February 15th, 2015
La Kid, Boston, This Afternoon.

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February 15th, 2015
“[William] Rauwerdink is also on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, where his biography on the university website does not include his stint at Lason or his convictions.”

Google the guy’s name and move down four — four — places on the list you get, and his massive fraud, his “greed and avarice” (according to the judge who put him away), his history of insider trading and securities fraud, is right there in your face. Again, you don’t even have to scroll down. It’s all in the first four paragraphs. Easy peasy.

So why is Rauwerdink on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the University of Wisconsin Business School? After having his staff ascertain that Bill’s a career fraudster (they can’t have just stuck his name on the list; they must do a tad of research, no?), perhaps Dean François Ortalo-Magné said A bread and butter fraudster is one thing; Rauwerdink’s the real deal. He’s been at it, from an astonishing variety of approaches, for decades. I need his advice.

February 15th, 2015
The poet Philip Levine has died.

Here’s a post I wrote about him awhile back.

NYT obit.

February 15th, 2015
Wind Chill 3 AM

What woke me early this morning felt like raw cold, not house cold. I followed the cold to the living room, where the wind had blown open a set of casement windows.

I’m in the habit of latching them in the middle and not bothering with the bottom and top. Now the doors were flung open to the incredible cold and the incredibly clear night sky. A blast of arctic reality.

February 15th, 2015
“[T]he stadium has incurred a debt of $35 million of its own, separate from the annual $15 million operating deficit. This fact is disturbing because the university announced in 2011 that it had raised $40 million in pledges for the $60 million stadium and was attempting to have it funded entirely by private funds.”

Piece of cake. Everyone loves football. I’m sure the money will appear any day now.

February 15th, 2015
“I know there is a big concern about the athletics program, particularly football. Does that have to go? No. But something’s got to go …”

Local commentary on verge-of-extinction South Carolina State University.

Like the ability to hear when you’re close to death, football, at the dying university, is the last thing to go.

February 14th, 2015
“[Florida Congressman Paul] Gosar said that if the U.S. were to pay ransom to terrorists, then ‘every American citizen traveling abroad becomes a subject in regard for kidnapping and then the plight of how much money has been captivated in the Boca Raton group.'”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says:

SOS is speechless.

February 14th, 2015
“It also determined that Song may have helped write the JPIM article and worked closely with its authors. Previously, he’d told The Star that he didn’t remember seeing the article before it was published.”

This Beware the B-School Boys story has it all: Planted journal articles, inflated statistics, made up statistics, the brains behind the scheme paid one of the highest salaries on campus, and said brains allowed to retire with hearty valedictories by his superiors after an independent audit revealed all.

The head of the entrepreneurship program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City really showed its young entrepreneurs how to get it done: If you want your program ranked first in the country, lie, lie, lie, lie, and lie. Life is about gaming systems, and Michael Song knows how to game. See his big office and big salary – all because he’s a game player.

Get it? Try it.

You say Song’s out of a job? Not for long. Not with his skill set. And note that in his departing statement he admits having done nothing other than showed at all times a relentless commitment to furthering the fortunes of the school. The chancellor, in his statement, agrees. Stand-up guy, Michael Song. We could use more like him.

February 14th, 2015
Daily Affirmations, DSK-Style

Let’s say I saved the world from a crisis that could have been worse than the one in 1929.”

February 14th, 2015
Under an existential threat to the school, South Carolina State University is able to gather fewer than thirty people to a rally.

The turnout strengthens the arguments of those in the legislature who point out that there’s no there there.

UD recommends that SCSU stop holding rallies.

February 14th, 2015
O Little Infinity!

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Neruda’s words in English.

Valentine’s Day 2015.

February 13th, 2015
Paul Campos comments on the NYT piece on UD’s George Washington University.

The NYT story is here.

Here’s Campos:

… Only when [national university] rankings expanded in the mid-1990s to encompass 50 and then 100 schools in numerical order did GW appear on these lists. Like the vast majority of colleges and universities, George Washington’s ranking has always been very stable. The school lurked and continues to lurk on the edge of the top 50, with practically no variation in its ranking from year to year. This suggests, of course, that what [ex-president Stephen] Trachtenberg did for the school’s overall reputation was exactly nothing, although his ability to convince credulous journalists that he had taken a humble inexpensive commuter school and transformed it into a high-priced academic powerhouse no doubt played a role in helping raise his salary by the time he departed to $3.7 million. (To the — very considerable — extent that a university’s endowment can be considered a proxy for its overall academic status, the history of GW’s endowment suggests strongly that the school’s status didn’t improve at all during Trachtenberg’s tenure.)

… Stephen Joel Trachtenberg might be considered academia’s king of meta-bullshit. His oft-repeated claims that he cynically and successfully exploited the Veblenesque yearnings of America’s middle and upper classes in order to make George Washington University much richer and more prestigious turns out to be just so much bullshit. But what most certainly isn’t bullshit is that he managed to exploit those claims themselves — although the prime beneficiary of those claims turned out not to be the institution that ended up paying him millions of dollars a year for his services.

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

UD thanks Dr_Doctorstein for the link to Campos.

February 13th, 2015
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

… when a bunch of people on the University of Kentucky football team were merely locking down the campus and calling out police helicopters because of their pellet gun play

But these guys (three of them) were just getting started. After that, there was the bar fight. Then there was the Eastern Kentucky University assault after the bar fight.

At least UK has a classy basketball program.

February 13th, 2015
Retirement Day, Joanna Soltan, Curator, School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

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UD‘s sister-in-law,
with her colleague Alahna,
says goodbye to her office.

February 13th, 2015
“That Penn State, a school that had become infamous for an assistant coach now in jail for sexually abusing children, would hire a coach who is connected, however tangentially, to an ongoing sexual-assault case involving multiple of his former players was baffling to some observers.”

Vanderbilt might not be a football school, but over the last four years, football has had a huge impact on the university.

So true.

Vanderbilt might not be a football school yet.

But like Penn State, new home of former Vanderbilt football coach James Franklin, it’s raping its way there.

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