Looked at through a purely capitalist lens, the American university classroom surges with potential for professors.

Professors, to take a common instance, can cash in on their captive market segment by making their own books a course requirement.

Years ago, UD covered on this blog a professor who sold ads for a local pizza establishment on his syllabus. He got a cut, as it were, from the pizza joint. (Can’t find the post!)

She covered a professor who, on the first day of class, told his students to write down their social security numbers and pass them forward. He’s in prison now, for theft. (Can’t find that post either! I swear I’m not making this shit up.)

UD has covered several professors who target their sitting ducks not for reasons of personal gain, but personal power. These professors, or their spouses, are running for political office, and they make passing the course contingent on leafleting the neighborhood or answering phones at campaign headquarters.

The noblest of this category of American professors are those who make grades dependent upon each student documenting that she has given blood, or voted, or performed some other civic duty dear to the heart of the professor.

Yes, indeed. A class is a terrible thing to waste.
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The latest capitalist wrinkle is on view at Metropolitan State University, where since 2003 the business school has been raking it in by having students sell tickets to local sports events or else. In one course, you get bonus points for selling extra tickets, plus there’s a superduper bonus for “exceptional sales volume.”

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All of this is not to be confused with simply enslaving students.

^^^^^^^^^^^

UD thanks David.

… Kentucky University. Among America’s worst universities, WKU has a president who, faced with hard facts (via the Knight Commission) about his school’s indifference to anything other than athletics, says “There’s no good that can come from making statistical comparisons to try to prove a point.”

From the moment one of its trustees told a faculty member worried about the school’s switch to Division 1-A football that “People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking,” UD has had a weakness for brainless, money-hemorrhaging, Bobby Petrino-worshipping WKU.

WKU spends over $36,000 per student-athlete and only $11,000 per full-time student — nearly a $25,000 gap — according to a study by the Knight Commission, a third-party organization that looks at both academic and athletic spending for universities across the country.

Faculty regent Patricia Minter raised concern over the spending disparity in last month’s Board of Regents meeting, citing the study and other statistics in her sole opposition [to] new head football coach Jeff Brohm’s contract.

“Faculty find it devastating that we continue to pay such large amounts of money for something that is ultimately really nice and fine, but it’s not the essential part of the university mission,” she said. “Apparently, we don’t have a problem underfunding the vital parts of the university mission, and that continues to be troubling.”

Sole opposition. Some broad. Figures.

… to the leadership of your university, the boys of Kappa Beta Phi.

While you’re at campus events listening to administrators intone about diversity and social justice, four of the people who run or have run your school – Fink, Langone, Lipton, and Grasso – meet in secret to say what they really think.

Oh, and if you’re a student at the University of Richmond, or Columbia University, or … UD ain’t got time this morning to study the entire membership list (though she will say that any woman who belongs to this club should see a psychiatrist pronto), but there’s a fighting chance a trustee at your university is on it… But anyway for sure if you’re at Columbia or the University of Richmond you have an opportunity to get up close and personal with the leadership of your school…

UD will admit to being fascinated by the… pincer movement by which the contemporary American university is dominated on one side by mindless reactionary jocks and on the other by mindless reactionary vampire squids. No wonder our schools have to hire increasing numbers of earnest high-minded speechmakers – the pressure at either end is killing them. (As longtime readers know, this is UD‘s theory as to why, after Larry Summers, Harvard felt compelled to hire Drew Faust, whose manner is that of Ma Ingalls, to, er, re-rhetoricize the school. UD predicts that Faust’s successor will be Garrison Keillor. It’s getting truly desperate out there.)

… or whatever you call it when hundreds and hundreds of people link to something. I’m delighted. Reuters has also linked to the post.

That was back in 2008, and you can measure how far this effort’s gotten by noting that you’ve never heard of this group but you are starting your morning by reading headlines all over America about the latest hedgie who can’t think of anything to do with $150 million other than feed it to “a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.”

Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist, patiently and earnestly lays out here why you should not give to massively over-endowed, massively stingy Harvard. Matthew Yglesias has been on a don’t give campaign for years. Brad DeLong, in a devastating comparison of Harvard and the University of California system, questions “the judgment of those who have tried to satisfy their charitable impulses by giving $15B to my alma mater over the past two generations.”

Gawker gawks. Jordan Weissmann titles a recent piece
Is Harvard So Rich That It Should Literally Be Illegal?

Robert Reich writes:

I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charitable deduction. It helps the poor. But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?

Even the major news outlets busy panting about the latest hedgie’s hundreds of millions dedicated in significant part to business buildings with his name on them pause to wonder for a sentence or two…

With an endowment of more than $32 billion, the famed Cambridge, Massachusetts, school isn’t hurting for money and has been ramping up its financial aid in recent years.

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See, here’s what worries ol’ UD. With the wise words of Tom Perkins about an imminent American Kristallnacht still ringing in her ears, she asks: What will be our Bastille? We already know when it’s likely to occur: July 14, 2014. But where will the storming begin? What will be the epicenter of this violent populist revolt?

Maybe here.

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Update: Yglesias weighs in.

[W]hen it comes to these fancy universities the official endowment figures are a drastic understatement of the real wealth of the university. Harvard’s real-estate assets are mind-bogglingly valuable, for example, but not part of the endowment.

… office upgrade.

She’s all aflutter about it at the moment, and is not ready to decide whether she wants one of the front window offices overlooking the White House or one of the side windows overlooking the National Mall.

And no. As to wall art, she doesn’t want the Warhol Mao, even though it matches the cover of her beloved DeLillo’s Mao II.

This one makes more sense. Something to study while waiting for students to visit me during my office hours.

The president of SUNY Broome has handled the heroin and alcohol overdose death of the chair of the school’s criminal justice program (also “a former police officer and New York State certified criminal investigator”) extremely well. Shortly after the death – as soon as reports of its circumstances started to come in – he acknowledged it, expressed shock, expressed sympathy, and used it as an occasion to prompt people who might know someone else in trouble:

“If you a have a loved one you think might be involved in drugs, please intervene,” Drumm said in a statement. “We so wish that we had any inkling of issues with our beloved colleague so that we might have done so.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the use of three so‘s in that second sentence … But really, as someone who has chronicled official university responses to very bad events for years, UD (to channel the second of your blogger’s multiple personalities) admires Kevin Drumm’s rapid, straightforward, humane response here, especially since this story unavoidably embarrasses the school. The person in charge of a significant component of SUNY Broome’s education in the law was himself lawless, etc.

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One detail of this story worth noting in terms of trying to get a grip on the nature of the drug epidemic: Wesley Warren seems to have been a heavy user of alcohol as well as (at the same time as) heroin.

… paying the almost $200,000 a year salary of a football coach who thinks it’s appropriate to say this at a public university:

[W]e’re going to make sure [players] understand that Jesus Christ should be in the center of our huddle…

UD thinks you can attract people like this to your campus for a lot less than $200,000 a year.

Anyway, like so many people in and around university football, he has apparently embarrassed the school enough to be asked to take his gospel of Jesus the Cerebral Hemorrhage Enthusiast elsewhere.

… descriptions of American football, remember: This is the game that dominates this country’s universities:

One thinks of ex-Denver Bronco John Moffitt, who quit [football] midway through this past season not because of a toxic locker room or for fear of concussions, but because playing in the NFL was getting in the way of living a fulfilling life. [Jonathan] Martin’s catalogue [of reasons to leave football] suggests that, whether or not the treatment he received was a stark exception, a workplace where the currency is misplaced bravado and casual cruelty is inseparable from professional football.

And hello? Does anyone think our big football schools, their teams coached by plenty of ex-NFL people, are any different?

After seven months on the job, the president of Youngstown State leaves for another gig.

Dunn has a history of applying to presidencies, according to media reports. He was named president of Murray State University in Kentucky in 2006. He applied for several presidencies beginning in 2010 and his relationship with the university’s board of regents deterioriated.

Restless soul!

