Simmons declined to speak on how involved she was in compensation discussions. She also declined to comment on the theory that giving Wall Street executives exorbitant pay to reward short-term profits could have contributed to the poor decision-making that precipitated the financial meltdown.
The president of Brown, facing the implications of her service on the Goldman Sachs compensation committee foursquare.
… without all the other unwelcome news stories swirling around the University of Miami. But with each event, the place looks more and more like a scandal-magnet.
A student at Brown University assesses the presidency of Ruth Simmons.
Simmons took a voluntary pay cut from Brown of about $100,000, but that turned out to be a symbolic gesture when she stepped down from her $323,000-a-year gig on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs with $5.7 million in company stock.
Her resignation from Goldman, though, came only after she had tied Brown to the billions in bailout-backed executive bonuses she approved as a member of Goldman’s compensation committee, drawing the ire of the national media and dragging the University into the recession’s starkest example of tone-deaf corporate greed.
Surfism, or the tendency to make fun of surfing degree programs, sounded the death knell for beach and surf studies at Swansea Institute, but that’s not stopping San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research, which will “teach surfers about the social, cultural and environmental costs of surfing.”
… at the University of California Irvine, refused to take state-mandated sexual harassment training.
“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.
“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”
Irvine removed supervisory responsibilities from him, threatened to reassign his courses, to put him on leave, boppity boppity boppity…
Eventually, McPherson did take the course, mainly because he became convinced his refusal was hurting some of his staff scientists. But he remained infuriated at the “coercive behavioral training,” which he called “insulting to the intelligence” and “a demeaning fraud.”
**************************************
McPherson might have been factually wrong that this no doubt squalid training session violated his rights as a tenured professor; but he was certainly right to call it squalid, and to protect his intellect, his individuality, and his own way of looking at things, from the state’s sensitivity facilitators.
With his irritable, articulate, and maybe slightly crazy refusals, McPherson represents the greatness of tenure in the American university. He is what he is, believes what he believes, and doesn’t care what his deans say. Far from finding tenure attractive because he yearns for lifetime job security (indeed at one point in the farce McPherson almost left Irvine for Buffalo), McPherson likes tenure because it makes it more likely that his right to privacy, and his freedom to resist various forms of bureaucratic intrusion, will be respected.
What McPherson is protecting, above all, is the sanctity and complexity of independent thought. He knows that however mentally defended he manages to make himself throughout the harassment session, his mind will in some important sense never fully recover from its exposure to staggeringly reductive simple-mindedness about the world. Tenure goes a very long way toward shielding Alexander McPherson from the idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy of much of institutional life; it even goes some distance toward protecting him from the consequences of his hatred of idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy. Tenure – and Scottishness – have given McPherson the confidence to hate bullshit and love truth.
**************************************
But tenure, Naomi Schaefer Riley argues in The Faculty Lounges, has just the opposite effect on American professors. It makes them lazy, cowardly, and truth-averse. Wedged into an enviable permanent sinecure, the tenured professor leans back and relaxes for the rest of her career, lecturing from yellowing notes, rewriting the same politically correct babble in journals no one reads… Oh, and running the university. As Riley describes it, the tenured faculty lounges about, nibbling on grapes or whatever… and at the same time holds all the power at the university. She talks about “the almost unchecked power of university faculties,” about administrators who “have no power,” and argues that only the abolition of tenure will check the irresponsible, complacent, self-interested machinations of professors. The faculty lounges and lunges.
Yet how to square this Oblomovian oligarchy with Benjamin Ginsberg’s argument in The Fall of the Faculty that “Power on campus is wielded mainly by administrators,” with faculty “shunted to the sidelines”? Ginsberg attacks the corporatization of the university, its takeover by anti-intellectual bureaucrats who, in their quest for power and money, ignore professors; he wants professors to get their asses out of their labs and libraries long enough to retake their schools.
