Exide, seller of fraudulent auto batteries, gave money to the University of South Florida ten years ago as part of a settlement in a case the attorney general brought against it.

The money – a bit more than two million dollars – went to a professorship in business ethics … This position would be an extremely selective, high-level appointment that would attract someone able to explain to MBA students why they shouldn’t sell fraudulent batteries.

But, in an echo of a protracted, much-discussed case at Princeton, people are now complaining that the money was not spent in the way the…  can we call it a gift? … intended.

Business professor Marvin Karlins and associate business professor Robert Welker made the allegation in a complaint filed Monday with USF’s compliance office.

“Ten years have passed, and there ain’t nobody sitting in that chair,” Karlins says. “They take $2 million, and they sit on it.”

That’s not true, according to USF administrators. They say the annual earnings from a $2 million endowment won’t cover the salary of a top scholar, who might make $200,000 a year.

So the money pays for other academic activities on both ethics and sustainability, the study of environmentally sound and socially responsible business practices.

… In their complaint, Karlins and Welker say it was “specifically ordered that the Exide money would be used to create an endowed professorship for business ethics.”

“To do otherwise is a clear breach of contract,” they say, one that could have “serious legal implications” because USF received state matching funds.

“We also find a certain irony in all this,” they said. “A corporation fined $1.25 million for unethical behavior now finds that USF is using that money unethically.”

One USF business professor accuses the accusers of being unethical because they’re actually pissed about other things, both having recently filed unrelated complaints against the university:

“[T]hey went looking for some dirt. … That’s not ethical in my opinion.”

So you have three unethicalities:

1.  The selling of fraudulent batteries.

2.  Misappropriation of funds.

3.  Vindictive whistle-blowing.

Three so far.

… is SUNY Cobleskill, a dispiriting collection of ‘sixties buildings along the road into the old but not very charming town of Cobleskill, New York. The university has a cute web page, but its drab, not too well-maintained, public high schooly architecture is a downer — especially given its backdrop, the long hills and bright fields of the leatherstocking region.

This photo has done its best to emphasize autumn leaves and a few attractive buildings, but it still gives you a sense of what I’m talking about. In decades of summer driving in the region, Les UD‘s have never thought to turn onto the campus and take a stroll.

Same deal for SUNY Albany, which we drive past when we need to go to the city, an hour’s drive from our place way up in teeny Summit. There too, at SUNY Albany, we’ve never wanted to get out of the car, though we did once drive onto campus. A current graduate student describes the problem in a recent op/ed in the Schenectady paper:

… [T]he university is physically a cold place, marked by mammoth concrete structures. Few buildings on campus are warm and inviting. Unlike some universities, after four weeks on campus, I have yet to find a place where one can sit where it is socially acceptable, if not expected, that one will say hello to the strangers at the next table. Where there are picnic tables, they seem to be placed somewhere off the podium distant from one another, leaving one to feel you are the university. [Not sure what she means by this last bit — That you alone are what’s going on?]

When chairs are placed in public areas, they tend to line the walls, facing large empty spaces instead of facing other chairs. Instead of inviting those sitting to speak to those nearby, they instead force the occupant to watch others at a distance, often enforcing a feeling of loneliness.

The other evening I found myself wandering the campus accompanied by a visiting Chinese scholar of Shakespeare (whom I know from a non-university activity), hoping to sit and watch a DVD on a laptop computer. After 45 minutes we gave up. Might I suggest a few carefully placed clusters of picnic tables up on top of the podium?

The university forces people to physically be either in or out. To leave campus is literally a half-mile walk, at which point one will find oneself on the fringes of your standard suburban sprawl with little to see. By contrast, many colleges border an area specializing in goods and services for students, including clothing, books, coffee shops and cheap restaurants. Often these become tourist destinations. Might such a zone, something similar to Ithaca’s college-town neighborhood, make a good economic development project? If successful, would it add to the richness of the Capital Region, perhaps in some way resembling Albany’s Lark Street or Jay Street in Schenectady?

Lack of what architects call density makes for non-places. Things are too big, too monumental, at SUNY Albany, and the windy spaces the monuments make between themselves sharpen the sense of nothingness. Add to this the lack of any background, any physical surrounding at all outside of sky and tree, and you get existential isolation.

The house was under surveillance, and he got surveilled. He loses his job at a Catholic university, and he suffers embarrassment, yes; but the prostitutes have to go to jail. Which seems unfair.

