The dean of the Kent State University Stark Campus, who resigned abruptly last week, did so after being stopped by security while spray-painting a parking sign on neighboring Stark State College of Technology’s campus.

The incident prompted a police report, but no charges have been filed.

Betsy Boze in an interview today said she “was simply correcting an error on the sign.”

Spray-paint was used to deface two signs on Stark State’s campus, according to police. Boze said the spray-paint was “not graffiti.

“But it was simply removing an arrow pointing to the parking lot that was incorrect and correcting it,” she said.

Boze declined to elaborate when pressed with more questions.

“I want to give you more, but I can’t,” she said.

She submitted her resignation Thursday, effective Friday.

Jackson Township Police continue to investigate the incident, which occurred at 11 a.m. Feb. 15. That was a Sunday when regular classes weren’t in session…

Two signs were altered during the incident — one sign on the east-end of the campus, near the main entrance and one on the west end of the campus…

As Mary Lee Barton, professor of management, spoke to her students, she couldn’t help but notice a couple of her students laughing and pointing at another student’s open laptop in front of them. The laughing and pointing continued, so she told the student to put it away and went on with the lecture.

Curious as to what was so funny, she pulled the giggling students aside once class ended, she said.

“I asked some of these fellas afterward, ‘What was so funny on his laptop?'” Barton said. “And they said he was looking at pornography.”…

The Orion, California State University, Chico newspaper.

… in the New York Times.

Not really enough meat in the article for UD to chew on, but maybe you’ll find something.

… kayaking and snorkeling the out islands off Key West.

Will blog tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a new Inside Higher Ed post.

… all over the place today, making futile arguments against bigtime university football and basketball.

…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.