TPM looks at Howard Zinn’s long FBI file. It notes that “[T]he anti-war activities of [left historian] Professor Zinn provoked a reaction in some members of the leadership of [Boston University]. What is perhaps more surprising is that at least some member of the university leadership was an informant to the FBI.”

TPM quotes from the file:

On 4/17/70, [Redacted] (former SA), [redacted] advised on instant date, that [Redacted for more than 2 lines] (an excellent source of the Boston Office) is highly disturbed with HOWARD ZINN, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, BU, Boston, (Bufile 100-360217, BSfile 100-35505, SI subject) because of ZINN’s persistent involvement in anti-war activities. [Redacted] was particularly incensed when ZINN, as featured speaker, spoke in front of Boston Police Headquarters on 4/14/70 in connection with a rally held for the release of BOBBY SEALE, BPP National Chairman. ZINN stated “it’s about time we had a demonstration at the Police Station. Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”

ZINN further sated [sic] “America has been a police state for a long time. I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”

[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU.

Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s] efforts for his removal.

TPM comments:

The Boston Office’s efforts to assist in the unnamed official’s supposed campaign against Zinn was denied — but only because the request was mislabeled as asking for help with Communist sympathizers, rather than anti-war sympathizers.

The Charter and Bylaws of Boston University indicate that there are only 2 people who could, alone, call a meeting of the Board of Trustees: the Chairman or the President. Otherwise, more than one-third of the members have to agree to such a meeting; there are currently 38 members of the Board of Trustees (though the number has fluctuated over time, it usually has around 40 members).

At the time, Arland Christ-Janer, now deceased, was the President — a job he’d held for less than 3 years. However, records reflect that, by April 1970, Crist-Janer had already given notice that he intended to leave in July 1970.

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees, who led the search committee for Crist-Janer’s replacement, was Hans Estin, the current Vice Chairman Emeritus of North American Management whose biography says that he served as an Air Force pilot during the Korean War.

… in Andrew Hacker’s remarks here. He’s being interviewed about his forthcoming book (August 3) attacking American universities. But UD would take issue with a few things too.

Yes, “there are just too many publications and too many people publishing… And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article.” (UD has written about the articles-on-steroids problem, and related over-publication issues, in these posts.) Hacker’s right to argue that undergraduate teaching is as important as publishing (actually, he argues it’s much more important).

His attack on tenure, though, isn’t as persuasive.

Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.

Obviously it’s hard to be anything other than anecdotal about this sort of thing. How do we measure the useless wimpiness of a person? I would just suggest the following:

There are reasons American universities dominate all the world rankings, and these reasons have to do with much more than our country’s wealth. I don’t mean to discount our wealth, but anyone who tells you that American universities dominate the global quality tables merely because we’re filthy rich is simply wrong. Hacker’s right that there’s a lot wrong with our universities, and that trends are downward; but anyone writing about our schools has to reckon with the fact that many of them are spectacularly good. They didn’t get that way by being top-heavy with terrified little weenies. Tenure deadens some people, for sure; others (see Eva von Dassow) it seems to embolden.

Hacker’s right that students should get a liberal arts, not a vocational, degree. If they want a vocation from the word go, they should go to a vocational school (more and more universities are transforming themselves into vocational schools, to be sure; but if students protested this, it might stop). He’s certainly right that big time sports fuck everything up.

At a college like Ohio State … undergraduates pour into the stadium for the big Ohio-Michigan game. They paint their faces red and blue and all the rest. But what are they cheering for? Victory in a football game. Michigan is actually a much better university than Ohio State — its reputation, its medical school, its law school, and so on. It makes you wonder whether Ohio is putting so much into its sports teams because its academics really aren’t so great.

Got to make the best of a bad situation, as Gladys says.

Hacker’s too much of a hippie about grades (they’re evil; toss them), and he’s too random on the subject of admissions (drop applications into a hat…).

But I love his final comment about some students arguably not being ready for college.

Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It’s the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way.

… I teach at a city college in New York, where we come very close to allowing virtually anybody who applies to walk in. I say, ‘This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job.” Some people say to me, “Your students at Queens, are they any good?” I say, “I make them good.” Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it’s remarkable how you can make up the difference.

I agree. Much of the curricular crap at universities finds its justification in the students-aren’t-ready thing… Students aren’t interested… So we make our professors clowns and have them teach the Harry Potter books… Or we give students laptops and let them play on Facebook while we do deadly PowerPoints in front of them…

Hacker’s right that the only thing that can change this scenario is a real teacher.

Even? Especially.

UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.

Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.

The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.

Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.

But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.

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.