…conflict of interest at the top of George Washington University’s medical  school can be found here, at UD‘s blogpal, Health Care Renewal.

… sang Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, and her voice drifted out to Duval Street, where UD was walking.

This drift of Dylan made UD happy, and she stopped for a moment and sang along, and she kept singing as she walked on.

Duval’s dark caverns seem strange to UD. She doesn’t understand why anyone would want the inner depths when the sun shines the way it does in Key West in the afternoon.

But maybe these are bars more than cafés, and maybe people want to get drunk out of the sun.

After yesterday’s long snorkeling expedition, UD spent most of today inside, working.  Midday, she left to get lunch, and on her way to a little restaurant on the harbor (while she ate, she watched a man throw fish to a crowd of pelicans), she marveled again and again at the white palmy houses of Key West.

Some are yellow, and other pastels.

This is by Greg Little.

The houses on Key West are green retreats, small self-contained flowering jungles.  Hibiscus and coconut palms throng their facades.  Asian fountains pump water in hidden corners.

On the porches of these houses, cats curl on wicker chairs, and peonies color the front door.

Behind the houses are pools, not long, and rather narrow, but a perfect emblem of the ocean.  The pools complete the impression of a world boxed and shipped to the self-contained Key West houses.  Flowing and overflowing nature in the flowering palms; culture in the landscape and architecture; society in the pink bicycle that leans against the shed, and in the Conch Republic flag.

“We must be light!” writes James Merrill (whose own entry to Key West he recorded in Clearing the Title) in his poem about the Greek island, Santorini.  Human beings almost seem a species of light.  They brought light to the world.  They crave the light the world sheds.

He also means we have to remain as light – as young, clear, and buoyant – as we can, as long as we can.  We have to respond to the world’s overtures.

Ezra’s sister Daphne writes a Little Ick in an essay about penises:

Which is not to suggest that Lawrence didn’t, despite what is clearly a complicatedly ambivalent attitude toward women, manage to move the conversation more radically forward than most.

As always, UD leaves it up to her readers to explain why this is a Little Ick.

But here’s a hint. It’s a sentence George Orwell discusses in Politics and the English Language:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Florida is a rogue state. Rules are meant to be broken.

You see it at Florida’s universities.

An immigrant from a non-rogue state – Bernie Machen, president of the University of Florida – has come in and sort of tried to clean up, but he can’t. Florida’s rogue all the way down.

Note Machen’s pathetic emails in the latest corruption scandal on his campus.

Good man. But pathetic.

The University of Florida is investigating cases in which College of Medicine administrators used a state program to retire and then be rehired without searches for other candidates – receiving perks such as bonuses and raises in the process.

UF President Bernie Machen said he has pushed to end abuses of the Deferred Retirement Option Program, known as DROP, but the allegations and 20 other cases suggest the effort has seen mixed success. The program is intended to provide incentives for long-time public employees to retire, clearing the way for lower-paid replacements.

… A provision in state law allows employees to get payouts that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars to retire and then return to work while collecting both salaries and pensions, a practice called double-dipping. The loophole has been used by an increasing number of public employees across the state.

Double-dipping is legal, but the law requires employees to take time off between their retirement and return to work. UF policy requires competitive searches for most faculty and staff positions. UF also has enacted rules intended to stop employees from making pre-retirement agreements to be re-employed, which can be costly at a time of budget cuts and layoffs.

The investigation follows claims made by former UF College of Medicine Dean Dr. Bruce Kone in letters sent to university and state officials. Using e-mail and other public records, Kone claimed administrators made agreements to be rehired without searches, in some cases without taking time off and being given other perks.

UF officials confirmed investigations are ongoing, but would not provide any details. Machen declined to comment on specific allegations but a 2007 e-mail showed he referred to one such agreement as “a prostitution of the University.”

… In one case, UF Jacksonville campus Dean Robert Nuss received a $150,000 lump-sum payment from DROP to retire in 2004, according to Florida Department of Management Services records. Kone alleged that UF waived search requirements before rehiring Nuss and also gave him a bonus of nearly $25,500 to offset retirement benefits that he missed under DROP rules.

He now gets a university salary of $385,000 while also receiving about $2,600 in monthly retirement benefits, state records show. Nuss did not respond to requests for comment.

