I was listening to Steely Dan play My Old School, one of my theme songs. Click on it, it’s a great song.
I realized I went to school to grow up in life, not really to learn. I went to classes and did did stuff, but it was just a step in life I had to take first. My real education was when I got out and started in life. School was just learning how to learn, mostly what not to do. Life is a big picture that I saw. I knew I had to get through this time and had a need to have my success being in life, not following the crowd in my teens. I watched the cliques and instinctively knew I didn’t want to be held hostage by them. Even then, I just knew I was going to be a bigger success and do much more than any of them. Other than a few sports stars and a doctor here and there, it came true. It’s not really important to me as I expected it. It’s because I didn’t pin my identity to that time of my life.
Most of all, I didn’t get stuck in my hometown and got away from those who stayed in the mud pit of mediocrity.
I know some people never leave college and re-live school every Friday night or Saturday during football season, but I am fortunate to have Mauerbauertraurigheit. I never wanted to be a part of what they were. Maybe it was just the introvert in me coming out, but I moved on and the memories weren’t strong enough to make me long for that, ever.
I went to school with some people from kindergarten through the end of college, yet I never think of them as friends. Just going to the same school isn’t the basis for a relationship. I never wanted to be in their clubs or fraternity’s, even when I had the chance. They weren’t the type of people I wanted to be a part of. At a college party one time I told Brad Hurd, who I knew since kindergarten that my best life decision until then was not pledging his fraternity. It was just the same elementary, middle school and high school people that I instinctively knew weren’t going to be significant, or my friends.
I also remember college graduation. I thought to myself, I may never step foot back on this campus and 43 years later, I never have. I’d had enough of college life and wanted to grow up and experience new and different things. People I knew still get together and pretend they are still there, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It was a chapter in my life that has closed. Life expanded so much for me after I got out that I feel no connection with the people anymore.
I still have friends from that time, but it had nothing to do with school. We are friends because of our relationship, mutual interests and experiences in life.
So, like the song, I’m never going back to my old school. I’ve passed up the 10th, 20th, 25th, 30th and 40th high school reunions so far, and have no plans to ever do it again.
I always thought that my life was going to happen after I left school, and it did. Those I went to school with act like they never left. Their pinnacle in life was either high school or college. They are like Al Bundy, high school football star, but loser in life. They relive the past at a time we were juveniles. I saw much more than that. Being a part of it wasn’t something I ever wanted to do.
On LinkedIn, I don’t even list my university. Instead I use Faber College, Knowledge is good.
Occasionally, I hear about someone from that time. Almost to a person, they didn’t amount to not much past that time of life. I hope they enjoyed their moment in the limelight, but it’s too bad that it came so early in life. When I see the pictures, they faded into old looking people who fell out of shape or didn’t realize their dreams. It’s sad. I wish they could have seen the big picture that what seems important to teenagers is not.
When I think about why, it was the people that I wanted away from, not the school. I continue to have highlights in life, rather than re-live an immature time of my life.
I’m never going back, to my old…..school, because I grew up to so much more.
No one gives much of a crap about colleges unless it’s theirs or it’s Football season or the Final Four, or they embarrass themselves.
Well, I graduated from UCF, although it was named Florida Technological University. It was started during the Apollo moon program to develop engineers for NASA. When that stopped, they had to try to be a business college.
I’m ashamed enough of what they have become that I changed my college to Faber College on LinkedIn. Knowledge is good.
I led the student advisory committee in the late ’70’s which recommended that the school start a football program. It is a big money maker and they have been nationally ranked. I won’t even go anymore. Hell, I’ll pull against them when they cross the line now as right is right and wrong is wrong.
It was all OK until they went woke, became a bunch of snowflakes and free speech Nazi’s. Now, they nationally are rank(ed) (smelling because being Woke). Unfortunately, I also went to school with some of the now board of directors (M. Grindstaff) and I’m not surprised that this group would allow this bias and contempt for the Bill of Rights. A lot of them are lawyers so what do you expect?
UCF fired tenured professor Charles Negy for tweeting the truth about black privilege, but it doesn’t matter, free speech should be protected (except for Negy). There is enough acidic speech against the position he was fired for that should have had them look at the real violations committed by UCF, it’s directors and spokespersons.
It turns out they violated free speech, Negy’s rights and acted like spoiled children. I’m embarrassed to be associated with them. I vowed never to step back on campus once I graduated and never have, knowing the kind of people they have running and advising it to be anti-constitutional. They had to re-hire him with back pay, bonus and tenure. Justice is served.
UCF is against freedom, free speech and the first amendment. Worse, they are Woke, a scarlet letter. They discriminate against conservatives, professors and white people. They also show a serious lack of judgement on their Board Of Emeritus Directors.
