… the story of Kevin Morrissey’s suicide closely. He was the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small, ambitious literary magazine at the University of Virginia, and he staged a very public suicide, first calling the police to say someone was dead, and then shooting himself in downtown Charlottesville.

Many people are accusing the journal’s top editor of having bullied Morrissey into suicide. Every day, the story gains in intensity and complexity.

The top editor is clearly a most aggressive, unpleasant character; but it’s a long way from this personality type, and the nastiness it can express, to his being responsible for the death of a man who for a long time suffered from clinical depression.

UD wants to keep an open mind, though. She’ll follow the story here. Meanwhile, here’s a skeptic. Here’s another one.

A UCLA student writes in opposition to the proposed online UC Berkeley degree. He talked to the director of an online engineering program at UCLA.

… Christopher Lynch, director of the UCLA Master of Science in Engineering Online Program, said that distance students can get to the same level of understanding concepts as traditional students, but that the department spends much more money per student to achieve this goal.

The department hired a teaching assistant and professor as consultants to provide support for distance learners, who are unable to approach professors after lecture or go to office hours as traditional students are. This would be a similar situation for undergraduates because face-to-face interaction is an important part of the university experience.

To maintain a UC-level education, many faculty members will have to be hired for support positions, costing the university millions. If this faculty is not hired, the UC online campus will not provide a UC-level education.

He notes a variety of other disadvantages, among them:

Skipping class and cheating by having another student take an exam become easier as attendance, participation and identity verification are difficult, if not impossible over the Internet.

Another UCLA professor comments.

“This would severely hurt the reputation and prestige of a degree and call into question the (UC’s) commitment to undergraduate education,” said Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Program who taught a hybrid online and offline course last spring.

According to Samuels, there are ways to incorporate technology in the classroom, but a fully online degree has no place at a prestigious research university.

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Costs more.

But only costs more if you care about maintaining quality. If you don’t care, it probably costs less.

… All the PowerPoint slides and chat rooms in the world can’t replicate the power of an in-person learning experience, and it’s hard to see how a cyber UC degree would have the same status as a regular one. UC faculty members are skeptical now, but in the future, employers and graduate schools will be. Complaints about how a cyber college would dilute the university’s status and dumb down learning helped bring down a similar project at the University of Illinois after two years.

… [T]his endeavor could be profitable. There is also the possibility that it could be a disaster…

The editorialist reviews the growing research pointing to the distinct possibility that online learning sucks.

If you want the truth about online university education, don’t ask administrators. They have obvious, unstated, reasons to adore it. Just ask students. They also adore it, but they tell you why.

From an article in a University of Texas newspaper about why online courses are so popular with students:

… Maura Ryan, a third-year UT Journalism major, [says,] “The lack of lectures makes online classes less educational. You really are teaching yourself the material so you aren’t able to get the expertise of a professor besides talking to him over email.”

Ryan confirms what many UT students regard as common sense — that online classes really are “so much easier than live.” Her current Psychology of Advertising class is “a lot less time” than her face-to-face classes, and consists of “really short lectures where everything is on PowerPoint.”

University faculty are also expressing concern. As student demand for online courses skyrockets, the level of faculty approval of this educational option remains low.

[A recent] report pointed out that less than one-third of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education, a statistic that has been constant over the past six years.

About a third of contributing academic officers admitted that they believe that online learning outcomes are inferior to their live counterparts.

Public schools have a greater percentage of students enrolled in online classes than private institutions. They also express a higher level of confidence in these courses. In schools with more than 15,000 students, 61.3 percent of chief academic officers rated online learning outcomes as equal to face-to-face outcomes.

With one in four current college students taking at least one Internet course, online education programs are becoming a critical long-term strategy to many public schools.   [Keep movin’ movin’ movin’ – Though they’re disapprovin’ – Keep them doggies movin’…]

Sarah Frankoff is a senior Broadcast Journalism major who cites UT’s long list of required courses as a reason for using an online option to complete her foreign language requirement.

After trying to take a live Spanish course at UT, Sarah decided it was “way too difficult and time consuming,” and is now in an online course because Spanish is “not a priority” in her field of study. “I think online classes are a great way to get less important courses out of the way.”

UT Extension’s website touts the possibility of completing the Business Foundations Certificate or completing prerequisites online as benefits of online learning. They cite today’s economy as a reason to get ahead with online learning. [Gt yr diploma qwik! Tday! Y wait?]

… reaches its apotheosis.

… James Stoner, chairman of [Louisiana State University’s] political science department, recently taped three 30-minute constitutional lectures for the new “Beck University,” which was announced Monday.

… “I read [Beck’s] use of ‘university’ as ironic or kind of a TV thing,” [said Stoner].

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Read all of UD‘s posts about online education by clicking on this post’s category. Or go here.

John D. Colombo, a University of Illinois law professor who has written about tax exemption and college athletics, says he doesn’t think the IRS action will fundamentally alter college athletics business. But he adds, “Audits are never comfortable. Just the IRS being there asking questions makes people nervous.”

Fine, yes, uncomfortable. Yes, nervous. But your coach is all right. The luxury boxes are all right. Get a grip on yourself.

The IRS has begun audits of more than 30 colleges that could include examinations of how schools determine the compensation of highly paid employees, including coaches and athletic administrators, according to an agency report.

The audits could include scrutiny of business activities that potentially can be seen as unrelated to schools’ primary purpose. Among the activities is the sale of corporate sponsorship packages that include athletics or are arranged by athletic departments.

… Colleges and Universities Compliance Project, which the agency said was part of a larger effort to review the largest, most complex organizations in the tax-exempt sector. Last year, the agency published a study concerning tax-exempt hospitals. [See post directly below this one.]

