UD doesn’t see too many of these — American universities run by secretive, all-powerful presidents and their business cronies on the board of trustees.
At Suffolk University, the president sits in his counting house and refuses interviews, while his minions on the board, to whom he throws lucrative university contracts, give him so much salary that he’s now got the highest presidential compensation in the country.
Like their models, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the president and the chair of the board of trustees of this university live in a world of personal fantasy in which the little people love them and all of their ways.
Lately, though, Suffolk’s leaders seem headed for the same fate as the Genius of the Carpathians.
Faculty dissent is bubbling up across Suffolk University, weeks after the furor over its president’s $1.5 million compensation – more than four times the national average for top college administrators – thrust the school into the national spotlight.
More than 70 percent of the law school faculty approved a motion during Thursday’s faculty meeting raising questions about the way the university is governed. The motion, relayed to the college’s board of trustees, expressed concern that President David Sargent’s “excessive’’ compensation has demoralized students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
The negative publicity over the pay package, they said, had harmed the Beacon Hill school’s reputation and its ability to raise money and attract strong applicants, criticism that the board chairman says is unfair and has dealt “a hell of a blow to Sargent.’’
Professors in Suffolk’s business school, the college of arts and sciences, and school of art and design have also begun to complain, according to several faculty members…
It is the first time in the school’s recent history that such a wide swath of the school faculty have openly questioned the way the university is run and its direction, a move one longtime professor likened to “children finally acting out, standing up to the parent.’’
… Suffolk froze faculty pay and raised student fees this year, while Sargent, who has declined multiple requests to be interviewed, continues to make more than his peers at some of the country’s more prestigious universities.
The chair of the trustees is playing the Elena role to perfection, defending his beloved, dumping on know-nothing critics…
“How many times do we have to go through this thing?… This guy is gold. He’s done everything for the school… I’d like to know how many people [He’s talking about the school’s professors.] examined this contract and are sophisticated enough to understand what’s in it.” … No written contract was presented to the board, and members were not given advance notice on the agenda… “They wanted to talk about it for 30,000 hours, but if you know Nick Macaronis, I don’t do that. I make decisions on the spot… Are you aware that I have donated a million and a half dollars to Suffolk? And this is not just pledged. Donated…’’
Sometimes nothing less than a revolution will do.
A graduate student has stabbed Richard Antoun, an anthropology professor, “four times with a 6-inch kitchen blade inside a campus office.”
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UPDATE:
From WHRW News:
Unconfirmed reports are coming in stating that the suspect was a foreign exchange graduate student, possibly from Egypt with difficultly obtaining grad funding, whose dissertation was to be judged by the professor.
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Another Update: Background on this sort of crime here in a 2007 New York Times article.
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Richard Antoun, distinguished anthropologist, has died.
Professors and students told pressconnects.com reporter George Basler that the mood in the building was one of shock and fear. “It’s scary as hell,” said Peter Knuepfer, an associate professor of geological sciences who works in Science I. “It’s another one of those things like the downtown shooting (at the American Civic Association, where 13 people were fatally shot in April). You think it happens somewhere else, but it happens here too.”
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An article, in a SUNY magazine, about Antoun.
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A statement from SUNY Binghamton’s president.
From Prague Daily Monitor:
Two renowned Czech university teachers and scholars in the field of psychology, Jiri Hoskovec and Jiri Stikar, have confessed to plagiarism they committed two years ago, the daily Pravo reports Thursday.
They apologised on the web page of the Charles University publisher’s for having passed a scientific text written by another author off as their own in their joint book Safe Mobility at the Old Age from 2007, the paper adds.
In their book, which is to be used in university courses as well as by researchers and general public, both authors included almost word-for-word excerpts from Psychology for Drivers written by Karel Havlik without citing the source, Pravo writes…
There won’t be any punishment. The press only responded when Havlik threatened to go to court.
… should be up shortly. It’s about ed schools. Title: Sheep May Safely Graze.
I’ll link to it as soon as it appears.
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Here it is.
— sends me this, from today’s New York Times.
Like Northeastern, Hofstra has dropped football.
From the Princeton University newspaper’s blog:
Friday morning of Fall Break, emissaries from Princeton University tapped into the spirit of the season early when they dispensed hot oatmeal to students in and around Harvard Yard. After losing 27% of its endowment, Harvard had ceased serving hot breakfasts to its students as a cost-saving measure.
The volunteers, all students belonging to Princeton’s humor magazine, The Princeton Tiger, used their fall recess to drive to Cambridge in order to help their less fortunate peers. “Everyone’s hurting in this economy,” said Steven Liss, Chairman of The Tiger. “But Harvard’s endowment shrunk from $37 billion to scarcely $26 billion– they’ve lost more than anyone in these tough times.” A Massachusetts native, Liss cited concern over the coming winter. “Harvard’s our rival, but we hate to think of them having to get by on only continental breakfasts…”
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From the Harvard Crimson’s blog. A headline:
PRINCETON STUDENTS ATTEMPT HUMOR
… notices something.
At 55, I’ve recently returned to university (undergraduate BScN) after graduating from my second undergraduate degree in 1990.
Many lectures now consist of someone simply reading what is on a PowerPoint presentation, and expanding on the points with whatever comes into their head. In the past, what I valued was the lecturer sharing what they knew about the topic from their own research or real world experience. To have someone reiterate what I’ve already read in the text is a waste of my time.
My vote would be to get rid of PowerPoint presentations. That would force lecturers to prepare to lecture rather than provide McEducation.
