Last December, a SUNY Binghamton professor was stabbed to death by a paranoid graduate student. The student was well known to police and fellow students for his threatening and crazy behavior, but was still a student at Binghamton.
Yesterday, a graduate student at the University of Florida famous for his big-lecture geography class about which one student, echoing other comments, writes “Impossible NOT to get an A,” was shot by police. It’s not clear what condition he’s in.
For a year, at least one professor and one counselor at the university had known that the student was seriously unstable:
Police first met with Adu-Brempong on Monday to check on him after a report of possible emotional problems.
Geography professor Peter Waylen had contacted police to say Adu-Brempong had sent an e-mail with troubling statements, which were redacted in the police report. Waylen told police Adu-Brempong had been having delusional thoughts for at least a year and that he previously had received help from a UF counselor because he believed the U.S. government was not going to renew his student visa, the report stated.
… Waylen and an officer spoke Monday with Adu-Brempong at his apartment.
“I asked Adu-Brempong if he had any concerns that I could help with. Adu-Brempong advised that he was fine and did not need anyone’s help,” Officer Gene Rogers wrote in the report. “I advised him that Waylen and I were concerned for his safety and were there to assist him any way we could.”
The report states Adu-Brempong refused help from a counselor and stated several times that he was fine.
Last night a neighbor called police because Adu-Brempong was screaming inside of his apartment. Details on what caused him to be shot are unclear at this point. Police say he threatened them with a knife and a pipe.
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UD thanks a reader for sending her the Florida story.
… runs the headline at Business Week, and this one’s worth unpacking a bit.
Almost all of the colleges and universities University Diaries writes about are non-profits. They exist not to generate money for investors, but to educate people. They need enough funds, of course, to operate on as high a level as possible; but because their primary function involves a public good – enhancing the knowledge and skills of people – they receive various and significant state and federal government subsidies and tax exemptions.
Public institutions, like Berkeley, some of whose students and faculties have taken to the streets in protest against
state cutbacks (today, March 4, is a Day of Action, and a number of large rallies representing many public schools are expected), and private institutions (even insanely rich ones like Harvard), both receive all sorts of tax breaks along with government financial support.
The furloughs Mr UD and his colleagues at the University of Maryland have experienced, and the many other signs of institutional strain that this blog has noted at virtually all American universities, have of course to do with varying degrees of withdrawal of government funds from schools under the pressure of a bad economy.
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Because our taxes support non-profit universities, we have a stake in making sure these places don’t use our money to give their presidents millions of dollars, or, like Harvard, to hoard massive endowments. Likewise, we have an obligation to keep an eye on the tax-exempt NCAA and tax-exempt universities with Division I-A football and basketball programs (indeed, many people now argue that the NCAA and these sorts of campus sports programs should lose their tax exemption).
My point is that all sorts of goodies, subsidized by the American taxpayer, come to universities, and universities expect (should expect) some level of government scrutiny (think too of Senator Charles Grassley’s many letters of inquiry to universities about possible conflicts of interest in their medical schools) and citizen scrutiny because of this.
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Things start to get muddy when we turn to America’s burgeoning for-profit university industry.
For-profits aren’t bound by the non-profit ethos which says that our primary goal is to enhance the public good. For-profits are for profits. They’re doing what they do primarily to yield as much money as they can for investors. Because of this, the for-profit story, as UD has chronicled it over the course of this blog, has featured the sort of scandals you’d expect: Brazen recruitment of any student with a pulse, almost exclusively online curricula, and a practice of lying to recruits about graduation rates and job placements. One firm “paid a $6.5 million settlement in July 2007 to the California attorney general’s office, over allegedly misrepresenting graduates’ job placement rates and salaries. It also agreed to cease enrolling students in 11 programs at nine campuses.”
Now keep in mind that for-profits get massive federal support too. Typically over eighty percent of their revenue comes from you and from me.
So let’s go back to the headline on the Business Week article: Your Taxes Supporting For-Profit Firms as they Acquire Colleges.
How does that work?
Let’s start here:
A 2006 regulatory change fostered online growth and made takeovers more attractive… That year, Congress eliminated a rule prohibiting colleges that offered more than half of their courses online from receiving federal financial aid.
Well, this blog ain’t keen on online – UD calls it the poor white trash of education – but, you know, that’s just me. Congress loves it, and has made it easier for you to make an entirely online university. (I know. Diploma mills have been at this for years. Whole other subject.)
Anyway. Okay. So you can now make a really low-cost, really profitable university. Zillions of students all over the world, a few professors doing a lot of typing (How many students does each online class contain? I dunno. A thousand?), very little physical campus to maintain… You get the picture.
