… what else? The Penn State mess. It’s not up yet. I’ll let you know when it’s been published. Meanwhile – a reminder. You can always check UD‘s IHE posts by clicking on READ MORE UD AT IHE on the right side of this page.
… what else? The Penn State mess. It’s not up yet. I’ll let you know when it’s been published. Meanwhile – a reminder. You can always check UD‘s IHE posts by clicking on READ MORE UD AT IHE on the right side of this page.
The scandal of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox.
The Sandusky story moves to another campus.
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Ronald A. Smith, professor emeritus of sports history at Penn State, said the university is particularly invested in portraying itself as a “pristine institution.” Anything that interferes with that narrative, he said, is likely to be hidden.
“The more important it is, the more likely there will be a cover-up,” said Mr. Smith …
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Technique from Sandusky.
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Having a child-care center named for an administrator charged with inaction in a child sex-assault case adds fuel to a public-relations crisis that has besieged Penn State in the last several days.
It lets itself be duped into hiring diploma mill grads and giving them huge salaries and responsibilities.
Not too bright out there in the heartland.
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UD thanks Rick.
Dig: The chair of GW’s physician assistant program
did not teach two out of three semesters of a course on evidence-based medicine during the 2009-2010 school year. In … letters, obtained by The Associated Press, the students claim they were never told why the classes weren’t taught and that they were all given “A” grades.
LOL! What was this chick thinking? Can this story be accurate?? Let’s see if Rate My Professors has anything on just-resigned Venetia Orcutt… No. But here’s her webpage at her last job and it’s got two teaching awards listed!
Think about her teaching method. It’s so simple, so ingeniously, brilliantly simple. A simple transaction. Goes like this.
You pay GW tuition.
I give you an A.
You keep your trap shut about it because you’ve never been offered a better deal than full credit and a guaranteed A for NOTHING. NADA. See me wave you away from my office with an imperial flick of my wrist. Off with you! Go and sin no more and I shall put an A on your grade sheet…
No but maybe not so brilliant. Recall the expression there’s one in every crowd. In every crowd there’s some spoiler, some petit morceau de merde who absolutely must follow the rules blah blah. Or maybe even worse there’s some freak who wants to learn something about being a physician assistant before beginning a physician assistant job search. Clearly these sorts of people are going to rat on you.
… from a Northern Illinois University student. It’s about classroom PowerPoint use.
[W]hen we graduate from this prison of perpetual PowerPoints, the information we will have to learn is not going to be presented to us in slide form…
Prison of perpetual PowerPoints is excellent.
The only reason why I can think you, professors, rely on PowerPoint presentation is because you are lazy. Why require students to know the material before class when you can just read it to them? Why spend time formulating an intriguing lecture when you can copy and paste from the book? Especially, why put in extra effort when you get paid either way?
… I pay to be taught. What is the point of paying a professor’s salary if the knowledge I gain in class is no greater than what I could have [gotten] from buying the book? If a subject is best taught strictly via PowerPoint, then I say it is time to start laying off professors. Cut costs by making it an online class, or install text-to-speech software on classroom computers and have an undergraduate click through slides and collect Scantron homework assignments and tests.
He’s seen the future, for sure.
These things are pretty easy to write, and given the incredibly lucrative medicalization of normalcy at the heart of the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we’ll see more and more of this literary genre.
Or maybe less and less. It can be hard to write clearly when you’re on anti-psychotics.
Mental health clinicians should consider signing this petition. It explains why taking the fifth, if you will, would be a terrible error.
… Penn State has begun, this morning, to shake itself awake. It’s gotten rid of one and put the other on leave.
(Note: This is a very big, very fast-moving story. I’ve added a number of updates to this post.)
Penn State is football city, so each step of this gruesome process – getting rid of Paterno, accepting the appropriate share of institutional blame, settling the lawsuits sure to come, acknowledging the degree of cover-up, suspending the football program – will be infinitely slow and self-wounding.
