Oho no you don’t. If you think the president of the University of New Mexico – one of the scummiest sports schools in the nation (put the last name of its last president – Schmidly – in my search engine) – is going to let you vote on the athletics fee, you’re nuts. He knows you’ll vote against it, and that is not the outcome he and the trustees want. So shut your traps and let the president and his buddies have their money-losing fun. It’s your money, after all; not theirs.
Yes, sports is the university’s front porch, as we’re constantly told by the rascals who run football and basketball on campus; but … well, you know the rhyme:
When she was good,
She was very very good;
But when she was bad
She was horrid.
Looked at with any objectivity at all, of course, big-time university sports is horrid (intellectually and financially corrupting; crime- and riot-generating, university-bankrupting) even when it’s very very good — indeed, big-time university sports generally only gets to be very good (winning championships and tv deals) when it’s very very busy with recruiting scandals, buying out coaches at huge expense, hushing up team crimes, blahblahblah, you know the list. But the actual squalid vileness of the enterprise is usually managed. A dustup here, a dustup there, but the basic look of campus football and basketball is tidy, most of the malfeasance hidden.
The NCAA and the Knight Commission have big yearly meetings during which in a corporate pointless way they natter about the challenges and the issues facing the student-athlete as he aces calculus and kicks field goals during the same afternoon. These two entities – the NCAA and the Knight Commission – play a crucial role in keeping the actual nature of the university athletics endeavor hidden. They both look respectable; both bring knitted brows to the challenges and issues and prospects and promises of the grand endeavor. I think most people realize that these people are entirely empty suits – empty excellent suits – but no one cares. People care about the games, not the brow knitters whose job it is to make the system behind the games look legitimate.
So that’s when it’s good. When it’s good, it’s very very good, with tailgating and car tipping and bonfires and all; but when things go badly, they go really really really badly. Big-time sports is the front porch that keeps on giving, the big ol’ central spotlighted star of your campus, the only thing most people know or will know about your campus. So when one of your coaches fucks little kids in on-campus showers, the whole world gets to see that front porch; and when one of your professors – the highly compensated chair of a department – is running a fake courses racket for the teams, the whole world gets to see that front porch too.
That’s when we get to watch the sport of denialism. We get to watch Penn State trustees say it’s all a government conspiracy. We get to watch the University of North Carolina say it’s only that bitch Willingham plus that bastard Kane.
Children don’t like it when you take away their toys. It makes them very angry and vindictive. They like it even less when you punish them for their misdeeds. When they are bad, they are horrid.
UD is madly running about preparing the house for guests – she’s having a welcome to spring afternoon tea.
Here’s one of the teas she’s serving – a recent find at Plow & Hearth, where she also bought a new red deck umbrella, a new wreath for her newly painted front door, a new bird bath, and many other things to coincide with Les Soltans having finally gotten a serious contractor in to fix up Ferdinand House (Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand, lived and died in UD’s house). Gord, said contractor, is in UD’s driveway right now, loading our large trash stuff into his truck, where Walter the yellow lab waits for him in the passenger seat.
We seem to have scored a spectacular spring day for our gathering (though it might rain later this afternoon). From where I’m sitting, the rhododendron’s scarlet is beginning to push through its big upright yellow buds. I can hear, from my back woods, the loud weird song of the thrush. I’ll hear it day and night, ceaselessly, all spring and summer.
This post is just nattering in place of the something more substantive I don’t have time for yet today. Later.
.. (UD‘s taking that designation from the headline of a recent article about South Carolina State University) could be understood to include pretty much every university ever, uh, covered by this blog. Harvard poor mouths. Yale poor mouths. UD‘s university – George Washington – recently found the cash to buy the Corcoran Gallery of Art; but last month UD attended a meeting where a professor said “if it weren’t for our students from China, I’m not sure the university could continue to be viable.” People say these things when they’re pitching new revenue-enhancing programs, or when they feel more comfortable hoarding than spending the endowment.
On the other hand, UD has covered a few universities which do indeed seem on the brink, though even they aren’t really. How often does a university close? Yeshiva University, embittered lover of rich bitches Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, has been downgraded by Moody’s with such calendrical regularity that the Moody’s Downgrade Days Calendar threatens to replace the Hebrew one. South Carolina State – one big ol’ inept corrupt money-hemorrhaging machine – is certainly in deep doo-doo, but the long-suffering taxpayers of that state will bail it out in order that it may live to stage sports events again.
A significant driving force behind the $13.6 million deficit was a $6.67 million shortfall in last year’s athletic program.
