My last student loan – for my doctorate – showing a zero balance

There you go, folks. That is what it looks like to no longer owe anything in student loans. Not only does it look pretty good, but it feels pretty good, too. Also, here is another screenshot from another part of the student loan website showing the zero balance. Check it out:

My student loans are fully repaid – all of them

As I mentioned the other day, I plan on writing more about student loans from time to time, but I just do not have much more to write about my own repayment journey because it is now, completely, over.

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

A screenshot of my last student loan payment, which went out this morning

Then two years later in August 2015, I started on a new academic journey to earn a doctorate. That quest ended in May 2018 when I earned my doctorate from the University of Southern California at a grand total cost of $89,286.86. I also financed my doctoral program through student loan debt. Repayment on those student loans began in December 2018 and now, just about two years later, I am happy to announce that I have fully repaid the doctoral student loans as of this morning. When I have a screenshot available of that student loan balance coming in at $0, then I will share it here for everyone to see.

The final count for the doctoral student loans is as follows:

$87,360.16 in loan principal
$1,878.84 in capitalized interest
$47.86 in closing and refinancing fees
$6,084.93 in interest

Total Amount Repaid: $95,371.79

When you add up the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral student loans, the total amount I repaid is $244,826.91. I never missed a payment, never incurred a late fee, and never asked for a deferment for any reason. I took out this debt knowing that it meant I would have to repay the obligations I was incurring. I never asked for my loans to be forgiven. I never contemplated a world where I would want them to be forgiven. I never believed that other people should be forced to pay for my student loans. The discipline needed to pay off these loans gave me a near perfect credit score.

While I am thankful that my student loan repayment journey is at an end (for good, this time), I am even more thankful of the financial discipline and education that I was able to garner over the last 14 years. Stay tuned to my blog for more student loan entries in the future… they just will not be covering my own student loan repayment because it’s finally over!

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

As always, though, before we get to this week’s links I again want to strongly recommend signing up for a free Feedly account. I get absolutely no kickback for promoting Feedly, but I am so appreciative of their product being the best RSS reader on the internet and I encourage everyone to use it. If you are using another RSS aggregator, please consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/. If you are already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here. Thanks!

One more time before you go – for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend considering a free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

This is how the title of The Emerald magazine used to appear.

Here are some inspiring thoughts from Brother William D. Akers of Zeta Chapter, the sixth Grand Sage of Sigma Pi Fraternity. Incidentally, Past Grand Sage (PGS) Akers served as Grand Sage for a 4 year period; why is today’s Sigma Pi Fraternity seemingly so against Grand Sages serving more than one, 2-year term? That might be something to think about, I guess. In any event, PGS Akers delivered the comments below to an assembly of Delta and Kappa Chapter undergraduates in 1914, while he was serving as the fraternity’s Grand Fourth Counselor.

“In college life as well as in the business world there is no room for the passive type of man. A dead man and a lazy one are exactly alike, except the lazy one takes up more room.”
I’m sure that we’ve all heard several iterations of this idea over the years – that if one is not being a productive member of society, then they’re not really living life and might as well be dead. Or that if an employee is not pulling his own weight, then they are actually dead weight and should be fired. I believe PGS Akers’ point is that as fraternity men, we must be active in the affairs of our chapter. For the undergraduates reading this – don’t get your defenses up just yet! Too often, today’s young men see a call for involvement as an unwanted burden on their freedom or a tax on their time. That’s not what “involvement” should be, regardless of what instruction you may have received locally. To avoid being the “passive type of man” that PGS Akers refers to, today’s undergraduate man just needs to avail himself of the activities that his chapter should already be engaged in. For example, if your chapter is mixing with XYZ Sorority on Thursday night, then go to the mixer! And if you have a few free minutes during the day that Thursday, then why not ask the Social Chairman if there is some small piece of the planning for the night’s activities that you can help him complete?

Further, to avoid the passivity that PGS Akers warns us about, today’s undergraduate man should attend his chapter’s weekly meeting, philanthropic, and service events. Again, these should be part of your daily activities as an active member in your chapter in the first place. This isn’t a call to new action, but rather a call to existing action.

Some Delta-Beta Chapter brothers hanging out at a chapter BBQ.

