And he ain’t even gotten to sports yet!

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Thomas Frank’s hit piece on the American university is swell (I’m still reading it), but Scathing Online Schoolmarm would caution against sentences like this one:

When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit.

Mixed metaphors are bad enough (cloaking your putsch in a fog?) but when you bring in bullshit… When you make the fog’s composition the shit of a bull… No.

Note that the sentence in my headline also mixes metaphors.

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Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up.

Finally he gets to football.

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Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed [the American university] for their own benefit.

The problem with Frank’s cri de coeur resides in sentences like this one. Too much cri, too much coeur. Not enough compelling, rational analysis. Phrases like a handful of parasites and billionaires are a major target of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell rightly notes that in our time “political writing is bad writing.” And bad writing fails to persuade.

The University of Miami – very close to becoming (with one scandal and another) the functional equivalent of the Las Vegas Strip – is in a tizzy over whether to delete A-Rod’s name from its baseball stadium. The article quotes one observer:

In cases like these where a donor’s name has been disgraced, their reputation and the purpose behind the gift have to be reevaluated, said Rae Goldsmith, vice president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“The Enron chair of business ethics is going to send a different kind of message than the Enron chair of the arts,” Goldsmith explained.

Different from would be better, but put that aside. Is it really true that we’d be okay with the Enron chair of the arts but not the Enron chair of business ethics? Isn’t that like saying we’d be okay with the Hitler chair of poetry but not the Hitler chair of race relations? The Madoff chair of creative writing but not the Madoff chair of accounting? Franchement, I think these names have sufficient general renown to make it unlikely that even human kinetics and leisure studies would have them.

When UD saw that name in the news this morning, it stirred a memory… She’d written about Evan Dobelle years ago on this blog…

So she checked her archives, and there it was – Dobelle was busy being fired, back in ’04, from the presidency of the University of Hawaii. He was accused of excessive personal spending.

The University of Hawaii is among this country’s very worst university systems, so Dobelle was moving into a laughable mess when he took that job. On the other hand, he does seem to have spent lavishly, with little in the way of results.

Dobelle, who jumps from job to job with suspicious rapidity, is, à ce moment-là, president of one Westfield State University, where damned if he isn’t facing exactly the same charges.

… my readers, who regularly send me items of interest on which they think this blog should comment? University Diaries couldn’t do its thing without all of you linking UD to university stuff.

Just in the last couple of days, readers sent me this facility-porn from the University of Oregon; an instance of jesuitical reasoning in the Georgetown University newspaper; strong commentary and – in the comments on the commentary – strong debate on the just-released MIT report in the Aaron Swartz case; and details on growing civil resistance against threats to privacy at Penn State.

As the new academic year begins, UD will – with your help – continue covering and commenting on university stories like these.

… being scammed.”

The much stranger than fiction world of Yeshiva University.

The University of Hawaii has it all; and its last president just gave up – years before her contract’s end – in the face of it. Now UH’s clueless trustees will spend months and lots of money trying to come up with an interim president and then a (cough) non-interim one…

A common theme at Thursday’s meeting was that the university needs to return its attention to students.

Now there’s an idea!

One trustee pointed to “abysmal graduation rates.” Enrollment’s declining on virtually all campuses. Over the last eleven years, tuition has gone up 141%. Much of the money seems to have gone to administrators.

Regent Jeffrey Acido, the board’s sole student member, also stressed that the university lacks a culture in which students feel committed to the school and its mission.

Now a Ph.D. student in his 10th year at UH, Acido said that he’s regularly had professors tell him to leave the university because of Hawaii’s dismal job prospects or because he has greater academic opportunities elsewhere.

“It kind of hurts because I believe in this institution, but (the university needs) to cultivate a culture in which you breed amazing students with faculty that encourage you to stay and not leave,” he said.

He recalled visiting campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley or Harvard, campuses at which he felt that “culture of commitment.”

“But I don’t stand toe to toe with them,” he said. “That culture has to expand. That culture has to multiply.”

It’s odd that Acido has been hanging around UH for ten years; but put that aside. He has detected the problem, the fundamental cause of all the UH embarrassments UD has chronicled on this blog. (Put Hawaii in my search engine for details.) But what he’s calling for – a setting of intellectual seriousness – is unlikely to emerge at UH. Hawaii’s one of those states – like Nevada, Montana, and South Carolina – with a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and corruption. To make matters worse for Hawaii, it is, like Alaska (another state with terrible universities), much too far from the mainland for any of us to pay attention or care. Hawaii is doomed – university-wise – and would therefore do best to appoint a total insider its next president. Someone who will leave it alone to continue stewing in its own juices.

… mention athletics.

It’s by Paul Campos. An excerpt:

[W]hat exactly is [all the money Gee raised] supposed to be for? In theory, of course, it’s for “education.” In practice, a whole lot of it goes directly into the pockets of a metastasizing cadre of university administrators, whose jobs, as nearly as I’ve been able to determine after being on a research university’s faculty for nearly a quarter century, consist of inventing justifications for their own existence, while harassing faculty to fill out evaluations of various kinds (In a particularly Kafkaesque twist, many of these evaluations are supposed to be of the administrators’ own job performance).

