… is as rare as it is beautiful.

A University of Vermont professor, who took an academic leave to direct a $540 million development project in Senegal — and funded by the United States — is among the top 100 delinquent taxpayers in Vermont.

Taxes from thee, but not from me; and to make it even better his academic specialty is anti-corruption and building civil societies.

[T]he state Tax Department has sued [Moustapha] Diouf twice in recent years in an effort to get him current with his state taxes.

The first lawsuit settled for $30,320 in November 2011 and required him to pay $50 a month, records show. That would take 50 1/2 years to pay off the agreement, but did not include any interest or penalties that might be imposed. It was to cover income taxes owed from 2002 to 2009, records show.

The state sued again in November 2013 to cover taxes for 2011 and 201[2]. He reached a settlement one month later to cover both cases for $43,428, records show. He agreed to have UVM to start sending the state $500 a month in December 2015 and that would take over seven years to become current, plus interest and penalties.

And although things have gotten so squalid at the University of Louisville that some members of the board of trustees have begun to complain, UD trusts that the tightly wound little ball of corruption that is UL will continue to bounce about the collegiate landscape, unobstructed by rationality or responsibility, for a long time to come.

The school people call not the U of L but the U of Smell has for years been one of the great stalwarts of this blog, generating financial, academic, and (of course) athletic scandals with Stakhanovite vigor. An important component of the U of Smell’s success has been absolute control of an absolutely worthless board of trustees, a board of trustees that spends its meetings fiddling while Smell burns. Now suddenly a few serious people on the board are threatening to sweep the BOT’s tinker toys off the conference table; they are “call[ing] for changing the focus of board meetings from ‘ritual and ceremony’ to the ‘business of the university.'”

To which UD says whoa. You are talking about changing a board of trustees whose model has been the imperial family of Japan to a board that functions as a policy-oriented unit. Forget it.

NYT obit.

… 9,000 students.

[University of Kentucky deputy athletics director DeWayne Peevy said that basketball coach John] Calipari’s $1,550-per-night suite at the Atlantis [in the Bahamas], which totaled $12,400 for the eight-night stay, was booked partly so team meetings could be held there. Peevy said that if Calipari had a regular room, UK would have had to rent out an additional meeting space at added cost.

A top dean at American University Washington College of Law is venting frustration over the recent exodus of AU students to George Washington University Law School, accusing his nearby rival of engaging in poaching.

“Speaking only for myself and not in my official law school capacity, I view this practice as downright predatory,” Anthony E. Varona, AU’s associate dean for academic affairs, wrote in a recent Facebook post, which was republished at TaxProf Blog on Thursday.

GW law officials deny they’re raiding AU’s student body, but what’s not in dispute is that an unusually large number of AU students are deciding that they’d rather go to GW. In the 2013-14 academic year, 54 students left AU to enroll at GW, according to its most recent disclosure data. Those students represented well more than half of GW’s total reported transfers for that year.

Getting desperate out there.

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“It’s pretty striking because American has much lower entrance standards than GW, but what GW is doing is essentially laundering the credentials of their [second-year] class,” Campos said. “The LSAT and the GPAs of those students don’t count against GW’s stats because transfer student stats aren’t part of the calculation of what a school’s GPA and LSAT is.”

Paul Campos sorts through the laundry.

The Cougar teams increasingly find themselves
Playing in a mostly empty gym that,
By the end of the men’s game,
Can be eerily quiet.

… made up his last name.

… renewing her ID card.
She had to. One of her
classes meets in the library,
and you can’t get in without
a card.

The process was very quick
and easy, and essentially
involved listening to the
student who processed her
tell her how his writing
courses at GW were “my most
difficult. It is so hard
to write well.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

… in which it’s vaguely noted that some university seems to have gotten itself into a bit of a fix money-wise… but oh well…

Southern Methodist University will lay off 100 employees by the end of February as the school attempts to cut up to $35 million in expenses.

SMU President R. Gerald Turner said in an email to SMU faculty and staff that the eliminations will allow more money to the university’s academic mission…

That’s right, just quote the man on that big ol’ academic mission at Southern Methodist University… Somehow (let’s not say how) Turner and others fucked up so badly that they’re firing people and they’re freezing hiring big-time… Texas-style big…

Perhaps an outsider’s perspective on SMU would help us get a grasp on things.

[SMU has] been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating … a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.

Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU.

How much more sordid can SMU and schools like it get? What can we expect in the next few years? Local journos will keep their traps shut, yes (here’s one local who tried gamely, as it were, to speak truth to the school’s booster-in-chief, but note how his questions keep provoking Soviet-era-style answers), but any significant newspaper outside Texas bothering to track SMU will easily expose yet another massive university scandal. Because keep in mind the context here. Even the local rag can’t help tacking this on to the very end of this article:

SMU in particular is feeling a squeeze from expenses including changing the school’s athletic conference, work to improve the school’s national presence and salary increases.

Those aren’t three different things. The fools think athletics is how you improve your national presence, and the crippling salary increases are largely about coaches.

So… in the new normal, which includes a deficit-ridden University of Texas athletic program, where’s SMU heading? A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece describes the now truly desperate financial situation for big-time university athletics, in which there’s a whole load of big new costs and

“States aren’t coming through with any more dollars, and student fees are largely tapped out,” [one observer] said. “It’s going to be a real challenge to figure this out.”

SMU isn’t going to figure it out. SMU is simply hopelessly stupid. It will keep doing what it’s always done – finance football games, throw tailgates, stagger about hazing people – until it runs out of money. Eventually its booster-in-chief (see above) will be forced to flee creditors. They will find him hiding out in a hole in the ground in his native village, à la Saddam Hussein.

But it doesn’t sober this writer up enough to draw the obvious conclusion. Oh no. He’s a little stunned, a little daunted. But no.

Rentschler’s capacity, by the way, is 40,000.

The Oxford University Press has warned its writers not to mention pigs, sausages or pork-related words in children’s books, in an apparent bid to avoid offending Jews and Muslims.

… chilling effect.

Hile!

It’s often only years later, when the lawsuits start teasing out emails, that you understand how certain harrowing instances of university research misconduct get to the point where, as at Duke University, “the methods used by [a] research group [weren’t] validated — and yet they [were] being used to assign patients to clinical trials.”

And just as in the University North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud case the (ignored, defamed) whistle blower was a person who ranked low in the local hierarchy, so in the Duke case, Bradley Perez was just a medical student, and when he complained to the now-notorious Anil Potti about the bogus research Potti was involving Perez in, the faker drew himself up to his full measure of fakery and told Perez “he takes it as a personal insult if people don’t believe in what he is doing.”

Perez persisted, casting about for other administrators who could help him put an end to Potti’s fraud. They weren’t helpful. They still aren’t. Two of Duke’s highest level administrators – Sally Kornbluth and Victor Dzau (famous Victor Dzau!) continue to insist they knew nothing about Perez’s early and frequent warnings.

Did Kornbluth know about the Perez case? Did Victor Dzau, who was then Duke Chancellor?

The answers are yes and yes.

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

One scientific observer, considering this case as it has now revealed itself, comments:

“There is more to this story than the heroic and principled actions of an erudite young man and the shame that has befallen a great university in blindly and selfishly defending its own. It is indicative of a lack of understanding of the scientific method among many scientists… The Duke scandal is extreme, to be sure. But irreproducibility in academic research is common. And the reward structure and complacency of universities is to blame.”

There’s money on the table, in other words, so let’s not fuck it up.