… [A] masterly new book argues [that the University of Chicago is] the United States’ greatest university.

… The University of Chicago is, in [the author’s] contention, “our closest approximation to the idea of a great university. … It is a meritocracy of ideas, a place where ideas flourish in an open way.”…

Once professors retire and become emeritus, they retain certain campus privileges. These might include parking, library, maybe an office if there’s enough space, catalog listing …. stuff like that. This Faculty Retirement page from the University of Oregon is pretty typical.

Although the UO page doesn’t mention it, it turns out that retired professors there can also rent university space to hold meetings.

One UO emeritus, who seems to be a Nazi, regularly invites his friends to campus in order to exchange fascist salutes and get up to date on what other white supremacists around the country are doing.

So far the university has issued badly worded statements about what a disgrace this is. But you gotta wonder: What kind of policy forces a school to host brown shirts? I think it’s nice that the University of Oregon respects its retirees, but this seems excessive.

An official announcement from Penn State:

The Office of Physical Plant (OPP) at Penn State will resume its crow relocation program this evening (Wednesday, Jan. 6). Large groups of crows have been gathering in the vicinity of Ford, Moore, Cedar and Chambers buildings, and near West Halls, Rec Hall, the HUB-Robeson Center and Pond Laboratory. Occupants of these buildings may experience the loudest noises as OPP’s sonic harassment efforts begin.

OPP’s anti-crow team will begin its efforts on the north side of Old Main at 7:30 p.m.; the campus community can expect to hear loud noises in the early evening as University employees launch anti-crow pyrotechnic noisemakers intended to convince the crows move to less problematic locations. Pyrotechnic operations may continue for several weeks until this objective is met.

OPP’s goal is to drive crows to a stand of trees east of the Visitor’s Center on the University Park campus. Small groups of highly trained OPP employees will be conducting the relocation operation and will be wearing distinctive green safety vests. Once the crows have vacated a location, crow effigies will be hung to dissuade the crows from returning. Light towers will be erected in the targeted relocation woods east of the Visitor’s Center to make the area more appealing to the crows.

No crows will be harmed in this operation. The public can expect some disturbance from the noisemaking activities and possible crow infestation if the crows attempt to re-roost in populated areas.

In addition to OPP’s efforts, the College of Agricultural Sciences is employing propane cannons at the dairy barns and at the the Organic Materials Processing and Education Center (OMPEC). These cannons produce loud blasts to scare crows away. The cannons may be used for most of the day, seven days a week, throughout the rest of the winter.

Last year about 3,000 migrating crows landed at Penn State’s University Park campus, creating unsanitary and unpleasant conditions. OPP’s goal is to discourage this mass roosting…

He’s more than reached that tipping point where accumulated institutional embarrassments demonstrate the failure of his presidency.

There’s the graduation rate.

There’s Rick Pitino (scroll down).

There’s the last dean of the school of education. (Background here.)

This list (I’m sure I’m missing stuff) describes a university president totally asleep at the wheel. Why hasn’t he been fired?

… Iris Murdoch remembered

the Oxford of our first year – utterly Bohemian & fantastic – when everyone was master of their fate and captain of their soul in a way that I have not met since. Those people just didn’t care a damn – and they lived vividly, individually, wildly, beautifully.

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

There – right there –
is University Diaries’
New Year’s toast to you:

May you live vividly,
individually, wildly,
beautifully.

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

… from AP’s education reporter.

We seem, in this article, to be inching closer to understanding why a university president was recently, and quite rudely, terminated.

My take on the thing here.

Athens University rector Christos Kittas, who was injured by hooded assailants who stormed onto the university’s main administration building (Propylea) last Sunday, submitted his resignation to the university’s faculty senate on Thursday.

Kittas was hospitalised for treatment after the attack, while also suffering a mild heart attack…

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

Several dozen people ran through a parking lot between Giannini Hall and Tolman Hall, wearing hoods…

Not Athens. Berkeley, last night.

It’s not only Greek university students who think bludgeoning professors and administrators makes political sense. We’ve got a few like that here.

As many as 70 protesters, many carrying torches and smashing windows, attempted to storm UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s on-campus residence late Friday in a violent act condemned by university officials and student activists alike.

Eight people, including two UC Berkeley students, were arrested on suspicion of rioting, threatening an educational official, attempted burglary, attempted arson, felony vandalism and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, the university said.

Some protesters threw incendiary objects at the house in an attack that left the chancellor and his wife fearing for their lives.

