I mean. The University of Texas considers itself a very respectable academic institution, ja? So here’s an article, plus comments on the article, in its campus newspaper.

Perhaps the most important line in the opinion piece is this:

Turner will likely turn pro after one year.

Turner is Myles Turner, a hot basketball prospect. UT’s trying to get him. UT, with the U for university.

Now the author of this opinion piece, a UT student, doesn’t even bother pretending that Turner will do anything academic while he’s at UT. He will play basketball for a season and leave. Indeed, pretty much everyone who writes about Turner agrees with this. So UT, like several other universities, is pissing itself blue at the prospect that this guy will visit campus for a few months, dribble the ball, and leave. This is the most important issue, the most riveting thing, on this American university campus at the moment. Will he or won’t he dribble the ball?

The opinion piece writer argues that Turner would actually be wise to go to another school, because despite what you’ve been told about Texas and sports, the school doesn’t really care much about basketball. The school only really cares about football. There are schools that care more about basketball, and Turner should go to one of those.

Again, note that in his arguments (he has others) against Turner coming to Texas, the student doesn’t say This guy, this Myles Turner, he might get a better education, even if only for a few months, at a better school… Because, you know, UT is a school, and … No. This guy will get nothing that UT or any other school has to offer. Too obvious even to put this down in words.

Now read through the comments on the article from other UT students. Most of the commenters are very angry because the author, Evan Berkowitz, has dissented from the piss yourself blue with excitement position that all true UT people must assume on the question of recruiting Turner. Some say Berkowitz is a faggot Jew who should shut the fuck up. Others seem embarrassed by their fellow students’ anti-semitism.

How to explain any aspect of this to anyone with even a vestigial brain?

… that will almost certainly hurt its sports recruiting.

Iowa freshman basketball player Peter Jok was arrested early Saturday for drunken driving, according to police reports.

Jok, 20, was arrested on a black 2013 moped …

Something’s terribly wrong at Iowa. Jok was supposed to have been arrested driving a 2014 Chevy Tahoe. If word gets around that local dealers aren’t feeding SUVs to recruits, look out.

In Athens, the Olympic Ideal is not just for the Olympics. Scenes from the Greek Cup final:

[The game was] halted when a firecracker was thrown onto the pitch.

Before the match Panathinaikos supporters threw broken plastic seats at riot police on the pitch and flares, firecrackers and other objects were thrown between supporters.

Police used tear gas to bring order and the presidents of both clubs, Giannis Alafouzos of Panathinaikos and Ivan Savvidis of PAOK, pleaded to fans from the stadium’s loudspeakers for calm.

Outside the stadium a police car was destroyed by a firebomb thrown by a motorbike rider.

One coach carrying PAOK supporters was attacked with rocks by Panathinaikos fans causing minor damage to the vehicle.

A large section of Athens Olympic Stadium was left empty to separate the two groups of supporters while a police helicopter kept a watch from above.

… Police … arrested the two owners of a PAOK supporters’ clubhouse in the centre of Athens after confiscating fireworks, iron bars, bottles filled with petrol, knives and baseball bats.

Some 4,000 police officers were deployed to keep the peace in the Greek capital for the match.

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And as for the Platonic Academy:

Photini Tomai, a Wilson Center favorite, and Director of the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is running for the European Parliament. Her background:

Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos appointed her as the country’s special envoy for Holocaust issues, a decision that withdrawn that June after 40 historians and other figures petitioned the minister over their concerns at the “unethical way” Tomai has run the ministry’s archives.

They said access to the archives involved “a very complicated and lengthy process in which the head of the archive takes part herself, and sometimes intrusively”. They also claimed that the “30-year rule” is not applied in many cases, meaning files from the 1950s remain inaccessible. Nevertheless, Tomai publishes extracts from files otherwise out of bounds to researchers in her Sunday newspaper articles.

“In a time when dozens of civil servants are suspended without judicial or disciplinary convictions, we, the undersigned, believe that if Ms Tomai remains the head of the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially after her conviction, it will raise major issues in academic ethics and in equal treatment. For the same reason we believe that Ms Tomai could not represent Greece in international organisations, conferences and meetings, jeopardising the prestige of our country.”

But that’s not all, folks!

In an October 2013 appeal court decision that has only recently been published, Photini Tomai, director of the foreign ministry’s archive, was told again that she must pay €20,000 in compensation to two authors after she published a children’s book that they wrote under her own name.

The decision confirmed an earlier ruling by Athens first instance court that Tomai was guilty of copyright infringement. That court ruled that a book entitled 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories, … was the work of screenwriter Eleni Kefalopoulou and her husband, film director Aris Fotiadis.

