A vice-chancellor at an Australian university tries to come to grips with the remarkable variability of that country’s universities on international rankings over the last few years.

It’s a real out-there metaphor, but hell. Kentucky.

… Harvard Yard.

… New York’s St. John’s University is certainly giving the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the University of Miami, a run for their money.

First there was this sadsack, who came to his court hearing in a bright red sweatshirt with ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY emblazoned on it in huge letters, in case anyone was wondering what university molded him into an embezzler. He got the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award in 2008.

Now there’s a former dean, on trial for embezzling (am I the only person who loves the word embezzle?) a million dollars via expense account chicanery (chicanery’s good too — sounds like the name of a spice).

The final paragraph of the New York Times article about her could only have been written in America.

… Ms. Chang’s home … has seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a gym, a sauna and a Jacuzzi tub. Ken Winslow, 74, a next-door neighbor, said that other than the Mercedes-Benz Ms. Chang drove, she did not appear to live ostentatiously.

We started here, at the very bottom — diploma mills — and argued that these represent really the only form of efficiency pricing in higher education, since the desired endpoint of the transaction is completely obvious to both parties: an official-looking piece of paper testifying to a particular advanced degree, plus the provision of extremely minimal institutional support in the off-chance it will be needed (I have in mind things like plausible-sounding accreditation, and people at the other end of the line who know what to say if phone calls about the degree are placed). Since no collegiate experience of any kind is intended — since, indeed, money is changing hands precisely so that the purchaser can avoid even a whiff of collegiate experience — we do not have to worry about defining and then evaluating the university education for which we are charging the student.

Let’s kick it up a notch now, to very expensive online for-profit universities, objects of a good deal of tut-tutting lately. Here the desired endpoint is equally obvious: certification of a vocational skill for which people will employ you pretty much as soon as you get the degree.

Among the many scandalous features of the online for-profits is that although they do almost exactly what many community colleges do (provide certification for employers that the person holding their degree is able to do a particular job), they do it at a far, far higher price. Not only that, but community colleges have plenty of face to face courses, which are far superior to online.

Online is supposed to be all about cost savings, but the for-profits pretty much use only online and still soak you.

Plus they have insanely high dropout and loan repayment failure rates. And the whole gainful-employment-within-a-reasonable-period-of-time thing doesn’t look too good either.

I mean, think about it. For-profits desperately, sordidly, pounce on any enrollee with a pulse; once they’re got ’em, they’re gonna give everyone A’s to keep ’em. So employers have no idea, based on transcripts, whether people from for-profit schools can do a particular job.

At costs comparable to private liberal arts colleges, for-profit schools are – as you know if you’ve watched the news lately – a national disgrace.

… yesterday took extremely dangerous amounts of cyanide out of a lab there.

She brought them to her house and used some of the cyanide to kill herself.

She had just lost her job. She wrote various farewell entries on Facebook, including this moving one: “Today… my heart shattered, and I left my soul behind somewhere.”

Beyond the sadness of this story lies a good deal of worry from security agencies about how easy it was for Emily Staupe to lift so much deadly material from the lab.

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More reaction.

You’re about to be beatified.

I’ve always liked what you have to say about the nature of a real university education.

… [A university should create] a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes… [The student] profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal.” A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit. This then I would assign as the special fruit of the education furnished at a University, as contrasted with other places of teaching or modes of teaching. This is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students.

In the same chapter, you describe, similarly, the university’s cultivation of “a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind.”

The university student, having been introduced to the breadth and variety, the lights and shades, of human knowledge and experience, attains some distance from the particular set of beliefs and preferences she happens to have inherited from growing up in a certain family and in a certain social setting. Freedom here is freedom from unreflective prejudices and emotions that undermine your ability to be fair, to see things clearly. The student gains all of this from exposure to professors and others at the university who embody, in their teaching and their conversation and their daily behavior, a truth-seeking ethos.

I like “candid” as well. From Newman to Orwell to Hitchens, a primary mark of an educated person is the consistent statement of unvarnished truths.

… [E]ducation is a higher word [than instruction]; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour… Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.

Ultimately, what you enter into at a real liberal arts college is the drama of mind and spirit constantly being transformed by dispassionate engagement in thought.

Not only is the president who helped steer the University of Kentucky into the ground about to retire, but, as reported here, a loud, contrarian faculty member is about to take a seat on the board of trustees.

And not only that, but the big tall Turkish guy UK was counting on coming to campus for a semester and playing basketball for them (no one reporting this story even pretends he’ll be a student, or that he’ll stay for more than three months) might not be able to make it.

… is what professors at the University of Kentucky call the entire academic side of their university.

If you’ve read University Diaries for any time at all, you know UD has long argued that only prodigious bourbon intake can explain the way the school is run.

