… Professor James Gundlach and other university sports whistle blowers, Missouri State’s Reed Olsen, an economics professor, has had the guts to expose financial corruption in that school’s athletics program. Background here.

A state audit of MSU’s budget (its results will be released this fall) will presumably clarify how the school’s leadership dissembled in the matter of the profitability of a big new arena it pushed through over strong faculty objection. But without Olsen’s insistence on the truth (despite the president’s assurance that the arena was profitable, it was, and remains, a big loss), the attention of the MSU community, and the attention of far-flung people like UD, would not have been drawn to this all too typical university scandal.

In his dissenting minority report, presented to the faculty senate at about this time last year, Olsen pointed out that the administration was both inflating the revenue stream and hiding the operating costs of the new arena.

To make matters worse, but again totally predictably, arena ticket sales are down.

Any administrator who tells you that ticket sales will support a sports facility takes you for a fool. Ticket sales are madly volatile almost everywhere. Yet again and again administrators think that if you raise prices when the shit hits the fan, things will be fine.

Actually, when you do that, a lot of people drop the whole thing in disgust and stop going to games. I mean, they don’t do this at truly degenerate schools like Kentucky. You could make season tickets seven million dollars apiece at Kentucky, and there wouldn’t be a peep out of anyone. But at most schools you can expect a bit of a walkout.

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

Bottom line at MSU? Olsen writes (in an email to UD):

… Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket …

Indeed Olsen concluded his minority report last year by affirming that the new arena has plenty of “negative impact on the academic mission” of MSU. He reminds the administration that the university’s faculty warned that “the university would [end up paying] for the costs incurred by building a new arena.”

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Why do I call this a typical athletic scandal?

Because again and again on this blog I watch jocksniffer presidents and mindless boosters lie and bluster their way to what they want and then make students and faculty – and taxpayers – pay when their pathetic fantasies evaporate.

Universities desperately need rational, informed, steadfast, and ethical professors like Olsen to act as a counterweight to the moronic grandiosity of their sports-mad leaders.

… continues. Tomorrow, Senate hearings on deceptive and illegal student recruiting practices in the industry resume. IHE provides, in this and other articles, a good deal of background, as well as links to important documents.

Undercover investigators posing as students found that employees at all 15 for-profit colleges visited for the [GAO] investigations made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” to students about accreditation, graduation rates, employment outcomes, program costs or financial aid.

At four institutions visited, admissions or financial aid officials encouraged students to submit fraudulent financial information in order to qualify for federal aid, the GAO says in its report.

UD’s been covering the scandal for years. In ’07, she wrote a fight song for the University of Phoenix.

Sing it out!

To the tune of Rawhide!!

Enrollin’ …rollin’ …rollin’ …

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’,
Though they’re disapprovin’,
Keep them students movin’, Phoenix!
Don’t try to educate ‘em,
Just rope and throw and bait ‘em,
Soon we’ll be living high and wide.

Boy, my head’s calculatin’
My paycheck will be waitin’,
Be waiting at the end of my pitch.

Move ‘em on, head ‘em up,
Head ‘em up, move ‘em out,
Move ‘em on, head ‘em out, Phoenix!
Set ‘em out, ride ‘em in
Ride ‘em in, let ‘em out,
Cut ‘em out, ride ‘em in, PHOENIX!

… where ultra-orthodox Jewish women in the hundreds are covering their faces and being mistaken by police for terrorists and annoying their husbands.

A group of these women is demanding a totally veiled school for their daughters, where everyone will wear the burqa.

So annoyed are their husbands that they have gotten a major rabbinical organization to ban the practice. But this won’t work, since the women are under the control of a charismatic burqa-cult leader — a woman accused of child abuse.

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I find most intriguing about the Israeli story the language Israelis and other observers are bringing to burqa wearing. It is the language of pathology. Burqa wearing is a “craze,” it’s “weird,” it’s “obsessional,” it’s a kind of nutty “competitiveness” — who can be the most zealous? It’s a “sexual fetish”, it’s “promiscuous,” it’s “extreme” …

What happened to the language of religious respect most observers have brought to Muslim women wearing burqas in Europe?

… she monitors the news coming out of Cobleskill, New York, the closest town to her houselet in Summit.

If you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile, you know that almost every August Les UDs (sans La Kid, who finds their way-nowheresville place, and the coyotes who bark around it at night, boring and alarming respectively) drive north and then west to what used to be called the Leatherstocking Region (New York State has decided the name’s a dud), but which is basically an area between the Adirondacks and the Catskills, with Cooperstown the best-known part of it.