The couple told the court that, ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, they came up with an idea to make an animated series on ancient Greek Olympians and sent a script to the national broadcaster ERT and a number of private companies. On the recommendation of friends, they also sent a copy to Tomai, in her position as head of the foreign ministry’s archives.

The authors received no offers and animation was never made. But in 2008, they noticed 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories in a bookstore and immediately recognised the characters in it as ones they had created. In many instances, they saw that text had been copied verbatim and the court agreed.

Oho no you don’t. If you think the president of the University of New Mexico – one of the scummiest sports schools in the nation (put the last name of its last president – Schmidly – in my search engine) – is going to let you vote on the athletics fee, you’re nuts. He knows you’ll vote against it, and that is not the outcome he and the trustees want. So shut your traps and let the president and his buddies have their money-losing fun. It’s your money, after all; not theirs.

Yes, sports is the university’s front porch, as we’re constantly told by the rascals who run football and basketball on campus; but … well, you know the rhyme:

When she was good,
She was very very good;
But when she was bad
She was horrid.

Looked at with any objectivity at all, of course, big-time university sports is horrid (intellectually and financially corrupting; crime- and riot-generating, university-bankrupting) even when it’s very very good — indeed, big-time university sports generally only gets to be very good (winning championships and tv deals) when it’s very very busy with recruiting scandals, buying out coaches at huge expense, hushing up team crimes, blahblahblah, you know the list. But the actual squalid vileness of the enterprise is usually managed. A dustup here, a dustup there, but the basic look of campus football and basketball is tidy, most of the malfeasance hidden.

The NCAA and the Knight Commission have big yearly meetings during which in a corporate pointless way they natter about the challenges and the issues facing the student-athlete as he aces calculus and kicks field goals during the same afternoon. These two entities – the NCAA and the Knight Commission – play a crucial role in keeping the actual nature of the university athletics endeavor hidden. They both look respectable; both bring knitted brows to the challenges and issues and prospects and promises of the grand endeavor. I think most people realize that these people are entirely empty suits – empty excellent suits – but no one cares. People care about the games, not the brow knitters whose job it is to make the system behind the games look legitimate.

So that’s when it’s good. When it’s good, it’s very very good, with tailgating and car tipping and bonfires and all; but when things go badly, they go really really really badly. Big-time sports is the front porch that keeps on giving, the big ol’ central spotlighted star of your campus, the only thing most people know or will know about your campus. So when one of your coaches fucks little kids in on-campus showers, the whole world gets to see that front porch; and when one of your professors – the highly compensated chair of a department – is running a fake courses racket for the teams, the whole world gets to see that front porch too.

That’s when we get to watch the sport of denialism. We get to watch Penn State trustees say it’s all a government conspiracy. We get to watch the University of North Carolina say it’s only that bitch Willingham plus that bastard Kane.

Children don’t like it when you take away their toys. It makes them very angry and vindictive. They like it even less when you punish them for their misdeeds. When they are bad, they are horrid.

UD is madly running about preparing the house for guests – she’s having a welcome to spring afternoon tea.

Here’s one of the teas she’s serving – a recent find at Plow & Hearth, where she also bought a new red deck umbrella, a new wreath for her newly painted front door, a new bird bath, and many other things to coincide with Les Soltans having finally gotten a serious contractor in to fix up Ferdinand House (Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand, lived and died in UD’s house). Gord, said contractor, is in UD’s driveway right now, loading our large trash stuff into his truck, where Walter the yellow lab waits for him in the passenger seat.

We seem to have scored a spectacular spring day for our gathering (though it might rain later this afternoon). From where I’m sitting, the rhododendron’s scarlet is beginning to push through its big upright yellow buds. I can hear, from my back woods, the loud weird song of the thrush. I’ll hear it day and night, ceaselessly, all spring and summer.

This post is just nattering in place of the something more substantive I don’t have time for yet today. Later.

.. (UD‘s taking that designation from the headline of a recent article about South Carolina State University) could be understood to include pretty much every university ever, uh, covered by this blog. Harvard poor mouths. Yale poor mouths. UD‘s university – George Washington – recently found the cash to buy the Corcoran Gallery of Art; but last month UD attended a meeting where a professor said “if it weren’t for our students from China, I’m not sure the university could continue to be viable.” People say these things when they’re pitching new revenue-enhancing programs, or when they feel more comfortable hoarding than spending the endowment.

On the other hand, UD has covered a few universities which do indeed seem on the brink, though even they aren’t really. How often does a university close? Yeshiva University, embittered lover of rich bitches Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, has been downgraded by Moody’s with such calendrical regularity that the Moody’s Downgrade Days Calendar threatens to replace the Hebrew one. South Carolina State – one big ol’ inept corrupt money-hemorrhaging machine – is certainly in deep doo-doo, but the long-suffering taxpayers of that state will bail it out in order that it may live to stage sports events again.

