But can he? The problem with – call it the Squeak Assumption – is that, as economists remind us, one’s perception of one’s financial condition has everything to do with what other people in your immediate world earn.

A few years ago, several of Harvard’s money managers resigned in protest because instead of making the industry standard for their job description (with bonuses and all, around thirty million a year at that time), they were stuck (because of alumni protests about over-compensation) at around ten, fifteen million. A few years ago, a University of Chicago law professor with a household income of close to half a million dollars cried poor in the national press.

If Steven Cohen, whose personal worth is between eight and ten billion dollars, sits on your board of trustees, you, as president of Brown University, are going to be challenged to maintain your self-esteem. No one likes to be poor.

If you want to understand why the new president of Rutgers, Robert Barchi, is, like a total idiot, continuing to engage in flagrant, self-serving conflict of interest, and thereby adding one more outrageous scandal to the ten others going on at that university, you have to understand what I’m trying to tell you. You have to try to put yourself in Barchi’s shoes. In his corporate-board world, clearing one million dollars a year is the absolute minimum, the barest acceptable situation. One million dollars is in fact for Barchi squeaking by. If Barchi has to drop his corporate money-for-nothing and suddenly plummet to $800,000 a year, this is what his world will look like to him:

One walks along a very rough path of the river bank, in between clothes posts and washing lines, to reach a chaotic group of little, one-storied, one-roomed cabins. Most of them have earth floors, and working, living and sleeping all take place in the one room. In such a hole, barely six feet long and five wide, I saw two beds—and what beds and bedding!—which filled the room, except for the fireplace and doorstep. Several of these huts, as far as I could see, were completely empty, although the door was open and the inhabitants were leaning against the door posts. In front of the doors filth and garbage abounded. I could not see the pavement, but from time to time I felt it was there because my feet scraped it…

Unless you understand Barchi’s world, from Barchi’s perspective, you cannot possibly understand how he came to assume the presidency of a university barely recovering from years of financial corruption and immediately set about securing his corporate board memberships.

I suppose it’s some sort of compensation, when the story about your young, already totally blighted university presidency jumps to the New York Times, that the quality of prose being produced about the fiasco significantly improves – even to the point of poetry. Rutgers has moved from storm to storm is lovely, lilting, memorable writing; even as the article in the Times rehearses all the stupid stuff Robert Barchi has overseen in the months since he took over at Rutgers, it sweetens things somehow with this poignant formulation…

UD thinks the poetry resides in the word moved… Think of the similar E.E. Cummings line

my father moved through dooms of love

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

Perhaps, as John Updike wrote, life’s a shabby subterfuge; certainly the last few years at Rutgers and the UMDNJ have been shabby in the extreme. Under its latest leader, a man who does not even understand the concept of conflict of interest, Rutgers straggles on. And the rain it raineth every day.

La Kid, Tower of London.

July 10, 2013.

Context matters. If you’re the new president of a crime- and scandal-ridden university, you want to watch yourself. Given the scuzzy reputation of the joint, you want to do all you can, personally, to model a new, less scuzzy ethos.

So for instance if you’ve just taken over the notorious University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a school UD has long described as having rolling prison admissions (scroll down and enjoy), you want to set a personal example of probity and non-greed and all the things UMDNJ has never before known.

You’ve taken over America’s most financially corrupt university as part of its recent merger with Rutgers University. And oh yeah that’s another thing. If at Rutgers you’re running a national laughingstock (thanks to endless sports scandals culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit about your sadistic basketball coach — again, scroll down… forever…) and a fiscal disgrace (thanks to your bankrupting the school to pay for your sports program), you really, really, really want to set a moral example as you begin to run the school.

But hey. It’s Jersey. Whaddya expect? You expect a president who can be content with his legitimate close-to-a-million-dollars-a-year salary? It’s fucking Jersey!

“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance.

Yeah! The place stinks already; how ’bout bringing your own stink bombs to the game? President Barchi’s particular stink bombs are of course all about sitting on corporate boards – as the New York Times points out in this article, it’s the done thing if you’re a university president panting to make (as the title of a recent book about the practice has it) money for nothing. And Barchi adds an extra jolt of stink by sitting on the boards of companies who do business with Rutgers.

What with perennially expensive sports scandals, and a sports program that in any case is bankrupting the school, you won’t be surprised to hear that tuition at Rutgers is so high that student protests escalate by the day. It can only make things better for students to realize that instead of running the school Barchi is off to relax-and-rejuvenate corporate retreats. What better way for the president of a struggling, scandal-ridden, public university to comport himself?