Where PGS Akers’ comment begins to challenge us, I believe, is when it is applied to the larger population and its growing number of phobias and general mania around fraternities and fraternity men. Strong undergraduate leaders are not the ones who simply take what they’re given and regurgitate it for the next “leader” to read and hopefully do the same. Strong undergraduate leaders take the information that they’re given, question it in a thorough and independent manner, and then decide which elements of the material are best able to advance his chapter to its goals and his brothers to their goals. The most important part of that decision-making, though, is when the leader takes the material that he has found to be bogus, biased, or not worthy of propagation and tries to ascertain why it was included in the first place. Was this information included in an effort to disrupt a positive, yet traditional environment? Was it an oversight on the part of the person providing the material? Is it a poorly-veiled attempt to fundamentally change the perspective of the leader and his brothers? And if the answer to that question is “yes,” then why is the leader’s perspective trying to be modified? The answers to these questions (and more) should determine how the leader’s next actions.

“We Greeks, and I mean to speak with modesty, are the highest type of American manhood.”
This comment should hold true today as well, though I fear the forces of anti-masculinity and anti-traditionalism which are ripping through our culture are too often preventing fraternity men from exhibiting the highest type of American manhood, that is, traditional masculinity. The conflicting, often biased voices in today’s conversation on what it means to be a fraternity man often leave fraternity men confused at best or uncaring and aloof at worst. Today’s young fraternity leaders need to cut through the nonsense and demand clear, concise language from their leaders. If they suspect someone from their university or one of their elected leaders in the fraternity is communicating in double-speak, then they need to stop the conversation until the party they are speaking with plays fair.

That is the method by which today’s young fraternity leaders need to position themselves if they want to represent the highest type of American manhood. Be tellers of truth and promoters of real equality. Do not allow someone – anyone – to be held to a lesser standard because of their position, gender, race, socioeconomic class, etc. Fraternity men should only work pleasantly in those systems where all people are treated equally. However, what I think most fraternity men will find is that today’s college environment is stacked against them because of their skin color, gender, and/or choice to embrace a traditional view of fraternalism. Fraternity men must work to change that growing bias because bias in any form is unacceptable – particularly on college campuses.

“[Those who are jealous of fraternity membership] view us through glasses which magnify our sins and fail to even show our good points.”
Boy, it’s like PGS Akers gave this speech in 2014, not 100 years earlier! How true is this statement? Earlier in his speech, PGS Akers describes the people who are consistently anti-fraternity as “individuals who fight us through jealousies.” What is most distressing about PGS Akers’ comment here is that it is so relevant to today’s hostile environment for young men, and young fraternity men in particular. Also disturbing is that if you apply PGS Akers’ statement to any aspect of life outside of fraternity membership, then you’re likely to get a similar outcome. Imagine this being spoken in 2015 and replacing “fraternity membership” with “investment banker” or “tech millionaire.” The point is that when you’re a fraternity man, you are likely receiving a considerable amount of seen and unseen anger from a population that is jealous of your very existence because of what your existence represents in their known-only-to-them minds. It’s hard for us, as leaders, to take the comments of Akers’ jealous populations seriously because they are spoken from a place that we can’t enter nor can we innately understand (nor should we attempt to understand). Most of their comments are spoken from a place of jealously and an attempt to diminish you by neglecting all of the good you provide while highlighting your negatives.

My Delta-Beta Chapter guys at a fashion show they put together for autistic students.

My chapter at Monmouth University has had to deal with this weak-mindedness in at least one Greek Advisor. This individual loved to denigrate my undergraduates’ accomplishments and took every opportunity to do so, which were numerous since the chapter was winning many awards during that time – most notably winning Sigma Pi Fraternity’s Most Outstanding Chapter Award (#1 in the nation in their tier). He loved to put my guys down because his graduate school indoctrinated him to promote an extreme position held by too many student affairs employees. And that position is that they should receive external undergraduate successes by challenging the students do to more and reach higher. Do more? Reach higher than #1 in the nation? Really? For those student affairs employees who may be reading this commentary, please take this former Greek Advisor’s pigheadedness as a lesson. Sometimes the student affairs employees need to check their biases and jealousies at the door and simply say, “Wow – you guys did a great job! We’re proud of you! Congratulations!”

“To know that you have warm personal friends, who are intensely interested in you and in your success is one of the greatest of motive forces, and makes us do our best.”
Preach on, PGS Akers! Isn’t this the very core of motivating forces that propels fraternities forward in the right direction? Namely, that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you have a group of individuals behind you “who are intensely interested in you.” Further, they are intensely interested in your success! What greater squad is there to roll with than people who actually care about you, right?!

For my part as an alumni advisor, I’ve increasingly become intensely interested in the professional successes of my young alumni. When I hear about one of my young alumni upgrading to a new company, receiving a promotion, or getting a raise, I find a growing level of pride in their accomplishments. In a similar manner, when one of my young alumni decides that they want to go back to school to earn a master’s degree, I become proud of their decision to expand their academic pursuits. And it’s that pursuit of excellence – the pursuit of being something bigger and greater than you are today – that I find so great and admirable!

