More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

It’s hard to say. This directory page is the best I can do, and it might not be the same guy. But a news article about him says he’s an “assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine.”

As you probably know, medical schools are notorious for handing out the title “professor” to pretty about anyone who hangs around the hospital wearing a white coat. This courtesy isn’t a very good idea, especially at a time when doctors are being arrested for running pill mills all over the country (especially in Florida). Castronuovo faces ten years in prison for writing oxy prescriptions like a bat out of hell.

Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.

At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.

Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.

The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.

The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.

The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.

The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.

This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.

Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?

What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.

Yes, UK’s now richly retired last president gassed on endlessly about how UK was on the verge of becoming a top-twenty university. How could it not soar into that empyrean? It spent most of its money on corrupt coaches and apathetic administrators. It embarrassed itself on a regular basis. It spat on the state’s most important living writer, Wendell Berry. Ain’t that how it’s done?

Actually, no. As this commenter – on an article about the newest faculty member on the university’s board of trustees – points out, Todd’s master plan trashed the school’s ranking and offered students an ever more amply paid, notoriously corrupt, sports program, coupled with angry, undercompensated faculty. Not really a recipe for a high US News and World Report outcome, though perhaps UK’s administration believes that the magazine uses sports wins in determining rankings.

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The new trustee, Irina Voro, points out that the school treats faculty like “bumpkins.” Plus she “cited a Russian proverb: ‘A fish starts to be rotten at the top.'” Plus, she said that “a friend who is a former UK auditor couldn’t decipher the UK budget that is furnished to each UK trustee.”

Well, only a bumpkin wouldn’t realize that when you’ve got a sports program like UK’s, a lot of sleights of hand are called for.

We just hired this guy, and now he’s won the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

One of the daffier experimental ideas in the Australian mental health community – trying out anti-psychotic drugs on children as young as fifteen who have never had a psychotic episode but might, by some mysterious standard, be at risk for one in the future – has been shot down due to international outrage.

Whether it’s Joseph Biederman here or Patrick McGorry there, note the common thread: dosing young and vulnerable brains and bodies with immensely powerful drugs, based on the thinnest of diagnostic justifications. It’s a sickening, destructive, and frightening trend. Universities need to be aware that they are housing – and often celebrating – the dosers.

… Harvard had to pay to settle fraud charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of its professors; but then the University of Florida doesn’t play in Harvard’s big-money, big-influence league.

Still, $435,000 ain’t chopped liver; and thanks to the very similar criminal mischief (it also involved federal contracts) of one of its former professors, UF may well have to pay that amount to the government.

Ginther also happens to be a former math professor with a Ph. D. from Stanford University who just happened to specialize in… statistics.

I’m telling you. Life is better in Washington. In UD‘s city, if you can just keep talking for seven, eight minutes tops, you can earn twenty to forty thousand dollars!

And it gets better. You probably don’t even have to write the speech! At these rates, you can be generous with your speech writer. Show up, stand up, mouth some words somebody else wrote, grab the check.

Here, for instance, are some notes from recent DC speeches on behalf of an Iranian group.

Gen. [Anthony] Zinni’s speaker agent confirmed that Zinni was… paid his “standard speaking fee” for an eight-minute address at an MEK-related conference in January — between $20,000 and $30,000… As for whether he had any qualms about how much the speakers were compensated for addressing the groups, [John] Sano, who delivered [one conference’s] longest remarks with a 14 minute speech, paused and thought…

Yeah, there’s the whole pause and think option… which some have taken:

Despite offers of up to $40,000 for notably brief remarks, sources with knowledge of speaker negotiations said at least four invited speakers have declined this year because they had questions about the [group’s] ultimate goals…

Clear up the questions about your goals and I’d be delighted to be limo’ed to your feast, say out loud like a good boy the eight minutes’ worth of words my speech writer wrote, take a check from you for forty thousand dollars and be driven home. That’d be great.

The author of the article from which I’ve been quoting cautions the reader:

Unless a speaker has a can’t-lose stock tip, nobody is inherently worth $20,000 for a six-minute speech…

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The author of the article questions this Harvard professor, who along with Zinni and Sano has made a killing this way. She responds with some major backoffology:

“I was invited to speak at a conference on the Arab Spring and I received a speaker fee… My remarks were aimed at an Iranian American audience that was concerned about Camp Ashraf. I, too, am concerned about the ongoing humanitarian situation there. But I would not want my presence at the conference to be equated with a position on the delisting of the MEK.”

Well, instead of taking nothing for the speech (you were motivated to give it, you say, by humanitarian rather than material concerns), you took tens of thousands of dollars from the group sponsoring it. So it doesn’t really look as if you have no position on the delisting of this organization.

Delisting from what, by the way? From our country’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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Throw this professor in with the Monitor Group, Lawrence Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and the rest of the Harvard crew, and you understand why Frank Rich and UD laugh so heartily when the New York Times publishes opinion pieces by Ma Ingalls about the evils of materialism.

… (as regular readers know, UD is fond of saying of UMDNJ that it has rolling prison admissions) scores another winner.

(Here’s a new book for UMDNJ to display in its visitors’ center. Sample sentence: The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is a microcosm for corruption in the rest of the Garden State.)

This place knows how to maintain a reputation: Keep ’em coming.

Maintain? Hell – enhance! The University of Medicine and Dentistry’s criminal class has traditionally been made up of local petty thieves who ended up on the board of trustees or whatever… This guy’s a med school professor! The crime is tax evasion on a most impressive scale, in fancy countries like Switzerland! Forget the whole Jersey backwater thing! We are moving up in the world!

