2010 was quite a year for St John’s University.

First there was this guy, St. John’s 2008 Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award winner. So proud was he of this achievement that he wore a big red sweatshirt emblazoned with ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY to his first TARP fraud court appearance.

Then the dean of their Asian studies school and vp of international affairs had the following federal charges brought against her:

She faces a 10-count indictment including bribery, forced labor [of graduate students] and tax charges. The most serious charge, forced labor, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The mainstream as well as tabloid press is going to town over Cecilia Chang, an out of control person who has already imploded in court, testifying (against legal advice) on her own behalf.

Elliott Carter dies.

A trustee of the University of Colorado Business School has been indicted for insider trading. Guilty or innocent, he seems already to have been scrubbed from the school’s pages.

… to whom he has just lost that he’s a fucker – and to do it on Military Appreciation Day, when the winning coach’s team is the Air Force Academy. It’s one thing for the video someone shot of the coach losing it to go viral and embarrass the whole university.

It’s quite another for the head of the university’s booster club to reveal a shocking overuse of quotation marks in his email complaining to the University of Wyoming athletics director about all of this.

At this time — the UW Foundation is feeling ‘foolish’ in funding an ‘f-bomb screaming loser’. Sorry to be harsh. But, I am starting to get hammered myself with the UW Foundation Board. I take my responsibility very seriously in helping the UW Foundation Board make “good decisions.” Right now ‘do not’ feel that I have guided a ‘good decision’.

… From the day of the Foundation investment in Dave — the Pokes have gone 1-7???. There is the ‘layman’s view’ that the Pokes were not competitive in the bowl — as Dave seemed to spend more time that weekend focused on his contract than preparing for the Bowl game. And, now 1-6 this season. And, now the YouTube ‘f-bomb’ fest by Coach Dave????

… Guide me … I need to know what to say when my Board members call me and question ‘the investment’ in Dave????? I know we said the ‘obligation’ from the Foundation would likely be only 2 years as Coach Dave ‘vaulted his career’ to a BCS school. But, we know the commitment could be 5-years??!!! And, it is doubtful that any BCS schools are lining up to recruit Coach Dave. At the rate Dave is going — would be nice to know that Coach Dave is ‘committed’ to win with the Cowboys — and, committed to accomplishing something in Wyoming.

Pelted with this quote-hail, Scathing Online Schoolmarm can only avert her face and ask WHY? WHY?

“WHY?”

I mean, what does the act of putting words and phrases in quotation marks do? It either

1. makes it appear that you are quoting someone else’s words; or

2. makes it appear that you are signalling irony or skepticism or sarcasm.

Look over the email and note the quoted words. Are they meant ironically? Noooooo. “Au contraire.” He has “put in quotation marks” precisely those words which are most “heartfelt.”

“”””””””””””””WHY?””””””””””””””””

… hide nor tuft of Keith Ablow, the faculty member who said that the only responsible thing he as a physician could recommend to Vice President Joe Biden’s family would be extensive tests for dementia and alcoholism.

Long before his post-debate analysis, Ablow had drawn protests from Tufts students and staff; but he remains that curious non-thing, an assistant clinical professor.

Ablow blows up frequently in public places with strange and strictly non-empirical remarks about other people, and, each time he does, Tufts notes that Ablow is non-faculty faculty – gets no money, has done nothing on campus for years.

Tufts calls Ablow’s position “voluntary,” but UD wonders what this means. He gets to just, like, be on the university’s faculty, because he wants to? Can any MD who thinks Soviet-style forensics is a blast voluntarily attach himself to Tufts? Is the position voluntary for Ablow and involuntary for Tufts?

Let’s say, for instance, that Tufts would like to stop enjoying its affiliation with Keith Ablow. Let’s say Tufts doesn’t think it’s right for Ablow to enjoy the respectability an academic affiliation confers. Let’s go overboard and even say that psychiatrists on the psychiatry faculty at Tufts conclude Ablow’s non-empirical procedure runs counter to everything psychiatry as a respectable therapeutic and intellectual endeavor has tried to be. Can’t it do anything about that?

