Big-time athletics enriches the academic setting in so many ways. At North Carolina Chapel Hill

because… you know… Julius Nyang’oro and all…

UD‘s advice to UNC Chapel Hill professors: Spruce up and look your best! You only have one chance to make a good first impression.

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UD thanks Christopher.

China is famous for its copy-cat architecture: you can find replicas of everything from the Eiffel Tower and the White House to an Austrian village across its vast land. But now they have gone one step further: recreating a building that hasn’t even been finished yet. A building designed by the Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid for Beijing has been copied by a developer in Chongqing, south-west China, and now the two projects are racing to be completed first… [The plagiarized project] the other is being built at a much faster rate than [Hadid's].

… that even UD, who prides herself on her grasp of our simulacral world, is having a little trouble.

It’s a diploma mill in Wyoming — nothing to see there; hundreds of thousands of diploma mills operate all over the world, and Wyoming is one of the most pro-diploma-mill states in America (God forbid the feds interfere with private enterprise). But even by Wyoming’s give-a-shit standards, the gloriously named Degree in a Day (the website provided in the Star Tribune story no longer functions) represents a problem. Dig:

The website tells visitors that purchasers can receive diplomas “in the traditional university manner printed on traditional paper with traditional fonts in the traditional format,” plus official transcripts, signed letters of verification to for use with an employer and letters of recommendation from the dean and president.

Under a tab called, “About Degree in a Day,” the website says it “offers verifiable and authentic life experience degrees from our own ‘Anonymous Universities.’” It continues, “We will never publish the name or allow it to be associated with this site to anyone other than alumni. We do this to ensure our alumni can feel confident there will not be any negative press online about their degree.”

The website “gives examples of legitimate-appearing university websites that it promises to construct in order to give purchasers ‘further proof their degree is in fact authentic,’” according to the complaint.

So… UD‘s been trying to figure this one out. Here’s what she’s come up with. If she’s right about the business model, it represents an authentic advance in the industry.

As soon as a diploma mill’s name becomes known, it becomes notorious. Coverage of the scam will invariably refer to “the notorious degree mill, LaSalle University,” or whatever. In order to avoid instantly stigmatizing the millions of people who’ve gotten bogus degrees from this or that outfit, Degree in a Day will tailor-make a pretend online university just for you. It will come up with a name (the model assumes one will never run out of plausible-sounding university names, and this seems to UD a reasonable assumption) that will be known only to you and to the few to non-existent employers who ever bother to check your credentials.

One particularly brilliant aspect of this model involves (I assume) the ability at a moment’s notice to change the university from which you graduated. Once you’ve been run out of town because of the exposure of your fake Cambridgetown Institute of Technology degree, you can go back to Degree in a Day and have them construct Oxfordshire Institute of Technology.

It was always about the superiority of sport to intellect – American universities were willing to spend millions of tax dollars and tuition dollars on coaches instead of academic programs because nothing sustained school spirit and generated alumni gifts like stadiums packed with excited students. And anyway all that sports money would eventually benefit the academic side of the university. A win-win situation.

Yet even the thickest heads in big-time university sports are beginning to notice that nothing in this model works. Even when schools give tickets away, fewer and fewer students attend games. Away games are often a total joke, with a few hundred tickets sold and even those simulacral — blocks of seats some corporation purchased for some reason, but no actual human being wants to use any of them, so a distinction is now drawn between live gate and… dead gate? Simulacral gate.

A bigger concern is empty seats. Some bowls’ live gates are barely half of their announced attendances.

Officials at lower-tier bowls “don’t even believe the (attendance) numbers they give you,” a BCS bowl executive told the American-Statesman. “They’re counting the tickets schools contractually are forced to buy. If they had to sell tickets, we’d probably have 15 bowl games. But that’s not financial reality. You’ve got TV money and sponsorships propping them up.”

Propping them up is one way to put it. Running them would be a better way, since the schools – beyond springing for the coaches and all – have vanishingly little to do with the whole thing, so that university football in America right now is essentially a bunch of tv programs featuring motion on a field in front of vast numbers of empty seats.

Thick heads are being scratched in athletics offices around the nation as to why no one’s showing up (the numbers are drastically down pretty much everywhere). They’ve kind of gone through their traditional excuses (distance, weather, losing seasons, blahblah) and the numbers keep plummeting, and that’s forcing them to scratch their heads yet more.

Let’s see if we can get somewhere with this.

