A Park policeman visits Garrett Park this afternoon.

UD‘s sister’s photo makes the town look like Mayberry R.F.D.

You wouldn’t know you’re actually in the heart of little ol’ ‘thesda.

Actually, journalism students at Pittsburg High School in Kansas didn’t have to work all that hard to discover that their incoming principal (salary close to $100,000) had diploma mill degrees. They just did what the people in charge of educating Pittsburg’s high school students couldn’t bother doing: They checked her out online.

“If students could uncover this, I want to know why the adults couldn’t find this,” said their journalism advisor; and in response UD says: Check out the credentials of the people who were supposed to check her out. Public education (with charter schools right behind) is a notorious dumping ground for frauds who bought their degrees. This blog used to cover such cases, but there were so many of them, and they were so redundant in style and content, that I stopped doing that. Now I only cover fun diploma mill stories like this one, where students had to do the work of the superintendent, and everyone else in Pittsburg pulling down a good salary to do due diligence on behalf of public school students.

Worse, the local superintendent ignorantly and indignantly defended the diploma mill grad… Until he couldn’t anymore, presumably because of the outcry from parents, teachers, and students.

Now it’s a big national story.

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… Robertson was unable to produce a transcript confirming her undergraduate degree from the University of Tulsa …

UD thanks Janet for sending her this very detailed Washington Post account.

Back when she followed stories like this closely, UD always used to say that you could probably get away with buying or fabricating all of your degrees if you kept your head down. By which UD meant that modest diploma millers, content with anonymous mid-level employment in the military, the fire department, or public ed (America’s three big milltowns), will probably live out their lives quite comfortably, drawing reasonably good salaries on the basis of having spent five thousand dollars on a totally bogus BA and MA. It’s only when they rise enough in the world to merit the slightest degree of vetting (and even there, as the Pittsburg case, pre-journalism students, demonstrates, there probably ain’t gonna be much vetting) that diploma millers run a risk of exposure.

I don’t mean to suggest that America is overrun with diploma mill grads. Pakistan, yes. Saudi Arabia, definitely. Once Hungary finishes pushing Central European University out of that country, it will certainly have made itself a much friendlier home for diploma mill grads.

Most countries are chockful of bogus degree holders, from the president on down, and no one cares. No one in a position of responsibility in the public schools of Pittsburg Kansas cared. But UD will say this: America has fewer bogus degree holders than probably any other country; and America even occasionally unmasks and removes bogus degree holders. That is a remarkable, distinctive, fact about UD‘s homeland.

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You just can’t keep a good story down.

And that photo!

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Explanatory Update: Why, you ask, has UD said nothing about those other two immense stretches – as far as the eye can see – of American diploma mills?

Why has she not even bothered mentioning here our profuse and hilarious online godbots, grinding out bogus preachers?

Why has she failed to discuss our equally pious high school diploma mills, whose function is to grind out plausible transcripts which allow schools like today’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, to admit their extraordinarily physically fit graduates? He got all A’s at Glorious and Merciful Supreme Master of the Playing Field Prep!

Why should ol’ UD waste time on these structural elements of modern American culture? We couldn’t have Touchdown Jesus without them.

What a shocker!

This is around the twentieth study to yield results like these.

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The real question now is: Why will most professors – assuming they bother to find out these results – not get rid of laptops?

And the answer is easy: Most of them are afraid to. No telling how students will respond.

And the rest of the professors? Laptops make their teaching lives ever so much easier. Life is beautiful when no one’s listening. Many such teachers compound the loveliness by using PowerPoint throughout the class, thus creating what UD calls The Morgue Classroom. They just need to stand there reading words out loud while students watch football games. A nice quiet workable twice weekly experience.

If you read UD, you saw Trustee Al “So-Called Victims” Lord coming way back. We covered his campaign for trustee here, paying special attention to his campaign statement (“Wife of 48 years, Suzanne, received her Penn State PHT (Putting Hubby Through) in 1967.”) and his platform:

Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno created the healthy alliance of academics and athletics. Penn State wins national championships in several sports and graduates America’s best prepared students. Our Trustees and Louis Freeh see a different Penn State.

I seek a seat on the PSU Board of Trustees because I can no longer watch the willful, cowardly destruction of our Penn State. “Freeh’s facts” are incomplete, selective, and largely unconvincing. Freeh’s report destroyed our past; left unchallenged it will diminish the future.