… “These are the same universities that come to the Legislature with their hands out and say we don’t give them enough money,” said state Sen. Mike Fasano, a New Port Richey Republican seeking to change the practice.

… Machen said that when he started in 2004, he found that some employees had made pre-retirement arrangements to be re-employed. He said he first directed such arrangements to be eliminated for senior administrators

A campus-wide memo sent in 2005 warned all employees that the arrangements could put their benefits at risk. UF received ambiguous state advice on the legality of such arrangements, Machen said, but he viewed such deals as bad policy.

… [P]hysician and administrator Dr. Nicholas Cassisi retired in June 30, 2003, and was rehired a month later at his pre-retirement salary of $435,937.

In a 2002 letter, former College of Medicine Dean Craig Tisher requested that all recruiting and affirmative action requirements for the position be waived.

State records show Cassisi received a lump sum of more than $90,000 from DROP and about $1,600 in monthly retirement benefits.

… An e-mail from Machen showed that UF’s president took issue with a pre-retirement agreement involving an endowed professorship.

In the Nov. 25, 2007, e-mail, Machen referred to the agreement with former Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs Dr. Robert Watson as “a prostitution of the University” and “one of the worst abuses of non-profit status I have ever seen.”

“Shame on everyone involved,” he wrote…

UD thanks a reader for the link.

… at the University of Connecticut, whose head coach, captured on Youtube, shows you how to behave.

… provides a way into the latest report on overpaid university personnel.

“When you have college presidents making $1 million, you’re going to have $800,000 provosts and $500,000 deans,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “It may be reasonable for these people to be well paid, but if faculty’s getting 2 percent raises, I don’t see why senior administrators who are already high-paid should get much larger increases. It reflects a set of values that is not the way most Americans think of higher education.”

If Alabama’s Coach Saban makes four million, all other university coaches expect their salaries to bump up. If Wall Street money managers make thirty-five million, Harvard’s money managers make thirty-five million. If the university’s president makes a million, provosts make close to a million.

And what sort of fool would make an issue of it? The market’s everywhere, including the university, and the only compensation mechanism in play is what other people are making, or what an employee could earn elsewhere…

But what’s that thing at the end of Callan’s statement about a set of values at odds with higher education? What the fuck is that?

Hell I dunno… He probably means like, uh, people think people at universities are motivated by things other than greed.

Whatever. That’s a dead end.

But hey what about this. What about this whole universities-are-non-profits thing.

Why do universities get spectacular tax breaks and other advantages for-profits don’t get?

Well, because our government thinks people at universities are motivated by things other than greed. Public good, you know. Universities are more into educating people than they are into raking in money. The government thinks this is great, and through excellent tax breaks encourages universities in their commitment to this civic activity.

For instance, as Charles Grassley notes:

Donations to colleges are tax deductible. Taxpayers pay for federal tax incentives to make higher education more accessible and affordable through college-savings plans and tax deductions for tuition and student-loan interest. Such tax credits and deductions cost U.S. taxpayers about $17 billion a year.

Universities are obligated to use this special tax status for maximum fulfillment of their charitable purpose of educating students. And Congress is obligated to make sure such tax policies are working as intended.

That’s just one way in which universities are extremely special when it comes to money – money the government gives them, money benefactors give them. As non-profits with a civic mission, universities get that money with the understanding that they’ll use it responsibly, to educate Americans.

Or think about it in terms of tuition. American parents pay immense sums in tuition. I don’t think they go into debt saying This is okay, because it will provide the provost with a fifteen percent raise this year. I worried, when the provost was only making $500,000, that the quality of our daughter’s education would be compromised.

So. If you think the university is a market creature like anything else, and your administration’s all set up to keep feeding the creature, then eventually the rest of Congress will see what Charles Grassley’s getting at, and they’ll begin to remove various tax and other advantages.

Sure, they will only start seeing it in the larger context of a collapsing economy, where disproportionate reward suddenly jumps out at everyone. But they will see it, and, depending on how self-serving your university has been, you can expect to attract some attention.

… Get off the phone!”

A crew member on our snorkel boat shouted this at a passenger opening his cell phone, and UD thought, yes, throw them all away and relax and gaze at the green water and the blue sky and feel the wind rippling your hair and the sun warming your back!

Yet she herself was talking into a phone.

