… can be as big as all outdoors.

In 1997, the owner of a massive cattle ranch in Wyoming gave it to Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming “for hands-on agriculture education.” But the universities say “the working ranch isn’t a very practical place for students to learn,” and have now put it up for sale.

The donor threatens to sue, since it seems to her that the universities “violated the gift agreement by insufficiently promoting the ranch to university faculty as an available educational tool.”

Why hasn’t the educational set-up worked? “To date, the ranch has had 25 interns and employees from both universities studying geology, range and wildlife management, and equine studies.” That’s in fourteen years.

The same University of Wyoming newspaper, in another article on the subject, increases the number:

In the past, the ranch has had more than 50 interns from a wide variety of fields, including art and geology. Japanese ranchers have visited, and students from Europe have asked to intern at the ranch.

That’s still ridiculously tiny.

To UD’s madly idealizing, hopelessly coastal mind, 50,000 gorgeous acres, a working cattle ranch, should be a spectacular acquisition for a land-grant university interested in maintaining and improving a state’s traditional way of life. It should also be attractive to a university’s art departments, to environmentalists, to scientists…

UW dean of the College of Agriculture, Francis Galey, told the AP, “It’s a very, very efficient and lean working operation. So the way it was set up staffing-wise, there just wasn’t a way to accommodate the teaching we wanted to do.”

I’m not sure what this means. No one on the staff was willing to teach? Isn’t that what the professor is supposed to do? Or am I picking up the possibility that the staff simply wasn’t very cooperative with the whole educational thing — wanted to be left alone to do its work? Disrupted classes?

Wyoming’s student paper writes:

The hidden message is that more educated ranchers do not work the land. They work in management and let unskilled workers work the land. This shift in ranch politics will mean fewer jobs and less state revenue. Family run ranches will quickly become a thing of the past, confined to western movies and stories told by grandparents.

In this Working Ranch article, more reasons emerge, mainly having to do with difficult access and hard winters and the fact that both universities have closer similar facilities (which maybe undermines the claim about the sale’s hidden message).

The darkest theory is that the schools just held onto the land as long as they had to legally and are now selling it because it’s insanely valuable. They’ll get around twenty million, apparently. They say the money will go to agricultural scholarships, but I wonder…

… leftover chicken from Nando’s Peri-Peri (there was an ugly fight, last night, over the lemon & herb sauce), and I say to him:

So there’s this town near Tacoma Washington which is on a beautiful bay – Chambers Bay. Pretty name, Chambers Bay, but the town’s name is University Place.

Silence. He’s fiddling with the toaster.

What university, you might ask — you’re supposed at this point to ask — is located in University Place? [Pause. Silence.] And that’s just it. There isn’t a university. Ain’t hide nor hair of a university. When the town was established in the 1800’s the University of Puget Sound thought it might locate there, but then it didn’t and they were stuck with the name. The US Open’s being played there in 2015, and some in the town – including the mayor – think they’d be better able to benefit from all that publicity and possible tourism and all if they were Chambers Bay instead of University Place. Easier to remember, prettier…

Mr UD responds:

Barring some truly important reason, you shouldn’t change names. The absurd fact of that name’s history is part of the lore of the town. Continuity matters. And it costs money to change the names of towns.

UD responds to Mr UD:

Yeah. The reporter interviews this very anti guy, Bill Callier: “He owns University Place Radiator, Mufflers and Brakes.”

University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?

… big mo.

… They’ve made a school that you’ll adore

But freedom’s on a distant shore

From Singapore.

… of this sort of thing (background here and here). Their universities sponsor events in which speakers call for the death of homosexuals, and where women can’t speak, and are segregated in some other room from the men. Now Ottawa’s Carleton University is dealing with the aftermath of having sponsored an event in honor of Khomeini. A group of Iranian-Canadian professors have written a letter to Carleton’s president protesting the event:

… Clearly, this “conference”, organized by a group of people associated with the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, does not have academic value and cannot provide an objective analysis of Khomeini’s thoughts and particularly their outcome.

