… Marbella.

CS50 Updates Course Policies, Asks Students To Go To Class

Okay, not the Onion. But Onion-worthy, no?

Look at this last part of the article, where one of the professor’s teaching assistants praises his experimental, innovative, problem-solving approach to teaching:

For at least one former CS50 staffer, the changes to the course signal [David] Malan’s willingness to solve problems through experimentation.

“Seems like he’s continuing to experiment and learn as I think he should and does relatively well,” said former CS50 teaching fellow Mark D. Grozen-Smith ’15. “I’m glad that we have innovation alive in such an impactful, high-demand class.”

Asking students to attend your course! Why didn’t I think of that?

The funny thing is, it’s often very easy. You don’t really need my instructions on how to detect con men (it’s usually men), because most con men are right out there. Very, very obvious. Let us consider three of them who are currently in the news, starting with … let’s call him the mildest of the cons.

This man’s trickery is in the long and highly rewarded academic tradition of Julius Nyang’oro, Thomas Petee, and Leo Wilton — all of them professors who systematically, over years, provided fake courses and fake grades for athletes. For professors who don’t give a rat’s ass about actually educating anyone, ever, the rewards of this behavior are deep, profound, and monetary. Schools almost entirely devoted to their football and basketball teams – like the schools these men work and worked for – reserve their eagerest gratitude for professors willing to confer upon athletes the trappings of academic respectability. Administrators can’t do it; trustees can’t do it — only professors can put the A-/B+ on the record and keep players eligible.

The system works beautifully, except that occasionally mistakes of judgment are made, and some female pipsqueak hired to help with the grading (in all of the cases I’ve mentioned, except that of Petee, it was a woman) turns out actually to care about educating people. She’s appalled when she realizes she’s part of a con game, and she goes public with the scandal.

In the case of Florida State University’s athlete-positive professor, we’re talking about an online (has to be online – makes it much, much easier to cheat or indeed do absolutely nothing and ace a course) hospitality course called Beverage Management.

I’m not making this up. At FSU, we have entirely entered the world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where a local university offers a course called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters.

But don’t be too harsh. FSU started out with much more curricular gravitas for its players. For decades, a music theory professor there let hundreds of athletes cheat their way through his intro course. When that scheme was revealed and became a big ol’ national scandal, FSU had to hustle to find another online curricular home for people it didn’t give a rat’s ass about educating. It lowered itself all the way down to a person who heads one section of his 33 page cv Scholary Honors (some of his students have had it up to here with his spelling). (Oh. And there’s this.)

Where does FSU go now? When this latest cheating scandal is over, where can they go that’s even lower than online courses in Beverage Management?

Okay, so the two other con men the media’s paying attention to this week:

Like the FSU guy with his article-length cv trumpeting his amazing accomplishments (come to think of it, Professor Gun-Spree also has the self-presentation of an egomaniac), the children’s book author whose PEN nomination has been withdrawn on PEN discovering what actual Native American writers have been trying to tell the world for years – the writer is a con man – also displays a hilarious sense of his own greatness.

And let’s end with Paolo Macchiarini, shall we? Stem cell research of course is the hard-science con man’s Emerald City … And this guy, like the others, didn’t exactly hide his borderline-psychotic world of lies.

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

UD thanks Barney.

The Ballad of James Ramsey is being written as we speak, and since the whole point of University Diaries is to pay attention to strange and unsettling things that happen in our country’s university system, we will follow his saga closely here.

A forensic audit demanded by [University of Louisville] donors recently confirmed that under Ramsey’s leadership, the foundation [which Ramsey, quite the monopolist, ran, along with running the university] authorized excessive spending, including on executive compensation, and realized unrecorded endowment losses to the tune of $120 million.

Yes, yes, Lawrence Summers, when Harvard prez, lost one billion from the endowment, so what’s a paltry $120 m? I mean, your university can lose twelve million in a matter of minutes if you have ninnies minding the till, so big deal. Money in, money out. At UL specifically, the job of donors is to give money; the job of trustees is to take it; the job of students is to shut the fuck up.

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

Turns out, though, that even in America’s arguably most corrupt state, a few people find abundant high-level university theft annoying, and though Ramsey probably won’t live long enough to go to jail … wait lemme check his age… guy’s pushing seventy… that’s not that old these days!… he has, er, tons of money with which to countersue, to appeal, to fall mysteriously ill and delay his trial, to become a shimmy shimmy koko bop fundamentalist preacher and get too famous to finger blahblahblah… he might be able to swing it so he can spend the rest of his days weeping to reporters about how he’s being treated exactly the way they treated Jesus …

Poor (impoverished; pathetic) UL is right now floating on this very same stream of consciousness, asking themselves if they want to take a big financial and reputational hit (and when your most recent dorm renovation involved retrofitting the building so it’s no longer a whorehouse for your athletes, you got you some reputational issues) and go after Ramsey and his cronies… Already “donations to the university have been falling rapidly, down 25 percent from 2016–17,” and the question is whether allowing the Full-Ramsey shitstorm to hit the public in the interest of eventually clearing the air (‘cepn nobody who knows Kentucky thinks anything will ever clear its air) will appease donors or simply remind them what an icky place the school, grosso modo, is.