A group of my undergraduates at this past May’s graduation.

A word to the undergraduate Sigma Pi leaders reading this commentary: you will not receive this type of lasting, post-graduation support from your Greek Advisor or from any of the negative voices that you hear while you’re running your chapter. As PGS Akers instructs us, the negative voices only want to magnify your sins and fail to recognize your good contributions to society. Lucky for us, we’re members of a true brotherhood of men. We celebrate each other’s successes and share the aggravation of each other’s setbacks. Those on the outside don’t understand that connection, but they do understand how to criticize their personal interpretation of that connection. Let them spew their hate because it further degrades any perceived authority that they assumed to have in the first place.

“…the strength of our fraternity and the future of the fraternity are in your hands.”
These words are as true today as they were when PGS Akers spoke them in 1914. Remember, when he delivered this speech PGS Akers was speaking to a group of assembled undergraduates from Delta and Kappa chapters. And even though we have over 100 more chapters today and we are a much more complex organization working in a much more biased environment, the truth is now and remains that the future of the fraternity is in the hands of our undergraduates. In a very real sense, as a group the undergraduate votes at our biennial Convocation far outnumber the combined votes of our alumni clubs, past grand officers, and other individuals who are allowed to vote during the business meetings. In a much more theoretical sense, the future of Sigma Pi Fraternity rests in the hands of those undergraduates who are willing to stand up to the hypocrisies that they face on a daily basis. Those undergraduates who are willing to question, in a gentlemanly manner, those with perceived authority regarding their hypocrisies are the ones who will lead this fraternity into the future.

“…the duties of our latest initiate are of more importance to the Fraternity than those of the Grand Sage. While the former may have no official duties to attend to, he is actively engaged, either in building up or tearing down our reputation, a matter of more vital importance than any official business could be.”
This comment follows the one immediately listed above as a further indication that the future of the fraternity is set by the undergraduates, not our alumni. Sure, our alumni may be in elected or hired staff positions, but the work of the fraternity has always existed at the active chapter level. This doesn’t take away from the many great and varied efforts of our alumni clubs and alumni volunteers. Our alumni volunteers, especially, are the workhorses of Sigma Pi Fraternity. Theirs is a labor of love and, if done correctly, their work bears more and better fruit than any other effort put forth by any other constituency in the fraternity.

Some of my Spring 2015 initiates from the Delta-Beta Chapter.

Yet still, the people who are most important to the fraternity’s future are not those with the shiny medals around their necks or the ones who get up each morning to go to work for Sigma Pi. The most important people in the fraternity are the ones who were just initiated into the brotherhood and have their entire lives ahead of them as men of Sigma Pi. Will they be actively engaged in building their chapter and, through that effort, making the national fraternity stronger? Or will they be one of the better-off-dead lazy men that PGS Akers notes in one of the earlier quotes cited above?

“Sigma Pi wants MEN, – men of brain and brawn, clean men, men who love and honor their Mother and Father, these are the men who will love and honor our Fraternity.”
During recruitment season, I wish that our leaders promoted this quote more to our undergraduates than anything else. In the last 10 or so years, many student affairs employees have co-opted Phired Up’s “values-based” recruitment model and demeaned it into becoming yet another battering ram to use against traditional fraternities and sororities. By “traditional fraternities and sororities,” I am talking about those chapters who look to find certain characteristics in the people that they recruit. That is, to find groups of kindred minds who are diverse by their origins and life experiences, but share common characteristics that are valued by the members of the chapter. Sigma Pi chapters should take PGS Akers’ suggestion and look for young men to join our fraternity who are MEN! Find guys who live clean lives, take care of themselves, and honor tradition both in their families and within the fraternity. These days, society is too quick to rewrite history in an effort to make tradition always appear biased, angry, or discriminatory. And while that may be true in some cases, the history of thousands of fraternity and sorority chapters across the country is not a history of discrimination. Even for those chapters who were founded by organizations that had exclusionary policies at their national levels – those policies no longer exist and likely haven’t existed for decades.

Today’s undergraduates do not need to be brow-beaten into thinking that they are exclusionary and that they need to take a more inclusive approach to recruitment. That’s nothing more than extremist jargon that seeks to dismantle traditional forms of masculinity (and femininity, for that matter). As PGS Akers states – Sigma Pi needs to recruit MEN.

