You just can’t keep a school like UM down. Feast your eyes (scroll down) on its decades of crime, scandal, violence, and corruption. Amazing.
… And while one could argue that it’s not in the long run a very good model — Howard University has so little money that it has now earned Moody’s lowest investment-grade rating — there’s no denying that it can be, personally, enormously rewarding.
Take Howard’s latest interim president. At his last job, as a high-ranking administrator at the university’s hospital, which runs huge operating losses, Wayne Frederick was amply rewarded:
Wayne Frederick, … then director of the cancer center at the university hospital, received [in 2010] a $97,006 bonus on top of his $586,335 base salary.
Naturally you’re going to have to increase tuition sharply, cut programs, and furlough staff to pay for those sorts of salaries and bonuses.
I mean, eventually, as one Howard trustee has noted, the school will have to close. But until then, there’s money to be made.
In my freshman seminar, weeks passed with all of us typing aimlessly on our computers and staying silent when my professor asked questions to the group. Finally, she had all of us stand up as she walked by and checked our computers. At most, two students were actually typing up notes. She banned computers from then on, and class discussions improved drastically.
A Dartmouth student recalls her very wasteful freshman seminar professor.
Professors can avoid this scandalous waste of time and money by investing five minutes acquainting themselves with the state of research on laptops in the classroom.
And why, wonders this University of Central Florida administrator, doesn’t our university have the same draw? Why doesn’t anybody come to our football games? Why can’t he swell with UCF pride at the same full attendance he sees at aquariums and amusement parks? “I … cringe when our football team is featured on national TV because the camera might pan up beyond the lower bowl or near the end zone, where seats are often empty.” The university has more than done its bit – it shuts down classes altogether when there’s a big game, for instance…
But here’s the thing about Central Florida University. Empty its football stands might be, but the school itself – qua school, if you know what I mean – is insanely overcrowded, with extensive reliance on massive lecture halls, online courses, PowerPoint automata instead of teachers, etc., etc. In fact, UCF is one of University Diaries’ online makeover schools, universities she believes should simply accept reality and shut down their physical campus.
Given the nature of UCF, would you go to a football game there if you were a student? What do you suppose this high-security (cheating and cameras are rampant) dystopia means to the typical student? A place to pick up a degree, sure. But little more.
Yet why, the UCF administrator asks, do students not understand that
the university’s investment in athletic programs and student-athletes is an important part of UCF’s move to enhance its brand and image, and full support by fans can be a major contributor to that end.
It’s the same deal at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, which is about to build a billion dollar football stadium:
[The university’s president] tied the stadium project to UNLV’s larger aspiration of becoming a top-tier research university.
What is there about spending all our money on sports will make us a great intellectual institution that these people don’t understand??
… university researchers” has long been a theme on this blog. UD‘s coverage has been local (“The [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group may have helped pave the way for OxyContin’s widespread use.”), neighborly, and much farther out, since this is a global phenomenon.
I’m not talking here about the massive, and I believe structural, fraud in most countries in the world, involving corporations openly bribing doctors to mis-prescribe and over-prescribe their meds. This is certainly the big picture, and every now and then someone complains, and newspapers cover the fraud, and corporations cough up penalty money and the fraud resumes. I’m talking – since this is University Diaries – about the corruption of universities by pharma.
Dennis Normile’s concise summary, in Science Magazine, of
the disintegration of Japan’s credibility as a site of research activity, ends by quoting a University of Tokyo official lamenting “a lack of awareness of research ethics.” But how can this be? Is he arguing that scientists at Japanese universities don’t know it’s wrong to make up research results in exchange for money from corporations?
… addressed to Sedgwick’s brother, David, and running from the ‘seventies through the early ‘nineties. UD has sent them off to UD‘s friend Hal Sedgwick, who maintains a memorial blog about his wife.
Long-term readers know that Eve’s brother, David, was UD‘s first boyfriend. (Details here.)
Here’s David as I knew him when
we were young, a fine observing
presence in the swirl of the world.
Several years ago he left some boxes in my basement; he and his wife and son were on their way to a new life in Louisiana, but they hadn’t settled on a place to live. He wanted me to hold on to what I thought were books and clothes.
At David’s memorial service, his wife told me to keep the boxes. I told myself I’d donate the clothes somewhere. The books would stay boxed until our shelves cleared enough to hold them.
Two nights ago I was in the basement, checking for water damage after the storms, and, expecting to see a pile of sweaters, I idly opened one of the boxes. Two black trash bags, tightly tied at the top, enclosed what felt like neither books nor clothes.