… as you may know, the winner of Michael Kinsley’s Most Boring Headline contest. Less boring, and just a bit tweaked, is a headline to accompany the recruitment news out of the Canadian Football League:

SOMEWHAT SHORT OF WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE

Yes, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats recruited (briefly) Mr Baylor-Rapes Art Briles; it also seriously considered (before rejecting) Johnny Manziel. Deadspin‘s indispensable Emma Baccellieri reports:

Manziel was charged with domestic violence last year for allegedly hitting his girlfriend and threatening to kill her; charges were dropped several months later after a plea deal. He also has a history of partying and drug use that repeatedly threatened his career. [Briles oversaw] a football program where players were accused of up to 52 rapes in four years …

***************
UD thanks Jack.

… and flies to Malaga,
where she’s meeting up
with American friends.

But, as Mike Bianchi points out, it’s only Wednesday. We know this team can do better.

As the University of Louisville’s last marauder-president attracts more and more attention from the Kentucky attorney general, it’s just a matter of time before his story – and the story of his merry band of fellow marauders – hits the front page of the nation’s paper of record. Already James Ramsey and The Louisville Muggers have hunkered down in their multiple luxury homes hoping no one can find them in all the square footage… But the long arm of the law might just extend to that tenth bedroom at the back of the basement, and then all of the Ramsey regime’s efforts to erase its possibly criminal record will have been for nothing.

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

Assuming things go as expected, here’s what we’ll soon see on Page One.

IN KENTUCKY, A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF GRAND THEFT

The accession of James Ramsey, a folksy local boy made good, to the presidency of the University of Louisville, was greeted with great enthusiasm…

Babadebah. You and I can write these things in our sleep. Utopia at last! And then – shocker – A Grand Reversal…

Your regular update of the Greek university system.

Sing it.

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

To the benefit of Mr. Ross
There will be a tax write-off
Of massive size

Michigan will stand and cheer
Its charitable buccaneer
What a prize!

From nothing much to thirty mill
A splendid haul
Is guaranteed for all

But of course
Fed’ral courts
Are not as enthralled

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

The celebrated Katz/Levine
Will engineer the money scheme
What a scene!

The IRS and auditors
Will look away and gently purr.
Don’t be late!

Messrs. K and L. assure the public
Their deduction will be second to none

But of course
Federal courts
Are having less fun

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

The celebrated tax judge James
Unentertained by fiscal games
Has ruled against

Appeal begins without delay
When Mr. R. performs his tricks another day
And Mr. R. will demonstrate
The many clever ways to calculate

And tonight Mr. R. is topping our bill!

UD will resume blogging tomorrow – right now she’s recovering from a very long day on campus.

Ne quittez pas.

Noticed the sedge
growing in our woods.

Mr UD cut some
for me.

Standing?

Please tell UD they were lying. The ever-elaborating Louise Linton story does not get really, really good until they turn out to have had Eclipse Coitus up there.

UD‘s keeping her fingers crossed.

Poland’s very ex-foreign minister was recorded without his knowledge a couple of years back, dishing obscenely on all things Polish. His critique of the Polish university system has just been released.

“You know, [American universities] understand what all those [Polish] rectors — those d**kheads and layabouts — over here fail to comprehend — that, you know, the main financing for universities can come from … endowments. It’s just that you need to have a database,” [Radosław] Sikorski reportedly said…

He was allegedly responding to [his dinner partner], who said: “I saw those f**king [American] campuses, all of it, those budgets at those universities, the five billion that Stanford has annually…. Five billion is the money they have to spend. One third is from endowments, one third from grants, one third from invested funds. So five billion is, f**k, huge business.”

UD‘s not quite sure if this guy’s division of Stanford funds, and yearly availability of those funds (he doesn’t talk about what they actually spend, and universities like Stanford are famous for hoarding their endowments), is anywhere near accurate, but she wonders if he knows how paltry a number five billion is for Stanford. Its wealth is vastly, vastly greater than that. She also wonders if either of these guys, who are basically complaining about public funding of universities in Europe, knows how much government subsidy Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford receive.

A glass-walled, high-ceiling library will take up part of the first floor, but the developer says not to expect to find books in the room. ‘Nobody really reads books. So I’m just going to fill the shelves with white books, for looks.’