Here are some other interesting points that I found in the January 1915 issue of The Emerald:

I encourage everyone who has an interest in Sigma Pi Fraternity’s history to check out the online archive of old Emerald magazines. If you like this stuff, then they are a treasure trove of information!

The first thing that strikes me when I look at the one hundred year-old magazine is that the gentlemen who operated the Fraternity in 1914 had the foresight to charge a subscription fee! At the bottom of the cover page is a note that reads: “Subscription rates $1.00 per year in advance.” Over the years I’ve sat in on many conversations regarding the cost of producing The Emerald. Whenever the idea of charging a small annual fee for the magazine is brought up, it is shot down. Some argue that we promised our members that we wouldn’t charge them a subscription fee and others say that no one would pay it. Regardless of why we select not to charge a small subscription fee today, the initial operators of this fraternity were not afraid to charge each member a dollar for the privilege of receiving the national magazine.

The next thing that strikes me about The Emerald is that they list the house address and contact information for every single chapter of Sigma Pi right in the beginning of the magazine. Of course, there were only 9 active chapters back then, but it’s still a nice touch!

The Emerald begins to show some meat when we get to the Foreward. This line strikes me as relevant in the anti-fraternity, anti-male environment that many of our chapters operate in today: “It is our earnest wish that The Emerald may be effective in espousing the cause of the College Fraternity in general and of Sigma Pi in particular…” I wish that this was still a core focus area for our national organization. Sigma Pi Fraternity – and no national fraternity, for that matter – no longer makes it a basic cause to promote the virtues of college fraternity membership. Further and more specific to Sigma Pi, we do not do a good job of promoting our undergraduates’ incredible successes in mediums that have lasting cache. In other words, while we might tweet a congratulatory note or post an update on Facebook noting a job well done, we do not use our publications as methods of publicly promoting the many good works that are intrinsic to fraternity life. From time to time we print stories about successful Sigma Pi alumni in our national magazine, but we don’t take those stories to the masses. We don’t utilize our Fraternity-owned web assets (we have six different, official Sigma Pi blogs) as methods of regularly promoting the great value of membership in our fraternity. Do we promote the value of being a Sigma Pi or a member of a Greek organization every once in a while? Sure. Do we use these assets to promote Sigma Pi and Greek Life on a consistent, regular basis? No.

The mindset of the early members of our Fraternity was that of dealing from a position of strength. They didn’t cower or bend at the first anti-fraternity accusation hurled in their direction. No! Instead, they believed that Sigma Pi “fills a distinct want and supplies the requirements of a definite need in the lives of our college boys.” This line from The Emerald comes from an editorial that was reprinted in the magazine and talked about the great success of a young Sigma Pi Fraternity as it worked to grow a strong reputation in the Greek world. I was struck by this short editorial because it speaks unabashedly about the virtue of fraternity membership. There is no silent apology or tone of regret that we even exist! One hundred years ago, fraternity men didn’t apologize for being men, for being masculine, or for recognizing the value of mentoring and one-on-one personal development that takes place within the walls of a chapter house.

Today the fraternity world throws its collective hands in the air and says, “We can’t win!” when a grossly biased editorial or disgustingly negative article is written about us. There is no innate belief that we should vocally and/or forcefully stand up against attacks on our very existence. In place of that belief, we’ve promoted policies of placation to the loudest, angriest voices.

It’s shameful.

Some other random points that I picked up in this issue of The Emerald:

A final comment from Volume II, Number 1 of The Emerald that seems relevant to what many of us face in today’s anti-masculinity, anti-fraternity student life environment. There is a line in the magazine that says: “It is our conviction that when we trim the situation down to the psychology of the matter we have before us merely the battle of the ‘outs’ against the ‘ins’; that it is, in short, simple, common, every day, human nature.” The core of this statement is the possession of an inner knowledge that we should all have as members of Sigma Pi Fraternity. And that knowledge is that we are going to be attacked by those on the outside simply because they’re on the outside looking in. Undergraduates have many hokey sayings about fraternity life – one of which is that from the outside looking in, you can never understand it, but from the inside looking out, you can never explain it.

That is the position that we find ourselves in today.

