… and they’ve got excellent noses for it. The new Kansas State University mascot – a catwoman who appears at football games and tells you to recycle – smells not merely of propaganda but of heavy-duty moral scolding. Just the sort of thing you want at a sports outing.

Subjected to mass ridicule, EcoKat has been quietly put down by her university handlers. Long live freedom.

UD cannot improve on this comment in response to the latest from America’s most hick-laden university, Central Arkansas.

… says the sheriff. He doesn’t expect a professor to be a fugitive from justice because of his just-discovered big-time meth distribution business. Professors don’t have weapons caches, body armor, and huge wads of cash in their houses. Professors aren’t presidents of bikers clubs.

Pshaw. Do you read this blog? Over its lifetime UD has covered stories of professors who had live bombs in their houses; professors who on the first day of class told students to write down their Social Security numbers and hand them forward. So that the professors could rob them.

As for drug use: University Diaries has covered stories of professors so disabled by cocaine or alcohol while lecturing that students had to escort them to the emergency room.

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Yes, universities tend to produce more white than blue collar criminals — The insider trader on the board of trustees is fast becoming a paradigmatic postmodern American university figure … There’s Friend-of-Donna, Nevin Shapiro. Yeshiva University couldn’t honor Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff enough until that dark night when it had to go through all its web pages and erase their names and pretend they never existed…

You can certainly expect more faculty members to steal from their grants than to distribute drugs. But the drug distributors are out there.

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One point about this particular guy. Starting last year, if Cal State had bothered to look, it would have discovered he routinely came to class late and rambled and was beginning to piss off students.

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

In 2002, the person in charge of billing at the UT Southwestern medical school brought a whistle-blower suit against the school, alleging that “audits between 1993 and 1997 found that surgeons in as many as 16 UTSW departments were submitting [Medicare and Medicaid] bills for postoperative care, deliveries and other operations they did not perform.”

For various legal reasons, the Justice Department didn’t pursue that suit; but here comes a more recent one, from a former surgical department chair, claiming

UTSW was improperly charging Medicare and Medicaid for resident supervision that faculty doctors weren’t providing before, during and after surgery.

He also accused Parkland of permitting the lax oversight and using surgical consent forms that misled patients into thinking faculty doctors, rather than residents, would operate on them.

Without admitting guilt, the hospital has just settled this one, for $1.4 million.

Some parents of suspended University of Miami players can’t help noticing that their kids are getting hammered while their highly paid coaches remain at large. With Miami in mind, Tom McMillen, in the New York Times, is appalled that “Bloated college sports budgets, with coaches who earn millions of dollars, often more than college presidents, have created a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, with the result that colleges are losing control over their own athletic programs.”

Similarly, recent law graduates – huge swathes of them unemployed and in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars – are noticing that their law professors continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while failing to produce many employable students.

It is kind of an amazingly sweet deal for these two university employees. You hire a coach at three million dollars a year and he gets that even if his team loses every single game. He’ll get more the next year, even with total losses, because breaking his contract and finding a new coach will cost too much money. Then he’ll get even more the next year with the same win/loss record. I mean, eventually they’ll fire him, but he’ll rake it in for a long time before that happens.

The tenured law professor has it even sweeter. Over the course of five years, only half of her students, say, get jobs. She snuggles into bed at night secure in the thought of a low course load and regular salary raises despite hundreds of idle young people suffering under the weight of immense loan repayments because she and her school were unable to train them well enough to make them attractive to law firms.

You’d think a market correction would come into play in both of these arenas. If coaches are corrupt and hurt their players, or if coaches win too few games, shouldn’t their three million dollar salaries take a hit? If law professors teach at schools half of whose graduates remain unemployed for years, shouldn’t their hundred and fifty thousand dollar take home take a hit? No, you say! Silly UD! Both of these groups are eminently re-employable! Universities need to be scared, onaccounta if that law prof gets huffy enough she can just up and take a job at Cravath! NO university football or basketball coach is too corrupt or inept to fail to get another lucrative position!

Well, first off, this isn’t at all necessarily true. Things can get a little undignified even for high-profile coaches. And a law professor at a substandard school (the ABA will accredit anything) doesn’t have many options.

And second: Why would you want to tempt fate (lawsuits from UM players are going to happen, and lawsuits from unemployed law school grads are already happening) by keeping such people at your school? Wouldn’t you prefer reasonably paid, competent employees?

Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock.

Here’s our most recent information on WKU:

There will be a lot of empty seats at LP Field in Nashville tonight when the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky open the 2011 football season at 9:15 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, 40,262 tickets were available at Ticketmaster.com, including nearly 10,000 in the lower level. The stadium, where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, holds 68,798 fans.

They’re desperately handing out free tickets so the stadium won’t look like a funeral home.

UD‘s friend Maurice sends her the most delicious article retraction statement she’s ever encountered. It’s via the site Retraction Watch, and it appeared in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology:

Volume 48, no. 11, p. 4200–4206, 2010. We hereby retract this article. After publication of the article, we realized that we had failed to cite the article “Epidemiology of candidemia in Brazil: a nationwide sentinel surveillance of candidemiain eleven medical centers” by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, B. J.Park, S. A. Nouér, B. Arthington-Skaggs, D. A. da Matta, D. Warnock, and J. Morgan for the Brazilian Network Candidemia Study (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). This article should have been cited as reference 9 in the References section instead of the article by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, R. Salomão, M. L. Branchini, R. Richtmann, A. Derossi, and S. B. Wey (Diagn. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 34:281–286, 1999). Moreover, we realized after our article had been published that major parts of the text had been plagiarized almost verbatim from Colombo et al. (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). Prof. Cisterna and Dr. Ezpeleta express their deep and sincere apologies to Prof. Colombo and his Brazilian Network Candidemia Study team, to the clinical microbiology community, and to Journal of Clinical Microbiology readers for this embarrassing situation. In addition, we state that Jesus Guinea, Julio García-Rodríguez, Juliana Esperalba, and Benito Regueiro should not have appeared in the author byline, as they contributed to the paper only by supplying isolates and clinical data for the patients and were not involved in the writing of the paper.

