The remarkable synergy between the values of universities and the values of big-time football is there for all to see: Commitment to free, independent thought, to dissent, to reason over violence, to sober deliberation over intoxicated impulse, to academic seriousness leading to the completion of advanced degrees, to academic integrity, etc., etc. And nowhere is that synergy on clearer display these days than at Washington State University, whose athletic director has compiled an enemies list of people who aren’t “on board and believing in what we’re doing.” No bowl game tickets for those people. Dissenters have been placed on a no-tickets list.

The list is based on “a crimson-letter file of any particularly snarky emails that haven’t properly embraced the new way.” As another true believer – this one from Rutgers – writes in one of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite pieces of prose:

Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in.

It’s the ethos that’s made North Korea such a success, and you’ll find it at almost all of America’s great football schools too – get with the game or get fucked.

One local writer doesn’t quite get it:

This is inspired marketing for a program that’s had almost as many empty seats as occupied ones for its last two home games.

Most schools rank donors for ticket eligibility on a priority list.

The place that’s foisted a decade of bad football on its audience suddenly has a blacklist.

[The AD] means it when he says he has to change the culture. But who knew what he had in mind was vindictiveness?

No, no, no – it’s not vindictiveness. And it’s not a moronic marketing strategy. No, no, no.

You are looking at it the wrong way. The Democratic People’s Republic of Washington State University is a benevolent, misunderstood state. It seeks, via shunning, to educate dissenters so that they may join the glorious new way.

This is also what re-education camps are for, and UD is certain the AD has these in mind too. Otherwise it would look vindictive.

The stadium could be at least a third empty Saturday, considering the combination of anticipated bad weather, a holiday weekend with students away from campus, and the relative insignificance of the Minnesota game in relation to the final standings

And that’s why they pay the coach almost two million dollars! Let’s not hear any more bellyaching about overcompensated football coaches!

The faculty of Yeshiva University, through all these years of scandal almost entirely moribund, begins to stir.

UD has no idea why they let shady trustees and their useful tool president fuck over the school for so long.

It’s too late, in any case, to avert disaster. UD recommends faculty stop calling themselves professors and start moving the word facilitator around on their tongues. It’s University of Phoenix time.

… many of them distinguished. Whew. I always worry that people won’t get their act together when things this bad happen. Women will not be segregated by bigots in British universities. Not if the rest of us have anything to say about it.

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Already over five thousand people have signed the petition. That was fast.

More and more people are paying attention to those complicit with the silencing of women in British universities. See my posts here and here. Now Sarah Khan lends her voice.

Universities UK’s new published guidelines suggest side to side segregated seating is acceptable as “both men and women are being treated equally” and therefore women would not experience “less favourable treatment.”

Universities UK clearly cannot see the wood for the trees. The idea that both men and women are equally segregated and therefore treated equally is highly erroneous. Perhaps one could argue such a point if so many [campus Islamic groups] weren’t such patriarchal constructions; shaped, structured and led by men.

So let me spell it out for Universities UK. [S]egregation results in ‘less favourable treatment.’ It enables the unequal distribution of power between men and women, resulting in gender based discrimination and inequality. It manifests itself in few female speakers being invited to speak to a mixed audience, limited decision making powers by female members, and how there has never been a female president of an Isoc.

Segregation perpetuates discriminatory social norms and practices, shaping male attitudes about women and restricting the decisions and choices of women. By allowing gender segregation, Universities UK are complicit in the gender inequality being perpetuated by Isocs; [Universities UK’s approval of gender segregation] will only make it easier for Isocs to treat socially unequal groups, in this case women, even more unequally.

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Preacher Haitham al Haddad, who has spoken in approximately twenty Isocs in the last two years, argues that women should withdraw from public life. [He hopes] to disempower them by denying them their economic self-determination and to silence them through their invisibility…

Universities UK are not only giving speakers like him a green light to say these things but are also preparing the gender segregated seating for him to say it.

Watch Britain’s universities carefully. They will show you how to hand your school over to vile demagogues.

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Nice comment on IHE‘s coverage:

This is such a step backward in civil and human rights, I am almost rendered speechless. “Separate but Equal” worked so well during the Jim Crow South or during Apartheid. Good on you, Britain, for working to bring this long-discredited viewpoint back into vogue…

If your university is inviting speakers who demand gender-segregation, perhaps you should start seriously looking at the sanity of those who bring these speakers [to] campus…

Or is it just beginning?

[N]o one could possibly be that good given the volatility of the markets. “As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up.” … [Harry] Markopolos noted that during his tenure at Rampart, he traded with some of the biggest derivatives companies in the world, and none of them dealt with [Bernard] Madoff because they didn’t think his numbers were real.

