It’s right and meet, I guess. If your country represents scholarly plagiarism to the world, you want the public face of your educational establishment to be a plagiarist. It’s the Korean way.
And Kim Myung-soo really fits the bill. He’s been stealing his students’ papers and publishing them under his own name for decades.
UD also likes the particular form of plagiarism favored by Korea’s intellectual elite. Pretty much everyone does it like Kim Myung-soo: You steal your students’ papers.
There’s an extra cramp of revulsion one feels in contemplating plagiarism that involves taking advantage of your superior position to exploit the hard work of an inferior who can do absolutely nothing about it, except to turn around and do the same thing to her underlings when she gets the chance.
… announces that he “will not engage with the media further in …regard” to the school’s famously terrible financial situation. Everybody’s talking about it.
Further is strange. He has never engaged with the media. And he never will. Yet another winning strategy from an institution full of winning strategies.
He will, however, whisper, just in the ear of Yeshiva insiders, just for their sake, that Yeshiva is great, fine, rolling in dough, very very fiscally prudent. Couldn’t be better.
************************
CBS: “A university spokesman declined CBS 2’s interview requests, but issued a statement claiming inaccuracies in Weiss’ report. It wasn’t specific.”
There goes President Richard Joel earning his salary again.
************************
Though he clearly wasn’t hired for his math skills.
As international attention pivots to scandalous, junk-status Yeshiva University, UD wants to acknowledge those people – like Andrew Sole – whose concern for the institution as a university rather than a tit for hedgies on the board of trustees prompted them to act on behalf of YU. She wants to acknowledge the three faculty members who, in 2012, wrote an anonymous letter to the campus newspaper (anonymity being required in the corrupt setting of this rapidly dissolving university) voicing their despair at the baffling failure of the university’s endowment — baffling because the cronies on the board of trustees who were high-risk-betting all of the university’s money away were far too arrogant to tell anyone about it. Why weren’t there conflict rules? Why wasn’t someone supervising the trustees and the money managers? Does it bother anyone that, with the exception of storied Yeshiva trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, pretty much the same people whose staggering financial irresponsibility destroyed the school are still on the board?
There’s a pathos, two years later, to reading these faculty members trying to figure out what’s going on:
No one is speaking about what caused the terrible drain on the endowment and when it will stop. In short, there is no transparency… Yeshiva needs to figure out why the endowment is performing so much poorer than the endowment of every other comparable institution in the nation and fix that problem. We do not know what the problem is or how to fix it – but we see that no one else is discussing what really is the problem, in part because of the utter lack of transparency in YU’s finances.
Well, that’s over. Now the whole world is watching as the story of how a school destroys itself through greed, secrecy, and cronyism, plays out in the national and international press. As the Yeshiva University story escalates, this blog will continue to note the people who warned the school that it was killing itself.
I mean, if you’re wondering just how far you have to go to catch the eye of an accreditor, take a look. Decades of arrant criminal mismanagement and outright theft to the point where they’ve basically killed the institution. That’s what it takes.
And, you know, it’s not as though we’re talking revocation of accreditation or anything. It’s only probation because (cough) we’re just starting to get a little concerned here…
I guess they noticed the Pinson trial or something…
Background on South Carolina State University here.
Time for this University of Virginia student to double her demands: $80 million!
Background here, in which UD urges the student to increase her damages demand to $1600 million. But upon reflection, and given that most of her case is dead, I think she should pare her demands back to simply doubling them.
Enormous jellyfish.
Wexford, Ireland.
Two hours ago.
*************
Rhizostoma Pulmo?
Barrel is the common name.
And yes – it’s a big
story all over.
Six years ago, a concerned Yeshiva University alum, Andrew Sole, wrote a letter to the president of that school calling for the resignation of the entire board of trustees, a scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Madoff-and-Merkin-led, lot.
Yeshiva’s answer to Sole (which came not, of course, from the president, who is far too busy and important to have bothered with such a triviality, but from some underling… or maybe the response was machine-generated…), Sole told a newspaper, was “scripted,” and “beyond offensive.”
And so it remains today, with Yeshiva the object of renewed contempt as stunning details of its take-down of itself via a combination of risky investments and the Madoff/Merkin tag team emerge. Sole once again calls attention to the fundamental negligence… perhaps amounting to criminality?… of the people who have now succeeded in running the school entirely into the ground (Moody’s has rated it junk); and, incredibly, true to form, Yeshiva has tried not responding at all to him, and then, under pressure from growing media attention, has denied everything. Everything’s peachy at Yeshiva! Plus the extensive report on its shameful activities is all “half-truths and inaccuracies.” Such as?
Yeshiva isn’t saying.
*******************************
Yeshiva has had to sell off some of its valuable Manhattan real estate, is trying to pare faculty by encouraging retirements, and has given up control of its Albert Einstein College of Medicine to save money. Yet it’s still at risk of running out of cash next year, Moody’s reported.
