A Bitter Benefactor

Here’s something funny. CSUF benefactor and Mihaylo business school namesake Steven Mihaylo got into a Twitter tussle with students over college debt and the lack of respect for their elders. Mihaylo ultimately threatened to redirect future donations to CSUF as a result of profane provocations from students. Daily Titan has the story.

Of course, there’s nothing new about an old guy mocking the generations that came after him. Particularly an old guy with a Trump hard-on and his own statue. But college students (of any generation) are not really known for respecting the opinions of their elders (or their bronze busts.) Mihaylo’s indignation and demand for reverence from angsty college students shows that the guy might be out of touch with his own cause.

14 Replies to “A Bitter Benefactor”

  1. Money can’t buy a sense of humor, which you need if you keep giving millions of dollars to Cal State students.

  2. What I find strange about this is he’s angrier at the students for not appreciating his donations to the campus than he is in the administration for pissing all that money away in the first place. Cal State Fullerton has never been more impressive architecturally but it is also far more expensive, and the chronic problem of not providing enough classes for the students in certain majors to graduate in a timely manner still isn’t being addressed.

    1. Gotta disagree about the architecture. The original buildings were not genius but they were clean and precise and have aged wonderfully well, especially when compared to the out-of-scale academic monstrosities that have followed – each worse than the one that came before.

      The Mihaylo Building is a large, hulking eyesore, perfectly symbolic of an college system that is bloated, inefficient and always hungry to get bigger – not better. They judge success by number of graduates – rather like McDonalds used to count the billions of burgers it sold. Mihaylo and the CSUF Administrators should be apologizing to us for making us look at that mess.

      The best buildings at CSUF now are, sadly, parking structures.

  3. I do feel bad for millennials. They are easy to make fun of, but they are coming of age with new challenges. Automation and offshoring have significantly reduced the amount of entry level jobs that my generation took for granted. It will be harder for these folks to enter the workforce and they have every right to be anxious about it.

    1. Titan. they’ve been saying the same thing for forty years.

      Actually, a lot of these kids would be better off learning a trade. There are some things that can’t be off-shored. Like when your plumbing backs up.

      1. “they’ve been saying the same thing for forty years.”

        Every generation has had a taste of it, but the impact has become significant in the last 10 years. I see it every day in the office of the Fortune 500 company I work for. We rarely hire young people for entry level work anymore. It’s cheaper and less risky to send it to India or the Philippines. Technology has made it so easy.

  4. It is of the upmost interest to see how someone apparently giving in a selflessness manner, turns around and scolds those,-who only under an economic system benefiting the “benefactor ‘-are the recipients of his pharisaical generosity. Thus, it seems to me, that the anonymity which would characterize all the tax dollars he overpasses with his donations, is the perfect resort for the public enlargement of his persona, and the make-believe to everyone, that there is not other way to solve our socioeconomic affairs other than having plutocrats as himself at the center of it

    1. My own correction: …the overpassing of the tax dollars with his donations is the perfect resort for….
      I think the avid reader understood that part despite my quick typing error

    1. I would hope and suspect that a relative small percentage. But the symbolic significance of the statue presence is what counts here

    2. Plenty of his $ donations went to the CSUF Business school NAMED AFTER HIM!!!!!!!!! The school reproduces the kind of economics he is very fond of. I paraphrase him next, “if I pay millions I decide what is to be taught”

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