The Board of Regents says that if South Dakota has to have a fascist McCarthy tipline to rat out woke professors in drag, Governor Kristi Noem should at least let them run it to allow for more efficient political persecution:
Regent Jeff Partridge of Rapid City said the regents have formally asked to take over and manage the tip line that Governor Kristi Noem started in May. Partridge made his comments Thursday during the board’s meeting at South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City.
Partridge, a former legislator, served as Noem’s interim finance commissioner during the 2022 legislative session after he was appointed to the board by her in 2021. He said Thursday there would be several advantages if the regents directly ran the call line.
“We would be able to be efficient in dealing with these in a very timely manner,” Partridge said. And, he added, “If we coordinated our efforts, we’d be able to help the student even better” [Bob Mercer, “Regents Ask to Take Over Governor’s Complaint Line,” KELO-TV, 2023.10.05].
But like any authoritarian, Noem is more interested in control than peak performance:
The governor doesn’t want to change, according to her chief of communications.
“The whistleblower hotline has been extremely effective to make sure that concerns are heard and hopefully addressed by the Board of Regents,” Ian Fury told KELOLAND News. “There are no planned changes in how the hotline is being administered at this time. The Governor’s Office will continue to run the whistleblower hotline and make sure it serves the people of South Dakota and our kids and grandkids” [Mercer, 2023.10.05].
The whistleblower hotline may have been extremely effective at getting Kristi Noem another couple headlines, but it’s not really smoking out any real threats to student morality and decency. Black Hills State University has looked into anonymous whistles blown about liberalism amok on its scenic campus and found bupkis:
BHSU president, Dr. Laurie Nichols, received a copy of Noem’s letter to the Board of Regents detailing the allegations that the university was facing.
“The comment that was made specifically about [the allegations were] that BHSU is promoting transgender ideology, pushing mask mandates, endorsing critical race theory and compelling students to choose a side in the Ukraine war,” Nichols said. “And then they gave some direct examples…On the subject of wearing masks in class a professor said, ‘if my kids die, it’s on you’ to the students. Students were required to find authors that were non-white for their freshman literature class[es]. Students were pushed to wear the Ukrainian flag pins of their clothing.”
President Nichols was asked by the Board of Regents to conduct an internal investigation to determine whether there was any evidence to support the claims made against the university.
“For example, we went into the freshman comp(osition) class… and looked at the syllabus to see what exactly we are saying students are required to do,” Nichols said. “We didn’t find anything egregious at all…We didn’t see anything that caused us great alarm.”
Another call to the hotline that claimed BHSU was pushing unauthorized mask mandates in relation to COVID-19. Allegedly, a professor on campus told their students that they were required to wear a mask in the classroom.
“We did find one instructor who had asked students, respectfully, to wear a mask in class because, at that point in time, vaccinations weren’t out, and he had an autoimmune compromised child,” Nichols said. “But [the university] did not require students to wear masks in class after the COVID year, which was fall of ‘20 and spring of ‘21.”
The complaint that drew the most attention from the board, however, was a call claiming that, during student orientation, a campus member recommended that students take SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) drugs to counteract homesickness.
“We could not verify that any person said that,” said Dr. Jon Kilpinen, BHSU provost. “What we gathered was that, in an orientation session, we were describing the services that our counseling and health centers provide, and that one of the people who works in our health center can issue prescriptions. And then, separately, there was a conversation about homesickness. We’re guessing that there was a family concerned about this and assembled things that weren’t said together.”
…The conclusion of the internal investigation yielded no results of consequence.
“I guess the long and short of it is we tried to see what we could find,” Nichols said. “And we found a few things; we’ll try to correct it and make it better in the future by talking to the faculty, but, in general, we didn’t find anything that bad” [Nathan Feller, “BHSU Responds to Allegations Submitted to Gov. Noem’s ‘Whistleblower Hotline’,” The Jacket Journal, 2023.09.26].
Regents exec Nathan Lukkes concurs that the anonymous complaints, which the Governor’s office is keeping mostly secret, aren’t protecting our kids and grandkids from much, if anything:
He took time to address several of the tips during Thursday’s meeting. Some allegations reported from the governor’s office to the SDBOR so far have been inaccurate, Lukkes explained, pointing to the BHSU antidepressant tip as one of them.
Lukkes said pronouns frequently pop up as a topic at the beginning of each semester, and clarified the SDBOR does not require preferred pronouns, nor should it or its staff “put students on the spot asking them to state their preferred pronouns.”
The SDBOR also doesn’t prohibit the use of preferred pronouns “if students so choose,” he said. Each time issues have come to the SDBOR’s attention, “any misunderstanding or misapplication of this position by faculty or staff have been addressed,” he added.
Regarding the SDSU course Noem referenced in her Aug. 22 letter, the SDBOR voted in its consent agenda Thursday to end that graduation requirement for programs in SDSU’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Lukkes explained.
Lukkes said the course had been the subject of discussion and review for more than a year and the SDBOR has had various questions about the course’s curriculum and content [Morgan Matzen, “Regents Want Control of Gov. Noem’s Whistleblower Hotline, Discredits Some of Hotline’s Tips,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader via Yahoo, 2023.10.05].
