… down by the Riverside.

A UC Riverside professor looks at the very simple, very stark numbers and comes to the obvious conclusion. Time to lay your burdens down.

… UCR’s athletic program is costing students $3.3 million dollars (2011), and the university $8.4 million dollars.

Ticket sales? $96,322, or well under 1% of the program’s cost.

Contributions? $623,561, or about 5% of the program’s cost.

In the last five years, UCR has seen large academic budget cuts, furloughs, on-and-off freezes on hiring, a huge rise in temporary faculty, and ongoing cuts in staff. Student advisors, for example, handle 400 to 600, or even more, students each. Yet athletic spending never stopped growing, and the university is now spending over $11m annually of state and student funds, according to the NCAA’s figures, on athletics — and that’s before the costs constructing and operating a new facility.

… [T]he NCAA as a whole is mired in scandal at a time when most universities don’t make back more than a fraction of what they spend on Division I (see Rutgers for examples of both), and big-ticket athletics is getting more and more costly every year. When staff has to ration their services to students, when faculty have to pay for their own office telephone lines, and when students have to pay more and more every year, the ever-rising additional cost of participating in Division I rather than Division II seems like a luxury we simply can’t afford.

That scandal thing is important. It’s rarely mentioned when people talk about what big-time sports are doing to this university or that, when they talk about specific dollar costs here and particular academic frauds there. This professor reminds us that we should never forget, as we focus upon the latest Penn State, that the largest picture here involves a lucrative, fully corrupt, and fully cynical industry centered in the NCAA.

Indeed, Americans are well on their way to fashioning some of their universities after the even more cynical and corrupt professional sports organizations.

Look at the University of Georgia, which will almost certainly choose a new president with the same total-insider commitment to the NCAA as the last one had. The University of Georgia, whose post-tailgate filth routinely destroys the campus and really who gives a shit.

I mean, few people on campus give a shit; when sports is all you care about, the despoiling of an academic institution by gallons of piss left after thousands of drunks careen back into their cars after games is nothing. So what.

Yet there is a larger world out there, watching this; and, of course, every year, as the stakes get higher and things get more corrupt, the scandal-factor grows. UD has predicted that in not too many years coaches will on some campuses be promoted to university president – an obvious move, an obvious acknowledgement of their financial, institutional, and political power. Academics at such places will become even more laughable than they already are; coaching salaries will soar; violent players – now treated not as demi-gods but as gods – will get even more difficult to handle.

Mild warning shots of the sort we’re getting from people like this UCR professor will be ignored, ridiculed, dismissed. It will be interesting to see, as universities sustain far more serious fusillades, whether attention will eventually be paid.

What is it about stem cell research that generates so much fraud? There were those Korean dudes, of course (the country even issued a stamp touting their work – which it then disappeared); but there have been quite a few others. Including – reportedly – Bodo-Eckehard Strauer, a massively prolific German scientist who seems to have fudged things like crazy. A group of investigators looked at

48 of the papers from his group and expose[d] a series of problems, including arithmetic errors in the presentation of statistics and identical results in papers presenting different numbers of patients. The authors also searched systematically in all of the papers for discrepant information – pairs of statements that could not both be true.

They document hundreds of errors. For example, in some papers patient groups are said to be randomised, while in others patients with identical outcomes are reported as being non-randomised to treatment and control groups. “And when we ran the statistical tests on the control groups, we found many amazing p values of up to 10-60 and 10-108,” cardiologist Darrel Francis from Imperial College London, one of the study’s co-authors, told Nature.

In a press release, Francis says: “Looking deeper, the seemingly comprehensive and decisive proof of efficacy gradually unravelled … the more we thought about it, the less we could understand.”

Strauer is already under investigation by the University of Düsseldorf.

… from Garrett Park, Maryland.

For starters, it’s insanely humid, but we’re all slogging through it with patriotic smiles. As I write, neighbors are gathering at the end of my driveway. Topics of conversation:

1. Mac v. Non-Mac.

2. The need to start the public school day later around here (some kids have to get up at five AM).

Mr UD now starts reading the Declaration of Independence to us. The shortened version, without the list of complaints.

