Free comedy

It takes some pretty high grade obfuscation to raise my eyebrows. I’ve run newspapers and have been deluged with some of the best spin-doctoring a large PR budget can buy. I’ve also served on college boards and in other adjunct roles in academia, and enjoyed the finest in that genre of palaver.

Nonetheless, I would’ve paid good money to be at the University of Cincinnati board of trustees meeting for the discussion of the proposal to change from quarters to semesters. The snippets of the process reported in the newspaper were enough to tantalize my appetite for high farce.

I’ve served on a number of boards and encouraged the management to continuously come up with ways to advance the cause. But when you bring the proposal to the board, keep in mind our limited time frame and stick with the concrete and specific. In other words, if you’re positing a significant change, don’t tell us it’ll be “better.” Show us precisely how, and with facts and figures.

Therefore, I wanted to be in the room when the reason for this prodigious change at UC was given as “When coupled with collegiate restructuring, the conversion will result in more synergies across programs, fewer programmatic redundancies across colleges and a more strategic array of degree programs.” Bravo! Well-crafted.

Mind you, I would be checking out the recipients of this, not the provost who fired it off. I would be looking around for those nodding sagely, just as though that explained it.

UC informed the trustees that the conversion would cost a little over $7 million, while a task force on the conversion projected a little under $13 million. That’s a discrepancy of only about 86%. Why hold up the vote and decisions to nail down the facts? You know it’s going to turn out to be multiples of that, anyway.

Not to be upstaged in the ready-fire-aim derby, the UC Faculty Senate asked the trustees two months ago to come up with the funding before a plan was out and approved. Good thinking, faculty. How ‘bout you sign a five-year teaching contract now and we’ll tell you what it pays later? Individual faculty quoted in the article were vehemently opposed to the proposed changes and predicted ruin, if approved.

What’s even more disquieting about that is the faculty doesn’t appear to discern that this is preordained and the falderal between the upper management and the board is just theater. I’m not complaining about the process, I just want seats for the performance.

It’s not bad enough to see this tease about trustee fun that I’m missing, but the newspaper includes a sidebar report that the College Conservatory of Music has requested that the trustees approve a purchase of new pianos in excess of $4 million. The proposal says that the purchase saves $1.8 million off the retail price, calculating in $414,325 that could be realized through the sale of pianos being replaced.

At that point, if I’m a trustee, I look down at the highly polished table to see if something is written on my forehead. First of all, selling off 165 heavily used pianos is neither a given nor part of a “savings.”

Then, what is the relevance of retail price? The average Steinway retail buyer purchases an average of…oh, lemme guess…one per lifetime? You buy in multiples of a hundred with greater frequency. You better not have been paying retail price or I’m about to set up a payroll deduction on you geniuses. This is like the Department of Defense justifying a broad-brush upgrade of fighter engines by saying it will give the jets a top speed of up to twenty times that of a Hyundai Sonata.

Just to dot the “i,” I’m scanning radio channels a few nights ago and hit the UC basketball postgame show. It was the “turning point of the game” segment, which I understand is sold as a sponsored deal. UC, a national power, had just flattened early-season patsy South Dakota 77-46. The UC announcer recounts the turning point play and I about go off the road from laughing.

It wasn’t the turning point of tonight’s contest. That would’ve taken place about a year ago, when they scheduled the Coyotes to be the Washington Generals of the season. But, if you have a sponsor who’s willing to underwrite the segment as such, it’s okay by me. I’m just along for the free ride.

I don’t know why I subscribe to XM to get the comedy channels when there’s so much free material.