If the complaint hotline were about real results, Noem would let the Regents manage it. Her keeping this hotline in her office shows she’s more interested in harvesting tall tales for campaign fodder and political intimidation than in addressing real student complaints to improve campus life.
My guess is she wants control because the “tipline” is a failure and she wants to hide that fact. Students have more effective ways to communicate any problems they have with an instructor or a policy. For one, there is talking to the person in question. Professors are usually very available and any problems can be handled directly. The tipline seems to be more for helicopter parents or busybody church ladies, than for students. Hey, college students are adults. They can handle it.
Moreover, a formal mechanism has long been or at least once was in place: students anonymously fill out student opinion surveys every semester on every professor for every class. If that’s not enough overkill…
Occasionally, from my experience, a disgruntled parent will directly contact a university president of even the governor, not that such an unjudicated complaint should carry any weight.
Noem wants to look like the savior, the great helicopter mom in the sky.
It was then-student reagent Tony Venhuizen who tipped BOR scales way back when and called for every-class student opinion surveys.
As a conservative leader who did not graduate from university, it appears your Governor Noem harbors personal feelings of resentment or frustration towards academic institutions. This stems from experiences of feeling excluded and judged due to her lack of formal education. As a result, she views restrictions on liberal thinking as a way to push back against what she perceives to be an intellectual elite or a bias against individuals without degrees.
AI Generated
Prompt Engineered by P. AItch
The Governor has taken up more than a few obnoxious initiatives. The “Tip Line” is in the top five and contains a germ of anti-intellectualism, which is popular with Governor Noem’s most devoted followers.
I know she has to be protective of some of the tips left that are solely focused on making fun of her. She would blanch if those personal disses ever got out.
Every-class student opinion surveys were a standard part of the Augie process in the ’80’s when I attended.
According to Wikipedia Ms. Noem has a BA from SDSU. Regardless, she is an idiot.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem)
It’s a surety that someone on your Governor’s staff has the job of making sure what’s on your Governor’s Wikipedia post isn’t “too true”.
Anyone can change Wikipedia posts anytime they want for whomever they want to say whatever they want. True or False.
Our Governor earned a toy degree from SDSU after attending NSU (then NSC). As a Representative to Congress she received preferential educational treatment that would never be afforded to an average college student. Her “rat on your Professor” hotline lays bare her intellectual deficiencies and shines a light on her ignorance. The notion of public education that is free of special political and economic interests is something she cannot comprehend.
The visionary men and women who worked tirelessly to establish our State’s Colleges and Universities must be spinning like armatures in their graves.
Agreed, anybody can write whatever in Wikipedia. Here is an accounting in the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/rep-kristi-noem-earns-her-college-degree/2012/05/07/gIQAgMRZ8T_blog.html
If it is indeed a toy degree, then that speaks more about SDSU then her, the idiot.
Who here would like to call out SDSU as a sham University? In 1990 I worked for a guy who said he would never hire a person from a SD school as he contended they were lesser universities, to put it mildly.
Student Opinion Survey Administration Guidelines
“The current agreement between SDBOR and the Council of Higher Education [COHE] requires that every faculty member be evaluated annually. The major purposes of the evaluation are to determine the level of performance relative to established standards, to assess progress toward promotion and/or tenure, and to inform annual salary decisions. (Section XII: 12.2.1). In regard to student opinion surveys and their relationship to evaluations, the agreement states that “the evaluation…will include student opinion surveys…if the faculty unit member’s duties include teaching.” (Section XII: 12.2.3).”
COHE was dismantled a few years ago (can’t have unions, you know). But the above policy is currently yet on the books.
https://www.sdbor.edu/administrative-offices/academics/academic-affairs-guidelines/Documents/6_Guidelines/6_3_Guideline.pdf#search=student%20opinion%20survey
Frequency of SOS has varied over time wih negoiations between the BOR and COHE over time. Vanhuizen was student member of the BOr in 2003-2008, appointed three times by Gov. Mike Rounds.
I suggest the current policy requires excessive surveys (approximately 8 surveys/year or some 50 surveys over the course of a four year college career), and that this numbs anyone involved, with the perverse consequence that no one really takes them seriously. Easier for a parent to get on the phone to the university president about Johnny’s teacher, and the complaint will be relayed down the chain to the department head, then to the faculty member, putting pressure on the latter. After all, that’s the top-down, South Dakota way to kick the offenders into shape—or else.
That’s 8 X 4 = 32, but tack on more for 1 credit courses, etc. Excessive nonetheless.
…and my apologies to T.V. for my misspelling of Venhuizen, above
The SD legislature outlawed collective bargaining by university faculty in the BOR system in 2020, this effectively dismantling the authorized bargaining agency, the Council on Higher Education (COHE), which latter was an affiliate of the South Dakota Education Association and the National Education Association (NEA). COHE first coalesced in 1977 when options were circulated among faculty.The
With the demise of COHE those troublesome ties norming back-water South Dakota standards to serious and quality national standards were suddenly gone—to the great relief of provincial South Dakotans, of course. God forbid faculty have a say in much of anything, let alone the terms and conditions of their employment.
The system thereby is lacking in a third party of the most highly educated in the state which would serve to triangulate and provide needed correction to the whole. Makes everything so much simpler and efficient, doesn’t it? With the price being the ensuing dumbing down of the very system itself.