Fine Arts and Rat Feces at Louisiana State University.
… When the ceramics studio ceiling crashed into a large sink that just about every student in the building uses, people around campus started paying attention to the [Studio Arts] building’s long list of issues. Problems with the building, which was constructed in 1924, date back much further and are not limited to that one studio.
One of students’ biggest concerns is lead paint and asbestos they have identified throughout the building using home test kits.
… There is exposed wiring throughout the building, some of which is near students’ lockers in the main hallway. When the ceiling leaks — which it often does in many places — students fear the mix of electricity and water and avoid going to their lockers.
Restrooms are not cleaned regularly and rat feces often appear throughout the building, [a student] said.
“I haven’t seen Facility Services in here until the ceiling collapsed,” she said. “Once we started the protest stuff, then we started seeing them here and there. … We’re only starting to get attention now that we’re speaking out about it.”
… At various times, the Studio Arts Building has been home to squirrels, rats, a raccoon and during summer 2013, a homeless man, she said.
“The shabbiness draws random people to it,” [a student] said.
… [On the up side, the building is] brimming with the kind of quirkiness that only art students could come up with… Someone drew the outline of a house around a hole in a wall where a rat that students named Leroy once lived.
Go, Rats! I mean, Tigers.
Then this letter, from Richard Joel, president of junk status Yeshiva University, is for you. Appreciate its thoroughness, candor, and clarity about that school’s calamitous situation. Appreciate its reality-based approach to the disaster Joel and his trustees – past and present – have brought upon the school.
Where else but at never-a-dull-moment FAMU (put that acronym in my search engine for many earlier posts about FAMU’s homicidal marching band, its other high-level thieves, etc.) would the dean be in jail for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from students?
This post’s title headlined some articles about this event that were published earlier today. He’s now the former dean.
… Chicago State University, bankrolled almost exclusively by taxpayers (it has vanishingly few students, and is losing them at a rate of about 20% a year, so it’s certainly not getting much in tuition), stands out. I guess it stands out because it’s a university, and most of us continue to assume that universities have more dignity or whatever than other public institutions.
It may be because of this moral/emotional over-investment of ours that a Chicago judge and jury have recently come down so very hard on outrageously corrupt and inept CSU. As Jodi Cohen reports, having found in favor of a whistle blower –
[James Crowley was] awarded $2 million in punitive damages and $480,000 in back pay after a jury decided last month that he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by university president Wayne Watson and other top officials.
– the judge has now decided to increase Crowley’s award.
Circuit Court Judge James McCarthy decided to double Crowley’s back pay, as allowed under state law. Crowley had been earning $120,000 a year when he was fired. McCarthy also Tuesday ordered Chicago State to pay $60,000 in interest on the back pay. That brings the total payout to just more than $3 million.
The judge will rule following a hearing set for May on whether Chicago State should also pay Crowley’s attorney’s fees, and on terms of reemployment.
“It is quite clear from the verdict that Mr. Crowley is to be given his employment back,” the judge said.
The term slam dunk comes to mind. The sentence Someone is really really pissed. comes to mind.
Yet why (as UD has asked more than once before on this blog) does CSU exist? Why has it not been folded into another university? Why has it not been shut down? CSU is as much of a scandalous tax syphon as any for-profit school-for-scandal.
… poll? What’s its secret?
Well, it’s a matter of priorities. Look at its public university system.
[I]t’s hard to find $900 million for a 60,000-seat domed college football stadium for a program that has had a winning record once in the last 13 years and resorted to giving away tickets for free to get people to go to its last home opener.
Sure it’s hard. Sure! No one ever said life was easy. But the state of Nevada knows what matters, and UD is sure it will devote millions of dollars to this initiative.
And anyway you can’t say Nevada students don’t care about basketball! The other night, UNLV’s student body president got so excited he got thrown out of a game!!
“I was the leader of our group,” said [Mark] Ciavola, a 39-year-old political science major and the campaign manager for Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas.
“If you feel you have to escort someone out, you escort the leader, but multiple people on both sides were yelling and gesturing,” he said. “None of the [University of Nevada, Reno] fans were ejected for throwing things at us, but perhaps no one saw that.”
More detail from Ciavola:
… Ciavola had tried to lead a group of about 50 UNLV fans around the perimeter of the court to chant “Rebels,” something he had done at last year’s game between the two teams.
He said they were stopped by a security guard or police officer who told them to return to the bleachers or they all would be thrown out of the game.
‘We went back to our seats, but as UNR starting tying up the game things really got heated and the entire stadium started chanting “F— the Rebels,’” Ciavola said. “The section in front of us was flipping us off and throwing things at us – a water bottle and crushed up paper — and finally we gestured back at them.”
A paper claiming to have found a simple way to turn mature cells back into stem cells (via a process called STAP) has now been disavowed by one of its co-authors. Almost from the moment it was published, questions were raised about the exact nature of the cells used, about duplication of images, about plagiarism, and about reproducibility.
It will almost certainly be retracted.
At Stanford the nasty aroma
Wafting westward from Mathew Martoma
Has become so intense
That it seemed to make sense
To decide to revoke his diploma.
… on it.
More broadly and less literally, Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales, describes her own currency:
If money were water, the contents of my wallet might have flowed through pure streams and filthy gutters, might be guilty, bloodstained, diseased. The pesos passed through the fingers of drug dealers and gunmen, maybe. The cheque could be traced from its innocent signatory back through bank, investor, to hedge funds, futures, skulduggery, I am sure. They are just paper promises, earned for writing, for reading, for teaching poetry. The coins we throw into the charity box have passed through the hands of saints and thieves, without a doubt.