There they read, write, go to a Glimmerglass opera, go (this year) to Stageworks Hudson for Imagining Madoff, visit with friends, take long walks, scythe their way through the overgrowth on the path from their teeny houselet to their absurdly teeny other houselet on their little pond, take day trips, and, in the middle of the month, eat dinner at the Bear Cafe in Woodstock to celebrate UD‘s birthday.

The SUNY campus at Cobleskill is sleepy, and architecturally unappealing; but lookee here. It just made National Public Radio.

… It was lamb day recently at the State University of New York’s meat lab in Cobleskill, a little town near Albany. Guys in white smocks and hard hats haul carcasses out of the cooler. They slaughtered the animals the day before.

… The local food movement is driving more farmers to raise animals for meat. But between farm and table is a bottleneck — a shortage of small slaughterhouses serving small farms, especially in the Northeast.

“What we need is for that smaller operator who may have 100 acres or 150 acres — he would like to have the opportunity to take and raise a few cattle or a few hogs and be able to slaughter them and sell them locally. To do that, you have to have an infrastructure,” says Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack…

Fields was the third witness to testify that he had sex with Sypher while she was married to her second husband, Tim Sypher, Pitino’s former equipment manager who now runs the YUM! Center.

University Diaries long ago named it The Worst University in America.

Today it was named Top Party School in America.

The University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, beat out Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, as the top party school — a ranking derived from questions about the use of alcohol and drugs, the amount of studying and the popularity of fraternities and sororities.

Reed College has the best teachers. And Reed was second in the nation for “study the most.” Interesting combination.

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UPDATE: Indeed let’s take a closer look at Reed College. Let’s look at three highly ranked (on Rate My Professors) teachers at the college ranked “best teachers.” Let’s see if we can discover traits they may share.

First, their names: Jerry Shurman, Mike Foat, Jamie Pommersheim. Shurman and Pommersheim teach math. Foat teaches religion.

Shurman’s RMP page.

Foat’s.

Pommersheim’s.

Read them, read them. Then get back to me….

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Okay. What did we discover? In no particular order, we discovered that

1.) Professors are weird. No surprise there. But it may be that really good professors are strikingly weird. Weird in the sense that they bring themselves into the classroom. Not that they talk endlessly about themselves, but that they are themselves. Not emotionally withdrawn. Not fake. Open. Vulnerable to being called weird. Human beings. Individuals. Students may like this in particular because at a young age, when students are tentatively working on becoming who they are, these professors — aside from teaching them — model a certain comfort in one’s own skin, an achieved identity. This can be quite inspirational.

2.) Good teachers assign a lot of work and expect class participation and general engagement. But since the teacher has excited the student’s interest in the subject, the student does not seem to resent the work. Indeed, the student may wish to impress the professor with her work, her enthusiasm, because she admires the professor and wishes the professor to admire her.

3.) The professor is not condescending.

4.) The professor has a sense of humor.

5.) The professor is very smart.

6.) The professor somehow manages to anticipate your confusions, your questions. From Shurman’s reviews: “His ability to know exactly what you are thinking and stumbling over is uncanny.”

(Note to online instructors: Don’t try this at home.)

7.) The professor’s enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, sometimes dangerously so. (“He hypnotized me into taking Attic Greek my freshman year, one of the dumbest mistakes of my academic career…”) It also broadens and deepens his lecture content. (“Says fascinating things about the structure and meaning of math in class.”)

8.) Enfin, it’s a pleasure. “His class was a real pleasure.”

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Is this a scientific sample? No. Does everyone love these guys? No. Are they teaching under optimal, small-seminar, selective college conditions? Yes.

Still. Don’t we all already know that these are the attributes of really good teachers? Doesn’t this result simply confirm what we know?

A UCLA student writes in opposition to the proposed online UC Berkeley degree. He talked to the director of an online engineering program at UCLA.

… Christopher Lynch, director of the UCLA Master of Science in Engineering Online Program, said that distance students can get to the same level of understanding concepts as traditional students, but that the department spends much more money per student to achieve this goal.

The department hired a teaching assistant and professor as consultants to provide support for distance learners, who are unable to approach professors after lecture or go to office hours as traditional students are. This would be a similar situation for undergraduates because face-to-face interaction is an important part of the university experience.

To maintain a UC-level education, many faculty members will have to be hired for support positions, costing the university millions. If this faculty is not hired, the UC online campus will not provide a UC-level education.

