That is something I can agree with.

With sweeping health care legislation making its way through Congress, our leaders are overlooking one of the most pressing issues in the US: public education. Since the 1960s, our expenditures have grown and our grades, domestically and internationally, have dropped. Education, which is so important for a free and industrial society, has been left by the wayside for decades.
The United States public school system instructs 55 million children in over 100,000 schools. We spend on average $10,770 per student, which is one of the highest expenditures per student in the world; financed almost entirely from property and school taxes. Of course, spending money is not a panacea. The average vocabulary of a 14 year old in 1945 was 25,000 words; today it hovers around 10,000 for the same age group. Our dropout rate is about 30%, and the kids that do graduate are already academically behind based on international test scores. American businesses are importing more and more foreign talent rather than hiring our own, and many people fear that what happened to our auto industry from 1970 till now will happen with our job market. What is wrong with America’s oldest “public option”?
1) We have one of the ‘slowest’ curriculums in the world, meaning we spend a great deal of time reviewing material such as arithmetic in middle school when comparable schools in other countries are onto geometry and algebra. Our textbooks are set up to skim several topics instead of delving deep into a couple topics over the year, which produces students that know very little practical information on several topics.
Instead of separating the gifted students from the slower learners, all students are taught together in the same classroom to avoid hurting anyone’s self esteem. This leaves the gifted students bored as the teacher must teach to the lowest level in the class. Suffocating a gifted student intellectually is a far worse crime than hurting someone’s self esteem. We will never know a gifted student’s true potential unless they are taught at an accelerated rate fairly early on.
2) We spend about 4 times as much money on education than we did in 1960 and our teacher to student ratio has plummeted, so we should be scoring significantly better on the SATs, right? Well actually the scores have taken a nosedive; the more money we pump into education, the worse our students score. We have more full-time nonteaching staff and other administrators than ever, which contribute very little to actual instructing.
3) Ever since 1960, our education system has been on a steady decline, which leads to the central problem of modern US public education, unionization. In 1962 teachers were allowed to unionize, and ever since, the main beneficiary of the education system has been its employees, not the students. The point of a union is to use collective bargaining to protect its own interests. I find it incredible that on any day of the school year, a group of teachers can go on strike and shut down the school until they feel like going back to work. Despite what any teacher on strike says, strikes send a pretty clear message that personal interests of teachers trump quality education for the children. The late Al Shanker, teaching union founder and president, said it best with “I will begin to care about the quality of children’s education in this country when they start paying union dues.”
Stemming from the union contracts is the idea of tenured teachers. Right now there are about 700 teachers in New York that are barred from teaching because of misconduct, but can’t be fired because they are tenured. Their union contracts force the school district to go through a maze of paperwork that can take up to several years to get through. While their paperwork is being processed, they sit in a room provided by the district and make $70,000 a year – to do nothing. That’s $5 million out of the budget for New York alone.
We need to fix these problems.
We need to drop this “social re-engineering” garbage and get back to basics. That means less sing-song time for ‘praise the president’ and more time for fundamentals. We need to end ‘social promotion,’ which means advancing a student through the grades based on age and not test scores. If a student doesn’t understand the material after summer school, then repeat the grade. A superintendent (which rakes in a national average $148,387 a year) in the Miami school district flat out said, “Half our job is education, and the other half is social work”. This is not improving our test scores.
Instead of the age old fix-all of raising taxes and dropping more money into the system, maybe we should do the unthinkable and switch from a “free” system to a free-market system in which students pay tuition to go to a school. Private school students consistently perform better on standardized tests, not because of the biggest budgets, but because every school knows they must instruct efficiently or face closure.
Finally, teaching unions have to dial it down to control the rising cost of education. The tenure system must be weakened or dissolved in order to ensure that schools do not get caught up in the mountain of paperwork involved with replacing a misbehaving or just plain bad educator. Award a limited tenure based on performance reviews by an outside group, not seniority.
Perhaps instead of writing massive and broad legislation enacting more “public option policies”, we should take a stronger look at the ones we already have.

Sources:
“Center for Education Reform – K-12 Facts.” Center for Education Reform – Home. Web. .
“Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – Overview.” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. Web. .