We previously discussed the effort to fire University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy after he tweeted about “black privilege.” UCF President Alexander Cartwright abandoned any pretense of academic freedom or principle in failing to protect a colleague from an anti-free speech campaign. Now, after a major court ruling against the university, an arbitrator has awarded Negy all back pay and benefits from the time of his firing. That is good news. What is not good news is that, despite shredding core principles governing higher education, Cartwright remains the UCF president. To the contrary, the university issued a statement that indicated that it is undeterred by the adverse court rulings. Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, required police protection after he tweeted about what he views as “black privilege.” There was a petition demanding his termination with more than 30,000 signatures and, as we have seen in other schools, his colleagues were virtually silent as Negy was attacked for expressing his views. While classroom misconduct has been raised by some critics, most of the effort (and the focus of this posting) is on his statements on social media. That petition focused on Negy’s statements on social media as unacceptable and grounds for termination:
“We are calling on the University of Central Florida to dismiss psychology professor Charles Negy due to abhorrent racist comments he has made and continues to make on his personal Twitter account. In addition to racism, Negy has engaged in perverse transphobia and sexism on his account, which is just as reprehensible. While he has a right to free speech, he does not have a right to dehumanize students of color and other minority groups, which is a regular occurance [sic] in his classroom. By allowing him to continue in his position, UCF would simply be empowering another cog in the machine of systemic racism.”
Negy faced protests at his home and on campus, according to news reports after he explored the concept of “white shaming” as an academic, including his book “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-Signaling, and Ignorance.”
Negy’s work is highly controversial and his tweets have inflamed critics. In a now deleted tweet, he wrote “Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”
He has also written, again on Twitter, “If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”
Again, the question is not the merits or tenor of such writings but the right of academics to express such viewpoints. There have been few comparable protests when professors write inflammatory comments about white culture or white privilege.
UCF President Alexander Cartwright told students that the university would investigate Negy, and that he and his Administration “are acutely aware of the offensive and hurtful Twitter posts that professor Charles Negy has shared on his personal page. These posts do not reflect the values of UCF, and I strongly condemn these racist and abhorrent posts.”
We recently discussed the Eleventh Circuit ruling against Cartwright and the university over its discriminatory-harassment and bias response team policies as violative of the First Amendment. The Eleventh Circuit overturned a district judge’s rejection of a preliminary injunction against the policy: “[I]t is imperative that colleges and universities toe the constitutional line when monitoring, supervising, and regulating student expression. Despite what we presume to be the very best of intentions, it seems to us substantially likely that the University of Central Florida crossed that line here.”
In oral argument, the university’s own lawyer struggled to define the terms or to say whether particular statements might be deemed prohibited. The court noted:
“The discriminatory-harassment policy’s imprecision exacerbates its chilling effect. To take just one example, what does it mean for one student’s speech to ‘unreasonably . . . alter’ another student’s educational experience? Both terms — ‘unreasonably’ and ‘alter’— are pretty amorphous, their application would likely vary from one student to another, and the university’s totality-of-known-circumstances approach to determining whether particular speech crosses the line only makes matters worse.”
Just as the university spent a huge amount of time and money to fight for these unconstitutional rules, it has litigated the matter over Negy to seek to strip him of his job and all benefits due to his exercise of free speech.
After teaching psychology at the school since 1998, Negy, 61, was fired in January 2021. As Cartwright turned the weight of the university against him, Negy had to sell his house to pay his lawyers.
The arbitrator noted that, while the school added objections to his teaching style, Negy received outstanding teaching reviews. Moreover, he noted Negy “demonstrated a willingness to entertain some change in his style of instruction; however, the record is devoid of any clear evidence that any member of his management requested such effort.”
Chad Binette, assistant vice president of UCF communications, indicated that the university remains undeterred by these losses. He stated that “UCF stands by the actions taken following a thorough investigation that found repeated misconduct in Professor Negy’s classroom, including imposing his views about religion, sex and race. However, we are obligated to follow the arbitrator’s ruling.”
What is not clear to me is how Cartwright retains his position as president in a Florida public university after such a record of attacks on free speech and academic freedom. He has not only sought to impose anti-free speech conditions on faculty but spent copious amounts of money seeking to preserve those rules and uphold those actions. These principles are the essence of any university and their abandonment constitutes a rejection of Cartwright’s obligation as a university president. I would not support his termination as an academic but, as an administrator, he has shown a serial failure to defend his faculty and free speech. Until university presidents are held accountable for failing to defend free speech, they will continue to yield to every flash mob that forms on a campus.
Delusions of Adequacy 