He notes a variety of other disadvantages, among them:

Skipping class and cheating by having another student take an exam become easier as attendance, participation and identity verification are difficult, if not impossible over the Internet.

Another UCLA professor comments.

“This would severely hurt the reputation and prestige of a degree and call into question the (UC’s) commitment to undergraduate education,” said Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Program who taught a hybrid online and offline course last spring.

According to Samuels, there are ways to incorporate technology in the classroom, but a fully online degree has no place at a prestigious research university.

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Costs more.

But only costs more if you care about maintaining quality. If you don’t care, it probably costs less.

A story out of Wales.

A retired maths teacher was stunned to receive a letter asking for his brain.

Colin Rodgerson was shocked by the letter asking whether he would donate his cranial tissue for medical research in the event of his death.

The 60-year-old received the request from scientists across the UK who are undertaking a project called the TIME study – research which looks into a condition called transient epileptic amnesia (TEA).

Mr Rodgerson, who was diagnosed with TEA five years ago, said he was more than happy to consider the request but was slightly taken aback by it.

“It’s not everyday someone writes to you saying, ‘Can we have your brain?’” he said.

“It was all written in a very sensitive way but it was surprising nonetheless just to be asked.”

… confused. And in the case of Missouri State’s new basketball arena, she just does not get it.

Unfortunately, after studying the numbers with care, Mr UD, a math whiz, doesn’t get it either.

This seems to be a story about a university president who fell somewhat short of the truth when claiming that in its first year the arena was in the black. An economics professor at MSU, Reed Olsen, ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that it was in the red – hundreds of thousands in the red.

Part of what makes this story difficult to understand — beyond the whirling numbers — is the odd way the Springfield News-Leader has chosen to present it.

One half of its page features the news that the university is now reviewing the arena’s finances. Oh, and there’s a new president. The old one suddenly left. Didn’t say why.

Check out the other half of the page for the hard numbers.

You don’t have to read Andrew Zimbalist to know that many university athletic programs … is cook the books too strong? There’s obviously lots of numbers-shifting going on here as the university now seems to acknowledge that it was wrong to claim a profit… But I really don’t know. I’ve emailed Professor Olsen about it.

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

Update: Professor Olsen responds:

After my report to the senate and a subsequent followup with the president, the newspaper dug up more information that showed that the arena was doing even worse than I had originally thought. They were hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena was losing about 2 M.

I’ve gone on to ask him several more questions. I’ll report some of his answers when I hear back from him.

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

From the News-Leader’s comment thread:

I and many others told you so. Now, the admission – this thing ain’t paid for.

And, the News Leader buries the story as a sideline.

What many of us said when this boondoggle was announced, what the students reported in their paper when it was learned their academic fees were being stolen, and what the faculty found by analyzing the accounting is all true – this ego pacifier for boosters who want to be like Mizzou is a financial lie.

This is not the end of the scandal. This “2 million” from athletics is a shell game. Athletics already operates with about $5-7 million (admitted) in state funds to make up the yearly deficit, so this is STATE MONEY. Once again the state and students are made to pay for the sports fantasies of wannabe boosters.

I’m pressing this story on University Diaries because, like the scandal at Western Kentucky, it’s shaping up to be the paradigmatic corrupt university sports story — it’s turning into a classic case of the destruction of a university via its sports program. Its apparent elements, shared with virtually all other death-by-sports university stories:

1. Corrupt, sports-mad leaders who cannot think about the improvement of their university in terms other than athletic. (Jealousy of a higher-profile neighboring university also seems at work in these stories.)

2. Toadying faculty willing to lie along with the president and the athletic director about the sports budget.

3. Students who sense what’s happening but don’t have sufficient power and knowledge to fight it.

4. One or two brave faculty members willing to fight against the lies.

5. An inept local press whose boosterism allows it to be manipulated by the leadership of the university.

… the ever-quotable Barmak Nassirian speaks.

… “This is now a sector in which the vast majority of participants are actually engaged in what I view as counterfeiting of degrees and consumer fraud,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Consumer fraud defined as over-advertised, over-promised, overcharged and under-delivered.

“For a group that reports to be market-based,” he went on to a room of education insiders at the New America Foundation, “what is a better measure of market failure than apparently nobody but the idiot federal government puts their money into these institutions? That is the single best indication that the product has no intrinsic value. People who spend their own money don’t spend it there.” …

Good piece in the Guardian about the melancholy long withdrawing roar of sex from British novels. “[N]o one [is] writing much about sex any more.”

Some people blame it on the annual, hilarious Bad Sex Award, pantingly chronicled on this blog year after year. Writers live in dread of it.