The vocal, anti-male minority that uses the biased media to publish negative outlooks on the future of fraternities are nothing more than those same “outs.” And they’re angry for many reasons, not the least of which is the life of pseudo-intellectual privilege that they’ve bastardized since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. That revolution promoted transparency above all else as it relates to large institutions. And the calls for transparency mostly took place on college campuses. But on those same campuses we – as fraternity men – sit in the face of that transparency. We are members of a private boys’ club which irritates those “outs” because they don’t know what we “ins” know. What they have are anecdotal accounts of the worst elements of fraternity life that they desperately try to explode into vast generalizations to define all of us. And what do we have as a response? One hundred years ago, the first brothers of Sigma Pi Fraternity would have brushed off the accusations of the “outs” by publicly ridiculing the use of extreme examples to define the whole. Fast forward to today and instead of calling out extremists and zealots, we’ve been reduced to taking personal offense to negative comments from the “outs” when we should be hitting them back even harder.

In one hundred years’ time, Greek leaders have gone from a group of men who took pride in openly promoting the virtues of fraternity membership to a group of men who mostly walk in lockstep with a student life industry that is more concerned with extricating itself from any risks or any possible offenses than it is concerned with introducing college students to scientific, biological reality.

I hope that Sigma Pi can lead the way for the Greek world and turn the tide back in the direction of being inherently proud of fraternity membership… and soon.

How awesome was that? Billy Joel is the man! And good for that kid standing up and taking a chance. He’s going to go far with that attitude – and a pretty amazing set of dancing fingers to match!

Canadian students in a lecture hall - not my students, but students nonetheless

Some of you might recall a little over a year ago when I wrote about how I was getting a little suspicious of the online learning environment and its influence on student achievement. In short, that blog entry talked about how I was unimpressed at the amount of classes that the online college I work for allowed their students to take at a single time. Further, I’ve been continually unimpressed by the inability for my online students to write in an academically acceptable manner or conform to basic academic formatting standards. Frankly, my students are not great writers nor do they give a damn about the required academic formats (APA, MLA, etc) when submitting their papers.

And still – as aggravating as those issues may be to an educator, believe it or not the focus of this article is something different! Today, my unnecessary complication is the with the attitudes of my online learners. To put it succinctly, these students don’t understand the first thing about the teacher/student relationship! Actually, there is a second annoyance that I’ve been encountering with my students which has to do with their inability to comprehend the nature of the online learning environment, but let me bitch about the teacher/student relationship first!

I’ve been continually amazed at how poorly prepared for the advanced learning environment some of my online learners are when my classes start. Now granted, I’m not talking about the entire class of students nor am I referring to even half of the class. However, at least 10% to 15% of each class that I teach is comprised of students who do not understand their role in the teacher/student relationship. Let me define that a little bit more…

I do not expect my students to be rote learners like we’re all stuck in the 1950’s or something. Instead, I expect my students to understand that they are not my customers – they are my students. This is a big topic of discussion in the higher education circles: whether the people who sit in the classrooms are customers/consumers or students. And, to my great disappointment, the trend is pushing more towards students being viewed as customers instead of seekers of knowledge or impassioned learners.

This is a big problem.

Defining a student as a consumer puts the student in a position to believe (incorrectly) that they can control the flow of work in the class (homework and weekly assignments) or the requirements for passing the class (grading metrics and evaluation rubrics). Why does this happen? Well, it happens for the same reason that, as a consumer, you can bitch and moan to your local auto mechanic and get your bill lowered. Namely… the customer is always right!

Exacerbating this problem is that this customer/teacher relationship just doesn’t work well in online learning (or higher education in general). In fact, it is the job of the college to tell these “customers” when they are dead wrong. At some point I hope to write a longer piece on this blog about how creating the customer vs. student scenario has led to the painful destruction of what should be a great American academic system. For now, though, my focus is on how some of my students believe that they can dictate my grading schedule. It’s outrageous! I had a student e-mail me two weeks before the class ended to tell me that he expected his final grade to be completed within 12 hours of his final paper being submitted (which was due the following weekend) because he needed to report his grade to the company that funds his education. After laughing out loud, I e-mailed the student back and explained that there is a ten day period between when the final student work is submitted and the final grades are due and that he should expect to see his final grade at some point towards the end of that ten day period.

He began e-mailing me every single day about his final grade. The student started contacting me one day prior to the class ending through the middle of the ten day period, which was when I had completed my final grading and submitted his grade for posting. Luckily, the online university was on my side in this debacle because – believe it or not – the student had been contacting the university daily, too!

For the last course that I taught, I had five or six of these unnecessary student complications. Again, all of this stems from the idea that the student is a customer and not a person being evaluated for his or her academic capabilities.

To finish up, the other item that annoys me about the online learning environment is the lack of online learners to understand how this arrangement is supposed to work. The best example that I can give is the students themselves – these are good people who, for one reason or another, could not attend college during the traditional time in one’s life where they would attend college (right after high school or a few years after high school ended). Maybe they started a family, maybe they took over the family business, maybe they had a job in the trades and are only now going back to get a degree – whatever the case, these folks are typically hard-working, already employed people on crazy schedules.