It seems as though the big news on the local, national, and world scene for the past decade has been the constant threat of the next big pandemic. In 2003, the spotlight was on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which was contained by the World Health Organization (WHO). Next up was the “Bird Flu” (H5N1), which from 2006 to present day kills millions of birds in Asia and would have been a pandemic if it had mutated to infect humans quickly. And that leads us to novel H1N1, the “swine flu”, which is virus made of four different strains; one usually in humans, one in birds, and two found in pigs.

This latest pandemic has been thought to have been in Mexico since January 2009 but only recognized much later in March at which point Mexico City was basically shut down. In April 2009, two cases are found in California, the first time the disease was discovered in the US.  Today, an estimated 49,214 people are infected in the United States and 631 people have died. This is the disease that has been christened as our latest pandemic.

However, the general student consensus on campus is not fear or concern but much closer to apathy and honestly, can you blame us? Based on CDC statistics, the people who have died after catching the any kind of influenza, including H1N1, has dropped below the seasonal baseline and well below the epidemic line. This does not mean H1N1 does not spread easily, which is all that pandemic status implies. So essentially, the most likely scenario if you catch H1N1 is that you will have typically flu-like symptoms. While that is not pleasant, you also get a week off from school and meals delivered to your door.

But wait a minute; the swine flu can kill, right? True, but right now the fatality rate of H1N1, based on early numbers, is just below getting struck and killed by lightning. We will not know the precise rate until the pandemic is over, and even then, the numbers are simply estimates. The CDC warns us though that viruses change with time and could grow to become much deadlier. The last time H1N1 was a major pandemic was the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed almost 100 million people at the end of WWI. That virus was relatively quiet, similar to our 2009 H1N1 outbreak, until it mutated and killed millions of people the next year.

Thankfully, scientists highly doubt the ability of the current strain to mutate into a more lethal form. Researchers at the University of Maryland concluded that the swine flu does not meet the typical criteria for recombination into a highly lethal form. In fact, most deaths from swine flu occur when the patient already has preexisting conditions, such as pneumonia. So the flu is not deadly to most in its current form, and the chances of it becoming deadly are relatively low. So what is the big deal?

As with most universities, Lehigh has taken a very serious approach to the Swine Flu. The administration has sent out numerous emails since last year informing students about the progress of Lehigh’s preparations for the flu from the “Pandemic Flu Committee”, formed several years ago to draft written plans to deal with such an outbreak. There is a special section of the website dedicated to the H1N1 virus, with prevention information and updates as well as the procedures the CDC “highly recommend” every major university employ. The Health and Wellness Center distributed anti-bacterial hand wash at check-in back in August and has masks available to cover the nose and mouth of infected students. The administration is taking no chances.

The difference in the level of seriousness between the administration and the student body is all a matter of perception. As a student, the most likely worst case scenario is a week of the flu and delivered meals. To the school, the worst case scenario is the same “as the worst case scenario for any college campus, and that is that there could be one or more deaths from this infection”, according to Dr. Kitei, director of the Health and Wellness Center in an email.  I believe the more likely worst-case scenario is for the infection to spread to a point where the school would have to close. Lehigh is always looking for national attention but I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind. The potential media nightmare and the damage to the school’s reputation are the things that keep school administrators up at night.

With news of a second student infection on campus on Tuesday 9/15, it will be interesting to see if the perceptions of the students change from the view that the infection does not affect them at Lehigh.  Dr. Kitei is skeptical, commenting that, “Obviously, students will be more aware of H1N1 novel (swine) flu now, but I’m not sure perceptions have changed.”

Sources:

CDC. “CDC 2009 H1N1 Flu.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Web. 15 Sept. 2009. <http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1FLU/>.

Dr. Kitei. Message to the author. E-mail.

ECDC Daily Update. Rep. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 15 Sept. 2009. Web. 15 Sept. 2009. <http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/healthtopics/Documents/090917_Influenza_AH1N1_Situation_Report_1700hrs.pdf>.

“Swine flu outcompetes seasonal flu, unlikely to get more lethal | Booster Shots | Los Angeles Times.” LA Times. Web. 15 Sept. 2009. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/09/swine-flu-outcompetes-seasonal-flu-in-ferrets-unlikely-to-get-more-lethal.html>.

“WHO | World Health Organization.” Web. 15 Sept. 2009. <http://www.who.int/en/>.