Some say it’s a generational thing, with ‘sixties people (Martin Amis, for instance) still into it, but younger types bored.

I dunno. I doubt it’s even much of a trend.

But the article cites an exchange from the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial that UD very much likes. The author of the essay quotes from Kenneth Tynan’s reporting from the proceedings fifty years ago:

“[The crucial incident of the trial] occurred on the third morning during the testimony of Richard Hoggart,” [Tynan] observed, “who had called Lawrence’s novel ‘puritanical’. Mr Hoggart is a short, dark, young Midlands teacher of immense scholarship and fierce integrity. From the witness box he uttered a word that we had formerly heard only on the lips of [prosecutor] Mr Griffith-Jones; he pointed out how Lawrence had striven to cleanse it of its furtive, contemptuous and expletive connotations, and to use it ‘in the most simple, natural way: one fucks’. There was no reaction of shock in the court, so calmly was the word pronounced, and so literally employed.

“‘Does it gain anything,’ he was asked, ‘by being printed f-?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Hoggart, ‘it gains a dirty suggestiveness’.”

TPM looks at Howard Zinn’s long FBI file. It notes that “[T]he anti-war activities of [left historian] Professor Zinn provoked a reaction in some members of the leadership of [Boston University]. What is perhaps more surprising is that at least some member of the university leadership was an informant to the FBI.”

TPM quotes from the file:

On 4/17/70, [Redacted] (former SA), [redacted] advised on instant date, that [Redacted for more than 2 lines] (an excellent source of the Boston Office) is highly disturbed with HOWARD ZINN, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, BU, Boston, (Bufile 100-360217, BSfile 100-35505, SI subject) because of ZINN’s persistent involvement in anti-war activities. [Redacted] was particularly incensed when ZINN, as featured speaker, spoke in front of Boston Police Headquarters on 4/14/70 in connection with a rally held for the release of BOBBY SEALE, BPP National Chairman. ZINN stated “it’s about time we had a demonstration at the Police Station. Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”

ZINN further sated [sic] “America has been a police state for a long time. I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”

[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU.

Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s] efforts for his removal.

TPM comments:

The Boston Office’s efforts to assist in the unnamed official’s supposed campaign against Zinn was denied — but only because the request was mislabeled as asking for help with Communist sympathizers, rather than anti-war sympathizers.

The Charter and Bylaws of Boston University indicate that there are only 2 people who could, alone, call a meeting of the Board of Trustees: the Chairman or the President. Otherwise, more than one-third of the members have to agree to such a meeting; there are currently 38 members of the Board of Trustees (though the number has fluctuated over time, it usually has around 40 members).

At the time, Arland Christ-Janer, now deceased, was the President — a job he’d held for less than 3 years. However, records reflect that, by April 1970, Crist-Janer had already given notice that he intended to leave in July 1970.

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees, who led the search committee for Crist-Janer’s replacement, was Hans Estin, the current Vice Chairman Emeritus of North American Management whose biography says that he served as an Air Force pilot during the Korean War.

The New York Times seems determined to keep writing about the scandal of university presidents serving on multiple corporate boards. Good.

The piece has a headline and a sub-headline.

The Academic-Industrial Complex

A Fear That Academics are Distracted Directors

Some analysts worry that academics are possibly imperiling or compromising the independence of their universities when they venture onto boards. Others question whether scholars have the time — and financial sophistication — needed to police the country’s biggest corporations while simultaneously juggling the demands of running a large university.

Why do the presidents do it?

Moolah.

Bigtime.

The attractions are clear for the president: lucrative extra pay and useful networking, among other reasons. For a dozen hours or so each month for each board served, in addition to preparation time, and their wise advice, they can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University and the first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs board until she stepped down this year. In 2009, she earned $323,539 from her Goldman directorship, including stock grants and options, as calculated by Goldman, and left the board with stock worth at the time around $4.3 million. This is in addition to her salary from Brown, $576,000 this year.

[Shirley Ann] Jackson earned $1.38 million from her directorships, comprising both cash and stock. That’s in addition to $1.6 million from her day job, including bonuses and other benefits.

Plus you learn new things! One president who was on Merck’s board says: “It was one long seminar in the sciences and molecular biology.”

Great. But if you were taking a seminar, why did Merck pay you? Why didn’t you pay Merck?

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Why do the corporations do it?

Universities are among the few institutions trusted by the public …and companies believe they can associate themselves with this quality by installing an academic on the board.

