What’s it like to be director of communications for the most scandal-ridden university in… I dunno… the world? How long do you keep that job, how long do you keep your sanity, before the whirlwind of arrests, cheating, fights, fake courses, and violations (I’m only mentioning sports-related stuff because nothing non-sports-related happens at Auburn) blows you over, and you have to quit?
Today’s challenge for Clardy involves the Dean of the Ag School, picked up for drunk driving this morning.
And some, ol’ UD can’t help concluding, are just spectacularly, consistently, shockingly, stupid. You sort of feel as though they mean well, and that they have a shaky though sincere sense of what a university is… sort of… And that if you met the folks in the administration you’d say Hale fellow well met! and definitely enjoy the sincere handshake this person would offer.
But one of the trustees holds a diploma mill degree and anyway many of them never show up for meetings… And there’s just a general sense of malaise because they don’t have funds to pay faculty much of anything but they have ten million dollars to give to a new sports arena, only they lie about taking that money from university funds… until they can’t lie anymore because a local journalist won’t let them… and the new president (stupid universities have major president-turnover) instead of saying all the serious and good things he could say by way of acknowledging and trying to right things, etc., says Hey don’t look at me I just got here!
There’s just a no one’s home, not much going on upstairs feel to places like Central Michigan University… a laxity… as in that Dickinson poem… first chill, then stupor, then the letting go…
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UPDATE: There are two detailed comments from CMU faculty members on this post’s comment thread. Take a look.
And as we approach a new year, University Diaries will continue to pursue the links between corporate-sponsored psychiatry research at some of America’s most high-profile universities, and the destructive, expensive pathologizing of the American public. ““[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers,” notes a Forbes writer. “The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” It wouldn’t be happening without Harvard’s Joseph Biederman and the rest of the COI university crew.
There’s hope. But only a little bit of hope. The battle has to be fought hard, and we’ll probably lose.
But anger over the money culture behind pharma investment, and at the damage being done to our children by anti-psychotics, will no doubt find greater focus and expression this coming year. UD will of course follow the story.
You can establish entire departments, entire schools, at a university. All you need is money and faculty and students. MIT has an Alchemy Department (or, rather, a door that says DEPARTMENT OF ALCHEMY).
About five years ago, chiropractors with money and political influence began establishing a chiropractic school at Florida State University. About ten years ago, a similar thing happened in Canada, at York University.
Science and medical professors at both schools brandished lawsuits and petitions and media appearances to make that idea go away, and they prevailed.
The latest effort of chiropractors to establish mainstream legitimacy through affiliation with a university is taking place in Australia. Some of the country’s highest-profile, most-respected scientists are furious at the University of Central Queensland. They are calling chiropractice anti-science nonsense, quackery, and superstition.
… has died – probably by suicide.
Pletz was facing immensities of litigation.
The school filed a civil suit against Pletz in March 2010 alleging that she used more than $2 million in university assets for her personal benefit. Pletz counter-sued, claiming that she had been wrongfully terminated.
In April, a federal grand jury in Kansas City returned a 24-count indictment against Pletz, alleging that she had embezzled more than $1.5 million from the school, engaged in money laundering and falsified tax returns.
… the University of Louisville (read all about it). It’s the lowest of the low.
But Louisville burnishes its sports reputation with rates of campus employee theft that simply knock the school of the park. In response to the latest theft, the Courier-Journal reviews the school’s klepto-history.
U of L’s problems with employee theft first came to light in 2008 with the case of Robert Felner, U of L’s former education dean, who is serving a 63-month prison sentence.
Felner pleaded guilty last year in U.S. District Court in Louisville to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion in the theft of $2.3 million from U of L and two other institutions.
Most recently, a university audit completed in August accused a former senior program coordinator in the College of Business of stealing more than $463,000 from the Equine Industry Program. That case has been turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office, but no charges have been filed.
The latest thief used stolen money from the athletics program to buy scads of oxycodone, which she later sold.
