These are excerpts from a strong-minded article about universities with virtually non-existent graduation rates.

I’ve covered scads of scandals at two of them: Chicago State and Texas Southern.

… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.

… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.

… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.

… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”

… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.

… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.

And how, pray, will they be shut down? That is precisely the job of the accrediting agencies. In taking away accreditation, they make it impossible for the schools to operate. But they don’t remove accreditation even from Chicago State, which has a 13% graduation rate.

Shut down the accreditors. Start a new agency that’s not just as corrupt as the schools it ignores.

… by a reporter for The Hatchet, George Washington University’s student newspaper. Subject: Texting. Has it damaged my students’ writing?

Stay tuned. I’ll link to the article as soon as it appears.

… does a full work-up on George Washington University.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.

… presses his case to the voters of Vermont.

The primary is tomorrow.

Mr UD loves it — as do many of their friends — and since he does the food shopping, we eat a lot of Joe’s food.

A longish article in Fortune tries to explain the market’s appeal.

Who’s a fan of Trader Joe’s? Young Hollywood types like Jessica Alba are regularly photographed brandishing Trader Joe’s shopping bags — but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly is a fan too. “What’s not to like?” says Costco (COST, Fortune 500) co-founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. “They’re very good retailers, and we admire them a lot.” Visit a Trader Joe’s early in the day, and there are senior citizens on fixed incomes shopping for bargains; on weekends and evenings a well-heeled crowd takes over. Kevin Kelley, whose consulting firm Shook Kelley has researched Trader Joe’s for its competitors, jokes that the typical shopper is the “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.”

But Mr UD hates Volvos.

This blog even has a category for it.

Beware the B-School Boys.

This is the third story along these lines that UD has covered. A business school professor offers his students an investment opportunity. The fools give him their their money, which he is now accused of having stolen.

“Being a college professor, I know it’s stupid now, but I didn’t even think about it being a scam. I thought, ‘This is just incredible,’” said Turnage.

Aaron Turnage, a Clayton State student, got taken by Stephen Williams, his business school professor. Williams also reportedly stole from his students when he taught at Georgia State.

Williams discovered something that Bernard Madoff and countless others have also discovered: A university affiliation (Madoff was a Yeshiva University trustee) is the most powerful character-colonic known to humankind.

Beware.

With Marc Hauser as background, Gerald Koocher, in an NPR interview, spells out some categories of research fraud.

… The kinds of things that the federal government focuses on for federally funded research is mostly what’s called F, F and P: fabrication, which is making up data out of whole cloth; falsification, which is modifying your data to fit your needs; or plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as your own.

But we are also concerned, for example, about questionable authorship practices, where you take credit for something that someone else really did most of the work on or where you list an honorific author in the hopes that their prestige will get you published, or when you are careless, such as sloppy record keeping, or when you intentionally rig your samples so that – or your methods so that you bias the results; when you don’t adequately supervise your research assistant so that some mistakes are made and never detected, and inappropriate data gets incorporated in the analyses…

… have produced many Giant Puffball mushrooms. They’re out there right now, only yards from my office window. They look like the brains of aliens that have been dropped from spaceships. Effing ginormous.

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PUFFBALL UPDATE: In the space of an hour, I’ve gone from being repelled by them, to being afraid of them, to being fascinated by them (I got online and did some reading), to putting on my gardening gloves, picking through my woods, and pulling one of them up.

It’s not the biggest, but – in its pasty pocked surface-of-the-moon way – it’s the most lovely.

I took it to Mr UD, who held, stroked, and sniffed it. I took it to La Kid, who drummed it like a bongo and sank a nail into it. I sent an email to Gabe Mandel, my foraging chef neighbor, and told him to take the rest and cook them.

As you know if you follow this blog, UD is about to teach a course on beauty. She has assigned, among other texts, this Oxford anthology.

As she thinks about this course, she’s writing a series of blog posts about art, aesthetics, ethics. Here are a couple of sample entries.

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The George Washington University School of Engineering, the Elliott School of International Affairs, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — her students in this course come from all over.

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UD has also been gathering news articles of interest to people interested in beauty. There’s the Council Bluffs sculpture controversy, generating coverage from as far away as Australia. There’s the Vogue oil spread.

The wee story of the Wee Frees in Scotland isn’t about the visual realm. It involves efforts on the part of some congregants of this austere Presbyterian denomination to change the way they sing in church.

Which is acapella. And only the psalms. No hymns. No musical instruments. Just the Old Testament psalms, in unison, or sometimes with mild harmony. Sounds like this.

Here’s a whole page of their singing.

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What’s being held on to when people hold on to this as their sole musical worship?

… from the blog All Things Shining.

UD wrote about the blog’s author back in 2006.

If you’d like to read more of her prose analyses, click on the category Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

Whenever UD worries that the currency of the title “Professor” has been devalued, she reads articles like this one in USA Today, about the styling of the latest Mercedes-Benz model, and heaves a sigh of relief.

“The new CLS points the way forward for the future perceptible design idiom of Mercedes-Benz”, explains Professor Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes-Benz. “At the same time it takes its inspiration from the great tradition of stylish, refined sportiness which has always been a feature of Mercedes coupés.”

If Mercedes-Benz thinks it’s a plus to put “Professor” in front of the names of its designers (this guy’s predecessor was also Professor), I guess we’re still prestigious.

… at Petra.

Gotta recoup what the prez is costing them.

My mother, a gardener, had a book in her library with a pleasantly old-fashioned title: Plants That Merit Attention.

Certain sentences merit attention, and over the life of this blog I’ve featured and talked about quite a few. These are sentences that rather leap out at you, little poems amid the prose.

Rereading, last night, the prose of Marjorie Williams, I found these two sentences. In the first, she’s describing her mother on her deathbed:

There she was in the hospital bed that had been brought in and set up in the corner of her bedroom, comatose some of the time and the rest of the time small and frail with an avian air of confusion.

In the other – I’ll give you two sentences for this one – she’s talking about the depression she and her husband felt as they tried living a normal life after Williams’ cancer diagnosis:

We don’t have to be actively thinking about the wild uncertainty of our future together to be pulled by its undertow. Sometimes, when either of us comes out of it and manages briefly to raise from the ocean floor the graceful wreck of our old, normal life, we can be happy for days or weeks or even a month.

Avian, yes? And the graceful wreck, yes? These are moments amid the prose when the eye stays on that part of page a bit longer, idles in the unexpected beauty of an image. An avian air. It’s not just that she found the bird metaphor, though that’s already spectacular, a way of making the rather abstract words that precede it (small, frail) suddenly take on physical specificity. It’s that an avian air is a poetic phrase, richly alliterative, delicate to the mind’s ear like a bird, landing with the mother’s frailty on the very end of the sentence.

And the word air! It breathes meanings, associations… Song, manner, atmosphere. When I first encountered this phrase, I heard a song I sing: The Lass With the Delicate Air. It played through my mind.

Graceful wreck of course is something of an oxymoron, the sort of phrase that lets us do the work we like to do when we read, lets us work out the ambiguities of an idea or argument or situation…

Or not so much work them out as recognize and accept them in their unworked essence. This prose doesn’t instruct. It makes nothing explicit. It gives voice to the almost-unutterable enigmas of life.

Harvard has finally, after years, said something official about the Marc Hauser scientific research scandal. Yes, he committed fraud in eight articles, three of which were published, and they’re being retracted as we speak. No, we don’t want to talk about what punishment he’ll receive. Don’t expect him to be fired. Now shush.