Ike Leggett’s blue-shirted army just marched by and got hell from one of my neighbors. On the issue just mentioned. (Leggett is Montgomery County Executive, and he’s running for reelection.)

Whoa. Here we go. Sound of sirens! Many labrador retrievers! Here comes the fire truck! Kensington Volunteers, Garrett Park being too petite (Melissa Mader, my neighbor, suggested “petite”) for its own fire department… Boy Scouts followed by Girl Scouts! Babies in colorful colors! MUSIC!!! MUSIC TRUCK. It’s green and has people with instruments on it. The people are playing patriotic marches. Bright yellow vroom vroom with little kid working it. Here’s the Mayor! I tell him I’m writing down everything he says and so he says nothing. Melissa crashes into him.

“Hold up your poster, I don’t understand,” pleads UD as a yellow balloon walks by.

“It’s about summer food. I am corn.”

(The theme of the parade is Summer Fun.)

… that you realize just how beautiful life at big-time sports schools like the University of Florida is. Hushing up the beatings that players mete out around campus is of course business as usual at such places, and only when one of your players goes on, a few years later, to be charged with murder (I wonder if that would have happened if instead of hushing up the guy’s early beatings, the university had taken the behavior seriously… But… you know… he was an important part of the team’s winning record, and there’s a lot of money riding on that record…) do you run the risk of news organizations digging up the hushing up…

Tim Tebow attempted to keep Aaron Hernandez out of trouble during a 2007 bar squabble while both were playing at the University of Florida, but not even the mild-mannered, Bible-toting quarterback could keep the hot-headed tight end from slugging a Gainesville, Fla., restaurant manager and puncturing his ear drum.

Still, after Tebow’s efforts failed, it appears the school or football program might have gotten Hernandez off the hook by reaching a settlement with the manager to keep him from pursuing charges, according to a supplemental investigation report on the altercation obtained by USA TODAY Sports.

Once you’ve learned, courtesy of the University of Florida, that you can get away with breaking someone’s ear drum because he asked you to pay for drinks you bought at his bar, I guess you figure you can get away with anything.

One more glorious tale of collegiate life in America.

UD‘s hometown – the place where she lived from 1963 until she left for college and other adventures, and then returned to in 1995 – is featured in the Washington Post.

… as I do here, there are educational institutions in America that do have pretty universally bad reputations, and these are the for-profits. When a legitimate secondary school or university proposes cooperating with a for-profit, its faculty and students (as in this latest case) often scream NO. Why?

[F]or-profit colleges received $32 billion from the US government in student aid in the 2009-10 academic year. They also charge far higher tuition fees than comparable state universities. Yet they spend much less per student on instruction. Indeed, they typically spend a lot more on marketing their courses than they do on teaching them. This may explain why the majority of students on their degree programmes drop out long before they graduate. In 2008-09 the median length of study for a student at a for-profit university was just four months. The inference is that for-profit universities recruit anyone who is eligible for Federal funds but care little about what happens to them afterwards.

The cynicism and nothingness of the for-profits is now a matter of public knowledge. No one who actually takes education seriously wants to be cheapened by association with these money-grubbers.

… on our way to Rock Creek Cemetery and Gore Vidal’s grave. Georgia is all stop and go traffic and saggy storefronts, a sad landscape in no way helped by the humid morning overcast. Google gives the wrong entrance to the place, so we asked a woman working in her garden how to get in. “Down that alley,” she said, pointing, “and turn left.” Bumpity bumpity down the alley and there it was, the church at the entrance (I sang in its choir one Sunday – a paid gig.).

We saw a big stone with McGOVERN on it and looked more closely. No first name, but next to it was Eleanor’s, and next to hers, Terry McGovern’s. Bette and I both remembered Terry McGovern’s cold drunk death.

We knew Vidal’s grave was near the famous Saint-Gaudens Adams Memorial (watch this with the sound turned down), so we first sat for awhile in front of that. Bette took this picture.

