Shares of Apollo Education Group fell sharply after the market close after the company disclosed the U.S. Education Dept. plans a review of federal financial aid programs at the company’s University of Phoenix.

… has died.

In the town where I lived, there was no mental food … at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it. Conversation consisted of trivialities. For women, household matters, problems with children. The men would talk about golf or business or horse racing or whatever their practical interests were. Nobody ever talked about, or even around, the big things — life and death. The whole existential aspect of life was never discussed. I, of course, approached it through books. Thought about it on my own. It was as secret as it would have been to discuss my parents’ sex life. It was something so private, because I felt that there was nobody with whom I could talk about these things, just nobody. But then, of course, when I was moving around at university, my life changed.

… the president of the University of Louisville (and yes, Louisville is named after that king of France), leads his university into ruin even as he revels in luxury.

[James Ramsey’s bonus is] equal to 25 percent of his current $624,000 annual salary.

The bonus, which equals nearly $156,000, comes as a reward for reaching “all but two” goals that were set for the President’s office, according to the statement.

What those goals were is unclear. A University spokesman declined to comment on the issue.

… [W]ith his annual salary, added performance bonus and the retention bonus that applies to the current year, Ramsey is set to make $1,280,000 this year.

It’s good to be the king! The peasantry needn’t know what those elusive “goals” were… Though they might be excused for wondering why the leader of one of America’s most dysfunctional universities on every level (finances, athletics, graduation rates, internal corruption, even a trustee who recently tried to jump ship but was forced to remain on board by the governor’s refusal to accept his resignation) is being showered with gold because he met all but two of I guess many goals… Wonder what the two goals he failed to meet were… Preside over a university that doesn’t embarrass everyone associated with it? Respond to any request from the media?

It’s all very reminiscent of Yeshiva University’s president. The lower YU’s credit rating falls, and the more he refuses to talk to anyone about what’s going on there, the more he gets paid.

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You wouldn’t think all of this would be a viable model for a university presidency, but there you go. It is.

Hillary doesn’t see the disconnect between expressing grave concern about mounting student loan debt while scarfing six-figure sums from at least eight colleges, and counting. She says now that she’s passing the university money to the foundation but, never Ms. Transparency, has refused to provide documentation of that.

Well, we’ve been following this story on University Diaries for awhile now, and because it’s about obvious high-profile hypocrisy, it was only a matter of time before Maureen Dowd got hold of it and majorly amplified it. So that has happened.

The only real way to argue for an unnecessary, irrelevant, bankrupting, and bohemoth carbuncle right in the center of your campus is by way of recourse to the divine, and, in particular, to divine retribution. You need to scare people. If they don’t get going and get saved, there will be hell to pay. Without tithing hundreds of millions of dollars (many of them coming from students and taxpayers) toward a new football stadium, you will lose the battle with the devil (opposing teams).

There are of course many ways to argue against such a thing… And what Scathing Online Schoolmarm is going to do this morning is look at point/counterpoint, starting with the God Principle, and then moving on to a more secular stance.

Should Colorado State University build a new football stadium? (Note: There’s in fact no question about it. The stadium – at a school where vanishingly few students attend games despite a more than respectable winning average – will be built. So this post isn’t about urging people not to build the stadium. Although not officially announced, it’s a done deal. This is America.) SOS reviews the writing of Mark Knudson, an advocate, and Deborah Shulman, an opponent. Okay, first Knudson.

His title: PUT UP OR SHUT UP. [O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest!]

CSU athletic director Jack Graham had a vision — a shocking and inspiring vision — when he first took the gig, and he has done a magnificent job of describing that vision. We can now close our eyes (or look on our computer screens) and see the glistening new stadium, blending in as a centerpiece and invigorating the entire campus.

Like Jesus, AD Graham is a radical visionary whose glistening stadium on a hill we too can glimpse when we close our eyes. Also like Jesus, Coach McElwain is beginning to run out of patience with his wayward flock:

How much patience will McElwain be asked to have while he waits for something to actually get done on the vision?

And now the more fleshed out theology:

The issue isn’t whether or not the new stadium is needed. If you know anything about college athletics, you know how badly it is. You know it’s time for the tiny but vocal minority of under-educated opponents to punt.

If CSU wants to remain at all relevant in college sports — remember, there is at least some chance that college football and basketball players might start getting paid in the next few years — then this kind of upgrade is not only needed, it’s critical to simple survival.

If the stadium project doesn’t happen, then it’s just as likely CSU will end up in the lower level Big Sky Conference as it is they will never play in another New Mexico Bowl.