I don’t want you to think that our Lord is the only Lord. University BOTs across the nation worship these Big Men and their big talk and big guns and big fights and big business brains. UD spends a good bit of time following trustees who try to smuggle guns into the United States Senate, run pill mills, run the whole university including the sports program, use seven hundred dollars of the school’s money to buy liquor in order to get through one board meeting (I’m talking about one single trustee here), trap and kill “multiple federally protected migratory hawks,” assault the university’s football coach while in court giving a deposition, etc etc etc. Read my Trustees Trashing the Place category for details on these and so many other cases.

Admittedly much of the trustee thing is about appointing rich miscreants and then there’s the waiting game: Will Steve Cohen give us a little of his ten billion dollar personal fortune before the SEC catches up with him…? Or do we risk our reputation on his doing jail time? Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin seem to be pumping major bucks into the school, but there are rumblings…

And while our Lord does have a rather shabby financial past you have to go WAY past shabby to lose a seat on a BOT that wants your money.

Anyway. It would all be rather embarrassing if Penn State were capable of feeling embarrassment.

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UD thanks Wendy.

In midsummer, and especially at the June solstice, the sun over St. Petersburg refuses to set. At about midnight, an eerie luminosity deposes the reign of night or day: the resulting silvered penumbra features hauntingly in the painting and photography and literature of the place. Because of the prevalence of water and the multicolor of the buildings — typically painted in pastel green, pink, blue, and yellow — a sort of trance descends over the retina. Best of all is to absorb it from a riverboat, slipping along the river or through the backwaters. Alexander Pushkin’s famous poem “The Bronze Horseman,” which is ostensibly about the massive, rearing statue of Peter the Great, becomes entwined with the city’s “limpid twilight’s moonless shine” and the golden cloudland of the light, for soon one dawn succeeds another with barely half an hour of night.

On a day of trauma and grief for that city.

… as Horatio has the gall to tell Hamlet when Hamlet alludes to the massive, two-decade academic scandal at the University of North Carolina.

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Hamlet’s sports-loving buddy dismisses all that’s been happening at UNC as a bunch of rumors. It’s as unreal as all that stuff they’re whispering about Penn State…

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Or, as Nietzsche famously said, “We have sports in order not to perish of the truth.”

The New York Times alludes to UD’s buddy, University of North Carolina professor Jay Smith.

And … who else? Who else among the UNC faculty bothered asking? The cardinal rule of being a professor at a football factory is to shut the fuck up.

Or no:

Some faculty members took the role of useful fools, vigorously defending the indefensible.

Useful, and richly rewarded.

Meanwhile UNC has consistently treated Jay like a pariah.

If you’re having trouble understanding this treatment, look to the trustee at Penn State complaining the other day about Jerry Sandusky’s “so-called victims.” Victims! You’re talking about young men lucky enough to be forcefully anally penetrated by a coach so famous a brand of campus ice-cream – The Sandusky Blitz – was named after him!

… at Yeshiva University, where his hijinks have long since made him a folk hero. But he’s outdone himself with his latest comments about an invited campus speaker he didn’t like.

The Yeshiva Commentator newspaper asked Schachter why he and one of his fanboys tore down posters publicizing the event.

“I don’t have to be insulted in my own institution. I have rabbanim in New Jersey who are always attacking me, always attacking all the faculty here in the Yeshiva. So it’s bad enough that they attack us in New Jersey, in the newspapers, and so on. We have to invite them into the Yeshiva to be mevazeh all the rebbes? They give an opinion that none of us know anything, they know better than all of us – I think that’s a chutzpah. Congress wouldn’t invite a communist to speak in Congress to explain communism. We’re not interested in communism. [The speaker] represents a different shittah, a total insult to all the rebbes in Yeshiva.”

When pressed if he takes issue with a specific article or statement issued by [speaker] Rabbi Klapper, Rabbi Schachter responded to the author, “You were born yesterday. I’m a little older than you. We have known the man for many years. He doesn’t represent our hashkafah at all! I think there are more important things to write in The Commentator. I said a fantastic shiur [Talmudic study lesson] today and yesterday – why don’t they write that up? Why do they write stupid things? This is not newsworthy. The shiur that I said is newsworthy.”

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Schachter also

object[s] to the study of the Christian Bible, … sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and [thinks] that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).

Schachter told a gathering of Orthodox leaders that

Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term.

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To be read by only those with the very strongest stomachs.

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The women all grab their phylacter
When they hear the approach of H. Schachter
He tells them they’re apes
He covers up rapes
He’s a one-person shonda enactor

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Yeshiva University: A financial and moral ruin overseen by clowns.