When your culture is simulacral – when everybody relates to the world via images (online universities, tv-mediated sports events) – the whole concept of physical presence falls away. Why be anywhere? Desperate universities talk about “enhancing the stadium experience,” but beyond making sure everyone’s sloshed they haven’t been able to come up with much. They spend millions on huge – yes – screens – the notorious Adzillatrons – and don’t consider the possibility that when you screen the event at the event (interspersed with screaming relentless advertisements) you take away any sense of immediacy and encourage people to reason their way to future non-attendance. (“Hm. I’m paying three hundred dollars to watch the game on an Adzillatron screen. I can watch it at home on my own screen.”)

And it’s a problem that just keeps feeding itself. Consider the loyal season ticket holder who thinks he’s really lucky because he gets guaranteed seats to every game. He gets to the game and no one else is there – except for a bunch of yahoos who stay long enough to get drunk and then leave halfway through. Eventually he’s going to stop attending. No one likes to feel like a chump.

The solution will come from advanced robotics. The networks running university football, seeing that viewership is also down, will figure part of it is the empty stadium. The empty stadium says to the viewer at home that maybe he’s a chump too — maybe fewer and fewer actual people share his enthusiasm for the game. To counteract this, the networks will purchase tens of thousands of humanoids programmed to remain in their seats and get excited.

The great thing about big-time university sports, we’re told, is how much excitement and esprit de corps it brings to campus…

Or, uh, to 750 miles from campus.

Once you get into the sort of sports debt the University of Southern Mississippi is in – they’re draining academics to deal with their majorly in the red program – you “need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base,” says the head of the faculty senate. Whatever the most lucrative venue for the game, you’ve got to go there, so forget about actual students and alumni attending.

Strange, ain’t it? UD doesn’t associate post-modernism with places like Hattiesburg, but the simulacrum’s alive and well in Dixie Land.

…says Woody Allen, is just showing up; but UD wonders if he’s ever read Baudrillard on the postmodern simulacrum. Not showing up, these days, is far more powerful. Having your name appear as an instructor in a course catalog, a faculty member in a new university’s promotional materials, or a co-author on a scientific article, is pretty much the whole deal these days for a lot of people. You go to Harvard because Professor Famous teaches there; her picture’s plastered all over the glossies Harvard sent your secondary school. But when you get to Cambridge it turns out PF plus many other luminaries are on rolling leaves without pay. A few other PFs are in residence, but they’re teaching vast lectures and manifest themselves to you as pinheads at the dark end of a cavern.

Paul Fain, in Inside Higher Education, has a good piece on Cambridge Graduate University which features an

ambitious list of faculty members, many of whom had never heard of the university… [CGU's head] said the university created its website only a few months ago, and that the concept is still evolving.

Wherever the concept goes, it’s going to be cutting-edge.

Where the Simulacrum Ends is a University Diaries Category. It appears at the bottom of this post.

But the simulacrum never ends. The constant, ubiquitous appearance of artifacts that present themselves as the intellectual or creative work of one person, but are in fact the work of a hired ghost (like the ghost complaining in this post’s title), helps create the white-noisy, bogus, unreal feel of the postmodern world.

Our most thoughtful writers – unspectral ones, like Don DeLillo – evoke this very contemporary sense that everything is engineered, even nature. In Don DeLillo’s novel, The Names, a young man enters an airplane:

The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese… He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn’t feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese…

When even your evenings are engineered, the fact of ghostwritten cookbooks, scientific articles written by ghosts in the employ of the pharmaceutical companies promoting the drugs under discussion in the article, or, most recently, grades and comments on university students’ papers written by ghostwriters in India paid by American professors, ceases to excite comment… The occasional ghost-confessional will appear in the New York Times, telling us how demoralizing, disembodying, strange, it feels to be a career ghost (Yet who wrote/edited/exaggerated the ghost’s confession?)…

Alas, poor ghost! But pity as well the strange disembodiment of the ghosted, for they too must feel the erosion of their reality as their pantomimed self pops out at them everywhere.

And pity their dupes.

… is most eloquent. But Sandusky will nonetheless be painted over.

There’s nothing new or interesting about these two stories. A politician and a reporter plagiarize. As is true of all the plagiarists UD has covered on this blog over the years, the reporter is a serial plagiarist. As is true of most plagiarizing politicians she has covered on this blog, this latest one, Scott Brown, barely deigns to notice the event, calling it all “silly.” So what if his statement (on his website) of his personal values was actually Elizabeth Dole’s statement of her personal values?

Wendy Kaminer comments.

[G]hostwriting and plagiarism are not “nothing.” Speaking for yourself, you inevitably reveal yourself, intentionally or not; pretending to speak for yourself, while hiring others to speak for you, you remain in the shadows. Who are these people we send to Washington to run the country? Who knows?

Who are these reporters and opinion writers we read? Who writes the research papers clinicians depend upon in prescribing therapies and pills and devices?

