Admission to the Pirogov med school in Moscow has always been pretty straightforward: You give the head of the school thousands of rubles, and he lets you in.

The Russian government figured it had gotten around this system by instituting a standardized exam, and mandating that the university admit the highest scorers.

The head of the school sat down and scratched his head and came up with a solution.

Announce you’ve admitted a class of high scorers. Then a few weeks later announce that none of the high scorers has chosen to attend Pirogov, so you’ve admitted instead the traditional cohort.

Would have worked, too, except for some damn blogger who figured out the scheme.

International soccer’s governing body has always been a punchline for corruption in sports. They make the NCAA look like UNICEF.

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Yes, my dear little brothers in sport, our retreat last week was all about this primary fact: We stink to high heaven.

What will we do about it?

Nothing.

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I mean, look up there. Two posts up. Headline Among the Company’s Expenses…

Do you seriously expect us to fuck with that?

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Sweetie, I hear you. But it’s too late to get rid of the scum. And our next President, Rick Perry, wouldn’t hear of it.

My best advice to you: Try to get a job at a school that’s not a sports factory. There are plenty of fine colleges and universities in this country.

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Another comparison.

“[P]rotecting and enhancing the integrity of intercollegiate athletics” … is the equivalent …of upholding the gold standard of the government of Somalia.

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And never forget who’s running the show.

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“It’s a circus. And the NCAA is running behind the elephants with shovels.”

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College football and men’s basketball are multi-billion-dollar businesses being run as an illegal cartel. So don’t say Congress or the President shouldn’t be “wasting time” on sports.

If the President and Congress make it clear to the university presidents that the system is completely unacceptable and they will lose all the tax breaks they currently enjoy if they do not do a complete tear-down, that will force action.

It sounds impossible. So did going to the moon. Sometimes you need to attempt the impossible. Especially when the current situation is completely sickening to witness.

Until recently, the University’s directory listed Villarreal as an administrator in the Division of Biology and Medicine. In an email to The [Brown University] Herald, Mark Nickel, Brown’s interim director of news and communications, called the listing”a professional and collegial courtesy” during Villarreal’s training at Rhode Island hospital. Villarreal was not an administrator…

Brown’s corporate denialist explains that a Brown administrator was not an administrator… That, you know, Brown writes these things in its web pages out of courtesy…

There’s no setting more courteous than your university’s medical school. Courtesy listings which call people administrators when they’re not administrators, and – more commonly – professors when they’re not professors. Courtesy (aka guest) authorships on research papers. Courtesy visits from pharma reps…

I declare, it’s like the first five minutes of Gone With the Wind over there! Everybody dressed in crinoline and bowing and scraping and extending courtesies left and right…

When reality bumps up against these exquisite poses, it’s always unpleasant. Robert Villareal, recent undergrad and medical school student at Brown, has already organized an impressive criminal drug distribution network.

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And speaking of backtracking, Brown has also been having second thoughts about one of its more idiotic money-making ideas: interest-rate swaps. As one financial advisor comments:

“The basic assumptions were wrong… Under ideal circumstance they could have worked out, but what are the chances when you have a 30-year deal that everything would go exactly as predicted?”

Brown has unloaded, at a cost of five million dollars, one of the swaps; there are two others which will cost them twenty million to unload. Two of the three swaps are with Goldman Sachs, on whose board Brown’s president sat for ten years. Reporters want to talk to her, and to Goldman, about that connection, but

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

Ruth Simmons, Brown’s president since 2001, resigned from the Goldman Sachs board in February 2010 after 10 years. Calls seeking comment from her spokeswoman, Marisa Quinn, weren’t returned.

Don’t be pretty much nobody smarter than a University of Florida Gators fan.

I mean no surprise there …it’s a university and all!

Gators fans spend loads – not just hundreds on each season ticket, but thousands on something UF calls a “contribution” before they even get the right to pay for one of the state’s most prized commodities: admission to a Gators football game …

Did I say admission? Hell, any jerk can get admission. These thousand dollar babies admit you not only to a guaranteed air-conditioned lounge but to a pre-game buffet!

