La vie en football factory.
… just passed the three thousand students mark!
UD thanks her sister, without whose technical assistance, and enthusiasm for the project, she never could have done it.
The University of Pittsburgh is a university, a non-profit institution advantaged in myriad ways because of its tax breaks as a non-profit. It is categorized, in fact, as a charity. Are you with me so far?
The person who runs the university’s hospital makes six million dollars a year.
Does that sounds like an appropriate use of tax-payer money? Like a non-profit salary? Or are you smelling just the slightest whiff of profit motive in this figure? Throw in private jets and chefs and chauffeurs and all and you begin to understand why the city of Pittsburgh is suing the hospital, and why this trend – suing so-called non-profits to make them act like (and share like) the for-profits they are – is becoming national.
But local Pittsburgh politics aside, large non-profit health systems are getting new attention from city and state tax officials across the country facing budget crises. “The fact is hospitals are coming under more scrutiny,” says Gary Young, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research. “The city’s willingness to take on a hospital with the cachet that UPMC has is sending a chill down the spines of many hospitals around the country who are saying, ‘If this is happening in Pittsburgh, what could happen with us?’”
I remind you of all this in connection with the public relations problems NYU is currently facing, as its administrators and some of its faculty help themselves to vacation houses on their students’ – and the taxpayer’s – dime.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I think part of the problem is.
The trend toward packing your board of trustees with Olympians like Steven A. Cohen (personal wealth nine billion dollars) and just down from there is that you as an administrator now hobnob on a regular basis with such people. Study after study tells us that perceptions of one’s financial success are profoundly dependent on the financial profile of the people in your neighborhood, at your workplace. It’s all comparative.
Your attitude toward personal wealth thus shifts as hedge fund managers become the new normal on campus. Your one million dollar a year compensation becomes downright embarrassing. Infuriating. What to do?
You convince yourself you can’t attract the mega-rich and their money to your campus without dressing, talking, and living like them.
You’re not being greedy; on the contrary, you’re doing high-minded work on behalf of the university by styling yourself a financial titan on the same level as your trustees.
***********************
One saw this process very clearly on the Yeshiva board of trustees when Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – men of unimaginable personal wealth – walked as gods among the administrators there. Fellow trustees and high-ranking administrators at Yeshiva fell over themselves to be cut into Merkin/Madoff deals. These people used to think they were rich. M and M showed up and showed them they were poor. “We thought he was God,” says Yeshiva trustee Elie Wiesel of Bernard Madoff.
So, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. If the water level is one billion dollars in personal assets, everyone’s going to want to rise to that. It won’t seem strange to them – it doesn’t seem strange to NYU – that multi-million dollar vacation homes would be part of a university compensation package. I mean, by prevailing standards, that’s nothing! That’s the bare minimum.
************************
This is all well and good – this rising tide business – until people who actually know what non-profits are — or people who realize they are giving their tax money to university robber barons — themselves begin to rise up.
So, nu, would it have killed you to cooperate? I mean, since you didn’t cooperate (which would have meant, far as I can tell, a not-outrageous amount of work on your part), you now have two problems: You got the lowest possible ranking on a national, high-profile, ed-school ranking; and you look as though you knew what was coming so you… didn’t cooperate.
George Washington University was among the lowest-ranked programs in the country. It received this warning from the council: “No prospective teacher candidates should entrust their preparation to these programs because candidates are unlikely to obtain much return on their investment.”
Here’s some stuff about the rankings:
Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations. Education secretaries in 21 states have endorsed the report… The review was funded by 62 organizations, led by the Carnegie Corporation and the Broad Foundation. The National Council on Teacher Quality analyzed admissions standards and inspected syllabuses, textbooks and course requirements and rated 1,430 programs on a scale of zero to four stars.
What, you said we don’t have to cooperate with that fly-by-night Carnegie Corporation… ?
Isn’t the business of being in denial about how bad they are one of the big reasons many ed schools are so bad?
So now your only option is to dump on the Carnegie and the Broad and all those education secretaries… Only we know what we’re doing… They don’t know what they’re doing…
Here’s what you should have done:
The University of Michigan’s School of Education was one of the few institutions that willingly gave its materials to the National Council on Teacher Quality. “There was no particular reason not to,” said Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball. “This is one of society’s most important topics.”
Let UD give you some advice, not that you’ll take it: Apologize for not cooperating (or at least give some reason for not having done so that doesn’t make you look dumb) and say that while you think the rating unfair, it’s one of many useful sources of criticism available to the school, and will be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, you’re going to have a bumpy pr ride for awhile, and you should be thinking in broader terms about how to manage it. One thing to do would be to publish and defend elements of your curriculum. The head of GW’s teaching program should right now (or in a few hours; it’s 4:13 AM) be preparing an opinion piece to be sent to the Washington Post which in measured terms explains and defends the school’s curriculum, admissions philosophy, etc.
