… did everything he could to warn us.

It’s much, much, much worse now.

And scads of people are warning us.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

… Brittney Griner takes the pressure off of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert.

In UD‘s recent squirrels-at-universities post,
she forgot to mention squirrel fishing.

The sport originated, according to a number of
sources, at Harvard, where students attached
nuts to fishing poles and, as squirrels grabbed
onto the food, lifted the squirrels off the ground.

(See this primer and film.)

UD‘s very attracted to the idea of squirrel
fishing. There’s a sweetness and an
inventiveness here. You need very little
equipment. Squirrels are plentiful everywhere.
No one gets hurt. Competition is keen,
and there’s lots of room for strategy (type
of nut, placement, timing once the squirrel
locks on, etc.). Squirrels disrupt our lives
in countless ways, and this feels like an
innocuous form of revenge.

Wherever it originated, it seems most
prominent at the moment at Berkeley.

… the thumb of Pharma.

… Inside Higher Education.

Title: PROFESSORMATRONIC

From The Canadian Press:

After months of balancing a woman’s religious beliefs with her desire to learn French, the Quebec government stepped into her classroom to offer an ultimatum: take off the niqab or drop the course.

The woman opted to keep her Islamic face-covering and has filed a human-rights complaint against the government.

In a province where the government frequently faces accusations of doing too much to accommodate minorities, these actions have prompted a fair bit of praise. [In Canada, as in Europe and much of the Middle East, opposition to the niqab and burqa is strong. These identity-annihilators are outrageous anywhere, but they’re real insults in university settings.]

The woman began taking a French course designed for immigrants at a Montreal college in February but she refused to remove her niqab while men were present .  [As you read, note that the woman’s motives, as presented here, have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with hatred and fear of men.]

The college was initially willing to accommodate her, but eventually balked as her demands escalated.

According to a report in a Montreal newspaper, she was allowed to give an oral with her back to the class and asked men to move so they wouldn’t face each other. [Wouldn’t face other men? Wouldn’t face her? Whatever.] [Update, from another source: “[S]he demanded that male students who were sitting around her move their places so that she could sit surrounded by women. That was accommodated by the school.” … Good morning, class. Okay, ladies! Form your phalanx!]

The breaking point occurred when the woman again refused to take off the niqab, though teachers had stressed it was essential they see her face to correct her enunciation and facial expressions.

In what appears to be a highly unusual move, provincial Immigration Minister Yolande James intervened. Officials from her department, acting with the minister’s knowledge, met with the woman to discuss her options.

“The government has specific pedagogical objectives in its French courses,” said James’s spokesman, Luc Fortin.

“We couldn’t accept that these objectives, or the learning environment in the class, be compromised.”

Several groups, including several teachers’ unions, applauded the government for drawing a line in the sand. So did moderate Muslim groups…

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

UD thanks David.

The Oregonian:

Despite winning football seasons in recent years, sports finances for Oregon State University and the University of Oregon both fell in the red by the end of the last fiscal year, according to a report the State Board of Higher Education’s finance committee will review Friday.

Oregon State intercollegiate athletics’ ending balance, what the board calls working capital, was $5.9 million in the hole as of June 30, 2009, and the University of Oregon’s sports programs posted a $642,000 deficit.

State Board policy requires universities to keep their ending balances positive. The board probably will ask administrators from each university to come up with a plan to bring working capital, current assets minus liabilities, into the black.

Last December, a SUNY Binghamton professor was stabbed to death by a paranoid graduate student. The student was well known to police and fellow students for his threatening and crazy behavior, but was still a student at Binghamton.

Yesterday, a graduate student at the University of Florida famous for his big-lecture geography class about which one student, echoing other comments, writes “Impossible NOT to get an A,” was shot by police. It’s not clear what condition he’s in.

For a year, at least one professor and one counselor at the university had known that the student was seriously unstable:

Police first met with Adu-Brempong on Monday to check on him after a report of possible emotional problems.

Geography professor Peter Waylen had contacted police to say Adu-Brempong had sent an e-mail with troubling statements, which were redacted in the police report. Waylen told police Adu-Brempong had been having delusional thoughts for at least a year and that he previously had received help from a UF counselor because he believed the U.S. government was not going to renew his student visa, the report stated.

