Tip o’ me tam to Marathon Pundit and John Bambeneck at Part Time Pundit.

John Rueberry sent this to me a while ago, but I was just reminded that I needed to write about it. Sorry, John, life is nuts for me right now.

A great program was started at the University of Illinois for veterans of the Iraq war: the state and the University of Illinois worked it out for these guys to get a FREE executive MBA from UIUC. Here’s how it works. They could either attend the Chicago office or the Champaign campus, and have the state pay for the program with Illinois Veterans Grants (IVG). Whatever was left, in the area of about 54% each year, would be picked up by the College of Business.

This program was so cool, and such an ingenius plan, that it was supported far and wide, by Rumsfeld, the State of Illinois, and Congressmen. There were an amazing amount of openings- 110 slots for veterans. But in the end about 46 were accepted. You can still view the program at the College of Business website.

Things fell apart rapidly. As Bambeneck put it:

The University of Illinois system is the same system that employs William Ayers as a distinguished professor of education. That’s the same Bill Ayers that tried to blow up government buildings and infamously quipped that people should kill their parents.

Robert Van Der Hooning is the architect the program that would send 110 Iraq war veterans through the University’s MBA program. According to Van Der Hooning, Dean Gosh, acting on behalf of the University, said there were too many “jarheads” in the program, and tried to scale it back, using several underhanded methods. Van Der Hooning says the criteria for acceptance was changed after the vets were promised slots. That is why only 46 of the 110 MBA student slots are occupied.

The reason that the number is so low is that the remaining applicants did not meet the criteria for acceptance by the appropriate deadlines. One would assume that a free executive MBA would draw more than 110 applications and that applications denied for cause would not have lead to a high-profile administrator in the College of Business not only leaving the University but filing a lawsuit.

But that’s exactly what happened:  Robert Van Der Hooning, the architect of the MBA program for Iraq Veterans at the University of Illinois, has left the University and filed a lawsuit, alleging anti-military bias and discrimination.

(This is an old post that I just published so talk to the hand about it being old)

Said Cao @ 7:14 am | Permalink   

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