… once again cracks the whip. You recall its directive to faculty last year:

In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”

The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.

Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”

And they meant it, baby. Chicago State has a 10% graduation rate, and much else besides, to protect; and now you’ve got some faculty undermining the peace-loving progressive masses of CSU by starting a blog!

A blog written by Chicago State University faculty members that has been critical of the school’s administration was sent a “cease and desist” notice by university lawyers …

[CSU] said the blog “violates the University’s values and policies requiring civility and professionalism of all University faculty members.”

Cage demanded that site administrators “immediately disable” the blog and provide written confirmation of that no later than Friday to “avoid legal action.”

UD trusts free speech advocates are all over this one. I’d say it’s an outrage, but everything about CSU is outrageous and it still syphons huge tax dollars from the poor citizens of Illinois. So it’s wasted breath.

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Scott Jaschik takes note.

New to teaching, I was proudly gazing at a sign on my office door proclaiming “Assistant Professor Grossman,” when the department secretary knocked.

“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” she asked.

“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”

Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

Brings back memories of Mr Risperdal himself, Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman.

… tradition; the university itself is clearly proud of it, since after decades of totally pissed vileness it continues to respond with soft words… Continues to set things up on campus to achieve optimal pillaging. They riot when they’ve been sleeping; they riot when they’re awake; they riot when they’ve been bad or good — so let them RIOT for goodness’ sake!

U Mass Amherst is one of those schools which (let’s be honest) knows it would have to shut down if it didn’t admit its cohort, and the U Mass cohort happens to be gangs of alcoholic bullies from the eastern seaboard. Similarly, if Ole Miss systematically shunned Confederacy loyalists with a big thirst, they’d lose a significant chunk of their incoming class. Most universities are dominated by a representative slice of the American pie; U Mass Amherst, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Alabama, Cal State Chico … these schools are not. They play the role of the freaks of this blog, the frenzied teetering muttering mad uncles of the American university family. When you give their students guns, as at Oklahoma State, you witness all manner of amazing things.

Yeshiva University. A gem of a place. Once again it is fighting with all its might against doing the decent thing: Offering a reasonable settlement to the 31 men sexually abused as boys by its educator of the year, under the watch of its president.

… med students, Evan Dobelle has decided to go down swinging.

… just took one hell of a plunge.

“I hope that [by] using this soft, constructive approach, we can help them and North Asia and the world to be a better place for mankind,” [the conferring university’s president said].

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Sets an interesting precedent.

“The Indian Institute of Technology has awarded an honorary doctorate in criminology to Dawood Ibrahim. ‘I hope that by using this soft, constructive approach, we can help the D-Company and organized crime around the world to be a better activity for mankind,’ IIT’s president said.”

… Yeshiva could not have done any better. A university whose sexual and financial scandals dwarf the sexual and financial scandals of all other American universities; where the vilest sexual abusers continue to be hired and kept on the faculty until pressure from journalists forces Yeshiva to fire them; where the school’s long history of sexual abusers means that it now faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential settlement costs from a massive ongoing lawsuit… A school perfectly happy to keep Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees long after suspicions of his massive criminality were rampant but hysterically punitive when a woman student wrote a short story with mild sexual content…

And here it goes again. You simply cannot keep Yeshiva University from being the most obscenely hypocritical university in America.

Within twenty-four hours of [a Yeshiva student] posting [a] survey [about sex], the University Dean of Students contacted [her] via email and phone informing her that her housing scholarship had been revoked.

No whores wanted here! We’re a religious establishment! What would Zygmunt Wilf and Ira Rennert and Julius Berman say! What shamelessness!

Outrage among students at Yeshiva’s disgusting behavior forced the school to back down. Good thing, because FIRE would have had a field day with this.

Yeshiva University: You simply cannot keep a bad school down.

… Alabama State University.

Yes, I know the state in general is stupid and corrupt; but ASU’s a whole other category, and especially states like Alabama can’t afford to keep running – with taxpayer money – any institution this corrupt and destructive. The agencies that continue to accredit ASU are simply whores.

That ASU is a deadhead is known and documented; that it’s run by thieves is equally notorious.

Americans seem to have trouble with the idea that universities, like businesses and states, can fail. Failed states; shuttered businesses; closed universities. Bad enough ASU educates no one; it also steals everyone’s money. Time for Alabama to show some guts.

… who oversee one of America’s most larcenous, most corrupt universities, the University of Louisville. A local paper wants to know why no one seems to catch all the thieving UL administrators until long after they’ve taken millions… The sports program is WAYYYYY-scuzzy….

Like other criminogenic schools – Wharton, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Yeshiva – the University of Louisville is a comprehensive model of degeneracy, featuring indifferent trustees, comatose students, and… professors? Are there professors there? Oh – right…

… for its typically disgraceful behavior in regard to the depravity of some of its rabbis. Marci Hamilton excoriates Yeshiva for issuing only the thinnest of reports about its decades-long sex scandal and cover-up. She rightly compares Yeshiva with the Catholic church and its shameful efforts to deny the depravity of some its priests.

YU reportedly spent millions paying [a law firm] to produce a “Report” that anyone with knowledge of child-protection policies could have written after receiving YU’s policies and reading [newspaper accounts of the abuse]. … I would not have permitted my name to be on such a deficient and embarrassing document. A document that was truly a “Report” would have included an actual report of the facts that prompted the need to review those policies.

As with Yeshiva trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the point all along has been to ignore, delay, and then – to the extent possible – deny.

Hamilton’s response would be a significant blow to most universities. But this is Yeshiva, and she is a woman. That means she does not exist.

… and an illiterate local press. What can you say?

Only that things are great: Southern University “continues to move in a positive direction.”

… you get a wonderful shot of the University of Hawaii athletic director leaning comfortably back in his office chair and wearing one of those relaxed Hawaiian shirts and drawling about how firing someone you’re paying more than your state’s governor… firing that person after only a few months… and giving that person a huge buyout to go away… and giving no reason why you’re doing all of that is utterly routine, no biggie, a real yawn. Happens every day in the business world~!

Well, number one, no, it doesn’t happen every day in the business world.

Number two, the University of Hawaii is a public, taxpayer funded, institution.

And while we’re at it, number three: The AD casually mentions that there’s no scandal here because after all the position was budgeted anyway, so why be upset that UH is paying the budgeted money for no one to do anything in the position?

I mean, let me be understood here about exactly what the AD is saying. He is saying that we quickly fired the highest-paid public employee in the state of Hawaii for reasons we’re not sharing (UD‘s been at this game long enough to know that quick secretive firings like this one almost always involve the discovery of an alcohol problem, or criminal misbehavior of some sort), and we’re going to keep paying this person as if he still worked here (I mean, he will physically be here until the end of the year; he just won’t do anything), and that’s your tax money, but nothing in this picture is amiss.

… OSU still has Gee-like Chief Financial Officer Geoff Chatas:

While traveling to an OSU fundraising event in February 2012, Chatas flew to Florida on OSU’s private jet and stayed at the five-star Ritz-Carlton Naples, which features clay tennis courts, two golf courses, stunning views of the Gulf of Mexico, a pure white sand beach and pool-side cabanas. The bill was 1,264 for two nights.

The Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where OSU spent 2,235 to accommodate Chatas in July 2011, is a five-star luxury hotel with high-end amenities including personal yoga and pilates instructors.

Chatas was a Gee hire, after all.

What’s next for Evan Dobelle? He has spent his way through the University of Hawaii, and through obscure and now much-impoverished Westfield State. Like Patricia Slade at Texas Southern University and Peter Diamandopoulos at Adelphi University, Dobelle arrives at obscure schools with his chest thrust out and starts talking about his important connections and how unless your school gives the president wads of cash for luxury goods no one will respect you.

Dobelle spent more on [a] 2008 Asia trip alone than the $92,000 that Governor Deval Patrick spent to take two dozen officials on a trade mission to Britain and Israel in 2011. But Dobelle said the only unusually expensive item was the luxury hotel bill in Bangkok, and there was a reason for it: The consultant who helped plan the trip said that Thai officials wouldn’t take Westfield State seriously if they didn’t put on a good show.

“She would say, ‘Who the f— will come and listen to Westfield State when they only have time for Cornell? You better set yourself up in a way to show a certain degree of prominence and respect to them,” recalled Dobelle. “So fine, that’s what we did.”

Verbatim out of the Slade/Diamandopoulos book of you gotta spend money on me to make money. They all peddled this line, as did way-high-living American University president Benjamin Ladner.

Todd Wallack, Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s nemesis at the Boston Globe, contributed to its detailed account of Dobelle’s doings. Wallack seems to be making a specialty of swinish academic administrators. He’ll always be able to find work. Just in the eastern seaboard area.