Irish elections today. Votes are now being counted.

Extremely funny article about an extremely sad situation here.

… José Cruz about the for profits:

Inaction is not an option. We have to rein in those that abuse our social investment and prey on our underserved population.

Every class is an online class.

… [During one class, a student] was playing ESPN College Town, an Internet-based game in which one creates a fictional college and maintains it a la Farmville. Essentially I observed this student playing a game that simulates the college experience, while in a college classroom, participating in the college experience.

… As budget cuts force universities to begin looking for ways to save money, one of the most popular methods seems to be an increase in the number of online classes offered. While some may argue that online classes detract from a student’s ability to absorb the material, most students that attend large universities understand that for many students, whether it has an official designation or not, almost every class is an online class. This is because large lecture halls seem better fit for LAN parties than learning experiences based on the number of students who surf the web during class….

UD has covered lots of stories like this over the years. A grant-getter teams up with someone who controls campus money.

The guy who used to run Florida A & M University’s Federal Credit Union teamed up with the guy who used to run FAMU’s Institute on Urban Policy and Commerce, and they did some commerce of their own, stealing $134,000 from a federal grant.

Records showed withdrawals corresponding with every deposit to a micro loan account during a period between 2002 and 2008. These withdrawals were then deposited in Telfair’s personal account.

Took every penny.

What’s interesting about this story is that no law school – far as I know – has responded to the charges. Except to shrug their shoulders and express some variant of It’s a free country and there’s a sucker born every minute.

In a recent interview, Christopher Hitchens explains that he almost never watches television, because the spectacle it presents, hour after hour, show after show, is so repellent:

“It’s… the Barry Manilow effect, when you see Barry Manilow and you think, ‘There are people who want to hear this, and they want more of it.’ Clearly there’s something I’ve missed.”

UD has struggled with a variant of the Barry Manilow Effect through all the years of her coverage, on this blog, of academic psychiatry at some of America’s most esteemed (Stanford, Harvard, Minnesota, Brown) universities. Although she recognizes the importance of the subject of campus medical research for any blog calling itself University Diaries, UD is always tempted to avert her eyes from the steaming piles of Conflict of Interest, irresponsibly recruited subjects, non-operating oversight boards, and ineptly designed studies that litter this activity.

And not only are there people who want to sponsor this work – people at the National Institutes of Health – but NIH is taxpayer funded; so, whether or not we like the tune these researchers are singing, we’re compelled by the government to hear more of it.

Which really makes us dupes, doesn’t it? We pay for bad studies that might put dangerous drugs on the market, and then we’re damaged by said drugs… said very expensive drugs…

Hard to think of a more thorough fucking-over than that.

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UD‘s thinking about this because of yet another sordid revelation from the academy…

Though that historian’s anonymous Amazon comments, viciously trashing fellow historians’ books and voluminously praising his own, look rather mild compared to this case, in which a computer science professor at the University of Washington apparently sent a series of threatening anonymous emails to his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer.

What can we learn from these two cases, one of which involves an international expert in computer technology?

Never assume anonymity.

James Fallows, in The Atlantic:

… Peter Orszag, until recently the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama, [will] join Citibank in a senior position. Exactly how much it will pay is not clear, but informed guesses are several million dollars per year. Citibank, of course, was one of the institutions most notably dependent on federal help to survive in these past two years.

… The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution — and then, less than two years after his Administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the Administration says it’s trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service — this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life…

This blog focuses on growing university disparities – executive compensation, athletics funding – but it’s good to keep in mind the larger picture of a nation bankrupting itself through cynicism and greed.

She wore a new law school, boys, she wore a new law school.

… and what are they paying her for?

Results like this, I guess: Rensselaer Polytechnic University is ranked tenth in the nation for worst professors.

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I’ve been reading through the RPI Rate My Professors pages. The school has quite a few legendarily bad professors – professors known by all, for decades, to be insulting, lazy, incomprehensible.

My favorite comment from among many negative appraisals of professors there:

This professor does not like people or questions.

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To be fair, I doubt President Jackson knows about any of this. Too busy on corporate boards.

In UD‘s opinion, that is.

Here you’ve got one of the many naughty people at America’s most criminalized university – the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – having his university pension taken away (he recently retired from UMDNJ) while he’s being tried for bribery.

In arguing that he shouldn’t have his pension taken away, the guy showed the judge “documentation from a psychologist that he has undergone treatment for schizoaffective disorder, major depression, a generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Four diagnoses? Four?? No wonder the judge denied the guy’s pension request! If the guy’s psychologist had merely gone to the trouble to flip through the DSM he’d have come up with at least twenty.

… round-up gets going, check your university’s trustees, its Outstanding Alumni Award winners… Check the names on your most prominent buildings, because some of those donors might be going to jail…

Matt Taibbi gets at the heart of insider culture:

The other crimes on Wall Street have been so pervasive and so massive in scope in the past decade or so that good old-fashioned insider trading — hedge funds and other gamblers robbing the great mass of uninformed investors by acting on exclusive intelligence not available to the rest of us — seems almost quaint.

… However there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy.

For sure some of the robbers have turned some of their loot over to their beloved alma maters – rather in the way Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin cut Yeshiva University into some of their winnings.

UD gets a nice warm feeling as she anticipates knowing which campuses have the most insider traders in the most prominent positions.

… for Apollo.

In North Miami.

They usually involve what you’d expect: A hot-shot, globe-trotting professor charges twice for travel. He charges his university, and he charges his hosts at his destination. Or he consistently inflates his expenses. Not by a lot, which would attract attention, but by a few hundred dollars, say, with each expense report.

All we know about Seshu Desu, a high-ranking engineering professor at SUNY Binghamton, is that he inflated:

Court documents show that on or about April 22, 2009, Desu submitted a trip receipt from Worldwide Travel Inc. for $1,985 — for which he was reimbursed… Desu’s actual airline travel cost only $1,585…

But UD figures there’s got to be a lot more to this story.