Retraction Watch muses on the ethics of guest authorship:

[T]he question of whose name appears on a manuscript is clearly political and jealously guarded. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But does the person who collects the data really deserve less credit than the lab head who was on sabbatical while the vast majority of the work was being conducted, or the section chief who likes to stick fingers in every pie simply to accumulate numbers on a CV?

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UD thanks Maurice.

… about the University of Miami scandal. Here’s a typical one:

I grew up on two major items on the vast American sports smorgasbord – major league baseball and college sports. In my case, the direct spectating involvement was more college basketball than football, although I was exposed to some very interesting football events when my father was an assistant athletic director at Villanova in the early ’50s…

Ah yes I remember it well… It was stinkin’ crooked then and it’s stinkin’ crooked now and I love it… Because I’m an American! Aren’t you an American?

We are Americans. We want this in our lives.

What?… Say again? Louder?… You don’t want it in your life? Or at least in your university?… What are you Canadian or something? Sit down shut up and listen … Ah… Let’s see… It was ’52 I think… No, maybe ’53…

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Here’s another old fart:

The scandal “only strengthens my support,” said attorney George Lott, a Miami alumni whose family is another major donor. “I think UM alumni, students and faculty will come together as a family and we will get through this together.”

If only we could have a scandal of this magnitude every five years or so! Alumni support would be through the roof.

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Let’s leave Pops and Old Fart on their rockers and go with the youth vote. Here’s a lecture from a dynamic hypercapitalist on why all of life is a market and corruption is a who-gives-a-shit byproduct of markets.

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It’d be interesting to hear these guys on, say, the drug war in Mexico.

Pops: Cocaine? We’re Americans. We want this in our lives. Why, I remember a lovely trip the wife and me took to Oaxaca one summer…

Old Fart: The drug wars bring us together as a family.

Hyper: Hey baby it’s a great big dirty world get real all markets produce corollary damage…

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Essentially all of these guys are signalling that if anyone tries to do anything about their game they’re going to go weewee in their pants.

Fay Vincent gets it said.

… the University of Louisville (background on this university here, here, here, here, here) are shocked to hear that UL’s current recruiting coordinator might have been deeply involved in the Nevin Shapiro University of Miami scandal (his last job was at Miami).

The reporter who broke the story about the University of Miami and Nevin Shapiro says to NPR:

But the reality is the NCAA is comprised of – it’s the universities. It’s the institution. It’s the presidents. It’s the power conferences and the conference commissioners, and in some way, shape or form, it’s – there’s no getting around the fact that they are all in bed together. You’re asking a governing body to look over universities that essentially help to establish that governing body’s power in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of an awkward marriage between the people who are expected to enforce are also made up by individuals who at – you know, at some point in their lives typically had worked within university structures, and I think that’s sort of what creates a lot of the gray area that people tend to attack when they go after the NCAA.

That’s the important thing. That’s what makes all of the university sports scandals so particularly, so intensely, disgusting. The NCAA isn’t a bunch of jocks acting like jerks with whom academic leaders are in constant conflict… because, you know, jock/intellectual… they’re naturally at odds, etc. … No. The NCAA is American university presidents. They run the fucker.

Here’s the NCAA logo.

Here’s what it should be.

From the New York Times:

“I don’t know how you repair this,” said State Senator Peter W. Galbraith, a Democrat who represents the village [of Williamsville, Vermont], walking along the road on Tuesday.

… “When are we going to get out of Afghanistan?” [a resident whose house was ruined] asked Mr. Galbraith, a former United Nations representative in that country, as he came by. “Frankly, I really am focused on the world, and it really helps you put things in perspective. No matter how much we lost, it’s nothing compared to the starvation in Somalia.”

Everyone’s upset because Peevy – a UK athletics public relations guy – went and got all peeved with a UK student reporter who had the gall to interview a couple of basketball players without getting Peevy’s permission.

Yeah, just a couple of amateur college athletes, but there’s a big, big big old public relations machine right behind them, and you don’t, like, just, you know, call them… I mean, are you crazy?

When he found out that the reporter had committed journalism, Peevy punished him and his newspaper by withholding various other forms of access to the team.

The Associated Press Managing Editors group sent a letter to Kentucky’s Director of Athletics:

This is a level of abuse of free speech not tolerated at universities in other states and is particularly abhorrent at a taxpayer-owned institution…

Peevy does this sort of thing all the time – whenever anyone dares to do some independent reporting.

Because of course you need to control the news very closely when your franchise is filthy top to bottom (scroll down). You don’t want a free press reporting on what’s going on. Peevy is seeing to that.

… UD prepares for her first day of teaching.

With power restored to Garrett Park, Les UDs left their hotel yesterday afternoon. They spent the early evening hours raking leaves and dragging limbs off the lawn.

The fox was at the top of UD‘s half acre exploring a mass of branches that fell across the open green near the deer and mourning dove encampments. Moving the branches will take some doing, and UD‘s not ready for the task.

The task of thought – dark, poetic thought – is like the elegant wary predatory movement of a fox… Now here, now here, and now here in the dark head, thought like a nocturnal animal’s body feels out what’s hidden there amid vast silent clearings. This twig, that leaf. The poetic body comes about its own business, brings sly hot perception to its own cold mental darkness, and the poem – like the dark snow under the fox’s paw – is printed.