… The IRS interim report noted the large number of schools with an athletics coach among the five highest-paid employees who aren’t officers.

USA TODAY surveys of football coaching compensation have shown the average pay for a head coach in the NCAA’s 120-school Football Bowl Subdivision has risen 46% over the last three years, to $1.4 million in 2009. For the 65 schools in the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, average pay for a head coach for the 2009-10 season was nearly $1.3 million, USA TODAY found…

All sorts of Nosey Parkers have been nosing around universities lately. There’s that group that looked at how several universities not only ran their endowments into the ground, but contributed quite significantly to the nation’s recent economic meltdown. There’s the IRS investigation of non-profit hospitals I wrote about earlier today.

And now university coaches. Is nothing sacred?

A former professor takes issue with a local paper’s argument

that virtual classrooms with unlimited enrollment and little maintenance would assist state universities live within a restricted budget …

Designing interactive online learning modules increases costs for the time of faculty and technological experts. Add in server usage fees and the 24/7 tech support for daily student access and downloading problems. Research has shown that online enrollment should be maximized at 20 students for best student-faculty interaction, far less than the usual concrete classroom.

The time-intensive nature of online interactions add[s] to student and faculty workload and cause[s] problems for students who cannot balance work, family, friends, faith and school. To be successful in online courses requires good reading comprehension and writing skills. Students who do not have these skills drop out and need to re-enroll at a later date, creating more problems for student progression and class enrollments…

This writer overlooks, however, the boots-on-the-ground reality of many online courses: Hundreds of students handled by one professor; the professor so overwhelmed, and so incentivized to pass students, that she doesn’t much care (notice?) whether they’re learning anything; an insultingly low level of intellectual interaction; the system’s inability to determine whether the person who says she’s taking the online class is who she says she is… In short, if you want to make your university one big correspondence course which hands out degrees to the largest possible number of students without making them learn anything or even verify their identity, online’s the way to go.

Police arrested Tiffany Lynn Gaubert, a 22-year-old unaffiliated with the University of 170 Constant Drive in Thibodaux, for disturbing the peace by intoxication after receiving complaints of someone overturning a motorcycle at East Campus Apartments.

The owner told police Gaubert tipped the motorcycle. Gaubert denied toppling the motorcycle and blamed it on a squirrel.

Gaubert, who police later learned was drinking vodka and Dr Pepper, said she was trying to feed barbecue to the squirrel when it ran off and knocked the bike over, said Sgt. Blake Tabor, LSU Police Department spokesperson.

She then became hostile toward the officers and was arrested and issued a misdemeanor summons for disturbing the peace.

From ABC News:

The woman who was at the center of the phony Duke lacrosse rape case was arrested today and charged with attempted murder.

The Durham Police Department told ABC News that Crystal Gale Mangum got into an argument with her boyfriend, Milton Walker, shortly after midnight on Thursday…

Hello!  This is Carolyn, the webmistress of University Diaries, here to let you know that my aunt Margaret is without an internet connection at the moment, thanks to the blizzard.  She asked me to inform you, her readers, that she will resume posting once her internet connection is restored.

Former Texas Tech University football coach Mike Leach sued the college on Friday, claiming it defamed him, and suspended and fired him without cause. Leach has denied the school’s accusation that he abused an injured played by locking him in a shed because he suspected the student was faking a concussion.

In his complaint in Lubbock County Court, Leach claims the school’s statements were intended to injure his reputation and hurt him financially.

… He seeks damages for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, defamation, deprivation of due process and seeks waiver of the school’s sovereign immunity…

As jobs for attorneys disappear, campuses like UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts establish new law schools. Debt-burdened unemployables are loosed upon the world.

A win-win situation, and since the American Bar Association accredits anything with a pulse, we can expect more of it.

An opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times gives some background and makes some suggestions:

… From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

… A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt.

… Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine…

[G]ive [accrediting] authority to an organization that is free of conflicts of interest, such as the Assn. of American Law Schools or a new group. Although the AALS is made up of law schools, it is an independent, nonprofit, academic — not professional — group, which could be expected to maintain the viability and status of the profession, properly regulate law schools, curtail the opening of new programs and perhaps even shut down unneeded schools. The AALS has cast a very skeptical eye [for instance] on for-profit schools, compared with the ABA’s weak hands-off accreditation policies…

New Jersey school administrators could be required to meet strict conditions to receive taxpayer-paid tuition assistance or additional pay for advanced degrees under the terms of a bill being considered today by the Assembly Education Committee.

Is graduating from an actual university a strict condition?

The legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Joseph Cryan, stems from an episode at the Freehold Regional High School District where three administrators used $8,700 in taxpayer funds to pay for doctoral “degrees” from Breyer State University – an unaccredited online diploma mill. Before the bogus nature of the degrees was uncovered, the district provided each with a $2,500 salary increase, which was commensurate to their being awarded actual doctoral degrees…

This is the University of Victoria director of the Office of Occupational Health, Safety, and Environment. He’s talking about the latest effort to remove the many, many rabbits on campus.

Wild rabbits hopping amok around the University of Victoria’s campus will be trapped, sterilized and released in a new location starting in the New Year.

The University of Victoria has chosen Common Ground, a wildlife control company, to start up a pilot project to test the best ways to capture, spay and neuter, and relocate about 150 pesky feral rabbits said to pose a health hazard on the campus’s athletic fields.

Earlier efforts to rid the place of the rabbits have involved shooting them and blowing them up; this approach, everyone agrees, looks more humane.

And if it works, well — as the director suggests, other campus populations are next.

Whoroscope, a poem by Samuel Beckett,
will be the UD category
into which we toss small stories
like this one,
from the University of Southern California.

Small stories within the big saga
of the university’s prostitution.