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Hey but what’s this? You say the Gators eat shit this year and some dummies are dropping their season deal? Leaving precious commodity gaps all over the stadium? Nobody wants to see a three thousand dollar seat sitting empty! What does that say about fan loyalty? How does it make the loyal fan in the next seat, who’s out tens of thousands of dollars for a privilege few people seem to want, feel?

It’s kind of lose/lose when you think about it. Figure you’ve spent all that cash and grazed the pre-game buff and inhaled the lounge … figure you’ve even gotten drunk as a skunk.

Now everything’s set for the big payoff… what we lady folk call The Big O — a winning game! Only it don’t happen. What happens is that the other team wins.

Well don’t you feel like a chump. All that money just to pig out, get drunk, access air conditioning, and watch your guys lose. You get up from that thousand dollar seat unsteadily, and you drive home pissed every which way.

The other lose part of the lose/lose thing I’m suggesting here is that you go to the next game and you set yourself down in your thousand dollar seat and the guy next to you spends the whole game telling you how much less he paid for the seat than you did ’cause UF is so desperate it’s practically giving them away. Plus the team loses again. Haw!

… and wants to say two things:

1. Your comments and emails – and poems! – have cheered her up immensely. Thank you.

2. When doctors want to show you affection, they squeeze your toes. UD finds this custom adorable.

More later.

… here, she goes in for some surgery tomorrow. She thanks her readers for their kind wishes.

She should be fine, but she’ll be out of it for a day or two.

UD‘s notorious for posting every day. But I very much doubt I’ll be able to post tomorrow.

I mean, maybe I can post tomorrow… But my subject matter is unlikely to be very universityesque.

More like Wow …. Look ……… My own …. personal …. handheld …. morphine dispenser …

Anyway, ne quittez pas.

… she often assigns David Mamet’s play (it’s also a film), Glengarry Glen Ross, all about slimy businessmen.

She’s delighted to see attorneys in one of the many Righthaven suits (for UD‘s involvement in this sorry story, go here) turning to literature to encompass the specific unpleasantness of the Righthaven scandal (for details of this filing, go here):

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Ricky Roma says to George Aaronow, “Always tell the truth – It’s the easiest thing to remember.” Had Righthaven followed this simple bit of wisdom, it would not find itself in its current thicket of predicament in Nevada, and it might find its fortune in Colorado to be more promising.

Righthaven’s scheme is based upon “Assignments” of copyrights from news entities to itself. When such assignments are honest and bona fide transfers of rights, they are remarkably simple – the copyright owner simply transfers all title to the copyright to the new owner. Righthaven’s scheme is much more complex, because there is so much dishonesty to obfuscate. In 1992, Glengarry Glen Ross was made into a film with the tagline “Lie. Cheat. Steal. All In A Day’s Work.” Righthaven should have watched the entire film and learned from Ricky Roma; instead it relied upon the tagline and has lied, cheated, and stolen from dozens of hapless defendants in Nevada and in Colorado. That conduct ends in Colorado with this Reply Brief.

More on Righthaven here.

Sometimes a simple little sentence says it all.

As the corrupt people who brought you the situation this sentence describes go on their summer retreat and do some really intense reposeful thinking about how they can unfuck their entirely fucked system — a system that directly benefits every one of the retreatants — they might give a thought to this sentence.

It appears in an article about one of the more notorious forms of money whoring sports universities do – selling beer to students at games.

Doesn’t always seem to work very well. One of the commenters reports from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

UNLV sells beer at basketball and football games. It’s generally not a problem at the basketball games from what I can tell (I go to nearly every home game), but the football games are completely different. There are numerous incidents at each game because of the alcohol being sold inside the stadium. Students/young-adults are binge drinking in the parking lot at tail-gate parties and then coming in and getting more drunk. It requires a very strong police/security presence in the stands just to keep order in Sam Boyd Stadium.