Upstairs, on the kitchen table, I cut through the bags and found – in this and three other identically packed boxes – stacks of photographs and letters. Also cassettes he’d made of his thoughts from places like Calcutta and Malacca.
David traveled and lived all over Asia for decades; he had a multinational love life; and he was, like his sister, a gifted writer who corresponded with other gifted writers. The boxes burst with passionate love letters to him (UD‘s high school love notes to David were mere foothills on the way to a vast groaning recriminating range); and they included files filled with correspondence from David’s sister, to whom he was very close.
Those three boxes, and a fourth box of objects (a luopan; a tallis bag), engrossed me for hours yesterday. I couldn’t bear to read my own stuff, which, like his exchanges with Eve, ran through the pre-email years and then vanished into online; and it felt wrong to read the other stuff. So I emailed Hal and packed off all the Eve letters and postcards I could find. I made a separate file of the many letters (manual typewriter, single-spaced, onionskin paper) from David’s parents, who – I saw as I scanned a few of them – elegantly combined descriptions of their cultural outings in ‘thesda with anxious inquiries as to his health and whereabouts. These I will give to David’s mother.
UD is gratified by Hal’s enthusiasm at the prospect of these new letters; she is gratified to think that some of the letters might be of interest to scholars. It is strange for her to think of having harbored unknowingly for so long David’s almost over-rich record (certainly much too rich for her to handle) of his short life. A life lived to the hilt.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm is a mad fan of super hyper dainty language brought to bear upon the raucously vulgar. It maketh her laugh.
Columbia [South Carolina’s] mayor has broken his silence about a business partner convicted this week on felony racketeering charges.
Mayor Steve Benjamin said he regrets going on a trip that included a visit to a Florida strip club with Jonathan Pinson, a former South Carolina State University trustee…
The mayor’s name came up frequently in Pinson’s trial, even though he was never charged. Some of the most salacious accusations came from a developer who testified that he took Benjamin and Pinson to Florida, where they visited a strip club.
“I regret being present for certain aspects of the previously referenced trip. I should have used better judgment,” Benjamin wrote.
Certain aspects of the previously referenced sojourn would have been better… But it’s still great.
I do this every year.
I am instablogging the Garrett Park Maryland July Fourth parade, which goes right by my house, and how could it not, given the Lake Wobegone size of Garrett Park. It is now ten in the morning; the parade leaves the Garrett Park Elementary School grounds at 10:30. Wee UD graduated from the school, but back then GPES was a dull low-ceilinged brick dealie with cinderblock rooms… Two years ago they tore it down (the population in madly sought-after ‘thesda has grown insanely) and an actual architect vastly enlarged and rebuilt it, so now it’s all way-high skylights and winsome curving hallways and rainscaped gardens.
I have swept my storm-tossed front steps and driveway, I have swept even the street in front of my house (don’t want the floats wobbling on the branches that came down last night), and I have placed one of my deck chairs at the end of my driveway. From this very chair I will blog the event (assuming internet connection’s okay – after the storm we lost it for a few hours).
After a typically grim July morning, things have picked up out there sun-wise, and it’s not even stifling. There’s even a breeze.
UD is hoping her elderly Latvian neighbors will also be out watching the parade, because Les UDs recently got a rather elaborate letter from, er, Latgales Regionala Nodala (stick a bunch of diacritical marks on some of those letters) about their Latvian snail farm. (Longtime readers know that Les UDs own a Latvian snail farm. Another way of looking at it is that Mr UD inherited property, post-communism, from Latvia, because it had been owned by his family. And it isn’t an active snail farm; it is simply full of snails that someone imported onto the property long ago in the thought that the family might want to farm snails. Something like that.) Said letter includes photographs of their property plus official-looking language and stampings… Is the paltry tax they pay on the thing about to climb to fifty million dollars a year? UD is hoping her neighbors are willing to translate this document for her.
Okay, I’m moving my operations to my driveway.
*************************
Internet connection so far fantastic. Cannot believe this is July and I am not sweating my guts out. A cool, breezy, sunny, morning.
Distant patriotic music!
And now, to my left, my down the street neighbor Peggy (I’ve known her for fifty years) puts out white folding chairs; and to my right – a big crowd of neighbors comes barreling down Rokeby Avenue… Looking for a prime viewing spot? Plenty of those, plenty of those… Like Lake Wobegone, we’re so small most of the townspeople are in the parade.
Hi Jack, says UD to her neighbor Jack.
I like the way you’re… [Jack mimics typing]
Someone’s got to blog the parade, says UD.
**************************
Sounds of sirens!
Many dogs, mainly poodles.
Wind instrument: bugle?
