Gotta recoup what the prez is costing them.
… has an excellent, concise update on the for-profit college scandal. It’s an interview with Jonathan Kaufman, Bloomberg‘s education editor.
You know how happy birthday presents make you! Toys!! Toys!!!
Now listen carefully to Mr. Weiler, boys and girls. Your university got a birthday present. From its best friend, Mr. Knight. A wonderful shiny present.
This present looks so pretty! See the present? Pretty presents are pretty!
… “Its a really nice building,” University sports marketing senior Taber Webb said, “but I don’t understand why the best building on campus is reserved for less than one percent of the student population. My tuition is spiking every year because supposedly Oregon doesn’t have enough money, but then you see things like Jaqua and its quartz stone fireplace on the first floor, and you begin to wonder what the deal is.”
… University spokesperson Phil Weiler emphasized that the Jaqua Center was a gift from Knight and the University had no control over how the donated money was spent.
“The building was a gift,” Weiler told the Oregonian. “When someone buys you a birthday present, you don’t ask them how much they spent for it.” …
Someone bought you a present, Taber! A pretty present!
Unfortunately for investors like Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, crazed rapacious thieves who pitch university money managers don’t typically have flashing eyes and floating hair. They tend to look more like this (via the Wall Street Journal).
This is Paul Greenwood, the compleat yellow bow tie white collar criminal.
In February 2009, UD covered the sad tale of Carnegie Mellon’s money manager journeying to the Greenwich office of this guy’s firm to, as Bloomberg put it “try to locate the school’s money.”
Greenwood had it.
Paul Greenwood, a former executive at WG Trading Co., pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges that he and his partner misappropriated millions of dollars in funds.
Mr. Greenwood admitt[ed] to taking “upwards of $75 million” for his own personal use.
… [A] court receiver’s preliminary assessment of the total investor losses in the case puts it in a range of $800 million to $900 million…
The universities might get a teeny bit of it back. Maybe.
Plus it comes from the student newspaper. Multimillion-dollar enterprises don’t care about student newspapers.
Still. It’s worth noting the intensity of disgust on the part of a sports writer for the University of Georgia paper.
Thus far, seven football players and the highest-ranking athletic department executive have been arrested this off-season. In 2008, eight players were arrested.
Thus far. We’re only talking off-season. These guys haven’t even put their cleats on yet.
These scholarship athletes pay nothing to attend classes here. They merely ride the coattails of being able to play a game and milk it for all its worth.
Lose the mixed metaphor. Otherwise, you’re on a roll.
As a fourth-generation Georgia student and an ardent supporter of the Bulldogs, it pains me to see shame brought to this university.
But I would rather see the team miss a bowl game than this disgraceful parade in handcuffs.
Because at least then something would have been changed for the better.
Here’s your problem. Michael Adams. Your president is deacon of the First Church of Jocksniffers. Your president was first runner-up in the Miss Head of the NCAA pageant. You are screwed.
Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.
On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.
It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”
The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.
KCBD reports:
… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.
… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.
As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…
So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…
But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…
… this morning’s Inside Higher Ed.
And, as long as we’re on the subject: The Goldman Sachs Song.
A word of advice to David Armitage, as he begins his long journey toward titular self-acceptance.
Armitage, the Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History, has by this point received at most a bit of ribbing from friends.
But – if history is anything to go by – the opportunities for ridicule will soon become too big to fail.
UD‘s advice? A self-deprecating sense of humor’s your best bet.
UD knows nothing about Armitage. But if he’s touchy and self-important, he’s toast.
The excellent chancellor of the University of Maryland is too kind. Human failing, bad judgment, all very nice, but let’s call it what it was: Greed.
I mean, the dean of the UM law school ran the place. So… what was it John Kenneth Galbraith said about corporate compensation? “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”
State university system officials have asked the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Law to return $60,000 in unauthorized compensation and have referred questionable payments totaling $410,000, which were revealed by a state legislative audit, to the attorney general’s office for review.
Chancellor William E. Kirwan revealed those actions and apologized for the audit’s findings at a hearing Thursday before the House subcommittee on education and economic development. He pinned responsibility for the $410,000 in payments on the recipient, former law dean Karen Rothenberg, and on David J. Ramsay, departing president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore…
Yes, Ramsay, like SUNY Binghamton’s Lois DeFleur, is getting his ass out of there toot sweet. “Rothenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday. The university said Ramsay will not be granting any interviews.” Legislators “could recommend withholding some of UMB’s $182 million budget, pending action on the audit items.” They’re waiting to see whether Rothenberg will cough up the $60,000 — first installment toward an ultimate payback of all the hundreds of thousands.
