Quick. Online. Largely bogus course content. Incredibly high tuition paid for by someone else.

The always pretentiously named but often cheesy executive MBA degree has always been a major candidate for fraud, and I’m sure Baruch College isn’t the first to run its program fraudulently, but it’s the first to get caught changing student grades so all the money keeps coming in.

The dean in charge when the forgery was going on has flown the coop and landed in a nice job at the University of Connecticut, which must be thrilled to have hired such a great manager.

Trustees of the University of Virginia were mad to save university money by putting courses online and all, but when it came to their own personal grooming needs, no cost was too high. They cain’t talk good, so they were arranging to pay for ten A-FUCKING-MAZING hours (Each hour costs – what? – a thousand dollars? UD knows this is nothing by corporate lawyer standards… But think of it this way – Michael Jackson’s doctor – the one who’s in jail – was also paid around a thousand dollars an hour.) of speech therapy.

The University of Virginia visitors are truly visitors from another planet. Most people would be so staggered by that rate that the whole point of the exercise would be lost. They’d stand there mute, their mouth hanging open.

The NCAA still has to drop the hammer on the Miami football program for the great Nevin Shapiro caper of 2011, which we’d unbelievably thought at one point was the worst thing that could happen to college football, or something like that. Those were simpler times, and I’m pretty sure we all really miss them.

… catches up with its vice-rector. He has just resigned. This leaves Dragas with her Dragas exposed.

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

And, as Teresa Sullivan anticipated, the Wulf is now at the door.

On Tuesday, engineering professor William Wulf sent a stern letter of resignation to the new interim president. It was unclear if Wulf had another job lined up. Wulf’s resignation was considered significant because he is one of fewer than 20 “university professors” among a faculty of 2,200, an honor bestowed on the school’s most accomplished educators.

“I do not wish to be associated with an institution being as badly run as the current UVa,” he wrote. “A BOV that so poorly understands UVa, and academic culture more generally, is going to make a lot more dumb decisions, so the University is headed for disaster, and I don’t want to be any part of that. And, frankly, I think you should be ashamed to be party to this debacle!”

Surprisingly well-written for an engineering type. Scathing Online Schoolmarm would have dumped the final exclamation mark.

An education columnist at the Washington Post pinpoints the exact location where Rector Dragas has dragged U Va’s sorry ass.

With its new managerial elite, and its expensive public relations firm for managing the crisis its own trustees have brought upon it, U Va is now digging a yet deeper grave. Why?

Because professors really don’t like being condescended to and massaged into compliance with benevolent managerial states. They know it when this pacifying technique is being used on them, and it makes them mad.

A school like Virginia has gone out of its way to hire many professors who are independent thinkers and who are committed to seeing the world clearly. These are not the sort of people who watch Goldman Sachs pr spots and say Wow. I thought Goldman Sachs was a vampire squid but it turns out it’s all about teaching inner city kids! They’re not the sort of people who watch BP pr spots and say Hey, could have fooled me. I thought BP was an oil company whose arrant disregard destroyed lives and landscapes. Turns out it’s an environmentalist outfit! They’re not the sort of people who say This Hill and Knowlton video of Helen Dragas wiping away a tear and talking about her anguish really puts the whole president-dumping thing in perspective for me.

The more of that shit Virginia does (and they don’t know to do anything else), the madder the university community is going to get.

In a classic tragic reversal, America’s great vampire squid is having some of its own blood drawn. Not very much, to be sure; but if Goldman Sachs has to pay lawyers’ fees for every associate on trial for insider trading, that could put it out of business.

Maybe they’ll send the president of Barnard College – a current Goldman Sachs board member – chasing after Rajat Gupta for repayment.

The author of a new book about growing is interviewed.