Very loud siren – must be coming from the fire engine that heads the parade.
Bigger crowd than usual this year – good weather?
Flashing lights stage right. Here comes the fire engine.
Way loud sirens as the fire engine comes down Rokeby Avenue.
***************************
Hokay. Much later. I managed to miss a good deal of the parade because a bunch of neighbors gathered around my chair and we all got to talking. So no real instablogging possible as UD learned of her neighbors’ new jobs, visits to Mexico, etc. UD also learned that the song she wrote for Garrett Park’s spring concert (a fund-raiser for a music scholarship) was – or so the event’s organizer claims – “a hit.” The musicale’s theme was Recycling, and UD put Garrett Park-related lyrics to Second Hand Rose. But she was at the beach when the concert took place. She had wondered how the lyrics went over…
Anyway. A good year for my town’s parade. Lots of kids, lots of clever takes on the parade’s theme: Garrett Park Through the Ages. UD‘s favorite thing: A bright red VW beetle convertible full of hippies. On the sides of the car were big white flowing letters that read LOVE PEACE HAPPINESS LOVE PEACE etc.
*****************************
Here’s what it’s like at 9:30 on the evening of the Fourth.
UD is lying down on the grassy hill halfway up her half acre. She is gazing high into the branches of her high old trees at three thrushes who are all very loudly singing their eerie thrush song.
Imagine the sharp harsh sound of the first high notes; imagine the strange low-throttle trill after that; and, after that, the famous ee-oh-lay. You lie there listening to them cycle through the three parts again and again, with variations…
The air is thick with fireflies.
From every direction, little local fireworks displays are popping and booming in your ears.
Congress, meanwhile, would occasionally hold hearings to allow elected officials to wring their hands over the growing scandal in for-profit higher education, but like any multibillion industry, its leading proponents answered by throwing around money in Washington. The Apollo Group (the University of Phoenix), for instance, made $11 million in political donations in 2007 and 2008, Mettler reports — about double the campaign contributions of Goldman Sachs, Time Warner and Walmart that election cycle. In her telling, John Boehner is speaker of the House largely because the for-profit colleges and private student-loan bankers gave so generously to his leadership PAC during his years as chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
(For more on America’s ongoing for-profit college scandal, click on this post’s category, CLICK-THRU U.)
Jonathon Pinson was recently chair of the board of trustees at South Carolina State University. Now he’s going to prison.
In the grand tradition of Leslie Berlowitz, ex-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who paid herself almost six hundred thousand dollars a year (she also had a chauffeur) to sit in a mansion in the middle of a park (right across the street, by the way, from Les UDs’ Cambridge house) and oversee a teeny staff doing dainty things, trustees at Minnesota’s Bremer Foundation have also taken our tax money and over-amply rewarded themselves with it.
In 2004, the three trustees together received nearly $125,000. That figure has increased by nearly 10 times in 10 years… “These institutions get tremendously preferential tax treatment,” [Aaron Dorfman] said. “And because of the tax-exempt status they enjoy, the rest of us pay higher taxes and in effect subsidize nonprofit tax-exempt charitable foundations.”
UD sucks at reading charts, but this one is pretty hard to misread…
There’s a touch of fascism, and a touch of Stalinism, in this account of life on the ground in Happy Valley.
[I] happened to spend a season in Ukraine, of all places, during the year immediately following Sandusky’s indictment and conviction and Paterno’s firing and death. Just as Odysseus had to journey inland until he encountered people who had never seen an oar before, I went where no one had ever heard of Sandusky or Paterno.
It was enormously refreshing. I paid no attention to Penn State football that fall. Before I went away, I found myself agreeing with those who insisted that the Sandusky case was not, strictly speaking, a football scandal, and that the NCAA therefore overstepped its authority and punished the innocent when it voided all those victories and took away all those scholarships.
From my vantage point in Ukraine, such burning questions cooled to room temperature. The victory total was a notation in a record book. Whether Penn State would now win most of its games or half of them or only a few of them for the next few seasons no longer mattered. As long as everybody has fun and nobody gets hurt, right?
Alas, when I returned from my year away I found Nittany Nation to be as avid as ever. I found it particularly strange to see how fans fawned over new coach James Franklin after the departure of Paterno’s successor, Bill O’Brien, for the NFL.
I could see how, after Paterno’s astonishingly long and successful tenure, the faithful might have transferred their allegiance to O’Brien, hoping for a similarly glorious career. Thus we had “O’Brien’s Lions” and “Billieve” T-shirts. But when O’Brien bolted after two years, I would have thought it would have been clear to all what an anomaly Paterno’s 46-year career was. Most coaches, like most employees in any industry, are loyal until they get a better offer. Best not to get too emotionally invested.
