… fewer than ten thousand students that concentrates the mind. The town of Princeton seems sort of amazed, in an ongoing way, about its university’s remarkable tax exempt wealth, and it’s clearly on a campaign to chip away at it.

The latest thing is that a judge has refused Princeton University’s request to throw out a case against it brought by residents and the town in which they claim that a number of buildings on campus should not be tax exempt since they’re non-educational.

Another, broader, charge in the case argues that

the University is not qualified for the tax exemption because it in fact makes money and distributes profits, especially proceeds from patents registered by the University.

Princeton is now lawyering up to defend its exemptions.

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

Princeton’s got the same problem Harvard (well on its way to a forty billion dollar endowment) does; maybe their lawyers can work together. As one observer points out:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

The trick is that this hedge fund can’t remit earnings to investors, and has to keep them in the company’s account, renaming these retained earnings as an “endowment”. So how do the insiders extract value from this business? One way is by giving themselves cushy jobs that pay a ton of dough. Those who manage Harvard’s money are well-paid. The prior investment head, Jack Meyer, left after criticism of a compensation plan that paid some investment management professionals more than $35 million each in a single year...

When tax-advantaged non-profits start to accumulate billions of dollars of cash through investment gains, and the insiders seem to be doing very well, it creates legitimate pressure for some legal changes. There is a broad range of alternatives: capital gains taxes on investment income, directly taxing the endowment, placing limitations on employee compensation, and forcing the distribution of a fixed percentage of the endowment are all obvious choices. Sanctimonious talk about “the mission of the university” is not likely to stop this …

Actually, I think sanctimonious talk, done well, can probably hold the line for a school. UD has always privately felt that the switchover from Lawrence Summers to Drew Faust as Harvard’s president had in part to do with the, uh, incompatibility of Summers and sanctimony.

… League of Denial.

… It’s easy to sit back and pontificate about why so many players are violent, both on and off the field, or how they ended up with ruined lives. We often blamed the players themselves. “They were irresponsible men, or had bad agents, girlfriends, wives who took advantage of them,” we explained. We blamed everything but the game itself for so many ruined lives and serious psychological problems.

… We have all made a very comfortable living off the game and the backs of men like Harry Carson, Tony Dorsett and Junior Seau.

Whoa, look out. The budgets of many universities rest on the recruitment and use of young men as football players.

****************
Found it here.

Professors Robert Dworkin (University of Rochester) and Dennis Turk (University of Washington) are feeling no pain!

Read their hilarious emails about how they’re making tens of thousands of dollars off of pharma – which wants to listen in on American professors conversing about new developments along the Oxycontin line (We Americans ♥♥ LOVE♥♥ our Oxycontin. Just look at any town in West Virginia. Eli Lilly’s got us eating out of its hand!).

’20k [to attend a meeting] is small change, and they can justify it easily if they want to be at the table,’ Dworkin wrote to Turk in July 2003, after an Eli Lilly representative bridled at the price.

Dworkin’s absolutely right. Once you’ve got a national (soon to be international!) epidemic going, you’re talking real money. Dworkin knows Lilly routinely pays billions in fines every year for illegal this and that, and it really don’t make no never mind since when your profits are zillions you can laugh at billions. So this Lilly asshole has the gall to bridle at paying twenty thou to sit in a room for twenty minutes? UD finds it amazing the Dworkin/Turk gang isn’t demanding twenty million per meeting.

Possibly Dworkin and Turk are low-balling because they’re professors and not businesspeople and there’s a learning curve for them. This might be helpful for context:

[There’s a new rule,] unveiled by the S.E.C. … requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages… [Yet C.E.O. compensation continues, and almost certainly will continue, to rise.] Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As [one expert] told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.”

If Dworkin and Turk find themselves at all hesitant, they can tape this article to their refrigerators and reread it just before talking price with Lilly.

… Alabama State University.

Yes, I know the state in general is stupid and corrupt; but ASU’s a whole other category, and especially states like Alabama can’t afford to keep running – with taxpayer money – any institution this corrupt and destructive. The agencies that continue to accredit ASU are simply whores.

That ASU is a deadhead is known and documented; that it’s run by thieves is equally notorious.

Americans seem to have trouble with the idea that universities, like businesses and states, can fail. Failed states; shuttered businesses; closed universities. Bad enough ASU educates no one; it also steals everyone’s money. Time for Alabama to show some guts.

A graduate student at UD‘s school – George Washington University – kills his best friend in a drunken rampage.

…one of my puffball mushrooms.

Hand-picked fresh for you
just seconds ago.

Click on the image for a
fuller sense of its human
brainishness.

Rooted collybia plus a leaf perfectly
bifurcated between brown and green.

Click on the image for more detail.

Just taken from UD‘s woods.

