You don’t want to make a practice of inviting financial criminals among your graduates to give commencement speeches on their way to jail.

For some schools – Wharton comes to mind – this would guarantee nothing but criminals for graduation speakers into the foreseeable future.

New York University, grasping the problem, said no to its own Charles Wilk, just convicted of “conspiracy to defraud the government and aiding in the filing of a false tax return.”

Or rather NYU said no to Wilk’s judge, who made the speech part of his sentence.

Wilk’s comrade in crime, Jeffrey Greenstein, did indeed address his alma mater, the University of Washington, on the joys and sorrows of massive tax evasion schemes.

… by your record of embarrassing or illegal activities, read this and relax.

In the aftermath of Stephen Gey’s death – he was a law professor at Florida State – one of his students pays homage to the strength of his character as well as to his intellect.

This article, a few years back, captures Gey’s passion, and his students’ reciprocal feelings.

This is the best – the very best – of the university, that free and ordered space, as Bartlett Giamatti called it – a space as removed from the tawdry cyberspace of distance ed as possible – where human beings and their passions meet human beings and their passions.

[Ben] Gibson and about 40 other students gathered for Gey’s First Amendment class Monday. They couldn’t see Gey, who was calling from his house of hard, steep angles. They could only hear his voice over three speakers. But they could picture him in those ironed jeans, sitting ramrod straight.

He called to say goodbye.

He said he could no longer teach, even by phone. He said he had wanted more than anything to finish the term, but was too sick. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said.

The class fell silent.

“This is Ben,” Gibson called out. “I want to thank you for the semester. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done.”

The class was again silent. So were the phone speakers.

Finally, they heard Gey sign off. “Thank you,” they heard him say. His voice was choked.

“Thank you for allowing me to fulfill my life’s passion.”

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The man in action.

Whoops! Plus I own the company that makes the stuff!

Labrie’s take on this is great: “The one that is the first author has got the responsibility.”

It’s great because, you know, quite a few medical journal papers have like five to twenty authors, with only the first author (maybe – maybe a drug company got the whole thing ghostwritten) actually having any involvement in experimenting and writing and shit like that which you might associate with experimenting and writing…

So put quotations marks, in that last sentence, around each use of the word author and you begin to see Labrie’s point.

Some of those not-first writers, let’s speculate, had little to do with the article; their names were plastered on it like some cheesy face cream because people know who they are, and that adds prestige. Why in hell – since their only involvement is to be informed of when the article comes out and instruct their secretaries to add its title to their list of publications – should they bother listing conflicts of interest?

While experts contacted by Reuters Health say that none of the anti-aging creams available to consumers has been proven to work better than a simple moisturizer, some products still run well over $100.

One way to justify those exorbitant price tags is to tout “clinically proven” …

(Why isn’t Suze Orman talking to women about one hundred dollar moisturizers?)

Journals, concludes one editor, are “the marketing arm of the pharma industry.”

… cornucopia.

It’s an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

This list reminds me that I have meant to list some university students – or recent university graduates – who have in the last few months died of pain-killer overdoses.

Austin Box, University of Oklahoma.

Robert Mueller, Wake Forest.

Wilson Forrester, University of Arizona.

Hope Reichbach, New York University.

Michael Israel, University of Buffalo.

… used since its inception as an ATM by administrators, has scored its first guilty plea. A vice-president stole tens of thousands of dollars. But he’s doing okay:

“You go to bed with it, you wake up with it. You have good days and bad days, but it’s always there,” he said. “Thank God for medication and professionals [helping me] through all of this and my family.”

VERY.

[Athletic Director Mike Hamilton’s] resignation is effective on June 30, [just days before the NCAA’s infractions committee comes to pay a visit] but he will be on administrative leave beginning Monday. According to reports, he will receive a buyout of $1.335 million over the next 36 months or $445,000 per year ($37,083.33 monthly)…

Hamilton fired football coach Phil Fulmer in 2008, Bruce Pearl in March and most recently baseball coach Todd Raleigh. He hired Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, but Kiffin resigned after one season to take over the University of Southern California program, which was sanctioned by the NCAA.

According to the News Sentinel, Pearl is being paid $948,728, and Raleigh is owed $331,657.53 for a total of $1,280,385.53.

According to The Tennessean, Fulmer received $6 million when he was fired.

The football violations being heard by the NCAA this weekend are under Kiffin’s regime.

He also fired baseball coach Rod Delmonico and basketball coach Buzz Peterson, who received $1.39 million in 2005 when he was fired, according to the News Sentinel.

