Amel Grami, an intellectual historian at Manouba University, whose campus was besieged last year by Salafi activists opposed to women’s equality, says the Arab Spring has “triggered a male identity crisis” that has strengthened the ultraconservative positions taken by Islamist parties. In Tunisia, he has noted, fundamentalists have called for girls as young as 12 to don the hijab and niqab, veils used by observant women. An Ennahda lawmaker has called for “purification of the media and purification of intellectuals,” while another Ennahda deputy, a woman, has urged segregation of public transportation by gender. Some Islamists have spoken of legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice largely foreign to Tunisia.

There’s a potentially very big story emerging out of the University of Louisville (one of the scummiest football factories this blog has covered, by the way), on whose faculty sits Mariusz Z. Ratajczak. Ratajczak has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of money from the Catholic church, to pursue work on

heretofore unknown stem cells present in adult cells. These tiny cells, he claimed, could perform the same tasks as embryonic stem cells, including tissue regeneration and the miraculous capacity that embryonic stem cells have to mimic other types of cell tissue. Moreover, these VSEL cells, said Ratajczak, could be harvested from adult cells without harming human embryos or relying on them for cell material.

Ratajczak claims to have discovered these cells; but no other scientist has been able to find them, let alone test them in any way. Arthur Caplan writes that Ratajczak’s claim (that “he had found very tiny cells residing in adult cells that behaved just like embryos. Ratajczak said they could develop into all manner of other cells, thereby acting as natural repair kits, given the right conditions and genetic tweaking.”) “must be the product of wishful thinking, or at worst, fraud.”

More detail here.

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The University of Louisville hospital has more than its share of problems lately.

Oh, and I forgot all about Robert Felner.

… at Haverford.

It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.

College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.

Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.

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If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:

Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.

Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.

Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.

It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.

UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.

After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.

I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…

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It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.

Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.

… jokes.

The winner by a mile was this one:

Three lawyers and three engineers are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three lawyers each buy tickets and watch as the three engineers buy only a single ticket.

“How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?” asks a lawyer.

“Watch and you’ll see,” answers an engineer.

They all board the train. The lawyers take their respective seats but all three engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, “Ticket, please.” The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The lawyers see this and agree that it is quite a clever idea so, after the conference, they decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money.

When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers don’t buy a ticket at all.

“How are you going to travel without a ticket?” says one perplexed lawyer.

“Watch and you’ll see,” answers an engineer.

When they board the train the three lawyers cram into a restroom and the three engineers cram into another one nearby.

The train departs.

Shortly afterward, one of the engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the lawyers are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, “Ticket, please.”

Er, make that 24.

And, as law schools across the country begin to enjoy the synergy of the ABA’s policy of accrediting anything that moves, and the dramatic shrinkage of the job market, there’s this from the Charleston School of Law (famed for the otter tank pissing incident):

Graduates of the Charleston School of Law are so alarmed by the possible sale of the school to InfiLaw System that they are considering ways to stop it.

Current students grew more outraged Friday, when they couldn’t get answers to their questions on the school’s future from its leaders.

The law school released a statement Thursday evening, which said it had entered into a management services agreement with InfiLaw System, a group that owns three other for-profit law schools.

Investors are cashing in and letting the place go diploma mill and they don’t want to talk about it.

… forced out. If this happens, UD‘s putting her money on Trent Lott as his successor.

… movie. UD thinks of its name whenever a big research fraud story breaks, since the trapped honcho almost always blames his years of image manipulation, plagiarism, data futzing, etc., on the others – shadowy research assistants in the corners of the lab of whose evil ways the honcho was tragically ignorant.

So it is with Shigeaki Kato, a University of Tokyo bigshot who studies molecular signaling. He’s at 43 retractions and counting. Note the use of the passive voice plus the others in his comment.

[Kato is quoted as having said] “there is no doubt that there was impropriety.” He is also quoted as apologizing and explaining that he didn’t catch the impropriety because he trusted his lab members.

Kato’s fraud goes back sixteen years! Talk about trust… I mean, I think we’re past trust and into naivete at this point… It’s the purest of heart who always get pulled down by the world.

… pages from his American imprisonment diary.

Le scoop on le pimping. Note the video of a protest at Cambridge University over his having been invited to speak there.

Today’s headline on NPR.

Maybe it’s time for Brown University to revisit its none of your fucking business position on the question of trustee Steven Cohen.

… Gored.

All praise to Todd Wallack, the Boston Globe reporter who put up with all the shit the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its risible public relations firm threw at him to try to make him go away.

**********

UD thanks Barney.

… trustee Steven A. Cohen – featured an exhibit titled: Move Along, Nothing to See Here.

What Brown University is currently exhibiting – institutional indifference to the university’s continued association with le très malsain M. Cohen – is a show of the same name: Nothing to see here. Steve’s our guy, SEC be damned.

