New College Independent Alumni/ae Association

As noted here, New College students are now losing their apartments due to the ongoing misfeasance by the school’s trustees. But students aren’t the only ones suffering from the college’s financial mismanagement that brought on the wrath of the U.S. Department of Education. Unpaid faculty and other employees are also desperately scrambling for assistance.

Perhaps most pertinent to this association, though, are the whistleblowers — formerly employed at our alma mater — whose severance payments are in default. Anyone wishing to help them out can make a donation through the site linked in this post.

You know you’re in trouble when your PC alma mater starts to resemble a GOP Medicare scam. Unfortunately, that’s the first thing I thought of when reading Harper’s  Washington Babylon this morning. I guess that’s what happens when the virus of criminal enterprise is allowed to breed unchecked in public institutions — it eventually infects an entire society.

News of the failure of New College to report degrees to the National Student Clearinghouse raises the concern that should the school close, potential employers and institutions interested in verifying diplomas would have nowhere to turn. The fact that the present probation under the U.S. Department of Education forced the school to place $3 million in escrow at the same time that enrollment has dropped by more than half, explains why paychecks were not issued last week, and why student loans are a month overdue, but it is no excuse for the school to show such disregard for its alumni/ae. A class-action suit may never materialize, but the school is certainly vulnerable for this ongoing misfeasance. Perhaps another front page story would help.

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

I was jokingly remarking to fellow alumni the other day that perhaps New College should initiate a smiling faces campaign similar to the one recently undertaken by the Kremlin’s department of social advertising. I noted they might even emulate Moscow’s metro intercom announcements on where to find psychiatric counseling when happy face billboards don’t suffice.

Then today I find out that the pseudo faculty rebellion this summer, led by the perennial lacky Adam Cornford, was apparently just pious posturing to obtain large raises. In fact, the briefly-voiced demand for trustee accountability this summer has been completely turned on its head by the flaky professor.

As the newly-appointed Public Information Officer for New College, Cornford — much like ministers of propaganda in the Kremlin — has set out to search and destroy all publicly available information about the school’s history of misfeasance in academic and fiscal integrity. In his first mission in subverting the public’s right to know, Cornford hacked the Wikipedia site by deleting news stories about the school’s long-standing corruption and incompetence.

Unfortunately for the poet-turned-propaganda-csar, both his deletions and falsifications have been detected by Wikipedia, preserved by alumni, and will likely be exposed by local media. Perhaps Cornford and his masters deemed this shrewd misbehavior as necessary to overcome the severe decline in student enrollment following the July 31 front page expose in the San Francisco Chronicle. Still, one has to ask, How is it that this coincides with the school’s motto of creating a more just, sacred, and sustainable world?

The following notice is from the New College website. The office was also closed most of the first week of October as well. Students should expect this one to two month (or longer) delay in student loan money to be the norm each semester. For those struggling to survive without timely loan disbursements, they should note that this situation was brought on by the trustees of the school and their misfeasance over the past decade. Students who want to see this remedied might want to get involved with the student council.

Please note: the Financial Aid Office will be closed for processing from October 8 through October 13. We will re-open our office on Monday, October 15.

This closure is necessary in order to submit students’ financial aid files for review to the Department of Education. In order for any student to receive their financial aid funds, we must submit all files for review to the Department. It is crucial we ensure that all files are submitted without packaging errors. If the department finds anything incorrect, they will return it to us to correct. If this takes place then it will delay the disbursements of those students’ funds an additional 30 days. Also, if we are not able to submit files with less than a 10% error margin, the Department can restrict or even eliminate our ability to participate in any Title IV funding. Because of this, it is important that we are able to review files without distraction. Please be patient. We are doing this in order to get the funds that all students have been requesting to them. Thank you for your patience.

Rose Stadler
Director of Financial Aid

I was reading Jenny Cashman’s essay The Revolution of Akhenaten and couldn’t help thinking of the cult of Gabel at my alma mater. While the iconography of power at New College is admittedly less monumental, the thematic depictions legitimizing the rulers of the school are no less commemorative in constructing an elite identity there than they were in the temples of ancient Egypt. The annals of its holy mission may be described online rather than inscribed on stelae, but the descriptive narrative functions as a similar literary device. The only thing missing at the campus are murals of dream motifs displaying scenes of Gabel communing with god.

Evoking memories of the recent rebellions at New College, Cashman writes “Akhenaten’s religion and his royal city of Amarna represent the social construction of a ‘community of believers’ that parallels how social movements of resistance create identity through religious fundamentalism in today’s global society.” While not a religion per se, Gabel’s Institute for Spirituality Law and Politics as well as the school’s just, sacred and sustainable motto do suggest that the trustees inhabit a higher plane.

Cashman goes on to say, “This type of identity-building, Castells suggests, is an expression of ‘the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded’, a defensive identity that ‘leads to the formation of communes or communities’.” The legitimizing literature of New College is replete with explicit community themes, but unlike genuine communes, the rulers of the school try to exclude both state institutions as well as the students who attend there. It’s hard to be more exclusive than that.