… is totally worth a read. Garvin summarizes the pay college athletes argument:

The sky’s the limit [on salary]. And they shouldn’t be distracted by having to go to class, either, or even having to read or write.

He crunches the numbers colleges will need to anticipate:

The average NFL player’s salary, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported earlier this year, is about $1.9 million. If colleges wind up paying even a tenth of that — a lowball guess — that means that the University of Miami football team would need a payroll of $16 million just to cover the 85 scholarship players the NCAA allows. (Though, if we’re doing away with the requirement that players be able to write their own names, I don’t know why we’d be nit-picky about silly things like roster limits.)

UD‘s laughing out loud here.

And don’t forget taxes!

Right now college athletes don’t pay taxes on their scholarships because their schools sports programs are tax-exempt. But once you start paying the players (and especially if all pretense that they’re getting an education is dropped), the IRS will certainly want its cut. And that will include the value of the scholarship in addition to whatever salary they’re getting paid. A year at UM costs about $55,000 these days; at current tax rates, that means a UM football player would be around $12,000 in hock to the IRS before accepting another cent.

Bravo, Hagerstown Community College. Kaplan came at you, melons bobbling, wanting you to direct your graduates their way.

Kaplan’s chief executives, after all, have to maintain their tens of millions of dollars in personal compensation, and they can’t go trolling homeless shelters for tax-money-bearing eager minds anymore. So they came up with this let’s cooperate! idea…

But in a blunt email to Kaplan, HCC (I wonder what the prez of HCC makes a year, compared to the zillionaires at Kaplan) has said no way.

As Kaplan moves ahead with its new marketing plans, please do not state or imply HCC is a Kaplan partner or that the HCC faculty or staff are suggesting our graduates consider Kaplan as the next step in continuing their education.

We tell our students, quite frankly, that there are much better transfer options for them to consider. In summary, we do not believe Kaplan’s partnership offer is in the best interest of our current or former students.

Asked to elaborate, an HCC spokesperson alluded to the for-profit industry’s notorious

recruiting efforts, financial-aid programs, job placement rates, and other business practices. Just this month, the U.S. Justice Department and four states filed suit against one for-profit school, stating possible violations to the federal Higher Education Act.

She also mentioned that Kaplan’s more expensive than the schools HCC traditionally recommends.

Why does it cost so much???

ZILLIONS of reasons.

It’s not just that it will finally address the scourge of “lugging stacks of books across campus.”

In the words of its one of its faculty members, “People shouldn’t be discriminated for where they chose to live.”

Julie Bindel, The Guardian.

On leaving academia seven years ago I vowed that I would never use PowerPoint again. I still speak at conferences, though, and have been known to rant at organisers when asked in advance for my PPT presentation. I inform them that I will be turning up with a set of index cards on which I have jotted down key points, but will not be boring my audience to tears with fiddly slides consisting of flying text, fussy fonts or photo montages.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in having a real discussion about ideas as opposed to force-feeding an increasingly sleepy crowd with numerous graphs and bullet points projected on to the nearest wall. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother showing up to hear a colleague elucidate on their thesis, when we are helpfully posted an advance printout of the presentation. As the speaker is building to a crucial statistic, delegates have long finished and are doing the crossword instead.

So we’re in a hotel again tonight.

The sky over the Rockville Pike is a mild blue with thin clouds, but the stands of trees among the malls are still shaking.

“The NCAA is starting to crumble internally. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, especially the athletes.”

The problem with this comment, from the head of the Drake Group, is that is misdescribes things in a pretty basic way.

The NCAA is stronger and richer than ever. With the new billion dollar tv deals, and with its retention of its absurd non-profit status, the NCAA is thriving beyond belief, and will continue to do so.

Why will it continue to do so? Because almost no one in this country – and certainly no one with any power – cares about what’s going on in big time university athletics. People want their games. They want them bad. They couldn’t care less what else the games bring.

University presidents know this. Tom McMillen, in the same article, says “You have coaches making salaries that are often 25 times more than what the college president at his school makes” as if he thinks this will get a rise out of someone. It hasn’t. It won’t.

What UD means is… If it were going to, it would’ve. Know what I mean? If I said There are dozens of universities in America which barely exist except as lucrative athletic programs, would that upset you? Galvanize you to action?

Or look at it this way: UD loves Barack Obama. Can’t wait to vote for him again. But Obama is a jock who loves big time university sports and – far as I know – has done nothing but heap praise on it.

And Congress? LOL.

This doesn’t mean you stop protesting the situation. It means you need to be honest about how deeply bad it is.

… Going Cosmic.

Miami shouldn’t be given the death penalty, as Sports Illustrated argued again 15 years later. It’s big-time college athletics that should be.

The basic move is: We can’t do Local X until we totally solve Universal X.

It’s a fantastic deflection exercise, beloved of people who are always saying things like Better the evils we know.

Another mission statement for the University of Miami (and many other campuses), courtesy of the coach of the Orlando Magic.

Colleges shouldn’t be farm systems. It doesn’t make any logical sense. But the schools don’t want to be blatantly in the situation of being professional sports even though they already are professional sports. They just want to disguise it, so they hide behind education. But, really, all you want is enough of your athletes to graduate so it looks like that’s what you care about. Anyone around sports knows it is all a bunch of bull[expletive]… The alumni want the illusion, and so does the school… But the kids know it is all bull[expletive]. Everyone does.

To judge by the particulars of an eight-year spree of lawlessness by one of your boosters, your football program has no regard for the rules, and your administration has no ability to enforce them.

… [Y]ou must shut the program down…

(Say what you will about the Miami Madoff, but Shapiro may be right: Cheating is even worse in the SEC, where, he says, “the money is an endless river.”) …

Truth, good writing, and all the right ideas.

All wasted.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.

[M]ost of these guys don’t get very good educations, because playing on a D-1 football team is basically a full-time job – at least as time-consuming (and certainly more dangerous) than most full-time jobs. Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.

The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.

The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

It’s hard to say. This directory page is the best I can do, and it might not be the same guy. But a news article about him says he’s an “assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine.”

As you probably know, medical schools are notorious for handing out the title “professor” to pretty about anyone who hangs around the hospital wearing a white coat. This courtesy isn’t a very good idea, especially at a time when doctors are being arrested for running pill mills all over the country (especially in Florida). Castronuovo faces ten years in prison for writing oxy prescriptions like a bat out of hell.

Lots of stuff on our lawn and in our forest to bring inside. We’ve made a reservation at a hotel for tomorrow – in case power goes out in Garrett Park. People walk along Rokeby Avenue carrying bags full of paper towels. We worry about trees falling on our house.

The predictable has happened with eight Miami football players being ruled ineligible for this season.

… Why is Miami president Donna Shalala still eligible for this season?

Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.

At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.

Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.

The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.

The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.

The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.

The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.

This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.

Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?

What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.