He’s the economics professor who last summer insistently pointed out that, despite lies from the administration about it, MSU’s new stadium was hemorrhaging money. Continues to hemorrhage money.
Olsen took a lot of grief for this, but he continues swinging, especially in light of a state audit that reveals just how corruptly MSU has been run.
Now that MSU has a new president (wouldn’t want the old president in place anymore, to be held accountable for having fucked up the school), and a new, damning audit, the school tries to figure out what to do…
While MSU dithers, old Reed pops up again.
… Missouri State needs to find ways to better fund and operate the facility, said [the new president], who has formed a task force to look into this matter.
Olsen, who last year disputed a university claim that the arena was paying for itself, questioned the makeup of the committee, saying it consists of people who were part of the problem.
Olsen wants the university to be honest with JQH’s accounting.
As MSU digs deeper and deeper holes, Reed Olsen will be there, trying to tell it what to do to get out of the holes. MSU will certainly not listen.
If that’s what your school always has been (see Auburn University), no sweat. But say you’re the University of Michigan, a school that has a distinguished past. What do people know about you now?
They know that your football coach is a strange and desperate man who gets way too choked up on the rubber chicken circuit.
They know that your athlete-mad professors get all expense paid junkets to the big games, even though those same professors are supposed to be policing the program.
In January 2009, the full faculty senate voted 19-11 to approve a resolution calling for the free trips to end.
President Mary Sue Coleman to the faculty senate: Fuck you!
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These and many more embarrassments have made the University of Michigan look like Gary, Indiana — a kooky, corrupt, dot on the map.
According to Diane Fedorchak, director of the Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS), only a small minority, perhaps five percent of the [student] body, legitimately suffer from ADHD.
Do you think five percent of the students at the University of Massachusetts have ADHD? Do you think five percent – over a thousand students – is a “small minority”? And do you think a syndrome so vaguely formulated that anyone who wants drugs for it can fake it and get them has a solid empirical basis?
An article in the U Mass paper says what we all know: Tons of perfectly normal students get the drugs at the drop of a hat from their doctors at home, or from psychiatrists on campus.
[One] student answered a series of questions such as, “Do you have a hard time concentrating or focusing?” …The student said… yes to questions she felt would ensure she’d be diagnosed with ADD, regardless of [her not] having experience[d] the symptoms repeatedly, if at all. “I basically ‘experienced’ as many symptoms as I thought it would take to convince the doctor I was ADD,” she said.
Her psychiatrist claimed the “test” revealed that the student had nine of the nine signs of ADD; zero of the nine signs of hyperactivity. Her examination lasted less than half an hour before the psychiatrist wrote her a prescription.
It’s not a brilliantly written article, but I like the way the writer puts “test” in quotation marks; and I like the way her use of “claimed” makes the psychiatrist sound exactly like the huckster he is.
Everybody’s all het up because a bunch of Columbia University students sell illegal drugs. Whoop dee doo. Happens on every campus. No one – except a few student journalists – notices that in many cases university and non-university psychiatrists are also pushers. That seems to me a much more significant, much more interesting, story.
The Requiem is Always in Style is a UDism. It is a thing UD says… and she… hold on… yes. She invented the saying. No one else says it. I mean, Google doesn’t show anything like the sentence The Requiem is Always in Style.
The requiem UD has in mind is Mozart’s, and the idea she has in mind is that since someone’s always dying, the requiem is always in style… In fact, veteran readers of University Diaries know that UD has a tradition of hitting the baby grand and belting out one or another number from this piece when someone who meant something to her dies.
And so tonight she played and sang through Number 3, Tuba mirum, in memory of Elizabeth Edwards, who, you might or might not know, was not only an English major at Chapel Hill, but also did a bit of grad school in English there, before switching to law school. She eloquently quotes Emily Dickinson – among other poets – in her book about her son’s death.