And yet, when Franklin arrived from Vanderbilt, fans flocked to the local airport hoping for a glimpse of His Eminence. Local emporia were quick to hawk a new set of not very clever “Franklions” T-shirts.
Up goes the statue of the Beloved Leader; down goes the statue of the Beloved Leader. Weeping in the streets.
New Beloved Leader.
New statue.
As Hillary Clinton’s unwise strategy of hitting up our universities for enormous sums of money begins to implode (here’s a long piece in the Washington Post about it), let us look at the matter more closely.
Say a famous speaker came to your campus – part of a fund-raising evening – and was paid $30,000. Drop one zero from Clinton’s 300 thou for a recent speech at UCLA and think about that much smaller sum. Is that a lot or a little? Remember: You are not a Goldman Sachs trader, but a university professor, or a university student.
If you’re a professor at UNLV, that amount is let’s say around a third of your yearly salary. A person shows up for an hour or two, gives a speech someone wrote for her, sits down, and gets a check for a third of your salary. Seems like a lot.
If you’re a student at UNLV, you’re looking at tuition going up 17% over the next four years. Out of state students already pay around $25,000; in-state pay around $6,000. $30,000 is a nice chunk of change.
Now put the zero back in. The trustees of your university shrug their shoulders at the 300 thou and lecture you about today’s capitalistic world (‘Brian Greenspun, a Las Vegas media baron and UNLV trustee, strongly defended Clinton’s fee, which he said is expected to be fully covered by proceeds from the dinner. He said her star power will boost foundation donations. “If you bring the right speakers in, people will come listen to them,” Greenspun said. “If you bring the wrong speakers in, no one will show up. The right speakers, in today’s capitalistic world, cost more money.”’), a capitalistic world against which Clinton’s speech – with its idealistic bromides – inveighs.
So… two things.
1. The number, the sheer number, the three hundred thou, is really by any standard of which you’re aware outrageously high. 30,000 is a lot.
2.
Harry R. Lewis, a professor and former undergraduate dean at Harvard University who has written critically about priorities in higher education spending, said speaking fees at Clinton’s level amount to “an extravagant form of advertising” for colleges that should focus instead on more scholastic initiatives.
“What makes fees at this level outrageous . . . is that one speaker’s fee becomes comparable to what it costs to educate a student for several years,” Lewis said. “At the same time you’re putting your students into serious debt, as most institutions do; it’s an allocation of resources that’s very suspect.”
One ostensible benefit for students is exposure to a major global figure such as Clinton they might not otherwise get. But Lewis questioned that rationale, asking, “Isn’t she on TV all the time?”
Of course, if you’re a UNLV student, you won’t get exposure to her unless you’ve got $200 to drop at the Bellagio.
The politics of the increasingly popular far-right aims to tap into fears and hatred of difference and migrants. In the race to ban the niqab, which has come to symbolise all that the far right hate, the French government, and now European Court of Human Rights, are leading the charge to give away the rights that were born out of the wars that were the ultimate manifestation of the hatred of the other.
This comment, a response to the latest legal confirmation of a country’s burqa ban, touches on a couple of the big mistakes and elisions to which one has become familiar in this important cultural debate.
The most important elision involves the writer’s suggestion that burqa bans are about political and legal institutions forcing it on countries (“the French government, and now European Court of Human Rights”). Shelina Janmohamed fails to mention strong to overwhelming popular support for burqa bans in several European countries:
82 percent of [French] people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved… Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain..
Current details here.
The latest from one country, Norway, here. A detail from Norway:
Labour has previously been split down the middle on the issue. The Progress and Labour parties have a combined total of 84 representatives in Norway’s parliament and are thus missing one vote in order to secure a majority for a possible ban.
Janmohamed casts opposition to the burqa as a far right phenomenon. It is not. Certainly right-wingers tend to like the idea; but as the poll numbers suggest, it is a position attractive across the spectrum. For details, go here, here, and here. Discussion here.
Finally, related to that last point: The primary reason many on the left favor burqa bans in most if not all of the public realm is that, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2010:
[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way.
That is, many people seem to see their position opposing the burqa having to do with protecting the rights of the women wearing them, not with responding in a panicky bigoted way to fear of the other. When I see a little girl in a burqa I don’t run off screaming with hatred and fear of difference. I feel solidarity with her as a young woman who deserves but isn’t getting the same democratic rights my daughter enjoys. As for adult women in burqas: My reading over many years about the response of people to fully veiled women reveals that the main response, rather than hatred or fear, is pity.