… the Wharton School.
Look for Wharton in the wiretaps.
… is the spectator sport.
Here’s a tax-exempt organization that does little other than make the world safe for big-time university athletics corruption (note its president’s hard-hitting response to the Education Secretary’s latest proposal about the droves of basketball players who don’t graduate).
Ralph Nader’s proposal to eliminate athletic scholarships and replace them with need-based money was a great opportunity for the NCAA to, say, reject the idea as overbroad, but express understanding of the motivation behind it, given the corrupt and destructive nature of much big-time university football and basketball.
Instead, the NCAA did another cynicism number. If the response to government officials wanting to reform a university-based system that fails to graduate huge numbers of high-profile athletes is to say jackshit about it and move on, the response to someone like Nader is to pull out all them nice girls on the swim team who graduate one hundred percent and you better believe it baby! Why is that mean man going after them nice girls?
The 145,000 student-athletes who receive athletics related financial aid each year are in fact students first — as evidenced by the fact that in almost every demographic they graduate at higher percentages than their counterparts in the general student body. …[T]hey are students, just like any other student on campus who receives a merit-based scholarship.
Don’t talk to me about football and basketball! Let’s just put all the athletes together into one big 145,000-person pile and note that most of them graduate! How unfair to pull out of that pile the few who play … What did you say? Which sports? … Oh yeah. Football and basketball. Why the obsessive focus on those sports? They’re just like any other…
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Why is the NCAA so cynical?
Because it works. No one, Mencken wrote, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.
[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.
Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”
Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”
Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:
The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.
Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?
Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.
Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.
Bristol University’s new cow simulator.
The top executives for the top 15 for-profit colleges pulled in $2 billion last year. Two billion dollars, practically all taxpayer money.
And that student loan money?—the default rate at these for-profits is 43 percent!
So, only 22 percent graduate and 43 percent default on the loans, leaving us holding the bag because students have been sold a bill of goods by slick marketers.
You already know all of this if you read University Diaries. Just reminding you.
Right after having seen a tepid performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf last month, UD turned to Taylor’s Martha and admired it all over again.
And UD does, she does dive below – way, way below, as must all writers who follow University of Tennessee basketball.
In finding Bruce Pearl, their latest coach, UD has had to dip substantially below what she thought was the bottom of the barrel, UT-sportswise, but it turns out there is no bottom of the barrel.
Having fired Pearl, UT will now reward him with one million dollars. From a comment thread:
[C]ommit minor violations but lie to investigators and cause them to become major violations; subject the school to be the butt of jokes; lose signees, commit additional violations while under investigation; put UT basketball in a terrible position regarding recruiting, scholarships, attendance, etc., for years to come, and get paid a million dollars.
So this Korean academic just got out of jail for embezzlement, and for forgery of a Yale doctorate. Here’s what she says about the doctorate in her just-published memoir:
In her book, she admits that someone else wrote the thesis for her, but says she never had any doubt about the authenticity of the degree. Yale confirmed the diploma was a forgery in 2007.
“Though I neither got the degree through hard work nor wrote the thesis by myself, I paid tuitions, submitted papers, finished a thesis defense in front of three Yale professors, not to mention that I passed graduation tests,” she writes.
I’m having some trouble unpacking this re: authenticity.
Milena Penkowa [scroll down for earlier posts] happened on his watch.
Actually, The Ratwoman didn’t just happen on his watch. Hemmingsen did a good deal to enable her vicious ways. And when caught out on his enabling, he lied about it.
The legal investigation into Hemmingsen’s management was sparked by suspicions that arose when he and the rest of the university’s management nominated Penkowa for a prestigious research award in 2008, even though they knew that she had been reported to the police on charges of embezzlement and forgery.
Hemmingsen initially said he didn’t know that Penkowa had been reported to the police, but later he admitted that he knew about it.
Earlier, in 2002, after a faculty committee, smelling a rat, rejected her thesis, “the university’s then dean of faculty Ralf Hemmingsen intervened and sought an external review of Penkowa’s thesis by two other researchers. They were critical of the committee’s decision, arguing that there was no clear evidence of research misconduct. Penkowa resubmitted her thesis to a different committee of researchers not based at the University of Copenhagen and passed…”
How do you get promoted from dean to rector at the University of Copenhagen? You do Milena Penkowa’s bidding.
Understandable, though. Penkowa was having “an intimate relationship with a Science Ministry official,” and you want to be sure to behave slavishly toward anyone shtupping a Science Ministry official…
Although the university’s board of directors says everything’s fine now that Penkowa’s been sentenced, nothing to see here, the new Science Minister, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, has lost faith in the board and will “increase supervision” of the university.
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How do things like this happen?
They happen when your university is so provincial as to make Lower Slobbovia look like Paris.
Conventional universities are forced into this one-to-many, someone lecturing to a timetable, because they have buildings to fill… In the online world you don’t need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don’t need to be trapped into a lecture timetable…
Gradually, determinedly, the online heroes lead us out of the darkness of the past.
… the supermoon (Image 5 is best); but I got back to Garrett Park in time to see (five minutes ago!) a brief, massive hailstorm, complete with thunder and lightning very near my house. The hail battered hard against the house.
My backyard deck is sprinkled with glow-in-the-dark hailstones.
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Update: Parthenon Moon.
Looks like the University of Tennessee may be firing Bruce Pearl. Not because of his (cough) ethics problems, but because he’s not winning games.
Perhaps the Administration well knows the college’s reputation cannot have them turning any more blind eyes to the magnitude of corruption in the UT Athletics Department. The national attention on the issue will certainly pull anyone down into the whirlpool to flush the UT Athletics system’s corruption.
NO ONE IS worth a crap is going to take the program over with all the trouble it is facing…
These two local commenters point out that the problem is not confined to games lost. That Pearl plays dirty is of course well-established; but this in itself doesn’t distinguish him from most big time university basketball coaches. As the first commenter notices, there’s a … call it a context problem at Tennessee. If them boys hold onto Pearl, they run the risk of attracting so much attention to the university that folks will start gettin’ a whiff of the whole damn UT athletics septic tank.
The second commenter makes the better the cheats we know point. Eventually a school’s reputation goes so far down the tubes that no even vaguely ethical coach wants to touch it. The commenter cautions that UT might want to hold on to Bruce if it doesn’t want to be forced to hire someone who makes him look like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