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Why is this man smiling? Now we know.

I mean, we know why he was smiling. Five years in prison await.

… The Faculty Lounges (as in takes it easy — because it’s tenured) wants UD to review it, so when UD gets her copy she will rouse herself from her tenured stupor, read it, and write a review of it for Inside Higher Ed.

The book’s Amazon page features several reviewers saying horrible things about tenured professors. Pretty much the nicest is “this self-obsessed caste.”

Texas has been breathing down the neck of the tenured lately. Tenure doesn’t fit the corporate model.

For my money, Richard Chait’s work on tenure is the best around (his introduction to this collection sets out the pros and cons nicely), but I’m looking forward to finding out whether Riley has stuff to add to the debate.

Let UD shake her head a bit here, try to clear things out… Okay. A Harvard professor, attacked in the last few days as a bigot because he wrote an opinion piece in an Indian newspaper containing a variety of intensely bigoted statements, as well as outrageous policy proposals, relative to Muslims, responds that his attackers are pro-Soviet.

I understand that the guy only teaches summer school, but shouldn’t there be minimal standards – of political understanding, and of responsible public statements – for summer as well as non-summer teaching? At Harvard?

Two Harvard students have started a petition calling for Subramanian Swamy’s ouster:

“Swamy draws a lot of prestige and legitimacy from his position at Harvard,” [one of the petition-writers] said. “If the Hindu right were to come into power in India, he could very well be someone who takes up a position in government, so I think it’s important for members of this community to play a part in discrediting him and saying, ‘No, he does not represent us.’”

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As current events at the University of North Carolina demonstrate, all serious universities guard their reputations, and all know that reputation can be undone in any number of ways. Slimy big-time sports programs are the fastest route to perdition, obviously; but industry-compromised professors on your medical faculty (an ongoing news story in the United States) can move you in that direction too, as can lots of other forms of financial corruption.

The problem with professors who express disastrously illiberal views – Ward Churchill’s writings on the ‘little Eichmanns’ who died in the Twin Towers, for instance – is that these people are terrible embarrassments to liberal arts institutions. They harbor precisely the ignorant, cruel fanaticism against which the university, above all human institutions, stands. What to do?

You certainly want to do something. It’s important to say out loud, one way or another, that you’re not, for instance, University College London, which has hosted speakers who call for the killing of homosexuals.

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Unless they’re truly – like the UCL speaker – inciting violence, professors with extreme and inhumane political views shouldn’t necessarily be fired. Universities should go to great lengths to protect speech.

But these people should certainly be fought, fiercely. Petitions of the sort the Harvard students are circulating don’t, I think, need to issue in expulsion. They need to issue in exposure (and indeed the Swamy story is all over the news today). Boycotts are also fine. Encourage students not to take classes with such people. Marginalize them in every possible way. Plaster their vile writings all over campus. Hold protests.

If, after investigating what is angering students, a university indeed decides that its reputation as a place of reasoned and humane discourse is imperiled by this faculty member, the school can punish that person in a variety of ways — all the way up, on occasion, to dismissal.

… Hauser immediately after the sanctioning of Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, it’s time to pause and think about the striking number of very high-powered faculty there who over the last few years have been under a cloud, or disgraced or, like Hauser, forced out. What’s it mean?

Keep in mind, first, that simply by virtue of happening at Harvard, faculty news gets a lot of attention. For all we know, multiple high-ranking faculty at Clemson have been punished or forced out for research misconduct, conflict of interest and failure to report massive income, conspiracy to defraud, failure to register as a lobbyist, plagiarism, etc. But we don’t pay attention to Clemson; we pay attention to Harvard.

Still, whatever the numbers, it’s pretty amazing that during the course of this blog I’ve followed endless stories of the most high-powered professors in the world — high-powered Harvard professors — doing bad things.

Most of these stories involve what I’d call crimes of grandiosity. Not opportunity; grandiosity. You work your way to the top legitimately; then, at the top, the same cleverness and ego and competitiveness and sense of invulnerability and restless insistence on more that got you to the top tips you in the direction of recklessness.

To be sure, some of these cases are boringly about personal greed (Biederman and Shleifer in particular); but all of them involve as well a significant element of empire-building, power-mongering, and arrogance. Many involve people who, bizarrely, don’t need to break rules in order to maintain their position of prominence in the culture. They break them anyway. So say also that there’s some operation of pleasure at work here; that these particular personalities have been drawn to the rarified, high-energy setting of Harvard because there’s visceral gratification to be had by scoring repeatedly and scoring big.

A colleague of UD‘s named Turley
Wants one boy to have many girlies.
“My thing on polygamy
Makes UD quite sick of me,
And even my wife has turned surly.”

An Australian professor and judge dies.

[Roddy] Meagher was … Challis lecturer in principles of equity and Roman law at the University of Sydney for many years. He wrote important books and monographs on several topics, most significantly Equity: Doctrines and Remedies with W.M.C. Gummow and J.R.F. Lehane.

He taught legions of students at the law school on Phillip Street over almost three decades, some of whom complained that he talked to a painting on the wall rather than to them. He said he was shy and did not know quite where to look, so he just looked to one side.

… He valued beauty, honesty, humour, loyalty and scholarship and was the most devoted friend imaginable. He loathed foolishness, hypocrisy and pretension…