… giggle.

Wild at heart.

It was a very bad bet. Their brand new basketball coach, Tim Welsh, was just found asleep at the wheel at a local traffic light, plastered.

He forgot to tell the university about this event. Hofstra read about the arrest in the paper. The school’s not happy. It looks real dumb, hiring this guy at hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hofstra has suspended Welsh.

“One month into the job and already setting a good example for your players,” comments one sports site.

Will he be fired?

Are you insane? Have you been reading this blog even for five minutes?

Of course he won’t be fired.

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Update: Welsh has resigned.

The civil case was brought against the firm and a single named banker — Fabrice Tourre. Who might the [Department of Justice] choose to prosecute [in a criminal case]? According to Chicago Law School Professor and securities law expert M. Todd Henderson, the sky is the limit.

The Atlantic

Chandru Rajam is a business school professor here at George Washington University.

He manages a business — a grading outsourcing business.

Rajam stands ready to take all of my students’ papers and exams and send them to India for grading, thus relieving me of the burden of reading my students’ work. Which in turn removes the burden of my worrying about whether they’re learning anything.

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When I think of Chandru Rajam, I think of a spa. A spa where I lie down on one of those narrow firm beds and get a nice long hot rock treatment. The rocks feel funny when they first set them down on your back, but gradually — with the help of softly piped in music — you feel an all-enveloping warmth… Your muscles begin to relax… And somehow — it’s hard to put this into words … plus maybe it’s not the prettiest thought … But somehow your total relaxation is intimately related to your knowledge that while you are lying on this quiet table, breathing in smoke from gently guttering lavender candles, a harried Indian housewife is sweating through thousands of papers and exams — among them yours — that have been emailed to her from America.

And you think, “I deserve this. I deserve the guest lecturers who teach my classes for me, the ghostwriters who write my papers for me, the PowerPoint slides written by someone else that I read to my students, and all the other “edupreneur” innovations that allow me, as an American university professor, to be treated in the way I should have been treated all along. I’m a citizen of a wealthy, successful, first-world country. Since when should someone like me dirty her hands with grading? … I know my students understand this, because while I sit back and read the PowerPoint slides to them they sit back and watch films on their laptops… Bottom line: I really don’t need to teach; they really don’t need to learn. We have servants for that. At some point the students will check the slides, just as I’ll … you know… maybe scan the grading the Indians have done for me… Make sure they’re doing a good job. Meanwhile… ah. Another rock….”

Next up, France and Denmark.

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“We’re the first country to spring the locks that have made a good number of women slaves, and we hope to be followed by France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands; countries that think,” said Denis Ducarme, a liberal deputy.

… it says at the top of this page (click on Negotiated Procedure for EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Poems to get to it).

(Update: Link’s not working. Here’s the home page.)

We’re at the website of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, whose function is to

provide the relevant institutions and authorities of the Community and its Member States when implementing Community law with assistance and expertise relating to fundamental rights in order to support them when they take measures or formulate courses of action within their respective spheres of competence to fully respect fundamental rights.

The guy who runs FRA also thought it would be a good idea to have a poetry contest.

The FRA is looking to contract a poet or other experienced individual (or group of individuals), or organisation, to devise a poetic composition based on the articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, along with the organisation of an accompanying performance.

This “Charter in Poems” (working title) should be composed in English (literary language). The piece will then be performed at the Fundamental Rights Conference 2010, to take place in Brussels on 7 December. This performance should be approximately 80 minutes in length, and should be supported by multimedia elements and/or other artistic performances (dance, music, etc.). It should be a group performance that reflects the diversity of the EU.

EIGHTY MINUTES OF POETRY ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS. That’s almost an hour and a half of people singing and dancing to the tune of balanced and sustainable development and [the] free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and the freedom of establishment.

The Justice Commissioner is pissed. That’s why FRA has had to close the negotiated procedure.

Justice commissioner Viviane Reding has killed off plans to recast the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as an 80-minute-long epic poem.

