America Falling into a Quiet Chaos
How Small-Town America is Slipping into Irrelevancy and Poverty
I have been watching events unfold in 2022. And I am experiencing a great discomfort on a number of levels. The mainstream media has repeatedly told us that we are getting closer and closer to achieving ‘normal’ - again. The US economy is strong. The US jobs market is strong. People are venturing out of their homes once again. Going to restaurants and theaters. Traveling in America and abroad. Attending ballgames.
Yes, for now, the ‘old’ American way of life may lie just a bit beyond our reach! But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, all is going well. Normality is just around the corner.
Corporate America is desperate to have us believe that the pandemic is over. Despite the deaths of well over one million Americans. Despite the continued suffering and, in many cases, the permanent damaging of over one million Americans who are currently experiencing ‘Long’ covid. And, finally, the direct and indirect mourning and suffering of tens of millions of Americans who have dealt with this monstrous virus every day, every week and every month since early 2020.
Hence, achieving ‘normality’ will not be achieved simply by inferring and telling Americans that the worst days of the pandemic are over. That the pandemic was actually nothing more than a nasty flu strain. So, get out there and spend some money! Lots and lots of money!
If this b.s. actually represents any form or semblance of reality, then why does the country feel so drained. Numb. Tired. Lost. Spiritless. Because it is.
I believe this ‘manufactured’ sense of enthusiasm and happiness does not represent the opinion of the vast majority of Americans. In fact, there is a developing and emerging perception of deep concern about the state of affairs in the United States. The future for too many Americans is grim. Quite grim.
It’s like looking at old black and white photos of the Great Depression in the 1930s. You can see the naked and stark truth in their eyes. The normal American confidence in confronting the future is absent. There is good reason for this visceral gut instinct. They sense that America is in trouble. A lot of trouble. As usual, the American people’s judgements and perceptions concerning the nation’s health are correct.
I live in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. A town of 20,000 residents. It is a college town with one university, and one community college. We have a casino as well. Things appeared to be moving along rather smoothly until about a decade ago.
Then whispers began. Our town’s university, Central Michigan University (CMU), began to lose students. Thousands of them over the next decade (2012-2022). Our local community college, Mid-Michigan Community College (MMCC), also began to fall apart. In fact, MMCC became a national joke and a local embarrassment.
In 2013, the US Department of Education identified Mid-Michigan Community College as one of the worst 265 colleges in America. It too began to lose thousands of students. It was assumed that MMCC would soon close. Its academic reputation was non-existent. Still is. Only local political pressure has kept MMCC open.
Ironically, both schools’ fates were ultimately determined by terrible administrative decisions. In 2010-2011, CMU decided to build a medical school that it could never support financially. And, in 2015, then MMCC President Christine Hammond decided to fire all the full-time faculty members. She read their personnel files and determined that all of them were “unsatisfactory”. She told me, initially, the MMCC Board of Trustees agreed with her judgement.
She quickly prepared the ‘Letters of Termination’. However, she was soon informed that the Board of Trustees had changed their minds. The board members learnt that litigation, due to the permanent termination of the faculty, could possibly cost the college millions of dollars.
So, President Hammond was now stuck with what she called an “unsatisfactory” faculty. Things never got better. Lawyers - not academic capabilities and qualifications - forced MMCC to keep their faculty.
In retrospect, Christine Hammond should have resigned and moved on. Instead, she decided to stay at MMCC and see if she could make it work. She failed.
President Hammond never recovered the upper hand in developing a quality community college. She could not get rid of the “unsatisfactory” faculty fast enough. Her ten-year plan to remake MMCC never happened. She never came close to succeeding. In 2020, after six difficult years, President Christine Hammond was gone.
At CMU, their attendance numbers continued to tumble (from 27,000 to 12,000; perhaps it is now as low as 10,000). In April 2022, The Detroit News, ran a front-page story about CMU’s stunning decline in its enrollment numbers and the article questioned whether CMU could even remain a “viable” university. The story sent shockwaves throughout the community.
As a result, scapegoats were identified. CMU’s Director of Student Enrollments and Recruitment was fired. In June 2021, President Bob Davies had identified (24) STEM-related courses/programs to become the new academic ‘focus’ of CMU. The university’s Liberal Arts and Social Sciences were now relegated to the academic hinterlands.
As expected, a firestorm erupted at CMU. Angry and dismayed faculty members demanded a vote of ‘No’ confidence take place. It did. Davies was symbolically fired by the faculty. But President Davies remains in office because the Board of Trustees still supported him.
However, President Davies’ talented provost Mary Schutten, who created the new academic program that focused upon the (24) STEM-related courses/programs was sacrificed upon the alter of political expediency. The outraged faculty demanded her removal. Schutten finally stepped down in December 2021.
In 2022, other scandals have rocked CMU. The school’s Honors Program is now being investigated for professional malfeasance. Why? By mistake, fifty-eight CMU students were improperly notified that they had received full academic scholarships. Due to this costly mistake, the Director of Financial Aid was summarily fired.
In the end, President Davies, in a face-saving gesture, decided to pay the tuition of each scholarship, but not the room and board. If all students graduate from CMU, it will have cost the university approximately three million dollars. That is a hell of a lot of money for a university that is financially strapped.
In April 2022, CMU’s athletic department was accused of overt racism for eliminating its track and field program and replacing it with a golf program. The US Department of Education became involved. A final decision has not been made. President Davies says it was a numbers game, and not racism, that determined the final decision within CMU’s athletic department.
President Davies could very well be correct. It was university finances, not race, that determined the fate of the track and field program. Nevertheless, it was another ugly story about CMU in the newspapers.
Finally, it is quite clear BOTH schools are failing. Both are in free-fall. Both are seeing the chickens coming home to roost. Both are academically mediocre. One has treated its faculty with little respect. And the other should have fired its whole faculty when it had the chance.
As a result, CMU is fighting for its life, and it may yet go down like hundreds of other colleges since 2017. But it is fighting to survive. Will it? We will see. Don’t bet the farm on it!!
MMCC should have been closed a decade ago. Only political intervention has saved it. For what? No one has a credible justification for such action. It is a “zombie” school. Dead but still pretending to be alive. Why on god’s green earth does anyone attend this school is beyond my understanding!!
Needless to say, BOTH schools in Mt. Pleasant are in deep trouble. But both educational institutions also represent one side of the coin in Mt. Pleasant. The other side of the coin is the local business community.
And the college students represent a huge factor within the local business community.
It is not a coincidence that as the student enrollment numbers began to fall off a cliff, at both schools, the local economic fortunes of Mt. Pleasant began to decline sharply.
Over the past three years, including the covid pandemic ‘lockdown’ period, the city of Mt. Pleasant has witnessed a significant change to its business facade. Several major stores have closed. Stores such as JC Penney’s, Sears, K-Mart and Kroeger’s groceries. Major restaurant chains such as Pizza Hut, Italian Oven, Big Boy, Ruby Tuesdays, and Krankers.
A bank has closed. Other local businesses have closed on Mission State. Mission State is the main throughfare in Mt. Pleasant. The town has no major bookstores that caters to educated adults, even though it possesses two institutions of higher education. We have only one legitimate clothing store, Kohl’s, which may soon be gone if the store is sold to a private equity firm. Otherwise, everyone will be buying the same cheap clothing from Wal-Mart and Meijers!
The local government finds itself broke. Not only has many of its largest and most prominent stores and restaurants vacated, but 20% of the local population has moved on since 2010. And don’t forget, 17,000 students are no longer attending Central Michigan University. Hundreds of local apartments remain empty. The profit margins of the local eateries have diminished noticeably.
Plans for a new Isabella County jail has recently been put back on the shelf. Why? The original plan called for a $41 million dollar project to be built. Then the city’s bean-counters discovered that their present, and future, tax revenues would be quite a bit lower than expected. Budgetary decisions on other priorities were also delayed. The land for the new jail was recently, and quietly, rented to a local farmer. No money. No jail.
To make a long story short, the fiscal chickens are finally coming home to roost in Mt. Pleasant. Even the most delusional of local residents are finally waking up to the brutal and inescapable realities that confront this once prosperous college town. It is ‘ugly time’. And nobody is smiling anymore!
CMU was going to spend $150 million dollars on a new 179-unit student dorms, called the Washington Commons project. But President Bob Davies has recently stated that the school was “cash-strapped”. Hence, local contractors are now hurting. The two big local construction projects (worth close to $200 million overall) are now dead in the water.
Mt. Pleasant is like many small towns in America. Its economy is getting tighter by the day. A sense of desperation is beginning to be detected. Crime is rising steadily. Particularly, robberies and the breaking into cars and apartments. All signs of social and economic decay.
I wrote about the socio-economic crisis enveloping Mt. Pleasant. I sent the article to The Detroit News. But I was told that serious reality-based stories were “not their style of writing”. They asked me to reduce my 1460-word story into a 175-word ‘Letter to the Editor’. I did. They, again, told me they “would pass” on the story.
Why was I not surprised? Urban America has simply ignored small town America and rural America for decades. The Detroit News is considered to lean towards the Democratic Party. No surprise there. Their ‘journalistic attitude’ toward small towns and rural Michigan merely reflects the same attitudes, biases and prejudices that exist within the Democratic Party.
In 2016, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton paid an extreme and painful price for ignoring this part of America. She went from being a ‘lock’ on becoming the first female president in US history to being a victim of the biggest electoral upset in American political history. Donald Trump carried rural Michigan by a 70-30 margin. And, yes, Trump beat Hillary in Michigan!
In short, both, The Detroit News and the Democratic Party no longer give a damn about a huge swath of America. And don’t forget, the voters in small towns and rural Michigan (and America) have always understood this b.s. attitude directed toward them.
Ladies and Gentlemen, there are now two Americas. The metropolitan cities, and everyone and everything outside them. A battle to survive is now under way in both realms. Major pockets of poverty are now present and growing in all of America’s major cities.
But small towns are shrinking in size and prosperity. The young are moving to the cities for jobs. Powerful external forces are also damaging the quality of life in America’s small towns and rural regions.
Mt. Pleasant is one of those small towns in rural America that is fighting for its very existence — in a world that has been engulfed by growing financial instability, by increasingly volatile domestic politics, and by a dangerous foreign war in a part of the world that very few Americans could find on a map.
If Mt. Pleasant fails to remain relevant as a town, then surely poverty awaits them in the near future.