… American university professors (except for the genial, dressed for success business school guys) are often, from the point of view of a school’s corporate/trustee leadership, irritants. They file hilarious plagiarism reports against the chancellor. They blog. They get together and ask their university’s leadership why it’s spending all the school’s money on football. (They’re able to run the numbers to prove this because their ranks include really good economists.)

Two things UD has learned, over the years of this blog, about The Professor Problem:

1. Wise schools let their professors rant. No doubt it eats away at the entrails of some administrators that some professors do not behave the way employees in corporate settings behave. Yet it seldom makes sense to target this restive contingent. Doing so, you may not only be forgetting the protections of tenure; you may also be signalling to the free thinkers who will make up some of your best faculty that they’d better choose a less provincial campus for themselves. An administration which goes after irritant professors long enough ends up creating the University of Nebraska.

2. Even wiser schools realize that it’s precisely the areas of universities with which administrators feel a warm affinity – the business school, the engineering school, the medical school, and of course the athletic department – that tend to produce the really serious institutional embarrassments. Irritant professors merely irritate. Genial guys in suits (UD realizes there are exceptions to this rule) tend to be your money and/or research fraudsters, your alcohol- and sex- and violence- and litigation-challenged… It’s the quiet transportation engineer running a couple of businesses on the side to whom administrators ought to be paying attention, not the noisy old hippie making fun of the president.

Life of the mind, North Dakota.

A legislative appropriation intended for academic grants has been used to fund athletic scholarships… Dickinson State University [used] …$16,000 for the Rick Enderud Rodeo Scholarship.

SCOTT WALKER DODGES QUESTION ON
WHETHER HE BELIEVES IN EVOLUTION.

… that raise?

Because of the misconduct allegations against him, [Rakesh] Kumar has not been able to find another research job. He also alleges that GW denied a “promised” raise to him.

You can follow her many posts about this staggeringly pointless institution by typing South Carolina State University in her search engine. She has often wondered aloud, on this blog, why the chump taxpayers of that state don’t en masse refuse to pay up until SCSU, with its virtually non-existent student body and its corrupt leadership, is shut down.

Now a state subcommittee has indeed voted to close the money pit, though higher level votes are needed to really make this happen. As proposed, the closure would be temporary; but the measure would almost certainly hasten the natural evolution of the campus toward extinction. You cannot function without students and without money. Taxing citizens year after year in order to transfer revenue to an empty outstretched hand is insane.

And speaking of transfer: Under the plan, SCSU students with respectable GPAs would be free to transfer to other state campuses. They may thus have an actual shot at an education.

This blog has followed Colorado State’s inexorable march to a brand new unaffordable football stadium. Ominously, the only member of the board of trustees voting against the thing was its treasurer, “over concerns [about] the University’s increasing debt.” The rest of the crew said haha what the hell. Sure, it might fuck up the academic side of the school but since when does CSU have an academic side?

Idiotically optimistic revenue projections for the thing – projections cited by the trustees – came from the same firm that’s managing the project, which the chair of CSU economics department points out is a conflict of interest.

“ICON Group … is the one that produced the report saying that the stadium will pay for itself, and that is a conflict of interest,” [Steven] Shulman said.

He said if revenues are insufficient to pay debt payments for the new stadium, he believes the money will be taken out of the academic side of the University.

But anyway. No getting between a boy and his favorite sport.

Whether it’s the FDA, so “deeply captured, drawn [so] firmly into the orbit of the pharmaceutical industry that it’s supposed to regulate,” that it routinely fails to inform “scientists, doctors, and the public” about research fraud; or whether it’s the research trials at the University of Minnesota, where the scandal of Dan Markingson’s 2004 death slowly, slowly begins to have real consequences for that institution.

A leading state lawmaker has asked Senate leadership to postpone selection of University of Minnesota regents until next month’s state review of the university’s drug-trial program.

Senate Higher Education Committee chair Terri Bonoff confirmed Friday she has asked Majority Leader Tom Bakk to delay the process in light of a letter from former Gov. Arne Carlson that was critical of the university.

In his letter, delivered Thursday, Carlson expressed concern over the university’s handling of patients in clinical drug research trials, as well as regents’ oversight.

Carlson said the program has a history of deaths, injuries and conflicts of interest. He described the selection of the 11-member Board of Regents as “little more than a political beauty contest.”