Concerned about what she viewed as a frivolous waste of time and money, Ms Reding, who is also responsible for fundamental rights and citizenship, has written a tersely worded letter seen by EUobserver to the director of the Fundamental Rights Agency, Morten Kjoerum, lambasting the plans.

“The language of the charter is already clear and direct,” she wrote. “I do not therefore see what is to be gained by running the initiative you have in mind in order to promote its accessibility to citizens. I rather see the counterproductive risk that the dignity of the charter is undermined.”

“This initiative does not provide the added value that is expected from the agency and is not in line with its mandate,” she continued, demanding to know how much time and money had been spent on the poetry plans.

… It is understood that the commissioner was surprised when she read about the agency’s poem project. “It just came out of leftfield. She thought: ‘Is this really how they should be spending their time?” said one EU official.

Ms Reding however said the idea was beyond the mandate of the agency and that it should stick to its main job of analysing the human and civil rights situation in the EU…

… for Ruth Simmons to start thinking about her decade-long directorship of Goldman Sachs.

At one point during the hearings, Sen. Carl Levin played the Jimmy Stewart good-banker role from “It’s a Wonderful Life” by describing capitalism as it’s supposed to be. Levin noted that Wall Street “has been seen as an engine of growth, betting on America’s successes and not its failures.”

Well, that’s what Wall Street proclaims in its advertisements for itself. But when defending themselves against legal charges, Wall Streeters retreat to honesty by saying that everybody knows they are really there to make money and that it’s naive to hold them accountable for the social impact of what they do.

Does she think that her firm should be held accountable for the social impact of what it does?

… both sit on the board of directors of a company probably about to face criminal charges.

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say.

… [I]n the more than two-century history of the U.S. financial markets, no major financial firm has survived criminal charges. Securities firms E.F. Hutton & Co. and Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. crumbled after being indicted in the 1980s. In 2002 Arthur Andersen LLP went bankrupt after it was convicted of obstruction of justice for its role in covering up an investigation into Enron Corp…

From the Yeshiva College student newspaper.

Across numerous departments, this year witnessed many disappointing faculty losses. Some of YC’s most famously beloved professors, for reasons largely unclear to students and, in many cases, even faculty, were fired or denied tenure. Why? Students find themselves frustrated and re-frustrated, in each instance unaware why professors whose courses they immensely enjoy, professors renowned for their knowledge, dedication, and skills, are consistently pushed to leave.

With such a high rate of faculty attrition, it seems YC has something against the good ones. What is it about professionalism and dynamism that seems incompatible with a job at YC? With abounding complaints about many professors who’ve been here for a long time, it’s particularly aggravating when YC finds a gem, then lets him or her go.

… Dr. Hrnjez’s molecular drawings are famous for the clarity they lend to organic chemistry. Dr. Pimpare’s commitment to advisement has allayed many students’ frustrations, and attracted many students to the political science major. Dr. Hogan, with his vast knowledge and devotion to his students, seemed to be the legitimating presence of the Art History Department. Why them? …

A comment in response to the article, from Hogan:

What creates an environment where good and dedicated teachers cannot succeed at Yeshiva is the management style of the Dean’s Office and a number of the administrative officers of the school. While it seems as if I was asked to leave, or perhaps the Commentator article wishes to convey that impression, I decided not to return in early February after my very carefully documented problems with the Payroll department (I was overpaid by about 300% per month for two months) were not fixed.

I appealed to the Dean’s Office, which …failed to solve the problem for six weeks, then to Payroll, which responded by writing one check for $0.00 and another that Chase Bank would not cash, and then finally to the head of HR Yvonne Ramirez, who said on 7 January she would look into the four months of payroll errors and get back to me. She never did. On about 9 April she apologized (in writing) but then never followed through.

The administration of Yeshiva College in particular is, in Ms. Ramirez’s words, not capable of addressing complicated administrative matters. So people like me, who work hard and try to do a good job, just give up.

… is the headline in the Seton Hall University newspaper.

Subhead:

STUDENTS LOSE PRIVACY IN CLASS

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If UD had written the article, the subhead would be:

PROFESSORS LOSE DIGNITY AND TRAIN OF THOUGHT IN CLASS

All a matter of perspective, I guess. But UD, a professor, sees mainly the pathos of academics reduced to spies… Instead of lecturing and leading discussions, the Seton Hall classroom monitors are as distracted as their laptop-using students.