UD will now check out GW’s teacher training curriculum. She’s happy to speculate about what might have set off the Council.
**********************************
UPDATE: The Washington Post is scathing:
The council’s methodology was developed over eight years, relying on a review of course descriptions, syllabuses, student-teacher observation instruments and other materials. It came under immediate attack as incomplete and inaccurate from institutions of higher education. Such criticism is rich considering that many of these same institutions fought tooth and nail to keep materials from researchers. “Tremendously uncooperative” is how Kate Walsh, president of the council, described many institutions, which refused to share textbooks or course descriptions. The council had to file open-records requests; many private institutions that are not subject to Freedom of Information requirements opted out. What were they trying to hide?
…by offering them amazing loans not only for fantastic Manhattan apartments and vacation houses (as described in this article) but also for third homes in European capitals?
To be sure, NYU hasn’t yet extended its two-subsidized-luxury-residences policy to a third subsidized overseas residence; but UD is confident this will be its next move. You can’t expect to draw the best, most committed professors to your unattractive school in Greenwich Village without offering to subsidize a primary residence, a vacation residence, and a place in a foreign capital of the professor’s choosing.
I mean, let’s do what the real estate people call comps; let’s look at how important people in Manhattan tend to live. Take the Murdochs. They own six residences, one on the Upper East Side, and the others in “Beverly Hills, London, Beijing, Cavan in South Australia and Carmel in California.” So say you’re recruiting a new NYU law professor. The legal job market has collapsed, so few of the professor’s students will get good legal jobs, but put that aside. She must be given what the very best professors demand if they are to be successfully recruited: One course per year. Armies of teaching assistants. A huge salary. Time off like crazy. Summer travel and research money. Plenty of freedom (and, once again, time) to pursue all conceivable forms of outside compensation.
You simply cannot expect such a person to buy a house with her own salary. You will need to give her spectacular deals on Murdoch-worthy residences in New York City, in surrounding states, and in a foreign capital.
Charles Grassley, that sour old scold who seems to see his job as superintending the American tax dollar, gets all high and mighty about what NYU is doing:
“Universities are tax-exempt to educate students, not help their executives purchase vacation homes,” he said in a statement on Monday. “It’s hard to see how the student with a lifetime of debt benefits from his university leaders’ weekend homes in the Hamptons.”
Ha! Loser! As Greg Mankiw and Eric Cantor have noted, Grassley’s just envious because he has a shitty little Senator salary, and these people are so much richer.
**************************
UD thanks David.
How degrading is it to be a professor at West Virginia University?
Well two of the school’s, er, troubled coaches (the predecessor of one of them was Rick Rodriguez of sainted memory) are getting enormous raises on top of their enormous salaries, while because of “a $13 million cut in state funding to the school … tuition [will] be raised and no pay raises [will] be forthcoming for university employees.”
This writer suggests that these wildly overcompensated coaches (neither has won many games lately) “could donate [their raises] for pay raises to university employees,” but you know how that goes. Greed has no limit in the lovely world of big-time university athletics. Reread the Wikipedia page on Rodriguez if you’re in any doubt.
The writer concludes:
The point is, that we have reached a point in time where some independent outside panel should look into the finances of the school and the athletic department, a thorough and comprehensive study that includes all financial areas, including [AD Oliver] Luck’s travel and the dealings over the athletic department’s Tier 3 negotiations, the reseating within the Coliseum and the raise in the required donations for football seats, all of which has stirred up what had been a loyal public.
This entire mess has grown to such proportions and entangles both the university’s finances and the athletic department’s finances, creating a situation where a soccer coach finds a way to get a new locker room built, where a football coach gets a new weight room to go with a raise and a $300,000 retention bonus next year but a math professor can’t get a three percent raise that someone has to come in and work it out.
Well, but you have to keep in mind the nature of the institution. You’re talking about America’s number one party school. Number one! So who’s that someone gonna come in and work it out? A public university doesn’t get to the top of that list without a concerted, statewide effort.
No, as that ridiculous thing, a professor at West Virginia University, you’re in a hopeless situation. UD‘s advice: Seek respectable employment.
… which seems to be (background here) working its way toward becoming America’s first faculty-free sports factory. A couple of faculty members – astonished by the university’s sudden “sweeping” of all departmental accounts – asked to see the school’s budgets for some recent years.
They were told that collecting, preparing and copying their requested documents — estimated by the university to total some 300,000 pages — would cost them more than $54,000 each.