[G]etting a mental-health diagnosis can intersect with the adolescent search for self. Being diagnosed and using medication confers an identity, that of someone with a mental disorder. To an adolescent who is preoccupied with constructing an identity anyway, and looking for clues to who she is, that can be a big deal. Some adolescents feel that having a diagnostic label is clarifying and that it helps them. But others wrestle with it. They ruminate about what it means to be sick. They take that identity deep inside, and sometimes magnify it way out of proportion. A diagnosis event can have lasting, rippling consequences, and I think adults should be very cautious and careful before they impose a diagnostic label, or let a young person self-impose such a label, on what may be ordinary developmental struggles.

But hey. That’s nothing. Because of the work of Joseph Biederman and others, it’s now routine for American toddlers to be given powerful psychotropics.

… begins, with its hastily appointed new president, Zeithaml (the name translates roughly into Time + Castrated Ram).

In the tradition of Bobby Lowder at Auburn, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld at CUNY, and Gene Powell at the University of Texas, Helen Dragas, head of Virginia’s trustees, seems to be a paternalistic anti-intellectual with power issues. These people occasionally arise in positions of authority at universities, and it is always a catastrophe.

If you want to anticipate the likely plot trajectory of this catastrophe, go back to the history of American University’s board of trustees when the now-notorious Benjamin Ladner was AU’s president. That long ugly expensive story featured clueless rich trustees pumping Ladner full of cash and privileges (keep in mind that even vast academic salaries look pathetic to real estate moguls and hedgies) until his profligacy became a national scandal. Getting out of the scandal took ages and did terrible damage to an already scandal-scarred university. Conflicts among the trustees were open, protracted and farcical, with this one and then that one leaving in a huff, etc. Expect a similar soap opera at Virginia.

Teresa Sullivan, suddenly ex-president of the University of Virginia, speaks to the trustees. Excerpts:

Sweeping action may be gratifying and may create the aura of strong leadership, but its unintended consequences may lead to costs that are too high to bear.

… Corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university. Sustained change with buy-in does work.

… [D]eans and provosts at every peer institution are setting aside funds now to raid the University of Virginia next year given the current turmoil on our campus.

… A dramatic top-down reallocation in our general fund, simply to show that we are “changing,” or that we are not “incremental,” seems to me fiscally imprudent, highly alarming to faculty, and unfair to students who expect to get a broadly inclusive education here. I have chosen a lower-risk and more conservative strategy, because I am accountable to the taxpayers and the tuition payers.

If we were to embark on a course of deep top-down cuts, there would also be difficult questions regarding what to cut. A university that does not teach the full range of arts and sciences will no longer be a university. Certainly it will no longer be respected as such by its former peers.

… Fundraising takes time. A new President first has to meet donors and establish trust and rapport. Instability is as alarming to donors as it is to faculty and in the last few days you are already seeing the impact.

A Romanian commenter succumbs to despair in response to an article in which the prime minister of the country is outed as a plagiarist.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been accused of copying large sections of his 2003 PhD thesis in law … more than half of Ponta’s 432-page, Romanian-language thesis on the functioning of the International Criminal Court consists of duplicated text. Moreover, the thesis was republished with very minor amendments as a Romanian-language book in 2004, and also forms the basis of a 2010 book on liability in international humanitarian law. A former PhD student of Ponta’s, Daniela Coman, is named as co-author of the books. Substantial sections of text in all three publications seem to be identical, or almost so, to material in monographs written in Romanian by law scholars Dumitru Diaconu and Vasile Creţu. They also feature direct Romanian translations of parts of an English-language publication by law scholar Ion Diaconu.

Co-plagiarist? Co-copyist? Co-collator? Co-author doesn’t sound right. My guess is that Ponta, who already had a high-ranking government job when he was, er, producing this thing, did almost nothing. Coman was his Appointed Plagiarist. I mean, I doubt he wanted her to plagiarize. But these things will happen when you deputize people to write your thesis for you.

Coman will take the fall, of course. I mean that’ll be Ponta’s first move – to blame it on her. She’s a woman and a subordinate and all. He can’t be everywhere. Coman the Barbarian did it. I myself am a fancy schmancy prime minister and above such things.