The group was apparently protesting student fee hikes and budget cuts. The demonstrators chanted “No justice, no peace,” as the chancellor slept. His wife woke him up about 11 p.m. …

Details and many comments at the Berkeley campus paper.

… is becoming a phrase to strike fear — or at least intense irritation — in the hearts of universities all over the United States. Whatever you think of his take on health care and other issues, Senator Charles Grassley is a fierce warden of public money, and he repeatedly goes after universities he suspects of wasting or in other ways misusing it. He writes them Grassley Letters asking them to account for what they’ve been doing with taxpayer money.

It’s usually when UD‘s talking about multiply-billioned Harvard, or football factories like the University of Alabama (which just cancelled a bunch of classes so everyone can go to a championship game), that she reminds readers of the remarkable tax breaks our campuses enjoy. They enjoy that non-profit status because they’re committed to the high ideals of educating citizens and generating important research. When it turns out that they’re just as committed to hoarding cash as they are to education, or when they ignore the whole education thing in favor of football, we should care. It’s our money they’re playing with.

America’s public universities of course don’t exhibit the structural corruption of, say, Greek and Italian universities. For the most part our schools are extremely cleanly run, it seems to UD; but Grassley and his staff have certainly uncovered questionable financial practices, and the ongoing story of the University of California San Francisco medical school is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The UC system has agreed to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a financial review at UCSF, after a U.S. senator raised concerns about allegations of money mismanagement and university officials making misleading statements to state leaders.

The allegations came from Dr. David Kessler, who was fired from his job as dean of the UCSF School of Medicine in 2007. Kessler had repeatedly questioned what he said were “financial irregularities” in the dean’s office budget.

In a letter to UC President Mark Yudof on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that he’s pleased that UC has agreed to an outside audit at UCSF, but noted several “troubling matters” at the university. He said UCSF administrators appear to have provided “misleading” statements to the California Senate.

… [Kessler’s] allegation relates to the dean’s discretionary funding budget, which he has said was millions of dollars less than what he’d been promised when he was hired in 2003. He conducted his own financial analysis in December 2004 and said he found an $18 million annual discrepancy…

These are large sums of money, and if it’s true that they’re missing, it would be good to know where they went.

WAFB.com:

Southern University’s former system president lost his wrongful termination lawsuit against the board of supervisors Thursday.

… [Ralph] Slaughter filed the lawsuit after the Board of Supervisors voted not to renew his contract earlier this year.

District Judge Tim Kelly did not mince words when he issued his ruling, saying after his dismissal, Slaughter emptied his office and stadium suite of just about everything that was not nailed down.

Judge Kelly also said Slaughter created chaos when he took those things, therefore Southern’s failure to pay his unused vacation and sick leave was justified. Kelly also ruled that Slaughter is not entitled to penalties or attorney fees.

… [The judge] called testimony from … Slaughter the “least credible” he has ever heard.

A jock-sniffing, nepotistic president; sociopaths on the sports teams; Mistress Jade, who punishes naughty grad students with whips, on the creative writing staff… It’s all gotten too much for UNM, which has just hired an expensive ‘reputation management’ consultant to make the corrupt twisted people who make UNM what it is look uncorrupt and untwisted.

UD awaits the ministrations of the public relations firm upon her. She looks forward to her sense of UNM as a crony-ridden craphouse being transformed by clever pr into a sense of UNM as something that smells really good.

… from UD‘s house in upstate New York is SUNY Cobleskill.  

Quite a distance down the hill.  The house sits way up in tiny Summit. We drive to Cobleskill, the closest town, for groceries.

A news story about SUNY Cobleskill is just beginning to break, and if its details check out, yikes.

… In a blistering complaint, a professor claims the SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill removed him from as dean because he objected to the school’s policy of recruiting unqualified students, many of them black, solely to get its hands on their tuition, “for the express and admitted purpose of making budget, knowing that these students are not reasonably likely to graduate.” He claims black students were fraudulently induced into enrolling so their tuition could “subsidize agricultural programs, which run at an annual deficit,” and which “serve white students almost exclusively.”

In his federal complaint, Thomas Hickey says he was a tenured professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He claims the campus president and vice president for academic affairs lowered academic standards and admitted students they knew were unlikely to graduate, and even falsified some students’ records to make them eligible.

… Hickey claims he discovered that a student who earned a B+ in English Composition was functionally illiterate.

He claims [Anne Myers, Academic Affairs VP] changed the school’s Academic Review standards by lowering the threshold GPA to 1.0: “On Dec. 2, 2008, Defendant Myers sent an email to the faculty stating that ‘in light of the budget, we will use a 1.0 [Grade Point Average] cut off for first semester freshmen for Academic Review.'” And he claims that “as one point, she suspended Academic Review entirely.”