**********************************
Of the two writers, UD finds Ginsberg more convincing. Though he overstates the power and menace of administrators, the salient numbers are on his side, especially the insane growth of such positions at universities in the last few years. Riley might take comfort from the fact that tenure is steadily shrinking all by itself, without her having to break a polemical sweat. Administrators way up; tenured professors way down – that’s the way it is.
And it’s too bad. Because although of course Alexander McPherson is an extreme example, he nonetheless symbolizes well enough the subversive sangfroid of the free, even insolent, intellect. As our universities winnow people like McPherson and stock up on vocationally-minded, business-minded administrators, they risk their own demise.
[M]ost of these guys don’t get very good educations, because playing on a D-1 football team is basically a full-time job – at least as time-consuming (and certainly more dangerous) than most full-time jobs. Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.
The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.
The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.
At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.
Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.
The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.
The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.
The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.
The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.
This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.
Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?
What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.
Treating the student as a customer, and shifting to what students want in the moment’s popularity, does not serve Kansas. Shifting university resources to the 200 students who today want to be crime-scene investigators, thanks to “CSI” on television, will produce 190 graduates without a job. Closing down a physics department because it only produces a few nuclear physicists, when we desperately need every one and many more, directly damages the future of Kansas and our country…
State universities should not be commercial storefront operations advertising the latest fad curricula. State universities serve a public good.
An Emporia State department chair notes that universities are not supposed to be customer-driven.
An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.
Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?
Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.
Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.
Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?
If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.
No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.
To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.
But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.
Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.
… UD managed to wedge in, as a subject of conversation last night with a tableful of old friends at Cafe of India, a university issue. Maybe not the world’s biggest university issue, but one of interest, worth thinking about, etc.
UD‘s friend Bill had earlier that day sent her Public Radio about Adam and Eve, an online sex shop (toys, films) which is among the many financial contributors to the University of Minnesota’s Sexual Health Education Chair.
Joycelyn Elders, the US Surgeon General for whom the chair is named, writes: “The most common cause of poverty is children being born to children. Sexuality makes up such a great part of our lives, and yet we spend so little time talking about it, teaching about it, and educating our young people about it.”
The public radio guy is way shocked that the university accepted money from the porn biz. He interviews the head of the sexuality program, who says this is a responsible, law-abiding company that already sponsors a variety of sexual education initiatives. As to whether hardcore porn, as the reporter puts it, “distorts a person’s view of sexuality,” the program director says that “many individuals and couples enjoy erotica as part of their healthy sex relationship, and we have evidence where that can be helpful. We’re also aware some people get lost, and we treat people who have problems with internet pornography. It’s just like gambling. … This can be used responsibly or irresponsibly. Fortunately, the gaming industry devotes a lot of effort to helping people learn .. and … promote responsible use, and that’s what [Adam and Eve’s] intention is as well.”
The consensus at Cafe of India? Bad idea. Embarrassing for the university. “Universities,” one diner remarked, “are supposed to operate on a higher level than other institutions. This lowers them.”
Other diners were yet more disapproving. “Pornography is disgusting. It demeans women beyond belief. It’s terribly socially destructive. I don’t watch it. Ever. For a university to align itself with this industry is unconscionable.”
Well, UD brought it up last night because she ain’t so sure.
Comments welcome.
… picture? Two specters and four forensically indistinguishable white males?
But Arkansas State University Mountain Home has deeper, uh, institutional presentation problems than this.
I mean, let’s just say that ASUMH really doesn’t want to be audited.
But – whoops. A disgruntled ex-employee went ahead and talked to the authorities and ASUMH got audited. What have them boys been up to?
