Of course the American Association of University Professors draws our attention, in a just-issued report, to massive overspending on sports and underspending on academics at American universities. After all:

“This comes from the American Association of University Professors, which has a vested interest in finding that too little money is going to faculty and too much to sports and administration,” [Terry W.] Hartle said.

Let’s not be naive! Get with the program! The AAUP is part of the universities-should-educate-people cartel. Take what they say with a big grain of salt.

Get used to it. Socialism used to be the “historical inevitability.” That didn’t work out too well. Football and basketball coaches as university presidents will happen. Anyone who looks at American universities can see it coming, and you don’t need to be a fancy social theorist.

At one time, trading a scholarship for athletic performances made sense. There wasn’t much money available in college sports even in the revenue producing sports of football and basketball. But as TV money seeped into the industry, coaches were paid more and more money and colleges felt they needed to spend more money to get the best available coaches to recruit and instruct. State legislatures approved astronomical raises for coaches and in many states where public colleges are part of the college sports industry, the football or basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees… Millionaire coaches like Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim bristle at the idea of paying college players even though the industry is flush with money from television and marketing partners…

College sports are not-profits. The industry has a blanket antitrust exemption that allows schools who play in college football bowl games to skip paying taxes from bowl game earnings. Yet NCAA members are getting billions from TV, and hundreds of millions alone from the Final Four weekend. At the same time, players are no longer content with missing out on their earnings. Dr. Harvey Schiller may have predicted the future for the industry, becoming a professional entity because there is too much money at risk for it not to happen.

The professionalization of our academic McDonalds (billions and billions sold) continues, with increasingly insistent arguments being made against the maintenance of non-profit status for athletics money, and for endowment money. Because it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Athletics and endowment?

If Harvard University generates a thirty-five billion dollar endowment (a number of other Ivies are not far behind), all of it in very significant ways protected from taxation… And if because of this astronomical profit people like Harvard investment managers get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, and people like coaches get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, but very little of the billions left over are spent for academic purposes (Harvard notoriously hoards its endowment; revenue sports players aren’t paid), why should we be surprised that communities surrounding McDonald’s schools are constantly challenging their tax exempt status in court? That Felix Salmon’s much quoted statement has it that Harvard is “a hedge fund with an educational institution attached“?

All of this is a small element of the immense income inequality debate in America today. CEOs like Gilead’s John Martin taking home almost $100 million each year are the real attention-getters in this debate. Yet America’s John Martin problem is a straightforward one: It is about capital markets and unlimited greed. Easy to grasp that.

And of course most of the people in this country have no trouble – applaud, in fact – one man or woman pulling in any amount imaginable for themselves. Ten years from now, Martin’s yearly compensation with be five hundred million. Bravo! Job well done. No upper limits, and people who question upper limits are jealous losers who have to be restrained by the state or the next thing you know it’s Kristallnacht.

Fine, okay, but does the same psychology pertain to high-minded non-profit universities becoming greedy billionaires? Even in America, there’s some vestigial sense that universities are different from John Martin. That sense could grow, could come to understand itself more clearly. And if that happens, there’s trouble ahead for the most profitable McDonald’s franchise-holders in the land.

Two Upstate senators say they voted against each incumbent University of South Carolina trustee because of “questionable activities” allowed to occur on two of USC’s campuses.

… [The senators cited] a performance on the campus of the one-woman show, “How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days.”

“All we are asking for is balance,” [one] said.

…[see post directly below this one] still duns you.

Just a few weeks ago Harvard received the largest donation in the college’s history [which adds significantly to its current endowment of close to thirty-five billion dollars], but recent Harvard grads are nevertheless still getting [donation] requests.

Henry Blodget is talking about University of Southern California trustee John Martin and his… well, Blodget has already tried to supply some adjectives… personal compensation. You sense, in Blodget’s emotional but not entirely polished description of human beings who take several hundred million dollars to themselves in compensation every year a kind of verbal difficulty, an eagerness and yet an inability to capture what it means – socially, morally – for one human being to do this. Piggish is a strong precise sort of word; yet he’s matched it with an abstraction (outrageous) which does little more than amplify his initial abstraction (the condition of being unbelievable). One feels as though the phrase should substitute a more precise word for outrageous… Or maybe the phrase would be stronger if one simply dropped outrageous and ended on piggish.

Anyway. A trustee stands as a role model for students and faculty, and Martin’s cosmic greed (cosmic is good, I think… I don’t know… I’m kind of tongue-tied on this one myself) conveys the highest values of that institution of higher learning. Higher, higher, higher, until you’re pulling in, as Blodget puts it, “700 times my lowest employee.”

Everything’s for sale at the University of Alabama, including the opportunity to have your name appear in the chancel itself, Nick Saban’s most sacred private place.