Ghostwriters, guest writers, public relations people, lobbyists, interns, research assistants, lab assistants, graduate students – there’s an entire simulacrum industry now. It stands between us and the truth.

A hired online class-taker describes his job.

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Here are a couple of entries from his article’s comment thread:

As our department has moved its … classes from live to online, objections about cheating (or even the basic identifiability of students) have been pointedly quashed. The reality is that courses are treated as cash cows and anything that interrupts the income stream is to be eliminated.

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Why doesn’t anyone blame the administrators who don’t back the professors when the professor says “I’m pretty sure the guy getting the A in my online class is the husband of the woman who’s actually signed up for the class. When I called her up to discuss her midterm, she PUT HER HUSBAND ON THE PHONE.”

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UD thanks Robert for the link.

… among other things, a closed enterprise that protects its own. See the university act as a guild.

A student in [University of Central Florida] Professor Richard Quinn’s business class posted a new video on YouTube. The video is from the first week of class, when Professor Quinn told students he writes his own mid-term and final exams.

But it seems Professor Quinn never wrote the mid-term exam his students cheated on. It was written by the publisher of the textbook for his business class. One student found a copy on the internet, and passed it on to others. [Quinn's statement to the class is excellent pedagogical technique, no? Keep the students off the scent by telling them that you write your own exam. Don't check the book! I write my own! You'd be wasting your time checking the book! ... Yet one of his enterprising charges looked anyway! Shouldn't Quinn give that person extra credit for business acumen? Never trust what other people say! Trust your instincts!]

… UCF spokesperson Grant Heston told WFTV “it’s not uncommon for higher education professors to use these pre-made exams produced by the publisher.” [Ah, Heston.  Guildmaster speaks.  Not uncommon, so that means, uh, perfectly fine so shut your face.  It's a guild thing; you wouldn't understand.]

… Eyewitness News asked if [Quinn] would be punished for using a test that’s so easily accessible online.

“It’s irrelevant. The focus shouldn’t be on the professor, but on the students who used the test inappropriately,” said Heston.  [Get the effing focus off my man!  This is how professors behave and did I already say shut your face?]

Background here.

And a new editorial in the local paper.

The important thing is not so much the technological details, but the synergy between professor and student.

Professor: Grading is outsourced.

Student: What’s being graded is outsourced.

Almost all of it’s going to India. An emerging tertiary education sector in India is made up of people learning lucrative new things by way of playing the parts of American and Australian students and professors.

Expect stories to come out pretty soon featuring American professors who have outsourced their entire online teaching classes to Indian graduate students and professors.

Back when UD was a hippie, Theodore Roszak’s book, Where the Wasteland Ends, was an enormously influential attack on technocracy.

Technocracy won, of course, and, in the case of universities, we now see, in both the for-profit and non-profit realms, a move toward the onlining of most higher education.

At the moment we’re in a transition phase, with rapidly increasing numbers of face to face classes featuring laptop use by students and PowerPoint use by professors. More and more professors also make lecture content available online.

A moment’s thought about this in-class arrangement tells us it cannot last, that it’s only a matter of time before everyone realizes you can accomplish online exactly what’s being accomplished in laptop/PowerPoint/downloadable content classes.

If you’re right now in a class of this sort, it will in a few years disappear from the physical realm and become part of the metaphysical.

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The problem with online is that practically everyone cheats. Short of constant video surveillance of you in your home, it is impossible to determine that you are taking the course, and not someone else. It’s equally impossible to determine that the professor assigned to the online course is teaching it.

It is easy to envision a time when low-salaried drudges will play the parts of professor and student in this transaction – the professor-simulacrum will get a cut of the actual professor’s salary, while the student-simulacrum will receive a stipend from the actual student. One can also anticipate formal enterprises growing up around these needs. There is already a business professor at George Washington University who charges professors for outsourcing their reading of papers and exams, and their grading, to people in India.

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Let’s estimate that, with several years of popular and easily available online courses behind us, we now have ten thousand Americans walking around who received A‘s in statistics courses in respectable American universities but who did not themselves take the courses. That means ten thousand Americans who do not know the difference between a statistic and a spastic colon.

Off they go to the workforce.

What we’ve done, see, is we’ve mainstreamed the old diploma mill problem. The old embarrassing disreputable diploma mill problem — it’s a problem schools as burnished as UC Berkeley will soon be up against. No one taught the diploma mill course; no one took the course. Money was exchanged, a degree was awarded. Now you’ve got this person working for you who doesn’t know shit – you begin to realize – about anything.

Same thing with lots of online courses.

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Is this where the simulacrum ends? With the online high school statistics instructor who doesn’t know what statistics is, teaching statistics to students whose parents pay someone to take the statistics course for them?

No. It could go on like that forever. There’s no end to simulation.