In a separate case also filed last week, [former Midland University athletic director Jason] Dannelly is accused of giving a 20-year-old student athlete $300 to have sex with him. An affidavit in that case said that Dannelly was empowered to arrange work study jobs for student athletes.
… Pinafore. In the fraud case of Professor Charles L. Bennett, it was, according to the FBI, his “brother and cousin” who improperly benefited (along with Bennett himself, of course) from his personal use of government funds. Northwestern University, on whose faculty he sat while distributing his NIH grant to himself and his brother and his cousin, should have seen that happening, and so has had to choke up “$2.93 million to settle claims of cancer research grant fraud.” The whistle-blower – a purchasing coordinator at NU’s med school – gets almost $500,000 of the proceeds.
Lucky South Carolina College of Pharmacy has pried Bennett free of Northwestern and successfully recruited him to its faculty. What a coup! The center he’ll be running is “is particularly focused on economic return on investment.” So is Bennett.
… The Nation. A Summer Institute of Civic Studies participant, Jim Scheibel, sent it to Mr UD. Excerpts:
…We hike the fees and we re-prioritize.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything ,and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights…… We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only)
Plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables or else we’re uncompetitive…
“The biggest suggestion from me, for the 125 Division I football programs, let’s all invest in NCAA infractions and compliance and let’s have an officer on every campus,” [University of Miami coach Al] Golden said. “You’ll find then that there’s a lot of coaches that want to coach life skills, want to teach leadership, want to teach kids what they need to be successful in every facet of their life, that want education, that are teaching it the right way.
“It doesn’t mean we’re less competitive and that’s a part of the fabric of the United States of America, to be competitive. We’re trying to teach life skills and learning in every endeavor. And I think they would see our mission and our value and our goals are commiserate with theirs.”
Wow – now the president of the Bundestag is accused of plagiarism. UD‘s German friend Chris explains to her that in Germany (in Europe in general I guess) having a PhD is considered very important, very much the done thing, for politicians. (I explain back to Chris that here in the States it’s the opposite. We tend to like our leaders unlettered. Neither Barack Obama nor Elizabeth Warren has been able to escape the professor slam. Sarah Palin put the word professor in front of Obama’s name damn near every time she used it. In his debates with Warren, Scott Brown compulsively called Warren professor.) So perhaps in your haste to get the thing, you copy some or all of it, as Norbert Lammert seems to have done at the University of Bochum.
As with most murders, there’s not much mystery here – about who did it, and how. It’s mildly unusual that a smart person – a professor at a med school – would be stupid enough to order the murder weapon via his university issued credit card two days before the murder. I mean, this sounds like someone who wants to be caught.
Or someone caught up in the passion of his rage against his wife, who he allegedly thought was having an affair. Someone who just wants the thing done, now, because he’s really pissed and he wants it to be over. He’ll show her.
University Diaries has covered bloodier, more dramatic wife-killing by professors – George Zinkhan, Rafael Robb – and the motives are all along the same lines … He thinks she’s unfaithful, or he wants their kid to himself, or she’s in the process of divorcing him. Or all three. Here the wife – Autumn Marie Klein, a University of Pittsburgh neurologist – was herself a distinguished professor, and her death at the age of forty-one is a loss for science.
La Kid, on the left, kisses Aoife,
a look-alike Dublin friend,
at La Kid‘s going-away party
last week. One of the guests brought
an American flag.
Amel Grami, an intellectual historian at Manouba University, whose campus was besieged last year by Salafi activists opposed to women’s equality, says the Arab Spring has “triggered a male identity crisis” that has strengthened the ultraconservative positions taken by Islamist parties. In Tunisia, he has noted, fundamentalists have called for girls as young as 12 to don the hijab and niqab, veils used by observant women. An Ennahda lawmaker has called for “purification of the media and purification of intellectuals,” while another Ennahda deputy, a woman, has urged segregation of public transportation by gender. Some Islamists have spoken of legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice largely foreign to Tunisia.
There’s a potentially very big story emerging out of the University of Louisville (one of the scummiest football factories this blog has covered, by the way), on whose faculty sits Mariusz Z. Ratajczak. Ratajczak has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of money from the Catholic church, to pursue work on
heretofore unknown stem cells present in adult cells. These tiny cells, he claimed, could perform the same tasks as embryonic stem cells, including tissue regeneration and the miraculous capacity that embryonic stem cells have to mimic other types of cell tissue. Moreover, these VSEL cells, said Ratajczak, could be harvested from adult cells without harming human embryos or relying on them for cell material.
Ratajczak claims to have discovered these cells; but no other scientist has been able to find them, let alone test them in any way. Arthur Caplan writes that Ratajczak’s claim (that “he had found very tiny cells residing in adult cells that behaved just like embryos. Ratajczak said they could develop into all manner of other cells, thereby acting as natural repair kits, given the right conditions and genetic tweaking.”) “must be the product of wishful thinking, or at worst, fraud.”
More detail here.
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The University of Louisville hospital has more than its share of problems lately.
Oh, and I forgot all about Robert Felner.
… at Haverford.
It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.
College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.
Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.
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If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:
Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.
Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.
Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.
It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.
UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.
After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.
I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…
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It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.
Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.
… jokes.
The winner by a mile was this one:
Three lawyers and three engineers are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three lawyers each buy tickets and watch as the three engineers buy only a single ticket.
“How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?” asks a lawyer.
“Watch and you’ll see,” answers an engineer.
They all board the train. The lawyers take their respective seats but all three engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, “Ticket, please.” The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.
The lawyers see this and agree that it is quite a clever idea so, after the conference, they decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money.
When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers don’t buy a ticket at all.
“How are you going to travel without a ticket?” says one perplexed lawyer.
“Watch and you’ll see,” answers an engineer.
When they board the train the three lawyers cram into a restroom and the three engineers cram into another one nearby.
The train departs.
Shortly afterward, one of the engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the lawyers are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, “Ticket, please.”
Er, make that 24.
And, as law schools across the country begin to enjoy the synergy of the ABA’s policy of accrediting anything that moves, and the dramatic shrinkage of the job market, there’s this from the Charleston School of Law (famed for the otter tank pissing incident):
Graduates of the Charleston School of Law are so alarmed by the possible sale of the school to InfiLaw System that they are considering ways to stop it.
Current students grew more outraged Friday, when they couldn’t get answers to their questions on the school’s future from its leaders.
The law school released a statement Thursday evening, which said it had entered into a management services agreement with InfiLaw System, a group that owns three other for-profit law schools.
Investors are cashing in and letting the place go diploma mill and they don’t want to talk about it.
… forced out. If this happens, UD‘s putting her money on Trent Lott as his successor.