Details here. “[W]hen a highly paid employee of a state university receives an extra 350 large in a single year, and nobody tells the legislature, shouldn’t a state university president expect a report like this to follow?”
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Update: Financial details on the scandal here. Here’s the heart of it:
Rothenberg’s base compensation is listed in university records as being the following: 8/2003: $288,925; 8/2004: $304,161; 8/2005: $327,246; 8/2006: $365,000; 7/2007: $408,450; 7/2008: $485,778; 9/2009: $485,778.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Median Salaries of College Administrators By Job Category and Type of Institution 2008-09. For law deans, the median salary reported is $266,895.
Rothenberg’s base salary, already above the 2008-09 median in 2003, increased 68% in the next 6 years. It increased 33% in just the two years between 2006 and 2008 (so much for the argument that the whopping additional payment in 2007 that was disguised as a sabbatical payment was somehow necessary as a retention bonus).
Her current reported salary ($485,778) nearly doubles the national average for the position. It is 2.33 times the salary earned by the next highest paid tenured faculty member at the law school (which is $208,055). It is 4.4 times the salary earned by new faculty members at the law school ($110,000).
Rothenberg never earned a salary greater than $200,000 at UMD before being named the interim dean. She never had a minute of administrative experience as a dean or an associate dean at any law school before her appointment. She never appeared as a finalist in any dean search at any other law school in the U.S. during her tenure. She left the UMD deanship without another administrative position anywhere to go to. And yet, in just 7 years of being the dean, she earned more than $2.5 million dollars, not including the extra sabbatical and research grant payments questioned in the audit, and not including the value of expense accounts and benefits….
[These numbers] are completely off the charts — they are wholly outside and beyond any standard industry practice or customary compensation policy at American law schools.
…We pay [UW president Mark Emmert] more than he could ever possibly need, while students are being priced out of the seats.
Yes. That is the brilliant strategy that the University of Washington, at a time of terrible financial difficulties, has adopted.
… to absorb into itself a law school not far removed from a diploma mill continues.
Some people in the Massachusetts government, and at the University of Massachusetts, want to expand the university to include the Southern New England School of Law, an unaccredited institution whose pass rate on the bar — around 43% — is unconscionable. No school with that low a pass rate should be in business; it’s simply stealing money from students.
Two University of Massachusetts trustees say what needs to be said in a Boston Globe opinion piece. They’re not diplomatic.
When someone offers to “donate’’ a fourth-rate, unaccredited law school to a great state university, taxpayers should guard their wallets. [Donates is in quotation marks because although backers of the idea claim it won’t cost the state anything, it will of course cost a shitload. Not merely in money; in reputation.] …[A]bsorption of Southern New England School of Law would pose significant financial challenges and prove to be an academic embarrassment to the university.
… Upgrading facilities and services to achieve American Bar Association accreditation will cost tens of millions of dollars. Even accreditation won’t guarantee quality worthy of the UMass name. The law school does not have a single distinguished faculty member. Indeed, the quality of the education is so poor that in a recent administration of the Massachusetts Bar Exam,only 6 percent of Southern New England Law School grads passed.
… It is difficult to see how we can salvage this mess and create a law school to rival Boston’s excellent private law schools… Our economy does not need more ambulance chasers educated at taxpayer expense…
When your university president’s a sports-mad, nepotistic, crony-loving knave who failed as president of two universities before he got to yours, you can certainly expect a lot of bad things to happen.
To its credit, the beyond-demoralized faculty at the University of New Mexico has done no-confidence votes up the wazoo. Hell, everyone on campus makes noise about the wrecking-ball they’ve got for a president (UD took this post’s title from one of many such sentiments in the wake of UNM’s latest travesty, Psycho Soccergirl).
A letter-writer concludes in the same issue of the student newspaper, “It’s yet another example of poor judgment by coaches at the University of New Mexico. One also has to wonder what is going on with the athletics administration and their obvious ineptness in running clean, championship-caliber sports programs. What a sad time this is for UNM sports.”
Not sad. The proper response to your campus having become a house of ill-repute is not sorrow. It is anger.
From the University of Pittsburgh student newspaper:
University officials say Pitt students won’t be affected by a [twenty percent] drop in endowment funds and [a] $35 million loss in investments, at least not this year.