The folks at MSNBC.com finally posted something worth reading. The other day they had an article that talked about how charities are finding it harder to plug the holes in their budgets with donations. As someone who makes a lot of donations each year and also works in and studies the nonprofit industry, I found this article very interesting. For me, one of the best parts of the article was:

It costs more to acquire new donors than to retain them, experts say. But churning through donors also makes it harder to woo benefactors. “Donors don’t want to be funding fundraising,” says Sargeant. “They want to be funding the work you’re trying to do.”

And they’re demanding much more accountability from the nonprofits they bankroll. If they don’t get it, they walk, says Penelope Burk, president of the fundraising consultancy Cygnus and Associates.

This is it - this is what the nonprofit industry comes down to. First, are you asking for someone to make a donation that goes to a cause or goes towards paying for salaries? Second, are you willing to explain your expenses and why money is put in certain places as opposed to others? Third, are you doing what you actually said you would be doing?

The answers to these three questions are why I donate to the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation. When I donate to the SPEF, I am giving a tax-deductible donation to two specific funds (both of my choosing) that are managed by people I know on a first-name basis and can e-mail at 1:00pm and receive a personal response by 2:00pm. These funds are under the oversight of a Board where I know many of the members on a first-name basis and have many of the cell phone numbers in my phone.

That level of trust is hard to come by in the nonprofit sector.

I helped put these two funds together and I know where each dollar is spent. I know how much of the fund’s earnings are spent on administrative expenses and I know how much goes back to the overall end-user and it what forms (scholarships for the undergraduate fraternity brothers). At any time I can pick up the phone and call the President of the SPEF and have a discussion with him.

There’s a level of trust and reliability there that you cannot build very easily. Hell, my own company is a nonprofit and I’ve yet to donate or invest any money with them! I’ll be changing that in the New Year, but it has taken me the better part of 16 months as an employee to even reach that level of comfort.

So be sure that you know the places that you’re donating to and be sure that you know where the money is being spent. And hey, if you feel like you can’t make an impact with any organization, then donate to the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation! It’s a good group with a good cause which I’d be more than happy to talk to any of you about!

Earlier today a news brief was posted on the Daily Record’s website that spoke about the increase in students attending county colleges. Below is an excerpt of the release, which I’m sure will be made into a fuller article in the coming days:

The New Jersey Council of County Colleges says there are 158,152 students taking classes this fall. Nearly 81,000 are full-time, a 4.6 percent increase over last year.

County colleges previously had more part-time students. But the group says that trend has changed as tuition climbed at four-year schools.

Tuition at New Jersey’s county colleges averages about $2,500. It’s $9,500 at four-year schools.

This is great! Not only are New Jersey students saving some money by attending the county colleges, but as more and more of them make the 2-year pit stop at “county” before heading off to the larger schools, there is less and less of a stigma attached to the schools. County colleges often get tagged with the “13th Grade” moniker or other derogatory nicknames. I’ve never attended classes at a county college, so I wouldn’t know what the classroom atmosphere is like though I can’t imagine it is too much different than attending a smaller class at Rutgers, Monmouth, Rowan, or TCNJ.

As a side note, if this means that more New Jerseyans are going to college, then that is another great outcome of the county colleges!

Every once in a while you find a court case that is just a complete waste of taxpayers’ money and the system’s time. From my view, the recent court case against Monmouth University to block the construction of a 196-bed dorm is a great example of waste. There was no need to go forward with this case after the appeals process upheld the university’s right to build the dorm. The way that Joe Hughes (a local resident who is vehemently against the university’s advancement and running for office) pressed this case forward was shameful. Not only was he putting an undue strain on an already busted legal system, but his “coalition of neighbors” had already been outnumbered by another township-based neighbor group that supported letting the university move forward with their new dorm. A portion of the Asbury Park Press’ story:

WEST LONG BRANCH — The state Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by a group of residents seeking to block construction of a Monmouth University dormitory.

The Supreme Court issued its decision without comment, as is its custom. The action set the stage for construction of the 196-bed dormitory and adjacent parking lot in a residential zone near the school.

