Ah, now we’re getting to it. Now we’re getting to the bottom of the scum bucket.

The head of an organization representing the online for-profit schools, pissed that a congressman is opening hearings on their executives’ compensation, asks why the government isn’t going after six million dollar a year coaches.

Why should the feds harass zillionaires who pocket government money while destroying the lives of poor people, when the feds don’t harass zillionaires who pocket the same public money (through non-profit tax breaks, etc.) while destroying the country’s universities?

After all, both zillionaires take the noble cause of higher education and grind it down, down, down, down until it’s so dirty decent people avert their eyes. Why single out our whores and not theirs?

Yet the reason is simple. University football coaches give their students money and sex and great cars. For-profit school presidents give their students nothing.

[With each revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], the number of diagnosable conditions increases. With each increase, psychiatry is criticized for ‘creating’ diagnoses to: 1) increase revenue to clinicians; 2) partner with big pharma to expand the mental health market; or 3) simply raise money for the DSM publishers. Consequently, in the absence of research demonstrating that new definitions meaningfully advance the utility of our diagnoses, our credibility with the public and our medical colleagues is challenged with each DSM revision.

Psychiatric Times

… the eruption of unregulated capitalism into the university — billion-dollar tv contracts that make already filthy university athletics unspeakably filthier; massive, Goldman Sachs-run online for-profit tax siphons; university presidents who presided over obscene corporate bonuses; professors with outrageous corporate conflicts of interest, and so on.

Peter Beinart, in a post about Occupy Wall Street, considers the larger culture of destructive greed in America, and the growing outrage over “financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown [who have] have almost entirely escaped justice.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement … represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.

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UPDATE: Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes that if the American government has become so oligarchic as to violate the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, citizens – like the Occupy Wall Street crowd – have a right – even a responsibility – to protest this violation vociferously.

The Guarantee Clause says that the United States shall guarantee to the states a republican form of government. It says that we are guaranteed a responsive government, a government that cares about the 99 percent, not a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent.

The ideals (and the fears) of the framers are still relevant today; the wisdom of the Guarantee Clause still applies. If government no longer pays attention to the vast majority of its citizens; if the government has been hijacked by the most wealthy and powerful in the country to perpetuate and expand their wealth and power; if the agencies of government have been derailed from their constitutional obligation to “promote the General Welfare,” then we no longer live under a republican form of government, and the government we have is no longer consistent with the United States Constitution.

A broken government, unresponsive to the public, is more than a misfortune. It is a violation of our basic charter– our Constitution.

William Black investigated the savings and loan scandals in the ‘eighties. You remember those. They cost American taxpayers around $500 billion and made the Milken brothers – responsible, according to many insider accounts, for much of the fraud – incredibly rich.

Decades later, noting UCLA law school’s recent enthusiastic acceptance of millions of dollars from Lowell Milken as long as UCLA names a school after him, Black reminds us what Bernie Madoff (benefactor and high-ranking Yeshiva University trustee) and so many other criminals and accomplices know: Prestige universities are reputation colonics. They are there to clean your tushy. They are Quackser Fortunes making their fortunes in the Quackser way.

This is why Black goes on to say

“The UCLA thing … is a great demonstration of one of my family sayings: ‘It’s impossible to compete with unintentional parody.'”

… but it’s uglier when the funds are meant to help minority students; and it’s even uglier than that when the embezzlers are the leadership of a university.

… will get you.

And the university promptly responded to his request: Fork over $40,000 – no – make that $100,000 – and they’re yours.

It’s hard for us to access our records! And since you’ve been so indecorous as to appeal to Hawaii state open records laws in response to our initial outright refusal of your request (“[T]he agency that oversees Hawaii’s open records law issued an advisory opinion saying the invoices must be released.”), it’s only right that we punish you.

Bad boy. Bother us again and we’ll charge you fourteen million and shoot off your kneecaps.

Gordon Gee tries to take your mind off of it.