… (she left the University of Maryland a number of years ago for Miami University) writes a manuscript about organized crime and Vladimir Putin that scares the bejaysus out of Cambridge University Press. Libel laws! No can publish.

This is from Karen’s response to the editor there:

Last week the EU and the US Government issued a visa ban and asset freeze on the very inner core that is the subject of my book. Many works will now come out on the makeup of the list and why each individual was placed on it. The answers to these questions are in my book. Isn’t it a pity that the UK is a ‘no-fly’ zone for publishing the truth about this group? These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools. And as a result of their growing knowledge about and influence in the UK, even the most significant British institutions (and I think we can agree that CUP, with its royal charter, 500-year history and recent annual revenues in excess of $400m, is a veritable British institution) cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal action…. [Perhaps some day we] can once again turn to CUP with the knowledge that it is indeed devoted to publishing “all manner of books” and not just those that won’t awaken the ire of corrupt Russian oligarchs out to make a further mockery of British institutions.

For the definitive statement of why American university professors don’t wanna know from their local Athletic-Industrial Complex, go here.

For pathetic up to the minute details of the pathology, go here.

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

By the way, the Chapel Hill Show Trials (I write about them here) seem not to have gone over well.

[A group of high-profile] retired [UNC] faculty took issue with an event at last week’s Board of Trustees meeting in which several athletes talked about their studies and spoke favorably of the tutoring program that assists them.

“The recent presentation to the Trustees by several accomplished student-athletes whose work as students has not been impugned was one more embarrassing exercise in avoiding the heart of the issue,” the professors wrote.

…my university. We had two recent student suicides to grieve. Last January, there was another.

It was a warm beautiful evening and the students who spoke were eloquent and none of us can begin to make sense of it.

The nitty gritty on compensation starts on page 27 of Gilead’s proxy document. Its compensation mix for Gilead’s executive group is skewed towards equity awards that are over 200% of base salary and annual bonus opportunity. On page 34 it’s noted that Gilead’s CEO John Martin took home more than $90 million making him one of the 10 highest paid CEO’s in the country. His 5-year compensation exceeded $250 million, top man in the pharma sector. Generous options and stock grants fueled by marked equity appreciation in Gilead told the story.

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

There is no qualm in Gilead
To make the top man whole;
There is no qualm in Gilead
To heal the CEO.

If I can’t earn like Martin
If I can’t take his take home
Then take me home to Jesus,
And say I died alone.

Read and learn. Should you attempt the delicate feat of being at once a revered intellectual and an occasional plagiarist, and should your plagiarism be discovered by some graduate student, say this:

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses…

Let’s note the elements of Zygmunt Bauman’s response, one by one.

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, [I laugh condescendingly at the small-mindedness of anyone who would compile a book of rules about proper citation. Such books are for little people – like the little person who has had the presumption to try to attack my eminence.] and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, [I am a committed (way committed in my youth but that’s none of your business) man of the left who stands way above the petty and absurd defense of private property which is the entire concept ‘plagiarism.’] I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses… [Sure, I could be a citation nazi; I could lose all my social importance via lockstep ‘obedience’ to ‘rules,’ but this behavior is beneath me. Plus my attacker is ‘obviously’ an idiot.]

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a winner.

… on the part of high-ranking university officials. And university priests.

There was the plagiarizing dean at one of the U Alaska campuses. One of his jobs was handling student plagiarism cases. No investigation was ever done. He just, uh, left.

Now there’s the naughty University of Alaska Fairbanks Catholic priest. Father Thomson, stopped by police while speeding his drug-laden, weapons-packed pickup around town, hit the trifecta… No, the quadfecta:

DUI, refusal to take to a chemical alcohol test, drugs misconduct and two counts of weapons misconduct for both possessing a firearm while intoxicated and failing to immediately inform troopers he was carrying a firearm.

Hold on.

No, that’s the cinquefecta.

… the University of Hawaii, which boasts one of the most expensive and most pointless of revenue sports programs (no one comes to the games) in America. Type university hawaii into my search engine for every recent act of the farce, to which we need to add, today, the crazy shit coming from the football coach at the last team practice/press conference. Things were just getting started when the coach saw a local journalist who had written something the coach didn’t like.

The coach screamed at the guy and abruptly cancelled the entire press conference.

Television reporters were interviewing quarterback Taylor Graham when Chow yelled that Reardon was not welcomed at the practice. This morning’s practice, unlike practices during the regular season, was open to the public.

Reardon said he was prepared to leave the grass practice field when Chow began yelling and then ordered a halt to the media’s interviews with players and assistant coaches.

UD loves to follow the careers of these strutting tyrants, these American university football coaches who think they own place because they do. They do own the place.

You gotta admit that stealing from students is the cherry-on-top of university corruption, the real apex of depravity. A high-ranking professor/administrator at Morgan State University did that, plus lots of other stuff that will send him to prison for a decade or so.