The owner of the business captures some of the unfairness:

[The owner] said that after speaking with his attorney, Thomas H. Ramsay, he concluded that he could not “afford to roll the dice at age 62” and risk greater punishment, so he accepted a plea bargain.

He said police repeatedly referred to him as the “brothel operator,” while treating Sargent “with deference.”

“If you watch the taped interview, the police are almost apologetic with this guy,” Clark said of Sargent. “They told him, ‘You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ and they agreed to contact him at his office, not his home.”

… and the news that does get out from this corrupt regime — so corrupt that the people laboring under it are in full revolt– is available to us only by uncertain internet outlets like anonymous blogs.

This blog, emanating from what the intelligentsia has renamed Texas Antediluvian and Mediocre University, seems to UD one of the more reliable sources of information about America’s most nakedly politicized campus.

Even as Rod Blagojevich-stuffed boards of trustees and administrations in Illinois falter, Rick Perry-stuffed places like A&M thrive, modeling the carefree, sporty, hack-run campus that has been the hallmark of higher education in Texas for so long.

What’s been dubbed the
white revolution in College
Station features white
ribbons and pieces of
paper hung from trees
in front of houses around
the university —

— symbolizing, say professors,
students, and alumni, the
gutting of any form of higher
level thought.

… talks about universities.

“Ahmadinejad has taken revenge on the students of Iran during these violent days. The regime’s aim is to damage universities, since they are the first base of change, movement and protest.”

Read Mark Scroggins’ amusing post about the president of the University of Florida and his Clemson-like approach to the US News and World Report rankings.   The proprietor of the fine blog Culture Industry is a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University.

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

Update: BERNIE MACHEN THINKS YOUR SCHOOL SUCKS

… I’ve spent the last six years of my life at Florida State University, first pursuing my master’s and now my doctorate in English literature. The English Department enrolls more than 20,000 students each year, teaching every university student — regardless of major — how to write and think critically. We’re the biggest department in the College of Arts & Sciences, with 1,600 majors, so if you want a marker for how healthy FSU is, the English Department is a good place to start.

Over the past three years, the Legislature has slashed some $80 million from Florida State’s budget, cuts that translate to — among other things — one of the worst faculty-to-student ratios in the nation. Only 48 faculty work to support those 1,600 majors, to say nothing of enrollees from other departments. FSU is expected to cut $56 million this year.

… Already, graduate students teach nearly 75 percent of classes at FSU. This previously silent labor force recently unionized in an attempt to protect our rights during these difficult times.

Why? At an average salary of around $11,000 per year (one of the nation’s lowest), without health care, graduate students teach packed classrooms and lecture halls full of undergraduate majors and nonmajors. What would Mom and Dad think if they knew that their son or daughter had never taken a class from an actual faculty member until they were seniors? But that’s the reality…

… at the BBC, titled A New Citizenship, allow UD to pause in her daily irrepressible point-making and remind you why she does what she does on University Diaries. (“I do what I do, I think what I think, and to hell with the rest of it,” wrote Harold Brodkey in the last days of his life, in This Wild Darkness; “you don’t actually exist for me anyway — you’re all myths in my head.”) The lectures allow her to shut up for a moment about university coaches and university medical faculties and PowerPoint professors and laptop students so as to refresh your memory as to what ma blogue is all about.

Like Sandel — like Christopher Lasch, like John Kenneth Galbraith, like Mickey Kaus, like a lot of people — UD‘s distressed by what Sandel calls the drift “from having a market economy to being a market society.” Sandel argues that the post-communist triumphalism of American culture has meant a complacency about morality, about civic values that transcend materialism.

The public life of democratic societies is not going all that well… [T]he momentum and the appeal of markets [has made us forget that] norms matter. [The problem is that] markets leave their mark on social norms…

Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities…. How [do we] value [non-market] goods[?] [I have in mind things like] education…

These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. We have to debate the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them…. [We must] argue about the right way of valuing goods.

Sandel provides straightforward examples of public activities degraded by commodification — one of his examples, close to UD‘s heart, since she’s a longtime donor, is that of blood donation — but he also mentions education, a far more complex instance of civic decline.

Complex enough, in fact, to keep a blog devoted to the commercialization of universities — the transformation of endowments into hedge funds, complete with managers who, although they work at a non-profit institution, take home thirty million dollars a year; the transformation of campus athletics into a money-driven, money-losing corruption machine; the transformation of medical research into farcically compromised corporate hucksterism — very busy indeed.