On nearby Kilkare Farm, the school plans to build a smaller parking lot, six tennis courts and a drainage basin. Neighbors fought for more than a year to block the plan that school officials said was necessary to house current students, not to expand enrollment.

Even the Borough Council got involved, when a majority of its members voted to sue their own Zoning Board of Adjustment for approving the portion of the project slated for Kilkare Farm. The council declined to pursue an appeal.

In June, a state appellate panel upheld a decision by then-Superior Court Judge Alexander D. Lehrer that determined the West Long Branch zoning board acted correctly in 2005 when it voted 5-1 to approve the project.

Property owners fought for more than a year to block the plan at the zoning board level before being rebuffed at the trial and appellate court levels.

There are so many variables at work here that it’s hard to put a finger on all of them. One of the things that gets me is that you have a minority of homeowners trying to make their stance the final stance when a majority of homeowners either disagreed with them or did not care about the issue. That’s wrong. America was not founded such that the minority position would win out and the legal system proved that in this case (although I am confident that was not the basis for their decision). The minority is to have a voice and that voice is to be heard and respected when possible. But when that voice is “my way or no way,” the majority rules.

I admire the passion of the minority homeowners group and they can never say that their voice is NOT heard in the township when it comes to university issues. They recently had the new sports complex at Monmouth University reduced in size thanks to their voices being heard. This is an example of public policy working as it should in terms of community input. But when your input isn’t taken as gospel, you shouldn’t immediately go to the courts. That’s ludicrous!

For me, this non-decision by the Supreme Court is one of their more sane actions lately. Let the university build and let these new beds take more students out of the surrounding communities and onto the campus. As a side note - I find it funny that these same neighbors are the ones that complain about students living in their neighborhoods. On the one hand, they don’t want more dorm beds. On the other, they don’t want students living next door. No logic there, folks.

Today’s Atlanticville had an article about “improving relations” between Monmouth University and its surrounding municipalities - namely Long Branch. I love Long Branch and I think some exciting and creative things are going on over there. I’m also a university alumnus who fought vociferously for students’ rights while an undergraduate. I consider myself privileged to continue that fight as I get older and move up and on through the game of life.

But what always gets me is how the students at Monmouth, by and large, don’t care about this fight. Taken from today’s Atlanticville:

Hayes told the council that the city and the university will be taking their partnership one step further this year and will be sharing information on the addresses of students living off campus.

“We have been able to make some significant headway,” Hayes said at the meeting. “It looks like the university will be willing to share some information with us about where students are housed, for the purpose of safety.”

Anyone who knows the story about the people involved here know that this has nothing to do with student safety. Kevin Hayes is the head of the inspection department in Long Branch. He’s been sued time and time again by local landlords for not granting Certificates of Occupancy for completely well-groomed and maintained houses. And not that it should matter in this particular case, but Hayes’ son was a Long Branch police officer who was one of the major causes of problems between the off-campus students and Long Branch. Hayes, Jr. and another young police officer in Long Branch were shaking down minority students in their off-campus homes and raiding their drug caches…so THEY could sell it on their own!

Of course they got no prison time because they’re politically-connected and this is New Jersey, but it makes me sick to read that the students “get a little better every year” when there are deep, troubling problems on both sides of the argument.

But when you have a student body that doesn’t give a hoot, what are you to do to stop these injustices? Re-read that selection from the article above - that’s illegal, folks. Going to school at a college does not permit that college to share your information with the local police force - especially when that police force has been sued in the past for being overzealous in their enforcement against college students and when they’ve even had to remove officers for shaking students down!

The university surely won’t tell the students anything about this - they relish the fact that 99% of the university community are lemmings who do what they’re told and (even worse) believe what they’re told. This is a tragic reality not just at Monmouth, but many of today’s private colleges and universities. You want to read something even more disgusting?

“If a student is involved in an issue of misconduct off campus, the police will send a copy of the report to us and I will review it,” Nagy said. “We will charge the student under the code of conduct. The student will go through the city’s court and through the Monmouth University court.