A significant driving force behind the $13.6 million deficit was a $6.67 million shortfall in last year’s athletic program.

[President Thomas] Elzey said the university is considering eliminating its women’s golf program as well as assistant athletic coaches. Elzey said the university is seeking private donations to help support women’s golf.

“It hurts me to do that,” Elzey said. “I don’t like the idea of retreating back in an area I love dearly, which is golf.”

His institution’s dying and he’s worried about his dead hand shot.

… Give it some money… And watch its president ignore the overwhelming sentiment of its student body and give that money to athletics.

Eastern Kentucky University is in this neighborhood (the article I’m linking to is absolutely terrific, by the way). Its schools need to spend scarce funds on training and education, but the president of EKU wants to spend them on football. EKU students know the president is full of shit.

While the fee has yet to be approved by the Regents the student body continues to debate the hike, most recently represented by a survey. In this survey distributed by the Student Government Association, students overwhelmingly did not support fees for athletics. In fact, more students participated in said survey than voted in the most recent SGA election, showing just how much students care about this issue.

But no! says the president (who, with the board of trustees, will ram this down the students’ throats anyway). Our students can easily spend an extra four hundred dollars tuition on football! I mean look at Western Kentucky! They charge more than that!

Ah, Western Kentucky. One of our favorite subjects here at University Diaries. Feast your eyes.

Yeah – we want what Western Kentucky’s got! If our students are so stupid as to think we should spend that money on their education, they’ll just have to suck it up. After all, says the prez, consider the arguments for soaking our poor students for football:

“I don’t think we can afford to stand still — that’s my concern,” Benson said. “This may be our window of opportunity, and if it closes on us we may have forgone an opportunity that may not come around again.”

Touchdown!

Plagiarism on high – plagiarism among professors at excellent universities (Charles Ogletree), plagiarism among the celebrated and venerated (Jane Goodall) – is always a little smudgy. Miscreants suffer little or no penalty, and language (mistakes were made, inadvertent, over-reliance on research assistants…) is brought forward to… smudge matters…

And so it was at Brown University, until a group of English professors decided to break through the smudge and complain about one of their soon-to-be-erstwhile colleagues.

As is almost always the case in high-plagiarism incidents, what seems to have been massive and obvious plagiarism (around 35 instances of virtually verbatim lifting were reportedly found in this professor’s book) took place, after which a series of smudging, tamping down, looking the other way, events took place. The press very quietly pulped the book. And, while the professor was taken off the tenure track, she was also – bizarrely – given a deanship.

It’s a temporary deanship, to be sure, but it involves working with graduate students on their teaching, which will, in turn, no doubt involve her writing letters of recommendation for some of them, etc.

Her once-colleagues are unhappy about a number of things here. They’re unhappy that a gross instance of plagiarism is being called not plagiarism by Brown but a mistake. (Thirty-five mistakes.) And therefore identified as not really research misconduct. (Smudge smudge smudge.)

“Everyone I talked to in the English department understood [the Brown University document reviewing this professor’s book to] be saying that research misconduct included plagiarism, that plagiarism is a form of research misconduct,” [an English professor] said. “Therefore any judgment that a faculty member’s work contained errors that were plagiarism but not research misconduct was a kind of category mistake. It was contrary to the logic of the University rules.”

They are also unhappy that her punishment is to be promoted to a deanship.

[M]any department members are displeased that [the] new position entails working with graduate students…

[One faculty member] cited the possibility of graduate students asking [her] for letters of recommendation or indicating on their resumes that they took part in a teaching program under her auspices without knowing that outside scholars might be aware of her errors.

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

UD takes a deep wizened breath here. Twas ever thus. UD is impressed with the professors who complained. But twas ever thus.

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

Another recent example of high-plagiarism smudgery.

With more and more pain pill addicts out there, and with hospital personnel having greater access than most, these stories keep happening (UD has covered quite a few on this blog). It’s rare that two overdoses (a doctor and a nurse) occur at the same university on the same day, but that too will become less rare.

… is the title of UD‘s latest article for her hometown newspaper, the Garrett Park Bugle.

It is curious, this “moral quietism in the face of avarice,” and it’s curious for many reasons. (UD‘s thinking about this quietism today because Paul Krugman – see the two posts below this one – is being greedy.)