I’ve often, on this blog, compared the guys on the inside of big-time university football programs to Blanche Dubois. Self-delusion, denial, and (as with Blanche) outright lies are what it’s about. Some programs – Kentucky comes to mind – have, like Dubois at the denouement, gone totally ’round the bend. Most are beginning-of-the-play Blanche: Brightly smiling and talking one hell of a good game; but, under that, just barely – season to season – keeping it together. Penn State is a strikingly self-deluded outfit and will take a long hard fall.
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“[I]t would be foolish to discount the possibility that, by the time the legal drama fully plays out, Paterno, Curley, Schultz and even Penn State president Graham Spanier all will be gone.”
At least Spanier can go out on a private plane.
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“The board of trustees needs to get hold of it so that they can get to the bottom of it.”
You can always count on a politician to find just the right words.
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The campus landmark – Penn State Creamery – … serves flavors of ice cream named after university celebrities. There is … something called “The Sandusky Blitz.” It might be wise for the owners to consider dropping that particular flavor from the menu.
“Time to go load up on the Sandusky Blitz at the Creamery. It will be replaced soon with the Curley Coverup and the Spanier Surprise!”
And the Paterno Panic.
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Two reasons Paterno and Spanier will melt as fast Sandusky Blitz appear here.
Tyler Barnard, a junior from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, said in Mamma Mia [restaurant] that he objected to the university paying for legal counsel for Athletic Director Timothy Curley and Gary Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business.
They have been charged with failing to report the alleged crimes, and with perjury.
“I want to start a protest movement saying I don’t want my tuition to pay for their screwups,” Barnard said.
Alyssia Motah, 20, a food science major who was among [a group of] protesters at the administration building, said the university needed to be held accountable.
“The reason they have been so silent is in part due to this football culture that we have here,” she said.
Students realize that, one, their university is little more than a tightly controlled football state. It’s degrading (it should be degrading) to perceive that you live in an oligarchy so powerful it can protect a flagrant sex criminal – and name cutesy ice cream flavors after him – for decades.
Throw sugar at the kiddies and they’ll play along.
Students also realize that, two, they’re subsidizing the sickness.
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All of a sudden, a football program where a star gets a new automobile from a booster now and then or a player gets a free tattoo in exchange for memorabilia doesn’t seem that bad. Penn State administrators are accused of failing to act on allegations of sexual assaults on children. Top that, Ohio State. Beat that record, Miami.
And the best question is this: If Penn State athletic coaches and administrators could look the other way when a 10-year-old is sexually assaulted on campus by a prominent former coach, what wouldn’t they do? What could possibly be beyond their capability to accept in order to protect the “good name” of the program?
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Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family professor of literature at Penn State. As incoming head of the MLA, he’ll be using that title a lot.
On Paterno:
[T]he PSU football system didn’t work for a lot of people in this instance. Why? Here’s the answer: Money, power and secrecy. While money has always been down the list of your personal priorities, the other two almost seemed paramount to you. You have had unequaled power in this town, whether you’ll admit it or not. Is there anyone else who can essentially ignore the university president and trustees? …
Perhaps the only conclusion I can come up with is you didn’t follow up because you didn’t want to. You were coming off back-to-back losing seasons, and you knew you were loaded for bear in 2002. If something came to light that summer, well, just perhaps PSU football implodes.
… [Do President Spanier] and those genius trustees think students are going to apply in record number to come to Pedophile State…?
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Congrats [to Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier] on being the second major university B10 president to look like a complete and total fool this year. Gordon Gee hoped Jim Tressel wouldn’t fire him. Now, you’re standing firmly behind two executives who allegedly failed to protect children from being molested, thus allowing it to go on for several more years.
Standing firmly behind and paying their legal costs out of student tuition money.
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The darker, more conspiratorial part of me really, really wants to hope that the coaching promotion [for a person who witnessed what turned out to be an anal rape] wasn’t a payoff [for not pursuing the matter after reporting it to the head of athletics], but many questions along this line will be asked.
… professor’s craw.
In reviewing a bunch of new books about the American university, UD‘s friend Anthony Grafton provides a phenomenology of the contemporary campus.
… Libra, is “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”
But Joyce is more likely to have written the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM’s predecessor, four, has a thousand pages, and we may be sure that five will have many more than that. It’s a megaton psychotropic prescription machine. As Allen Frances, editor of earlier, more sane, DSMs, writes, “DSM-5 is suggesting many new and untested diagnoses and also markedly reduced thresholds for old ones.”
