Typical dullard editorial in the local booster press complaining about one of the few signs of social progress coming out of the south: People are refusing to go to football games. The Gainesville Sun editorial board, puzzling over growing indifference at the University of Florida, has it figured out:

Noon and 12:21 p.m. kickoffs certainly don’t help in attracting late-to-rise college students.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve got, what, eight home games a season?

And how tragic for America. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in filing suit today against one of the country’s many tax syphons (put the phrase tax syphons in my search function for previous posts), calls the exploitation of America’s poor by for-profit colleges like ITT “truly an American tragedy.”

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this morning filed a civil lawsuit against for-profit college company ITT Educational Services, seeking restitution to students allegedly harmed by ITT’s private loan programs, a civil fine, and an injunction against the company.

Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has been a big investor in ITT. Which is… Okay, that’s her business, you might say, though UD would say that it represents at least an embarrassment … But the real scandal here comes from the fact that Blum is a University of California regent who presumably had something to do with that university itself investing in ITT. From a 2010 article in the Berkeley Daily Planet:

… Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million — nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.

The regents’ conflict-of-interest policy requires them to “avoid the potential for and the appearance of conflicts of interest with respect to the selection of individual investments … public officials shall not make, participate in making, or influence a governmental decision in which the official has a conflict of interest.” And the California Political Reform Act of 1974 provides civil and criminal penalties for officials who ignore conflicts of interest — as UC makes clear in ethics training presentations specifically created for university officials. The Board of Regents, however, is self-policing and it tolerates situations that cause others concern.

John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, California, comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”

Shades of Yeshiva University under the management of Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin! … Well, that university investment strategy ended badly, and I think Berkeley’s is about to come to grief too… But … look. You don’t need to be Thomas Frank to be sickened by the cynicism of America’s greatest public university getting rich off the backs of America’s most vulnerable student population…

Especially since it’s not only Berkeley. There’s Columbia University, already famous for its business dean’s starring performance in Inside Job. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, sits on the board of the company that owns Kaplan. Students there were so disgusted by this that they started a petition calling for him to leave the board. The language of their petition pithily summarized the American for-profit ed business model:

Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.

In announcing the suit, the CFPB said this was just the beginning of a much wider action against the whole scummy industry. UD is skeptical. It has been scummy — reeking to high heaven, in fact – for a couple of decades, and no one with any power to really kill it off seems to have cared. That’s the American tragedy.

… Chicago State University. Corrupt even by Illinois standards. An almost non-existent graduation rate. Ruled by one greedy hack after another. Frauds in high places. The functional equivalent of North Korea.

And now… (drum roll)…

A Cook County jury has awarded a former Chicago State University employee $2.5 million in damages and back pay after deciding he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by the university president and other top officials, an amount that a judge could further increase at a hearing next month.

… The lawsuit by former Chicago State senior legal counsel James Crowley alleged that he was fired in February 2010 after he refused to withhold documents about university President Wayne Watson’s employment that were requested by a faculty member under the state’s public records law. Crowley also claimed that he was retaliated against after reporting questionable contracts to the Attorney General’s office.

So what’ll it take to shut the place down?

Students are leaving in droves.

Is it possible Illinois will keep the shake-down operation going even without students???

Profound, hilarious, beautiful writing about being a geezer with a lot of dead cheerleaders.

Roger Angell’s writing jibed, somehow, with something I wrote in my journal yesterday:

I thought suddenly – on my way just now from my office to the Foggy Bottom metro – of my mother, about whom – despite my deep love for her – I don’t very often think. Given the drama of my father’s death [suicide], I think a good deal more about him. But okay, I think of Mitz, and… it’s kind of a blank. What is Mitz? My sweet sweet mother to whom I owe it all, really – all my happiness. Because she loved me so much. But the thought I had – the only thought I had – recalling her, was “Now that I’ve got a bit of age on me it’s absolutely obviously true that I’m totally unlike her.”

It is the duty of the dead, writes Saul Bellow somewhere, to be forgotten. (In Herzog, he writes, “To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”) I don’t like the end of that just-dead interim, when they’re still alive because we’re mourning them so intensely — when that’s over, their duty to be forgotten comes into play, and they fulfill that duty.

Amazingly, I’m still in the David-interim almost three years later. A measure of his immense influence. Just the other day for some reason I produced a small squeak of compassion at the thought of him, rather than the routine angry bark … He must finally be moving out of the interim…

Its applications are down fourteen percent this year due to the JTD (Just Too Disgusting) problem.

The Rolling Stone article about its way-past-you-could-puke frat system probably accounts for about five percent of the drop (“There’s been a lot of turnover [of staff] in the Dean of the College and other offices . . . and fraternities have been left somewhat to their own devices,” [one alumnus] said. “It’s become a bit of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”).

The rest of the drop might be parceled out between catastrophic credit swaps courtesy of grown up frat boys, and of course Christopher Kipouras.

— a new super-opiate that also goes under the name of Zohydro — is the hypnomaniac’s little helper, the sort of thing Michael Jackson’s personal physician, who scoffed at anything weaker than Propofol, would have taken a second look at.

Even an FDA panel thought introducing Yo!Hypno to an already-mass-sleepwalking (to the point of falling over and dying) America was a bad idea; but somehow it got overruled, and soon all of America will be Hillbilly Heroin Heaven.

An NPR reporter asks a pain guy about to make, er, a killing on this thing about conflict of interest. “If the drug manufacturers are sitting in a room with FDA officials talking about pain drugs and they’re there because they spent twenty or thirty thousand dollars to be in the room, and [opponents] aren’t allowed in that room at the same time, does that raise any concerns for you that that could be a conflict of interest?”

Answer: Zzzzzz… wha’?….

On Dec. 15, shortly after Army football’s 12th consecutive loss to the U.S. Naval Academy, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, announced that he was considering institutional changes to build a winning program. “When America puts its sons and daughters in harm’s way, they do not expect us to just ‘do our best’ . . . but to win,” he wrote. “Nothing short of victory is acceptable. . . . Our core values are Duty, Honor, Country. Winning makes them real.”

See if you can follow along on the logic of this chick with me. Ms Caslen argues that there is a direct link between victory on the football field and victory on the battlefield. This babe thinks it appropriate to allude to people dying in armed warfare in the same breath as people playing a field sport. How can we, she asks, expect our sons and daughters to die for their country if we don’t also expect them to win football games? After all, winning on the gridiron is the same as winning on the outskirts of Baghdad. Winning on the outskirts of Baghdad isn’t real; it only becomes real when Army is also winning football games. Words like duty honor and country are hollow cliches until we beat Navy.

Does it worry you just a tad that the people running the nation’s defense don’t grasp the difference between football and warfare? Does it worry you just a tad that operational logic is in the hands of people who are, uh, nuts?

… the next guy can!

Tetched in the head University of Tennessee is on its way to another bought out coach.

As David Climer points out, $1.56 million is

a lot of money to pay somebody not to work. But it’s nothing new for UT. The Vols rank among the national leaders in buyouts.

UT is still on the hook for the bulk of Derek Dooley’s $5 million buyout, which is being paid in installments through December 2016. And don’t forget former athletics director Mike Hamilton. UT still owes four more monthly payments of $37,083.33 to fulfill his $1.335 million in parting gifts.

It all adds up. Over the last decade, UT has paid more than $15 million in buyouts to athletics department personnel.

Bankrupting a university in pursuit of a winning season – that’s UT all over.

… [I]t is important to understand that every incentive in academic life is geared against engagement with the world outside of academics. There’s no other way to put it. This has perhaps changed slightly in the intervening 15 or 20 years – with the Internet being a major part of that. But I suspect that’s more people acting in spite of these incentives and reacting to the increasingly straightened [Update: SOS thanks her Nabokovian reader, johnshade, for pointing out that Marshall needs to straiten this word out] job opportunities in the profession…

All the incentives of academic life drive against having the time, the need and in many cases the ability to communicate with a larger public. In some cases, that’s as it should be. In others, it’s about the straitened nature of academic life, specialization driven by bad job prospects, an over-abundance of Phds, and a deep, deep conventionality driven by risk aversion rooted in those other factors.

It was the electronic monitor around a student’s ankle that first gave Kelli J. Amaya serious doubts about the Harris School of Business.

The young man with the monitor was studying to be a pharmacy technician, and Ms. Amaya, who worked at Harris, a for-profit chain of trade schools, knew that the most widely recognized certification for pharmacy technicians excludes anyone convicted of a felony or even a low-level drug offense.

But the student received federal financial aid, and for the school to keep collecting it, he had to remain in the program and complete an internship. So Ms. Amaya said she was told to find him an internship, even if that meant deceiving the employer.

“I saw students who never should have been there, students with whopping gaps in learning abilities and major psychiatric problems who were just not capable of doing the work,” said Ms. Amaya, an administrator at Harris’s Linwood campus, and then at its Wilmington, Del., campus, from 2009 to 2011. “The bosses were always like, ‘Stop asking why they’re enrolled, just get them to graduation however you can.’ ”

I’m sure they’ll tidy them up a bit. Maybe lower the windows a tad.

Just a reminder – and an update – of one of the biggest pharma scandals of the year. Background on this one here. Basically the company gave humongous money to the university, which duly manipulated data for the company’s benefit. In turn, the company duly advertised its product by touting the results it had paid for.

Whoring for pharma: Happening also at a university near you.

… is, if you ask UD, pretty much the formula for some of what goes on under what people at universities call Leadership Studies.

Florida International University, famous for an onfield football brawl, squalid sports teams, and an arrogant high-living president who, when he retired, had a whole campus named after him as an expression of gratitude for what he did with public funds, has put together a real winner of a leadership studies program. Said president – Mitch Maidique – is on the faculty, as is Fred Walumbwa, whose pearls of leadership wisdom (“Always be on the path to leadership…”) adorn the page announcing his appointment.

Walumbwa was only hired last year, and already he’s leading FIU in (about to be) retracted research papers. Five – in one journal, Leadership Quarterly. The editor writes:

In recent weeks serious allegations have been raised about the scientific value and contribution of a number of papers published in recent years in our discipline, five of which were articles published in LQ.

It’s not clear exactly what Walumbwa and his co-authors did wrong, though one would have to suspect they fudged data. Mushy fields like psychology (leadership studies’ sister city) are notorious for retractions – here’s looking at you, Diederik Stapel — and Marc Hauser — etc. — …

Hank Campbell headlines his post about Walumbwa this way:

When Something As Vague As A Leadership Journal Retracts You For Lack Of Data, You Are In Trouble

He goes on to say:

A journal that published papers on something called ‘ethical leadership’ wouldn’t seem to need any strong evidence basis, just a lot of surveys and weak observational claims with pretty words attached, so if it gets so many complaints it retracts five of your papers, you must really be out there.

… Walumbwa told RetractionWatch “We have data, we are working on that now.”

Oh. If you have data, why wasn’t it in the papers? And how did it get published in the first place?

—————-
UD thanks David.

Uh-oh. So what do we do with the growing battalion of business ethics professors battering their incorruptibility into the stubbornly corrupt hearts of MBA students? Batter my heart, twelve-person’d ethics faculty, as John Donne might put it; yet if Annabel Beerel (the kind of name Vladimir Nabokov would have loved – it’s like a word game involving coming up with a name using the smallest number of letters) is right –

Most MBAs have their sights on gargantuan salaries and huge share options. Any discussion regarding excess CEO pay, for example, even when the company has clearly lost significant market value over a sustained period, is typically shrugged off with, “Well whatever is legal is OK.”

– and that’s only one of many points Beerel makes on the way to arguing that – as her headline has it – ETHICS TRAINING DOESN’T WORK.

Franchement, UD thinks she must be right, given all the battered by morally superior forces Wharton and Harvard MBAs out there insider trading and all.

But, with America’s large number of exquisitely, expensively educated white-collar crooks in mind, which business school will dare announce We’re firing our Force for Good and doing what UD‘s been, for years, saying we should do. We’re starting a speakers series featuring jailed miscreants who might scare at least a few of our students straight. I don’t see this happening. Amid the current crime-spree, B-Schools are compelled to look as though they’re doing something.

What with Tom Perkins and the rest worrying about a populist uprising against America’s oligarchs or plutocrats or whatever, UD thought she might do a service by featuring particular people among this otherwise undifferentiated and therefore easy to stereotype mass.

Today’s guy is F. Perkins Hixon. “Perk,” as he’s known, grew up in Tennessee.

As a boy in Tennessee, F. Perkins Hixon said he “grew up listening to recordings of Maria Callas.” So after he moved to New York, he subscribed to box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, gradually upgrading to the top class, a parterre center box of eight seats, at more than $16,400 a season.

But love of opera was only part of the reason for subscribing, said Mr. Hixon, a senior managing director at Evercore Partners, an investment banking and strategic advisory firm. Even the ability to entertain far-flung friends was not the deciding factor.

The real issue was legroom. The chairs in a Met box, unlike the regular tiered seats, can be moved around.

“I’m six-foot-seven,” Mr. Hixon explained. “An opera lasts three to four hours, so if you don’t fit into your seat, it’s not very comfortable.”

Perk has trouble recognizing his own father.

[Last year, Evercore, the investment firm for which Hixon worked] received alerts from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry regulator, and the company confronted Mr. Hixon about trading in accounts belonging to [his ex-girlfriend] and his father, according to the SEC.

At the time, Mr. Hixon said he didn’t know either of them, according to the SEC complaint.

“When confronted by Evercore with the fact that he claimed not to know his father, Hixon Jr. said that although he saw ‘Frank P. Hixon of Duluth, Georgia’ on the list and recognized him as having the same name as his father, he did not identify him to Evercore as someone he knew because ‘Hixon’ is a common name in the South and his father did not live in Duluth,” the SEC complaint said.

Perk, a Harvard MBA, is currently out of work.

Mr. Hixon, 56, was arrested in Manhattan on Friday morning by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with seven counts of securities fraud and one count of making false statements.