… “This is a university. This is a university.”

Again, as you read this update, repeat: This is a university. This is a university.

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Emory at first did nothing about complaints directed at [Charles] Nemeroff, but in the aftermath of intense political pressure from the United States Senate, and from Senator Chuck Grassley in particular, he was subsequently stripped of his department chairmanship and forbidden from accepting more drug company largess. He soon left the university. Not to worry, though; he has since resurfaced as chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami.

This is a university.

This is a university.

“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing…” You’d be surprised how many American universities are the educational equivalent of one of UD‘s favorite songs. These are truly nothing places full of fully salaried nowhere men and women. Everyone knows they should be shut down – even current and potential students. All have shrinking enrollments and massive absenteeism (professors and administrators are as absent as students). All are farcical in the way of Rube Goldberg contraptions that have blown every fuse but continue to make random movements.

Baltimore’s Coppin State is a notorious nothing; this letter writer to the Baltimore Sun says the obvious: Let it go. Public nothings are incredible wastes of money. Stop humiliating the taxpayers of Maryland.

Can this be true?

UD has ridiculed Southern Illinois University on this blog for years. Put “Poshard” in my search engine for scads of posts about the place. But she had no idea it got as bad as this…

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Well, here’s the faculty page. All boys! ‘cept fer one girl that the dean done dumped. Laura Hatcher is suing.

I must say. It takes a special commitment to femicide to sustain absolute gender purity for over half a century. I trust the department has taken advantage of this distinction to forge relationships with its brother institutions in Saudi Arabia.

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UD thanks Wendy.

It’s how things have always been done at the University of Hawaii, proud flagship of one of our most corrupt states; and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.

For background, put hawaii in my search engine if you have the stomach for it.

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“It’s a common pattern in Hawaiian political culture to announce campaigns against corruption, but the problem is so deeply rooted with high-level officials that are involved, and there are low-level scapegoats who feel the brunt of the campaign,” said Jeff Jones, an associate history professor at UNC-Greensboro …”

Whoops. No. That should be Russian political culture. Russian.

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.