Four college students, likely to be five including [Chico State’s Mason] Sumnicht, [who has been taken off life support,] have died this semester [in Chico] from alcohol or drug abuse […].

“It seems incomprehensible,” [a policewoman] said.

One friend wonders if, for his 21st birthday, Sumnicht attempted to drink 21 shots.

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It’s not entirely clear from news reports, but this seems to be the breakdown: Two of these deaths have been Chico State students; one seems to have been a person visiting Chico State. Two others who died were students at other colleges in the town of Chico.

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Judging by this 2005 article, recent Chico State presidents have tried, and tried hard. Faculty were almost totally uncooperative (“[F]aculty do not perceive it as their responsibility… to deal with this serious problem.”), despite the fact that, as the two presidents who wrote the article note, “they have tremendous influence on their students.” The presidents suggest shutting down the fraternities.

That hasn’t happened.

What to do? The town’s a toxic site, and Chico State, with its disastrous history of self-destructive student drunks, is its epicenter.

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Since the stubbornness of the destruction suggests that the core problem is a profoundly – maybe permanently – embedded culture of booze, one approach would be to empty the campus of students. At the end of this academic year, announce that all students must transfer to another institution. Close down all fraternities and sororities, and do other things to make it difficult to drink yourself to death (this would include getting far tougher with bars, the local city council, advertisers, etc.). Once you’ve done all that, admit a new freshman class. Make it clear to those admitted that they are part of a new Chico, and if they can’t sober up they will be expelled right away.

… on this blog, has died.

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Update: A fine account of Gilbert’s career and his last days.

A former Oxford lecturer stole all the money of a design firm which had temporarily employed her. She

plundered the firm’s accounts to spend thousands of pounds at stores including internet couture site “Net a Porter” and Selfridges.

She also hired holiday homes in Portugal, spent £10,000 flying a friend to London from Italy and made out cheques for thousands of pounds.

When she realised the police were on her tail, [Maria] Di Natale tried to have two incriminating computers stolen from the company offices.

She

covered her tracks by ensuring the company financial system was “almost wholly destroyed.”

Then, when the previous financial controller was asked to return to the company, Di Natale suggested selling the company to avert bankruptcy – to a firm she owned.

An investigation by an accountancy firm found she had spent £13,286 on Portuguese holidays, £17,000 on renting a flat for her and her husband and £2,840 on a chaise longue.

She had also hired a jet to fly in an associate to London for a charity football match.

She should not go to jail, her lawyer argued, because she is

suffering from bipolar disorder.

She will go to jail. For five years.

… from the usually staid Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read the whole thing. Do not miss the videos.

Because every paragraph of it is good, it’s hard for UD to choose an excerpt. I guess this is her favorite:

Here’s the course description of “General Humanities II,” taught by Michael Coker, an English instructor at Western Oklahoma. “We start with the Renaissance and move to the present,” he says in an online video. “We cover art, culture, society, religion, politics. The humanities is a very broad topic, and we cover essentially everything that leads up to our modern society, the ideas that inform our modern world.”

Sounds like a really interesting class — but seven centuries in 50 hours? That may seem daunting, Mr. Coker acknowledges. “But I’ve designed the class to be doable in 10 days,” he says in the video. “If you don’t have a lot going on in those 10 days, the class is not overly difficult.”

There’s only one downside to this writer having so outdone himself. You can already see his piece for next year:

Some accreditors have questioned whether a ten-minute course on the decline of the Roman Empire can really legitimately cover the material. “It sounds daunting,” acknowledges its instructor, “but if you don’t have a lot going on in those ten minutes, it’s a cinch.”

… — by far —” has really hit the ground running.

But then when you hire Mike Leach you should expect your money to be paying for more than coaching. When you take on at vast expense a person just fired – because of allegations of player abuse – by Texas Tech, pain slut … Texas Tech, a school that never saw a sadist it didn’t like… You should probably expect a little roughing up in exchange for all that cash.

You should also expect Leach to sue your ass and everybody else’s. Even though he always loses. After costing you millions of dollars in legal fees.

Yes, Mike Leach was quite the hot prospect when Washington State eagerly took him on board and gave him all its money. How utterly unexpected that just after he’s begun coaching there a prominent player has left the school, charging abuse by Leach’s staff. How totally shocked Washington State will be when Leach’s lawsuits against it start coming in.

UD long ago failed to be amazed by the criminal stupidity of certain American football factories. She does continue to be amazed that no responsible adults – faculty, trustees – exist at those schools.

… or they’ll never disclose.