[President Thomas] Elzey said the university is considering eliminating its women’s golf program as well as assistant athletic coaches. Elzey said the university is seeking private donations to help support women’s golf.
“It hurts me to do that,” Elzey said. “I don’t like the idea of retreating back in an area I love dearly, which is golf.”
His institution’s dying and he’s worried about his dead hand shot.
… Give it some money… And watch its president ignore the overwhelming sentiment of its student body and give that money to athletics.
Eastern Kentucky University is in this neighborhood (the article I’m linking to is absolutely terrific, by the way). Its schools need to spend scarce funds on training and education, but the president of EKU wants to spend them on football. EKU students know the president is full of shit.
While the fee has yet to be approved by the Regents the student body continues to debate the hike, most recently represented by a survey. In this survey distributed by the Student Government Association, students overwhelmingly did not support fees for athletics. In fact, more students participated in said survey than voted in the most recent SGA election, showing just how much students care about this issue.
But no! says the president (who, with the board of trustees, will ram this down the students’ throats anyway). Our students can easily spend an extra four hundred dollars tuition on football! I mean look at Western Kentucky! They charge more than that!
Ah, Western Kentucky. One of our favorite subjects here at University Diaries. Feast your eyes.
Yeah – we want what Western Kentucky’s got! If our students are so stupid as to think we should spend that money on their education, they’ll just have to suck it up. After all, says the prez, consider the arguments for soaking our poor students for football:
“I don’t think we can afford to stand still — that’s my concern,” Benson said. “This may be our window of opportunity, and if it closes on us we may have forgone an opportunity that may not come around again.”
Touchdown!
Plagiarism on high – plagiarism among professors at excellent universities (Charles Ogletree), plagiarism among the celebrated and venerated (Jane Goodall) – is always a little smudgy. Miscreants suffer little or no penalty, and language (mistakes were made, inadvertent, over-reliance on research assistants…) is brought forward to… smudge matters…
And so it was at Brown University, until a group of English professors decided to break through the smudge and complain about one of their soon-to-be-erstwhile colleagues.
As is almost always the case in high-plagiarism incidents, what seems to have been massive and obvious plagiarism (around 35 instances of virtually verbatim lifting were reportedly found in this professor’s book) took place, after which a series of smudging, tamping down, looking the other way, events took place. The press very quietly pulped the book. And, while the professor was taken off the tenure track, she was also – bizarrely – given a deanship.
It’s a temporary deanship, to be sure, but it involves working with graduate students on their teaching, which will, in turn, no doubt involve her writing letters of recommendation for some of them, etc.
Her once-colleagues are unhappy about a number of things here. They’re unhappy that a gross instance of plagiarism is being called not plagiarism by Brown but a mistake. (Thirty-five mistakes.) And therefore identified as not really research misconduct. (Smudge smudge smudge.)
“Everyone I talked to in the English department understood [the Brown University document reviewing this professor’s book to] be saying that research misconduct included plagiarism, that plagiarism is a form of research misconduct,” [an English professor] said. “Therefore any judgment that a faculty member’s work contained errors that were plagiarism but not research misconduct was a kind of category mistake. It was contrary to the logic of the University rules.”
They are also unhappy that her punishment is to be promoted to a deanship.
[M]any department members are displeased that [the] new position entails working with graduate students…
[One faculty member] cited the possibility of graduate students asking [her] for letters of recommendation or indicating on their resumes that they took part in a teaching program under her auspices without knowing that outside scholars might be aware of her errors.
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UD takes a deep wizened breath here. Twas ever thus. UD is impressed with the professors who complained. But twas ever thus.
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Another recent example of high-plagiarism smudgery.
With more and more pain pill addicts out there, and with hospital personnel having greater access than most, these stories keep happening (UD has covered quite a few on this blog). It’s rare that two overdoses (a doctor and a nurse) occur at the same university on the same day, but that too will become less rare.
… is the title of UD‘s latest article for her hometown newspaper, the Garrett Park Bugle.
It is curious, this “moral quietism in the face of avarice,” and it’s curious for many reasons. (UD‘s thinking about this quietism today because Paul Krugman – see the two posts below this one – is being greedy.)
