… will steal from it.
After decades of honing their larceny on their own government’s education subsidies, they seem to find stealing European Union education money a piece of cake.
Roughly translated, the title here is WHERE’D YOU GET THE PORSCHE?
The London Evening Standard looks at the details behind the professors’ acquisition of around – in American dollars – three hundred million:
It is claimed that over 10 years, the academics — who would normally earn between £1,300 and £1,700 a month at most — drove up the costs of their work and funnelled the cash to bogus mailbox firms which they set up in Cyprus. They spent the money on a “fabulous lifestyle”, building villas, taking holidays and buying fast cars and fine wine…
Trinity College, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546, stores … wine to be drunk by dons, their guests and some privileged students.
Following a freedom of information request it emerged that the total value of wine stored in its cellars is £1.67 million.
Israeli students have had it. Thousands of them have hit the streets to protest continuing government stipends for yeshiva students, money dispensed even in the face of a recent High Court of Justice ruling that the stipends are discriminatory. As Haaretz writes:
[The stipend] is bad news for anyone who values equality and the rule of law… [The ongoing financial support] sends the message to university and college students, who do not receive benefits of which the income allowances are only a part, that Israel prefers poverty and backwardness to enlightenment and contributing to society.
The student government president at Hebrew University succinctly explains why so many university students are protesting: “We want to stop this disgusting law.”
Background here.
In Israel — a country with a powerful and growing ultra-orthodox population whose anti-Zionism prompts their refusal to educate their children in the country’s national curriculum, even though Israel entirely subsidizes their education — a university president goes after faculty who assign some materials critical of Zionism in their sociology classrooms.
Israel should pay less attention to intellectual diversity in its higher education sector, and more attention to the vast number of anti-Zionists it’s cultivating in the lower grades.
Domenico Pacitti included this tidbit in an article which attempted, ten years ago, to touch on some of the most sordid crimes of Italy’s almost entirely sordid university system.
Pacitti points out that no legal remedy exists.
Adding more laws to the 200,000 already in existence has already proved futile and even counter-productive: in Italy breaking the law is literally a way of life and asking for it to be upheld is considered offensive. European derecognition of Italian universities as bona fide institutions would be the logical step to take.
Far from having been derecognized, the startlingly corrupt – even by Italian standards – San Raffaele has become the prime minister’s pet university. His daughter just graduated from the school.
The prime minister’s eldest daughter by his second marriage was awarded her philosophy degree by the San Raffaele Life-Health University after submitting a dissertation on the concepts of well-being, freedom and justice in the work of the Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen. Roberta de Monticelli, who holds the chair of philosophy of the person at San Raffaele, said that after declaring the results, chancellor Luigi Verzé had turned to Barbara Berlusconi “asking her if she thought a faculty of economics could be founded at the San Raffaele based on the thinking of the author on which she had written her thesis, and inviting her to become a teacher”.
De Monticelli claims she was not just kept from examining Barbara Berlusconi; she was kept even from seeing her thesis.
“The first candidate was programmed for 9.30am. My presence on the panel, however, was scheduled from 10am onwards,” she said. “I understood then that the first [candidate] was going to be Barbara Berlusconi.”
The professor said that she had asked to see the thesis written by the prime minister’s daughter “but there were no more copies”.
… unable to continue generating income.
A former chancellor of Bournemouth University has been charged with an £11,000 fraud over the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Taylor of Warwick reportedly claimed money for visiting his sick mother in the Midlands even though she had died in 2001.
The Crown Prosecution Service has been investigating the claims since they were made last year, and it announced yesterday that he has been charged with six counts of false accounting…
The modestly named Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan’s new flagship education facility, has officially opened in Astana. President Nursultan Nazarbayev presided over the June 28 opening ceremony of the state-of-the-art campus on the outskirts of Kazakhstan’s rapidly developing capital.
“Young people should strive to enter this place. I agreed that the university would be named after me so that no-one would let me down,” said Nazarbayev addressing the university’s first matriculating class…
Los Angeles Times.
… The fare dodgers who jump the turnstiles or sneak in through exit barriers on the Paris Métro are as much a fixture of the city as the subway itself.
Those caught without a proper ticket, though, face fines of up to $60. What’s a poor freeloader to do?
The answer, in the land that gave the world the motto “All for one, one for all,” is typically French: Freeloaders banded together to set up what essentially are scofflaw insurance funds, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary fervor.
For about $8.50 a month, those who join one of these raffish-sounding mutuelles des fraudeurs can rest easy knowing that, if they are busted for refusing to pay to use public transit, the fund will cough up the money for the fine.
… At least six or seven such funds now exist throughout Paris, some based at universities, others organized by arrondissement, or district…
Various Israeli newspapers are reporting significant movement toward reforming the country’s shameful system of subsidized yeshivas for the married ultra-orthodox.
Ha-aretz:
It took the High Court of Justice a decade, since the original petition was submitted, to rule against the distribution of welfare payments to married men studying at yeshivas.
… [T]he court ruled that awarding stipends to yeshiva students but not to students at nonreligious institutions of higher education is illegal and unconstitutional.
… The ruling came about two months after a Knesset subcommittee was shown the results of an official survey indicating that about one third of the yeshiva students who applied for welfare lied about their income in order to qualify.