And this is a UNLV game, so we’re talking only 10,000 people at most at a game (unless it’s Wisconsin and the Badger fans sell it out). Usually it’s less than that, maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Imagine a stadium packed with 80,000, it would be nuts. Actually just last season the university made the paid tail-gate lot go dry because of the incidents that occurred during the UNLV/UNR game. I think the universities considering selling beer just to make a few extra bucks are greatly underestimating the problems that accompany it.

Great synergy. Your team sucks, so no one comes to the games. You figure plying students with drink might bring them in, but it doesn’t because your team sucks. Meanwhile your school (and it’s not a very good school to start with – UNLV I mean) has no budget because the state (Nevada I mean) doesn’t care about education, and because you’re in hock for all the big-time athletics stuff you thought was such a great idea.

So sucky team plus you don’t even make the money on booze you thought you’d make because … what did the commenter say? Six thousand a game? Six thousand pissed losers? Watched over by a “very strong police/security presence”? (That costs money too.)

I’m not sure even Samuel Beckett could sketch so arid a scenario.

And why don’t they ever learn?

Because they don’t care.

After all, it’s only your tax money.

Still.

You’d think that just one person at NASA might do a quick check of the universities from which their employees graduate, and the kinds of degrees they’re earning. After all, NASA pays their tuition.

The Office of the Inspector General has found that NASA misused $1.4 million in tax money by reimbursing dozens of its employees who pursued degrees outside NASA’s established programs at for-profit colleges, such as the University of Phoenix (the subject of an ABC News 2010 investigation) and Strayer University.

Now notice the non-reimbursable schools. They’re not diploma mills; they’re our old friends the scandalous tax-syphoning for-profits… So … Écoute: The beauty here is that you, the American taxpayer, are getting your ass whipped in two different ways:

1.) Your taxes pay tuition for the aggressively recruited flunkies at the for-profits;

2.) and your taxes pay for the compensation federal employees (like the NASA people) receive for illegitimately attending (not really attending, of course; everything’s online) the same for-profits.

[B]ecause this $1.4 million represents tuition payments for only a sample of employees at the four Centers and Headquarters where we conducted detailed audit work, we concluded that an examination across all NASA Centers likely would result in substantially higher questioned costs.

This is from the NASA Office of Inspector General. Great to know there are probably lots more cases.

The OIG found that 11 of the top 20 universities NASA employees attended were private or for-profit institutions that are on average 3.6 times and 1.6 times, respectively, more expensive than public universities.

So much for the argument that the for-profits make college affordable for poorer people. Of course you knew already – didn’t you? – that for-profits are extremely expensive? I mean, why wouldn’t they be? It’s only your tax money.

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You think this will change? This won’t change.

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Don’t enough people in this country hate the federal government? I guess not.

… basks on the balcony; hummingbirds buzz the feeders. Time for Les UDs to head back down to the flatlands. They go home today.

Their visit yesterday to White House Farm was spectacular, especially their walk through the haunted old white house itself, its flooring gone through generations of Shenandoah River floods, but the beauty of its fireplaces and windows still there, under the dust, after 250 years. Chris Anderson, the foundation’s executive director, narrated the history of the house (it has seen, among other things, Stonewall Jackson burn the adjacent White House Bridge in 1862, blocking the progress of Union forces), and talked about the foundation’s plans to restore it.

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Large prints of Thomas Jefferson and John James Audubon on the upper landing of the farmhouse reflect the new owner’s engagements in the civic and natural worlds.

We met the owner, Scott Plein, as we walked through the house to its open kitchen; he sat at a table set beside long windows that overlooked sunflowers and karst ponds and heirloom tomato plants and black cattle. The whole property is surrounded – sheltered; made somehow beautifully self-contained by – the vast Appalachian range.

The place was a perfect utopia of yellows and blues. The blue of the sky and the range, the yellow of the sun and the cornfields. It was dreamy – a dream of river and land and harvest and house. The wind rippled the soybeans and made a green ocean.

“Everybody is going to come to these games,” [Florida Atlantic University Mary Jane] Saunders said last week during the ceremonial first lighting event at the $70 million stadium on the north end of campus. “You go to one game and you are going to be want to be part of the whole thing.”

