By Jake Vest
The guy who came to fix the garage door almost certainly doesn’t know what the word “lugubrious” means. And yet he made $115 for about 15 minutes of work that he did in a very lugubrious manner.
The flooring guy who did our baseboards showed up in a vehicle I can only dream about ever being able to afford. He did not know what “soporific” meant. I know that for a fact because I warned him that this was the kind of word his daughter might run into on the SAT.
I coach SAT and am capable of teaching a kid the kind of words people who run colleges think are necessary. However, I am nowhere near capable of earning enough money with these words to send a kid to college. There seems to be a gap between that which is considered necessary at a university and that which one might find to be useful in life. It’s like two different realities.
I bet Santa Ono knows what soporific and lugubrious mean. Ono is the person the University of Florida thought it wanted as a president until the Board of Governors got all dissentient and sententious and cantankerously rejected him.
The issue seems to be DEI – Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. This is a large bucket of worms that includes notions of being more fair to some people without being less fair to others and raises numerous questions that do not have answers that will satisfy anybody.
Supposedly there is a controversy involved, but I can’t put my finger on it. I read about the meeting and am not sure what one side intended to do, what the other side was trying to make sure wasn’t done, or what any of it had to do with any practical aspect of running a university.
The base salary was $1.5 million. Ono reportedly stood to make in the neighborhood of $15 million over the next five years, including automatic bonuses for work nobody yet knows will even be adequate and extra pay he is entitled to because people like him are entitled to extra pay.
I doubt that this gomer has never done anything that has made a lick of difference to real people who live over here in this parallel world where garage doors break and flooring needs to fit into corners. The pay struck me as excessive. But then again, I can’t do baseboards, so what do I know?
I don’t think I could have brought myself to care about education politics if I had not gone to dinner at Beef O’Brady’s. Our server was a delightful and hard-working young woman who just happened to have been in one of my fourth-grade classes. She told me she skipped graduation ceremonies to pick up a work shift and jumped at the chance to earn a few bucks watching our cats while we travel. She’s saving for school.
Great kid, smart as a tack and has AP credits and a GPA to prove it. She desperately wants to go to college and thinks she can make it, “if I can get in.” A reasonable doubt. Lots of kids with great credentials and great attitudes can’t. No room at the inn.
So, a state university is turning away thousands of deserving students who are willing to clean litter boxes, haul trays and live on ramen noodles to scrape up an education. Meanwhile there is a controversy over who should be paid $15 million to “lead” – whatever that means.
And one of the big issues is fairness?
It’s enough to make you feel downright lugubrious.