… Waylen and an officer spoke Monday with Adu-Brempong at his apartment.

“I asked Adu-Brempong if he had any concerns that I could help with. Adu-Brempong advised that he was fine and did not need anyone’s help,” Officer Gene Rogers wrote in the report. “I advised him that Waylen and I were concerned for his safety and were there to assist him any way we could.”

The report states Adu-Brempong refused help from a counselor and stated several times that he was fine.

Last night a neighbor called police because Adu-Brempong was screaming inside of his apartment. Details on what caused him to be shot are unclear at this point. Police say he threatened them with a knife and a pipe.

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

UD thanks a reader for sending her the Florida story.

… runs the headline at Business Week, and this one’s worth unpacking a bit.

Almost all of the colleges and universities University Diaries writes about are non-profits. They exist not to generate money for investors, but to educate people. They need enough funds, of course, to operate on as high a level as possible; but because their primary function involves a public good – enhancing the knowledge and skills of people – they receive various and significant state and federal government subsidies and tax exemptions.

Public institutions, like Berkeley, some of whose students and faculties have taken to the streets in protest against
state cutbacks (today, March 4, is a Day of Action, and a number of large rallies representing many public schools are expected), and private institutions (even insanely rich ones like Harvard), both receive all sorts of tax breaks along with government financial support.

The furloughs Mr UD and his colleagues at the University of Maryland have experienced, and the many other signs of institutional strain that this blog has noted at virtually all American universities, have of course to do with varying degrees of withdrawal of government funds from schools under the pressure of a bad economy.

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

Because our taxes support non-profit universities, we have a stake in making sure these places don’t use our money to give their presidents millions of dollars, or, like Harvard, to hoard massive endowments. Likewise, we have an obligation to keep an eye on the tax-exempt NCAA and tax-exempt universities with Division I-A football and basketball programs (indeed, many people now argue that the NCAA and these sorts of campus sports programs should lose their tax exemption).

My point is that all sorts of goodies, subsidized by the American taxpayer, come to universities, and universities expect (should expect) some level of government scrutiny (think too of Senator Charles Grassley’s many letters of inquiry to universities about possible conflicts of interest in their medical schools) and citizen scrutiny because of this.

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

Things start to get muddy when we turn to America’s burgeoning for-profit university industry.

For-profits aren’t bound by the non-profit ethos which says that our primary goal is to enhance the public good. For-profits are for profits. They’re doing what they do primarily to yield as much money as they can for investors. Because of this, the for-profit story, as UD has chronicled it over the course of this blog, has featured the sort of scandals you’d expect: Brazen recruitment of any student with a pulse, almost exclusively online curricula, and a practice of lying to recruits about graduation rates and job placements. One firm “paid a $6.5 million settlement in July 2007 to the California attorney general’s office, over allegedly misrepresenting graduates’ job placement rates and salaries. It also agreed to cease enrolling students in 11 programs at nine campuses.”

Now keep in mind that for-profits get massive federal support too. Typically over eighty percent of their revenue comes from you and from me.

So let’s go back to the headline on the Business Week article: Your Taxes Supporting For-Profit Firms as they Acquire Colleges.

How does that work?

Let’s start here:

A 2006 regulatory change fostered online growth and made takeovers more attractive… That year, Congress eliminated a rule prohibiting colleges that offered more than half of their courses online from receiving federal financial aid.

Well, this blog ain’t keen on online – UD calls it the poor white trash of education – but, you know, that’s just me. Congress loves it, and has made it easier for you to make an entirely online university. (I know. Diploma mills have been at this for years. Whole other subject.)

Anyway. Okay. So you can now make a really low-cost, really profitable university. Zillions of students all over the world, a few professors doing a lot of typing (How many students does each online class contain? I dunno. A thousand?), very little physical campus to maintain… You get the picture.