“The student is charged twice,” Nagy said. “Just because you do not physically live on campus does not mean you can do whatever you want. A student’s actions affect our reputation.”

That’s right folks - forget about your 5th amendment rights against double jeopardy! You get charged TWICE for the same “crime” in this circus! And having been through that rodeo once or twice, I can tell you that the school’s judicial officers know that this is illegal. Students are often cited by the local police on a Thursday night and expected to go through the university judicial process within a week or two when their actual court date is a month or more away. In essence, the school attempts to find you guilty before the United States legal system!

When you bring this up to the university, they cite their student code of conduct. Most students (with a head on their shoulders) then cite their Constitutional rights. The university ALWAYS comes back with the fact that they are a private university and do not need to respect those rights…which is a lie thanks to President Clinton. President Clinton signed something called the Higher Education Amendments of 1998 which snuck in the provision that if a private university receives ANY federal funding, they MUST respect the Constitutional rights of the students.

That’s generally when you get the university to sit down and start tapping their foot.

But what does it matter? Civil rights have gotten so bad in the Long Branch/Ocean Township area that an article like this can actually be published, describing how the entities intend on destroying students’ rights, and no one will do anything about it. Watch - we’ll get another edition of the Atlanticville next week and there will be no student response…

There’s just no passion any more in undergraduates.

On Sunday, September 23rd, over 110 undergraduates and more than a dozen alumni volunteers from Sigma Pi Fraternity gathered on the campus of Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. These undergraduates represented some 37% of the total undergraduates in the New Jersey Province of Sigma Pi Fraternity.

The purpose of the annual fall workshop is to focus on the various keys to success for each of the chapters in the province. While we generally have a broad array of presenters speaking on a variety of issues, this fall we took a different approach. We invited Josh Orendi from Phired Up Productions, LLC to come in and run the entire workshop.

I’m pleased to say that Josh and Phired Up hit a home run in New Jersey!

Some of the feedback regarding Josh and his outstanding Phired Up presentation:

He really had an effect on the chapter here at FDU and we’re already putting into effect his recruiting methods. Also his methods turned the little wheels in our heads and we are tweaking some of our previous ways of doing things into a combination of his system and our own to make it work best for the chapter.

This is just one of the bits of feedback that we’ve gotten from our undergraduates. From an alumni advisor’s perspective, the Phired Up team is easy to work with and presented no problems in setting up this workshop. And while I’m going over the workshop, the team from Rowan University’s conference services was great to work with, too. I highly recommend working with both Rowan University and Phired Up!

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Monmouth University, a group of students and I led a public relations battle against Ocean Township and their excessive abuse of our civil rights as residents of the town. Police officers routinely opened our front door at all hours of the day and night and walked through our house “just to see what’s going on.”

We had police officers come to our house with two or three cars during the prime party hours on the weekend and tell us to keep the noise down. When we invited them into our house to see the 3 guys who were hanging out playing Tiger Woods Golf on PlayStation 2, the cops would put their tails between their legs and tell us that they had better not have to come back. Yeah right. And we had better not have to get the FBI to investigate that police station (again). Oh yeah - we had the FBI investigating Ocean Township well before the township’s corrupt Mayor, Terrance Weldon, was indicted.

I am only bringing all of this up because of the recent corruption talk in New Jersey…and because the story hit recently that Ocean Township is considering suing their corrupt former Mayor:

The township is weighing the option of suing former Mayor Terrance D. Weldon for violating his oath of office in accepting $64,000 in bribes from developers.

“We actually have a firm that has approached us about litigation and we are considering that,” Mayor William F. Larkin said at a Township Council meeting Wednesday night. “There is actually a firm that wants to represent us without cost.”

That was from the Asbury Park Press. I feel compelled to bring this stuff up because seven and eight years ago a bunch of college students and I SAW the corruption, we lived through the corruption, and (most importantly) we publicly called these administrators out on their corrupt ways. And what did we get in return? A group of local residents and activist-for-the-sake-of-being-activist students who condemned us for using the word “corrupt.”