And I totally respect that fact. In fact, I encourage more people who are not of the traditional college age to seek out methods to procure college degrees.

What shocks me, though, is that these online learners don’t take a minute to do the least bit of research on the people who teach their classes because if they did – surprise, surprise – they’d find out that their professors are in the same boat! We’re typically teaching at two or three universities and, in my case, I’ve got a variety of jobs and volunteer positions that take up all of my time. In other words, when I have a “customer” student complaining that they want their grade to be submitted first and ten days earlier than the rest of the class, it makes me want to punch the wall. There’s an arrogance – an ignorance of reality – in that request. There’s a certain, “I’m in charge and I’m paying you for my degree so fork over what I want, when I want it – NOW!” in that type of request.

It’s unacceptable and I hope that my fellow online teachers are approaching these problems the same way that I do – with the knowledge that we have an obligation to uphold the academic standards of our institutions and thus we need to be sure that the teacher/student relationship as well as the teaching environment are both preserved and respected.

But the point of this entry is that I’m beginning to grow suspicious of this all-online university setting and I’ll tell you why…

A few months ago I popped into an online discussion board populated by professors from this all-online university. Among the many interesting and engaging discussions was the poor writing quality of the student population, in general. This was a problem that I noticed in my classes, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it because of the demographic composition of my students. They’re mostly older students that ended their education during or immediately after high school and then entered the working world. Then ten, twenty, thirty, and even forty and fifty years later they decide that they want to get a Bachelor’s Degree and enroll in the all-online university where I teach some classes. With that type of background, the class instructor (me) needs to be able to process and ultimately comprehend a different writing style.

I’m fine with that – believe me.

But reading through these discussions (and the one cited above, particularly) led me to start thinking about what type of student was actually enrolling in this school. However, as with most “deep thoughts” that I’ve had recently, I put it aside and worried about the work at hand that I needed to complete before whatever deadline hit. Most of you know how it is with deadlines.

But then I began teaching another section of my course and within two weeks of the class starting, half of the students were not responding to e-mails or participating in the online discussions. When you’re enrolled in an all-online university, you must participate in the online discussions – it’s how you’re graded for goodness sake! Like any educator would be, this lack of engagement made me pretty concerned. I tried contacting each of the students that chose not to participate in any of the assignments and I received three responses. Two of the students said that they planned on completing all of the work, but they were a little busy at the moment and to stay tuned because they would submit all of their work on-time. I didn’t hear from them again until, well, read on. The third student, however, was a real eye-opener for me. The third student told me that she was enrolled in 54 credits through December.

Repeat: FIFTY-FOUR CREDITS THROUGH DECEMBER!

Folks, that is absolutely obscene. For this all-online university to allow a student to register for 18 classes in a five month period is disgusting. For comparison’s sake, in a bricks-and-mortar college semester (which is about three and a half months) the typical student takes between 4 and 6 classes. And those students who opt to take 6 classes during the semester know that they are getting themselves ready for an extremely busy three and a half months! Yet, the all-online university where I teach some classes allowed a student to take three times the amount of classes that a traditional university would allow.

That’s ridiculous and the all-online university should be ashamed of itself.

I advised the student to drop my class since it was not feasible for her to submit the required information in an appropriate timeframe. She agreed and dropped the class and actually thanked me for giving her such good, sound advice. Look, I should probably be advising students to stay in my classes because then I get paid more, but I couldn’t do that to the student. It’s just not right.

That was about six weeks ago when the class was just getting started. Now let’s fast-forward to last week when the class ended. Guess who I heard from all of a sudden? That’s right – I heard from those two students who told me that they would have everything submitted on time. Since they didn’t complete all of the required work during the required timeframes (or even the grace periods), they scored a “0” on each item which led them both to fail the class miserably. However, two days before the class was scheduled to end (I’m not exaggerating, it was two days prior to the class ending) they contacted me, separately, and asked if they could submit all of the past due material.

My mind when I read those e-mails: “Really? Really? You didn’t have time to do the required work during the two months that the class was in session, but now you’re going to do two months worth of work in two days? Really? Do I really have a sign on my virtual forehead that says, ‘Moron!’? Really? You’d have been kicked out of the course already in a bricks-and-mortar university.”