… of the building where UD covers monthly Town Council meetings for the Garrett Park Bugle reminds her why she loves her town, the town where she grew up. Like the train station (Image 4) down the street from UD‘s house, it’s small and beautiful and for UD at least very evocative – of stillness, simplicity, and long passages of time.

“It must be nice to live in a neighborhood that’s an arboretum,” writes a local blogger about Garrett Park. It is, and not only in the spring and autumn. In winter the trees are a delicate gray against the snow. In winter the town’s small wooden houses surrounded by big trees make it feel like a Japanese garden, a quiet island.

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Yesterday, for the first time after Hurricane Sandy, I walked to the top of our property, a thickly wooded hill overlooking a plunge down to train tracks. We thought no trees fell during the storm, but here was a massive fall – a dead elm with so broad a bifurcated trunk I thought it was two trees. As I lopped through smaller branches, most of the wood I saw was hollowed and rotten, home to generations of critters. Dry dusty vines looping around the trunks gave them a Southern Gothic feel. The vines came loose in my hand. I raked the logs and leaves that covered a path I’d made through the woods. Now, with some climbing, you can get to the end of the yard.

The simplest solution is often the best. It’s now undisputed common knowledge that laptops, phones, and other technologies brought into class distract you and those around you who are forced to be aware of your fascinating screen. Tens of thousands of professors, and increasing numbers of departments, ban laptops from the classroom.

And this is clearly the trend. In a few years, two or three techno-cults will survive on a few campuses; their directors-of-campus-technology leaders will continue to insist that watching Tits Galore while listening to a Heidegger lecture makes the concept of Geworfenheit ever so much clearer. But they will be shouted down; eventually, it will be very difficult indeed to find a laptop-friendly university classroom.

But professors aren’t always attracted to simple solutions. Faced with the laptop problem, they contort themselves, and they turn students who are supposed to be learning things into guinea pigs.

Take York University’s Henry Kim. Kim is fully aware that his students aren’t listening to him because they’re watching shit on their laptops. Instead of banning laptops, however, Kim has taken a page out of Erich Honecker’s East Germany and turned his students into a spy network. If a student sees another student using her laptop for non-class purposes (Kim has already had his students swear some ridiculous pledge, etc.), she is to report that to Kim.

“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class.”

Comrade Honecker speaks! Creating new social norms by encouraging students to turn in other students – that’s the solution to the laptop problem!

… university athletics program in the United States, does it again. Scan some of these posts to remind yourself — no, to convince yourself, because it’s actually unbelievable — that the citizens of an American state have for decades allowed their money to subsidize criminal players; overpaid, rule-breaking coaches whose immense buyouts go on forever; endlessly litigious athletics staff employees; and an athletics department currently running – amid declining ticket sales – a four million dollar deficit. Wouldn’t you expect, at this point, at least a modest grassroots protest somewhere? We’d like to be paying for a real university that doesn’t embarrass us kind of thing? I mean… butt-chugging, anyone?

But with every new squalid story — this one about the recruitment of a thief (other schools didn’t want him; Tennessee was thrilled to take him) who has now apparently begun stealing on campus — the people of Tennessee sit there, as if they think the reason they pay tens of millions to university coaches is so that these people can make brilliant decisions like these…

Don’t Tennesseans ever wonder whether the University of Tennessee has a president? Don’t they ever wonder why this person never appears, never makes statements?

Or how ’bout those trustees?

To be sure, a few cynical Democratic lawmakers still support the government-funded for-profit college scam (put for-profit in my search engine for background). But as the industry’s greed, and criminal neglect of students’ educations, becomes common knowledge, it’s mainly Republicans – famously contemptuous of financial dependency on the government – who continue to whomp themselves up for an industry almost wholly bankrolled by federal dollars.