She wanted to share her thoughts and experiences with Mr UD, but he wasn’t picking up, so UD left a bunch of messages narrating each stage of today’s trip to the reef: UD meeting with her fellow snorkelers by the newspaper machines; UD settling in to a semi-shaded seat on the boat and being surrounded by a family each of whose three children went back and forth over whether they were going to snorkel. (There are sharks. I won’t go. The wetsuit’s pinching my neck. I won’t go. The water’s 67 degrees. I won’t go.); UD‘s slight anxiety about snorkeling again after so many years (She did fine.); the just-okay reefs (UD, who has snorkeled Andros, the Caymans, and Cozumel, is spoiled.); the surpassingly beautiful island views from the boat…

Truly, despite the bad reggae on the return trip, UD was in heaven. Many happy people (the crew dashed about pouring beer) smiled at the solitary old woman … a widow?… still game after her long life … The old girl went in snorkeling!… And UD smiled back at every single one of them… In a deep bass she sang Moos peepool leev on a loonely island…

Some of the passengers had come from a Disney cruise ship. A vast Goofy — he seemed to be in the act of painting the ship’s name — hung suspended over the vessel’s side.

Many of these people wore mouse ears.

UD took a bicycle rickshaw home from the marina. “WHAT’S YOUR NAME,” the bicycle lady, a strapping twentyish woman, screamed at UD. “MINE’S NATALIE. ARE YOU AT AN INN OR A RESIDENCE. WHERE ARE YOU FROM. I GREW UP HERE. HEY BABY. [Hey baby was for a fellow rickshaw driver pumping up Duval. She was pumping down Duval, to UD‘s United Street apartment.] AND I’M TELLING YOU I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU NEVER NEVER NEVER. [Sung along with the radio.] ”

… makes such an enormous salary.

It’s a tough job, presiding over a university’s decline, but someone’s got to do it.

… titled DEATH OF THE DOTCOM DEGREE.

Despite many commentators such as US management guru Peter Drucker saying that “bricks and mortar” universities would disappear within 30 years, there’s no sign they are vanishing.

… But the virtual universities that were set up during the dotcom boom have almost all disappeared.

… All along, [Clifford] Stoll has maintained that students want social interaction. “There’s the interaction with other students. It isn’t just memorable; it’s really the purpose of living. The reason we go to college or even elementary school is to be closer to others, to develop friendships. I’m sure I’m like you. I went to college thinking, ‘Hey, this is going to be a weird experience’,” Stoll says.

“I’m not going to get that from an online university, no matter if all the web units are taught by Nobel laureates, which they are not.”

… “(From) working in the area for a while [says one professor] you realise that the principles of good teaching and learning change very slowly if they change at all and the technology changes very quickly,” he says.

“The danger is to see that the new technology is the thing that we should be focusing on (but) really we should be focusing on what it is that makes a quality teaching and learning experience…”

… Stoll also is wary of new online technologies in the classroom. “My feeling is that the hard lesson that every generation has learned is that there’s no cheap way to get an education,” he says. “There’s no short cut to a quality education.”

… because it wants to win games.

Nothing to be done, though. The president used to play basketball.

Something indefinable – a balance of exotic remoteness, cultural marginality, and artistic intellect – beckons many to Key West, where, until recently, the Sunday New York Times often arrived on Monday and local phone numbers contained only five digits.

This begins to get at it…

It’s similar to what I wrote about Bali. Key West isn’t the coldly enigmatic world Elizabeth Bishop describes when she’s in Canada. Up there she shivers on frigid and foggy northern islands whose people live hidden away, and where we can’t see anything. “An ancient chill,” she writes, “is rippling the dark brooks.”

Down here in Key West, where Bishop also lived, the world doesn’t disdain the transient warm fragility of you. It doesn’t dismiss you as a mere human being in the glacial scheme of things.

Because there’s nothing glacial about it. All’s in motion, and all’s clear here: A fresh breeze is rippling the light fronds.

A fully visible world where people are out and about, living their lives in the sun, makes people part of nature, and makes the world, therefore, unenigmatic. In some senses, at least. We are, when we’re here, so obviously part of the scheme of things.

So the latest thing is that students on certain exercise machines at the university gym are generating energy:

The gym at Oregon State University offer elliptical machines for college students to work out on, and the motion they create helps to generate heat energy in the same process.