And that’s what Rose Hackman, a Columbia University student, has done with regard to tight-lipped Business School professor Glenn Hubbard, star of the film Inside Job.

Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard is … featured in [the film] “Inside Job.” In interviews in the film, Dean Hubbard is asked about his extensive ties to the financial service industry, including a 2004 paper written with the then-Goldman Sachs chief economist, William C. Dudley (now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York), in which Hubbard praised credit derivatives as enhancing economic stability, reducing volatility, and making recessions less frequent and severe. According to the New York Times, Warren Buffett has called these same practices “financial weapons of mass destruction” that are widely acknowledged by many economists as having helped trigger the crisis.

Following the film’s release, along with other single-school initiatives, Columbia Business School nominally addressed critics by establishing a committee headed by Hubbard’s vice dean, Christopher Mayer. The result was a pledge by the committee to go beyond University transparency requirements. The pledge asked Business School faculty to declare all outside activities on an online CV, linked to each faculty member’s individual website.

But Hubbard’s position as economic advisor to the former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney still remains absent from his online Columbia profile. His ties to the Analysis Group, a consultancy firm which has placed him as an expert defending financial industry players, also remains absent.

A campus policeman killed the person wielding the sword. It’s too soon to know whether this was a student at Metropolitan State University, or whether the person with the sword was drunk or high, etc.

… by Edmund Blunden, who fought in the First World War.

He wrote this in 1936.

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Can You Remember?

Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

Thanks to the substantial income that poured in over the years from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, inspired by Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she was able to give seven-figure donations for a new wing of the London Library (Eliot had been its president) and to Newnham College, Cambridge. She also donated £15,000 for the annual TS Eliot prize for poetry.

My latest Inside Higher Education post.

… showing up for games. It’s such becoming behavior for a university, harassing your undergraduates out of the library and into the stands.

As at Michigan State, where the little buggers persist in showing minds of their own. The basketball coach is really angry with them.

“I don’t want to hear about it being too cold,” [Tom] Izzo said. “If it is, we’ve got a bunch of wimpy students, you know?

“I love our students. I think students have got to hold students accountable… We’ve got to self-evaluate.”

HEY. WATCH ME EARN MY 3.5 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR BY CALLING THE STUDENT BODY AT MSU WIMPS.

“The comparison is night and day,” Yarabeck said. “When I first got here, you’d almost see as many other school shirts as you did Sam Houston shirts. To be honest, everything was kind of revolving around people going to class — which they need to do — but there wasn’t that sense of pride that there certainly is now. Now you go and it’s hard not to see people in orange shirts.

“The whole school coming together and generating spirit feeds on everything. It’s like momentum, when you start winning games; the players learn how to win. When you start having spirit, like when the Kat Krazies were created about five years ago, that puts it up a notch too. Guys painted out in orange banging on a metal sign … that kind of unnerves the opposition.

“All these things worked together and generated positive feeling for our sports teams and a real pride in SHSU. What’s not to be proud of? Look at how the student body has grown – the word is getting out. It all fits together for the betterment of our university.”

The great thing about big-time university sports, we’re told, is how much excitement and esprit de corps it brings to campus…

Or, uh, to 750 miles from campus.

Once you get into the sort of sports debt the University of Southern Mississippi is in – they’re draining academics to deal with their majorly in the red program – you “need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base,” says the head of the faculty senate. Whatever the most lucrative venue for the game, you’ve got to go there, so forget about actual students and alumni attending.

Strange, ain’t it? UD doesn’t associate post-modernism with places like Hattiesburg, but the simulacrum’s alive and well in Dixie Land.

Really? UD spends quite a bit of time chronicling university coaches who hit people – players, staff – when they get angry. Those of us who follow campus football and basketball can easily reel off five or so names of coaches who keep getting fired because they’re verbally and/or physically abusive to students.

And hell, most of them come from the same school!

That would be good ol’ Texas Tech, a school so masochistic UD calls it America’s university as pain slut. The latest thing is that cameras have caught good ol’ Tommy Tuberville hitting one of his coaches. Like right out there sose everybody can see!

UD‘s pretty sure she’s on the side of Green Mountain College in this dispute about whether to slaughter and then sustainably eat two oxen who’ve had to be retired from the fields.

But she knows she’s enjoying some of the things people on and off campus are saying.

Off-campus enemies of the slaughter and eat approach are, say the provost, “at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”

A student notes: “It’s funny that it’s blown up in such a way, because on any other farm anywhere, this isn’t even a conversation that you would begin to have. It’s something that animals get to a certain point in their lives and they become food. And that’s just how it’s been for years, you know, decades.” Millennia, actually.