These can be twisted, inept, inventive, off the charts; but the classic university fraud – UD has no idea why, but she’s been covering university frauds for a long time – involves the director of an engineering-related program, a guy, who creates a fake company and gives his grant money from the federal government to that company and then uses it to buy a condo on a golf course and a Lexus and a whole lotta other shit.

Not that I want to beat up on my already unranked institution, but George Washington University experienced exactly such a fraud just a few years ago.

Since these always go according to a rather strict formula, you’d figure schools would have guards posted at the doors of their directors of engineering programs, but I guess this is not considered good form. In any case, it keeps happening, with Morgan State University the latest case.

A full-time engineering professor at Morgan State University was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday in an alleged scheme to defraud the National Science Foundation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding.

Manoj Kumar Jha, 45, who oversees the university’s transportation engineering graduate program, according to the university’s website, allegedly fabricated an elaborate research proposal on behalf of a private company he founded and then applied for funding through the NSF’s Small Business Technology Transfer program, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office…. Jha received $200,000 to conduct the research but instead allegedly made personal mortgage and credit card payments, paid his wife $11,000 for work she didn’t do and wrote himself a $6,000 check, prosecutors said.

Jha, who is also the founding director of Morgan State’s Center of Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research, also applied for $500,000 more for the project but did not receive it, prosecutors said.

And what a tangled web we weave!

In March 2011, Jha allegedly sent back faked time sheets for a purported research scientist as well as a copy of a faked expenditure ledger “in which he allegedly entered fictitious research expenses in order to conceal the fact that NSF funds had been converted to Jha’s personal use,” prosecutors said.

(This just in – via Wendy, a reader.)

UD‘s university must now lie – at least for a while – – in the unranked sweat of an enseamed bed. That is, because George Washington University for years misrepresented the class rank of entering students, it is being punished to the nth degree by US News and World Report.

George Washington University on Wednesday lost its U.S. News and World Report ranking as one of the top national universities because the school revealed it had erroneously reported data on incoming students for more than a decade.

The private university held the coveted 51st ranking on the “Best Colleges” listing of the top 200 national universities. But U.S. News said the use of incorrect data in the September publication made the school’s rank higher than it would have been.

U.S. News said the school will have an “unranked” status until the publication of its 2014 edition of “Best Colleges” and until the school confirms the accuracy of its data.

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

NOTE TO THE MEDIA:

As a professor at George
Washington University, I
am available to be
interviewed about how

traumatic this is.

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

Sing it with me:

So yank me and wank me,
Spank me, unrank me,
I’m yours ‘til I die,
So in love,
So in love
So in love with you, my love, am I.

Eric, a reader, points UD in the direction of a wonderful piece of writing.

… this is about, right? Seems the Hardin County (Texas) GOP treasurer wants to secede from us maggots – them’s the word he used – what done elected Barack Hussein Obama. The Hardin County GOP seems to have rustled itself up a new treasurer real quick.

Morrison was recently “chosen by former State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy to help screen Texas public school textbooks,” but look on the bright side. He can’t do any more damage than has already been done to Texas public school students.

Commentary is a propaganda sheet, directed, as degenerate movements often are, by a beneficiary of nepotism, in order to advance a moribund ideology and the interests of one faction in a foreign country. It’s an almost text-book case of intellectual decline and fall.

Four college students, likely to be five including [Chico State’s Mason] Sumnicht, [who has been taken off life support,] have died this semester [in Chico] from alcohol or drug abuse […].

“It seems incomprehensible,” [a policewoman] said.

One friend wonders if, for his 21st birthday, Sumnicht attempted to drink 21 shots.

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It’s not entirely clear from news reports, but this seems to be the breakdown: Two of these deaths have been Chico State students; one seems to have been a person visiting Chico State. Two others who died were students at other colleges in the town of Chico.

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Judging by this 2005 article, recent Chico State presidents have tried, and tried hard. Faculty were almost totally uncooperative (“[F]aculty do not perceive it as their responsibility… to deal with this serious problem.”), despite the fact that, as the two presidents who wrote the article note, “they have tremendous influence on their students.” The presidents suggest shutting down the fraternities.

That hasn’t happened.

What to do? The town’s a toxic site, and Chico State, with its disastrous history of self-destructive student drunks, is its epicenter.

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Since the stubbornness of the destruction suggests that the core problem is a profoundly – maybe permanently – embedded culture of booze, one approach would be to empty the campus of students. At the end of this academic year, announce that all students must transfer to another institution. Close down all fraternities and sororities, and do other things to make it difficult to drink yourself to death (this would include getting far tougher with bars, the local city council, advertisers, etc.). Once you’ve done all that, admit a new freshman class. Make it clear to those admitted that they are part of a new Chico, and if they can’t sober up they will be expelled right away.