These professors must constantly run their eyes over their surveillance screens and — while trying to think and talk about civil engineering or geology or absurdist plays — interpret the images they see in order to determine whether or not they are relevant to the class. And then I guess they must decide how to punish wrongdoers…

Some Seton Hall professors have begun using surveillance software to monitor student activity on their laptops during class.

DyKnow software allows professors to monitor student’s laptop activity during class. The professor downloads the DyKnow software, which allows the professor’s laptop monitor to become a surveillance screen.

… Professor James Kimble of the communication department is one professor who uses this software.

“I’ve grown increasingly concerned that internet access is a distraction for my students, so much so that I feel confident in my growing belief that it is affecting student learning and, ultimately, student grades,” Kimble said…

The students are pissed; they defend their right to show contemptuous disregard for the person addressing them from the front of the room.

So this does not seem to UD a good solution. She feels sure, what with American ingenuity and all, that students will evolve DyKnow-blocking software (it probably already exists), in response to which the professor will install DyKnow II, etc.

Laptop wars. A bit unseemly. Time to get on the ban-wagon.

MinnPost.com discusses a recent study of American universities which concludes, among other things, that

Universities [don’t] tap their endowments for more cash in tough times, even though their rules [allow] bigger withdrawals.

“One reason to have an endowment is to smooth over the shocks,” [one of the authors] said. “It’s a rainy-day fund so that when things go bad, they can dip into those reserves. What we found is they deviate from their own policy.”

Among the reasons for this behavior: Endowment managers who are more concerned about the “prestige” of building the endowment’s value and “implicit contracts” with donors to maintain the size of the endowment.

“What our paper shows is that universities are behaving in a way to grow the endowment rather than using it to support the activities of the university,” [he] said. “The point is that if you think endowments exist to smooth over the shocks in bad times, they’re not doing that. … They’re maintaining the value of the endowment for its own sake.”

UD wrote about endowment hoarding here. She featured this Peter Conti-Brown paper and wrote:

UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment [of some universities] has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room….

… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.

To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.

Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.

Many of the schools under review have already haughtily dismissed the entire report.

Some of the largest colleges of education in Texas offer poorly designed programs that leave prospective teachers unprepared for the job, according to a new report that suggests more rigorous and meaningful coursework.

The two-year study from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., slams eight of the largest education schools, including the University of Houston’s, for seriously shortchanging aspiring teachers, particularly with inadequate math and reading instruction.

“The most consistent feature of teacher education in Texas is a lack of consistency,” according to the 500-page report, which is being officially released today. “Rather than consensus there is inter-institutional confusion as to what it means to fully prepare a teacher for the classroom.”

Some programs, for example, require aspiring middle school science teachers to take one biology course while others mandate as many as nine, according the report. At the same time, the report said, some classes and assignments don’t seem relevant or tough enough.

Texas Wesleyan University, for example, allows students to take a class called Local Spring Flora to satisfy a science requirement…

A Berkeley professor speaks up at an open meeting about funding.

A math professor at the same meeting does the numbers:

Professors and community members debated the role of athletics on campus after Calvin Moore, chair of the task force and professor emeritus of mathematics, presented preliminary suggestions for how the department can remedy its financial instability.

Though department officials said last semester that the cost to campus – which totaled about $13.7 million last year – would be significantly lower this year, Moore said the cost will be the same if not more.

Part of the campus support the department received last fiscal year came in the form of a $5.8 million loan from funds at the discretion of Nathan Brostrom, former vice chancellor of administration.

Though Brostrom and Laura Hazlett, associate director for the athletic department’s business office, have said the loan will eventually be paid back, Moore said he doubted any money would ever come back from intercollegiate athletics.

“This is sunken money from the campus, and it’s not going to come back in our lifetime,” he said.

Sunken money’s a nice phrase.

… [W]hy did [Stephen Ambrose] lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.

Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon…