… but its students can.
The governor of Louisiana thought he’d figured out how to rid the state of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
In 2001, Southern had a 5% graduation rate. That rate is now 8%.
As the governor tries to do something about this scandal, Southern devolves into farce, the latest act of which involves a fired professor who just kept teaching and being paid because no one noticed he was still there.
He was fired as part of an emergency two years ago, when
enrollment declines and state budget cuts prompted Southern to declare a financial emergency, called exigency — in this case, a 20-month process that allowed the university leeway to cut academic programs and lay off tenured faculty.
Those enrollment declines are going to be the only thing that will eventually be able to shut Southern down. It’s fun to be in the audience for the last acts of a farce, but no one wants to be onstage. When no one goes to your school, you have to stop existing.
Or do you? Maybe Southern can figure out a way to keep going. Maybe administrators can designate one another professors and set up classes for themselves.
Governor Vaginal Probe, Penn State — more and more people and institutions are eager to see up the old canal… But aside from the fact that initiatives of this sort prompt equity questions, there’s the matter of privacy. Mandated monthly bouncy-wouncy updates didn’t sit well with women on the Penn State faculty, who felt that whether they wanted their partners’ sperm to squiggle eggward unimpeded was their own business.
In response to complaints, Penn State has opted for the withdrawal method and will not after all impose a financial penalty on canal proprietors. But the university points out that it’s got to find some way to deal with exploding health care costs…
Well but listen. If Penn State had just kept an eye on Jerry Sandusky – a man projected to cost the university almost as much as its health care expenses for one year (both come in at around two hundred million) – it wouldn’t be so desperate.
.. and busy all night celebrating my kid’s
… 23rd birthday.
Am now too tired to post.
See you first thing in the morning.
197
Reported instances of players on BCS teams who were arrested in 2012 — an average of 16 per month. The SEC led all conferences in arrests with 42, followed by the Big 12 with 37. Fewer than a quarter of the 197 arrests resulted in players being kicked off their teams. Only one player was arrested more than once and wasn’t dismissed from his team or suspended for at least a game. Florida State running back James Wilder Jr. Wilder has been arrested three times, and has yet to miss a game. He has played in both Florida State games this season.
Here’s the photo I want you to have in mind as you read the following summary of the Scott Eaton story at Northern Kentucky University. I want you to see how dressed for success the guy is, how he’s doing the Number One thing that Joe Paterno’s statue does (did), how next to him on a presentation board there’s the slogan BUILDING WINNERS FOR LIFE rather than, say, STEALING FROM YOUR SCHOOL AND FUCKING EVERY FEMALE IN SIGHT. I want you to think about how many American universities, as they sport up, fervently embrace and abundantly pay and abundantly esteem douchebags like Scott Eaton.
Smiling sweet-smelling Scott Eaton who came to pathetic NKU knowing he couldn’t do anything for it but that it could do plenty for him, and immediately began his sex and money extravaganza.
He did it for years, too, and that’s onaccounta no one cared, no one understood, some people were being cut in on the deal, some people were too scared to speak up about The Athletic Director, etc.
Dumb, pathetic, desperate schools like Northern Kentucky University are sitting ducks, and their desperate athletic programs are set up to attract people like Scott Eaton, who know losers for life when they see them.
As we speak, a shooter (or shooters) at the Washington Navy Yard has killed or wounded several people, some of whom have been transported to GW Hospital. UD doesn’t teach today, but she can imagine the scene outside the hospital, with police, reporters, families, onlookers, etc. And this is already an extremely busy Washington intersection, with the metro, law offices, and GW medical school buildings immediately adjacent.
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UD hadn’t planned on posting about the firing of GW’s business school dean, but the story has gone from strange to bizarre to bizzzzzaro in the last few days, so here goes.
Handsome young hotshot Douglas Guthrie is hired away from NYU three years back to lead GW’s way-ambitious b-school (it not long ago got an amazing new building, plus a big ol’ budget…). Guthrie overspends his budget rather shockingly and is for this reason (or so the official story goes) fired.
It’s very bad news for the b-school, which has lately seen lots of administrative turnover and disappointing national rankings.
It gradually becomes apparent that Guthrie has a story to tell, and he has really spilled it to The Hatchet, the school newspaper. The suggestion in the story (partly coming from Guthrie, partly from others) is that the overspend was a cover story, the real deal being charges against Guthrie of “making illegal financial deals in China and having sex with colleagues.” These charges apparently came from the chair of the Faculty Senate executive committee, and Guthrie seems to be claiming that it was his lawyer’s letter to the university, discussing the possibility of a slander lawsuit, that really prompted his firing.
As to whether Guthrie might have tried to profit personally from his overseas university work … who knows? There’s plenty of precedent for it, with Harvard’s Andrei Shleifer (his adventures in Russia cost the university $31 million in penalties) the most notorious case. But the explosive charge in the GW newspaper piece is this one: The executive committee chair apparently also charged that
Guthrie had been sharing profits with [university provost Steven] Lerman and other top administrators, according to [another faculty member’s] complaint.
Yikes.
… Since leaving government, [Lawrence] Summers took a lot of money from Citigroup. As one of the key architects of the bailout, he was responsible for the decision to prop up Citi with hundreds of billions of dollars of public money and Federal Reserve cheap capital rather than breaking Citi up. As Fed Chair, he will be a principal regulator of too-big-to-fail banks including Citi.