But – Did I say diploma mills were a whole other subject? They’re not really. You need to differentiate yourself from them, and that means real accreditation. Which is where we reenter the Business Week story:
ITT Educational Services Inc. paid $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June. In return, the company obtained an academic credential that may generate a taxpayer-funded bonanza worth as much as $1 billion.
ITT Educational, the U.S.’s third-biggest higher education company with a market value of $3.8 billion, may increase it by 26 percent, or $1 billion, within five years because of the purchase of 1,200-student Daniel Webster in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Michael Clifford, an investor in Del Mar, California, who has participated in the acquisitions of four nonprofit colleges. At least 75 percent of new revenue would come from access to the more than $100 billion a year in financial aid the U.S. hands out to college students, he said.
Key to tapping that money is Webster’s regional accreditation, which is the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard University and helps students transfer course credits from one college to another. Daniel Webster’s accreditation was its “most attractive” feature to ITT, said Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington law firm that has long represented the company.
“Companies are buying accreditation,” said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who studies for-profit higher education. “You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don’t have time. They want to boost enrollment 100 percent in two years.”
Let’s look more closely at what you’re getting as a student here:
The cost of attending an ITT Technical Institute, including tuition, fees and off-campus room and board, was $26,775 in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who entered ITT’s two-year schools in 2004, 29 percent graduated. ITT derived 70 percent of its 2009 revenue from federal financial aid, according to a company filing.
Wow. Where do I sign up? You get to pay Harvard rates for flunking out of a little-known academic institution. Plus, our taxes are paying for seventy percent of the school’s revenue!
Is our government watching out for us here?
The scrutiny these new for-profits get
“doesn’t remotely satisfy the sloppiest of due-diligence requirements,” said [Barmak] Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. “There is no methodical review of who has bought the college. If the Cosa Nostra applied, you would think you’d take a look.”
But the Department of Education is on it, man!
The U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that new for-profit colleges can’t qualify for assistance for two years, Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said in a telephone interview.
Under federal regulations taking effect July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the secretary of education if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50 percent in one year.
“It’s an area that we are watching closely,” Shireman said. “It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing.”
Kind of reminds you of the SEC when it was run by Bernie Madoff, doesn’t it?
It’s a very unorthodox play, so pay attention:
The Sporting Blog:
CITADEL QUARTERBACK CHARGED WITH
ROBBERY OF ONE OF HIS OWN COACHES
Among the four people charged Saturday in a Charleston, S.C., armed robbery was Miguel Starks, who was being considered as the possible starting quarterback next season at The Citadel, and Reginald Anthony Rice, a former linebacker for the military academy, as well as two College of Charleston students.
The victim in the case is one of Starks’ own coaches at The Citadel, assistant coach Joshua Harpe of West Ashley.
A police affidavit states Starks pointed “a handgun (semiauto) at the victim, struck him once in the head with the handgun and ordered him back into (the) apartment … The defendant … then bound the victim with black duct tape around his legs, mouth and eyes and threw him face down on the living room floor.”…
UD thanks David.
… what expensive webs we weave when first we prosecute for libel.
From the transcript of Simon Singh’s appeal in response to the British Chiropractic Association’s libel action against him:
THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I want to come back to something I raised before lunch which is still troubling me and it still has nothing to do with the outcome of the case, but here we are. Your clients [the BCA] are very steamed up at what they perceive to be a very serious libel. It has been said about them that they have indulged in happily promoting bogus treatments. Your case is – their case is: “That is absolute nonsense. We don’t. That’s not what we are running our professional lives for.”
It is now two years on, jolly nearly, since the matter that caused all this umbrage was published. The opportunity to put it right was not taken. The end of this litigation will not be for another how long – another twelve months?
MS ROGERS QC: Well that depends on a number of factors.
THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: Yes. So all the opportunities to put this right – to make it clear to the public that these allegations are nonsense – simply have not been taken, and yet it matters. I quite understand that it matters to your client that they should not have to put up with defamatory statements. I am just terribly troubled about the entire artificiality of all this and all of the huge expense. Somebody at the end of this litigation – somebody – is going to pay a vast amount of money. It will either be Dr Singh out of his funds or it will be your clients out of the contributions made by the subscriptions paid by their members. I am just baffled.
MS ROGERS QC: If your Lordship thinks that my clients relish spending years and money and time on this litigation, that is not right.
THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I do not think anybody is relishing this. No, forgive me. I am not for a moment thinking anybody is relishing it – plainly nobody is relishing it. But, at the end of the day, as to this issue about whether there is any reliable evidence [supporting various claims of chiropractic cure] or not as we speak now, it is either there or it is not. If there is reliable evidence, goodness gracious, why isn’t somebody publishing it?
Precisely the argument made to Calvo-Goller by the editors of the journal she believes libeled her. They offered her prominent space in their journal to comment and set things right. Instead, she sued, and is currently a figure of fun among the scholarly communities of the world.
Things have gone yet worse for the BCA. The trial has attracted enormous publicity to the way they advertise, and indeed to the legitimacy of the health claims they make.
From yesterday’s Guardian:
As the British Chiropractic Association’s battle with Simon Singh continues to work its way through the legal system, chiropractors are counting the financial costs of a major backlash resulting from a libel action that has left the Lord Chief Justice “baffled”. What was originally a dispute between the BCA and one science writer over free speech has become a brutally effective campaign to reform an entire industry.
A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures from the General Chiropractic Council.
The council, which is responsible for regulating the profession and has 2,400 chiropractors on its books, informs me that it has had to recruit six new members of staff to deal with a fifteenfold increase in complaints against its members – from 40 a year to 600. While it declined to comment directly on the costs inflicted by the reaction to the BCA’s actions, it is clear that a six-figure sum will be involved for the extra staffing costs alone, to which will have to be added the considerable costs of any misconduct hearings.
… who a few months ago wrote an excoriation of Brown’s president for the disrepute she brought to the school through her seat on the board of Goldman Sachs. (UD featured his opinion piece here.) Liebling wrote with the confidence, clarity, and ethical maturity most writers twice his age (nineteen) lack.
Liebling wrote to UD today, linking her to a New York Times article about the controversy at Brown. An excerpt from the article:
For Dr. Simmons, the controversy is not going away …quietly. Even though she said last month that she had decided not to stand for re-election to the board at the annual shareholders meeting later this year, some of her critics say she never should have taken the job at Goldman to begin with — and that she certainly should not have accepted so much money.
How much money?
A spot on a board, particularly at a moneymaker like Goldman, used to be considered a plum job. The demands were relatively modest compared with the rewards. Dr. Simmons, for instance, was paid $323,539 last year for her work on the board, and will soon leave her position at Goldman with stock that is currently worth about $4.3 million. That was on top of her salary at Brown, which was $576,000 this year.
Less of a plum now, what with all the public attention …
But anyway – here’s what’s wonderful:
Simon Liebling, a sophomore from Highland Park, N.J., got tongues wagging on College Hill when he criticized Dr. Simmons in The Daily Herald.
“Most people agreed with my basic point that this brought shame on the university,” Mr. Liebling, 19, said during an interview in a coffee shop at the center of campus. “It has been taken by most people to be outrageous.”
Bravo, Liebling.
The unionized faculty has placed an ad in the student newspaper advising students to begin looking at other universities for their summer courses.
“The UNH Faculty Union will boycott the 2010 summer session if a contract settlement with the UNH Administration is not reached prior to the final scheduling of courses,” reads an AAUP advertisement run in today’s edition of The New Hampshire. “We strongly recommend that students investigate summer course offerings at other institutions well in advance.”
… “I need to take summer classes in order to have enough credits to graduate by next May,” said junior Arielle Romano. “This is a university. We’re paying astronomically high tuition prices. I understand professors have to make a living, but they are here to teach us; it’s an honorable profession. It seems selfish of them to strike a semester of classes for an extra 0.2 percent increase in salary.”…
Students are indeed very angry, and, as this editorial makes clear, their anger is directed against the faculty union.
There’s a good deal of language, in comment threads to various campus articles about the crisis, about lazy professors.
UD‘s only comment at this point? Universities with unionized faculties have a responsibility to inform incoming students about the union. UNH students would not be angry if, when they accepted UNH’s offer of admission, they knew that the school operates on the collective bargaining / strike model. This isn’t the sort of information students and their parents should be expected to pick up in some casual way. UNH needs to be very, very clear about the ways in which this arrangement makes campus life precarious.
… wrote UD‘s colleague, Lee Sigelman, to her in an email in January 2008. Lee, who died last December, was an eminent political scientist. With various colleagues, he had his own blog, The Monkey Cage.
From The Monkey Cage, some memories of Lee.
i had professor sigelman for one class, intro to US politics. you rarely find heads of poli sci departments teaching intro classes to masses of freshmen but i think he enjoyed teaching it (i cant come up with any other reason why he would).
he started the class by asking everyone to fill out notecards with our contact info and one interesting thing about us. I put that my [only] real skill was the ability to draw homer simpson, and then i drew him. this made it onto the projector at the start of the next class.