I think it’s crucial, when talking and writing about the degradation of civic life into cynical materialism, to avoid platitudes. Not everything in America has declined in this way, and the problem with some writers on the subject (Lasch in particular) is that they exaggerate things. But if we confine ourselves to universities, if we irrepressibly focus on what they’re turning into, I think we make Sandel’s point for him. In abundance.

Blaming the MBA degree for the country’s current financial mess is unfair.

Pablo Triana elaborates:

… MBAs did no more and no less than what a typical Wall Streeter has the potential to do. Once they receive that diploma and cash in their sign-on bonuses, MBAs became businesspeople, thus displaying the same potential weaknesses as any other businessperson (MBA or not, high school graduate or not): temptation, avarice, corners-cutting, cheating. The MBAs involved in the crisis found themselves in such unsavory position not because of their academic credentials but because of their (degree-neutral) actions as businesspeople. I mean, it’s not like the MBA-endowed Merrill Lynch traders who gorged on impossibly toxic securities based their reckless decisions on anything they were taught years prior by some taciturn professor. “Man, b-school made me so greedy and unethical that I had no alternative but to purchase $100 billion of Subprime CDOs” was most certainly not the rationale behind the actions of the punters anymore than his HBS brainwashing was the main motivation behind Jeffrey Skilling’s peccadilloes in Houston.

B-school administrators and faculty (together with naïve outsiders) are simply assigning too much weight to what goes on inside their hallowed grounds. Maybe that’s why they are blaming their students and the gaps in their education for the worst crisis since the 1929 Crash. These people assume that what MBAs are taught at b-school dictates their future professional activities, and nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of finance, particularly in the case of trading activity. I know, I studied and taught at top b-schools. B-schools arrogantly believe that what they teach affects graduates throughout every single day of their lives, but in fact MBAs can’t forget what they were taught soon enough (and employers too typically assume that they didn’t learn much; simply witness the contents of the training programs at investment banks). Note to administrators and profs: no, what you taught (or didn’t teach) MBAs did not cause the crisis; your indoctrination is not that important, is not that relevant, is not that influential, not by a long shot. Once your students receive their diplomas, they, frankly, forget about you. As they should, as grown-up businesspeople…

… is one of the country’s least impressive.

Last year, Ron Turner, the Bears’ offensive coordinator, was paid $235,000 by the U. of I. in the final year of a settlement reached after he was fired five years ago — an amount that’s more than the president of Governors State University made.

… but strongly optimistic, on a beautiful summer day at the Garrett Park pool, where UD has just finished her swim, and where she now (they’ve got wifi this year) blogs. The little square of orange light on her computer panel shivers and shakes, and it takes an awfully long time to go from one window to another, but UD will take what she can get by way of internet access (on Thursday her home computer problems should be solved). Hotel lobbies, Starbucks, and now the local pool — when computers disconnect, UD reconnects with her little ‘thesdan world.

Five people have emailed UD about the clout list at the University of Illinois (she’s afraid if she tries to link to an article, it’ll take forever), and she’s grateful to them. She’d already read an article or two about it, and had decided not to post on the subject. But since so many of her kind readers think of UD and University Diaries when they read coverage in the Chicago Trib and elsewhere about the well-established use of clout on the part of politicians and trustees to get unqualified students admitted to the flagship public campus, she’ll happily share her thoughts.

Used to be UD was real radical on the subject. When she first started going with Mr UD, he told her about various Harvard friends of his who’d been admitted with middling grades and scores because their parents were well-connected. She was scandalized, and did quite a bit of populist railing against it, which irritated Mr UD no end.

He tried to explain to her that no university merely looks at grades and scores — there are all sorts of special admits, like athletes and musicians and the geographically well-distributed (UD recalled her father saying that he wasn’t that impressive a candidate for Johns Hopkins, but “No one had ever applied to Hopkins from Ocean City High.”) and, yes, children of alumni. “The main question,” said he, “is Can they do well at the university? All of my friends did very well. Most graduated with honors. And you know all of them and how well they’ve done in life.”

Although her position has moderated a bit, UD remains scandalized by purely money admits — Duke and Brown seem particularly fond of them — where if your father is Ralph Lauren or Rudy Giuliani (how else to explain Andrew Giuliani?) you have a much better chance of getting in than someone more impressive and less wealthy. And sure, many of the University of Illinois admits she’s reading about sound unable to do well at the school — Mr UD’s minimal criterion. One in particular — a law school candidate — sounds terrible, and it’s sad to read the admissions dean begging the administration clout-slaves not to make him write an acceptance email to this person. He worries that the candidate’s wretched test scores will damage the law school’s competitive statistics; he’s sure the candidate will be unable to pass any bar exam.

