Greece will finally allow private colleges to operate this fall.

Or maybe not.

Greece’s terrific higher education sector isn’t happy about this, and may torch all the cities in response.

After all, September’s around the corner.

Tailgaters at this season’s Texas Tech football home games could see changes to the university’s alcohol policy and will have to seek alternative parking spots as the campus accommodates stadium construction.

A proposed change to the university’s alcohol policy would ban kegs from the campus…

… The university already bans alcoholic beverages from the campus, but Student Government Association President Suzanne Williams said that hasn’t stopped tailgaters in campus parking lots from consuming alcohol before and during football games.

“It’s become where policy and practice are very different things,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure the policy is up to the practice.”

Some reader comments:

I would be for anything that could bring some class to what has become a black eye for the University. I hear too many first hand reports of ill-treatment of visitors like vehicle vandalism,verbal confrontations of people wearing opposing jerseys from drunks and don’t forget the classless profanity laced altered fight song. I hear more people say that the Lubbock experience is just not worth the trip.

How about enforcing the rules you have now and throwing the drunks in jail. The TTU police have their hands tied because heaven forbid they throw the wrong guy (big donor) in jail…

… I’ve seen an older drunk Tech fan punch and knock down a sober opposing fan, just for cheering for his team. I’ve also had that turned towards me and my family. It was so bad that none of my family will go back to Jones for a game….

Here’s TTU’s problem. You want to keep them drunk enough not to notice that Alberto Gonzales is on the faculty earning $100,000 for teaching one course, but not so drunk that they attack visitors.

But this might be Number One.

It makes it SO easy to cheat. And to charge other people money for helping them cheat.

Distance education makes it easy for students to learn nothing, while at the same time allowing people in the distance education office to supplement their salaries.

Best thing about it — Even when people get caught, the university can’t stop it from happening again!

Read and learn. But you probably already know.

A two-month UTB-TSC police investigation found school employees in 2008 had committed “gross academic fraud” after student employees and regular staff used their positions to steal test answers, according to a UTB police report obtained by The Brownsville Herald.

The wrongdoing occurred within the Blackboard Learning System, an online service commonly used at universities.

The system allows professors to post tests and course materials for students, teach entire courses online and keep online grade books. Blackboard generally serves to enrich the learning experience; however, former student employees of the school’s Office of Distance Education, the office that manages Blackboard, confessed to a police investigator that they had used the online system to access test answers to help themselves cheat, give the answers to other students, or even to sell.

… The police report shows that one student employee, who worked in the Office of Distance Education, sold test answers to another student through a student middleman for $60. The student employee got $30 and the middleman got $30. That same student employee agreed to take a test for another student in exchange for $40. A different student middleman was involved in this deal, but it’s unclear how much money that person was to receive. The student employee said he never received payment in this scam.

“The agreement was I would take the exam for a friend of (the middleman) and score no less than 96,” the student employee wrote in his confession. “The friend would then give (the middleman) $40, so that (the middleman) could give (the money) to me.”

That student goes on to give a detailed explanation of how he was able to obtain the other student’s Blackboard password, and take the test for the friend on one monitor, while pulling up the answers to the exam on a second computer screen.

“It was very easy to use this method,” he wrote. That student employee also said he stole answers for a friend to give to a girl his friend wanted to “get with.”…

— Brownsville Herald —

Sweet review of what sounds like a sweet book of reminiscences about time spent at Oxford University.

From the review:

…This idea of a university as a ­community of civilized and civilizing discourse has been exported all over the English-speaking world, almost by osmosis. It has only occasionally been spun into words—by educators such as, in the 19th century, John Henry Newman, the Catholic convert who became a cardinal and is shortly to become a saint, and, in the 20th century, Robert Hutchins at the ­University of Chicago.

But the book goes on to note how uncivilized Oxford’s culture could be, too.

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

Great cover, by the way.

Goes as well with this blog’s
color scheme as that blue rat.

“This is THE week,” says Syd, our landlord. “Every school in America is closed. It’s wild around here. Get ready to stand in lines.”

… Rehoboth Beach dispatches
from UD, here’s a glamour
shot of La Kid, taken
last June on the beach.

As always, blogging
continues apace,
whatever my location.

From a newspaper article excerpted in University Diaries, July 16, 2007:

Teachers, students and administrators tampered with a private college’s computer system to change grades and create fake degrees for money, prosecutors charged Monday. Among the fake degrees given were those for physicians’ assistants, they said.

The 10 defendants created or altered records for at least 50 people since January , charging fees of $3,000 to $25,000 for better or deleted grades and for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.