Bullshit on them. We were right. The Mayor of the town has been indicted and in his wake the Police Chief left his post and the housing inspector left, too (among other officials). All of these folks were in on the crap going on in Ocean Township and we saw it all before anyone else would believe it. Now we’ve been proven correct.

I want my apology!

Some of you may remember last summer when I was repeatedly posting all of the bad things that happen in Ocean Township, New Jersey. My purpose was to constantly spin these “bad” news stories against the completely horrific manner in which Ocean Township singles out and goes after college students. Monmouth University students are - by and large - a credit to the community. They engage in mandatory community service for many of their on-campus organizations as well as bolster the economy by living in what would other be vacant housing. I’ve got news for all of the pompous homeowners that hate these rental houses…vacant housing doesn’t pay the property tax bill and the less property taxes that are collected, the more YOU have to pay to make up for it.

In any event, I digress. Another story popped up in my favorite local paper the other day, The Coaster. Seems that TWENTY-TWO underage kids were arrested at a “drinking party” during the last week or so of August. Now, I don’t condemn the kids as much as I condemn the parents in these situations. I do, however, think that there is an alarming situation in Ocean Township.

That is, I think it is absolutely crazy that these types of stories are looked at with wonder and amazement by the local adults. What? You guys were never kids? You never gathered at a friend’s house and got drunk when you were in high school? Okay, I submit that kids today are much stupider and generally more likely to drink and do experimental drugs than ten, twenty, and maybe even 30 years ago. I’ll give anyone that in the argument.

What I won’t give is that these kids are doing what kids do. Again, I’m no genius, but there has got to be a level of comfort between parents and their kids where the kids can hang out and begin to feel a degree of freedom, but are still safe in the process. I don’t have kids so I have little room to talk about what that level of comfort might entail.

I have, however, suffered through going to college while renting a house in Ocean Township and I have to make this point…

Maybe if the police and township officials and nosy neighbors didn’t spend September through May going after generally harmless (and of age) college students, they wouldn’t have a huge underage drinking problem with their “locals.” Just something to consider…

For those of you that haven’t heard, there was a terribly tragic accident last spring at Rider University here in New Jersey. One of the fraternities on that campus had a “big brother/little brother” night and as one of their local traditions, each family tree had a family drink. Sticking to this local, and stupid, traditional one of the new brothers literally drank himself to death from vodka. It’s a sad, sorry case where fault can be placed on everyone involved from the fraternity brothers to the young man who died after he drank all of these drinks.

However, one location where you absolutely cannot lay any blame is on the administration at the university. And, in case you haven’t seen this in the news, both the university Greek Advisor and the Dean of Students were charged with hazing in this case. Now folks, unless these two individuals either were present for this drink-fest or had prior knowledge of the booze night taking place, they are absolutely not liable at all by any stretch of the imagination.

This is akin to your boss getting a reckless driving ticket because you were swerving in and out of lanes the night before. It’s like comparing apples to t-shirts. It’s crazy.

As a fraternity man, I know that many undergraduates hide their less glamorous, local traditions. Incidentally, this is also why I’m glad to be a brother of Sigma Pi Fraternity - we’re systematically eliminating our bad traditions regionally and throughout the nation and replacing them with good ones. It’s a great thing to be a part of, really. That said, there is absolutely no way that these young men would have put this disgusting tradition out there for the school to see AND there is no way that, once knowing about this, the university would have let the students carry on like nothing bad was happening.

It just doesn’t work like that. That would be like Lee Harvey Oswald telling the FBI, “Hey, I’m going to pop Kennedy in the head,” and the FBI letting it happen. The system just doesn’t work that way.

Should the students who facilitated the young man’s death be charged? Of course. Should the administrators? Good Lord no! The people who are to blame here are the young man himself and the students who facilitated the act. That’s it. I fully believe that the administration’s charges will be dropped. And, if the university had any cajones, they’d go after the Mercer County prosecutor just like those young men down at Duke went after Mike Nifong.

