From the Louisville Courier-Journal:
[A] nonprofit that manages halfway houses for former prison inmates [spends] nearly $200,000 a year for luxury suites at the University of Louisville’s football and basketball arenas…
Almost all of the tax-exempt, non-profit’s money is federal and state government funds.
It infuriates me to read of ballooning spending on university athletics programs (and especially exorbitant coaches’ salaries) when academic departments are being cut… [T]he culture of athletics promotes anti-intellectualism, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and bullying…
That’s not the full list. Check out the way university campuses look after tailgaters are through with them. The bigger sports are on your campus, the more money your university spends on attorneys’ fees. Plus… ah, fuggedaboutit.
Today’s Baltimore Sun describes my present location:
DEEP CREEK LAKE: [C]lear; 70 degrees. The lake is back to normal. There are fewer pleasure boats and fishing is easier. As this water cools–and it will quickly–quality walleye, smallmouth and largemouth bass will delight the anglers.
UD and her sister are about to take a boat ride around the lake. They are astounded at how chilly it is up here — a strange feeling after so much heat in ‘thesda. Windy too.
… UD sees nothing on the University of Missouri Saint Louis news page about the NCAA having put the school on two-year probation because of sports betting and unethical behavior.
In one of those typical little scummy university sports stories, UMSL’s golf coach had a fantasy golf business on the side which employed various players and administrators at the university. No doubt the university knew, but gaveth not a shit. Football, okay, you worry about football… But who’s gonna notice golf? Really, let the boys have their fun…
UD will be spending today at Deep Creek Lake with her sister (Mr UD is inside all day, at the American Political Science Association Convention).
Plenty of events at Deep Creek Lake (amazingly, UD‘s never been there before), including the scary-sounding Apple Butter Boil.
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On this page, it gets more precise: Appalachian Apple Butter Boil and Corn Roast. Arts, crafts, and music while stirring apple butter and roasting corn.
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I’ll obviously be too busy at the boil to blog much. But I’ll take my laptop with me, and I’ll post now and then.
Announcing Swine Science Online.
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Swine Science Online includes the first course UD has seen that she acknowledges would probably be better taught online.
Swine Manure and Nutrient Management (1 cr.)
Function, application, and advantages and disadvantages of nutrient management systems. Manure production rates, manure handling systems, storage and manure management planning for land application and odor mitigation strategies.
… just caught my eye in the New York Times. I’ll link you to it now. Then I’ll read it and see if I’ve got anything to say…
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Hokay.
Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
Absolutely. It’s okay for a few courses at extremely expensive colleges to be taught by carefully selected adjuncts and grad students. But more than a few? Scandalous.
[If] colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.
Uh-huh.
But I dunno. If you read the whole thing, it’s confused. It takes on all sorts of big issues – presidents’ salaries, tenure, athletics, inequality – but doesn’t have the space or the organization to make much sense of them.
… is up and running, and we’ve been discussing, among other things, bad art.
Even as we carried on our discussion yesterday, this New York Times piece on the subject — with lavish illustrations — appeared.
Here are some of the ways the article describes bad art:
anonymous, strange, clumsy and cheap
created in all seriousness, but clearly something has gone wrong, either in the execution or in the concept
off-kilter paintings (and psyches)
disturbing, yet I can’t seem to look away
Consider one of the paintings, An I for an Eye.
It’s not bad merely because it’s badly painted, its colors flat and loud and inexpressive, its body/tree in awkward juxtaposition with a trunk. It’s bad because it combines a colossal desire to convey something the painter considers a profound truth, with a miniscule ability in fact to convey it.
Again, this is partly because the painter lacks craft. There’s a disconnect between the painter’s thoughts and his hand.
But it is more importantly because the painter lacks insight, clarity, and subtlety in relation to the revelation about the human condition that he wishes to press upon us. His painting fairly pants with philosophical fervor; it wants to provoke an epiphany about life in its viewer. Yet its painstaking, painfully schematic, metaphor, its insulting intellectual dullness — we grow as trees grow, rooted in the soil of the earth, aspiring toward the sun of happiness, and yet in our blindness and shame we produce the fruit of sorrow — communicates only the vapid, overweening self-confidence of its creator.
I suppose this is what makes it good bad art — the intensity of conviction on the part of the painter.
All bad poetry is sincere, said Wilde.
Good bad art is intensely sincere.
UD‘s friend Jack updates her on the University of Victoria rabbit problem.
This article announces that the university is now legally free to trap its rabbits and send them to sanctuaries.
Advanced degrees obtained through purchased dissertations are particularly popular among top managers and the bloated army of mid- and upper-level bureaucrats. They are also popular among mayors, governors and their aides, as well as State Duma deputies, for whom a new academic title is a respectable status symbol that goes nicely with the dacha, Mercedes, driver and flashing blue light.
McLeod was a guy’s guy: He loved to talk about sports, particularly University of Georgia football, the school from which he claimed to be an alum. Along with naming his boat Top Dawg, a play on the team’s nickname, McLeod liked to brag that his own dog was a direct descendant of the original Uga, the football team’s bulldog mascot. He made a big deal about attending the annual Georgia-Florida game, which is held in Jacksonville, frequently reminding people that it was known as the “world’s largest outdoor cocktail party.”
They usually involve what you’d expect: A hot-shot, globe-trotting professor charges twice for travel. He charges his university, and he charges his hosts at his destination. Or he consistently inflates his expenses. Not by a lot, which would attract attention, but by a few hundred dollars, say, with each expense report.
All we know about Seshu Desu, a high-ranking engineering professor at SUNY Binghamton, is that he inflated:
Court documents show that on or about April 22, 2009, Desu submitted a trip receipt from Worldwide Travel Inc. for $1,985 — for which he was reimbursed… Desu’s actual airline travel cost only $1,585…
But UD figures there’s got to be a lot more to this story.
“Where there are deer, mountain lions [are] not far behind.”
A California Department of Fish and Game spokesperson explains why the animal was in an urban area.
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Deer are so numerous and so bold in UD‘s backyard — and front yard — that she’s begun throwing deck chairs in their direction. Only this seems to produce enough noise and violence to keep them in the back part of her woods. They are like grazing cows, quite domesticated, and indifferent to our presence.
Will there eventually be mountain lions in Garrett Park, UD‘s town?
… but for-profit universities?
… Education Management Corporation operates Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, South University, and various Art Institutes…. [T]he company [has] hired DCI Group, a Washington-based lobbying and public relations firm … to coordinate a campaign against the Education Department’s proposed “gainful employment” rule.
… DCI Group [was] paid nearly $350,000 to represent Burma’s military junta. “It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image,” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported, “drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade…”
Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman must be smiling.
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UD thanks David for the link.