According to The Tennessean, the total cost of all of Hamilton’s firings is $9,070,385.53.

Ed Greif, a local sportswriter, does the numbers.

Tennessee: Hire guys you have to fire because they get caught breaking rules, then pay them millions and millions of buyout dollars for years. Genius.

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A LIGHT STORM OVER THE OCEAN

A light storm over the ocean!
As if day were trying to wedge itself back in.
Flashes over clouds are like flashes over mountains.

After days of heat, a hard cold wind!
And the sheeting of clouds without rain.
A light storm over the ocean.

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

… about whether we’re becoming decadent and late imperial and all.

What makes political decadence possible is the luxury of a secure international position, which makes it possible both to meddle in various global problems where our vital national interests are not really at stake (Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc.) and permits Americans to think that it’s perfectly ok to put climate change deniers, religious fanatics, former body-builders turned actors, and other unqualified individuals in high office.

That sort of thing.

[T]he Weiner episode mark[s] the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior — John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line.

That sort of thing.

UD would only ask y’all to calm down and think this through.

We not long ago elected an eminently serious, eminently qualified president, for instance.

And vice-president.

We pay our taxes. Etc.

You want decadent, look at Italy, where they elect Berlusconi and don’t pay their taxes. In a recent New Yorker post about Strauss-Kahn, Adam Gopnik reported that

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing … [in] what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

The very fact that we react strongly to trivialization and irresponsibility in our country’s politics suggests that we know what it means to be politically respectable. Did you see what President Obama did to Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

Let France glance over at Italy and worry. It has plenty to worry about. We have much less.

Newt Gingrich Aides Resign En Masse.
The candidate’s too dégueulasse.
Each gets a pin
From his Tiffany’s tin
In remembrance of things past.

This is potentially a very big story. I want to read more about it before I comment, but it’s important enough for me to put a couple of links up already. Here, and here.

Original report here.

What am I talking about? The BBC explains:

A report from the US-based thinktank The Oakland Institute claims that the scramble for arable land in Africa by foreign investors is forcing millions of small farmers off their ancestral land.

As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, wealthy countries and investment funds are seeing an opportunity in Africa and acquiring huge tracts of fertile land to produce crops like wheat, rice, corn and biofuels for consumption back home. The report says that an area the size of France has already been sold or leased to foreign investors.

Because of poor land ownership laws in many African countries and a lack of transparency about deals, it is claimed, these land deals are delivering almost none of the benefits promised to African citizens.

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

WTF?

In the west African country of Mali, one investment group was able to secure 100,000 hectares of fertile land for a 50-year term for free, according to the Institute’s report.

A local reporter demonstrates that a particular high school is a diploma mill. Miami Dade College accepts their graduates and will, it informs the reporter, continue to do so.

… (pronounced embolize), is UD‘s term for the tendency of some MBA programs to lie about their job placement numbers.

An ethics complaint made to [the University of Florida] alleged that Warrington College of Business Administration officials manipulated data on the [2009] job placement of program graduates.

A higher percentage of graduates were reported as being employed in order to maintain the program’s ranking in U.S. News’ annual guide to graduate schools…

The school admits the numbers were madly inflated, but denies lying. It was just “inexperience” or something.

Fudging is very much the way at UF. Take this statement from the Distance Learning page on the business school’s website:

Studies have shown that there is no significant difference in the learning outcomes experienced by students in a traditional classroom versus those in a distance learning situation.

Footnote? Wanna source that? Why not?

… the European Court of Human Rights has winner written all over it.

The application states the principal applicant is the husband who “expects and instructs” his wife to wear the burqa, a full-body covering that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a face veil that only leaves an opening for the eyes.

But he will be at risk of prosecution under French law if he crosses the Channel because he will admit that “he expects and instructs his wife to wear the niqab/burqa”.

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

UPDATE:

When I see a woman in a burqa, my feelings are of revulsion. Not of the women themselves, of course, but of the culture and the men who require this of them. Not only do I want to set them free, I want to protect my own daughter from the sight of what appears to me as forced subservience.

Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield describes exactly what happened to UD ten years ago, in Virginia’s Pentagon City Mall, as she walked with her ten-year-old daughter. At the sight of three women in burqas, UD immediately, instinctively, put her hands over her daughter’s eyes.

Greenfield concludes:

It’s time to have an American conversation about the burqa. It will not be the same as a European conversation; it will take into account distinctive American ideals, some of which — like liberty and equality — inevitably conflict. We should not presuppose that the conversation will be simple or have only one possible outcome.

Yes.