This is an old story, and a most repellent one.

Cynical universities are in on the scam too, since it has the effect of pushing down their “admitted” percentages, making the schools look that much more attractive.

… on them?

[UD thanks her sister for the article.]

… you’ve already read this sort of prose.

If you happen to be the state of Minnesota, and if you happen to close down one of these diploma mills, you will be accused of failing to understand the beautiful educational synergy of online technology and fifteen year olds.

The Minnesota Department of Education has taken an unprecedented move to close an online charter school accused of graduating students improperly.

The department notified the West St. Paul-based BlueSky Online School on Thursday that it would sever the school’s contract with its overseer, a recourse the state has under recent charter legislation.

Don’t you love the idea of giving an online school the name BlueSky? It’s the one thing you’ll never see – you don’t even get to take short walks from one classroom to the next. Prison would be more like it.

Actually, prison’s an improvement. At least you get a cellmate.

Oh – and in its defense BlueSky says the following:

BlueSky has said the charges reflect a lack of understanding of online instruction.

Yes, let’s all get on board for the proper understanding of online high school instruction.

You take a teenager, see, isolate her in a room with full access to games, Facebook, YouTube, music, and the rest of the internet, and watch her learn algebra.

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UD thanks Michael for the link.

From the New York Times:

… “Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

… Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.

… [M]any law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics.

… Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.” …

A being has the same,” writes Emily Dickinson in The Bone that Has No Marrow.

Bones in need of marrow need people willing to be bone marrow donors; non-profit institutions like university hospitals are among the beings who have obligations to handle the pulling in of donors in a seemly and humane way.

After all, they’re non-profits, dedicated to education and healing. Right?

That perennial class act, the University of Massachusetts, burnishes its reputation once again:

… UMass Memorial Health Care Inc.’s use of pricey models in short skirts and spike heels to entice people to sign up for its bone marrow registry, while allegedly misleading consumers about the cost of testing, has drawn scrutiny of the hospital chain from authorities in New Hampshire.

Condemning the practice as a scam involving “suspect marketing and billing practices,’’ New Hampshire Attorney General Michael A. Delany yesterday announced a major probe of shopping-mall bone marrow donor recruitment drives by UMass Memorial and its subsidiary, the Caitlin Raymond International Registry.

James T. Boffetti, New Hampshire senior assistant attorney general, said in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon that his office will investigate potential criminal violations of New Hampshire’s Consumer Protection Act as part of a joint probe with the state’s Insurance Department.

Caitlin Raymond staff and the models from a Boston agency, which charged UMass Memorial between $40,000 and $50,000 a week for about a year and a half, told potential donors that the DNA test required to join the registry did not cost anything, Boffetti said.

However, UMass Memorial billed the potential donors’ insurance companies as much as $4,300 per test, far more than the roughly $100 charged by most labs, according to Boffetti.

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A new fighting song for U Mass.

We whore for bone marrow
Through malls broad and narrow…

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UD thanks Dennis.

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Not that I want to pile on, but really.

3. College presidents who sit on corporate boards have faced criticism and even lawsuits when things go wrong. Some have decided it’s not worth the hassle. Match the college leader with the board from which he or she resigned:

A. Erroll B. Davis Jr., then-chancellor of the University System of Georgia

B. Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown U.

C. E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State U.

D. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

a. Stepped down last year from the board of Massey Energy Company, owner the West Virginia mine where 29 miners died in April.

b. Resigned board position at BP five days before the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April.

c. Left the board of Goldman Sachs in March, a month before the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company with fraud for its role in the subprime-mortgage crisis.

d. Left the board of NYSE Euronext in April, but is paid more than $1-million annually for service on five other boards, in addition to an academic salary of $1.6-million.

Yeah, that last one’s Shirley Ann Jackson – everyone knows that. Too easy.

But with today’s news out of Goldman Sachs, it’s a good moment to honor the many years of loyal service the president of Brown University (she’s c.) gave the Goldman Sachs compensation committee.