A student writes in the University of Saskatchewan newspaper:

… Think about what you’re paying for each class. In Term 2 there are approximately 24 lectures per course. With the course costing approximately $600 and the text at, oh say $100, that’s nearly $30 per class. For about an hour long lecture, is it really worth the money? For 30 bucks you could go see two movies … and even get snacks for each! Even if one of the movies sucks, you’re still getting more entertainment value than a prof reading some PowerPoint slides.

Oh, sure, sure, but school isn’t about entertainment. It’s about learning and education. Let’s not lie to ourselves; there’s not much of that going on. So if we aren’t learning we should at least be entertained. And as fun as it is watching documentaries when the prof is too lazy to give a lecture; it’s just not worth the moolah…

… [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.”…

As jobs for attorneys disappear, campuses like UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts establish new law schools. Debt-burdened unemployables are loosed upon the world.

A win-win situation, and since the American Bar Association accredits anything with a pulse, we can expect more of it.

An opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times gives some background and makes some suggestions:

… From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

… A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt.

… Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine…

[G]ive [accrediting] authority to an organization that is free of conflicts of interest, such as the Assn. of American Law Schools or a new group. Although the AALS is made up of law schools, it is an independent, nonprofit, academic — not professional — group, which could be expected to maintain the viability and status of the profession, properly regulate law schools, curtail the opening of new programs and perhaps even shut down unneeded schools. The AALS has cast a very skeptical eye [for instance] on for-profit schools, compared with the ABA’s weak hands-off accreditation policies…

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.

UD admires T.S. Eliot. She recently, on this blog, discussed a short poem of his.

As UD prepares to teach – next week – a course on modernism, she checks to make sure Eliot’s cultural centrality numbers are as high as ever.

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Here’s her first hit on Google News for T.S. Eliot, from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:

“Not with a bang but a whimper.”

T.S. Eliot was talking about the end of the world, not the power-charged Pontiac, proud maker of Firebirds, GTOs and other muscle cars.

You could probably have gotten a good deal on a Pontiac this week – such as a discount and 0 percent financing – with GM phasing out the brand at year’s end ..

The Waste Land is the Eliot poem everyone knows about, of course, but The Hollow Men — its last lines anticipating the death of the GTO — has also worked its way into the popular mind.

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Two items of interest about The Waste Land convey how powerful that work remains.

The beach shelter at Margate, where Eliot went for a few weeks in 1921 to recover from a mental breakdown, and where he wrote an early draft of the poem (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”), has been designated a protected Special Architectural or Historic Interest site. “To anyone that cares about poetry, the shelter is a shrine, a temple, a small monument to a great genius,” comments Andrew Motion, a recent poet laureate.

Plus there’s a current production of The Waste Land on a London stage. Excerpts from the show, and some conversation about it, here.

First Kansas, then Texas Tech, and now the University of South Florida. Where will it end?

Texas Tech fans are outraged, and I’m sure we’ll hear from USF fans shortly as their own beloved sadist is fired. As Texas Tech people have pointed out, violence against your players when they’ve fucked up is a venerable coaching tradition in university football. Bottom line, it works. That’s why university coaches have the highest salaries on campus.

… proprietor of the blog You
Made Me Theorize, sends her
news of the latest edition
of a Joseph Conrad classic.

A Limerick About An Asshole

An envoy from Guinea-Bissau
Got a ticket for two hundred thou.
I was over the limit? Oops. Sorry.
You know how it is with Ferraris…
I’m immune from your laws anyhow.

…We pay [UW president Mark Emmert] more than he could ever possibly need, while students are being priced out of the seats.

Yes. That is the brilliant strategy that the University of Washington, at a time of terrible financial difficulties, has adopted.

… [Missouri] Gov. Jay Nixon doesn’t appear to be interested in choosing a new poet laureate who comes with controversy. His application for the post includes questions asking an applicant whether there’s anything in his or her background that could embarrass the governor.

Nixon’s spokesman, Sam Murphey, said the questions are standard for anyone seeking appointment to a state board or commission.

He did not return follow-up phone calls, nor did he respond to e-mailed questions asking for specific examples of what might embarrass the governor.

Application forms for poets laureate in other states do not ask similar questions.