Getting rid of everyone but beloved Yeshiva trustee Zygi Wilf!
“Oz, with his credible position as a professor at Columbia University…” writes about Columbia University’s Mehmet Oz, a shameless huckster.
Columbia gives him credibility. What does he give Columbia?
I hope most of us can agree that these two outcomes would be less than optimal.
Yet the hard-headed report just issued by the Education Trust suggests that we’re certainly headed there. Fancy schmancy schools don’t take in enough Pell Grant people and risk becoming gilded ghettos. Why should the American taxpayer subsidize that? Trailer park techs take in little besides poor people, many of whom never graduate. The students default on their big government grants. Why should we subsidize that?
So, reasonably enough, the authors of this report argue that if after a certain number of years a university can’t graduate anyone, or a university graduates only the sort of people who need little help from us to pay for their education, we should withdraw tax support from those places.
I’ll have more to say about this in a few moments. Ne quittez pas.
*******************
Hokay. Here’s the deal. It’s a great report – clearly written, tough-minded. The authors are correct that – since accreditation agencies won’t do their bit and shut down drop-out factories like Texas Southern University, a school the Education Trust report features – the federal government needs to shut them down via refusal of tax subsidies. Certainly the free market is doing its bit – enrollment at schools like Texas Southern is tanking – but, hard as this is to believe, it’s true that Texas Southern University and the many schools like it will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe. They will continue to function with only faculty, administrators, and football players. They will mutter vaguely about online programs or something.
And why will they continue to exist?
Look no further than Garnet F. Coleman. There’s a Garnet in every crowd, the local pol who believes in the “strong status of our proud institution, Texas Southern University” and makes sure hapless taxpayers keep throwing their money down a hole. Garnet thinks it’s fine that TSU is incredibly ineptly (and sometimes corruptly) run; fine that its athletic program (why does a school like this have athletics at all?) is deeply in debt, blahblahblah… Because TSU does so much good by failing to graduate students whom it burdens with lifelong debt…
In one of its more shameful editorial decisions, the New York Times two years ago agreed to play along with this madness. Sent a reporter down there who, without comment, quoted TSU’s president saying this:
He said his administration is taking a more hands-on, student-centric approach that should improve academic achievement, which he said had not previously received sufficient attention. Despite what the graduation rates suggest, Mr. Rudley said the campus is in the midst of a renaissance.
The reporter also gushed about new campus buildings, better maintenance of public spaces, etc. Yes, a renaissance was happening right now.
Or in a minute or two. Be patient, be patient.
The Education Trust people now introduce the startling proposal that we no longer wait, that we acknowledge the wasteful scandal of schools like TSU and shut them down.
Texas Southern University … fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.
**************************
Then there’s the other end of the problem: Rich kid schools.
Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, in 2011 fell in the bottom 5 percent of all colleges in its enrollment of low-income students: 10 percent. Yet equally selective institutions like Amherst College and Vassar College enrolled more than twice as many low-income students, 23 and 27 percent respectively. We see the same variation in the public sector. The University of Virginia, which ranks in the bottom 5 percent on service to low-income students, enrolled only 13 percent Pell students in 2011, whereas the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Binghamton enrolled 20 and 26 percent Pell students…
And here’s a fascinating mystery:
There are high-achieving, low-income students whose academic credentials place them well within the band of elite colleges’ current admission standards but who for a variety of reasons do not apply to or enroll in these selective institutions. Nearly two-thirds of low-income students with high grades and SAT scores do not attend the most selective institutions for which they are qualified, compared with just over one-quarter of high-income students with similar academic credentials.
Counterintuitive, huh? You’re a genius from Missoula but you don’t go to Harvard, which is desperate for you. Why not?
Well, begin by reading this essay by Walter Kirn, a kid from Minnesota who accepted an offer of admission from Princeton. Although UD has difficulty believing the story Kirn tells about being kidnapped by a castle-dweller, she finds the rest of his account of being middle-class at Princeton credible. Not only were these four years of social hell – of being made to feel poor and outcast – they were intellectual hell as well, as Kirn tells it.
We laughed at the notion of “authorial intention” and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend — or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.
Way to go, Yeshiva.
****************
Of course, there’s a teeny bit of collateral damage.
Classy of Yeshiva’s president (“One portion of spending that increased more than three times was the president’s compensation: according to documents the school filed with the IRS, where [the previous president] had earned just under $344,000 in his final full year as president (2002), in recent years, [Richard] Joel’s total compensation has reached $1.2 million.”) to make jokes about the situation.
Very Marie Antoinette.
Ever wonder what these departments look like? Here’s the one Chase Garnham’s talking about.
There is a required internship for all HOD majors.
UD would be interested in knowing how the football players satisfied this requirement, since Garnham seems to be saying that they barely had time to take HOD classes, let alone do an internship. Similarly, how many of the football players’ HOD classes were online? Independent studies?