Thomas Cronin, a physics professor, responded to Myers’ email with one of his own, according to the complaint. It said: “The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long. One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a very low form of corruption.” …

Here

are

three

articles from three universities about the class on Wednesday before Thanksgiving controversy.

(Very pleasant, thank you, and I hope yours was too. Highlight: Playing Rock Band, UD‘s sister on drums, La Kid on guitar, and UD warbling into the mike. We did all these songs I sort of know… sort of know the chorus, maybe… Ramblin’ Man, Kids of America, American Woman… Started mentally ramblin’ during Ramblin’ Man… I was thinking Allman Brothers didn’t Cher marry one of them Sonny always seemed dumb named one of his kids Chesare because you couldn’t expect people to figure it out if they named him Cesare…)

So here’s my take on Should we cancel Wednesday classes before the holiday.

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

What’s happening, most broadly, at the American university right now is what UD calls Invisibility Drift. Classes used to meet three days a week; now most meet two. There used to be very few holidays and cancellations; now there are gobs. Official cancellations and particular professors cancelling for this and that reason. Some class sessions you just watch a film, which you can do anywhere, at any time, and there’s nothing class about it… I mean, no one’s up there teaching you something; there’s no discussion going on. The classroom, the professor, other students, the university — all incidental. I’ve read more than one Rate My Professor complaint about professors in courses like these turning out the lights, starting the film, and leaving. See you next Tuesday! Enjoy the show.

Add to this high levels of class skipping among students (I did plenty when I was an undergrad), high levels of watching tv shows on your laptop or texting while you’re in class, high levels of guest lecturers instead of the ostensible professor teaching the class, high levels of blowing the course off and looking at downloaded stuff in your dorm…

You get the idea. The university as a physical location where professors and students interact in real, flesh and blood time and place vanishes. Does your professor look at you and talk to you and think in front of you? Do you look at the professor and listen to her and take notes? Do students look at each other and talk to each other? Bring books and look at the places in the books where the professor directs their attention?

No. Ain’t much attention going on in the vanishing classroom. People are absent — physically or mentally.

So look at it this way. Administrators are aware that at $50,000 a year or so they need to, well, pay attention to the fact that their enterprise as more or less originally conceived and priced is vanishing. At least at British universities, where you seldom see a professor or take a class, they don’t charge much of anything. Here in a quintessentially postmodern transaction you pay immense sums of money for white noise. (Let’s not even talk about the Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies major you’ve chosen.)

Am I saying it’s all evaporated? No. I’m talking about a trend. I’m talking about administrators’ awareness of a trend.

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

So slot this into yet another canceled day — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And keep in mind that when you cancel the Wednesday you also basically cancel the Tuesday and eventually the Monday — There’s some psychological principle going on here, I guess… a kind of infinite regression principle in which once you cancel Day Z, Days X and Y are imperiled…

You can see, I hope, why universities are reluctant to do this particular deal. I mean, think about it from the perspective of the many schools like Auburn and Georgia where classes are further dumped left and right because of football games … It begins to look as though we might as well forget classes for the entire months of November and December.

Many universities are therefore doing nothing for the time being about the Wednesday. They leave it up to the professor, who tends to cancel classes. Over time, so many professors will cancel as to make it impossible for the few professors who hold Wednesday class to do so. Everyone will be gone. Professors will lecture to a whistling nothingness.

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

Me? I hold class. Quite a few students showed up in both classes, and we had relaxed, excellent discussions (of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and DeLillo’s Underworld).

(I mean, I thought they were great.)

Dispositions assessment for new candidates approved (includes consultation with UMN general council) [sic]

This excerpt from a University of Minnesota school of education task force draft says it all.

The professor who wrote it doesn’t know how to spell counsel. The same professor looks forward to subjecting applicants to the school to an assessment of their cultural competence – cultural competence here being what the task force tells applicants it is.

Applicants who don’t want their social views investigated and approved by admissions officers might save themselves money and anxiety as to the correctness of their views by not applying.

Applicants who read the criteria by which they will be considered culturally competent, and who alter themselves to conform to the school’s standards of cultural competence should feel encouraged to apply. This group should understand, however, that even if admissions officers find their degree of competence acceptable at this time, applicants will continue to be scrutinized closely on the matter throughout their years at the school.

The reason the task force thinks it might want to check in with the general council is that someone in the group has an inkling that political litmus tests might be considered unconstitutional.

But constitutional questions are the least of it. Who but an idiot would apply to this school?