But – Did I say diploma mills were a whole other subject? They’re not really. You need to differentiate yourself from them, and that means real accreditation. Which is where we reenter the Business Week story:

ITT Educational Services Inc. paid $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June. In return, the company obtained an academic credential that may generate a taxpayer-funded bonanza worth as much as $1 billion.

ITT Educational, the U.S.’s third-biggest higher education company with a market value of $3.8 billion, may increase it by 26 percent, or $1 billion, within five years because of the purchase of 1,200-student Daniel Webster in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Michael Clifford, an investor in Del Mar, California, who has participated in the acquisitions of four nonprofit colleges. At least 75 percent of new revenue would come from access to the more than $100 billion a year in financial aid the U.S. hands out to college students, he said.

Key to tapping that money is Webster’s regional accreditation, which is the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard University and helps students transfer course credits from one college to another. Daniel Webster’s accreditation was its “most attractive” feature to ITT, said Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington law firm that has long represented the company.

“Companies are buying accreditation,” said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who studies for-profit higher education. “You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don’t have time. They want to boost enrollment 100 percent in two years.”

Let’s look more closely at what you’re getting as a student here:

The cost of attending an ITT Technical Institute, including tuition, fees and off-campus room and board, was $26,775 in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who entered ITT’s two-year schools in 2004, 29 percent graduated. ITT derived 70 percent of its 2009 revenue from federal financial aid, according to a company filing.

Wow. Where do I sign up? You get to pay Harvard rates for flunking out of a little-known academic institution. Plus, our taxes are paying for seventy percent of the school’s revenue!

Is our government watching out for us here?

The scrutiny these new for-profits get

“doesn’t remotely satisfy the sloppiest of due-diligence requirements,” said [Barmak] Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. “There is no methodical review of who has bought the college. If the Cosa Nostra applied, you would think you’d take a look.”

But the Department of Education is on it, man!

The U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that new for-profit colleges can’t qualify for assistance for two years, Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said in a telephone interview.

Under federal regulations taking effect July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the secretary of education if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50 percent in one year.

“It’s an area that we are watching closely,” Shireman said. “It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing.”

Kind of reminds you of the SEC when it was run by Bernie Madoff, doesn’t it?

From LEX18.com

Lexington police say that a University of Kentucky professor arrested Tuesday was involved in sex crimes.

According to court documents obtained by LEX 18 overnight, Dr. Robert Tannenbaum, 68, engaged in sexual acts with an adoptive relative four to five times a week between August 1998 and June 1999.

The relative was in eighth grade at the time.

Tannenbaum faces four counts of incest.

Tannenbaum is an important professor and administrator at UK.

Allen Frances (background here) continues to warn us. No one’s listening.

… This wholesale medical imperialization of normality could potentially create tens of millions of innocent bystanders who would be mislabeled as having a mental disorder. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day — despite the lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses.

… This is a societal issue that transcends psychiatry. It is not too late to save normality from DSM-V if the greater public interest is factored into the necessary risk/benefit analyses.

From a student opinion piece at Sam Houston State University:

One summer, I took a class with an especially dry subject matter. Sitting through lecture after lecture taken nearly verbatim from the chapter we were just quizzed on was absolutely numbing. What are we paying professors for if all they do is put the textbook up on PowerPoint and read it to us? Ten hours a week, wasted.

It’s a very unorthodox play, so pay attention:

The Sporting Blog:

CITADEL QUARTERBACK CHARGED WITH
ROBBERY OF ONE OF HIS OWN COACHES

Among the four people charged Saturday in a Charleston, S.C., armed robbery was Miguel Starks, who was being considered as the possible starting quarterback next season at The Citadel, and Reginald Anthony Rice, a former linebacker for the military academy, as well as two College of Charleston students.

The victim in the case is one of Starks’ own coaches at The Citadel, assistant coach Joshua Harpe of West Ashley.

A police affidavit states Starks pointed “a handgun (semiauto) at the victim, struck him once in the head with the handgun and ordered him back into (the) apartment … The defendant … then bound the victim with black duct tape around his legs, mouth and eyes and threw him face down on the living room floor.”…

UD thanks David.

… what expensive webs we weave when first we prosecute for libel.