It’s been months now that we’ve known Cohen’s scandalous firm to be insider trading central; but, well, as a commenter on the latest Brown Daily Herald article writes:

Why would it affect Cohen’s [trustee] status? Steve Rattner gave the family weekend speech in 2012 after being charged in a pay for play scheme by the SEC, and paying huge fines.

Trustee Steve the First! Gone but not forgotten (scroll down). As to the Second: UD understands a university pausing for a very long moment before breaking up with a guy who makes nine hundred million dollars a year in salary. A guy with a personal fortune of around ten billion dollars. UD‘s heart goes out to Brown at this difficult time. Brown must work out a complex moral calculus: Filthy lucre vs. a shred of ethical integrity.

Stay tuned.

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

As always, UD thanks Roy.

Late last week, the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the antitrust lawsuit filed against the [NCAA] by former University of California, Los Angeles basketball player Ed O’Bannon and a group of other former college athletes added six current college football players to their amended complaint; in response, NCAA vice president for legal affairs Donald Remy released a statement claiming that O’Bannon and company’s “scheme to pay a small number of student-athletes threatens college sports as we know it.”

“In particular,” Remy wrote, “we would lose the very real opportunity for at least 96 percent of NCAA male and female student-athletes who do not compete in Division I men’s basketball or FBS football to play a sport and get an education, as they do today.”

In other words? This is the end. Of everything. Make us share more of the pie with greedy revenue-sport athletes and their trial lawyers by eliminating amateurism, and say goodbye to women’s lacrosse. Don’t you want those hard-working young women to earn college degrees? Cue “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana.

Yeshiva University’s Moody’s rating has just been downgraded to Baa1 from A2; Moody’s is currently reviewing the university for further downgrades.

How does a university get to such a disastrous place?

It was not the work of a day. Yeshiva had to make itself so notorious that students didn’t want to enroll, and alumni didn’t want to donate. This took about five years, starting with the brilliant idea of putting Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – both YU trustees – in charge of Yeshiva’s money. Conflict of interest? Who cares.

The financial and reputational hit was a biggie. But Yeshiva was just getting started.

Instead of dealing forthrightly with its misbehavior, Yeshiva said nothing and simply erased Madoff’s name from all mentions on its website. (It couldn’t erase everything: “Madoff’s name was prominent in the program for Yeshiva’s annual Hanukkah dinner and convocation, a major fundraising event, held on Dec. 14 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, three days after he was arrested.”) It then went about characterizing itself as an innocent victim of this mean man and his friend Ezra.

With the Madoff/Merkin mess already destroying Yeshiva’s integrity, extensive sexual scandal now hit the newspapers. Decades of important Yeshiva University rabbis preying on children, or looking the other way while children were preyed upon, are the talk of the town. Yeshiva will probably have to settle hundreds of millions of dollars on the traumatized people suing it.

A third crucial component of Yeshiva University’s catastrophe is its inability clearly to admit wrongdoing, coupled with the continued prominence of people reportedly associated with wrongdoing. Take Hershel Schachter.

The power of the rabbinical school rabbis to intervene in student intellectual and extracurricular life could also undermine [Yeshiva University’s] efforts to compete with secular colleges. Rabbi [Hershel] Schachter, who objected to the study of the Christian Bible, also [said] he sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).”

Okay, so far just a jerk, the sort of anti-intellectual endemic on fundamentalist university campuses. But there’s more.

Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter, who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment.

No comment, of course; and Schachter retains a high rank at YU. So does Kenneth Brander.

Better recruiting is [YU President Richard] Joel’s answer to declining enrollment. Back in June, he tasked Rabbi Kenneth Brander, head of the Center for the Jewish Future, with a special assignment: to “re-invent recruitment strategies,” as Joel put it to the Stern College student newspaper, The Observer, in an October interview.

And here is Brander in the Jewish Daily Forward:

[T]wo men have told the Forward that they tried to warn … Kenneth Brander, about Andron. Brander led the Boca Raton congregation from 1991 until 2005, when he took a post as dean of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future.

One man who said that he was molested by Andron for three years told the Forward that he called Brander during the early 1990s.

“I told [Brander], he’s definitely a pedophile,” the man said, referring to Andron. “[Brander said] he would look into it, and he never called me back.”

Another man said he tried to warn Brander about Andron a little more than a decade ago.

The man said he tried to call Brander “four or five times,” but Brander did not respond. So the man said he “had to leave a very uncomfortable message” with someone in the Boca Raton Synagogue office. Later, a “third party” from the synagogue contacted the man to say that the allegations against Andron were “rumors” and that “in any case, it’s behind him,” the man said.

Brander may well be innocent of these charges; but as far as YU’s future goes, it doesn’t matter. The school is in free fall.

All he ever wanted was what was best for his kids.

Now everyone’s beating up on him.