Oregon State University (OSU) is located in Corvallis, Oregon and has been offering this capturing of energy to any college student wanting to add to the power gathering.

… The hardware used to capture this energy is installed on 22 of the elliptical machines and can save the college about 3,500 kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough power to help support a small energy efficient house.

The hardware is set up so that more machines can be fixed to the power grid in the future and adds to the harvesting of other people’s energy workout. OSU is now known as the college that is turning other people’s workouts into usable energy…

Take it a step further. In hard economic times, offer
students Green Galley Scholarships, in which the
university covers their tuition in exchange for, say,
twenty hours a week on the elliptical.

… a New York Times reporter interviews its latest money manager.

The writer describes a recent bit of history quite unfairly:

[Jack] Meyer racked up a stellar record running [Harvard’s] endowment, putting [its] returns second only to Yale’s. But complaints about the size of managers’ pay packages, relative to the academics’ pay, ultimately prompted Mr. Meyer and many of his acolytes to leave in 2005.

The people who protested the thirty million dollar a year salaries of Meyer and his boys were mainly alumni, not faculty. Their argument was not a comparative but an absolute one. No one human being should take away thirty million dollars a year from a job. The word they used was obscene, not relative.

This was not a pay equity case, with professors lusting after their own thirty million. This was a case of a group of alumni whose protest prevailed (Harvard management salaries have been lowered) as soon as the managers’ tens of millions hit the New York Times. Public outrage sealed the deal.

———————————-

UPDATE: From Forbes.

Meyer built a Wall Street-like trading operation and managed most of HMC’s money in-house. It looked like a giant hedge fund, and it had paychecks to match. A high-level HMC manager would make as much as $35 million in good years. Those sums triggered what became an annual Harvard tradition: first, the disclosure (compelled by tax laws applying to nonprofits) of the HMC bonuses, followed by an outcry led by the late William Strauss and a group of Harvard alumni from his class of 1969.

What a tangled fuckup we weave, when first we practice to make a university a trading operation… Okay, UD‘s going to help Harvard out here.

Here’s what you do. Figure Meyer plus four other guys each took home … let’s low-ball it… twenty million dollars a year. So… 100 million altogether? Figure they did this for five years… Five years of that and you’re talking about a serious rainy-day fund.

So what you do is ask these people to return as much of this money as seems to them appropriate. No doubt, since they care more about Harvard than personal greed, these people have already approached the university asking what they can do. It’s just a matter of Harvard formalizing the process.

The University of South Florida professor who stepped down from his position earlier this week wants to take back his resignation.

Dr. Abdul Rao, an associate dean and professor at USF’s School of Health, says he was rushed into a resignation after he was caught on tape and admitted to stealing a graduate student’s bicycle.

Rao accepted a 50,000 dollar buy out to resign from his 384,000 dollar per year position.

“Our position is his employment is over,” University Spoke[s]man Michael Hoad said. “And, anything different, his attorney will have to talk to our attorney.”

Professor Rao’s discovering that when you’re a thief — with a YouTube recording the fact, and a court case pending — jobs are scarce.

She teaches only one course a semester at the University of Florida.

In the sort of dinky program that assures small classes.

And she’s complaining.

Because her university wants her to teach two.

UF’s authority to change the agreement under which faculty are hired without their consent was questioned Thursday in a six–hour arbitration hearing.

UF and the faculty member in question each presented evidence concerning the university’s right to adjust her course load without her permission.

When Florence Babb, an endowed professor and graduate coordinator of UF’s Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, received her agreement letter in March 2004 outlining the terms of her hire, it determined she would teach one course per semester and promised her a research assistant.

Endowed faculty are expected to increase the university’s prestige with their contributions and research, and thus they often have lighter teaching loads.

Last March, Babb was informed via a letter from then–interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Joe Glover, that her teaching load would be increased from one course per semester to two courses per semester “because of the state’s fiscal difficulties and the severe budget cuts applied to UF.” Babb said to her knowledge she was the only endowed professor to receive such a letter at that time. She was also relieved of her research assistant. Babb said the lower course load allowed time to conduct research.

She filed a grievance in April 2008 and said that UF violated an agreement it has with the United Faculty of Florida, or UFF, the faculty union…

Icing on the cake: Her grievance will cost the university a lot of money.