From the transcript of Simon Singh’s appeal in response to the British Chiropractic Association’s libel action against him:

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I want to come back to something I raised before lunch which is still troubling me and it still has nothing to do with the outcome of the case, but here we are. Your clients [the BCA] are very steamed up at what they perceive to be a very serious libel. It has been said about them that they have indulged in happily promoting bogus treatments. Your case is – their case is: “That is absolute nonsense. We don’t. That’s not what we are running our professional lives for.”

It is now two years on, jolly nearly, since the matter that caused all this umbrage was published. The opportunity to put it right was not taken. The end of this litigation will not be for another how long – another twelve months?

MS ROGERS QC: Well that depends on a number of factors.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: Yes. So all the opportunities to put this right – to make it clear to the public that these allegations are nonsense – simply have not been taken, and yet it matters. I quite understand that it matters to your client that they should not have to put up with defamatory statements. I am just terribly troubled about the entire artificiality of all this and all of the huge expense. Somebody at the end of this litigation – somebody – is going to pay a vast amount of money. It will either be Dr Singh out of his funds or it will be your clients out of the contributions made by the subscriptions paid by their members. I am just baffled.

MS ROGERS QC: If your Lordship thinks that my clients relish spending years and money and time on this litigation, that is not right.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I do not think anybody is relishing this. No, forgive me. I am not for a moment thinking anybody is relishing it – plainly nobody is relishing it. But, at the end of the day, as to this issue about whether there is any reliable evidence [supporting various claims of chiropractic cure] or not as we speak now, it is either there or it is not. If there is reliable evidence, goodness gracious, why isn’t somebody publishing it?

Precisely the argument made to Calvo-Goller by the editors of the journal she believes libeled her. They offered her prominent space in their journal to comment and set things right. Instead, she sued, and is currently a figure of fun among the scholarly communities of the world.

Things have gone yet worse for the BCA. The trial has attracted enormous publicity to the way they advertise, and indeed to the legitimacy of the health claims they make.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

As the British Chiropractic Association’s battle with Simon Singh continues to work its way through the legal system, chiropractors are counting the financial costs of a major backlash resulting from a libel action that has left the Lord Chief Justice “baffled”. What was originally a dispute between the BCA and one science writer over free speech has become a brutally effective campaign to reform an entire industry.

A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures from the General Chiropractic Council.

The council, which is responsible for regulating the profession and has 2,400 chiropractors on its books, informs me that it has had to recruit six new members of staff to deal with a fifteenfold increase in complaints against its members – from 40 a year to 600. While it declined to comment directly on the costs inflicted by the reaction to the BCA’s actions, it is clear that a six-figure sum will be involved for the extra staffing costs alone, to which will have to be added the considerable costs of any misconduct hearings.

… who a few months ago wrote an excoriation of Brown’s president for the disrepute she brought to the school through her seat on the board of Goldman Sachs. (UD featured his opinion piece here.) Liebling wrote with the confidence, clarity, and ethical maturity most writers twice his age (nineteen) lack.

Liebling wrote to UD today, linking her to a New York Times article about the controversy at Brown. An excerpt from the article:

For Dr. Simmons, the controversy is not going away …quietly. Even though she said last month that she had decided not to stand for re-election to the board at the annual shareholders meeting later this year, some of her critics say she never should have taken the job at Goldman to begin with — and that she certainly should not have accepted so much money.

How much money?

A spot on a board, particularly at a moneymaker like Goldman, used to be considered a plum job. The demands were relatively modest compared with the rewards. Dr. Simmons, for instance, was paid $323,539 last year for her work on the board, and will soon leave her position at Goldman with stock that is currently worth about $4.3 million. That was on top of her salary at Brown, which was $576,000 this year.

Less of a plum now, what with all the public attention …

But anyway – here’s what’s wonderful:

Simon Liebling, a sophomore from Highland Park, N.J., got tongues wagging on College Hill when he criticized Dr. Simmons in The Daily Herald.

“Most people agreed with my basic point that this brought shame on the university,” Mr. Liebling, 19, said during an interview in a coffee shop at the center of campus. “It has been taken by most people to be outrageous.”

Bravo, Liebling.