At the very least, this looks terrible. He saves Citi management and shareholders, then he gets a nice pile of money from them for not much work, and now he is regulating them again.
… [At Harvard,] Summers’s questioning of the intellectual capacity of women contributed to his downfall, but in many ways it was the least of his problems. Far more serious were his penchant for overruling the Harvard endowment’s professional money managers with impulsive investment decisions that cost Harvard billions, and his involvement in the Andrei Shleifer affair.
… Summers is also vulnerable for his activities since 2010. Harvard has a strict rule requiring that full-time faculty spend at least 80 percent of their professional time on Harvard business. With all of his extracurricular Wall Street affairs, there is no realistic way that Summers could have met this rule. Either Harvard bent its own rules, or the companies on whose boards Summers served were violating their legal duties by using Summers as a marquee name or paying him in the expectation of future IOUs, but not as a true fiduciary…
There’s a recurrent theme here of personal and institutional greed – get-rich-quick credit swaps that turned out to cost Harvard billions, massively self-serving Wall Street “affairs.” It always seemed bizarre to UD that a man this crass and cynical would be placed in front of the Senate for confirmation. What was the Obama administration thinking?
During the Dominique Strauss-Kahn business, a writer for the New Yorker noted the anxiety with which “many in Paris” are witnessing “the ‘Italianization’ of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…” Their country after all had not long ago produced (just like Italy) an accused rapist as a leading candidate for political office. Strauss-Kahn came close to being president; Silvio Berlusconi, convicted of tax fraud and sex with an under-age prostitute, was Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister.
UD has always been intrigued by the ways in which states fall into depravity, and the way they care about that (the French care, according to the New Yorker writer) and don’t care about that (the Italians don’t care). Italy is so depraved, and so indifferent to its depravity, that Italianization has become a globally portable noun, toted around to designate a national culture’s relaxed descent into moral turpitude.
Richard Rorty, in his philosophical essays about postmodernism, expressed anxiety about the Italianization of the United States. He routinely described us as “rich, fat, tired North Americans,” cynical about all of our institutions, and sinking back, in the absence of belief in the possibility of social improvement, into our comforting consumer goods (Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, is the best fictional evocation of this cultural mood).
But that was only our high culture, Rorty was quick to caution; our elites – financial, intellectual – are Italianizing, as in figures like Lawrence Summers, who despite his remarkable moral grubbiness, seems set to become our next federal reserve chair. (Hm. Not so fast, UD.)
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One way to understand the Oklahoma State University story is to suggest that Italianization has now invaded our great plains states, the country’s symbolic center of rectitude.
Look at Iowa’s long-serving senatorial scold, Charles Grassley, and tell me whether, when you look at him, you can think of anything but rigidly upright stands of wheat. Then look at this dude. The expression on President Obama’s face says it all.
So traditionally America – especially America’s heartland – was the exception, the clean place, the corny, cock-eyed optimist of nations, with the corniest locale the plains of Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. “Blondie and his frau out of the plain states came!” says cruel sophisticated George, mocking the newly arrived wholesome faculty couple in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Now that the plains states are epicenters of football scandal (yes, given structural corruption, there are plenty of other football scandal locations), you see the beginnings of Paris-style anxiety about Italianization even on the plains.
From Penn State to the Miami scandal to Johnny Manziel’s autograph saga to alleged violations at top college football programs across the country, the NCAA has never faced more “culture” issues than it does today.
“Culture” here designates not merely the corruption itself (everyone knows college football is rancid), but indifference to it, everyone’s fine Italian hand waving away any embarrassment or shock over the fact that Nick Saban, recipient of $5.3 million a year from one of the poorest states in the union, routinely tells journalists to shut up when they ask about his dirty program. (“Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, stamped out of one news conference last week like a petulant child, all because reporters dared to do their jobs. He would talk about the football game, not the system of big-time college football, the system that made him rich and famous. Never that.”) Just like Joe Paterno, this guy’s got a fucking statue! These guys are our heroes!
UD’s pretty confident that Saban’s statue will meet the same fate as Paterno’s… But maybe not. Maybe by the time the massive Alabama scandal hits, the process of Italianization will have advanced to the point where no one gives a shit.
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Anyway, my point is that the plains were our last bastion. Now it’s pomo meh. Meh. Rape at Montana, rape at Colorado, pimping at Oklahoma, drugs at Iowa, meh. The plain-spoken plains have spoken. They’re on board. Benvenuto!
Why should a Pickens who is healthy and strong,
Blubber like a baby if his team goes astray?
A-weepin’ and a-wailin’ how they done him wrong,
That’s one thing you’ll never hear me say!
Never gonna think that the men who squeal are the only men among men.
I’ll snap my fingers to show I don’t care;
I’ll buy me some brand new boots to wear;
I’ll scrub my neck and I’ll brush my hair,
And start all over again.
Many a new face will please my eye,
Many a new love will find me;
Never’ve I once looked back to sigh over the bromance behind me;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Many a light lad may kiss and fly,
A kiss gone by is bygone.
Never’ve I asked an August sky, “Where has last July gone?”
Never’ve I wandered through the rye, wondering where has some guy gone;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
