Senator Charles Grassley – echt-American right-wing nerd – and Andrew Ross – left Euro hipster – find common ground in their disgust at the big-money machine New York University has become. Both wonder why a non-profit uses its extensive tax breaks to bleed its students for tuition, underpay its faculty, and give millions of dollars to administrators.

The culture gap between faculty and administration is pretty staggering lately. We’re scrambling to offer unpaid MOOCs; they’re looking for more Helen Dragas and Steve Cohens to put on the university’s board of trustees.

And indeed herein lies the problem, if you ask UD. Ross asks:

“Faculty who don’t necessarily get concerned with governance issues or for whom academic governance is not something that turns them on, these revelations I think turned the stomachs of a lot of people,” Ross added. “Just the scale of the payouts, multimillion dollar loans, multimillion dollar homes that were purchased, and the salaries. They really add up to a package of questions that have led to requests for further investigations.”

Part of the answer to this package of questions involves that board of trustees. NYU’s – like most fancy schools’- is dominated by hedge fund managers and the like. This means that over the last couple of decades the people with whom administrators consort on a daily basis are multimillionaires and even (Steve) billionaires. Larry Summers, Ruth Simmons – their immediate world has been the world of Goldman Sachs, where earning less than twenty million dollars a year is a mark of shame.

It’s not merely that high-ranking administrators these days consort with hedgies; like presidents Summers and Simmons, they often are hedgies, or they sit on the boards of hedge funds.

Trustees have always been rich, of course; but when ascending to an administrative university position now means that your compensation standard rises from six figures to seven or, uh, ten (Steve), you are going to feel compelled to shake down the school for big bucks. Otherwise you won’t be able to live with yourself.

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One practical recommendation for NYU from UD: Book a Greg Mankiw “politics of envy” talk and make faculty attendance mandatory.

They are Huh? presidents. The things they do are so nutty, so destructive, that you simply have to sit back and wonder.

These are the university presidents with multiple ongoing national scandals to their names, the university presidents always reeling from massive sex scandals to massive money scandals, never quite catching up with anything… You can sort of see the sweat dripping off of their faces as they stonewall on this one, pass the buck on that one…

Shalala – University of Miami – is still buffeted by the rioting football players scandal and the Nevin Shapiro scandal, but now, in addition to those, she’s got the Pascal Goldschmidt scandal. Much of her medical school faculty is up in arms about Dean Goldschmidt and his, er, management techniques… But Shalala says nothing; whether it’s Goldschmidt, or her other proud med school appointment – Charles Nemeroff, she’s just going to keep on keeping on thank you very much…

Joel, of Yeshiva, is a yet stranger case, a man whose tenure has witnessed the deification and then rapid de-deification of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the existence of a board of trustees (all male, natch; women would be against Yeshiva’s religion) so rife with conflict of interest it became a laughingstock, and a decades-long sex scandal whose legal costs promise to set YU back even more than the $150 million or so it lost because of Bernie and Ezra.

This sex scandal, this latest thing, involving rabbis abusing boys at Yeshiva’s university-run high school, isn’t raising Joel’s game any.

[One of the abused] also said that he reported the abuse to Y.U.’s current president, Richard Joel, before and after Joel took up the post in 2003. Joel did not launch an investigation into the abuse allegations until they were published in [a newspaper].

At first, through a spokesman, he said that Y.U. had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to “assist” in the investigation. Later, he said that Sullivan & Cromwell’s investigation would be independent.

Same old same old. Denial, number one. Number two, try to control everything. Number three, pushed to the absolute effing wall, begin – tentatively, shamelessly, angrily, self-righteously – dealing with it.

… ignored murderous hazing among its students.

We’ve known that for a long time, but the investigative report making it official has just been released.

The school is now on probation — and not just because its students haze one another to death. Because of anything else you can think of. Financial corruption; inept, constantly changing leadership; hilarious graduation rates. Whatever.

He begins his more-guns-are-needed response to the massacre in Connecticut by quoting William Burroughs:

“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

William Burroughs was a madman who killed his wife with a gun.

Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for championing the thought of William Burroughs. And for helping to keep guns in the hands of madmen like him. I await your next column on the wit and wisdom of Timothy McVeigh.

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UD thanks a reader for linking her to this remarkable piece of writing.

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Here’s something humane and non-insidious on the subject, written after the Virginia Tech massacre.

This blog covers Alabama State University because it has to – ASU is a university story of significance.

It is incredible to her that this criminally inept institution is accredited. It should be shut down.

Well, this British university is hosting a talk by Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, a preacher who preaches that all homosexuals should be killed.

Reviewing my University of Tennessee posts in light of the most recent event there – an alcohol enema party that almost killed someone – I find myself pretty overwhelmed by the comprehensive degeneracy of that school. Other universities in America are pretty disgusting (the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for instance, has a large drunken violent student body), but UT has a special combination of corrupt sports teams, corrupt coaches, indifferent leaders, and desperately alcoholic students that makes it truly madly deeply disgusting.

You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”

The pseuds who pretended to have written it have no shame.

You would think their universities would have a smidgeon.

… name.

It still adorns the head of the Modern Language Association.

What’s that? What was that you said? Professor? Sandusky a professor?

Ask yourself: What’s the most powerful constituency on a university campus? It’s almost always the professors. When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever? Why didn’t that totally fucked by football school have at least one Thomas Palaima, one William Dowling, one faculty member who spoke out about how sick the place was? You don’t have to have known anything about Sandusky to know the school was a football whore.

But no. Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!

For that matter, where are the professors now? Where’s the formal statement from the faculty about how horrible these events are, etc? Why did it take Louis Freeh to complain about the culture of sport at Penn State? What happened to the headline that should have said

PENN STATE PROFESSOR ATTACKS CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

Where did that go? Or – even better:

PENN STATE PROFESSORS ATTACK CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

The problem with vehement, outraged post-Freeh Report opinion pieces like this one, which breathlessly recounts the excruciating filth of university football in this country, is that these pieces — we’ll see tons of them in the next forty-eight hours — are simply little system flushes, little emetics, little confessionals, for the very sports guys who’ve happily been covering the game for years. I hope they feel better now. But tomorrow they’ll be back at it, back playing the game that they love as much as Paterno’s happy little North Koreans did. All for football! All for the Beloved Leader!

When this story first broke … Paterno said, “This is not a football scandal and should not be treated as one.”

Many agreed. Many still do, including some misguided alumni and football All-Americans and … surely those numbskull students who marched on campus, embraced Paterno’s statue on campus and protested his firing without any regard for the victims.

The problem is concluding that because Sandusky’s reprehensible acts did not lead to a competitive advantage, the football program shouldn’t pay. But the cover-up changes that. What the powers at Penn State did was beyond anything any college athletic program has ever done, beyond free clothes or free rent and academic fraud.

To hell with a free Camaro. We’re talking about sweeping allegations of a child sex offender under the rug in order to protect a school’s image, fundraising and recruiting. There is no more extreme example of a lack of institutional control.

Penn State deserves to be hit hard.

… Paterno and the powers at Penn State were too concerned about the ramifications, off and on the field. That makes it a football scandal, as well.

Jeff Schultz, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

… conclusions about Penn State. Thanks to football, the school has become a pathetic inbred place, hopelessly in thrall in the sort of hero worship that makes the worshiped behave with arrant disregard.

Now the adults on campus will – far too late – move in to remove Paterno’s name from the library and various professorships. It will be harder to convince the true believers to remove his statue from the stadium, but in time that will happen too.