If one human being – University of Southern California trustee John Martin – happily accepts $180 million in one year’s personal compensation, American commentators might drop a dollop of rhetoric on it (“obscene”) … Our satirists (see Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities) might ridicule it in fiction … But it’s not as if anyone in a position of, say, legislative authority in the country is going to say or do anything about it. On the contrary, it’s much more likely that our elected greed-apologists (Eric Cantor, Mitt Romney, legions of others) will lustily applaud; while our unelected apologists, the most famous of which is currently Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins, will both 1.) express outrage that anyone would express outrage over, say, nurturer-of-insider-traders and Brown University trustee Steve Cohen hoarding nine billion dollars in personal wealth, and 2.) warn that lack of moral quietism in the face of avarice is tantamount to a violent fascist revolution.
But, really, the very phrase moral quietism in the face of avarice is the problem, no? Every element of this phrase – moral, quietism, avarice – is thoroughly rejected by most Americans. There is no level of money acquisition – acquisition in comparative terms, like Krugman’s, where his salary and work load at CUNY is humiliatingly disproportional to the salary and work load of anyone else at that public institution, and acquisition in absolute terms, as in Cohen’s household billions – which could ever rise to avarice. In this country, the correct moral position to take in regard to the personal acquisition of disproportional and astronomical sums of money is admiring approval. And… quietism? John Paul Rollert is incorrect to interpret the deafening silence at, say, the money managers at one American university receiving from that non-profit institution $25 million in yearly compensation as a kind of uncomfortable quietism. Think of it as an awed hush.
And please. Avarice? A word out of, what, Everyman? Take me back, baby. Avarice. At once a delicate word (vampire squid is vulgar) and a retro word, a tea-with-doilies word and a dead-lo-these-many-centuries word… Here comes Avarice onstage, his pockets lined with greenbacks! …
There is no avarice. There is only (as defenders of Krugman are saying today) a free market in a rich country. There is only what the market will bear. And, like most Americans, the current market (in which there is less and less “non-profit”) will bear absolutely anything.
The blogosphere is having fun with Paul Krugman today (see my own take on things in the post just below this one). But lest we forget: Krugman has always been hypocritical about making his own big bucks. This is from Andrew Sullivan’s website, years ago:
KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980′s and 1990′s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.
“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…
I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.
All greed is local. The polite perplexity of a recent CUNY PhD in the face of wealthy Paul Krugman having accepted a CUNY professorship that pays him $450,000 to teach one seminar over the next two years overlooks the fact that Krugman, for all his attacks on American greed in his New York Times column, lives in a certain world. In this world (New York City, hedge fund managers), $450,000 (more than that, with various perks) is a slap in the face. You cannot spend decades surrounded by people who make twenty million dollars a year and not revise your greed radically upward.
The same awkwardness arose from Harvard professor Larry Summers indulging his hedge-fund-level greed while… being a professor…
[Harvard University professor Lawrence Summers] consults not only for hedge fund DE Shaw but for venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, asset-management and advisory firm Alliance Partners, stock-exchange operator Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., and for financial services firm Citigroup. He also has a healthy income from speaking — more than $100,000 earlier this year, for example, for a single speech to a conference organized by Drobny Global Advisors.
That is a busy schedule for a full-time faculty member who, like other professors, is allowed only a day a week for consulting — and Summers also chairs the advisory board of the Minerva Project, an online university startup, and holds an administrative role as Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
This is the same Lawrence Summers who told Professor Cornel West to stop spending so much time on his outside activities and get back to his scholarship — because more was expected of a University Professor.
It’s all very postmodern: Krugman is a highly-paid professor-simulacrum whose function is to appear in CUNY advertisements. Big money, big promo, big nothing.
I’d urge Krugman to quantify that esteem for CUNY by donating a significant portion of his earnings, say $100,000 a year, to a scholarship fund for students or the Professional Staff Congress welfare fund, which provides much-needed health care benefits and emergency assistance for CUNY adjuncts.
Yet why should Krugman do that? He has – is asked to have – nothing to do with CUNY.
… Funds to begin to make sense of a scandal like Sul Ross University. A terrible school with a graduation rate approaching zero, a school only lately on probation, Sul Ross naturally is all about athletics.
Back in November the entire football coaching staff was fired. Then the president of the university resigned days later.
There’s no there there, at Sul Ross, which opens the door to local bullies and boosters and hangers-on. No one’s saying exactly what happened (maybe everyone on campus is too addled to know), but the local press suggests the latest Sul Ross administration ran away because
There were claims that coaches were physically and verbally abusing players, that athletes were being bribed to incriminate coaches, and that coeds were being pushed to have sex with recruits.
Yadda yadda. Bottom line: When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, boys will get up to trouble. And Sul Ross is all about boys.