“Kids were holding them down in the locker rooms, there was a lookout at the door watching for coaches not to come. They hold them down and stick various items up their rectum… including Coke bottles, deodorant bottles, steel pipes, baseball bats, and broomsticks.”

… “Some kids, mostly [high school] athletes, are calling the victims ‘rats and snitches,’” [one resident] said, noting that most of the alleged victims have remained anonymous. “A lot of people are saying they feel bad for [the accused], that they didn’t do anything too extreme.”

On Tuesday, at least one student, he said, was wearing a shirt adorned with a photo of one suspect’s face.

… “What the boys did was disgusting and terrible, but none of this would be allowed to happen if these kids were better monitored. I guess the teachers are too busy stealing money, having sex with students, and looking at child porn to watch the kids,” one mother said.

“People forget, don’t they?” she said, echoing other parents who pointed to the La Vernia [Texas] School District’s record of scandal:

In January 2016, a math teacher quietly resigned amid an FBI investigation—child-pornography charges followed months later. (He pleaded guilty to one felony and is due to be sentenced in May, according to court records.) In 2015, a 26-year-old physics teacher was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a student. Then there were the allegations of theft and embezzlement, the suicide of a vice principal at the junior high school, and that time a seventh-grade teacher (and niece of a local sheriff) led police on high-speed chase and was jailed for possession of methamphetamine and assault on a public servant. She served five years’ probation after a stint in rehab.

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“This is Small Town USA,” [a parent said.]

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UD thanks John.

… boring.

UD admires this Baylor University student’s opinion piece – it’s well-written and straightforward about the depth and viscosity of shit in which his school currently swims.

He begins with a handy review of the Baylor “Rape Riot” Bears – their alleged deeds, their upcoming trials… He might have mentioned the “52 by 31” lawsuit as well, but he’s writing under space limitations.

[T]hese things won’t be going anywhere. Baylor will likely have four former football players on trial for sexual assault during the next calendar year, and it will undoubtedly be in the news… So, my fellow Baylor students and fans, prepare for more bad headlines. Know that when you check the news, Baylor and sexual assault will continue to be paired together. Be ready to hear tasteless rape jokes and calls to shut down our football team from rival fans and people in far corners of the country whose only impression of Baylor is the dark things they see in the news.

At the end of the piece, he grasps for some hope – see my headline – and of course UD can’t blame him. But that very hopeful list of his – interim prez, new coach and athletic director – goes in the opposite direction, methinks. I mean of course what else can a school like Baylor or North Carolina or whatever do when its purulence oozes out for the world to see… Naturally the thing you do is bring out the new linen… But those of us who follow universities closely know that instability in the positions that matter (forget prez; at schools like these all you need for prez is someone who gets out of the way of the AD and the coaches) is simply asking for more trouble. Basically your choice in these positions is The Corrupt Veteran or The Deer in the Headlights. Neither turns out well.

… and University Diaries can’t wait for what’s next.

UD‘s posts on Auburn, one of America’s most scummy sports factories, are here.

Grabbing the guarded by the short hairs: Higher ed in Saudi Arabia.

After white nationalist Richard Spencer did his thing at Texas A&M awhile back, the university changed its policies so that now all approved speakers need sponsorship by a campus organization.

An official campus spokesperson explains:

As one of the stewards for protecting and enhancing the brand, this is particularly troubling to me as the influx of these outside groups may connote to your viewers [she’s talking to CNN] an environment of acceptance by our campus when none are actually our students or faculty.

This is an official spokesperson. This is a person who gets a salary to talk like this.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Let’s scathe.

These words usher us into the depths of the deepest forest. To follow this sentence is to follow Hansel and Gretel as they stray farther and farther from any known world, into an enigmatic and malign witchery. It is to search hopelessly, desperately, for a referent, a subject, a predicate… to scratch your head and say steward for? Isn’t it steward of? When she uses the word “brand,” does she mean university? Does she mean reputation?

When you get to “this” (‘this is particularly troubling’), it is to ask What is this? To what does it refer?

And influx? I wasn’t worried about massive numbers of neonazis pouring into Texas A&M until I got to influx.

And why the constipated connote when she means express or signal?

By the time we’re into the completely nutty windup (‘an environment of acceptance by our campus when none are…’) we may be too addled to realize that the spokesperson’s final statement is overwhelmingly likely to be untrue. Surely some Texas A&M students – maybe even some faculty – have white nationalist sentiments. Did Spencer speak to an empty room? Were no members of his audience affiliated with the … brand?

Speak simply and directly, darlings.

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UD thanks John.