… but its students can.

The governor of Louisiana thought he’d figured out how to rid the state of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.

In 2001, Southern had a 5% graduation rate. That rate is now 8%.

As the governor tries to do something about this scandal, Southern devolves into farce, the latest act of which involves a fired professor who just kept teaching and being paid because no one noticed he was still there.

He was fired as part of an emergency two years ago, when

enrollment declines and state budget cuts prompted Southern to declare a financial emergency, called exigency — in this case, a 20-month process that allowed the university leeway to cut academic programs and lay off tenured faculty.

Those enrollment declines are going to be the only thing that will eventually be able to shut Southern down. It’s fun to be in the audience for the last acts of a farce, but no one wants to be onstage. When no one goes to your school, you have to stop existing.

Or do you? Maybe Southern can figure out a way to keep going. Maybe administrators can designate one another professors and set up classes for themselves.

Next up, on the Sports Illustrated hit parade:

Around 2007, Joel Tudman, an [OSU] assistant strength-and-conditioning coach who is also the team’s chaplain and carries the title of Life Issue/Social Development Counselor for the football program — a mentoring position that has become more common within athletic departments — was put in charge of the drug counseling program for football. Tudman is also founder of Net Church, which he started in 2006. The congregation has grown quickly, and Sunday-night services were moved from Bennett Chapel to a student union auditorium, where Tudman’s sermons are delivered to an audience that often includes 40 or more football players.

Tudman, however, has no formal training in drug counseling. While Tudman’s bio on the athletic department website indicated that he had received a “double masters in health and counseling” from Texas A&M-Commerce, he in fact has only a single master’s degree, in Health, Kinesiology and Sports Studies. (Tudman’s bio on the Net Church website also erroneously stated that he had master’s degrees in Health Promotions and Counseling. After Tudman was interviewed by SI the bio was corrected.) His Oklahoma State bio said that he was twice honored by the Lone Star Conference as a running back and was a “3 time All-American sprinter.” In fact, that conference recognized him once (honorable mention in 2003) and he was an All-America sprinter only in 2004. (After SI began investigating Tudman’s background, the school pulled his bio from its website.)

Tudman says because he took courses in health and counseling while at Texas A&M-Commerce he “thought it was a double masters.” He produced a transcript that showed he completed five counseling courses, but none of them dealt with substance abuse and he never enrolled in the two courses Texas A&M-Commerce offered in that area. Tudman concedes that his athletic accomplishments were also embellished. “That’s [a mistake] on my part,” he says. “I take full responsibility.”

… (Tudman remains unlicensed to treat drug users.)

When asked about Tudman’s qualifications and background, [OSU] athletic director Holder said, “I didn’t look at Joel’s résumé” …

What Holder looked at was whether Tudman was a sufficiently pathetic blowhard to be controlled by Holder. Answer: Yes.

The school also paid $6,900 to send an administrator to a week-long course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; 15 months later, the employee took unpaid leave and then retired, the report said.

The Jewish Daily Forward, which broke the Yeshiva University sex abuse story, is rightly disgusted by that school’s paltry response to the absolutely damning independent report about decades of disgusting behavior by that university’s rabbis and administrators.

Yeshiva’s punishment is – however much that institution tries to avoid it – inescapable. With fewer and fewer people applying to the school, and with its credit rating in the toilet, Yeshiva is certainly going to remain historic; but it will, in not too long a time, cease to be at all important. Between Madoff and Macy, it has sealed its fate. No smart, self-respecting person wants to go there.

… has responded to the lawsuit against Trump University…

Meanwhile, David Halperin points out that TU is just one of many for-profit schools for scandal in the United States.

While none of the major predatory for-profit college companies — University of Phoenix, EDMC, Corinthian, Kaplan, CEC, etc. — have a frontman as publicly odious as Donald Trump, their abuses and harms go much deeper than those of Trump University.

That’s because they’ve entrapped far more people, and because our taxes continue to pay for them.

New York’s attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony “Trump University” that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

Korea’s Dongguk University keeps suing and suing Yale, trying to get them to give it fifty million dollars because of an administrative mistake relative to the amazingly, comprehensively corrupt Shin Jeong-ah.

Their latest appeal has failed – since in order to prove defamation you need to prove malice – and it looks as though instead of enriching itself by tens of millions it has seriously impoverished itself through court costs in a case about faked credentials that should never have been filed.

**********

UD thanks Ruth.

… Dean Shirley Mays allegedly described as ‘building a better mousetrap.'”

Wow. If true, Dean Mays certainly has a way with words.

She’s got the fiction part down.

Ovidius Ovidius
With rector insidious
Ovidius, Constanta campus!

Er, make that 24.

And, as law schools across the country begin to enjoy the synergy of the ABA’s policy of accrediting anything that moves, and the dramatic shrinkage of the job market, there’s this from the Charleston School of Law (famed for the otter tank pissing incident):

Graduates of the Charleston School of Law are so alarmed by the possible sale of the school to InfiLaw System that they are considering ways to stop it.