“Corporations think this is a way of enhancing their prestige and legitimacy, especially in the case of Ivy League presidents,” he says. “I suspect that’s the principal motivation. It’s probably not for their business sense.”

John Gillespie, who has written a book on corporate boards, “Money for Nothing,” says academics are often selected for another reason — because they are less likely to rock the boat than directors from the business world.

Academics may be trained to ask tough questions in their own fields, but when confronted with tricky business issues far above their level of expertise they “often become as meek as church mice,” he says.

Right. They’re learning things. They’re taking one long multi-million-dollar seminar.

One expert on corporate boards does not mince words about one of this blog’s favorite board-sitters, Brown’s Ruth Simmons.

… Goldman Sachs was hurt having Dr. Simmons as a director because she lacks financial expertise and was focused more than she should have been on other things like the firm’s philanthropy… “That seat could have been held by someone who understood derivatives.”

But she was learning!

As for the exceptionally greedy Jackson of Rennselaer:

“[I]t is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” on so many boards. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.

Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards, although he is reluctant to single out particular directors or companies. “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”

As academics serve on a greater number of boards, there is also an increased chance of reputational risk if a company runs into difficulties.

“Woe to the university president who would sit on BP’s board,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Erroll B. Davis Jr., chancellor of the University System of Georgia, was on the BP board for 12 years, though he stepped down in April, just days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, causing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His retirement, however, wasn’t enough to protect him from being named, along with other directors, in a small number of lawsuits filed against BP over the disaster.

Plus… He’s only a business professor at Harvard, but… Bill George! Here’s looking at you!

And don’t forget Ruth Simmons. She’s left the Goldman board, but she’ll probably be named in various lawsuits against it.

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I think Phyllis Wise, who has compromised herself and her university by sitting on Nike’s board, puts the matter best:

“Many years ago, academicians tended to be dreamers,” she says. “We assumed somebody else would figure out where the money was going to come from. That notion is no longer the case.”

I mean, I think Wise intends to refer here to the money that comes to the university. But UD prefers to read her statement differently.

Those poor silly old dreamers! They never got rich.

That notion is no longer the case.

… Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

… No longer free to exercise it myself [Judt has Lou Gehrig’s disease], I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right — and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm found a good example of nospeak in reading blogs that were responding to the recent Saudi fatwa advising women to breastfeed men.

There is of course strict gender segregation in Saudi Arabia; but if a woman suckles a man, he becomes ‘family.’ Thus, as a Saudi woman, I will now be able to interact with men unrelated to me, so long as I first breastfeed them.

Here is how one blogger responds to this grotesquerie.

I am certainly not an expert in Islamic law or religion, nor do I write this in order to contribute to the stereotypes propagated in the West or claim cultural superiority. There are cultural differences I don’t understand, thus I try to reserve my judgement.

One wonders what sort of pronouncement from a community leader would be bizarre enough for this writer to respond with something other than politically correct vacuity. What sort of statement, what sort of policy, might prevent her from retreating into know-nothingism (cultural differences I don’t understand)? Does she understand anything about how women live in Saudi Arabia?

If she really can’t understand the difference between women told to breastfeed all unrelated men with whom they come into contact and women not told to do that, I think it would be better for this writer to retreat all the way, into silence. Certainly if she thinks withholding any judgment of this fatwa is enlightened, that judging a cleric who tells women to do this would express an unacceptable sense of cultural superiority, she would best say nothing at all.

As it is, her nospeak conveys not merely the intellectual insecurity Judt describes. It conveys the utter erosion of moral capacity.

It’s a category on University Diaries. See it? And that’s because over the years UD has covered so many stories of generous MBA guys getting their names on university buildings, and then, when it turned out the money was a small part of an empire of stolen goods, getting their names sandblasted off the buildings, that she decided to collect all of the stories under one heading.

And here’s yet another one.

Ten years ago, the University of Michigan inaugurated Sam Wyly Hall. At the ceremony, the business school dean kvelled about “what the University of Michigan helped [Wyly] to do.”

Well, what Wyly and his brother have done – let’s see if we can be exact about this – what they’ve done, see, is “illegally trad[e] millions of securities of public companies while they sat on the company boards. The SEC complaint accuses the two of using a system of offshore trusts and subsidiaries to hide their interests, selling more than $750 million in stock over a 13-year period. The complaint charges that they used inside information about the pending sale of [one of their companies] to reap more than $31.7 million in profit…”

So… sandblast the whole name off? Expensive. Embarrassing. UD has a better idea. Just change one letter.

WILY HALL