The implication is that Haredi cabinet ministers and MKs are about to fight for a line item that costs NIS 135 million a year – NIS 45 million of which, allegedly, is allocated fraudulently.
Not only is much of this state money awarded fraudulently; the people it goes to refuse to provide, for themselves or their children, even the sort of basic education that would make them employable.
The High Court of Justice was presented with a petition Sunday demanding that it order the Knesset and the Education Ministry to explain why ultra-Orthodox schools are not being forced to teach basic subjects, such as Mathematics and English.
… Tens of thousands of students are being deprived of knowledge, tools, and “basic training necessary for the fulfillment of human autonomy, the ability to make an honest living, and the ability to incorporate themselves in Israeli society as active, contributing, and equal citizens,” the petitioners say.
They add that the law harms the legal rights of students attending the small yeshivas, and that it “perpetuates their economic dependence on the community and welfare payments from the state”.
No democratic state, they conclude, agrees to fund a school system devoid of governmental inspection.
A writer for YNET expands on that last point:
There is no other country in the world – not even one! – where the government funds private education. There is no other country in the world where Education Ministry representatives are not allowed to enter a school whose bills they pay (and fully so – 100% of the bills.) There is no other country in the world where teachers refuse to present their curriculum to the body that pays their salary.
He describes the children of an ultra-orthodox friend:
They can’t talk about computers, literature, geography, history, or even the Bible. Yeshivas barely teach any Bible, only Talmud.
He notes that the state’s willingness to pay all expenses for private yeshivas has meant that the national education system has been starved:
[I]n the past eight years we’ve seen a 24% decline in the number of students in teacher colleges in the national education system. People don’t want to be teachers in our sector; not with the current salaries. Why are the salaries so low? Because in those same eight years, the number of teaching cadets in your sector leapt by 111% – and all of this comes from the same budget.
Meanwhile, university students work (many haredim do not), serve in the army (ditto), and struggle to pay tuition. It’s such a grotesque disparity that one wonders why it took a decade for the Israeli court to notice its illegality and unconstitutionality.
**********************************
Update: The Jerusalem Post provides historical background. It concludes:
The haredi leadership can no longer justify devoting all of its energies to the singular endeavor of preserving tradition and insulating its flock from “evil” outside influences. It must now rise to new challenges. First and foremost among these is ensuring that while an elite few continue to carry the torch of tradition, others receive the skills needed to integrate into a dynamic labor market.
A new crackdown on even minor alterations of the hijab is taking place in Iran. Guards are appearing at the gates of universities. They turn away insufficiently hidden women.
“I believe Hijab is an invisible political tool for the stagnant, patriarchal politics… a view that gives priority to woman’s sexuality over her other human dimensions,” [a student said] in a telephone interview from Tehran.
“Undoubtedly, the totalitarian system’s patronising way of thinking encourages people to deny their bodies, wear unkempt clothes, and gravitate toward sadness, and it has no room for human health and development. This thinking cannot be effective in reducing abnormal behaviour in the society,” she said.
“Autonomy is the disengagement of the state from the university,” she says, calling the results of the first wave [of university changes] disastrous:
“This is creating a lot of competition between colleagues, some of whom are now having to teach much more, and others who are having to do more research, and it is creating a lot of inequality.”
As the French university system attempts to become respectable, a professor at the University of Bourgogne, and a spokesperson for the main group resisting the changes, captures the source of faculty anger. Pretty much everybody has to work now. Plus, their work is being judged.
This blog has chronicled the reduction of higher education to indoctrination in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. The latest development: State seizure of private universities.
Chavez sent a message via his Twitter account to students of privately funded Santa Ines University, letting them know their school was being taken over by the government and tuition will be free.
“Students of Santa Ines University, I just approved a nationalization plan for the good of everyone. Now: FREE!” beamed Chavez last week on the microblogging website, which he uses frequently after having set up an account last month.
University officials weren’t available to comment on the charges, but students said the government’s reasons for taking it over were just an excuse to tighten its grip on the country’s education system.
“This is the worst of many bad moves by Chavez,” Carlos Chavez, a leader of the university’s 3,000-strong student body and who is not related to his president, told Dow Jones Newswires. “He’s going to impose his revolutionary, Marxist, socialist agenda on us students, and he’ll kick out good professors who allow us to study capitalism.”
The nationalization of the school was made official Monday, when the government’s newspaper of record, the Official Gazette, announced the “forced acquisition” of Santa Ines, and said it has been renamed Jose Felix Ribas University, in honor of a Venezuelan independence hero.
… la clé to the future.
A vast multiversity’s being built just outside Paris, in Saclay.
In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world’s best.
The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France’s answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation’s best university only ranks 40th in the world.
… “Our goal is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world,” said Herve Le Riche, who heads the 4.4-billion-euro project (5.9 billion dollars) in Saclay, a plateau of grain fields dotted with clusters of modern buildings.
Already home to some top-notch colleges such as the Polytechnique engineering school, the new campus will start opening its doors in 2015 as a grouping of 23 universities, colleges and research institutes.
New laboratories, amphitheatres, student housing along with shops and transport will be built with a view to making France a destination for some of the best and brightest who now head to US and British universities.
… Sarkozy got the academic world talking when he announced that one billion euros of his 35-billion-euro national loan program would go to Paris-Saclay.
That’s on top of 850 million euros earmarked for the project under his government’s university reform program….