Walter Bargen, the outgoing poet laureate who was appointed by former Gov. Matt Blunt, said he did not have to fill out an application, but he and his wife did agree to a Missouri State Highway Patrol background check. Blunt’s staff also asked whether there was anything they should know about. Bargen told them, “I grew up in the ’60s,” and that he once used the word “nipple” in a poem…

From Crosscut, Seattle.

An editorial in North Jersey:

… The same state university that has gone into deep debt to expand its football stadium now is seriously considering a massive overhaul of its athletic center. This is a very bad idea.

The Rutgers Athletic Center has not been expanded since it was built 31 years ago. A bigger and better center may be desired, but now is not the time. The proposed expansion includes a new basketball practice facility, adds premium and club seats, replaces the playing court and scoreboard and creates an atrium that would house retail stores and a hall of fame. New coaching offices also would be built.

To date, there are no estimated costs for the ambitious plan, but Rutgers hopes private fund raising, plus income from the sale of premium and club seats, will pay for the project. Where have we heard that before? Ah, yes, Rutgers’ football stadium.

The expanded stadium was going to be financed with private funds. But the money didn’t materialize and the university had to borrow much of the needed $102 million. Has no one inside the athletics department noticed the recession?…

The University of Cincinnati’s sports program will need up to $11 million in new funding every year to be competitive in the Big East Conference, but it still is running a deficit every year and owes millions of dollars from past overspending.

A new report also shows that UC’s Athletic Department is losing about $3.5 million a year and has amassed a $24 million debt, mainly from a shortfall in construction of the Varsity Village complex on campus.

… UC will start construction soon on a new sports complex along Jefferson Avenue that will include football practice fields, but a potential expansion of Nippert Stadium – and whether UC can afford a project that could cost up to $50 million – looms over the program…

… is a classic disorder among degree fraudsters.

UD‘s been saying for years that if you want to get by with a diploma mill degree or just a degree you made up out of your head, you need to keep your sheepskin stats low.

UD understands it’s tempting, as long as you’re manufacturing your own awards, to give yourself three or four or five. But the danger is that if anyone investigates you, all those PhDs will look odd.

Currently a lad of 31, Jason Walker “taught three undergraduate courses, as well as one graduate course” in some medical subject or other at the University of Victoria. This was in 2006, so he was what? 27? But already at 27 he had ” two or three doctorates in forensic and behavioural sciences and medical epidemiology.” These and earlier degrees were from a variety of schools:

Among the academic institutions Walker has claimed to have studied at are the University of Victoria, the University of Calgary, McMaster University, the University of Toronto, Yale University and Smith College.

Smith College is an all-women liberal arts institution in Massachusetts.

I guess he liked the anonymity of the name Smith.

Anyway, Walker recently gave expert advice in some child custody thing in Canada, and someone in some office checked up on him, and now he’s in deep Vancouverian doodoo.

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Update:

… [P]olice became suspicious about his academic background when someone looked closely at a University of Toronto degree on his office wall, spokeswoman Sgt. Julie Fast said.

“It says it’s a Ph.D. in ‘philiosthy.’ That is how it’s spelled,” she said…

UD says philiosthy is a variant of philioque, itself a variant of filioque. This was a theology degree.

The man who until recently managed Wesleyan’s investments wrote this to his wife in an email when he still worked at Wesleyan.

He was excited about the extra money he was about to make (Wesleyan paid him $500,000 or so, sickeningly low when you consider that his peers at Harvard until recently got thirty million dollars a year) from — just like Phyllis Wise and Mark Emmert at board-seat-crazy University of Washington — sitting on a bunch of corporate boards.

This guy, Tom Kannam, also opened up tons of new businesses while working for Wesleyan (he billed Wesleyan, according to a lawsuit the college has filed against him, for travel and other stuff associated with these ventures), and generally seems to have regarded his Wesleyan job as a kind of stupid side gig he held onto because it gave him access to information and connections that moved his real money-making activities along.

The Kannam family emails Wesleyan’s gotten hold of and presented in its suit are wondrous to behold. When Kannan tells his wife that Wesleyan has just updated its conflict of interest policy and that the policy looks really serious, she responds: Oucheroo.