In Gee’s own case, the sums of money involved are disgusting. At the time he was apparently forced out after having made a few tactless jokes in a private meeting, Gee was getting paid about two million dollars per year. This does not include the $7.7 million that the university paid for Gee’s travel, housing and entertainment between 2007 and 2012 – a sum which included at least $895,000 for soirees at Gee’s university-provided mansion, more than a half million dollars for private jet travel, and “$64,000 on his trademark bow ties, bow tie cookies, O-H lapel pins and bow tie pins for university marketing.”

… Universities are not businesses, and university presidents are not CEOs. These institutions exist for reasons other than to maximize their revenues and enrich their management class. That it is even necessary to point this out illustrates the extent to which we have allowed the mentality of what investment bankers call “the market” to invade every aspect of American culture.

… that Harvard University, a non-profit with all the tax breaks pertaining thereto, hoards a thirty-five billion dollar endowment… That all those Right-Not-To-Think states with their incredibly bad universities get huge tax breaks for luxury suites in their sports arenas…

And that some non-profit university hospitals… Well… Take a look:

[The University of Pittsburgh hospital’s] CEO, Jeffrey Romoff, makes almost $6 million a year. That makes him the highest paid CEO of any large nonprofit hospital in the U.S., according to a recent analysis by TIME. Romoff also has more than a dozen administrators that take in annual salaries of over $1 million, and according to the city, he has access to a private chef, chauffeur, and a jet, as well as one of the most expensive office spaces in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh’s mayor is suing to get rid of the bogus non-profit’s non-profit status. He’ll probably win.

Why? Recall Oscar Wilde calling fox hunting “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Romoff’s attorneys – as will be obvious to everyone – will be the unspeakable in defense of the despicable.

… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.

All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.

Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.

Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.

… is unsurprising. She made a mess. But FAU’s fatal problem remains: It’s not a university. It holds some classes, yes. But it doesn’t much care about its faculty (all sorts of knaves and fools lurk there and create embarrassment for the school); and it has poured huge money into a football stadium that everyone knows will sit empty and bankrupt the place. Recall that FAU was so desperate to get a naming sponsor’s money that they agreed to have the name of a shady for-profit prison company be emblazoned on the stadium — until ridicule and outrage forced the university to withdraw from the deal. The president blames “fiercely negative media coverage” for her downfall, but when you make a mess that’s what you get.

… and now geese at the University of Waterloo.

… Tenured Radical and Joe Fruscione, are featured in this PBS report about academia and retirement.

It’s an old problem, one that this blog has followed with concern for many years: How do you handle it, public-relations-wise, and logistics-wise, when a politician or money man whose name you’ve plastered all over campus buildings goes to jail for corruption? Certain schools – Seton Hall, most prominently – experience this problem over and over again.

There’s an interesting sort of time-sensitive aspect to it. Most cases, to be sure, are after the fact – the name went up, the guy went to prison, the name got sandblasted. Rising action, climax, denouement. Some are before – Georgetown was going to name Douglas Ginsburg, but the SEC named him first. And a few are sort of during – Nevin Shapiro’s little student lounge plaque had just gone up when when Nevin went down.

Many and varied are the problems associated with de-naming. If, like U Miami, you’ve only done a little plaque, piece of cake. Just take it down. When we start moving in the direction of engraving, however, we’re talking big money. Sandblasting doesn’t come cheap. It’s also embarrassingly loud. You can have some guy steal into Nevin’s room at night and remove the thing; but does this guy look like the quiet sort? Why not just yell We made a terrible mistake or We consort with criminals at the top of your lungs? And try explaining to Seton Hall parents why hundreds of thousands of their tuition dollars went toward pulverizing the names of crooks from three of your buildings. So far.

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Forget trying to see these things coming. No school – up to and including burnished ones like Brown, which will eventually have to do something about trustee Steven Cohen – is likely to scrutinize a politician or a hedgie and decide they’d rather not go there. Money is money, and you don’t want to insult a person from the money class. Word gets around. This is about cleanup.

UD has long proposed the erasure/sheeting approach. Inspired by Hasidic groups who erase images of women from photos (Hillary Clinton is the salient example here), and Muslim or Muslim-sensitive groups who sheet women in photos (Southampton University’s advertising materials are the go-to place here), UD has proposed simply adding or subtracting letters from the name.

So in the most recent case – jailed, disgraced Pennsylvania state senator Bob Mellow – you’ve got a couple of universities there with MELLOW engraved on buildings.

They could sheet/erase, by way of adding, pulling, or shifting letters. MELLOW, without too much work, could be altered to read FELLOWS, which sounds very British (Fellows of All Souls); for less money, they could go in the other direction – down-home and friendly – by dropping the M and W and putting an H at the beginning of the name: HELLO! They could be whimsical and add YELLOW to the name… Joycean, and put an S at the beginning (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”)… They could do homage to Saul Bellow by changing only one letter…

You can’t make this shit up.

A top rabbinic dean of Yeshiva University has warned rabbis about the dangers of reporting child sex abuse allegations to the police because it could result in a Jew being jailed with a black inmate, or as he put it, “a schvartze,” who might want to kill him.

… Yeshiva University has been embroiled in a mounting scandal following a series of reports in the Forward since December about abuse allegations against two former staff members at Yeshiva University’s high school for boys in Manhattan.

“[The] warden in the prison can kill you. They can put you in a cell together with a shvartze,” [Hershel Schachter said].”