… 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.”

Once you finally get Steven Cohen off your board of trustees, here’s one hell of a target of opportunity: Daniel Vasella.

He just got here. Get him while he’s hot.

… here. (Read the rest of my WKU posts here, if you can stomach it. Scroll down.)

Next, enjoy this beautiful observation from a faculty member at a university meeting last week.

Dick Taylor, an assistant professor in the school of journalism and broadcasting, asked [the president] if money spent on the football coach could be used towards education.

“In my three years, I’ve watched just the football coach … go from 250,000 a year to 450,000 a year to 850,000 dollars a year,” Taylor said. “I really wondered if the money could be better spent in what our core is which is educating students to get jobs.”

LOL.

Sports school presidents only say the truth on their way out the door and down the stairs.

UD has seen it again and again.

Here’s the latest case – the outgoing president of jockshop University of Nevada Las Vegas confides in an exit interview:

If we had paid as much attention to what the quality of the incoming deans were, as we were for a football or a basketball coach, I know this institution would already be at least on a peer with Harvard or anybody else. The level of scrutiny over athletics is a conundrum.

Yes, fine, go ahead and segregate by gender at university events, says this British group. Separate but equal, dontcha know. Works every time.

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“Outrageous.” Yes. Keep it coming.

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him.

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Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you’re ready. It’s a terror. It’s a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We’ve set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear.

UD is very proud.

In his letter, President Joel wrote that the current fiscal crisis will force YU to “reframe the way we educate.” Joel noted, “conventional models crumble beneath the weight of fiscal hardship,” and discussed the need for a “new strategic vision” to increase revenue and efficiency in new graduate programs and online education.

This blog has followed, with disgust, Yeshiva University’s longtime irresponsibility in every imaginable institutional sense – hiring, trustee appointments, presidential compensation, intellectual freedom (put YESHIVA in my search engine for details). Now the Post-Bernard Madoff bill’s come due, and the only thing missing from the president’s statement is his acceptance of responsibility and his resignation.

“Yeshiva has suffered philanthropic walkouts,” writes the school paper, putting the matter diplomatically. Remember Andrew Sole’s letter, written all the way back in 2008, to Yeshiva? A letter the school blew off? Sole called for the resignation of the entire board of trustees.

… [H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.

In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.

The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees.

Fuck that! said Yeshiva. We like our boys (it’s almost all boys; they all seem to be in each others’ pockets; and one of them – Zygi Wilf – just got convicted of racketeering). We’ll just go our own way, and Sole can drop dead.

(This must have been one of the strategies featured in Leadership in the Non-Profit World, a class Yeshiva’s president gave just last January, with a guest lecture from the former president of George Washington University, a longtime defender of Yeshiva University’s way of doing things. Here’s President Trachtenberg. [You need to be a CHE subscriber to read the full contents of the article.])

But Yeshiva has dropped dead. Expect it to go almost entirely online, in the cheesiest, most desperate, way.

… you get a prize. But this paragraph is good for your early morning amusement:

In an attempt to find out what disciplinary steps [Frostburg State University] might be taking with [Arthur] Siemann, The Bottom Line asked an administrative assistant at the Cordt’s P.E. center for a comment. We were referred to the Dean of College Education, Dr. Clarence Golden, then the assistant Dean, Dr. Roger S. Dow. Dow declined to make an official statement and referred us to Dr. William P. Childs, Interim Provost, who also declined to comment, but referred us to Elizabeth Medcalf, FSU’s Director of News and Media Services. Medcalf explained that, due to the privacy issues involved, no official statement could be made as to the disciplinary actions taken towards Dr. Siemann. Thus, The Bottom Line is unable to report as to whether Siemann has been put on Administrative Leave with or without pay.

LOL.

After wrapping up his last experiment on the day that he was supposed to retire, Sanger did not again work in the lab and spent the rest of his life gardening.