This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.
But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?
Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?
Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.
I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.
What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.
According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:
The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.
Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?
If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.
That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.
Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.
What was the problem?
Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:
To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.
The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."
Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.
There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.
Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…
…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.
Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!
Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.
We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.
They deserve so much more.