Clarke’s capsule history of filthy lucre is part of an argument she’s making against some of the finalists in a poetry contest dropping out of consideration when they discovered the prize money came from a hedge fund.
Broadening out yet more the problem some people have with money, Philip Larkin writes that money is filthy because it “sings” the long human history of twisted compulsion, acquisitiveness, and grubbiness… Money is about our sad, grandiose, never fulfillable, and often intensely destructive dreams…
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
Spartan, dour Larkin would perhaps have agreed with spartan, dour Christopher Lasch that “Luxury is morally repugnant,” that in democracies there should be “a moral condemnation of great wealth.”
******************
So okay. But universities – like everyone and everything else – still need money, and most people believe that educating people and making research possible are good uses of it. That’s why universities get amazing tax breaks; but, again, the discomfort about immense accumulation and/or inappropriate use of university money is also why many people think continued tax breaks for multi-billionaire schools like Harvard and Princeton are wrong. It’s why some people are unhappy when billionaire alumni choose to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to these same multi-billionaire schools. As Lasch suggests (other political theorists, like Michael Sandel, seem to agree), there’s something icky – something positively undemocratic – about grotesque huge personal fortunes and – in the case of universities – about grotesquely huge endowments.
And then there’s the problem of where university dollars come from. Apartheid South Africa was an overwhelmingly uncontroversial sort of divestment target, involving too many traces of cocaine, if you will, for many people to accept.
More subtle is the provenance of dollars from individuals like the Koch brothers, who hold libertarian, Tea Party-esque social and political views many people find repellent.
Catholic University has just accepted a million dollars from the Kochs to study that elusive and evanescent thing, “principled entrepreneurship.” A vocal group of Catholics has protested the gift, citing “the Kochs’s opposition to the expansion of Medicaid, hostility to public unions, and support for global warming denialists,” and pointing to the current Pope’s excoriation of “unfettered capitalism.”
Virtually all popes, far as I know, rail against unfettered capitalism, so that one (I’m sure Catholic U. has in the past taken lots of money from unfettered capitalists) doesn’t really fly; and libertarianism is certainly a respectable political position… Hell, all of the Koch’s positions, while maybe not smelling like a rose, are within the bounds of civil discourse.
You’re on safer ground when, as with apartheid, you look at what people and institutions actually do. So, for instance, when a Koch-funded group offered, a few years ago, to fund two economics professorships at Florida State University on the condition that people from the Koch-funded group get veto power over the appointments (the professors had to be sufficiently free-market and anti-regulatory in their orientation), a clear line was crossed. Similarly, also at FSU, “BB&T, the bank holding company, funds an ethics course on the condition that Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ be required reading.”
These two seem pretty obvious examples of outside groups using their money to influence what goes on in the classroom.
… is sort of like being Oscar Pistorius’s defense lawyer over and over again. For years, Blaguszewski’s role as spokesperson for the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been to, uh, yes, acknowledge that some of the lads at the school are a mite violent. They riot; they throw beer cans at the police; they assault and batter with dangerous weapons; they pick spectacular fights.
And they have for years; vicious drunken rioting is a long tradition at the school, and things are getting worse. The latest riot – today’s riot – has so far produced 46 arrests.
And poor Ed Blaguszewski keeps getting wheeled out to say the school is appalled at these bad apples but most of the students are great and hey I’ll bet a bunch of the troublemakers aren’t even really U Mass students …
**************
UPDATE: There’s Got to Be a Morning After…
Arrests are now up to 73.
Collecting bottles and cans around the scene of the mayhem Saturday night, Amherst resident Raul Colon told the Gazette that the day’s events looked like “a revolution, like in the countries that have revolutions between the students and the government.”
And there’s this intriguing tidbit about what you pay for in Pennsylvania when your taxes pay for public universities:
Other colleges across the country have gone on high alert around St. Patrick’s Day to deal with alcohol-fueled students. At Penn State, the school paid licensed liquor establishments to stay closed this month during the unofficial drinking holiday known as State Patty’s Day for the second year in a row.
Your higher education taxes at work!
Well, at Penn State they’ve been paying for (cough) all manner of things for a couple of years now.
La Kid, Rufus Wainwright,
and La Kid’s friend Molly.
Kennedy Center Honors,
December 2013.
(Click on photo
for a bigger view.)
… everything’s topsy-turvy. The spokesperson for a Los Angeles school board candidate who boasts a degree from “America World University” says the city’s “children deserve better.” He doesn’t mean they deserve better than a bogus PhD holder in charge of their education. He means they deserve better than to live in a district where people have the gall to point out that someone who wants to be in charge of their education has a bogus PhD.
And not just a bogus PhD. On her cv, the candidate renders America World University American University. Classic diploma mill holder move. Mess with the name a little and everything comes out all right.
… by which university professors could exploit their students for personal gain.
All of the strategies she mentions are… strategies, whereas Georgia Tech’s Joachem Teizer runs rings around all of those strategists simply by using the most direct approach imaginable: He tells his students to hand over their money to him. Teizer basically holds up his students.
The one complexity in Teizer’s approach comes at the very beginning: He only targets students who don’t speak English very well.
Allegations against Teizer came from about 10 Asian graduate [engineering] students he supervised. [An investigator] learned the students are not fully fluent in English.
The first allegation, made in October 2013, notes that one student told school officials he paid more than $10,000 in cash to the professor in 2011.
Auditors estimate the total payments are double that sum.
*********************
In a detail that I know you will like as much I do, Jochem Teizer specializes in “resource detection.”
*********************
UPDATE: And Georgia Tech not long ago got rid of Bonnie and Clyde!
What is it about Georgia Tech?