Markopolos is talking about the year 1999. It wasn’t until Bernard Madoff was arrested in 2008 that Yeshiva University – under cover of night, without comment – erased his name as chair of its business school. This was farcical enough, but Yeshiva went farther: It invested huge sums with the financial criminal of the twenty-first century. “We thought he was God,” said his fellow trustee, Elie Wiesel.

One appreciates Wiesel’s honesty. He is willing to state openly just how stupid, just how grossly negligent, were the conflict-of-interest crazies running Yeshiva University.

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The excellent Gavriel Brown, who writes for YU’s student newspaper, provides a detailed account of the manifold ways in which the very same fools, who continue to run Yeshiva, have now run it into the ground. The column even provides an edgy graphic (scroll down) complete with smugly grinning President Richard Joel. Brown concludes:

YU can no longer be an empire and President Joel can no longer be an emperor.

Yes, especially since he turns out to be Nero.

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But the farce deepens yet more. The comments on Brown’s column are from outraged Yeshiva insiders who cannot believe that anyone in the Yeshiva family has the shamelessness to air this dirty laundry. How dare he! The next thing you know, someone will point out that the family that endowed an entire Yeshiva campus – the Wilfs – just got convicted of racketeering. That Ezra Merkin held as powerful a position as Yeshiva trustee as his partner in crime, Madoff. That the board of trustees has long been farcically rife with conflict of interest.

Of all the investment managers in New York City and around the world, the board chose one of its own to manage a significant portion of the university’s endowment. Given the conflict of interest, the trustees who approved the decision to invest endowment with Madoff should be held accountable if they failed to perform adequate due diligence.

Do you think anyone has been held accountable? Well, put it this way. Do you think that Zygi Wilf has been removed from Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?

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You want farce? An American university priding itself on its piety as the higher education arm of the orthodox Jewish community resembles a criminal enterprise. It seems to be run by an emperor. It is cheered on to annihilation by idjits. That’s farce.

The FBI’s Files on Camus and Sartre Confirm the Utter Meaninglessness of It All

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[S]tarting in 1945 and 1946, the FBI kept tabs on famed philosophers and authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in hopes of discovering whether existentialism and absurdism were just communism in disguise… While existentialism and absurdism were subversive theories, in their way, they never posed any imminent or long-term harm to America, unless you consider a rise in the number of pretentious comp lit grad students to be a threat to national security.

A Guardian writer describes a new report approving gender segregation in British universities.

Good grief. The compromise is that women can’t be put at the back: “The room can be segregated left and right, rather than front and back.” Depressingly, the National Union of Students has endorsed this. What’s wrong with “side by side” segregation? Just ask how that would look if universities allowed speakers to demand separation by race.

This sickening report – which UD hopes self-respecting UK universities will ignore – caves to what the Guardian writer calls “the sexist eccentricities of some religions.” If only they were as innocuous as eccentricities. They are profoundly encoded convictions, excruciatingly out of place in liberal democracies.

If liberal democracies don’t fight back in places devoted to intellectual and social freedom – places like universities – they are making the world safe for theocons. UD is proud of the way her country has decisively rejected theocons at the polls (Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli); for contemporary Britain she feels sorrow and alarm.

The campus in on lockdown: People report seeing a man with a gun, and the school received word from someone saying that his roommate (it’s unclear whether this means a Yale student) said he planned to come to campus and shoot people.

Here’s the message when you go to yale.edu right now.

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UPDATE: Things seems to have calmed down, and the lockdown has for the most part been called off. Police are suggesting that sightings of someone with a gun were most likely people seeing first responders to the scene.

… If UD can alter that song a bit… Not that it’s surprising, in a new news sort of way, that Yeshiva’s current president long knew and did nothing about sex abuse allegations at that university’s high school.

[I]nternal documents obtained by the [Jewish Daily] Forward indicate that, in fact, [Richard] Joel, who arrived at Y.U. in 2003, was told both before and after he became president about allegations against Rabbi George Finkelstein, the former principal of a Y.U. high school — and that he declined to intervene in the first instance or respond in the second… “I spoke with [a former student making a charge against the school’s principal] a bit,” Joel explained in a 2004 email to a colleague, describing a complaint … made to him years before he took up his post at Y.U. “[I] told him to get on with his life, that I didn’t see a case and that Finkelstein was out of the education business.”

Sensitive, huh?

Well, Yeshiva will also soon be out of the education business.

… editorial glitch in a Harvard journal is Sarah Silverman’s bit in a recent interview with Scott Simon:

I grew up in New Hampshire and there are not many Jews in New Hampshire, but I didn’t feel so different until maybe, like, around third grade. Kids started blaming me for my people killing Jesus. I remember, like, even then thinking, like, it’s not like we killed baby Jesus. I mean, man, like, he had quite a run. He was 33. And, by the way, you’re welcome. If we had not killed him, he wouldn’t even be famous.