… on this blog, has died.

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Update: A fine account of Gilbert’s career and his last days.

A former Oxford lecturer stole all the money of a design firm which had temporarily employed her. She

plundered the firm’s accounts to spend thousands of pounds at stores including internet couture site “Net a Porter” and Selfridges.

She also hired holiday homes in Portugal, spent £10,000 flying a friend to London from Italy and made out cheques for thousands of pounds.

When she realised the police were on her tail, [Maria] Di Natale tried to have two incriminating computers stolen from the company offices.

She

covered her tracks by ensuring the company financial system was “almost wholly destroyed.”

Then, when the previous financial controller was asked to return to the company, Di Natale suggested selling the company to avert bankruptcy – to a firm she owned.

An investigation by an accountancy firm found she had spent £13,286 on Portuguese holidays, £17,000 on renting a flat for her and her husband and £2,840 on a chaise longue.

She had also hired a jet to fly in an associate to London for a charity football match.

She should not go to jail, her lawyer argued, because she is

suffering from bipolar disorder.

She will go to jail. For five years.

… from the usually staid Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read the whole thing. Do not miss the videos.

Because every paragraph of it is good, it’s hard for UD to choose an excerpt. I guess this is her favorite:

Here’s the course description of “General Humanities II,” taught by Michael Coker, an English instructor at Western Oklahoma. “We start with the Renaissance and move to the present,” he says in an online video. “We cover art, culture, society, religion, politics. The humanities is a very broad topic, and we cover essentially everything that leads up to our modern society, the ideas that inform our modern world.”

Sounds like a really interesting class — but seven centuries in 50 hours? That may seem daunting, Mr. Coker acknowledges. “But I’ve designed the class to be doable in 10 days,” he says in the video. “If you don’t have a lot going on in those 10 days, the class is not overly difficult.”

There’s only one downside to this writer having so outdone himself. You can already see his piece for next year:

Some accreditors have questioned whether a ten-minute course on the decline of the Roman Empire can really legitimately cover the material. “It sounds daunting,” acknowledges its instructor, “but if you don’t have a lot going on in those ten minutes, it’s a cinch.”

… — by far —” has really hit the ground running.

But then when you hire Mike Leach you should expect your money to be paying for more than coaching. When you take on at vast expense a person just fired – because of allegations of player abuse – by Texas Tech, pain slut … Texas Tech, a school that never saw a sadist it didn’t like… You should probably expect a little roughing up in exchange for all that cash.

You should also expect Leach to sue your ass and everybody else’s. Even though he always loses. After costing you millions of dollars in legal fees.

Yes, Mike Leach was quite the hot prospect when Washington State eagerly took him on board and gave him all its money. How utterly unexpected that just after he’s begun coaching there a prominent player has left the school, charging abuse by Leach’s staff. How totally shocked Washington State will be when Leach’s lawsuits against it start coming in.

UD long ago failed to be amazed by the criminal stupidity of certain American football factories. She does continue to be amazed that no responsible adults – faculty, trustees – exist at those schools.

… or they’ll never disclose.

And that’s what Rose Hackman, a Columbia University student, has done with regard to tight-lipped Business School professor Glenn Hubbard, star of the film Inside Job.

Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard is … featured in [the film] “Inside Job.” In interviews in the film, Dean Hubbard is asked about his extensive ties to the financial service industry, including a 2004 paper written with the then-Goldman Sachs chief economist, William C. Dudley (now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York), in which Hubbard praised credit derivatives as enhancing economic stability, reducing volatility, and making recessions less frequent and severe. According to the New York Times, Warren Buffett has called these same practices “financial weapons of mass destruction” that are widely acknowledged by many economists as having helped trigger the crisis.

Following the film’s release, along with other single-school initiatives, Columbia Business School nominally addressed critics by establishing a committee headed by Hubbard’s vice dean, Christopher Mayer. The result was a pledge by the committee to go beyond University transparency requirements. The pledge asked Business School faculty to declare all outside activities on an online CV, linked to each faculty member’s individual website.

But Hubbard’s position as economic advisor to the former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney still remains absent from his online Columbia profile. His ties to the Analysis Group, a consultancy firm which has placed him as an expert defending financial industry players, also remains absent.

A campus policeman killed the person wielding the sword. It’s too soon to know whether this was a student at Metropolitan State University, or whether the person with the sword was drunk or high, etc.

… by Edmund Blunden, who fought in the First World War.

He wrote this in 1936.

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Can You Remember?

Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

Thanks to the substantial income that poured in over the years from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, inspired by Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she was able to give seven-figure donations for a new wing of the London Library (Eliot had been its president) and to Newnham College, Cambridge. She also donated £15,000 for the annual TS Eliot prize for poetry.

My latest Inside Higher Education post.