UD takes both a case by case and a larger, political-atmosphere approach to the clout admissions phenomenon. Illinois is of course one of our most corrupt states. And bad clout admits certainly increase when you’ve got players like Blago at the bat.

Similarly, many of our corrupt, provincial southern states have long regarded colleges and universities as patronage machines, charitable arms of the legislature designed to give jobs to governors’ wives and advanced degrees to children of the prominent. So when there’s a background of deep-rooted cultural corruption, you want to pay particular attention to clout practices.

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

Update: Wrote this yesterday. Apologies for light posting — continued connectivity difficulties. They’re on their way to being solved.

… for the past few days.

1.) The botched-robbery murder inside a dormitory at Harvard University. This seems to have been a planned attack, organized perhaps by a senior at Harvard, the girlfriend of the shooter.

2.) Kansas State president John Wefald‘s (put it all together, it spells FLAWED) parting fiasco as he retires. That fine middle linebacker Sigmund Freud (The Sigmeister to his fans) would have plenty to say about a long-serving leader expressing his accumulated resentments, and his conviction that the school will fall apart without him, by arranging for it to fall apart. Oh! I didn’t know that the crony I appointed AD would do secret deals that would embarrass the school around the world and bankrupt us! Whooooops….

These are strange stories, a kind of Extreme College Sports. They represent a deepening of campus tendencies everyone knows are already there — widespread student drug use, filthy athletic programs.

Y know, every now and then
I think you might like to hear something from UD
Nice and easy

But there’s just one thing
You see UD never does nothing
Nice and easy

She always does it nice and rough
So we’re gonna take the beginning of this song
And do it easy

Then we’re gonna do the finish rough
This is the way we do Proud Mary

And we’re rolling, rolling, rolling on the river
Listen to the story

She left a law job in the city
Working for the man every night and day
And she never lost one minute of sleeping
Worrying bout the way things might have been

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

Ate a lot of roe in Russia
Had a chauffeured car in Gay Paree
But she never saw the good side of her marriage
Till she got a job at the UNC

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

… in a kingdom by the sea…

Or make that a city by the lake, and my friend Taraneh, who was taking some courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology, drove me over there. I was stunned.

This was the coldest, ugliest campus ever. The synergy between the flatness of Chicago’s plain, and the plainness of IIT’s flat architecture, was deadly. The place was a morgue, the buildings slabs.

To make matters entirely morbid, it was a dreary winter day. No one around, dark empty sky.

I fled, never to return. Modernism’s one thing, brutalism another.

Now the proposed demolition of this IIT beauty —

— to make way for a public transit stop — has Mies van der Rowe enthusiasts up in arms. Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful? Who else could’ve raised those brick shithouse walls like Mies?

An op-ed in the New York Times by the chair of religion at Columbia brings together familiar arguments about how American universities should change to avoid obsolescence.

Like Francis Fukuyama, Mark C. Taylor wants to abolish tenure because it has created “institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.”

Although university tenure as an institution still seems to UD pretty secure, she reminds you of the recent upheaval at Mr UD’s University of Maryland over how stringent post-tenure review should be.

UD‘s most intrigued by Taylor’s comment about scholarly publication:

In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

It’s certainly true that tenure has wedged into place senior professors who may value nothing but older models of print publication. These professors review junior professors who look more and more like Taylor’s mixed modern model.

The Modern Language Association came out a number of years ago against the tyranny of the book manuscript and for the new formats Taylor mentions, but he’s correct that virtually nothing has changed.

—————————————

Update: It’s useful, in this connection, to look at the latest recipient of the Clark Medal in economics, second in importance to the Nobel. Professor of Economics at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez has never published a book, and he has never occupied a narrow subject band. He publishes articles, mainly online. His work sometimes appears as book chapters.

In an earlier post on this subject, UD quoted Lindsay Waters: “To make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.” UD continued:

Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him “why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge.” The economist, Waters concludes, is right: “Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays… .?”

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

(Paul Krugman titles his blog entry on the prize SAEZ DOES MATTER.)

(“Mr. Saez, an easygoing Frenchman who loves surfing, has resisted overtures from the powerhouse economics departments at MIT and Harvard University.” The model here, of course, is Colin McGinn.)