NYU has bought the Larry Rivers archive, which includes

films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.

One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.

… N.Y.U. has agreed to discuss the matter and has already, at the urging of the foundation, pledged to keep the material off limits during the daughters’ lifetimes. Two years ago [one of the daughters] asked the foundation to destroy the tapes, but it declined…

… [Nature Publishing Group], which is owned by the German publishing house Georg von Holtzbrinck, …[is] trying to impose a 400% increase in its online access fee for [the University of California], a hike the university says would come to more than $1 million a year. The result is talk of a systemwide boycott of Nature publications unless the firm becomes more accommodating.

… “Why are we paying to read the results of our own research?” asks Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford’s School of Medicine. In 2000, Brown co-founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which today publishes seven journals on the open access model. That model charges researchers for publication of their accepted papers, but allows them to retain their copyrights and makes their work available to all users for free.

… [B]ecause of the rise in fees for scientific and technical journals, “we’ve had to decrease what we spend on books for the humanities, and that trade-off is very stark,” Farley says. “Ultimately it hurts the whole institution.”

The libraries let the academic community know that Keith Yamamoto, the executive vice dean at UC San Francisco Medical School, was willing to launch a boycott of Nature if necessary. That’s meaningful because Yamamoto was an organizer of a 2003 boycott of Reed Elsevier that resulted in that technical publisher’s rolling back a rate hike.

Yamamoto says a new boycott would look very much like the old: He would call upon faculty members to stop submitting papers to Nature publications, resign from Nature editorial and advisory board, decline to peer-review papers for the journals, and of course suspend their subscriptions.

… The UC system says it pays an average of $4,465 a year for each of the 67 Nature journals it subscribes to, a fee Nature proposes to raise to an average of $17,479…

Trump University’s leader is unhappy with real estate decisions made by Columbia University’s leader:

Trump said Columbia came close to buying land from him on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center before Bollinger’s appointment to the university presidency in 2002. Trump said he had been working on a deal with businessman and Columbia trustee Alfred Lerner, when Lerner fell ill.

Bollinger, formerly president of the University of Michigan, had different ideas for the university’s expansion and said he wanted to stay closer to the university’s home in Harlem. And, according to Bollinger and the expansion’s Environmental Impact Statement, the nine-acre Trump property was too small and too far from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.

Years after the deal fell through, Trump is still irate. “They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,” he said in a phone interview.

Here is an excerpted version of Trump’s recounting of events, as stated in a letter he wrote to the Columbia Spectator’s Eye magazine:

Columbia University had a great opportunity to build one of its finest and most spectacular campuses anywhere in the world…It would have given Columbia large acreage, fronting the Hudson River between 59th and 62nd Street directly behind Lincoln Center. It was [Alfred Lerner’s] vision to build Columbia’s Business School and School of Performing Arts there, and what a vision it would have been…

The new President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who came in from the University of Michigan, didn’t like the idea. Instead, he wanted to build Columbia’s new buildings in a lousy location on land which, in certain instances, he did not even own. Once the project was announced, it became virtually impossible to acquire the holdings because everybody wanted top dollar. He actually announced his project before buying the land—dummy!

If that wasn’t enough, Trump added a hand-scrawled comment at the bottom: “Bollinger is terrible!” And in a phone interview with The [Wall Street] Journal, Trump continued his invective, calling the university president a “total moron.”

… Brian Murray is under house arrest on charges of insurance fraud and theft, accused of stealing more than $1.3 million in premium payments collected from an assortment of businesses, schools and other organizations.

… Mr. Murray, 67, former head of Murray Insurance Agency Inc., was arrested late Thursday by agents from the state attorney general’s insurance fraud section and arraigned before Magisterial District Judge John Pesota. Some of the victims of the alleged fraud include Moses Taylor Hospital, Mount Airy Casino Resort and several Jesuit universities, including the University of Scranton, which gave Mr. Murray, an ardent financial supporter, an honorary degree in 2006. Mr. Murray allegedly took their premium payments but left them uninsured…

… libraries. From the point of view of the blogger at The Librarian’s Commute.

It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.

Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.

According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.

The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.

(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)

Yeah. Or, as an observer of Harvard University recently put it:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

It’s just like the NCAA. People look at the NCAA and they say Why is that organization tax exempt? Why are all sorts of university sports goodies tax exempt? Do you know how much a luxury box costs? Hell of a tax write-off. Do you know how much the head of the NCAA makes? And it’s a non-profit! The tax laws make it easier for universities to pay their coaches four million dollars a year in order to recruit generations of players who leave school in nine months. Etc.

Eventually, people will begin to talk about immense wealth-generating tax exemptions based on all those fine upstanding educational values.

Indeed, because of the tax breaks, schools like Princeton and Harvard have become multibillionaires, a fact their struggling localities have noted… The localities want the schools taxed…

… U.S. municipalities still reeling from the economic crisis turn to their local universities, whose land holdings are mostly tax- exempt, to close budget shortfalls.

But wait just a minute! The schools will point out how they’re struggling too. They used to have 30 billion dollars, and now they’re skidding along on 20!

Princeton used to have 16 billion and now it has around 13 billion… Its neighbors note that it maintains a teeny student body. Why does it need all that tax-exempt-begotten-money? Does each student get a one million dollar scholarship?