However, one of the tenets of this all-online university is that we cater to our students’ professional lives and personal needs. So I had no choice but to tell these students that I would accept their late work and grade it, replacing their “0” grades with whatever they earned. But I have to tell you this – the work they submitted was rushed and really poorly done. They didn’t score well at all and, in truth, they should have been removed from the course as soon as they didn’t submit the required work on time (or a day or two late).

So this latest experience mixed with the generally mediocre-at-best writing skills of my students has me growing more suspicious of this all-online university stuff. I’m not sure where this is going to put me at this particular institute of higher education as I continue to build and expand my professional teaching resume, but at this point – I’m very concerned about my students and whether or not they are capable of the type of quality that the job market expects from a Bachelor’s Degree holder.

This time around I’m pretty aggravated about this old guy that was in my class. Generally, I have no issue with old people enrolling in graduate courses – in fact, I encourage it! I hope to still be taking classes when I’m older. Why not? Who doesn’t love learning new stuff?

However, when I eventually take classes as an older guy, I have no intention of acting like this lunatic that was in my class this semester. This guy came off like a bumbling buffoon of an idiot with almost every comment he offered in the class.

You may remember that the last time I wrote one of these unnecessary complications diatribes I focused on an idiot girl in this same class. One of her major problems (aside from not being prepared for graduate study) was that she couldn’t properly communicate and she was enrolled in a communications program. Well, this guy has the same problem. Yet again I’m baffled by the severe lack of communication skills that the old guy in my class had. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder about the level of rigor put into the application review for this program. Good Lord – it’s like they’ll let anyone in!

But here is an old guy who is enrolled in a communications-based program and he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class. I repeat: he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class! Meanwhile, his day job was working in a production studio teaching new hires for a local television channel how to operate the machinery and create graphics for the various screens. The guy worked as a presenter and instructor all day and he didn’t want to present or instruct for class assignments. What the heck type of sense does that make!?

Yet, that’s not the most aggravating part of this guy. No. In fact, what really bothered me about him was his obstinate attitude.

I remember one night when the Professor wanted to let everyone go 30 minutes early. We specifically didn’t take our regular “break” in what was a 3 hour class because we wanted to get out early. And just when the Professor was getting us ready to pack up and leave, this old asshole kept speaking and asking questions. Now, as an Adjunct Professor I would never discourage the continuation of a class discussion. However, as a guy with some common sense, I would have held my questions until after the class ended. Further, I would have asked questions that had some meaning. This guy extended our class by an additional 20 minutes (i.e. we only got out 10 minutes early) because he was asking about how the online message board system worked.

Seriously.

This guy kept us an extra 20 minutes because he wanted to talk about the finer points of an online message board! And what’s even more annoying is that the questions that he was asking were basic, easy to answer questions that had nothing to do with our topic of study. But still, the idiot felt the need to constantly repeat that he’s a cynic and he likes playing devil’s advocate. For what?! What exactly are you f’ing advocating for when you’re talking about whether or not an online submission gets to its final destination?! Honestly – what are you talking about you f’ing idiot?

This guy was a moron and I’m so glad that I don’t have to be in class with him any more. Idiot.

Once upon a time I was the Vice-President of the eighth grade class back in Mount Arlington Public School. At the same time I was President of the school’s band. I really can’t remember much about either position, so I don’t have anything to comment on here. Sorry.

High School
When I got to Roxbury High School, I ran for Vice-President of the Freshman class and won that election. I don’t recall much about what we did Freshman year other than maybe a fundraiser or two. I wasn’t overly pleased with the position of being “Vice-President” so as Sophomore year came closer I ran against the sitting President for her position and won. As I recall, being President of the Sophomore class was very much like the being Vice-President of the Freshman class – we didn’t do much. You know, sometimes these high school kids run for office on platforms of being able to change the food in the cafeteria or being able to get better parking situations for the students. The reality is that all of that stuff is off limits to the students and handled by teachers and unions.

Anyway, I ran for President of the Junior class (won that one, too) and at least in this position I was able to plan our Junior Prom. That was a lot of fun because we had a certain budget to work within (I don’t remember how much it was now, but it was thousands of dollars) and we managed to come in under budget. That was a good accomplishment and something that I don’t think normally happened when planning these things.

As my Junior year came to a close I had to choose between running for President of the Senior class or running for the President of the Student Council. There were two things that swayed my decision. The first was that the President of the Senior class is the President of the class for life. In other words, you have to horde all of the memorabilia for the class, you have to plan the reunions, you have to try to stay in touch with everyone…not for me. The second thing that swayed my decision was that the President of the Student Council was a more prestigious position.