A key concern in the letter is the 2004 suicide of drug trial participant Dan Markingson.

Useless trustees make the world safe for things like conflicted researchers, and conflicted researchers can make the situation of participants in experiments unsafe. UM has managed to avoid a serious reckoning with what Markingson’s fate represents, but events are beginning to change that.

There’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been wanting to post, but let UD for one millisecond in the long life of this blog say a variant of that obnoxious thing that you hear lots of people (at least lots of people in Washington DC) say: I’ve been so busy (read: so cool and in demand) that it’s been hard for me to keep up with the blog. This is a truly certifiably obnoxious sort of thing to say, and UD has heard obnoxious people say something like it all her life and UD never says it because it’s obnoxious but let her FOR ONE MILLISECOND in the long life of this blog say it. She is truly – to quote whoremistress Bella Cohen – all of a mucksweat.

************************

Let UD say – much less obnoxiously – I hope – that one thing she always wished for — that she have a life with many different sorts of experiences and challenges — has come true. She has not only taught (and written about) literature, here and abroad, to university students. She has led seminars for corporate managers, lectured at public libraries, addressed gatherings on athletics and architecture and interior design, gathered a global online classroom of close to ten thousand students, and been on the receiving end of more media attention that she ever thought possible. Her blog has thousands of dedicated readers, many of whom have written to her (to link her to important articles; to ask her to promote their books and their causes), and some of whom have become friends.

**************************

If she’s now somewhat over-committed, that’s a good thing, it’s a thing she’s worked for, it’s fine.

She will now post all that stuff. Ne quittez pas.

[Marco Rubio’s] co-professor, Dario Moreno, is turned out in the raggedy beard and belly of a true academic…

“I …like it because these professors can do whatever the hell they want,” [Rubio] marvels. “They never stick to the syllabus.”

**************************

Professor Song

Foul, free and merry was he
Foul was he but and ben
Foul by the banks o’ Earn
And foul in Glenturrit glen

Strauss-Kahn Denies ‘Frenetic’ Activity at Alleged Sex Parties

Galbraith’s famous observation is also true of some university presidents. Like the guy who just left Brandeis after only five years.

[W]hile faculty were subject to caps on salary increases, Lawrence’s compensation soared from about $589,000 in 2010 to $878,572 in 2013, the last year for which data is publicly available.

You do wonder about people sometimes.

“You are unlikely to bump into neighbors wandering the halls because only about a third of the owners live there at any one time,” explains the paper of record about one of several buildings in New York City full of condos purchased by shell companies and rarely lived in by human beings. “The building’s annual holiday party is a lonely affair,” not only because no one’s home, but also because a lot of the owners are, uh, not inclined to show up in public. On the advice of their lawyers.

One of these guys, Wang Wenliang, is on the board of NYU.

Walking along the beach yesterday, UD watched as a greenback of some sort floated out of the waves and stopped right at her feet.

Whoa, she said to her sister. Lookee here. Money from Mother Nature.

UD excitedly picked it up in hopes of bagging a C-Note or higher (UD‘s gratitude to MN for spitting free money out at her quickly transformed into an insistence that it be Something Big), but it was only a dollar bill.

Still, UD is reasonable enough to appreciate this striking bounty. No wonder people all over the world want to move to America.

… lay in shelves along the beach this morning. On some outcrops colonies of gulls sat, fluffing their wings but basically staying put while UD steamed along. Yesterday’s high wind was gone, and the sun shone with amazing intensity for seven in the morning. Despite the cold, I felt its heat on my shoulders.

A calm ocean and a clear sky and a world all mine had me banging on to myself about Being, Nothingness, and My Buddha Nature. Plus other stuff. I forget.

(Details here.) Fareed Zakaria’s high-profile pilfering is distinctly A-One: Atelier. If UD may plagiarize herself:

Atelier is a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors, [some of whom] appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

Michael Kinsley is the latest writer to review Zakaria’s output and conclude:

He went too far. Far too far. I would love to be able to say that Fareed is being penalized for doing what everybody does. That’s what he believes about some of these episodes, I think. But when you’re making points—one, two, three—that another writer has made, and in the exact same order, though with different exact words, you’re not just participating in a great swap meet of ideas in which nobody owns anything. You are claiming ownership of ideas that aren’t your own. That’s not a “mistake.” That’s on purpose.