This is the second in a series of posts about the tendency of universities to deny things — things they’d be better off not simply denying.

Just below this post is a post about Columbia University’s decision to deal with a now-jailed professor who worked there for twenty years by telling reporters that he hasn’t been around for ten years. True, but he did work there, in an honored, high-profile position, for a long time, and it would be more seemly for Columbia at least to acknowledge that. You don’t want to be like America’s shabbiest campus, Yeshiva University, and pretend Bernard Madoff wasn’t an honored trustee on whom the university depended for financial advice. You want to be better than that.

Similarly, the University of Minnesota seems to think it’s fine to respond to reporters pestering them about a rather smelly clinical trial one of their professors ran by saying fuck you that was years ago. When you simply deny – worse, when you smear reporters for pursuing the story (the university’s communication director recently wondered in an email if a Scientific American reporter was a “wacko”) – the thing you’re denying keeps coming back to haunt you.

The trial was run by psychiatrists. Surely they’ve read Freud on the way denial works.

Here’s the most recent news report on the escalating Dan Markingson scandal.

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UD thanks Bill.

This blog faithfully covers the tendency of universities who hire and retain people who turn out to be big-time crooks to deny, deny, deny.

Most of these stories are about doctors who go to jail for running pill mills or ripping off Medicare.

Jose Katz spent two decades as a respected Columbia University faculty member; his name appears on dozens of scientific papers coming out of Columbia labs. After he retired (probably before too, but who’s counting), Katz set about telling everyone who came to his office that they had angina and needed expensive invasive things done to them. In this way, he accumulated tens of millions of dollars, and now he’s going to jail.

Note that in this report a Columbia spokesperson insists says they haven’t seen Jose around campus for ten years; note too that his lawyer repeatedly calls Katz a professor. He’s a professor … he’s a professor…

UD isn’t, of course, saying that Columbia should somehow have sensed it had a crook in its midst. She is saying that having happily affiliated for years with a convict currently plastering his faculty status all over town, Columbia can do better than issue a flat denial of any connection. Something like this would be good:

Columbia University is dismayed that a person once in good standing on its faculty has been convicted of serious fraud. The university has strict employee vetting procedures in place, and as far as we know Dr. Katz broke no laws while at Columbia. But this case is a reminder that all schools need to remain vigilant.

This article about the University of Colorado destroying its academic mission in pursuit of football money will have you tearing up at the poor little rich boy story that frames the narrative.

Best way to read the piece is to skip over the hard numbers stuff.

Colorado’s athletics department is awash in red ink. It owes the school nearly $30 million in internal loans provided over a series of years to help cover the athletics department’s move from the Big 12 to the Pac-12 and the considerable cost of buying out departed coaches and athletics directors while paying bigger bucks for new ones, among other costs. Plus, [Coach Mike] MacIntyre’s contract specifies other areas in which the school commits to spend even more on football, from facilities to staff to academic support… The average compensation package for major-college coaches is $1.81 million, a rise of about $170,000, or 10%, since last season — and more than 90% since 2006… The department is paying back $21.4 million in internal loans over 10 years at 2% interest, with $3 million in internal payments to be paid this fiscal year, shrinking the balance to $18.4 million.

But with a $7 million deficit last fiscal year and an expected $4 million deficit this fiscal year, [the loans will] stand at $29.4 million at the end of this fiscal year.

Colorado also provides the athletics department with a subsidy of roughly $5.5 million each year under the category of institutional support that does not need to be repaid.

Skip all that and go right for the heart – Coach MacIntyre loves his dad!

Eco-friendly University of Alabama:

“[The Quad] gets torn up every year… It’s almost to the point that we need to replace the whole system.”

[One groundskeeper], who oversees all of the grounds on the University of Alabama campus, said though tailgating is a lot of fun, it does take a toll on the grass. Each year the University pays anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 to rehabilitate the Quad.

“Before football season starts, the Quad is nice and pretty grass on both sides,” [he said.] “There’s grass on the east and west sides, but if you go on the west side now [to see the damage] it’s because tailgating just chews it up. We know that [it happens] every year. We over-seed and hydro-seed it in November, so that way it will be nice and pretty again in the spring.”

… “From corner to corner there’s beer tops… In the years past we’ve had to go in there and comb the Quad from east to west because there were so many that it had gotten really noticeable…”

Beer tops are just the small stuff.

Of all the items left on the Quad after home games, the most notable are not money or food. … [T]ents, living room furniture and televisions are left behind and never claimed.

Groundskeepers are impressed:

… “[Our] fans and visitor fans have been really good… ”

“You can’t put that many people in one area and expect it to be spotless… We’re realists. They do well for the most part until the beers get to flowing.”