Then began the difficult search for Gore. Section D, steps from the Saint-Gaudens – we knew this much. Also an unusual combination of a long slab and an upright gravestone. We munched the taffy we’d picked up at the cemetery offices, where a nice woman told us Vidal wasn’t in their system yet. I thought of the strange state he was in almost exactly a year after his death – a kind of predigitalized bardo – and how he’d maybe find that amusing. Anyway, I knew if the woman gave us Howard Austen’s location, that would also be Vidal’s. D 48, she said, and she circled the location.

The 48 was no help – Rock Creek Cemetery is not user friendly – but we tromped on, munching, peering, following this lane and that among the boxwood and statuary. Traffic from North Capitol Street streamed by. We were the only visitors, far as we could tell, in the whole place. Just us and two guys digging a fresh grave.

We circled and circled Section D but kept coming up empty; and I said to Bette: “Let’s go. It’s the thought that counts.” And as the Volvo crept away from the D Section I saw it, just curbside, and twenty steps straight downhill from the Saint-Gaudens: An upright stone and a large slab. “Hold on. Stop.”

So I would be able to salute him after all; which I did. I saluted him and I said I know you said love is not your bag, but I love you.

He wrote this, at the end of his memoir:

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits… Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.

So after all he wrote a love story, the story of his imperishable love for Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in the war and is buried near Vidal, both of them in the shade of a copper beech. Strange to think that his entire life after one passionate encounter with Trimble felt to Vidal partial, unfulfilled in any important way, and that his memoir anticipates the final lying-in that would bring him back to completion.

UD now stood under the beech thinking of all of this, of the way she read Vidal for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject…

Well… not insta… UD is right now off to Rock Creek Cemetery with her friend and neighbor Bette, where they will of course visit the famous Adams Memorial. Steps from this statue lies Vidal, and although he was a kook in his latter years… and although quite a bit of his writing was hackwork, many of his essays were beautiful and brilliant. UD will write about her little homage journey as soon as she gets back.

This bizarre institution is one of the main locations keeping this blog in business. It specializes in trustees like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, infantilizing and sexist rules for its students, conflict of interest among its post-Madoff/Merkin leaders, and decades worth of hushed-up sex scandals. And it’s all presided over by a very highly paid president who responds to most things with denial or silence.

Yeshiva is the very model of a corrupt university, and it should surprise no one that today its chancellor has had to resign in disgrace, having ordered the hushing up of extensive sexual abuse of students.

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

The larger context:

In recent years traditional law prohibiting cooperation with oppressive governments was invoked by ultra Orthodox groups to forbid reporting sexual abusers to the civil authorities (as required by American law). Modern Orthodoxy followed the haredim in denying the legitimacy of non-Orthodox movements. Even at Yeshiva University, a highly respected rosh yeshiva and decisor, Rav Hershel Schachter (seen as continuing Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik’s halachic teaching in the rabbinical seminary), said publicly that the prime minister of Israel should be assassinated if he dared to give up some section of Jerusalem for the sake of a peace treaty. (He later apologized for the comment.) Recently, Rabbi Schachter was recorded warning against reporting sexual abusers to the authorities (lest they be imprisoned and exposed to harm from anti-Semites).

On and on it goes; and if it weren’t for tenacious people like Peter Doshi, academic ghostwriting would be even more pernicious than it is.

This blog has long covered the scandal of ghosted professors. It will continue to do so.

… UD reflects on the concept “reputation” at her branch campus at Inside Higher Education.

Vanderbilt très SEC.

… of the way we were…

… UD will unpack, pull herself together, and do some blogging later.

Most important thing to relate right now, though: She won one of these, because her horse came in first at one of these.

In the age of technology and mass media, HD televisions are closer to the “real thing” than ever, and more games are available on television than ever before. Some universities, such as Michigan State, Georgia and even Alabama have noticed a disturbing trend of fans leaving games early to renew their “buzz” and watch from the comfort of their own home. The sale of alcohol could be a preventative course of action for this problem.