[T]rustees were unaware Dunn was seeking another job. Other trustees told the Southern Illinois University student newspaper The Daily Egyptian that they were blindsided and unhappy by Dunn’s actions.

To which UD can only say

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon Dunn’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.

… she’s able to watch certain stories grow, take a particular shape…

Most stories go nowhere, but some stories – like the ongoing one about the University of Chicago undergraduate found dead in his dorm room – rather quickly go national, and then international, and it’s worth considering why.

After all, hideous as it is, several American university students die each week. They get too drunk to find their way home and meet misadventure; they get drunk and get in fights and get beaten to death; they get hazed to death; they kill themselves; they overdose or they drink themselves to death. Some years, some schools (in the last few years, Cal Tech, Cornell, Chico State, NYU; most recently, the University of Pennsylvania) suffer as many as three or four student deaths in one semester or one year, and the press takes notice, and people at these schools agonize over what in their campus culture might be contributing to this. Sometimes, some schools, like UD‘s own U of C, experience an individual death whose details capture public attention.

It should also be said that high-profile schools, like the University of Chicago, are more likely to receive a lot of attention merely because they are high-profile.

So this particular death, this death at Chicago, featured two of these press-attracting elements: It happened at a high-profile school, and there’s a lurid quality to one of its details.

The student’s absence was not noticed for a number of days. His body, as it lay face-down on the floor of his dorm room (he lived in a single), was, by the time it was discovered, decomposing.

This is undoubtedly a chilling detail. It’s certainly chilling to ol’ UD, since she has no trouble envisioning with precision the scene at the dorm. She lived directly across from it – International House, it’s called – during her last two years in Hyde Park, and often visited.

Newspapers like USA Today (DEAD STUDENT LAY UNNOTICED IN DORM FOR DAYS) will exploit this lurid detail; they will use it, perhaps, to say or suggest something about the anonymity and indifference of big cities, or of big city schools. But UD‘s of a different mind. It doesn’t seem that strange to her that any grown-up (outside of the sort of people who have bodyguards) might die and fail to be discovered for a few days. We grant each other a lot of space, a lot of independence, in this country, and college in particular is a time during which we leave people alone to think, read, explore.

Initial results in this death suggest no foul play; toxicology reports are pending. Suicide or an overdose is most likely.

… which, if I’m not mistaken, is one short of 5,000. The number continues to grow at a healthy pace, and UD is thrilled.

If you’ve found any of UD‘s posts on poetry – of poetry – of interest, you’ll find at the link a systematic presentation of her take on the form.

… for some time (background here, here, and here). Here’s an update on continued, increasingly desperate, protests.

The nation’s young people are tired of enduring one of the world’s highest inflation rates, highest murder rates, scarcity of basic staples like toilet paper, and the near certainty that things are going to get worse before they get better. A few days ago, the Associated Press reported on Venezuelans camping on the sidewalk to get information about emigrating to Ireland.

… This week, the streets of Caracas, Maracaibo, and the rest of Venezuela’s largest cities saw large protests that ended in violence. Three people were shot dead, with dozens more wounded. Many eyewitnesses lay the blame for the violence on government-sponsored armed motorcycle gangs, similar to the ones used to suppress pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009.

… They see a dark future ahead, one in which Venezuela’s slow slide into a Cuban-style autocracy accelerates and is finally realized in its entirety.

… of the chair of SUNY Broome’s criminal justice program having apparently died of a heroin overdose.

There’s no nothingness like University of Hawaii nothingness. Nothing happens, and Hawaiian students and taxpayers pay through the nose for the privilege.

There’s big nothing – like the Stevie Wonder scam – and there’s small nothing, like the $64 student fee for nothing.

A UH student noticed a big jump in his fees one semester, and he went to the local investigative news reporter (there’s no there there to go to at UH itself). She immediately established that the fee was bogus (outright theft or incompetence, you make the call) and immediately got a hell of a comment from a high-ranking nullity on campus. That’s life, he said. Sometimes in life you pay for stuff you don’t get.