… [R]eputable academic institutions have a moral obligation not to turn a blind eye on atrocities committed against their colleagues in other countries. Providing forum to individuals, who under the pretext of academic freedom, propagate the ideas and values of a regime that is known for its violation of all standards of academic freedom and rights, is far from promoting academic debates.

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… [A speaker at the conference,] Kurt Anders Richardson, at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, … said Khomeini “was the one who emphasized the equality of human beings, the equality of male and female.” …

In an interview with Maclean’s after the conference, Richardson said he has received a lot of criticism from Iranian émigrés in Canada since making those comments and said he had based them on Khomeini’s writings, rather than his actions.

Oh! Okay then.

… the NPR program Fresh Air interviews Kevin Carey on American universities.

Aunt Voula captures the problem of for-profit non-profits. Just as she doesn’t realize that lamb is meat, for-profit non-profits don’t realize that profit is profit, and therefore that profiting from running a non-profit organization makes it not not-for-profit. If you catch my drift.

This very category confusion (for-profit / not-for-profit) has tripped up the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a putative non-profit long run for the personal profit of its director. Le tout Dallas is shocked and offended that the director has now been forced out and forced “to repay the medical center for every cent of his inappropriate spending.” How dare taxpayers humiliate this man by prying their money out of his hands!

University news for today: Everyone’s suing everyone.

The scandal-excised president of Penn State is suing Penn State.

The mother of the woman killed by University of Virginia student George Huguely is suing the University of Virginia.

The parents of two murdered University of Southern California students are suing the University of Southern California.

Okay so for what it’s worth UD anticipates that the intriguing Minerva Project will be a failure. Here’s why.

Whenever your dominant, overriding motivation is profit, you’re going to create a shitty education.

Minerva bills itself as a new Ivy League American university. It’ll be totally online and totally expensive.

It will cost about half as much as elite university tuition, to be sure, but this will still be much too pricy for what students will get, which is basically a classier version of other online for-profit schools. No campus, no contact with professors or students (unless you pay yet more to live in an apartment building in some random city that Minerva will designate for their students), no experience at all besides watching a high-profile professor give lectures and then doing interactive sessions with a teacher.

I’m not sure what ‘teacher’ means here. Someone with an advanced degree, says the article I’m reading; but that could mean a person with an MA and little to no actual classroom experience…

Let us regard skeptically Minerva’s claim that it will be “the first elite American university launched in a century.” I’m afraid you don’t launch elite universities. It takes quite a lot of time for people to know you exist, much less have this great reputation. Look how long the elite American universities have been around, and tell me whether you think you can whip one up pronto.

[Minerva’s founder] says that the genesis for Minerva was in learning how many academically-qualified students were being rejected from America’s top universities. “Harvard’s dean of admissions, for example, said that 85% of applicants are qualified, but less than one in ten is actually accepted… and it’s particularly difficult for foreign students trying to get into American schools. There is a basic supply and demand imbalance.”

Yeah, well, once a person who’s qualified for Harvard is turned down, she doesn’t start looking for online schools. She goes to Cornell (or any of a healthy number of other very good to great schools) instead.

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UPDATE: Back in ’09, Frank Rich detailed the remarkable commitment to personal enrichment on the part of Minerva’s chief advisor, Larry Summers:

Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”

Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.

But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.

Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.

You can be sure that Summers will bring this same innovative education/personal enrichment mix to Minerva.

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A discussion forms at Inside Higher Ed.

… Glenn Poshard (scroll down here for UD‘s posts about one of the few old-time political hacks running an American university). Before Hungary’s president showed that you can plagiarize your thesis and not have plagiarized your thesis (scroll down), Poshard was already there, doing the same thing and holding on – to this day – to his position as president of Southern Illinois University.

But just as No-Quit Schmitt is under strong pressure to leave his post, so Poshard finds himself under threat. The governor’s office and some high-ranking SIU trustees are trying like hell to get him out (faculty are leaving; fewer and fewer students are applying; Poshard and his cronies are fatally tied to the Blagojevich regime), to the point where Poshard has actually had to try to talk. Which never works out well. “My leadership has been one of a positive nature on this university.” That’s your president speaking, kiddies.

