Corinthia College, Again

There was an item in the news today about former students of the for-profit Corinthian College banding together to refuse to pay their student loans.

The group, initially dubbed the Corinthian 15, sent a letter to the Department of Education last month, saying they would stop paying the federal student loans they took out to pay to attend various outposts of Corinthian Colleges, a chain of for-profit colleges. Under a deal with Department of Education last year, the company agreed to shut down or sell its schools last year amid allegations the company lured students by advertising dubious job prospects and career services.

The interest rate of the loans was higher than that offered by federal student loan programs; and the tuition costs were higher than one would find at comparable schools. But that's not the worst of it.

Last summer, federal regulators forced Corinthian to either shutter or sell the majority of its 100-plus campuses after allegations it had falsified student job placement data and pressured students to take out costly private loans. When Corinthian sold its remaining campuses in a $24 million deal to student loan servicing company Zenyth, Zenyth agreed to forgive $480 million worth of private student loan debt incurred by Corinthian students. But students who took out federal loans to pay for school have to meet a certain set of criteria to be considered for loan forgiveness. In a nutshell, they would have had to be currently or recently enrolled at campuses that were shut down last year.

The number of protesters has swelled over 100, and are backed by an Occupy group (Who knew they were still around?) calling itself the Debt Collective. However this story turns out, it's something to keep in mind as Teapublicans rush to dismantle public education in favor of for-profit private enterprise. That includes you, Darth Snotwalker.

Which has nothing much to do with this cartoon strip I drew for the UW-Parkside Ranger some 30 years ago or so, except for the similarity of the college name. (Click on the image to embiggenify.)

My Corinthian College cartoons veered from the topical to silly ones like this old thing. (I posted a few examples of Corinthia College strips last June on the topic of racist sports team names.) This particular one is in the format of a Sunday color comic, even though it came out on Thursday in black and white.

Corinthia College

The current war of a word over the name of the Washington Redskins reminds me of when many colleges and high schools were going through the same debate back in the 1980's.

Two colleges in my area had teams known as the Redmen and the Warriors. The Carthage Red Men were originally named as the counterpart to a sister school's Blue Men, but the college flag showing a letter "C" sporting Native American warrior feathers left no doubt what the name had come to mean. The Marquette Warriors could just as easily have had a blue-faced kilt-wearing Pict wielding a claymore for their mascot, but in their case, Warrior meant "Willie Wampum."

To their credit, these colleges ultimately yielded to public pressure to change their team names (now Big Red and the Golden Eagles), but not without a good deal of rancor and resistance.

Drawing a comic strip about higher education for a student newspaper on a campus whose sports teams offended no ethnic sensitivity, I was inspired to introduce a sports department to my fictional campus. You may want to click on this image to embiggen:

The catch, as far as this gag goes, was that I had to come up with a team name that was ridiculous yet truly offensive. Most cartoons attempting this topic imagine insulting depictions of white people -- crackers, honkies, palefaces, trailer trash, etc. They're demeaning terms, but they demean the dominant majority culture, so it's okay, the theory goes. As a result, they annoy, but don't wound.

My next installment in the series was the last on this topic. I think you'll quickly see why.

I imagine that Corinthia College's sainted coach Elpirt Yalp would have been considered quite liberal in his day for his admiration of Negro Culture, to use the terminology of the time. But popular sensibility had risen above his lofty ideals by the 1980's. The Theater Department would have ceased performing darkie songs in blackface in the 1970's -- although there might still have been a fraternity forcing their pledges to do it.

In the end, one can claim that appropriating someone else's heritage for a sports logo, however well-intentioned it may have been once upon a time, never remains benign for long. A tomahawk chop becomes popular. The cartoonist designing your logo produces a racist caricature.

If you want an ethnic mascot, you might just have to look to your own background. The Minnesota Vikings and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are free to celebrate their own heritage in a way that the Coachella Valley High School Arabs cannot.

Better yet, choose a feisty or majestic animal, or a respected profession. (Sorry, but "The Packers" is already taken.)