Title: Love, and the Arrest of Life

If you haven’t yet enrolled in UD‘s poetry MOOC, feel free.

Following the massive academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is essentially following the entire leadership of a school – president, deans, high-ranking faculty – attempting to convince people that this leadership saw no difference between a department flagrantly run for the convenience of its athletics program and all other departments.

These people are attempting to convince us that despite well-established fraudulent procedures along these lines at many big-time sports schools – clustering of players into certain majors, department chairs who are nothing more than tools of the athletic program, tutors who cheat on behalf of players, the use of the designation “independent study” to create rafts of bogus courses – all signs of sports-sponsored academic fraudulence on their campus “escaped attention,” in the words of a dean.

No wonder they are having difficulties persuading us to believe that – despite SUNY Binghamton, Auburn, and all the other recent national academic fraud stories with exactly these elements – no one at Chapel Hill had enough distrust in the integrity of its catering-to-athletes department to investigate even a little. We’re supposed to believe that, until the unfolding of a series of events entirely outside the hands of the school’s leadership, everyone trusted in the integrity of this department and its chair.

It’s tawdry and pathetic. It’s insulting to all of us watching as UNC simply and repeatedly lies. It’s particularly insulting to the taxpayers of North Carolina who pay the salaries of corrupt department chairs and cynical administrators.

Well ain’t that great. What a fucking profile in courage. Hawaii runs the scummiest losingest football program out there, but look out world here we come!

On Thursday afternoon, former UH quarterback Colt Brennan was released from jail. And in separate incidents, three current football players were arrested for DUI’s. The school is also investigating the canceled Stevie Wonder benefit concert.

A football whorehouse is a football whorehouse, and you can get all Southern about it and hem and haw about tradition and shit but whether you’re Chapel Hill or Penn State you’re a whorehouse.

The particular stink from Penn State having become over-familiar from 24/7 coverage, the country’s moving on to Chapel Hill for a fresher stench.

America is on one long summer college athletics tour this year. After Chapel Hill, it’s going to be the University of Michigan.

“Generally, (faculty) call for an external review of athletic advising, independent of the Athletic Department, as well as more forthright statements from the administration about the compromises made to host Division I athletics at UNC,” the report said.

That’s a wee UNC faculty committee commenting on an entire academic department run by and for athletics. The external review will be a stunner (look what Louis Freeh did) in which, to the astonishment of the university’s president and trustees, it will turn out that massive academic fraud at the school was organized not by one or two well-meaning misguided people, but a whole whorehouse of characters, but that of course we shouldn’t hold the trustees or the president responsible.

Tragic enough that Southern Methodist University football got the death penalty and never recovered; now it emerges that three of their players have been robbed of all their electronic toys by a prostitute one of them refused to pay.

The tragic flaw this time was leaving her alone in their house after refusing payment:

The three football players went to their end-of-year football banquet and left the escort in the home, according to a police report obtained by Channel 11.

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UD thanks Dave.

Adauto is an unidentified University of Texas El Paso administrator (?), who cheerily cooperates with the local press in providing background on Professor Fernando Rodriguez, who has suddenly up and resigned. Or retired. Or whatever.

Rodriguez turned in his resignation letter in recent weeks, Adauto said. Asked why UTEP didn’t make that information public, Adauto said, “I’m not sure it was necessary. He resigned.”

… Asked whether the professor’s departure is a resignation or a retirement, Adauto said, “Technically, there is no difference.”

He’s just… gone, okay? I don’t want to talk about it!

The reasons he left are indeed manifold and obscure. A scan of the El Paso Times article suggests levels of corruption typical to Texas but rather shocking in other parts of the country. The FBI notes that he

received more than $914,000 in outside employment between 2001 and 2009 without reporting it as required by University of Texas at El Paso rules. Additional documents showed that Rodriguez was paid an additional $233,000 by Aliviane Inc. in 2010, bringing his total pay by the nonprofit to more than $1.1 million.

While Rodriguez will never reach the heights of Nemeroff (that was pharma; this was only the federal government), he managed to pull in quite a lot of money while disclosing none of it to UTEP. Also, unlike Nemeroff (so far), he will probably go to jail.

A commenter on an article about a student recently expelled from Portland State University nails it.

Of course people like this guy, who lied about having four guns in his apartment after campus police went there because of threatening remarks he made about one of his professors, will sue the universities that make them leave. Doesn’t matter. PSU did the right thing.

Tim Foley was among the children most extensively groomed for a future spy career, officials say. Though he wasn’t American-born, his parents lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, under the assumed names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Mr. Foley was 20 when his parents were arrested and had just finished his sophomore year at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

His parents revealed their double life to him well before their arrest, according to current and former officials, whose knowledge of the discussion was based on surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included bugging suspects’ homes. The officials said the parents also told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps.

He agreed, said the officials. At the end of the discussion with his parents, according to one person familiar with the surveillance, the young man stood up and saluted “Mother Russia.” He also agreed to travel to Russia to begin formal espionage training, officials said.

Did I teach this guy how to be even more American in an Intro American Novel seminar? Was I an unwitting tool in the hands of Russian intelligence?