Those indicted include Touro College’s former director of admissions, the former director of the school’s computer center, three former Touro students and three public school teachers, Manhattan prosecutors said.

“One dangerous thing they did was give degrees to physicians’ assistants,” Morgenthau said.

Records found in the home of Andrique Baron, a former admissions director at Touro’s campus in Manhattan, showed he was running the scheme as early as 2003 and possibly earlier, Morgenthau said.

“We don’t know how many hundreds, maybe thousands, were involved,” the district attorney said.

Baron’s main accomplice was Michael Cherner, former director of the computer center at the school’s Brooklyn campus, Morgenthau said.

Baron, 34, and Cherner, 50, also took bribes to create master’s degree transcripts for three city schoolteachers who never attended Touro, said the district attorney.

Money was collected from the teachers by a bagman identified in Baron’s cell phone by the nickname Jimmy Bag, the district attorney said.

… Baron spent the cash on two luxury cars, high-end audio equipment and huge flat-screen television sets in almost every room in his home, Morgenthau said.

Six of the 10 defendants were arrested at various times from March to July on charges of computer trespass, computer tampering and falsifying business records. Baron, Cherner and the bag man also were charged with bribe receiving. All the charges are punishable by up to four years in prison.

Four of the 10 defendants are at large.

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

New York Post, yesterday:

A second Touro College computer honcho is going to prison for running his office as a literal diploma mill — pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from students seeking better transcripts, glowing letters of recommendation and in a few cases completely fabricated degrees.

“This was a horrendous betrayal of trust,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber told the crook, Andrique Baron, 36, of Elmont, L.I., before sentencing him this afternoon to serve between 2 2/3 and 8 years prison.

Baron was the former director of admissions for Touro’s School of Career and Applied Studies on West 23rd St.

For at least four years, he and his co-defendant — Mikhail “Michael” Cherner, the former computer director at the Kings Highway, Brooklyn, campus — took money from a dozen students, who were also charged, in a “Sawbucks-for-Sheepskins” scandal that became public two years ago.

Some of Cherner and Baron’s “customers” merely changed “F’s” to “A’s” on their transcripts.

Three teachers paid $3,000 each to buy the Masters degree required to teach special ed.

A Queens man bought a bogus psychology masters, while a Brooklyn woman bought her bachelors without taking a single class, and a fake letter of recommendation to law school went for $50,000.

When the scandal broke, prosecutors said they feared the pair had sold doctored degrees to as many as 50 people — including some for physicians assistants and physical therapists.

The Board of Ed, which issues licenses in these fields, had to sift through the credentials of thousands of Touro alumni to be sure there were no bogus teachers, therapists or medical personnel working in the city, said prosecutor Jonathan Lenzner.

The horrible publicity affected everything from accreditation to admissions to the ability to get bank loans, said Frank Snitow, a lawyer for the college, which has 17,000 students internationally. [They seem to have dumped the Career and Applied Studies name. UD can’t find it on their website.]

Baron apologized in court, peevishly — bemoaning he didn’t get a “second chance” — before being led out in cuffs.

… the anal fixates at Harvard University.

… That Harvard’s endowment exists to advance education and research is not what an observer would infer from the institution’s behavior. Instead, Harvard appears to have decided to put financial dominance ahead of the current needs of students, families, and citizens — even while the institution remains almost unfathomably wealthy. Taxpayers, who help to support this nonprofit, have reason to ask whether this is the best choice.

Harvard has options, even if its financial gurus find many of them unattractive. The institution’s academic leaders need to remind them that endowment investment and spending decisions must be guided by the twin goals of furthering education and research, not winning the hedge fund Olympics.

And if Harvard’s gurus found it acceptable to follow an investment strategy that could, and did, lose close to 25 percent in a year, then they should certainly deem spending a few tenths of a percent more to hold harmless the operating budget acceptable, too…

Time to remind you of this editorial
cartoon from a few years ago:

Another entry in UD‘s series, That Which Does Not Kill Me.

At 5-feet-0 and 107 pounds, Melina Bell looks more like, say, a college philosophy professor than a champion bodybuilder.

As it happens, she’s both. And to prove it, Bell just won a major bodybuilding title to go along with the several scholarly papers she has written on the philosophy of women’s bodybuilding.