It’s odd to UD that Sul Ross is about anything. I mean, anything you and I have to pay for.
The [Jameis] Winston revelations are one more reminder of just how far universities and their apologists are willing to go to protect the multibillion-dollar enterprise that we call “college sports.”
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Well, you know, we get these little eruptions; sometimes, as in the Florida State scandal, the New York Times gets involved and things seem to make slighter larger eruptions.
But keep this in mind. University athletes accused of rape, university athletes found guilty of rape — these events are a dime a dozen. (University athletes accused of beating the shit out of people are a penny a dozen.) During the life of this blog, UD has covered dozens and dozens of them. Sometimes schools like the University of Montana produce so many stories of this sort that they – and the one-watering-hole-per-square-inch towns that harbor them – begin to get a reputation. Enrollment suffers because parents don’t want their daughters living in a rape town. But overwhelmingly – as the NYT reports – these things go absolutely nowhere.
Wanna know why? Okay, here’s the list.
1. No one cares. People care about their team. They like their team’s aggressive players, and… you know… hard to keep all of that shit on the field. Too bad.
2. Billions of dollars are on the table.
3. It’s just girls getting hurt. Or – in the Sandusky case – underprivileged young men. Who cares.
Not only will things go nowhere. You can already see the rehabilitation of Paterno’s Penn State moving along nicely, with much of Happy Valley galvanized at the prospect of The Statue going up again… and at the much-discussed prospect of another statue of Paterno being commissioned for another high-profile place at Penn State.
Yes, this is what that university is all about lately. The important thing at Penn State is tons of people getting to work packing the board of trustees with true Penn Staters like Al Lord. (Note that Lord’s campaign page features not a picture of the candidate, but a picture of God himself, halo’ed in white.) Lord might well win a place on the Penn State board of trustees.
So before that happens, you want to understand the culture? Read and learn. Here’s Al’s position statement, with UD‘s commentary in parenthesis. (UD thanks an anonymous Penn State person for sending this to her.)
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“I walked onto the Ogontz (now Abington) Campus mid-December, 1963. Since, I have felt an outsized, almost inexplicable affection for Penn State. [Almost inexplicable. The guy’s a hell of a writer – the sort who shoots himself in the foot, making the reader giggle.] Though a very average student I always have felt fortunate to possess a Penn State degree. [Try to puzzle out the logic of this statement. It might make sense to say Because I was an average student I feel fortunate… But Though?]
Penn State’s relentless evolution from just a state university to America’s best [Relentless. This is the macho sports guy talking – everything that happens has to be a heroic struggle, high drama. And did you know Penn State was the best university in America? Mere months after having hosted the nation’s most sordid university scandal?] has been a fifty year source of pride. Better than others, Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno created the healthy alliance of academics and athletics. [Okay, the guy’s got balls. The name Spanier and the word healthy in the same sentence. Okay.] Penn State wins national championships in several sports and graduates America’s best prepared students. [Penn State students are certainly prepared to talk in great detail about what goes on during man on boy shower action. They have learned all about that.] Both academics and athletics well—that is our Penn State. [Word missing before “well”?] Our Trustees and Louis Freeh see a different Penn State. [Capitalizing Trustees is strange.]
I seek a seat on the PSU Board of Trustees because I can no longer watch the willful, cowardly destruction of our Penn State. [This is the way Donald Trump writes and talks. This is a Trump guy. Rich hothead with a surfeit of self-regard, and knows – like Trump – that he knows everything and we know nothing.] Our Boardroom splits between pride and shame; yet still none know the facts. [Again – can you figure the logic of this last sentence?] “Freeh’s facts” are incomplete, selective, and largely unconvincing. [Quotation marks around “Freeh’s facts.” What does he mean by them? That these facts only appear to be facts? That Lord spits on so-called Freeh’s so-called facts? As with Trump, the character-age, if you will, of this writer is around fourteen.] Freeh’s report destroyed our past; left unchallenged it will diminish the future. [Again note the high-heroic tone, the would-be Lincolnesque rhetoric which comes off as bragging clueless nothingness.]
… Father of two grandfather of six. Wife of 48 years, Suzanne, received her Penn State PHT (Putting Hubby Through) in 1967. [UD finds this nod to the wife’s PHT degree particularly winning.] … ”
In case you were wondering why pharma is intrinsically corrupt. And will remain so. After all, this writer didn’t even mention pharma’s impressive capacity to make up bogus ailments, frighten the shit out of us about them, and provide pills.