Poshard’s problem is that the current government of the state of Illinois is very embarrassed and seems to be on an anti-corruption kick.

… realize just how powerful a condemnation of their school they’re expressing.

Roughly a third of the classes I have taken towards my bachelor’s degree have been general education requirements, and those have almost all been lecture, test, repeat. Since most of the information we are tested over is straight out of the textbook, is it really necessary for me to be there and watch a professor read from PowerPoint slides for an hour?

Is this in fact the way general education is taught at Southern Illinois University?

Under withering attack from much of the faculty (“In our view [Hogan] lacks the values, commitments, management style, ethics, and even manners, needed to lead this university, and his presidency should be ended at the earliest opportunity.” Ouch.), Michael Hogan has announced his resignation.

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UD thanks Wendy.

They don’t seem to embezzle any more than employees in other settings, but it’s our job here at University Diaries to cover acts of embezzlement at universities egregious enough to make the evening news.

There are some countries – Greece comes shriekingly to mind – where being a university president seems to mean little more than taking the money the government gave you to run the place.

UD‘s not sure how corrupt Hong Kong is along these lines, but the University of Hong Kong certainly let its chief of surgery steal a lot of money before someone decided to try to make him stop. Before being found guilty of misconduct and false accounting, John Wong Kin-ling had quite a run.

Uh, let’s see… He was close to the university’s dean of medicine, from whom he apparently learned his trade:

… Lam Shiu-kum … fell heavily from grace in September 2009 when he was jailed for 25 months for pocketing HK$3.8 million in donations meant for medical research ….

Probably got a few pointers from that guy… Then…

Problems about accounting have dogged Wong for a while, and certainly since 2007. That was when he was accused of using donations – believed to be from James Tien Pei-Chun’s family and meant for research – to purchase a Lexus car, though he returned the vehicle to the school.

One insider told The Standard’s sister publication East Week: “Doctors would open different accounts to manage income, but there was no monitoring.”

Another source claims Wong once admitted that he had traveled first class to meetings overseas.

… [T]he four charges he faces – and has denied – in District Court are a tangle that involve a former assistant jailed for embezzlement, a private surgical training center, his driver-cum- helper, taxation authorities and others.

The former executive officer is June Chan Sau-hung, jailed for 22 months in 2010 for embezzling HK$3 million from the training center. She has been testifying for the prosecution against Wong.

… [Charges] include not notifying the police of Chan’s embezzlement. Wong said he had felt sorry for Chan as she was struggling with family responsibilities and wanted to help her repay the money she had taken.

It’s also alleged Wong directed HK$730,000 from the account of the training center – Unisurgical, in which he’s a director and shareholder – to pay his own helper-cum-driver for five years.

Wong said that although his driver was hired as a domestic helper he also picked up guests the university had invited to forums from the airport and their hotels. So he had the [training center] pay half of the salary.

And travel expenses incurred by Wong, it’s alleged, were handled in a way to deprive the Inland Revenue Department of some HK$120,000. But Wong said secretaries and other staff had handled such matters.

Funny money stuff at universities is usually some sad assistant to some sad assistant grabbing ten thou from the kitty and blowing it at Walmart’s. You’ve got to get to the higher managerial levels (see American University president Benjamin Ladner) for the good stories.

An article by two Emory University law professors with the great title Law Deans in Jail argues that fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and false statement charges ought to be brought against some administrators and against US News. (Click on one-click download at the top of the page to read the entire article.)

Deans and professors say they are simply trying to game the U.S. News rankings when they deploy schemes to produce false, misleading, or partial data in an effort to improve their school’s position in the rankings. We hope that the analysis in the paper helps people in the legal education industry recognize that competing for higher rankings is serious business, as serious as a federal prison.

The authors are particularly scathing about UD‘s institution, George Washington University, which, when US News started counting part-time as well as full-time student scores, apparently dealt with its sudden drop in ranking by slashing the part-time program.