If one human being – University of Southern California trustee John Martin – happily accepts $180 million in one year’s personal compensation, American commentators might drop a dollop of rhetoric on it (“obscene”) … Our satirists (see Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities) might ridicule it in fiction … But it’s not as if anyone in a position of, say, legislative authority in the country is going to say or do anything about it. On the contrary, it’s much more likely that our elected greed-apologists (Eric Cantor, Mitt Romney, legions of others) will lustily applaud; while our unelected apologists, the most famous of which is currently Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins, will both 1.) express outrage that anyone would express outrage over, say, nurturer-of-insider-traders and Brown University trustee Steve Cohen hoarding nine billion dollars in personal wealth, and 2.) warn that lack of moral quietism in the face of avarice is tantamount to a violent fascist revolution.

But, really, the very phrase moral quietism in the face of avarice is the problem, no? Every element of this phrase – moral, quietism, avarice – is thoroughly rejected by most Americans. There is no level of money acquisition – acquisition in comparative terms, like Krugman’s, where his salary and work load at CUNY is humiliatingly disproportional to the salary and work load of anyone else at that public institution, and acquisition in absolute terms, as in Cohen’s household billions – which could ever rise to avarice. In this country, the correct moral position to take in regard to the personal acquisition of disproportional and astronomical sums of money is admiring approval. And… quietism? John Paul Rollert is incorrect to interpret the deafening silence at, say, the money managers at one American university receiving from that non-profit institution $25 million in yearly compensation as a kind of uncomfortable quietism. Think of it as an awed hush.

And please. Avarice? A word out of, what, Everyman? Take me back, baby. Avarice. At once a delicate word (vampire squid is vulgar) and a retro word, a tea-with-doilies word and a dead-lo-these-many-centuries word… Here comes Avarice onstage, his pockets lined with greenbacks! …

There is no avarice. There is only (as defenders of Krugman are saying today) a free market in a rich country. There is only what the market will bear. And, like most Americans, the current market (in which there is less and less “non-profit”) will bear absolutely anything.

The blogosphere is having fun with Paul Krugman today (see my own take on things in the post just below this one). But lest we forget: Krugman has always been hypocritical about making his own big bucks. This is from Andrew Sullivan’s website, years ago:

KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980′s and 1990′s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”

– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.

“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…

I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”

– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.

All greed is local. The polite perplexity of a recent CUNY PhD in the face of wealthy Paul Krugman having accepted a CUNY professorship that pays him $450,000 to teach one seminar over the next two years overlooks the fact that Krugman, for all his attacks on American greed in his New York Times column, lives in a certain world. In this world (New York City, hedge fund managers), $450,000 (more than that, with various perks) is a slap in the face. You cannot spend decades surrounded by people who make twenty million dollars a year and not revise your greed radically upward.

The same awkwardness arose from Harvard professor Larry Summers indulging his hedge-fund-level greed while… being a professor…

[Harvard University professor Lawrence Summers] consults not only for hedge fund DE Shaw but for venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, asset-management and advisory firm Alliance Partners, stock-exchange operator Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., and for financial services firm Citigroup. He also has a healthy income from speaking — more than $100,000 earlier this year, for example, for a single speech to a conference organized by Drobny Global Advisors.

That is a busy schedule for a full-time faculty member who, like other professors, is allowed only a day a week for consulting — and Summers also chairs the advisory board of the Minerva Project, an online university startup, and holds an administrative role as Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

This is the same Lawrence Summers who told Professor Cornel West to stop spending so much time on his outside activities and get back to his scholarship — because more was expected of a University Professor.

It’s all very postmodern: Krugman is a highly-paid professor-simulacrum whose function is to appear in CUNY advertisements. Big money, big promo, big nothing.

I’d urge Krugman to quantify that esteem for CUNY by donating a significant portion of his earnings, say $100,000 a year, to a scholarship fund for students or the Professional Staff Congress welfare fund, which provides much-needed health care benefits and emergency assistance for CUNY adjuncts.

Yet why should Krugman do that? He has – is asked to have – nothing to do with CUNY.

… Funds to begin to make sense of a scandal like Sul Ross University. A terrible school with a graduation rate approaching zero, a school only lately on probation, Sul Ross naturally is all about athletics.

Back in November the entire football coaching staff was fired. Then the president of the university resigned days later.

There’s no there there, at Sul Ross, which opens the door to local bullies and boosters and hangers-on. No one’s saying exactly what happened (maybe everyone on campus is too addled to know), but the local press suggests the latest Sul Ross administration ran away because

There were claims that coaches were physically and verbally abusing players, that athletes were being bribed to incriminate coaches, and that coeds were being pushed to have sex with recruits.

Yadda yadda. Bottom line: When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, boys will get up to trouble. And Sul Ross is all about boys.

It’s odd to UD that Sul Ross is about anything. I mean, anything you and I have to pay for.