Poetry, you know, is a very strange thing, and very few people quote it or read it or love it. Poetry is very morbid, most of it. Here’s a poem, by Charles Baxter. Appeared in this month’s Poetry magazine.
Please Marry Me
Please marry me. Your mother likes me.
—Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dream
We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother
Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.
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So some guy remembers a dream he had; he was happy in the dream though he’s basically a sad person — all the dismal issues… Prominent among his dismal issues is the bewildering, unassimilable emotional legacy left by his alcoholic mother.
He was happy in the dream because he’d sort of reanimated her by interfusing her music, her Mahler, with his dream. In the dream his suffering bewilderment about his mother’s life becomes lucid joy:
the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again
If you sit up smartly and peer closely at a bewildering thing, you can see how it works! You can see the particular mix that makes that thing that thing…
In his second stanza he peers closely at the bewildering mix that was his mother – her blended whiskey, and then the whiskey blended again, with milk, mother’s milk, to confuse her onlooker, her son. Her obscure contrapuntal liquid, her milky witchery, her alcoholic alchemy…
Yet the dream’s given him this wonderful epiphany: So that’s what she was about! I see it now! I see how the sections worked together to create her counterpoint!
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Or do I? Sentimentally, he evokes the famous last section of Mahler’s Ninth:
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Quiet. His mother sits in a silent movie, her drink milky white, the organist wearing white gloves…
Pretty picture; but he’s idealizing. He’s idealizing his mother’s despair as a form of acceptance, a Mahlerian dissolving, a slow, slow, delicate movement toward peace.
And his now wide-awake consciousness won’t let him get away with it:
No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.
… very expensive, very board-motivated, Victor Dzau, from Cardiobrief.
Cardiobrief notes that Dzau is shy about his board membership at PepsiCo, which he doesn’t list on his faculty bio page (he lists his Genzyme board membership only).
Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo …strikes me as the most troubling of all [of his four corporate board memberships]. As a prominent and influential health care leader, how could Dzau treat a tax on soda, or a ban on vending machines in schools, or any of a multitude of other health policy issues relating to the obesity and diabetes epidemic? In addition, might Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo (and the other companies) produce a chilling effect on the free speech and activities of Duke faculty and affiliated doctors?
UD‘s blogpal, Gregg Easterbrook (he of the famed Christmas Letter), takes a wide-angle look at university athletics.
Some excerpts:
[N]early all universities lose money on sports. Recently the NCAA reported that only 14 Football Bowl Subdivision programs clear a profit, while no college or university in the United States has an athletic department that is financially self-sustaining. Nobody in FBS — not Alabama, not Auburn, not Oklahoma, nobody — has an athletic department that pays its own way.
At many colleges and universities, athletic programs cannibalize donations that might have gone to education.
[H]igh coaches’ salaries don’t even result in programs that make money, the way high coaches’ salaries in the NFL result, at least, in profit.
[I]n football, Ohio State has a 1-to-5 ratio of staff to students: while in English, the staff-to-student ratio is 1-to-280. Divide the latter by the former. In staffing terms, Ohio State treats football as 56 times more important than it does English.
The Columbia football coaching staff has 14 people, including a chaired coach — the Patricia and Shepard Alexander Head Coach of Football. Not the football coach, the Head Coach of Football.
It is difficult to believe Auburn really needs an athletic director, an executive associate athletic director, five senior associate athletic directors, four associate athletic directors and a guy with the title senior associate athletic director & CFO.
Well. Auburn. Reason not the need. I got nowhere else to go!
Roy Poses, at Health Care Renewal, looks more deeply at the
very
very
VERY
VERY
(one very for each of his four corporate boards) busy, very overcompensated, chancellor of the Duke University Health System.
Victor Dzau’s take-home pay has inspired a Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke to stage campus protests against his latest bonuses.
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Duke’s misstep in this matter is clear. It hired a Professor of Christian Ethics who actually believes that stuff.
… The result of these so-called budget pressures, as we try to educate increased numbers of students with ever-smaller budgets, is espousal by administrators of things like online education or larger class sizes or “distance” education despite evidence that these “changes” do not benefit students to the same extent as face-to-face education. For example, at one campus, administrators have encouraged faculty to teach yoked classrooms where the professor is only present in one but is broadcast to students in the other room — something tried and discarded in the ‘70s when TV teaching failed as an educational innovation.
I am regularly contacted by students at online universities seeking hands-on research experience in my lab, because it is not offered at their school and they cannot apply to graduate programs without it.
… This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.
But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality. Then when professors point out these things, we are accused of resisting fundamental change, as if we have a collective personality flaw that makes us too rigid to recognize good ideas or “inevitability.” …
I hear you, baby.
A professor at a public university in California prefers to go unnamed in an Inside Higher Education piece about the poor white trash of education, online classes. The writer points out that among the spectacular advantages of online is that graduation rates at some schools improve markedly with them. This is largely because students can get a friend or family member who knows the material to take the course for them; or because the overworked person running the show isn’t very rigorous.
… But I mean I hear you when you complain that distance devotees call people who say the obvious out loud – these courses are dreck – rigid, flawed, regressive… Oh yeah.
You forget to mention the other thing, though – the thing for-profit distance devotees say about you and me: Elitist slime! You’re slamming the door to self-improvement shut in the face of people who have no option but to take out enormous loans they can’t pay back in order to sit at home and talk to a screen! That’s the only form of higher education available to these people, and you’re denying it to them!
Yeah. UD‘s heard them all. All the beautiful claims made for the superiority of a total separation between two human beings as one of them tries to learn something.
You know what that person learns? She learns that legitimate schools won’t accept her expensive credits from for-profit online schools.
Let’s think about what might be in the mind of schools that consistently reject her credits. Let’s take our time…
Actually, we can do this fast. Reread this post’s headline.
Compassion is always good. The professor in question is adored.
But when an alcoholic on the faculty — multiple DUIs, operating without a license, public intoxication, felonious assault on a police officer, violation of pre-trial release, failure to appear in court —melts down in front of her students, in class …
… “She wasn’t finishing her sentences,” [one] student said. “It was like she couldn’t find the right words. We asked what was wrong but she just said she wasn’t feeling very well.”
For a few minutes after watching Evans, another student said they believed she was having a stroke.
“Someone went to call 911, and everyone else just sat there really upset,” the student said. “She’s easily everyone’s favorite teacher.”
… While the class waited for the ambulance to arrive, students tried to talk to Evans.
According to the student, when asked what was wrong, Evans told students that the university had taken away her job because she had been charged with a DUI. When police came into the class, they told students to leave.
This woman – driving drunk on a suspended license, assaulting police officers – is dangerous. She should not have been in a James Madison University classroom.
… after the Kennedy Center Honors.
This was taken a couple of hours ago.
[Click on the photo for a larger picture.]
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From the LA Times:
The producers saved the finale for [McCartney], with a blowout cover of “Hey Jude” that involved Grohl, Stefani, James Taylor, Mavis Staples, Alec Baldwin, an enormous choir and a whole lot of non-flammable lighters waving in the air.
That was my kid – standing in the aisle between Forest Whitaker and John Lithgow – handing out non-flammable lighters to wave in the air…
… that La Kid performed with James Taylor at the Kennedy Center tonight. Also with Mavis Staples. Her chorus sang along with the two of them to a Hey Jude / Let It Be medley in honor of Paul McCartney.
Most of the chorus stood on the stage, but La Kid was part of a smaller group that walked from the rear of the hall down the aisles, distributing flash lights to audience members (Flash lights? This seems odd. But that’s what she told us she was going to do.) Then she walked up to the stage and joined everyone as they waved their hands in the air and did that endless
Na. Na-na. Nananana. Nananana. He-ey Jude…
Maybe they turned the concert hall lights down for this? A thousand points of light?