[University of New Mexico] Athletic Director Paul Krebs said the business model for the rebuild of The Pit two years ago, which cost about $45 million, was “predicated on a naming gift for The Pit.”

Apparently the Pit, UNM’s basketball arena, actually cost 60 rather than 45 million, but I guess the cost was predicated on being 45 million… Just like the renovation itself was predicated on a rich person offering 10 million dollars so that this person’s family or business name would be on the stadium…

Unlike Florida Atlantic University, which did score a rich namer (a local prison company) for its stadium (whoops – FAU had to turn down the gift because of outrage over the perceived sleaziness of that prison business… FAU’s disgraced president resigned… and since then, no other namer has come forward, so the school is hemorrhaging money…), UNM hasn’t gotten one bite. Even though it spent 60 million dollars on the basis of a promise – a predication – that a naming gift would be forthcoming.

No problem, however. Tuition and fees will rise, and faculty salaries will remain flat, so that this unpredicated outcome can be handled.

Luckily, UNM students and faculty are accustomed to the peculiarly expensive nothingness of la vie UNM. They’re already paying for an empty baseball stadium. There are all sorts of ongoing monetary and other costs related to the latest batch of unpleasant coaching departures (Alford, Locksley). Everyone at UNM seems willing to remain eternally poor and stupid — predicated on sports.

… overlooked.  Brain injury, drunk driving, gun-play — the sorts of activities significant numbers of high-profile-sports student athletes engage in — these things get less attention than bogus courses and friends with impermissible benefits, etc.

UD isn’t sure why, given the obviously greater drama of that first list… Maybe it’s because some of that stuff hasn’t happened yet, as it were (eventually some players will probably die of football-inflicted brain injuries…), and while the other stuff (drunk driving, gun-play) does happen here and now  it usually  doesn’t end up actually killing anyone.   Plus millions of Americans play with their guns and get drunk and get into fights and all.  Big deal.

The other stuff, the academic stuff, can have all sorts of NCAA implications, which can hurt team performance, etc.  It can hurt eligibility.

Thus Luke DeCock, a Kansas City  Star writer, notes how bizarre it is that the latest fuckup on a University of North Carolina sports team is in trouble for hanging out with a professional agent and possibly taking gifts from him and all, but no one seems to care that a gun was found just outside the car he was driving when he was recently arrested.

Drive around with a 9 mm handgun and nine rounds of ammunition … and you’re asking for real trouble. That was also found outside Hairston’s car, and while the police said Wednesday they don’t anticipate any additional charges against Hairston, there’s still no explanation for the gun. That’s the really worrying thing about this entire episode.

NCAA violations very rarely put lives at risk. Guns kill.

There have been 14 homicides in Durham in 2013 already. It’s an unchecked epidemic of violence, too much of it taking place in the same neighborhood where Hairston and his friends were arrested.

As DeCock writes:

Not to be deliberately obtuse, but while rental cars and parking tickets have added a whiff of conspiracy to P.J. Hairston’s troubles, isn’t the bigger issue that a gun was found outside the car the North Carolina basketball star was driving when he was arrested?

 

Apparently it’s being obtuse to believe that the weaponry student athletes are carting around is more disturbing than the mysterious Yukon SUVs they’re driving. I mean, unavoidable bottom line here seems to be that we don’t much care whether they kill themselves or even us; we care that their team remains eligible.

I think this is how you get to Aaron Hernandez.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

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

Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.

… being scammed.”

Ah, Penn State. Took our eye off that ball for a bit.

Yeshiva University has been hogging the sex abuse limelight lately… But now that PSU’s most recent president, Graham Spanier, has sued Louis Freeh for libel, we must all pop our favorite antiemetic and swivel our attention back there.

UD doubts there’s an antiemetic strong enough for us to look at both campuses at once.

Weird bizarre shameless odd sad and insane are some of the adjectives the Bloomberg Business Week writer I quote in my headline uses in his piece as he tries to figure out why a once reasonably respectable man – a man now under criminal indictment for endangering the welfare of a child – launches an unwinnable lawsuit that can only bring greater disgrace to himself and the university that continues to employ him as a professor.

What can I say… It’s damnably difficult for people who’ve been university presidents, who have flown in (taxpayer-provided) private jets, and who have run massive sports empires, to think ill of themselves. Year after year they get spectacular evaluations from the trustees, who (at places like Penn State and Gordon Gee’s Ohio State) want caretakers who leave the coaches alone. Now suddenly just because some old fart coach got caught in the shower Spanier’s being attacked!

We’ve spent the last year watching several university presidents be destroyed by the sports programs on their campuses. Other presidents (Donna Shalala most notably) have been reduced to little more than NCAA petitioners. Yet UD doubts there’s one university president in America who thinks it can happen to him or her. Spanier’s nutty libel suit emerges out of the toxic, only-in-America combination of presidential grandeur and sports pimping.

No better way to optimize your Novartis-funded results on a Novartis drug than to place a Novartis employee on your faculty and put that person in charge of statistical results. This research protocol all but guarantees that your results will be in line with corporate efforts in this case to establish the drug as effective for pretty much any human ill you can think of. And that is just what happened!

The Novartis plant held the same position in four other Japanese university labs. Truly an impressive effort on the drug-maker’s part.

The much stranger than fiction world of Yeshiva University.

If you’re the plagiarism-positive German university establishment, the last thing you want is a bunch of bloggers investigating and outing biggies like education and defense ministers who plagiarized their dissertations. So it should come as no surprise that the Rectors Conference has come out with the helpful suggestion that these bloggers shut the fuck up.

[T]he Rectors’ Conference – Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, or HRK – seeks to restrict the activities of internet forums like Guttenplag or Vroniplag, which played a key role in developments.

Yes, you go ahead and try to do that. Already 1300-plus German and other academics have petitioned against you. (Ol’ UD is of course among them.)

Here’s the problem, as I see it, for Loose Lips Sink Plagiarists Hippler: He and his organization have no good options. Here are their options.

Option One: Become the butt of free speech jokes.

Option Two: Add publicity and outrage to the campaign to bring legitimacy to German academia, thereby increasing the number of people investigating plagiarism.

Option Three: Remind people of the hilarious details of the von Googleberg case — and of others — thus refreshing and deepening the ridicule your educational institutions have already suffered.

Since they’ve already showed their hand as a secretive, plagiarism-enabling guild, it’s too late for the good rectors to do what they ought to have done. Probably some day, after they’ve suffered enough contempt, they will do it:

Try reading the dissertations your students submit to you. Hell, try working with them as they write their dissertations.

I know how busy and important you are… How unbelievably degrading such scutwork is… I mean, where would you start? For decades you’ve sat on your ass and passed one unseen thesis after another. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

This phrase appears in an angry editorial written by a Florida International University student. The student is embarrassed that since “2006, the football, men’s basketball, soccer and track and field teams, as well as the women’s cross-country and indoor and outdoor track teams have been sanctioned by the NCAA for poor academic performance at least once.” The basketball team’s APR score is so low, it “received a ban from next year’s postseason and a reduction in practice time.”

The writer, however, goes on to call schools like FIU (he also mentions Duke, Ohio State, and the University of Miami) “sports-accomplished.”

I’m familiar with derogatory terms, like jock shop and football factory. I’m impressed that someone has now come up with this positive term.

Ohio State, University of Miami… these schools have accomplished so much…

A school that’s been little other than a school for scandal for as long as UD can remember. Here’s a recent recap of only its very latest scandals.

UNC currently is on probation for wide-ranging major violations in football, including impermissible benefits from agents to players. The football program was given a postseason ban and other serious sanctions, and the scandal led to the firing of football coach Butch Davis, the retirement of athletic director Dick Baddour and ultimately played a role in the resignation of chancellor Holden Thorp.

In addition, the school has been rocked by an academic scandal that centered around bogus classes in the African-American Studies Department. A significant number of athletes – including many football and men’s basketball players – were enrolled in the classes…

With that as context, the timing of a potential legal and NCAA issue involving the leading scorer on the 2012-13 Tar Heels basketball team is hardly ideal.

As another observer puts it:

UNC has become the butt of jokes and the home of collegiate scandals, inquests, NCAA penalties, disgraced university employees, fired professors and departed football coaches, athletics directors and chancellors.

Yet this same observer claims that before this, UNC boasted

centuries of clean living, academic propriety and athletic purity.

Really? Are you prepared to go with that description? I mean, all grody sports schools do this – they all lament a golden age of propriety and purity, now sadly temporarily tarnished… Penn State was amazing on the subject…

Eh. Let ’em.

Let ’em sit in the local bar bawling into their beer about how great and true it used to be.

… Brazilian soccer.