Frances offers an example:
‘Attenuated psychosis syndrome’ will have a ridiculously high false positive rate ( 80-90%), no effective treatment, would promote unnecessary exposure to harmful antipsychotics, and would cause needless worry and stigma. Since studies prove conclusively that the symptoms are so very rarely predictive of psychosis, why in the world would DSM-5 give someone the stigmatizing and absurdly misleading label ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ and open the door to inappropriate antipsychotic use? Recognizing all these risks, a large portion of schizophrenia and prodromal researchers are sensibly opposed to the inclusion of ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ in DSM-5. But unaccountably, the work group stubbornly clings to its proposal and, without the petition, there is a good chance it may sneak into DSM-5.
In great part, the DSM-5 is a work of the imagination. Like all ambitious novels, it exhibits enormous scope and imaginative energy. Told from the point of view of a detached omniscient narrator, it chronicles the plummeting of populations into pre-psychosis, and their ultimate rescue by “the number one revenue producer of all classes of drugs,” anti-psychotics. Its pages evoke a les misérables America, massively prodromal, holding out its butyrophenone-bowl on every street corner.
For reasons both logical and illogical, [Penn State’s] coach has long been obsessed about sheltering his Nittany Lions team, as if it were a wartime army.
Practices are closed to the media. Assistant coaches are off-limits. Reporters have virtually no access to players. Information – think of [Joe] Paterno’s long-secret salary – is locked away.
A decade ago, for example, when The Inquirer did a lengthy series on the growing influence of money in college sports, Penn State jealously guarded information – such as the dollar amount of its contract with Nike – that other schools, schools with less-upright reputations, readily made available.
Now, unsettling as the implications might be for Penn State’s loyal followers, outsiders will want to know what else has been hidden from public view over the years.
There will be speculation that perhaps the reason Paterno’s program never ran afoul of the NCAA was because the NCAA couldn’t cross the moat. What else went on …?
To live in a university-sports village, to be one of its faithful flock, is to realize that what Coach does is best for you and best for the team, and not ever to question Coach. Coach leads the wartime army. It’s always wartime. In wartime ways of life that seem strange in times of peace become routine. Loose lips sink ships!
The University of Oregon – one of the scummier sports schools around – is having a bit of trouble holding aloft the ‘self-supporting’ banner. We don’t take a penny! Our program makes so much money we don’t need to take a penny!
Well, if you’re persistent enough, and don’t mind filing repeated public-records requests, you’ll discover in the fine print at almost every school that claims to be self-supporting all sorts of contractual maneuvers that amount to subsidies.
For instance, UD‘s friend
Bill Harbaugh, an economics professor … filed a public-records request. What turned up was an illuminating “memorandum of understanding” between Pat Kilkenny, former athletic director, and former UO president Dave Frohnmayer that was signed in June 2009, two weeks before Frohnmayer retired.
That memo capped the athletic department’s overhead assessment at 3 percent through June 2012. That is one half the assessment rate charged other UO auxiliaries this year …
For instance:
UO diverted $8.5 million in general fund dollars from 2002-2010 to pay for academic support — including tutoring and counseling — of its athletes.
For instance:
[T]he general fund is picking up 50 percent of the legal costs in defending UO against possible recruiting violations by the football program.
A clean program (UD hasn’t encountered one yet, but assume a clean program) of this sort costs a fortune; a dirty one, like Oregon’s (And pretty much all the others. You know Jerry Tarkanian’s famous saying: “In major college basketball, nine out of 10 teams break the rules. The other one is in last place.”), costs a mega-fortune because of all the court cases and settlements and lawyers. Basically big-time university sports programs are always under threat of sanctions for violations, always being sued by fired coaches, always – see Penn State – defending themselves against criminal conduct accusations, always paying hotshot accountants to hide their bright budgeting ideas (as in the present case), etc., etc. Do you have any idea how much money self-supporting jock schools have to take out of their general funds just to protect their asses from what it means to do business as a big-time university sports team?