Correct answer: Nothing. You don’t want to know from NMSU because NMSU is NSFW – it’s the sort of obscenity from which decent people avert their eyes. Tens of millions of dollars in athletics debt… no one goes to the football games… no money for academics… and except for this guy and a few others no one gives a shit.

Here’s a sample from a letter the chair of the board of trustees wrote. I won’t quote from it because I’m one of those people who doesn’t enjoy puking her guts out, but you might enjoy it, so go ahead and take a look.

A couple of NMSU students actually thought trying to understand what the trustee wrote and then responding to it might be worthwhile, and UD applauds the effort. You should never give up on human beings, no matter how…

This is truly a clown school. This is truly a school with not a shred of dignity. And now this. One of their players is a violent shit who set off a huge on-court brawl. UD figures he’ll be back attacking opponents after a two-game suspension. After all, it’s New Mexico State.

… Zohydro and pay to play.

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

After great pain, a formal meeting comes –
Sales reps sit ceremonious, all ears –
While Dworkin and Turk
Collect their money and get to work.

In the mix.
Each and every soul gets a fix —
Pain or no pain — land of addicts, ho! —
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

… in reporting that cash- … there must be a more urgent word than strapped — cash-sapped? – Yeshiva University will make about $20 million by selling ten apartment buildings near its Washington Heights campus.

Moody’s [has] cut YU’s credit rating to Baa2, the second lowest rung. Bloomberg News quoted Margaret Soltan, an associate professor of literature at George Washington University, who said, “What’s very heartbreaking about Yeshiva is that it attracts these very sincere, spiritual people yet it is revealing itself to be such a catastrophe. … It’s a catastrophe for the community that the leadership there has managed to screw it up.”

Pointing to slides projected on a large screen, [the provost], a scholar of organizational behavior, accused [UNC athletics whistleblower Mary] Willingham of making slanderous statements about the academic abilities of Carolina football and basketball players. Her assessments “are virtually meaningless and grossly unfair to our students and the university that admitted them,” he said. “Using this data set to say that our students can’t read is a travesty and unworthy of this university.”

The verdict, recorded on videotape, was swift: The assembled scholars erupted in applause.

“In 25 years of faculty meetings, I’ve never seen anything like it,” [a history professor] said later. “It was a public conviction and an intellectual execution.”

Typical dullard editorial in the local booster press complaining about one of the few signs of social progress coming out of the south: People are refusing to go to football games. The Gainesville Sun editorial board, puzzling over growing indifference at the University of Florida, has it figured out:

Noon and 12:21 p.m. kickoffs certainly don’t help in attracting late-to-rise college students.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve got, what, eight home games a season?

And how tragic for America. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in filing suit today against one of the country’s many tax syphons (put the phrase tax syphons in my search function for previous posts), calls the exploitation of America’s poor by for-profit colleges like ITT “truly an American tragedy.”

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this morning filed a civil lawsuit against for-profit college company ITT Educational Services, seeking restitution to students allegedly harmed by ITT’s private loan programs, a civil fine, and an injunction against the company.

Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has been a big investor in ITT. Which is… Okay, that’s her business, you might say, though UD would say that it represents at least an embarrassment … But the real scandal here comes from the fact that Blum is a University of California regent who presumably had something to do with that university itself investing in ITT. From a 2010 article in the Berkeley Daily Planet:

… Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million — nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.

The regents’ conflict-of-interest policy requires them to “avoid the potential for and the appearance of conflicts of interest with respect to the selection of individual investments … public officials shall not make, participate in making, or influence a governmental decision in which the official has a conflict of interest.” And the California Political Reform Act of 1974 provides civil and criminal penalties for officials who ignore conflicts of interest — as UC makes clear in ethics training presentations specifically created for university officials. The Board of Regents, however, is self-policing and it tolerates situations that cause others concern.

John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, California, comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”

Shades of Yeshiva University under the management of Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin! … Well, that university investment strategy ended badly, and I think Berkeley’s is about to come to grief too… But … look. You don’t need to be Thomas Frank to be sickened by the cynicism of America’s greatest public university getting rich off the backs of America’s most vulnerable student population…

Especially since it’s not only Berkeley. There’s Columbia University, already famous for its business dean’s starring performance in Inside Job. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, sits on the board of the company that owns Kaplan. Students there were so disgusted by this that they started a petition calling for him to leave the board. The language of their petition pithily summarized the American for-profit ed business model:

Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.

In announcing the suit, the CFPB said this was just the beginning of a much wider action against the whole scummy industry. UD is skeptical. It has been scummy — reeking to high heaven, in fact – for a couple of decades, and no one with any power to really kill it off seems to have cared. That’s the American tragedy.

… Chicago State University. Corrupt even by Illinois standards. An almost non-existent graduation rate. Ruled by one greedy hack after another. Frauds in high places. The functional equivalent of North Korea.

And now… (drum roll)…

A Cook County jury has awarded a former Chicago State University employee $2.5 million in damages and back pay after deciding he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by the university president and other top officials, an amount that a judge could further increase at a hearing next month.

… The lawsuit by former Chicago State senior legal counsel James Crowley alleged that he was fired in February 2010 after he refused to withhold documents about university President Wayne Watson’s employment that were requested by a faculty member under the state’s public records law. Crowley also claimed that he was retaliated against after reporting questionable contracts to the Attorney General’s office.

So what’ll it take to shut the place down?

Students are leaving in droves.

Is it possible Illinois will keep the shake-down operation going even without students???

Profound, hilarious, beautiful writing about being a geezer with a lot of dead cheerleaders.