So I ran for Student Council President and won (there’s a pattern here, guys). One of my good friends from grade school was running for the President of the Senior class so I endorsed her candidacy and she wound up winning, too.

I liked being Student Council President because it gave me direct access to the Principal and allowed me to plan some of the school-wide events like spirit days and some of our community-based events. For example, Roxbury High School holds a dance every year at the high school for the local senior citizen center. I helped to plan that event and it was really a lot of fun. Also, Roxbury has a winter dance for all students every year and that was a lot of fun to plan, too. And since my buddy was the President of the Senior class, I helped her plan our Senior Prom.

Being President of the Junior class and Student Council President was great training on how to work within a budget, how to manipulate a budget, how to advertise and publicize events where people need to purchase tickets to attend, etc. I really enjoyed those positions. Oh, and on my way out of Roxbury High School I was in charge of the school-wide elections so I convinced a bunch of the younger football players and wrestlers who I had been mentoring to run for positions and I think almost all of them won. I thought that was a good way to leave a lasting impression on the school.

Monmouth University – Sigma Pi Fraternity
When I arrived at college I could have kept climbing the ladder and eventually become President of the Student Government, but I really had no interest. In fact, I had no interest in being “involved” other than doing my school work and making new friends. And that’s what I did for my first semester – met new people, scored a 3.9 GPA, had a whole lot of fun – typical college stuff. But sometimes you can’t hold down the urge inside…

When my second semester began, I decided to pledge Sigma Pi Fraternity (there’s another story behind that, which I might get to at some point). I think there were 9 or 10 guys in my pledge class – I don’t remember any more. However, I do remember that they made me the President of the pledge class and I remember that because they elected me as the President due to my high grades, but the position of President meant that I was quizzed and questioned before the rest of the guys. No big deal, I learned the fraternity history pretty quickly so I didn’t mind.

After I was initiated (almost ten years ago), I didn’t really come around to any of the meetings or events until the week before the semester ended (and at that, I only really remember going to a party and eventually passing out on a couch that was broken and busted). When I began my first full semester as a member of the chapter it had been quite some time since I was in a position of real power (over a year since I was Student Council President). So the urge to do something substantial was bearing down on me and at the end of the semester I opted to run against the sitting President of the fraternity (who was a very well-respected Senior).

That guy dropped out of the race before the guys cast their ballots and I won by default. That was December 2000. I kept running for re-election and remained the President of the chapter until January 2003 (which was actually one month too long, but we did the transfer ceremony to the next President late).

There are a bunch of reasons why I remained President for so long. At its core, I think the reason is because I needed the challenge that the Presidency gave to me and the chapter needed the professionalism that I demanded of myself and the organization. It was a good, symbiotic relationship that was helped by this thing in my head that demands that I become the best at what I do, period. So while I was President, we ended a lot of the bad traditions in the chapter and started (or brought back) some better ones. More than anything else, I remember that being chapter President was more like running a small town than a small business. I say that because when you run a small business you have your actions and maybe the actions of two or three other people to worry about in addition to your finances, advertising, planning for the future, etc. Running a fraternity chapter, though, encompasses all of those things but to a much higher degree. Plus, you had to work within regional and national structures as well as with local officials. Also, at one point we had over 50 guys (which is a substantial number for Monmouth University’s campus – about 2.5% of all men on the campus were members of our fraternity) and all of the guys were out there doing their own thing.

One of the reasons that I was an effective leader, I think, was because I delegated responsibility and didn’t get bogged down in the nitty gritty bullshit that takes place in fraternity chapters. When the guys wanted to have a party, I had people that took care of the parties. When the guys wanted to have a rush event, I had a committee that took care of the rush event. When we had to teach the new classes about the fraternity, we had guys to do that, too. I saw my job as managing the fraternity’s relationship with the external communities and training/guiding the rest of my leadership team on how to manage the chapter.

It was pretty damn successful, too. We dug ourselves out of a $9,000 debt, more than tripled the size of the chapter, and skyrocketed up the national rankings (the chapter was eventually ranked #1 in the nation while I was the Chapter Director a.k.a. local advisor). Plus, our image on campus was heightened by all of the great things we were doing to the point where I won my final election to become President of the InterFraternity Council…and I wasn’t even present at the election!

Being IFC President was fun because when the university told us that we couldn’t do certain things that are fundamental parts of self-governing, I dissolved the IFC. That spark was part of what eventually lead to a somewhat reform of Greek Life at Monmouth University, but that’s an entry for another time.

So there you have it, folks. Those are all of the times (that I can remember) where I was President of an organization. Happy President’s Day!