The small-thinking opponents of the stadium can keep talking about dressing up Hughes Stadium and trying to make it look big time, but it never will be. Talking about upgrades to Hughes Stadium is simply another way of saying “putting lipstick on a pig.” Nothing screams “Smallville” like a dirt parking lot — out in the middle of nowhere.

It is so abundantly obvious to sect adherents that a university with a low-attendance football stadium should pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a new one that no argument is needed. Either you see the vision or you don’t. But let me put it this way: Without this stadium, you will die (“survival”). After you die, you will be buried (“a dirt parking lot”) and then go to hell (“the lower level”).

Okay, counterpoint.

Headline: CSU Can’t Afford a New Football Stadium. Not at all catchy or scary. Nothing Sinners in the Hands of an Impatient God about it. SOS fears we are in for a sober, fact-based analysis.

She mentions “millions [in] deficit spending for football.” She reminds us that “faculty had been on a pay freeze for four years” back in 2012 when the AD spent millions and millions on ten football coaches.

More than half the athletic department revenue comes from student fees and university subsidy. The students, faculty and taxpayers pay for football.

In a nationwide trend and at CSU, attendance at football games has been declining. At CSU, athletic ticket sales are less than 8 percent of revenue. Profit or breaking even is an unrealistic goal since most Division 1 schools operate football programs at a considerable deficit and require university subsidy.

The $125 million stadium guesstimate doubled, yet the Board of Governors determined these donors need to raise just half the money, not including costs imposed on CSU and the city. City Councilman Wade Troxell estimated the stadium would impose up to $50 million in city infrastructure adaptations. Taxpayers will cover this cost.

Blah blah. Facts. It’s about vision, baby! Get out of Smallville! Think big!

Why have athletic donors been granted such power and leverage to dictate development of CSU and Fort Collins?

Cuz they got the vision!

First-rate dialogue doesn’t hurt either.

So far, one of our main characters – Professor Julius Nyang’oro – has been frustratingly silent, so not even a speech, much less dialogue there. But he apparently will cooperate with authorities – i.e., talk – about his long history generating fake courses for athletes at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Two other dramatis personae – Mary Willingham and Rashad McCants – have had lots to say about UNC’s corrupt academic tutoring system (that would be Willingham, who’s suing UNC ) and its “garbage no-show classes” system (and that would be Rashad, an athlete whose 4.0 GPA at UNC was a piece of cake, and as curious a piece of cake as Alice ever nibbled). But again, not much give and take here.

With the recent extended comments of UNC Professor Jay Smith in response to other UNC athletes trashing McCants and his claims, we do begin to see a little back and forth, a little point counterpoint, a little taking of sides, so that the drama truly begins to look as though it’s about to take off. UNC and the NCAA will of course remain silent – except for mechanically generated platitudes and threats – throughout this drama; but Smith’s beautifully written response signals to UD that The Storming of Chapel Hill is well on its way to being publicly staged, with a script of which GB Shaw might be proud.

Smith’s response (quoted in full with his permission):

I’m struck by the profiles of those attacking Rashad McCants. On the one hand, you have old-timers spouting off about their experiences in the 1960s, ’70s or early ’80s. These people haven’t seen the inside of an academic support program in years, even decades. They don’t have a clue what the program was like in 2005. Yet they hurl their venom at McCants – a player who had the guts to share his transcript on television, and who also had the guts to buck the tide while he was at UNC [an offense against ‘the family’ for which he has never been forgiven].

On the other hand, you have more current players willfully deceiving gullible journalists – while carefully guarding their transcripts – because they don’t want to face reality and deal with the shame that the ‘Carolina way’ was no more than an illusion during their playing days. Antawn Jamison [who played at North Carolina from 1995-98] has the audacity to call McCants a clown? Someone needs to remind Jamison that [UNC-sanctioned special investigator] Ken Wainstein is actually looking at transcripts. Wainstein knows. And he’s going to be issuing a report.

Other people know, too, including some who are writing books. The truth is eventually going to come out. And we’ll see who’s wearing the dunce cap when this story is all said and done.

As for McCants’ refusal thus far to speak to the NCAA or UNC’s compliance officer … I can’t say that I blame him. Look at what UNC has done to him in the wake of his allegations. They slimed him, as they do everyone who dares to utter a critical word about the UNC athletic machine. Why would he want to sit down for a discussion with such people? [I suspect he sees Wainstein as just another agent of the University.] And the NCAA? McCants doesn’t care about doling out punishment or ‘making an example,’ which is all the NCAA ever does.