A jock-sniffing, nepotistic president; sociopaths on the sports teams; Mistress Jade, who punishes naughty grad students with whips, on the creative writing staff… It’s all gotten too much for UNM, which has just hired an expensive ‘reputation management’ consultant to make the corrupt twisted people who make UNM what it is look uncorrupt and untwisted.
UD awaits the ministrations of the public relations firm upon her. She looks forward to her sense of UNM as a crony-ridden craphouse being transformed by clever pr into a sense of UNM as something that smells really good.
… says it all – smartly, concisely. Good writer.
Well, he doesn’t say it all. He forgets to add that laptops are a lazy professor’s best buddy. Babysit the kiddies by clicking on the tv.
This commenter — goes by the name of Godot — appears on a thread at the Austin American newspaper.
Godot is responding to an editorial in the paper which sheds a wistful tear or two over graduation rates for baseball (37%, lowest score in the Big Ten), basketball (47%, lowest score in the Big Ten) and football (49%, lowest in the Big Twelve ‘cept fer Oklahoma) players at the University of Texas.
It’s really too bad, writes the paper, that our flagship university seems unable to graduate these people… I mean… Sure would be nice if it could and all… But… well… you know…
Godot argues that it would be honest as well as economical for Texas to acknowledge that the state doesn’t give a shit about education. Texas could be our first state, says Godot, to experiment with shutting down all schools.
UD predicts that after five or so years of no formal schooling and zero education taxes, the state of Texas will look exactly the way it looks right now. Only richer.
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Correction: GTWMA, a reader, notes that all the Big Ten stuff up there should say Big Twelve.
From Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally.
BUZZ: The orchestra plays, the characters die, the audience cries, the curtain falls, the actors get up off the floor, the audience puts on their coats, and everybody goes home feeling better. That’s a happy ending, Perry. Once, just once, I want to see a West Side Story where Tony really gets it, where they all die, the Sharks and the Jets, and Maria while we’re at it, and Officer Krupke, what’s he doing sneaking out of the theater? – get back here and die with everybody else, you son of a bitch! Or a King and I where Yul Brynner doesn’t get up from that little Siamese bed for a curtain call. I want to see a Sound of Music where the entire von Trapp family dies in an authentic Alpine avalanche. A Kiss Me Kate where she’s got a big cold sore on her mouth. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum where the only thing that happens is nothing and it’s not funny and they all go down waiting – waiting for what? Waiting for nothing, waiting for death, like everyone I know and care about is, including me.
In a blog post about the latest sleaze under Florida coach Urban Meyer, Pete Thamel writes:
Coaches in college football have long histories of ignoring serious transactions for the sake of winning football games…
Interesting slip… Coaches in college football are of course very serious about one transaction: Their contract, with its millions of dollars in yearly compensation and its massive buy-out clauses and all. But when it comes to recruitment, the blogger’s correct: The transaction’s not serious at all. It’s this wild and crazy thing where you have the university admit people who aren’t going to be able to graduate, and who have significant criminal records, and then you just hope like hell they behave til you get some touchdowns out of them. It’s insane.
And then when they don’t behave – when they rob people or drive drunk or whatever – everybody rushes to sympathize with the coach, the same person who fucked up the university by admitting them… Poor Coach Meyer! How’s he holding up?
Coaches like Urban Meyer make Lawrence Summers look fiscally responsible.
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Update: A commenter really gave Thamel hell about transactions. (Scroll down the comments a bit.)
Thamel thanked him and changed it to transgressions.
I’m less inclined to give bloggers hell about these things, because I know how easily mistakes get made when you’re blogging a lot.
On the other hand, you’re supposed to read over what you’ve written a lot, too.
And on the other other hand, if you write for the New York Times, don’t you have editors?
… Stanley Fish of a couple of books about politics and the university. Fish notes a welcome moderating of views on both the left and the right, but also says this:
… To his credit, [Cary] Nelson [in his book] expresses uneasiness at his part in creating an academic word where “’the professional is the political.’ ” If he now believes, as he says, that we should “set aside our political differences in tenure decisions,” he should also believe that we should leave our political differences and commitments outside the classroom door. The reason he gives for declining to do so is that a classroom free of political passion would be overly reasonable and contribute to the acceptance of the status quo: “The relentlessly reasonable classroom may reinforce confidence in the reasonableness of the nation state in which it resides.” Get it? If you confine yourself to the subject and preside over reasoned discussions of the assigned materials, you will be turning your students into toadies for the neoliberal state. I guess you would also be courting that danger if you arrived at class on time, and devised objective tests and assigned grades accordingly. In the face of an argument like this one, there is literally nothing to say…
Here Fish gets at the problem of disposition and cultural competency mandates in American schools of education. (See this earlier post, and the many comments it attracted, for details.) Cary does not believe in the existence of reasonable, dispassionate, objective discourse in the classroom setting. He’s the guy on your block with the bumper sticker that says If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. It’s an obvious fact to him that pretty much whatever the political situation is, it’s fucked up and outrage-generating.
To tamp down your passionate indignation for the sake of a classroom ostensibly devoted to the poetry of John Milton would therefore be a dereliction. What we call “art,” after all, is — read correctly — most importantly a vehicle of social protest.
Whatever their subject, in other words, professors need to leave it at times and model in the classroom a passionately partisan response to ambient political events. Professors are not merely teaching Milton, with all of his aesthetic as well as social and theological complexity. They are teaching their students not to become neoliberals.
Fish is right — there’s nothing to say about this argument. Its cynicism takes your breath away.
The man who killed four members of the Lakewood police force might be on or near the campus.