Feral rabbits on the University of Victoria campus face death or relocation and sterilization if they cross into “rabbit-free zones” starting this summer.

“The ground is just littered with rabbit feces,” said Tom Smith, executive director of facilities management. “There are many places on campus where you don’t even want to walk across a lawn.”

In its latest attempt to control the 1,600 bunnies that run rampant across campus, the university unveiled a population management plan on Monday.

The centrepiece of the plan are two zones – a “safe zone” in the centre of campus and a “dead zone” around residences, sports fields and nearby neighbourhoods.

Two hundred of the fuzzy creatures will be allowed to live in the 40-hectare safe zone within the perimeter of Ring Road. Food will be provided to entice the bunnies to stay within the prescribed space.

Rabbits found outside Ring Road will be euthanized…

********************************

(Background on this post’s title here.)

I’m with Douthat.

Here’s Fish.

This is sort of one of those Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? statements. It comes from a University of Florida official responding to a scathing state audit of the university’s handling of federal grant spending.

The arrest of nuclear engineering professor Samim Anghaie and his wife, Sousan, in October on federal fraud charges resulted in an internal UF audit that is also part of the report.

The couple face a July 6 trial in federal court in Gainesville on charges they fraudulently obtained $3.7 million in government contracts and diverted money into personal bank accounts to buy cars and homes. The audit found internal controls failed to prevent nearly $58,000 in inappropriate salary costs from being charged to two federal projects.

In another case, an audit found $890 in moving expenses for an employee who relocated to Gainesville from Georgia were improperly charged to a federal project.

Okay, Anghaie, and his wife, and the relocating employee aside, there’s absolutely nothing to see here.

Jayandran Palaniappan, a young man from India, worked in bioengineering research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Funding for this position was about to run out; he’d been fired, because of the bad economy, from some private industry positions before this.

Like Jerry Wolff, a biology professor at St. Cloud State, and like a number of other students and professors UD has covered on this blog, Palaniappan meticulously planned his suicide.

[P]olice have been able to determine that Palaniappan took a shuttle to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, flew to Buffalo, N.Y., and took a shuttle to a Comfort Inn not far from Niagara Falls, all on May 11.

“He apparently walked into the water and went over the falls,” [a policeman] said.

Palaniappan was a runner (Googling his name produces many races in which he took part). Like Wolff, a serious outdoorsman who traveled to and killed himself in a national park (to “return my body and soul to nature,” he wrote in a suicide note), and like Cameron Dabaghi, a Yale athlete who took a train from New Haven to the Empire State Building and, with a running start, cleared a barrier at its top, Palaniappan seems to have chosen his form of suicide with great care, to reflect in some way his philosophy of life. All three men journeyed to iconic locations and then, in a last burst of physical vigor, ran off the face of the earth.

… for theft of Italian antiquities.

The public prosecutor’s office in Rome is after J. Michael Padgett, antiquities curator at Princeton, for export and laundering.

University Diaries will follow this story. But she anticipates that it will be long and murky and unedifying. Italy is corrupt to the core; so even if it’s right that some of its loot has been looted, it won’t be able to act justly in the matter.

… seem to be happening again…

Yes, it’s the same old same old here at University Diaries, where valedictorians who plagiarize their commencement speeches are as common as … well, as common as loyal alumni who donate stolen money to their school.

These are both Ivy League stories, which is the only reason they’ve risen to the level of national news. It may turn out to be more or less amusing to see whether Yale returns the money, or whether Columbia will explain why its class valedictorian is unable to write a short speech by himself. But if you’ve been a faithful companion to me on my Blog Journey, you know these are retreads.

“It’s quite easy to pick on us because everyone he wants to pander to already thinks we’re overpaid Marxists,” said David Burdige, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University and member of the school’s Faculty Senate. “If you’re trying to appeal to a particular group of people, then picking on the university as being bastions of leftwing thinking and depravity, it’s sort of like shooting bears at a garbage dump. You’re guaranteed to score points.”

A professor in Virginia’s public university system responds to the attorney general, who has “[challenged] university policies that bar discrimination against gays and lesbians and [used] a civil subpoena to demand documents from a former University of Virginia professor known his scientific work on global warming.”

The IRS mailed 400 questionnaires to nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers and is reviewing an additional 13 that failed to respond, the agency said.

This is all about Senator Charles Grassley’s complaint (he’s the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee) that many extremely wealthy universities, holding billions of dollars, hoard their endowments. Since non-profits get all that money in large part because they get amazing tax breaks, they’re obliged to use it… To spend it, reasonable amounts of it, so that, for instance, students aren’t priced out of an education, or made to take on outrageous debt.

The IRS survey found that 344 institutions had an average spending target of 4.7 percent to 5 percent of their endowments each year on operations.

… Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he’s concerned that 5 percent has become a “ceiling” for colleges and that wealthier institutions should be spending more. The finance committee held hearings in 2007 on rising tuition costs and growing endowments at colleges including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, prompting the institutions to provide more financial aid.

… Forcing universities to spend more of their endowments would discourage diversified investing and push them toward more conservative portfolios, said James K. Hasson Jr., a lawyer at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Atlanta, who represents tax- exempt institutions.

“A mandate would remove flexibility and creativity from the tools available to colleges,” Hasson said. “There doesn’t seem to be a crying need for a legal mandate.”…

Right. With a mandate, Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, wouldn’t have been able to put together those clever credit default swaps.