He wants to see the system change going forward. Neither UNC nor the NCAA has an interest in changing anything. This is why UNC will not acknowledge the truth of what McCants has said and it’s why the NCAA went to court last month to maintain the charade that football and basketball players are ‘students first.’ McCants, it seems to me, just has little interest in wasting his time.

When Roy Williams came here from Kansas, he brought with him the team academic counselor who had served him so well at Kansas: Wayne Walden. He regarded Walden as such a vital contributor to the good fortunes of his teams that he was practically moved to tears when Walden departed in 2009. Walden knew every detail about the academic lives of those players; he had to. He registered them for their courses, for crying out loud. [And that means he got on the phone with the Department of African and Afro-American Studies and he put them in paper classes.] Walden also spoke with Williams every day; he had to. Williams’ claim that he had no earthly idea that his players were floating along on paper classes – and that he never would have guessed that one of his stars was enrolled in four no-show classes in the spring of 2005 – is nothing more than a confidence trick. He’s counting on the customary journalistic favoritism, and journalists’ amazing lack of curiosity, to enable him to tell this whopper and walk away with his aura intact. We’ll see if that works.

Yes, things are heating up. Things are taking shape.

… Columbia University.

This year, it was a Leeds University professor.

Let us see if we can make some headway into the mystery of why, occasionally, male professors teaching large lecture courses strip in front of their classes.

In both cases, it was part of a lesson plan. The physicist intended to shake his students out of conventional thinking as they entered the bizarre realm of physics. The events management guy meant to show his lecture hall what a boffo sales presentation looks like.

In both cases, the lesson plan failed. Certainly both instructors riveted their students; but the students seem – judging by their reactions – not to have been riveted on physics or business, but rather on psychology. As in the psychology of a professor who takes his clothes off (except for his shorts) and then does other strange things (assuming the fetal position; shaving) in front of large numbers of people.

So … Nervous breakdown? No. UD has covered a few cases of professors having nervous breakdowns or other sorts of mental collapses in front of their classes, and while they may indeed involve removal of clothing, they’re not like this. In the case of breakdowns, students tend to be immediately distressed, frightened, and on the phone to 911.

UD instead inclines toward Male Midlife Narcissistic Disorder. You’re restless, under-appreciated… There’s this ready-made irresistible crowd of eyes…

UD can’t get too excited about the gathering Zizek plagiarizes from a “white nationalist hate group” magazine storm. As the editor of Critical Inquiry (which published what UD is pretty certain will turn out to be only the first widely known piece of plagiarism from Zizek) admits, the guy did indeed plagiarize, and from a most unlikely source…

Yet what is in this story that isn’t already there in the Jonah Lehrer, Johan Hari, Chris Hedges, Stephen Glass, Phil Jacob, Jason Blair, etc., etc., etc. story?

We seem to like to be fooled. Bernard Madoff’s returns were outrageously too good to be true. Didn’t stop everybody from investing with him.

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UD thanks Dave for tipping her off to the story.

There they sit, the proud medical school graduates and their parents, the proud high school students and their parents, and there you go honoring their efforts by not even being willing to get off your ass and write your own speech. Fuck ’em. The fools won’t notice I stole the speech because they’re too fucking stupid.

But even in the sorriest group there are always a few people who figure things out. (One audience found the speech online as it was being mouthed and they were able to follow along, word for word, in real time.)

Unlike the Canadian med school dean up there, who fessed up immediately and resigned, the Mansfield Massachusetts school superintendent seems to be trying to talk her way out of the thing. She didn’t plagiarize!

Let UD be as clear as she can be: This woman is an insult to the school and should be fired.

**********************

And off she goes.

… has fallen even lower. Despite plying its students with beer at the football stadium, it’s suffering a significant drop in ticket sales. Wonder why? Must be because they haven’t partied the place up enough. (UD has long recommended, given the amazing love of opioids in that state, that WVU athletics offer fans Oxycontin.)

To make matters worse, the local public radio station recently featured a professor at WVU who gave it hell for deciding to spend seventy-five million on an upgrade for its rapidly emptying stadium. WVU’s athletic director came right back at him with the following argument:

There is no argument that West Virginia University’s first responsibility is to provide the best and broadest educational experience possible for its students. It is the first part of our land-grant mission of teaching, research and service.

For many current and potential students, high-quality intercollegiate athletics are a key part of that experience.

In what way is football part – a key part – of an educational experience? Answer: It isn’t. More and more WVU students seem to realize that. But even as attendance tanks, WVU spends all its money on its football stadium.

Wretched, wretched WVU.