Well, that’s one way to try to increase your revenue – extort money from people trying to determine how inept your budgeting is.
UD‘s exciting Bloomsday last year, where she sang and read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in front of a packed gathering at the Irish embassy, is followed by a quiet one now, beachside.
Beachside like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Chapter Three, where, in despair, he walks along a beach near Dublin. A young ambitious writer who’d gone soaring off to the continent to write his great books, he’s come crashing to earth – and Ireland – in the guilty, grieving aftermath of his mother’s death. The whole chapter’s his interior monologue on themes of soaring life, haunting death, sex, love, family, and ambition, as he broods along the beach.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
proud rhythm/sand furrows: You see the matched pair, the metered poetry, mirroring his metered walk. Also the subtle assonance of it all: the f‘s and the v (feet/over/furrows), the monosyllabic, final d of sand and proud, taking along with them for good measure the d of sudden. The poetry too of those liquid l‘s in along/boulders/wall; the yet more poetry in all those long lovely open ah’s: march/along/wall. This is gentle prose, echoing the gentle setting of sand and waves and wind on a summer afternoon, the quietness of a solitary man walking and thinking. The storm is inside his mind; when we come to his monologue’s content, to the thoughts themselves, the prose will take a much harsher turn. But here we are still in third person, the consciousness of indirect discourse picking up on externalities.
Proud means bold means our genius is going to choose boulders, and gold , but never bold; he won’t say bold, but while we read, inside our own internal monologue, the word bold, the idea of boldness aligned with pride, will somehow bubble up, somehow subaquatically accompany all of this — haunt it, if you like, the way Stephen’s mother’s death will haunt his thoughts, present, and even insistent, but not quite there on the page. And that is the mind, that is the way it is, as our feet march in proud rhythm. Under the rhythm there’s another rhythm, deeper and always insinuating and complicating and – for Stephen, right now – dead calming, keeping him, despite his full-of-beansness, his amazing libidinal energy – from soaring.
(For an American analogue, there’s this famous passage, from A River Runs Through It:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
James Joyce can actually capture these underflows verbally. Norman Maclean wrote a great book but like virtually all other writers, he can’t do that.)
He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls.
Stephen’s morbid set of mind perceives the boulders as massive skulls, a collective grave all piled up, and of course he’ll think much more directly in those everything-I-see-is-death terms in this chapter — Omnis caro ad te veniet he will say to himself a few moments after this passage; all flesh shall come unto thee. From a requiem mass.
The beach is a graveyard of all manner of things tossed up after being spun forever in the underworld. Much of this chapter will be Dedalus describing the washed up dead things he sees. But the narrative of this short paragraph, like the narrative of his long day and night, June 16, 1904, will be an effort to rouse himself from his dead calm, to defy death and the guilt and fear and despair it occasions, so that he can live and love and write:
Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
It’s high summer, mid-June, a very sunny day; the world bids him notice the buzzing above the oceanic cemetery. As it bade him in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just before he left for the continent:
A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters.
A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.
Joy; the sky above the waters. So Dedalus will, in this slender Ulysses paragraph, go with the sun, with the brightness that illuminates a rickety but real world – the slender trees, frail but lit up; the lemon houses, lemoned for a moment by the sun. It’s just a moment, but it’s real enough. It’s even poetic, with slender and lemon making another assonantal pair.
Soon enough, Dedalus will meet up with our man of the moment, Leopold Bloom, the two of them making a pair that poeticizes and makes bearable, makes legible, and lovable, the world of the living.
Yet another Pravda (this one The Coloradan) pumps out propaganda about a university’s athletic program. What a wonderful world it will be when the Colorado State University football team makes us an intellectually great, financially profitable institution! Comrade Jack (the article refers to the latest AD by his first name – ‘Under Jack’s Watch’ – because he is your friend, your buddy, one of you…) and his vast new $250 million stadium (that’s the cost estimate — we know how that goes) and plentiful new administrative assistants will make everything better. Although our attendance figures are pretty pathetic, he will make them perfect by increasing the number of available seats and raising ticket prices. He will bring a “new way of looking at college athletics,” in which athletics is the front porch of the university (you’ve never heard that one before!) and the AD spends the university’s money like a drunken sailor (also unprecedented!).
Mike MacIntyre doesn’t care that University of Colorado athletics has a $7.5 million deficit, much of it buyouts — buyouts, you know? totally totally wasted payments to former coaches who didn’t win enough games and pull in enough fans.
Mike’s heavily into interior design, so along with his own obscene salary (including buyouts for when he’s the next loser coach) he’s insisting — and the university’s fellatial president has said yesssssirrrr mr mac!!!! — on shiny new offices for him and the boys.