Current students grew more outraged Friday, when they couldn’t get answers to their questions on the school’s future from its leaders.

The law school released a statement Thursday evening, which said it had entered into a management services agreement with InfiLaw System, a group that owns three other for-profit law schools.

Investors are cashing in and letting the place go diploma mill and they don’t want to talk about it.

… movie. UD thinks of its name whenever a big research fraud story breaks, since the trapped honcho almost always blames his years of image manipulation, plagiarism, data futzing, etc., on the others – shadowy research assistants in the corners of the lab of whose evil ways the honcho was tragically ignorant.

So it is with Shigeaki Kato, a University of Tokyo bigshot who studies molecular signaling. He’s at 43 retractions and counting. Note the use of the passive voice plus the others in his comment.

[Kato is quoted as having said] “there is no doubt that there was impropriety.” He is also quoted as apologizing and explaining that he didn’t catch the impropriety because he trusted his lab members.

Kato’s fraud goes back sixteen years! Talk about trust… I mean, I think we’re past trust and into naivete at this point… It’s the purest of heart who always get pulled down by the world.

… Gored.

All praise to Todd Wallack, the Boston Globe reporter who put up with all the shit the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its risible public relations firm threw at him to try to make him go away.

**********

UD thanks Barney.

… Airport.

University spokeswoman Karen Moon said in an email that a number of offices on campus are already involved in handling the new supplementary courses, and an email address and phone number have been established specifically for organizing the courses.

But calls and emails made by The Daily Tar Heel to both inquiry lines went unanswered.

Dee Reid, director of communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, and Chris Derickson, assistant provost and University registrar, both said the best information available at this point is that on the University’s website — the same proposals that were submitted to the accrediting agency.

The Department of African and Afro-American Studies did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

According to University documents, 304 alumni who received academic credit for “Type 1” courses — those which either did not exist or the instructor denied teaching and signing the grade roll for — will be given the option of returning to UNC for one supplementary course at any time over the next five years.

The University of Pittsburgh is a university, a non-profit institution advantaged in myriad ways because of its tax breaks as a non-profit. It is categorized, in fact, as a charity. Are you with me so far?

The person who runs the university’s hospital makes six million dollars a year.

Does that sounds like an appropriate use of tax-payer money? Like a non-profit salary? Or are you smelling just the slightest whiff of profit motive in this figure? Throw in private jets and chefs and chauffeurs and all and you begin to understand why the city of Pittsburgh is suing the hospital, and why this trend – suing so-called non-profits to make them act like (and share like) the for-profits they are – is becoming national.

But local Pittsburgh politics aside, large non-profit health systems are getting new attention from city and state tax officials across the country facing budget crises. “The fact is hospitals are coming under more scrutiny,” says Gary Young, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research. “The city’s willingness to take on a hospital with the cachet that UPMC has is sending a chill down the spines of many hospitals around the country who are saying, ‘If this is happening in Pittsburgh, what could happen with us?’”

I remind you of all this in connection with the public relations problems NYU is currently facing, as its administrators and some of its faculty help themselves to vacation houses on their students’ – and the taxpayer’s – dime.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I think part of the problem is.

The trend toward packing your board of trustees with Olympians like Steven A. Cohen (personal wealth nine billion dollars) and just down from there is that you as an administrator now hobnob on a regular basis with such people. Study after study tells us that perceptions of one’s financial success are profoundly dependent on the financial profile of the people in your neighborhood, at your workplace. It’s all comparative.

Your attitude toward personal wealth thus shifts as hedge fund managers become the new normal on campus. Your one million dollar a year compensation becomes downright embarrassing. Infuriating. What to do?

You convince yourself you can’t attract the mega-rich and their money to your campus without dressing, talking, and living like them.

You’re not being greedy; on the contrary, you’re doing high-minded work on behalf of the university by styling yourself a financial titan on the same level as your trustees.

***********************

One saw this process very clearly on the Yeshiva board of trustees when Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – men of unimaginable personal wealth – walked as gods among the administrators there. Fellow trustees and high-ranking administrators at Yeshiva fell over themselves to be cut into Merkin/Madoff deals. These people used to think they were rich. M and M showed up and showed them they were poor. “We thought he was God,” says Yeshiva trustee Elie Wiesel of Bernard Madoff.

So, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. If the water level is one billion dollars in personal assets, everyone’s going to want to rise to that. It won’t seem strange to them – it doesn’t seem strange to NYU – that multi-million dollar vacation homes would be part of a university compensation package. I mean, by prevailing standards, that’s nothing! That’s the bare minimum.

************************

This is all well and good – this rising tide business – until people who actually know what non-profits are — or people who realize they are giving their tax money to university robber barons — themselves begin to rise up.