Talk about prosecutorial aggrandizement…

The local news media are reporting that the West Long Branch Zoning Board vote of 5 to 1 in favor of expanding the Monmouth University campus has been upheld by a State Appellate Panel. Some of the folks living around the university took it upon themselves to fight against this approval, citing petty collusion between the university and township officials. Someone even blasted a local Committeeman because his daughter received an academic scholarship from the university. What a disgraceful charge to levy at the Committeeman…

That’s the problem with local politics in America today - anyone with a voice feels that they are entitled to their day in court and this holds up the progress of the greater good. An article in today’s Asbury Park Press cites that 36 families have been fighting against the expansion of the university…but you do NOT see it listed anywhere that well over 200 families in the town have supported the university and many more families just don’t care either way. I live down the street from the university and while I do not publicly support Monmouth’s desire to expand, I can certainly agree with the vast silent majority in West Long Branch that we don’t mind the expansion.

Now, some people will claim, “Well I live across the street from the university and quality of life is low and blah blah blah.” Sorry, but if you live next a community swimming pool, do you complain that people are swimming there? If you live next to a gym, do you complain that people are coming and going all day to work out? If you live next to a university do you complain that college students are being college students?

No.

And this is obvious - none of these thoughts are new in the debate. The small minority who feel that their opinion outweighs the majority in West Long Branch oftentimes comes back with the statement that they were in town before the “university” was. In this argument, the word “university” is key. In 1994, Monmouth College became Monmouth University. So many of the locals take 1994 as the starting point of the “university” not mentioning that the college was started in 1933.

Yes - this “We were here first” argument HAS been used to defend the minority’s right to blast the university. I’ve even had it used against me in informal discussions about the university with other people in town. It’s mind-boggling, really.

Anyway, congratulations to Monmouth University for winning the right to expand their campus. Best of luck.

The three young men who were falsely accused and publicly abused by disgraced former District Attorney Mike Nifong have filed criminal complaints against him. Good for these guys! A few comments on the overall situation…

College students all over the country know how their civil liberties are trashed on a near-constant basis because the few “bad apples” in the bunch ruin the image for the greater group. As I’ve said time and time again, as an undergraduate I routinely had police officers just open my front door and walk through my house at all hours of the day from the early morning to the late night. It got to the point where it was near-comical. We went so far as to even call the FBI for their help (our reasoning was - when the police are the ones who are breaking the law, who do you call?).

What Mike Nifong did to these boys is criminal. He attempted to prosecute them while KNOWING they were innocent and that the evidence proved them to be innocent. He ruined their college years, he ruined their immediate post-college years, and he greatly damaged the justice system in his district. He’s disgusting and a fraud and he deserves both jail time and to give these boys a just financial sum. Imagine if you were in the place that these boys were in - imagine that you were Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty or Dave Evans.

First, you are falsely accused of rape and while you KNOW you’re innocent, a corrupt system keeps beating you down. Then you have to endure public criticism from the anti-collegiate crowd. Furthermore, you have racist groups threatening to “take care of” your situation if the legal system does not (how are these groups allowed to hold the legal system hostage like that?). Your parents are blowing through millions of dollars to defend you in court because - as we now know in America - you are guilty until you PROVE yourself innocent. Oh, and to top it off - your own SCHOOL convicts you before the justice system by suspending you as soon as you are charged! Another epidemic affecting America’s college campuses are administrators who feel that they are judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to adjudicating off-campus activities. These administrators were not at the event, had second and third had FALSE reports about the event, and still decided to suspend the students.

And this is in America, people!

I hope that Reade, Collin, and Dave take Nifong to the limit. I hope they bankrupt him and send him straight to jail. All these kids did was be college students and you know what? There’s NOTHING wrong with that! And for you idiots out there who are completely against college students being college students, go see a psychiatrist. Yes, students should be respectful when living off-campus. But when they ARE respectful and you don’t hear a peep out of them - STOP trying to look into their homes and their lives and passing judgment on them.

Because you know what? Sometimes the chickens come home to roost - just ask Mike Nifong about it.