As people all over the nation and world hunker down to avoid contaminated from the dreaded Wuhan Flu, college students in particular are wondering why they are paying top dollar for goods and services they’re not actually getting.  Though some universities are refunding back meal plans and other fees, they are not dropping the cost of tuition – even though the education the students are receiving is obviously not as high.

New York University senior Michael Price explained, “I am personally upset that we are being denied access to this equipment and facilities and still being charged the same amount for what is admittedly by the university a lower quality education.”

NYU’s Dean of Tisch School of the Arts Allyson Green had a rather, um, unusual response to Price’s inquiry for a tuition refund. The dean explained no refunds would occur (and that she didn’t have the authority anyway to grant them), she attached this video — on purpose – of her dancing at her home, to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”  (If any of you are wondering this was an official school communication, as it was uploaded to NYU’s official Vimeo account.)

“This was not an accident, this was her sort of way of trying to reach out to the student body,” Price said, obviously baffled by the tone-deaf response.

If you ask me, this is totally nuts.  In other words, exactly what I would expect from a NYU dean.

“The focus of my career as a performer, choereographer, and dance educator, and my most authentic mode of expression, has always been dance,” Green explained after the video went viral.  “In the video, I shared the song with which I have welcomed first-year students to the Tisch School of the Arts for the past eight years. It is a piece that — as I explained in the accompanying email — speaks to frustration and disappointment, and that helped see me through the loss of 30 friends to AIDS — another difficult period for artists,” she wrote.

I get it.  So a global pandemic goes throughout the world, but her rich artist friends are the ones hardest hit?  Sounds about right.

“What I meant to demonstrate is my certainty that even with the unprecedented hardships of social distancing and remotely-held classes, it is still possible for the Tisch community to make art together, and that all the artists in our school will find ways to remain closely connected even as circumstances challenge us. I regret it if my email left the reasons for my dancing misunderstood — although I will note that I have also received many positive acknowledgments — but its intent was surely neither frivolous or disrespectful.”

It is both frivolous and disrespectful. 

The silver lining is this: maybe people will begin to see what a complete waste of money this so-called “prestigious” university actually is.

Hat Tip: Campus Reform

Image Credit: Twitter Screen Shot

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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