All schools have internal problems, but UD can think of no American university with UL’s over-the-top combination of sports corruption and employee criminality.
[Central Florida University,] which has more than 50,000 students, was [asked by the IRS] if dues paid for its president, John Hitt, to belong to the Interlachen Country Club in nearby Winter Park and the Citrus Club in downtown Orlando, as well as $4,000 a month for travel for his spouse, was reported as taxable income. Chad Binette, a university spokesman, declined to comment.
But the tax-free thing only gets really disgusting when it gets to Harvard — a THIRTY-TWO BILLION DOLLAR endowment, and still claiming exemptions up the wazoo.
In reviewing a bunch of new books about the American university, UD‘s friend Anthony Grafton provides a phenomenology of the contemporary campus.
[A] Louisiana State University assistant professor identified a new species of pancake batfish in the Gulf of Mexico last year, and the discovery was recognized by the International Institute for Species Exploration as being one of 2010’s top 10 new species. While LSU didn’t increase his $85,000 pay, he did get a nice note of congratulations from the provost, he said.
Across the Baton Rouge campus, Les Miles is having a good year, too. His top-ranked LSU football team is undefeated… Miles will make an extra $200,000 on top of his $3.75 million-a-year salary if they win the title, and $300,000 more for winning the national crown.
… “We are not doing this, [said the professor,] for monetary gain.”
… “These coaches aren’t motivated by the bonuses,” said Scott Minto, director of the San Diego State University Sports MBA program. “It is about creating a legacy. National titles do that.”
Alabama Athletic Director Mal Moore said neither [Nick] Saban [$4.7 million annual salary with the chance of an additional $525,000] nor other coaches are in the business for the money.
Nobody’s in it for the money!
It’s the details that separate the criminal from the ordinary mind. If UD were – like Barry Landau and Jason Savedoff, the Batman and Robin of historic document theft – going to steal and then sell our nation’s heritage, she’d take the treaties and letters and all, but she wouldn’t think to remove their card catalog entries so that there wouldn’t be a record of the documents having been in the library or the museum in the first place.
I mean, now, when she reads that the guys did that, sure… it makes perfect sense … remove your footprints …
This article features a photo of the innocent University of Vermont library, an easy mark for Barry and Jason (they got 67 documents).
This article features Savedoff pleading guilty.
A University of Maryland hospital has been sued by the US of A for medical reimbursement fraud. In 2004, Kernan Hospital had zero cases of the rare, extreme form of malnutrition known as Kwashiorkor; then, by 2007, it had spiked to 287 cases, as though a hospital in Baltimore Maryland had inexplicably begun admitting droves of desperate African babies.
Here’s the lawsuit.
The University of South Florida Polytechnic has been good to the Goodman family…
A study does side by side comparisons of the University of Singapore and the University of Malaysia, “two institutions that both began as offshoots of the same British colonial university.”
Lack of academic and administrative freedom, plus non-meritocratic admissions, guarantee substandard schools.
Fifty thousand! FEEEEFFFTEEEEE TAOZAND!
Do you know how much money Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs earns every, I dunno, minute? His mere bonuses in the last few years have ranged between fifty and one hundred million dollars.
Lawdy. Maybe he figures putting Barnard’s president on the Goldman Sachs board is like giving the school a lot of good stuff, but Debora Spar should probably talk to Ruth Simmons about that one. (Upside: It pays you insanely well for doing almost nothing. Downside. Simmons has announced her resignation from Brown. She will be busy with Goldman litigation no doubt.)
Blankfein recently blanked on a speech he was supposed to give at Barnard. Word is he cancelled because of School the Squid Week, planned to coincide with his appearance. (It’s a reference to the vampire squid metaphor in Matt Taibbi’s famous Goldman Sachs article.) Plus there’s the Occupy Wall Street thing down the block.
It’s all getting a lot of press attention — as will Spar herself when students discover the sorts of colleges their president presides over.
But anyway. Predatory capitalism is certainly interesting, and worth studying, and Barnard students – plus their president – have front-row seats.
