Proud national emblem!

Yet another I Do But I Don’t true confession.

The lads are up to their pupiks in heartbreak.

When will it end.

… a hardship.

Beautifully written, a model of reasoned concision.

But, at a school like Ohio University, ornamental only. Geisha-prose.

I think. Something like that. There’s too much stuff going on there to keep track of…

Women could learn a lot from guys like these. The Jersey Honors List includes an old familiar face around here – James Wasser, diploma mill grad par excellence – but it’s good to get acquainted with his fellow scholars.

Our product is a killer – Great new slogan for university football.

Qasem Exirifard has been dismissed from Tehran’s Khajeh Nasir Toosi University after its academic committee, in charge of examining staff’s qualifications, deemed his voice was effeminate …

It’s pretty much the same process at any university that loses accreditation (both of these universities are distinctly heading that way), loses its financial base (both are Moody’s basket cases), loses alumni donations (SCSU never had much of that, but Yeshiva did, and it’s losing it), and loses students (enrollment is tanking at both schools). If you want to know how to drive your school into the dirt, you can learn the procedure at almost any failing or failed university. A few schools (Sweet Briar) shut down because of market or demographic forces they really can’t control (very few women want to go to single-sex schools), but the overwhelming number of institutional collapses of the sort Yeshiva and SCSU are undergoing display the same mix of factors. Let’s review them, using as our focus this account of the latest developments at Yeshiva.

UD used to think that boards of trustees were pretty pointless – rich businesspeople overseeing, in a vague way, the activities of a university, but, basically, above all, and ever and ever, being called upon to transfer huge chunks of their personal fortune over to the place. Indeed this non-interventionism might be more or less the way things are at high-functioning schools… Maybe you’ll find one or two trustees who actually do understand universities, and who actually have a meaningful relationship with the school’s president… At happy roly-poly little sports factories like Auburn you’ll find one or two trustees (they played for the team back when) actually setting admissions policies and sticking their noses in recruitment, but this form of corruption doesn’t push the school in the direction of collapse. You can’t collapse a school that’s already, like Auburn, an intellectual joke. And it can in fact be perfectly serviceable to have a BOT made up of clueless sheep herded by a brilliant Babe.

Most BOT’s, in other words, don’t amount to much in the smoothly running institutional scheme of things; they’re like US ambassadors to Malta. How badly can they fuck up? You don’t want the person you appoint ambassador to Malta to be ambassador to Afghanistan; for Afghanistan, you need someone who knows how to be an ambassador. For Malta, a rich donor to the current President’s campaign will do. For trustee, a rich donor to the university will do.

But it turns out that a truly depraved board of trustees can bring down a school. Truly stupid, self-serving, self-righteous, risk-taking cronies of the sort Yeshiva and SCSU boast can take an already vulnerable campus and pound it into the dirt.

The key is greed and secrecy.

The key is assembling a group of male buddies (if you want total destruction, the more men the better), many of whom are in each others’ pockets financially, none of whom knows or cares anything about universities as such, and all of whom think they’re doing the lord’s work – for race, for religion, for class. Schools that implode tend to be fantastically parochial. Their trustees are fantastically parochial people, ignorant of much beyond their particular political or spiritual orthodoxy. These trustees routinely bring on board characters like Jonathan Pinson and Bernard Madoff and let them run the show because hey Jonathan! Bernie! My man!

So now your trustees are hard at work stealing the school’s endowment while, one by one, being very publicly carted off to prison or court – a carting off that really does very little for your school’s reputation and its alumni loyalty. For president at this point you have one of two types: The twelfth deer in the headlights you’ve hired in twelve days (the board merrily ignores this person) or just the opposite – a loyal long-serving crony-servant.

The process of destruction is now so bad at Yeshiva and SCSU that the faculty is routinely voting no confidence left and right… But another problem with BOTs of this sort is that they do not know that the faculty exists. What does a faculty do? Students they get – students go to concerts and games and students provide the money the BOT misappropriates. Students, yes. Faculty? So this sort of BOT/university president essentially does not communicate with faculty. Their relationship to faculty is restricted to firing most of it when the BOT’s years of malfeasance destroy the school’s credit rating and they can’t borrow any more money.

“It’s the time of year when we put the schedule together, and we realized we were paralyzed because we didn’t know which faculty would be around,” said [Gillian] Steinberg, an associate professor of English and director of writing at YC. “The administration won’t tell us who will get a contract renewal.”

She can’t take it anymore; she’s leaving Yeshiva.

Then there are the students. You can see Yeshiva cultivating a good longterm relationship with them as well.

According Yadin Teitz, a junior at Yeshiva College who has been leading student efforts to get information from the administration, the “administration operates without consulting the faculty.”

“There’s no connection between what’s going on at the top and at the bottom,” Teitz, an editor at The Commentator student newspaper, told The Jewish Week. Teitz’s March 3 article was the first time students, and many faculty members, found out about cuts being made to the core curriculum.

“There’s no transparency,” said Teitz, who said it was “crazy” that faculty members had to find out about cuts to their own programs through a student newspaper.

Exactly the same at SCSU. You’ve basically got a semi-criminalized sect sequestered in a building somewhere on campus, working feverishly to continue bleeding what money they can out of the institution before it utterly bleeds out.