… that UD supposes it doesn’t much matter that they’re also footing the bill for three diploma-mill fakes at the University of the District of Columbia.

It’s a case of what UD calls diploma milling — all three professors bought their PhD at the same diploma mill.

Diploma milling happens all the time. Colleagues at schools, in fire and police departments, in the military — all the bureaucracies where you can only get a serious raise if you have an advanced degree — recommend to one another a particular automatic-degree-dispenser. The three UDC professors with bogus degrees all work together, in the department of Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Social Work.

I guess it didn’t occur to them that someone – a reporter, in this instance – might find that coincidence worth pursuing.

Though UD is going to guess that someone inside UDC tipped off the reporter.

That’s usually how it happens. Someone inside the organization is royally pissed that while she worked hard and paid a lot of money for a legitimate degree, colleagues parted with a few thousand dollars and pressed the BUY YOUR PHD NOW!! button on their computer.

AWKward.

A former student of [University of Chicago Business School professor Gary] Becker’s told me that he found many of his classmates to be remarkably amoral… They perceived any failure to commit a high-benefit crime with a low expected cost as a failure to act rationally, almost a proof of stupidity. The student’s experience is consistent with the experimental findings I mentioned above [See this post’s headline.].

AWKward.

Yes, UD‘s back in one of her most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Click on it at the bottom of this post for years of stories about guys who went directly from America’s very best business schools (Wharton does our financial criminals proudest, but Harvard’s in there trying) to a life of global money mayhem. The swath of destruction they leave suggests that remarkable amorality is only Part One. There’s also a brilliant nihilistic malice in play.

Since the deeper they get into their business school curriculum, the more some students seek to reduce the earth to cinders, one might ask, as Luigi Zingales does in the pages of Bloomberg’s (whose founder makes anyone who doesn’t flaunt his rule-breaking, anti-social, privileges look stupid), whether, as he puts it, business schools “incubate” criminals.

UD wouldn’t use the word incubate. B-schools refine criminals; they take naive inchoate rapacious instincts and educate them. They also – as the Rajaratnam case confirms – bring criminals together. They provide the critical mass without which conspiracies cannot flourish.

In a few days, Les UDs leave for their summer stay at – oh, we’re intimates now; I’ll tell you the place’s name – Budy (Polish for shacks). Budy is their little house in upstate New York. Here they sit around reading and avoiding the hellishness of August in our nation’s capital.

In the middle of August, they go to the Bear Cafe in Bearsville (a pretty ride through Catskill Park) to celebrate UD‘s birthday.

I’ve already mentioned that upstate neighbors have warned Les UDs about more bears than usual this season, and here’s a story about bears in Bearville.

This guy, a mentor at SUNY Empire State (I think mentor means professor), keeps getting his house trashed by bears.

Following their first bear invasion… the Knowles family locked the windows and doors and left home for a dinner gathering.

They returned a few hours later to find a kitchen casement window had been torn open, its lock twisted into uselessness. Their home had been trashed all over again.

The family cleaned up their home and went to bed, hoping they’d have no more visits from bears.

But the next day was the worst. Knowles and his family returned home at 7 p.m. to find the house completely ransacked. The bears had trashed 7-year-old Takemi’s bedroom, rummaging through his closet, even defecating on his bed.

Two guys from the Department of Environmental Conservation showed up, with guns.

“I’m feeling terrible, about to witness an execution,” Knowles later wrote in an e-mail.

But the shots missed their mark. The bear scampered off into the woods behind Knowles’ home. Thirty minutes later, the DEC men determined that both shots were “clean misses” and the bear had not been injured. The trapped cub was released.

The experts now hope the mother bear has been spooked enough to stay away from homes in the area.

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A commenter on the article writes:

I feel much safer now that we know 2 DEC officers can’t hit a standing bear.

“The book was swiftly removed from the shelves and the authors vowed to find the culprits.”

Yes, it’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world when it comes to plagiarism. Find the culprits? “[O]ne must wonder what the role of the people listed as authors is, if they did not actually write the book themselves.”

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“Living?” said Villiers’ Axël. “Our servants will do that for us.”

Writing? say the plagiarists that this poor overworked woman tracks. Our servants will do that for us.

The University of Texas has a fracking mess on its hands because a prominent professor didn’t disclose – in a study he authored about the fracking industry – his big financial investment in the fracking industry.

Dude still doesn’t get it: “Disclosing my Plains board position would not have served any meaningful purpose relevant to this study.” What a tool.

… on Penn State.

As Berkeley makes its own MOOC moves, this distinction is crucial: Free, open-sourced MOOCS are a public service, an investigation into certain technologies, a way of broadcasting your university’s name to the world, a democratizing gesture. Monetized credit-bearing online courses have impossibly high rates of cheating, are often cheaply done and poorly staffed, with one (frequently part-time) faculty drudge (I call these people air traffic controllers) responsible for hundreds of students, etc. They are hard to distinguish from the tax-syphoning, for-profit, shames-of-a-nation. (Scroll down.)

Faculty leaders have cautioned the university against moving too quickly with the online courses. The UC Academic Senate has said it worries about the quality and finances of the UC Online project.

In contrast, some of those most concerned about UC’s plans say they support free projects like Coursera and edX.