…[see post directly below this one] still duns you.

Just a few weeks ago Harvard received the largest donation in the college’s history [which adds significantly to its current endowment of close to thirty-five billion dollars], but recent Harvard grads are nevertheless still getting [donation] requests.

Henry Blodget is talking about University of Southern California trustee John Martin and his… well, Blodget has already tried to supply some adjectives… personal compensation. You sense, in Blodget’s emotional but not entirely polished description of human beings who take several hundred million dollars to themselves in compensation every year a kind of verbal difficulty, an eagerness and yet an inability to capture what it means – socially, morally – for one human being to do this. Piggish is a strong precise sort of word; yet he’s matched it with an abstraction (outrageous) which does little more than amplify his initial abstraction (the condition of being unbelievable). One feels as though the phrase should substitute a more precise word for outrageous… Or maybe the phrase would be stronger if one simply dropped outrageous and ended on piggish.

Anyway. A trustee stands as a role model for students and faculty, and Martin’s cosmic greed (cosmic is good, I think… I don’t know… I’m kind of tongue-tied on this one myself) conveys the highest values of that institution of higher learning. Higher, higher, higher, until you’re pulling in, as Blodget puts it, “700 times my lowest employee.”

Everything’s for sale at the University of Alabama, including the opportunity to have your name appear in the chancel itself, Nick Saban’s most sacred private place.

… (she left the University of Maryland a number of years ago for Miami University) writes a manuscript about organized crime and Vladimir Putin that scares the bejaysus out of Cambridge University Press. Libel laws! No can publish.

This is from Karen’s response to the editor there:

Last week the EU and the US Government issued a visa ban and asset freeze on the very inner core that is the subject of my book. Many works will now come out on the makeup of the list and why each individual was placed on it. The answers to these questions are in my book. Isn’t it a pity that the UK is a ‘no-fly’ zone for publishing the truth about this group? These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools. And as a result of their growing knowledge about and influence in the UK, even the most significant British institutions (and I think we can agree that CUP, with its royal charter, 500-year history and recent annual revenues in excess of $400m, is a veritable British institution) cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal action…. [Perhaps some day we] can once again turn to CUP with the knowledge that it is indeed devoted to publishing “all manner of books” and not just those that won’t awaken the ire of corrupt Russian oligarchs out to make a further mockery of British institutions.

For the definitive statement of why American university professors don’t wanna know from their local Athletic-Industrial Complex, go here.

For pathetic up to the minute details of the pathology, go here.

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By the way, the Chapel Hill Show Trials (I write about them here) seem not to have gone over well.

[A group of high-profile] retired [UNC] faculty took issue with an event at last week’s Board of Trustees meeting in which several athletes talked about their studies and spoke favorably of the tutoring program that assists them.

“The recent presentation to the Trustees by several accomplished student-athletes whose work as students has not been impugned was one more embarrassing exercise in avoiding the heart of the issue,” the professors wrote.

…my university. We had two recent student suicides to grieve. Last January, there was another.

It was a warm beautiful evening and the students who spoke were eloquent and none of us can begin to make sense of it.

The nitty gritty on compensation starts on page 27 of Gilead’s proxy document. Its compensation mix for Gilead’s executive group is skewed towards equity awards that are over 200% of base salary and annual bonus opportunity. On page 34 it’s noted that Gilead’s CEO John Martin took home more than $90 million making him one of the 10 highest paid CEO’s in the country. His 5-year compensation exceeded $250 million, top man in the pharma sector. Generous options and stock grants fueled by marked equity appreciation in Gilead told the story.

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

There is no qualm in Gilead
To make the top man whole;
There is no qualm in Gilead
To heal the CEO.

If I can’t earn like Martin
If I can’t take his take home
Then take me home to Jesus,
And say I died alone.

Read and learn. Should you attempt the delicate feat of being at once a revered intellectual and an occasional plagiarist, and should your plagiarism be discovered by some graduate student, say this:

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses…

Let’s note the elements of Zygmunt Bauman’s response, one by one.

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, [I laugh condescendingly at the small-mindedness of anyone who would compile a book of rules about proper citation. Such books are for little people – like the little person who has had the presumption to try to attack my eminence.] and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, [I am a committed (way committed in my youth but that’s none of your business) man of the left who stands way above the petty and absurd defense of private property which is the entire concept ‘plagiarism.’] I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses… [Sure, I could be a citation nazi; I could lose all my social importance via lockstep ‘obedience’ to ‘rules,’ but this behavior is beneath me. Plus my attacker is ‘obviously’ an idiot.]

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a winner.

… on the part of high-ranking university officials. And university priests.

There was the plagiarizing dean at one of the U Alaska campuses. One of his jobs was handling student plagiarism cases. No investigation was ever done. He just, uh, left.

Now there’s the naughty University of Alaska Fairbanks Catholic priest. Father Thomson, stopped by police while speeding his drug-laden, weapons-packed pickup around town, hit the trifecta… No, the quadfecta:

DUI, refusal to take to a chemical alcohol test, drugs misconduct and two counts of weapons misconduct for both possessing a firearm while intoxicated and failing to immediately inform troopers he was carrying a firearm.

Hold on.

No, that’s the cinquefecta.

… the University of Hawaii, which boasts one of the most expensive and most pointless of revenue sports programs (no one comes to the games) in America. Type university hawaii into my search engine for every recent act of the farce, to which we need to add, today, the crazy shit coming from the football coach at the last team practice/press conference. Things were just getting started when the coach saw a local journalist who had written something the coach didn’t like.

The coach screamed at the guy and abruptly cancelled the entire press conference.

Television reporters were interviewing quarterback Taylor Graham when Chow yelled that Reardon was not welcomed at the practice. This morning’s practice, unlike practices during the regular season, was open to the public.

Reardon said he was prepared to leave the grass practice field when Chow began yelling and then ordered a halt to the media’s interviews with players and assistant coaches.

UD loves to follow the careers of these strutting tyrants, these American university football coaches who think they own place because they do. They do own the place.

You gotta admit that stealing from students is the cherry-on-top of university corruption, the real apex of depravity. A high-ranking professor/administrator at Morgan State University did that, plus lots of other stuff that will send him to prison for a decade or so.

… searching for this post, about the death of a George Washington University student –the student featured in the post is not the student who was apparently found dead in her dorm room this morning. The earlier death happened last January.

Police are not investigating this morning’s death as a homicide.

… and I am just sitting here asking myself WHY. Auburn! Football City!

The largest expense remains compensation for coaches, support staff and administrators, which reached $34.7 million in 2013. When adjusting for inflation, Auburn’s costs for athletics department employees have increased 62 percent since 2006.

Plus, like pretty much everywhere else, fewer and fewer people are coming to the games… Salaries go way up… Ticket sales go down… Quite the business model…

And there’s all those millions in severance for people who aren’t there anymore…

… George Washington University, and the campus newspaper is all over it.

You can’t keep these ambitious stem cell researchers down. Remember the Korean guy? They even did a stamp for him showing a person in a wheelchair gradually gaining the ability to walk because of the Korean guy’s amazing stem cell research.

That didn’t turn out well. I mean, once scientists tried reproducing his results.

Now there’s this Japanese stem cell person who also got amazing results due to the simple expediency of making up data and altering pictures.