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He was a wonderful mentor. And, if he’s out there reading this in the great beyond, I promise I’ll never use the word impact as a verb again!
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Lee was a remarkable person—funny, witty, engaging, and, despite all the heights he reached, exceedingly modest. It was humbling and inspirational to see how he lived his life and comported himself in the face of enormous adversity over the past two plus years.
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[One evening, at a fancy restaurant, Lee and I] were greeted with much enthusiasm and escorted to a semi-private room where a waiter and several assistants helped us into our chairs, grabbed the neatly folded napkins off the plates, and snapped them onto our laps.
Our waiter, a young, officious and somewhat pretentious fellow, introduced his staff, told us at length about the wonderful specials available to us, and, at the end of what had been a five minute peroration asked if Lee had any questions. Without skipping a beat, Lee replied, “What’s the capital of Albania?”
The waiter looked stunned, but managed to stutter out, “I don’t know, but we’ll find out before you leave.”
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Lee and I were friends and riding buddies who came from completely different professional backgrounds. He was the academician and I spent a career in business. The common ground we shared was our love of riding our bicycles.
One summer afternoon, a group of us had ridden out MacArthur Boulevard from the District into Maryland where we rode River Road. Lee particularly liked riding River Road; it was hilly and he loved to climb. He was a great climber and no matter how hard I tried I could never catch him on the long climbs.
We had finished our ride and the group was heading back down MacArthur into the District. Normally I jump off and take the Chain Bridge home, but [I] decided to stay with the group and venture home over the Key Bridge. Riding MacArthur into the District is relaxing, especially after a tough workout, because it’s flat and when it’s not, it’s downhill. We rode to where MacArthur meets Canal Road and the road narrows. From that point, past Georgetown University, to M Street at the start of Georgetown, the road becomes very bicycle unfriendly. Over the next quarter mile, cars, buses and trucks all jockey to either take M Street, the Key Bridge or the Whitehurst Freeway. Bicyclists and motorized vehicles always have an uneasy truce, and the truce is often stretched to its limits on this very short roadway where there are no shoulders.
Unusual as it was, I happened to be at the front of the group and Lee was behind me when a small passenger bus pulled up alongside us at the red light at the beginning of the run to M Street. The door opened next to where Lee was patiently sitting waiting for the light to change and I heard the driver say: “Why don’t you take the bike path?” Without missing a beat, Lee answered: “Why don’t you take 495 (The Capital Beltway).”
An Ohio State University football fan, Van Ness is converting his firetruck into an enormous Buckeyes helmet.
From The Lantern, OSU’s newspaper:
The fire engine, a Ford C-8000 Sanford Pumper, most recently belonged to a landscaping company that used it to transport water…
He … had to keep the project a secret from his family.
“It was classified because I didn’t want my mother to find out I spent money on a fire truck,” he said. “She wouldn’t have been happy.”
Van Ness said the Fire Buck will feature two flat-screen televisions, high-definition satellite coverage of Buckeye football games, a video game system, propane grill, and removable seating on the rear deck.
… The OSU Fire Buck is stationed at Street Creations Body Shop in Groveport, Ohio, for body and paint work, and then will be on its way to Auto Additions in Westerville, Ohio, for graphics. Once finished, the engine will resemble an OSU football helmet…
… doesn’t see much difference between a Georgetown University and a University of Phoenix education.
UD also wonders. I mean, of course, there’s the price….
… [T]he forced migration of academic endeavors to the Internet leaves me feeling cold and amateurish.
My loudest complaint is the impersonality of the online model. There’s something reassuring and intimate about a hand-corrected paper. To print a paper is to finalize it, making change all but impossible. Printing a paper brings the writer’s ideas and craft into the physical world. In a realm as tenuous and self-conscious as academia, tangibility provides a reassuring degree of legitimacy. A professor’s handwritten corrections are a sign that, even if the grade is poor, the student’s effort received individualized attention. Inserting feedback via track changes, or any online form, is chillingly anonymous and curt.
… [R]eplacing short essays turned in for feedback with essays copied-and-pasted into a three-inch Blackboard window actually weakens students’ grip on the fundamentals of structured writing. And if I wanted significant portions of my interaction with professors and classmates to take place online, I could have pursued admittance to the University of Phoenix.
[We are moving toward a way of being] I see as artificial and impersonal.
Duffley’s headline:
INTELLECT VIRTUALLY ABSENT IN THE ONLINE CLASSROOM