Roger Angell’s writing jibed, somehow, with something I wrote in my journal yesterday:

I thought suddenly – on my way just now from my office to the Foggy Bottom metro – of my mother, about whom – despite my deep love for her – I don’t very often think. Given the drama of my father’s death [suicide], I think a good deal more about him. But okay, I think of Mitz, and… it’s kind of a blank. What is Mitz? My sweet sweet mother to whom I owe it all, really – all my happiness. Because she loved me so much. But the thought I had – the only thought I had – recalling her, was “Now that I’ve got a bit of age on me it’s absolutely obviously true that I’m totally unlike her.”

It is the duty of the dead, writes Saul Bellow somewhere, to be forgotten. (In Herzog, he writes, “To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”) I don’t like the end of that just-dead interim, when they’re still alive because we’re mourning them so intensely — when that’s over, their duty to be forgotten comes into play, and they fulfill that duty.

Amazingly, I’m still in the David-interim almost three years later. A measure of his immense influence. Just the other day for some reason I produced a small squeak of compassion at the thought of him, rather than the routine angry bark … He must finally be moving out of the interim…

Its applications are down fourteen percent this year due to the JTD (Just Too Disgusting) problem.

The Rolling Stone article about its way-past-you-could-puke frat system probably accounts for about five percent of the drop (“There’s been a lot of turnover [of staff] in the Dean of the College and other offices . . . and fraternities have been left somewhat to their own devices,” [one alumnus] said. “It’s become a bit of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”).

The rest of the drop might be parceled out between catastrophic credit swaps courtesy of grown up frat boys, and of course Christopher Kipouras.

— a new super-opiate that also goes under the name of Zohydro — is the hypnomaniac’s little helper, the sort of thing Michael Jackson’s personal physician, who scoffed at anything weaker than Propofol, would have taken a second look at.

Even an FDA panel thought introducing Yo!Hypno to an already-mass-sleepwalking (to the point of falling over and dying) America was a bad idea; but somehow it got overruled, and soon all of America will be Hillbilly Heroin Heaven.

An NPR reporter asks a pain guy about to make, er, a killing on this thing about conflict of interest. “If the drug manufacturers are sitting in a room with FDA officials talking about pain drugs and they’re there because they spent twenty or thirty thousand dollars to be in the room, and [opponents] aren’t allowed in that room at the same time, does that raise any concerns for you that that could be a conflict of interest?”

Answer: Zzzzzz… wha’?….

On Dec. 15, shortly after Army football’s 12th consecutive loss to the U.S. Naval Academy, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, announced that he was considering institutional changes to build a winning program. “When America puts its sons and daughters in harm’s way, they do not expect us to just ‘do our best’ . . . but to win,” he wrote. “Nothing short of victory is acceptable. . . . Our core values are Duty, Honor, Country. Winning makes them real.”

See if you can follow along on the logic of this chick with me. Ms Caslen argues that there is a direct link between victory on the football field and victory on the battlefield. This babe thinks it appropriate to allude to people dying in armed warfare in the same breath as people playing a field sport. How can we, she asks, expect our sons and daughters to die for their country if we don’t also expect them to win football games? After all, winning on the gridiron is the same as winning on the outskirts of Baghdad. Winning on the outskirts of Baghdad isn’t real; it only becomes real when Army is also winning football games. Words like duty honor and country are hollow cliches until we beat Navy.

Does it worry you just a tad that the people running the nation’s defense don’t grasp the difference between football and warfare? Does it worry you just a tad that operational logic is in the hands of people who are, uh, nuts?

… the next guy can!

Tetched in the head University of Tennessee is on its way to another bought out coach.

As David Climer points out, $1.56 million is

a lot of money to pay somebody not to work. But it’s nothing new for UT. The Vols rank among the national leaders in buyouts.

UT is still on the hook for the bulk of Derek Dooley’s $5 million buyout, which is being paid in installments through December 2016. And don’t forget former athletics director Mike Hamilton. UT still owes four more monthly payments of $37,083.33 to fulfill his $1.335 million in parting gifts.

It all adds up. Over the last decade, UT has paid more than $15 million in buyouts to athletics department personnel.

Bankrupting a university in pursuit of a winning season – that’s UT all over.

… [I]t is important to understand that every incentive in academic life is geared against engagement with the world outside of academics. There’s no other way to put it. This has perhaps changed slightly in the intervening 15 or 20 years – with the Internet being a major part of that. But I suspect that’s more people acting in spite of these incentives and reacting to the increasingly straightened [Update: SOS thanks her Nabokovian reader, johnshade, for pointing out that Marshall needs to straiten this word out] job opportunities in the profession…

All the incentives of academic life drive against having the time, the need and in many cases the ability to communicate with a larger public. In some cases, that’s as it should be. In others, it’s about the straitened nature of academic life, specialization driven by bad job prospects, an over-abundance of Phds, and a deep, deep conventionality driven by risk aversion rooted in those other factors.

It was the electronic monitor around a student’s ankle that first gave Kelli J. Amaya serious doubts about the Harris School of Business.

The young man with the monitor was studying to be a pharmacy technician, and Ms. Amaya, who worked at Harris, a for-profit chain of trade schools, knew that the most widely recognized certification for pharmacy technicians excludes anyone convicted of a felony or even a low-level drug offense.

But the student received federal financial aid, and for the school to keep collecting it, he had to remain in the program and complete an internship. So Ms. Amaya said she was told to find him an internship, even if that meant deceiving the employer.

“I saw students who never should have been there, students with whopping gaps in learning abilities and major psychiatric problems who were just not capable of doing the work,” said Ms. Amaya, an administrator at Harris’s Linwood campus, and then at its Wilmington, Del., campus, from 2009 to 2011. “The bosses were always like, ‘Stop asking why they’re enrolled, just get them to graduation however you can.’ ”

I’m sure they’ll tidy them up a bit. Maybe lower the windows a tad.