Even if the team goes 1-11? 3-9? Everybody’s gonna wanna be part of that whole thing?

Now this here sports writer in Florida, he’s warning FAU that well you take a place like Akron. They bought a big new stadium and not everybody came to the games.

Akron planned on an average attendance of 15,000 a game when creating its financial plan for the stadium, and the sagging attendance is what created the shortfall in the budget.

And that’s just Akron. You read this blog, you know about tons of other examples of schools that just felt sure their team would win every game so they’d triple that hundred million investment in no time.

See, it’s real simple. You know how your sports team wins every game and packs ’em in? It’ll be just like that for FAU.

Todd Nelson heads for-profit colleges. As head of the University of Phoenix, he “signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education, which had found that Phoenix had ‘systematically and intentionally’ violated federal rules against paying recruiters for students.”

Competitor Education Management Corporation snapped Nelson right up, and now he’s overseeing a similar federal and state lawsuit which, one amazed observer notes, “spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.” The suit wants $11 billion in state and federal financial aid back from Nelson’s ed biz. Wow.

What’s next for this financial genius? He led Phoenix through a loss of almost ten million dollars; Education Management will certainly settle for around… let’s say one billion. Time to jump to Kaplan, where he can maybe work his magic on even bigger numbers.

… Harvard had to pay to settle fraud charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of its professors; but then the University of Florida doesn’t play in Harvard’s big-money, big-influence league.

Still, $435,000 ain’t chopped liver; and thanks to the very similar criminal mischief (it also involved federal contracts) of one of its former professors, UF may well have to pay that amount to the government.

Ginther also happens to be a former math professor with a Ph. D. from Stanford University who just happened to specialize in… statistics.

I’m telling you. Life is better in Washington. In UD‘s city, if you can just keep talking for seven, eight minutes tops, you can earn twenty to forty thousand dollars!

And it gets better. You probably don’t even have to write the speech! At these rates, you can be generous with your speech writer. Show up, stand up, mouth some words somebody else wrote, grab the check.

Here, for instance, are some notes from recent DC speeches on behalf of an Iranian group.

Gen. [Anthony] Zinni’s speaker agent confirmed that Zinni was… paid his “standard speaking fee” for an eight-minute address at an MEK-related conference in January — between $20,000 and $30,000… As for whether he had any qualms about how much the speakers were compensated for addressing the groups, [John] Sano, who delivered [one conference’s] longest remarks with a 14 minute speech, paused and thought…

Yeah, there’s the whole pause and think option… which some have taken:

Despite offers of up to $40,000 for notably brief remarks, sources with knowledge of speaker negotiations said at least four invited speakers have declined this year because they had questions about the [group’s] ultimate goals…

Clear up the questions about your goals and I’d be delighted to be limo’ed to your feast, say out loud like a good boy the eight minutes’ worth of words my speech writer wrote, take a check from you for forty thousand dollars and be driven home. That’d be great.

The author of the article from which I’ve been quoting cautions the reader:

Unless a speaker has a can’t-lose stock tip, nobody is inherently worth $20,000 for a six-minute speech…

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The author of the article questions this Harvard professor, who along with Zinni and Sano has made a killing this way. She responds with some major backoffology:

“I was invited to speak at a conference on the Arab Spring and I received a speaker fee… My remarks were aimed at an Iranian American audience that was concerned about Camp Ashraf. I, too, am concerned about the ongoing humanitarian situation there. But I would not want my presence at the conference to be equated with a position on the delisting of the MEK.”

Well, instead of taking nothing for the speech (you were motivated to give it, you say, by humanitarian rather than material concerns), you took tens of thousands of dollars from the group sponsoring it. So it doesn’t really look as if you have no position on the delisting of this organization.

Delisting from what, by the way? From our country’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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Throw this professor in with the Monitor Group, Lawrence Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and the rest of the Harvard crew, and you understand why Frank Rich and UD laugh so heartily when the New York Times publishes opinion pieces by Ma Ingalls about the evils of materialism.