… these sorts of obscenely greedy non-profit people/institutions are a perennial source of amusement at University Diaries, passionate as we are here about hypocrisy at its most pious. And it doesn’t get any more pious than the non-profit world, where it’s all for Art, for God, for Enlightenment… for Humanity, dammit!

But chauffeur-driven Berlowitz and the astoundingly overcompensated trustees of Bremmer are teeny weeny greed/hypocrisy tales… Their organizations are too runty to make much of a ruckus when local reporters force open the books and expose everyone. There’s a pleasure in the revelations, to be sure; but it’s a modest pleasure, like drawing on a Cuban cigar while standing on a fine-sand beach on a clear night… Happy-making, but circumscribed…

And then there’s the ABIM.

Let us take a trip mise en ABIM – into the abyss of the American Board of Internal Medicine, as it buys multimillion dollar apartments which offer owners chauffeur driven late model BMWs because American medicine will never obtain optimal patient care unless the ABIM trustees can stay in this apartment when they’re passing through Philadelphia…

The ABIM has figured out over the years that its monopoly on the recertification of doctors means they’ve got the men by the balls and the women by whatever you get the women by. You wanna practice, you gotta stay certified. So…

1. charge tens of thousands of dollars for the test and for test prep materials; and

2. constantly increase the number of tests that have to be taken.

Through these clever expediencies, this non-profit has accumulated tens of millions of dollars for itself! We’re talking tens of thousands of doctors after all! There’s nothing runty about it! And you can’t argue with the results:

[I]n 2001—just as the earliest round of new-test standard was kicking in—the ABIM brought in $16 million in revenue. Its total compensation for all of its top officers and directors was $1.3 million. The highest paid officer received about $230,000 a year. Two others made about $200,000, and the starting salary below that was less than $150,000. Printing was its largest contractor expense. That was followed by legal fees of $106,000.

Twelve years later? ABIM is showering cash on its top executives—including some officers earning more than $400,000 a year. In the tax period ending June 2013—the latest data available—ABIM brought in $55 million in revenue. Its highest paid officer made more than $800,000 a year from ABIM and related ventures. The total pay for ABIM’s top officers quadrupled. Its largest contractor expense went to the same law firm it was using a decade earlier, but the amounts charged were 20 times more.

But then it turns out that you can’t just keep increasing your salary and your tests and your real estate portfolio forever. A tipping point will eventually be reached, and here the tipping point is named Paul S. Teirstein. Teirstein points out that

The ABIM is a private, self-appointed certifying organization. Although it has made important contributions to patient care, it has also grown into a $55-million-per-year business, unfettered by competition, selling proprietary, copyrighted products.

So Teirstein has introduced competition, starting his own certifying organization:

The group’s fees are much, much lower than those charged by the ABIM. And its board and management—all top names in medicine—work for free.

I attended a brick-and-mortar, affordable community college nursing school, and the in-person experiences with professors were invaluable to me as a student, as a practicing registered nurse and as a human being. I am finishing my bachelor of science online.

There is no teaching going on. For my online statistics class last semester, we used Pearson Education’s MyStatLab.com. No one taught me statistics; it was abysmal.

… Clegg’s was the right move. Universities have to be free to draft their own policies on invited lecturers, and campuses should always lean hard in the direction of free speech.

The Deputy Prime Minister personally vetoed the plan during private talks with David Cameron, after one of the worst Cabinet rows in the Coalition’s five-year rule.

Mr Clegg said he could not support moves to require university bosses to vet visiting speakers and prevent impressionable students from falling under the spell of extremists – because Liberal Democrats feared the move would erode “free speech”.

… Theresa May, the Home Secretary, told the Telegraph that academics must now “play their part” in preventing radicalisation, even though there is no government guidance on how they should tackle extremist speakers.

Recent student protests against mandatory gender segregated seating at university events, and against speakers calling for the criminalization of the scourge of godless homosexuality, have been quite effective. International astonishment at Westminster University having gestated the fucker who cuts off everybody’s head has also helped clarify matters. Let this process play out.

We would propose that the IRS begin sending letters to all Greek organizations putting them on notice that if they discriminate, their tax-exempt status will be revoked. They can retain their tax exemption if they demonstrate that they do not discriminate based on race. This provides Greek organizations with a choice. If they are willing to comply with the norms of society, then they can enjoy the benefit of their tax exemption. If they do not wish to conform, they can explicitly signal that desire by forgoing the public subsidy implicit in being exempt from taxation.

… [W]e should also leverage the universities’ tax exemptions. The time is long past for universities to condone — or, at best, turn a blind eye to — this type of behavior. If a university wants to ignore the discriminatory behavior, then it should also be required to clearly signal where it stands.

Not a problem for the frats. Just keep the system intact: The ME BIG BOY thing graduates American capitalism’s most successful predators. They can easily make up for the loss of the tax exemption.

As for the universities: A place for everything, and everything in its place. The absence of the tax exemption will reveal which universities the country’s corporate elite will want to consider.

[Salisbury University] suspended the chapter in response to a [hazing] lawsuit. In retaliation for the suspension, J. Michael Scarborough, a founder of the school’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter and an investment giant, withdrew a donation of $2 million. Because the school took a hard line against torturing students. (The fraternity is up for review and a possible return to campus this fall.)

Just the thing you want dominating the social life of universities.

And he didn’t even get to drunk and violent.