As David Halperin notes, a Republican victory in November is probably the industry’s last chance to salvage its basic model (enroll everyone; use their federal education money for your executives’ salaries; watch everyone drop out and spend the rest of their lives trying to pay back loans; find new suckers). Even with Republicans running the country, the for-profits may be unable to reverse the collapse of their sickening sector, one of the few surviving instances of pure exploitation of the weak by the strong, the masses by the elites.

The athletics director at scandal-mad University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is “speaking out,” reports a local news station. No more waffling, no more evasion!

He is now ready to announce that “the Carolina program is not perfect, and that he’s working to fix the problems.”

And that’s not all.

In response to allegations that football player Erik Highsmith plagiarized course papers from “blogs written by 11-year-olds” Cunningham announced “[W]e’ve got outstanding student athletes.”

Keep up the new fresh air policy, Bubba!

… UD learns that Graham Spanier, once president of Penn State, has been charged with “obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy, endangering the welfare of children and failure to report allegations of child abuse.”

In the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal,

emails show that [Tim] Curley, [Gary] Schultz and Spanier at first agreed to report the allegations by [Mike] McQueary to child welfare authorities, but that Curley later changed his mind “after talking it over with Joe” — a reference to Paterno. They then developed a new plan to encourage Sandusky to seek professional help, according to the Freeh report. “This approach is acceptable to me,” Spanier wrote in a Feb. 27, 2001 email to Curley and Schultz. The only downside for us if the message isnt ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline and a reasonable way to proceed.”

These new charges not only bring back the Penn State scandal; they remind us of its profound dimensions: The president of a major American university is now accused of a shocking list of crimes.

… at the University of Southern California, a well-heeled school near some dangerous neighborhoods.

In April alone two students were murdered not far from campus, and a few days after that, a campus security guard shot and wounded a man who’d just robbed two students.

Last night, at an on-campus Halloween party hosted by a USC student organization, two men (neither a student) got into a fight, and four people were shot, one critically.

As the story develops, we’ll want to know about security at the party. Did students need to show identification cards? Were campus police around?

The story has – hours after the shootings – already received big national and international coverage.

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UPDATE: These details can’t yet be confirmed, but a campus blogger describes the party as free for USC students and open to non-students for a fee. If so, given recent events, that was a really stupid decision on someone’s part.

The scene was apparently one of mayhem, with panicked crowds running from gunshots.

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From an interview moments after the shootings, with a student who witnessed the events:

I still don’t believe it happened. I definitely don’t believe it happened. It did not in the least occur to me that it was real. Why would it be real?

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Tweets. “I need a bullet-proof vest for school.”

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How Not to Do Damage Control:

1. Call it an “isolated incident” when everyone can see that it’s more of a culminating incident, with crime getting closer and closer to campus over the last few months.

2. Assure people that “campus security was monitoring the party, witnessed the shooting and was able to quickly apprehend the suspects.” What a comfort. They were standing around and watching.

According to reports, the crowd had grown dangerously large. Was campus security simply monitoring this? Why did they let the crowd get so large?

3. Don’t say “This incident reminds us that we must look out for ourselves and be particularly vigilant about the personal safety of friends and guests at our social events. … We all play an important role in ensuring a safe campus.” The words for this statement are insipid and smug. The spokesperson should have begun by noting how frightening this event was, and how totally unacceptable. He should then have announced a change in USC’s idiotic policy:

[C]ampus policy requires that student parties be open only to guests with student IDs from USC or another university.

Huh? Anyone, given recent events, could have seen that neighborhood violence was encroaching on campus. To have so open a policy is asking for trouble.

The president of the university needs to hold a news conference and announce new security policies.

Wearing pressed prison khakis with a pale logo on the back (INMATE—NEW HANOVER COUNTY), his hair is thinning, and all white.

A fifth student has died.