Now, UK goes from the valley to the Peek — Joe Peek, UK professor of finance and newly-elected faculty member on the university’s absurd board of trustees.

Peek talks all kinds of amazing shit. Here’s some of it:

At the June Board of Trustees meeting, the budget that was approved included another $6 million for Coldstream [Research Park]. …My understanding is that Coldstream was supposed to be profitable long ago, and UK has already invested over $11 million in it. …I have heard, but do not know for sure, that an evaluation of Coldstream is on the agenda. Why would UK give Coldstream more money and only afterwards evaluate it?

Is UK really number 129 [on the US News and World Report ranking]? … Facts [like this one] don’t cease to exist because UK administrators choose to ignore them. … We are supposed to be Kentucky’s flagship university; it is about time we start acting like it.

Readers’ comments on the article are also intriguing:

[UK] has been held captive by basketball for as I long as I can remember (5+ decades).

UK [:] excellence in pharmacy and basketball…

Lets work together to end UKs idiotic sports obsession…

… that the whole Marla Ahlgrimm thing (background here) is nothing, don’t mean a thing, fuck off.

Sandy Wilcox, president of the UW Foundation confirmed Ahlgrimm is currently serving on the UW Foundation’s Board of Directors, and said whether she maintains her seat is up to the rest of the board.

Wilcox said the board does not meet in the near future, and only the board members have influence in her status on the board.

Ahlgrimm’s arrest is a separate issue, not relating to her involvement on the board, Wilcox said.

“Her arrest has nothing to do with what she’s done in the past and the fact of the matter is she hasn’t been convicted of anything,” he said.

There’s everything wrong with this response. Let us count the ways.

1.) Whether she stays on the board is not exclusively up to the board. If she’s convicted of running a pill mill (extremely likely), and the board, for whatever reason, cleaveth to her nonetheless, the university will certainly step in and rip her muy embarrassing name off of this page.

2.) The arrest has everything to do with her involvement on the board. If I were a potential donor to the university, and the first name I saw on the list of 2010-2011 board members was a drug pusher, I’d say Hm. Should I give my money to UW, or should I give it to my coke dealer? … Coke dealer.

3.) Her arrest has everything to do with what she’s done in the past. What she’s done in the past is sit on a university board with extremely serious fiscal and ethical responsibilities, while at the same time apparently pack illegal, expensive, and dangerous drugs for delivery to people all over the world.

4.) No, she hasn’t been convicted of anything. But if the University of Wisconsin Foundation’s only basis for dismissing a member of the board jailed for something this serious is the absence of a conviction, it’s got a big problem.

…how universities are getting caught up in pill mills, she didn’t expect the first such story to happen so soon.

Marla Ahlgrimm, a high-profile University of Wisconsin board member (the board in question is UW’s fundraising arm, the University of Wisconsin Foundation), has been arrested for running a pill mill.

Ahlgrimm’s the leading edge. You should expect more revelations about universities housing, and giving legitimacy to, pill mill proprietors.

Why?

Because now that police are shuttering the cheesy little pain palace storefronts you see people lined up in front of in your cities, and indeed now that many cities are passing anti pill mill laws, some pushers will seek refuge and respectability inside universities.

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“Incredibly personalized medicine.” Ahlgrimm is interviewed.

UD‘s friend Jack updates her on the University of Victoria rabbit problem.

This article announces that the university is now legally free to trap its rabbits and send them to sanctuaries.

The Moscow Times:

Advanced degrees obtained through purchased dissertations are particularly popular among top managers and the bloated army of mid- and upper-level bureaucrats. They are also popular among mayors, governors and their aides, as well as State Duma deputies, for whom a new academic title is a respectable status symbol that goes nicely with the dacha, Mercedes, driver and flashing blue light.

Ponzi bait.

McLeod was a guy’s guy: He loved to talk about sports, particularly University of Georgia football, the school from which he claimed to be an alum. Along with naming his boat Top Dawg, a play on the team’s nickname, McLeod liked to brag that his own dog was a direct descendant of the original Uga, the football team’s bulldog mascot. He made a big deal about attending the annual Georgia-Florida game, which is held in Jacksonville, frequently reminding people that it was known as the “world’s largest outdoor cocktail party.”

… the story of Kevin Morrissey’s suicide closely. He was the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small, ambitious literary magazine at the University of Virginia, and he staged a very public suicide, first calling the police to say someone was dead, and then shooting himself in downtown Charlottesville.

Many people are accusing the journal’s top editor of having bullied Morrissey into suicide. Every day, the story gains in intensity and complexity.

The top editor is clearly a most aggressive, unpleasant character; but it’s a long way from this personality type, and the nastiness it can express, to his being responsible for the death of a man who for a long time suffered from clinical depression.

UD wants to keep an open mind, though. She’ll follow the story here. Meanwhile, here’s a skeptic. Here’s another one.