The interim athletic director (at Boulder you’re interim, fired, or making interior design demands before being fired) is on top of the situation.
“We need to look at efficiencies,” [she] said.
… are pretty remarkable. Les UDs head over there today for a couple of weeks of who knows what sort of weather… Though it’s one of UD’s convictions that with very few exceptions there’s no such thing as bad weather at the beach. It’s all good there – vast sky, vast water, and a chance to watch the convoluted things they do together. The stars, the sun, the contrails and the cargo ships. What’s not to like? The way it feels on your skin is whipped up wind and warmth. Long fields of gulls sit there when you walk the beach in the morning. There’s the business of spotting dolphins. You can keep your head down and look for striated stones – a particular mania of mine. Between the quiet hours of early morning and late evening there’s of course the main show, the blue-umbrella’ed broilers, among whom Les UDs sit, reading, squinting, broiling.
In our little apartment overlooking the boardwalk, there’s the setting up of the mini-domesticity of the short vacation – the one big trip to the supermarket, the exploration of the apartment’s towels and sheets, the phone call to our old friends the Elkins (they’ve bought an apartment across the street from the one we rent) to arrange some socializing. If the weather’s truly bad, we’ll play a lot of Scrabble, pausing mid-game to stare together at the witchy sky.
Naturally, blogging continues apace, whatever the weather.
I dunno. UD likes this bucolic/high tech image, this meld of Outer Lafayette and a crop of keyboards…
But as ye sow so shall ye reap. This grotesque dumping is what you’re reduced to when you’ve been caught breaking into your professors’ offices and into their computers and changing the grades you got in their courses.
F grades were changed to As or Bs, Cs were changed to As, and even As were changed to A-plusses.
What the hell. Go all the way.
*****************************
If this sort of thing catches on, maybe some local farm can advertise itself as a keyboard dump. Set aside a field. Charge twenty dollars a keyboard.
“[S]tudent fees and direct university support of the [Marshall University] athletic department’s budget nearly doubled since 2006.” “[T]he athletic budget has increased by almost $13 million, or nearly 75 percent, since 2005… [F]rom 2006 to 2012, the biggest growth in money to shore up the [athletic] budget was in direct university support, going from about $3 million in 2006 to $7.44 million last year.”
The faculty – compensated way below market, and in some cases up to thirty percent below market – have made bold to complain a little. That complaint has revealed something about Marshall that UD‘s not seen before at any American university. For significant segments of the Marshall community, professors as such represent a politically offensive barrier to the school’s true, exclusively athletic, identity. One of the highest profile local columnists ridicules and excoriates the professors and concludes
The radicals … just want a raise.
Much of the commentary on his column (and related columns) similarly dismisses professors as liberal scum, etc.
Reading around in the local press on the issue, UD thinks she has for the first time identified an American university willing to be honest about itself: Marshall sees no reason to sustain a faculty. A close look at the place points to the possibility that West Virginians are not educable. They can, however, be kept comfortable at large sports events. We can see Marshall, year by year, acting more decisively on this knowledge.
A combination of sports events and rocket-shot-out-of-anus lawsuits will keep the Marshall University administration rolling along nicely.
… of pharma-compromised universities, to which we in the US have become accustomed. As is almost always the case in these scandals, only because a medical student at the University of Toronto bothered to look into both the financial interests of one of his professors, and the origin of the pain management textbook the professor used in a mandatory course, did it become clear that even as “Canada’s opioid addiction epidemic took root,” he and his classmates were being encouraged to prescribe arguably the most dangerous of prescription opiates. Although more powerful than morphine, oxycodone was consistently described, in the book and by the professor in his lectures, as among the safest of this class of pills in terms of addiction.
The student, now a doctor, discovered that the professor was a consultant to Purdue, the drug’s maker, and that “quotes [in the book] that endorsed the drug never actually existed.” That is, the professor (who wrote the book, presumably with help from the manufacturer) apparently made up positive statements about the drug and put them in the book.
The professor protests that he did the lectures “for free.” Which UD guesses means he’s boasting that the university didn’t pay him. Why should it? I’m sure Purdue paid him far more than the university ever could.
Anyway. What’s done is done. “In 2000, less than 4 per cent of the opiate addicts in withdrawal treatment at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) were addicted to oxycodone, the primary ingredient in such prescription drugs as OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. By 2004, that figure had climbed to 55.4 per cent.”
One assumes plenty of other pharma consultants remain in teaching positions in other Canadian universities. How often does the odd whistle-blower among the students come along and discover how foully he and his fellow students are being corrupted? Almost never.