The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University on acquisitive, amoral universities.
Among his complaints:
… [M]edical researchers lend their names to articles written by drug companies to boost sales. Ghost writing has benefited researchers by giving them additional publications to add to their resumes..
The problem, which has alarmed medical editors in the US, arises when ”publications are the coin of the realm in university scientific careers…”
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He says a university should produce people “who understand the world and their place in it, who can speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.”
Why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it.
“It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!”
Miami Herald
Students at China’s Tsinghua University are upset that a campus building has been named after a commercial donor, Jeanswest.
At least they’re not the University of Louisville.
Take back your cash
Take back your slots
What made you think
That I’m so easily bought?
Take back the books
The Ayns and the Rands
I may be poor
But I’m not one of your brands.
Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.
A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.
Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.
In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”
You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?
Shakes you up.
Indiana Tech, an undistinguished, mainly online thing, boasting a ten percent four-year graduation rate, is going to open a law school.
The ABA, which would accredit Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s tool, will certainly accredit the Indiana Tech Law School.
… known as the Research Foundation, has long been an object of investigation for misuse of funds and general disorganization. And now one particular thing the Foundation recently did with its money has become a big local story: It gave bunches of it to the daughter of an important state politician, but it didn’t ask to her do anything to earn it.
The state’s ethics commission on Friday charged the president of the research foundation of the State University of New York, John J. O’Connor, with giving a no-show job to the daughter of the former Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno.
Bruno’s since been found guilty of federal fraud (not for this; for all sorts of other things); and his daughter has quit her sinecure. But it’s good to remind ourselves that using universities as dumping grounds for politicians and their beloveds is not merely a folkway of America’s deep south.
We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.
Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.
All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.
But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.
… in trying to get a grip on the London School of Economics/ Benjamin Barber/ Other Academic Friends of Libya controversy, scandal, whatever you want to call it. Start with a university story that has nothing to do with Libya.
Frank Rich recently wrote, in the New York Times:
[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] 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 … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
And he was making millions and millions of dollars. At a one day a week job.
He was paid, what, $800,000 or so to be Harvard’s president.
Put aside whether, as Ben Stein suggests, such a beneficiary of Wall Street money could ever, in his government capacity, “crack the whip” against it (“Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”) and ask rather, from the point of view of the university, whether his raking it in while president is seemly.
It’s not unseemly if you regard a university as an institution like any other in a capitalist economy, primarily geared toward generating profits (in its athletic program, in its entrepreneurial scientific work) and generating personal wealth (for consultants to money funds, like Summers, for consultants to wealthy dictatorships and other countries, like Barber, and for university presidents like Shirley Ann Jackson, who sit on corporate boards and earn millions to attend board meetings).
As Barber says, in his defense, “Everyone gets paid.” It’s exactly the same way university presidents defend giving four million dollars a year to football coaches: There’s a market for everything, and everyone gets paid the going rates.
Absolutely none of this is unseemly (I’m not talking, by the way, about the astounding salaries made by presidents of for-profit colleges. These guys are for profit, baby, and you better believe it.) if a university is a corporation with classrooms, run and staffed by people seriously distracted by big money elsewhere. But a lot of people have a nagging feeling that universities are something more. Indeed these people note that our government seems to feel they are something more, since they receive remarkable tax benefits. Some of them are even public institutions (Barber taught at two of these, Rutgers and the University of Maryland), direct recipients of taxpayer dollars. What happens to Americans’ support for non-profit universities when so much that goes on at those places is outrageously profit and personal wealth driven?
The Libya dust-up is only the latest lesson in a gradual education taking place among the American public as to what really goes on in higher ed.