American university sports events get more and more violent, so much so that it wasn’t much of a story when, last year at this time, Syracuse University was host to multiple fights and one stabbing at their “Orange Madness” opening basketball event of the season. Police swarmed the building and everyone was ushered out before the event was scheduled to end because security couldn’t control all the fights.

Big deal. The life of the mind.

But yeah sure, as the chancellor said up there in my headline, we promise to do better next year.

So here we are and “how could this happen?” asks the local paper. How could it happen that Syracuse University, in designing this “family friendly” event to prevent last year’s violence, hired Ace Hood? Ace Hood…

After a night rocking to songs about fucking bitch pussies and shooting the fuck out of everyone with your arsenal, Syracuse will be ready for the football and basketball season!

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

UPDATE: Now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into the culture of the Syracuse athletics department and many of its fans (why not hire Ace Hood?), it’s time to cancel his act because a few malcontents object to his brilliant subversive lyrics.

Wonder how much his cancellation fee is. Yet another excellent use of university funds.

Everyone’s wondering who his replacement will be.

How about something for the girls? Rihanna!

Many “students” are little more than cogs in the great NCAA money machine. Sure, they receive their scholarships, and some are serious about their studies, but how much time can they put it on classwork when they are expected to practice, travel across time zones and play at a quasi professional level in order to keep those scholarships?

And what happens to them when they get hurt? Or more often, flunk out? The answers often aren’t pretty.

College sports and the big-time dollars they produce have effects on the core educational mission. When Nike founder Phil Knight builds his alma mater, the University of Oregon, a $68-million “football performance facility,” it is money not spent on a new science or performing arts building. D-III athletes don’t “inadvertently” sell their autographs, like Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, to memorabilia collectors, nor do our alumni have reason to take the NCAA to court for compensation for use of their likenesses in sanctioned video games.

Attendance is tanking at lots of Division I football games, and UD wonders whether some part of that isn’t simply disgust, scandal fatigue. Americans expect the professional leagues to be disgusting, but there’s a vestigial sense that universities should be better. Amid all the theorizing about why people aren’t going to university football games, there’s maybe this, as the authors of the opinion piece suggest: Our tolerance for the Div I Big Lie is finally starting to weaken.

Yes well there was ol’ UD yesterday afternoon walking in the rain to her class at 1776 G St (finally an address UD can remember). Right hand, umbrella; left hand an Urban Outfitters bag in which lay the MacBook Air GW just gave her and fifteen blue books (midterm). As she passed the World Bank, the loudest, most armored-car-strewn security operation she’d ever seen – and you see them all the time in Foggy Bottom – came blaring out of the Bank and onto the street. A staggeringly enormous black vehicle led the parade, flanked by nervous guys on triple-wide scooters and then sidewalks full of men whispering into phones. Pretty much all of us stopped to gawk. Even the veterans among us found this display noteworthy.

It was Malala. When the Taliban’s itching to put another bullet in your brain, this is how you go home after you give a speech.

Empty expensive stadiums and sadistic highly compensated coaches and teams on a permanent crime spree are all well and good; but now Moody’s is warning about Division I schools becoming credit risks, so say goodbye – maybe – to all that fun.

In laying out risk factors to Division I programs, Moody’s cited the increasing use of public subsidies to fund sports, exposure to litigation over head injuries, and the possible movement away from the NCAA amateurism model. Moody’s views future costs as uncertain.

I love that possible movement away…

The amateur tv networks that have taken over amateur Division I sports at our universities will have to bail out these schools when no one will lend any more money to them… At which point tv will call all the shots – not just most of the shots, which they do now. That means they will demand butts in all seats. Viewers hate to see empty stadiums. But how will we do that, the universities will ask their tv guys. Not our problem, the tv guys will say. Meanwhile, each year attendance is effing hemorrhaging .

The university goes to robotics and it goes to engineering and it says to the professors there solve this for us. And they do solve it, they make animatronic students but it’s not cheap, so the university’s athletic division continues to lose zillions every year meaning that they’ve been able to please the tv overlords but they’re still in very bad shape credit-wise…

… you will recall, threatened to sue Harper’s Magazine over an article about the university’s notorious budget problems. Cooler heads – i.e., students – prevailed, and the suit (Joshua Reinharz darkly suggested that “that the article’s author, Christopher R. Beha, was motivated to write an article casting Brandeis’ finances in a negative light because his aunt Ann Beha’s architectural firm was rejected by the University in its bid for a 2004 building project.”) never happened.

But universities continue to make this sort of mistake, with Canada’s York the latest example. Again a university has taken umbrage at a magazine article – in this case, an article which called the campus “a hunting ground for sexual predators.”

That’s strong language, to be sure, but I suspect “literary license” covers it, and, in any case, a lawsuit costs a lot of money and will ultimately be a high-profile way of keeping the issue of campus safety in the news.

… Upstate Medical University?

They’ve even placed him in an “undisclosed off-campus” location!

… titled The Last Days of the GOP.

What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what they are willing to say if their names aren’t used. One former Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?”