Well now, take this John Gresham. His position at ASUMH is Husband of the Director of Development. In that capacity, he got to build – no bids were taken – “the Thompson-Martin Gate and McClure Gate at the college for a total cost of $218,623.” Plus his wife – her position at ASUMH is Wife of the Owner of GRR Land Company LLC – uses the time and resources of ASUMH to run his business:
Four personal file documents found on an Office of Development laptop related to her husband’s business. They included a loan document, a steel building proposal, a steel building purchase order and a flyer for commercial marketing, according to the report. A fifth personal document, a rental property advertising narrative, was found on a stand-alone computer assigned to Gresham.
What’s a university for, anyway? The money and the equipment are just sitting there.
And then there’s them magic pens the Wife of the Owner bought.
… so with Paul’s two wine bottles, it’s the object that counts. Like it or not, human beings glom onto things. When it comes to questionable behavior, they find physical, discrete, countable things vivid and graspable.
Vast convoluted abstract bad behavior — Goldman Sachs pushing all that money around — eludes us, but the four hundred dollar haircut, the seven (I think. I’ll have to ask my staff.) houses, these we get.
*******************************
Although the Ryan story does have an easily detectable gamey scent, its real meaning indeed lies deeper. At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson narrates:
Hedge fund billionaires make giant contributions to elite universities and get like-minded professors hired to named chairs… Together, they influence politicians, who set the economic agenda in Congress and to a great extent in the media.
… [T]he very baldness of what’s we’re seeing in this particular case is a helpful reminder of the myriad ways money buys access. It’s not just campaign contributions or even the promise of high-paying jobs to politicians who’ve left office. Money buys experts. It buys credentials like named chairs for the experts you, as a billionaire, want to be influential. And then you and your pet expert go to a nice dinner and drink $350 bottles of wine with a high-profile member of Congress and when he cites the ideas you were pushing, he’s not citing some self-interested hedge fund guy, he’s citing a University of Chicago economics professor.
***********************************
Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr wrote The Uses of the University.
Clawson is describing the uses of the university today.
The prez of Barnard College joins the board of Goldman Sachs.
“I find Goldman to be a particularly interesting company …”
***********************
Women of Barnard: Congrats!
In the aftermath of Stephen Gey’s death – he was a law professor at Florida State – one of his students pays homage to the strength of his character as well as to his intellect.
This article, a few years back, captures Gey’s passion, and his students’ reciprocal feelings.
This is the best – the very best – of the university, that free and ordered space, as Bartlett Giamatti called it – a space as removed from the tawdry cyberspace of distance ed as possible – where human beings and their passions meet human beings and their passions.
[Ben] Gibson and about 40 other students gathered for Gey’s First Amendment class Monday. They couldn’t see Gey, who was calling from his house of hard, steep angles. They could only hear his voice over three speakers. But they could picture him in those ironed jeans, sitting ramrod straight.
He called to say goodbye.
He said he could no longer teach, even by phone. He said he had wanted more than anything to finish the term, but was too sick. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said.
The class fell silent.
“This is Ben,” Gibson called out. “I want to thank you for the semester. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done.”
The class was again silent. So were the phone speakers.
Finally, they heard Gey sign off. “Thank you,” they heard him say. His voice was choked.
“Thank you for allowing me to fulfill my life’s passion.”
***************************
This is potentially a very big story. I want to read more about it before I comment, but it’s important enough for me to put a couple of links up already. Here, and here.
Original report here.
What am I talking about? The BBC explains:
A report from the US-based thinktank The Oakland Institute claims that the scramble for arable land in Africa by foreign investors is forcing millions of small farmers off their ancestral land.
As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, wealthy countries and investment funds are seeing an opportunity in Africa and acquiring huge tracts of fertile land to produce crops like wheat, rice, corn and biofuels for consumption back home. The report says that an area the size of France has already been sold or leased to foreign investors.
Because of poor land ownership laws in many African countries and a lack of transparency about deals, it is claimed, these land deals are delivering almost none of the benefits promised to African citizens.
****************************************
WTF?
In the west African country of Mali, one investment group was able to secure 100,000 hectares of fertile land for a 50-year term for free, according to the Institute’s report.