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.

Sports Illustrated offers some commentary on the SUNY Binghamton fiasco (details here):

… [T]he lessons of Binghamton, a state school 140 miles northwest of New York City, were no shock to college basketball insiders.

“What’s happened there really should come as no surprise to anyone that was in the league or following that league,” former Boston University coach Dennis Wolff said. “They were making a recipe for disaster by the way they were going about their business.”

… “The concept of giving kids transferring in (a scholarship), I don’t think anyone’s against that,” Wolff said. “But the idea that almost every guy that came in had been asked to leave where they had been before, that puts it in a different light in my mind.”

… “The problem with Binghamton was simply that the course that they chose, they were under suspicion from the beginning,” [another observer] said. “People said, ‘Whoa, whoa, this guy’s been at three schools. This guy’s been at four schools. … What price glory here?”…

The lessons of Binghamton will not get learned. Universities have spun off their sports programs — they throw lots of money at them but avert their eyes. Who wouldn’t. It’s sordid over there.

Somebody hires a coach who recruits criminals, and the shit hits the fan as anyone not averting her eyes could predict.

Simple matter of negligence. We pay university presidents a lot, but most of them don’t know anything about what’s going on in the big campus sports, and they don’t want to know.

That’s how you get drunkard coaches, coaches who beat up their assistant coaches, coaches who recruit criminals. Every one of these coaches costs an American university between a million and four million dollars a year. Their contracts make it close to impossible to fire them without costing the school many more millions.

… The survival of big-time intercollegiate athletics (principally revenue generating sports like basketball and football) is dependent upon what some call the “big lie.” As Drake University provost emeritus Jon Ericson explains: “It is a myth that you can take a student who is academically unprepared for higher education, a student who has a job on his team that requires 20 to 30 hours a week that causes him to miss numerous classes and come dead tired to others, and expect him to acquire a university education.”

It simply can’t be done — unless, of course, there is a complicitious faculty and administration. In the name of winning, grossly unprepared high school students are frequently admitted and are then exposed to a phony curriculum. The formula for success on the playing fields and staying academically eligible often include[s] no-show courses and dubious independent study. The academic magic can also include the pressuring of faculty to change grades or drop requirements altogether. When educational compromises like this are made for athletes, what’s the point of having big-time college athletics?

Former Tufts University provost Sol Gittleman once remarked: “Division I-A college athletics has nothing to do with education.”…

A psychology professor writes in the Albany Times-Union.

… where Mr UD has been a visitor, houses the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics: Elinor Ostrom. She is Mr UD’s friend.

“She’s the most prominent person working to preserve the connection of political science to all things civic. So she was, for instance, part of the small group of people that we brought together to plan the Summer Institute in Civic Studies.

You need to keep alive the civic impulse of the social sciences, and she’s been active in promoting, for example, civic education.

It’s a wonderful endorsement of a way of thinking about social science which connects it to civic practice.

She’s very committed to interdisciplinary studies. She’s done a lot of work on systems governing the allocation of water.

Farmers and governments develop such systems. The general question is: How do you get people to cooperate? She works pragmatically with people and institutions on this, and does the theoretical work.”

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Here’s an excellent place to read an essay of Ostrom’s. Hers is the first chapter in the book.

Oliver Williamson of Berkeley is the other winner this year.

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Update: A nice take on what Ostrom’s about.

… at 12:30 today UD meets George Gollin, diploma mill expert and physicist, at Kinkead’s for lunch.

At 1:45 a Red Top cab shows up at the front of the restaurant to take UD to the News Hour studio, where she’ll be interviewed about Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

More later today.

… One of [the people named as an author of a published paper on a new heart device] is a true ghost author. Anthony Rickards, a cardiologist, … died before the research was conducted….

Even if you die before the research is conducted, you can ghostwrite the results!

I guess Rickards’ estate got his ghost fee.

I’m getting this from The Guardian; England too is beginning to reckon up its ghosts.

One of them – this one’s still alive – is in a spot of trouble.

One of Britain’s leading bone specialists is facing disciplinary action over accusations that he was involved in “ghost writing”.

The wider phenomenon has come to light through documents disclosed in the US courts which have revealed a culture in which doctors agree to “author” studies written by employees of drug firms. The doctors may have some input but do not have access to all the evidence from the drug trial on which the paper’s conclusions are based, the documents showed.

The General Medical Council will call Professor Richard Eastell in front of a fitness to practice committee. Eastell, a bone expert at Sheffield University, has admitted he allowed his name to go forward as first author of a study on an osteoporosis drug even though he did not have access to all the data on which the study’s conclusions were based. An employee of Proctor and Gamble, the US company making Actonel, was the only author who had all the figures…

Background on Eastell, and on Sheffield’s shameful attempt to shut up one of Eastell’s colleagues, a man with a conscience who condemned the scandal, is here.

… she thought “Five men tie up a woman and rape her in a dormitory bathroom while a party’s going on not far away and no one hears anything? No one comes in?”

Suspicious, she decided not to write about it on her blog, even though, if true, it was a very big university story.

Another reason UD felt uncertain about this case: A number of fake rape stories are happening at universities lately. Women report being raped and then, a day or two later, admit to having lied about it.

The Hofstra student has indeed admitted lying; the sex, she says, was consensual. The men she accused are quite unhappy at having been arrested and jailed, and having their mug shots appear all over the nation’s newspapers, because of a crime they did not commit.

Baltimore police say a Johns Hopkins University medical student armed with a samurai sword killed an intruder in his garage.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says campus police and an off-duty city officer responding to a call for a suspicious person heard screams to call police around 1:20 a.m. Tuesday.

Guglielmi says the student told the man he found in his garage to leave and the man accosted him. That’s when Guglielmi says the student defended himself, cutting off the man’s hand and causing a severe laceration to his upper body…

… that a body has been discovered in the Yale science building where Annie Le was last seen.

Details from the Yale Daily News.

More details from the New York Post:

… [A] university student has failed a lie-detector test when questioned about the missing young woman but [investigators] refused to provide details, including whether he was the same young man who had been led from the building for questioning early Saturday.

Ah oui. Especially since they’re the poor white trash of education.

You know. On-line university courses. Most of them stink, for obvious reasons.

But one thing about them — because they don’t use up classrooms and equipment and campus time in the way of courses where you see and hear other human beings, they’re cheaper, that’s for sure…

… relaxes at his vacation home.

The workshop follows recent controversies in Australia over commercially-funded clinical practice guidelines for venous thromboembolism prevention, and a sponsorship deal between Sanofi-Aventis and the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute which was in breach of the Medicines Australia code of conduct.

Australia takes up conflict of interest.