An assistant professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University, Bell just won both the Open Lightweight and Open Overall titles at the 30th Annual IART (International Association of Resistance Trainers) Hercules Bodybuilding Championships Pro-Qualifier. This qualified her as a WNBF (World Natural Bodybuilding Federation) pro bodybuilder…

After finishing second in her first two regional contests, Bell asked the judges what she needed to improve on for the next contest. “They told me certain areas to work on with my physique. So I worked on those areas and made great progress. Then after the third contest, again coming in second, I asked the judges for more input, and they said ‘You should really consider putting some pads in your top to give yourself a more feminine figure. And have someone help you with your hair as we really don’t like the way you’ve done it.’”…

[She has been invited to] write an essay on gender norms and women’s bodybuilding, titled “Is Women’s Bodybuilding Unfeminine?,” for the forthcoming book Strength and Philosophy…

…  has more details of the Continuing Medical Education hearing at the Senate.  (UD live blogged part of it here.)  Some morsels from Carlat:

[One CME defender] conflated two issues: the remarkable advances in medicine over the past few decades and industry funding of CME. The two are not related. We’ve had advances in medicine because of great science and appropriate interactions between doctors and industry–bona fide relationships based on developing products and conducting clinical trials. None of these relationships would be threatened in any way by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act or by the IOM’s proposal to greatly scale back industry funding of CME.

My favorite moment of the hearing was when Senator Al Franken directly confronted [this speaker], saying (again, I’m paraphrasing): “You seem to draw a lot of conclusions from anecdotes of people who have benefited from modern medicine. Medicine is a lot better now than when we were kids, but that doesn’t mean that industry should fund CME.”

[The] comments [from the CME accrediting organization spokesperson] were disappointing in the extreme. He repeated a single refrain, saying, in essence: “There is no problem with bias in CME. We are doing our job well. ACCME is the firewall between promotion and education.” C’mon … You know what’s going on. You’ve seen the many, many letters of complaint reporting biased programs. In fact, you reprimanded one company for bias within the last few months–I know, because the reprimand was based on my letter. It only took you about two years to issue your decision. I won’t mention the specifics in this blog because I promised you I wouldn’t.

Four Kentucky State University football players are facing charges of robbery and now their coach says he’s been fired without cause.

21-year-old Cordell Key, 23-year-old Jemario Dorsey, 19-year-old Jerrel Noland and 21-year-old Nathaniel Mills of Louisville were all arrested.

The players were arrested at a restaurant near the UK campus after allegedly trying to steal the restaurant’s tip jar.

Meanwhile, Fred Farrier, the head coach at the Frankfort University says he was fired over the weekend.

But because they named themselves The Airborne Toxic Event, the central plot element in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I’ve sort of kept up with them anyway.

When I phone-interviewed Mikel Jollett of the L.A.-based indie-pop-rock band the Airborne Toxic Event, it surprised me when he said:

“We wanted a name that was a big fuck-you to names,” he said of the Don DeLillo-novel-inspired band name. “People say, ‘It really turned me off when I first heard that name.’ And I say, ‘Good, I’m glad.'”

… Jollett’s a smart dude. He’s an aspiring fiction writer and has written stuff for Filter magazine and the L.A. Times. He was mid-novel when he felt called to become a rockstar.

“I came to this crossroads. I had to decide whether to finish my novel or play music,” he said. “I had a literary agent and I was getting published and I had a column at NPR and my writing was going really well. It [had taken] years to get to that point. But then I was like, ‘I’m gonna start a band.'”

That was in 2006 and the ATE has since released a multi-hit record and are touring extensively around the world (“there’s definitely a lot of globetrotting going on,” Jollett said). He continues to make progress with his novel, though — an excerpt was recently published in McSweeney’s.

“You know that Bukowski poem, ‘How To Be A Great Writer‘?** ‘If you want to be a great writer, first of all you have to fuck a great deal of women,'” Jollett quoted. “I don’t think that’s true, actually. I doubt Steinbeck fucked that many women.”

Not knowing exactly how many women Steinbeck laid pipe to, Jollett continued, citing his interesting upbringing as being something of, but not completely, an inspiration for his music and writing.

“My parents had a healthy disrespect for all things conventional. They met in a commune, and I was born on that commune. They were kinda hippies, like starcrossed lovers. You know how the ’60s produced all these odd couplings? That was one of them,” he said….

I know, I know. A very weirdly written article. SOS can’t even figure out how to fix it…. Is the writer high?

————————–

** Pot-banging piece of crap. But don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself.

… university professor.

(Scroll down for the trailer.)

When UD looks out her back
windows at her overgrown forest,
it’s all about birds. They’re everywhere.

Just now, UD saw a female red
cockaded woodpecker on top of
her garden fence.

UD thanks a reader for alerting her to the latest Grassley letter, this one sent to the Naval Medical Center, just a hop, skip, and a jump from UD‘s house.

Once again, Senator Grassley wants to know about any “failure to report outside income by a physician at your institution.”

How do you think he’ll do? He’s sent out dozens of these letters, and so far he’s batting a thousand. Let’s keep backing a winner.