So poetic a title, Vibration and Control. As in Whitehead’s term vibratory organism, or as in Baudelaire’s poem, Music, ‘vibration and control’ suggests the very dynamic of human existence – our lives as shaped expressions of energy…

Music, like an ocean, often carries me away!
Through the ether far,
or under a canopy of mist, I set sail
for my pale star.
Breasting the waves, my lungs swollen
like a ship’s canvas,
night veils from me the long rollers,
I ride their backs:
I sense all a suffering vessel’s passions
vibrating within me:
while fair winds or the storm’s convulsions
on the immense deep
cradle me. Or else flat calm, vast mirror there
of my despair!

I sense all a suffering vessel’s passions / vibrating within me… It’s also the very basis of aesthetic response: Listening to music, sailing away on its ether, makes one resonate with the universal suffering of the human vessel. Yet that sympathetic vibration, because it is for you, at the moment of listening, aestheticized, feels as it were supported (“cradle me.”) Tis what UD has said so often on this blog about artistic experience, and it’s an idea that goes back to Aristotle: We are intensely drawn to aesthetic response in part because it cathartically allows us to go through the feeling of suffering in a way not personal to us. Art “mirrors” our despair; it is not the raw stuff of our despair. It vibrates our being with being and is therefore thrilling, clarifying, purgative, and even – in making us feel universal suffering – compassion-making…

But what grand work of art is titled “Vibration and Control”?

Well, let’s shift gears.

“Vibration and Control” is the name of an engineering journal. One of its contributors was part of a peer review ring:

[Peter] Chen and possible collaborators may have set up as many as 130 fake email accounts that they used to fabricate identities as peer reviewers to help clear articles for publication. On at least one occasion, [the journal’s publisher] alleges, Chen “reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he had created.”

The journal has in one swell foop retracted SIXTY articles.

Not very poetic, but very postmodern. A lot of journals these days pretty much run themselves. When you don’t have real editors (most journals don’t have much in the way of readers either), this sort of thing will happen. Another instance of what UD calls where the simulacrum ends.

*********************

UD thanks two of her readers for various links to this story.

The report also recalled former S.C. State Board Chairman Jonathan Pinson, who viewed an Atlanta Falcons football game in a $5,000 suite. Half the cost was paid by an S.C. State vendor and half by an S.C. State foundation, according to the report. Pinson has since been convicted of federal corruption charges in connection with other activities at the university and separate business deals.

… about their beloved sports schools.

This is just the sort of institution likely to do something real about the national grotesquerie of big-time college sports. (“If college presidents really wanted to halt the college sports machine, they could try two options. They could insist that athletic departments operate within their university budgets, like the English or biology departments; or they could ask Congress to rescind the tax breaks on the commercial income earned by athletic programs. That has about as much a chance of happening as Florida International did at beating Florida last Saturday. Can you imagine a senator from Texas or Pennsylvania embracing the idea of taxing the Longhorns or Nittany Lions?“) (Sure. This was written in 2009 – before the Nittany Lions gave us all an uncensored look at where our athletic program taxes are going. So what. It’s impossible to imagine an athletic program sufficiently depraved to attract serious congressional attention. Though I guess it’s a fun mind game to in fact try to imagine the depths of degradation that might… Nah.)

This guy calls it tragic that

Harvard is paying a team of professional fund managers as much as $5 million [apiece] per year to lose the university more than $9 billion over the last five years compared to a passive, indexed investment in the S&P 500.

He weeps that if they’d invested more wisely, “[Harvard’s] endowment would have grown to more than $42 billion, instead of $33 billion.”

(Does he know that only a few years ago Harvard fund managers were paid $35 million a year apiece? Let us not tell him! He is sad enough.)

Aye, and if they’d invested yet more wisely, Harvard’s endowment might have grown to $420 billion… Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you professional fund managers are made of stone! If I were you with eyes and a tongue to speak with, I’d crack heaven wide open with my laments! Tens of billions gone forever. I know how to tell when an endowment is alive or dead. Harvard’s is as dead as the cold ground. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm agrees that plagiarism is a very bad thing, but grilling seems to her an overreaction.

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OTOH, assuming the nominee survives, SOS has doubts about his capacity for logic (a capacity for logic, like a capacity for independent thought, being a good thing in an education minister). When confronted with his spectacularly large plagiarism portfolio, the nominee said:

“(The theses) contain information that is widely available,” he said. “I don’t think that can be called plagiarism.”

This comment put SOS in mind of the Doonesbury collection titled “But the Pension Fund was Just Sitting There”