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

A word of compassion here, if I may. It’s one thing when the German defense minister (soon to be the plagiarizing star of a major motion picture) plagiarizes his thesis; or when the president of an American university, like pitiable Glenn Poshard, does the same thing. These are people living in strong, free, and comparatively uncorrupt countries. What I mean to say is that it’s disgusting when people plagiarize entire theses under these conditions.

It’s another thing when people emerging from decades of totally corrupt academic and social life plagiarize. It’s still bad, and they should still take a fall when they are found to have done it. But even now – long after they dispatched the Ceauşescus – the Romanians live within a pretty bogus social reality, with plagiarism merely one part of the general fakery. It’s harder to resist plagiarism under these circumstances.

… faculty senate. They just took a close to unanimous vote of no confidence in the university’s trustees.

The University of Virginia trustees who last week, after her being on the job for only two years, decided to dump the president and not tell anyone why.

Various faculty and high-level administrators are talking about leaving.

It looks as though Virginia has decided to model itself on Shorter University, much of whose faculty has left because they refuse to sign the following document:

I reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality.

The Virginia statement, I guess, would go something like this:

I reject as acceptable all organizational activity not in agreement with strategic dianetics, including, but not limited to, foundational humanistic course offerings, faculty participation in university decisions, and communication with the university community.

I’m sorry. Make that strategic dynamism.

The University of Virginia is entering into leaner days as significant numbers of donors withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, their financial support for a university which has simply been whacko for the last few days. You don’t hire a president and then fire her two years later unless she’s been grossly incompetent or immoral or criminal. The whole thing is nuts, farcical. UD predicts that Teresa Sullivan, the ousted president, will be reinstated, and that board members involved in unceremoniously kicking her in the ass will resign.

Background here.

There was talk about how environmentally friendly the structure would be and how, included among the luxury suites and private boxes, would be recruiting areas, not just for athletic officials, but for department heads who wanted to impress upon potential faculty or students how great the university is.

Faculty recruitment at the proposed new Colorado State football stadium.

When Soltan finished delivering Molly Bloom’s orgasmic finale in the ambassador’s formal living room — “His heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” — Collins stepped up the microphone and said, “Yes, indeed!” He noted that “Ulysses” had never been banned in Ireland.

An account of Bloomsday at the embassy features your blogger.

As I say in the post below, I’m not sure the ambassador’s “Yes, indeed!” was unreservedly thrilled …

This Bloomsday started like all of them – on the metro.

Hours before I’d been at the beach, and the sky was clear blue and the water windy and gray. I didn’t want to leave, of course, and I thought about a quiet life always at the shore.

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

I walked north from Dupont Circle up Connecticut Avenue, then climbed the hilly street of fine houses and clever little urban landscapes to the Irish Embassy. It was warm, but not too warm, and UD was nervous, but not too nervous, because before she left home she glugged some Gdansk Gold-Wasser Zlota Woda.

UD seldom drinks, but when she does, she’s amazed at how well it works.

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

The ambassador greeted me at the door. “You’re one of our readers!” he said.

“Yes. I’m your Molly Bloom.”

I said I’d worried a bit about the soliloquy’s obscenity. “My husband said there might be clergy in the audience.”

“Oh yes! There will certainly be clergy… I must say, I was listening to some actors practicing the Molly Bloom section earlier today and I was rather… uh… ”

“Well, I’ve chosen a series of short passages and nothing too over the top.”

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

Four men preceded UD, reading a bit from various earlier chapters. It was a very full room, everyone standing and holding drinks. Some guests wore period costumes. UD spotted two priests.

The readers stood in front of a large fireplace; nearby windows gave out on a view of lawns and hydrangeas.

The ambassador stood just to UD‘s left — inches away. And as UD read Molly’s endless complaints about her husband (could have been a prima donna only I married him… O but then what am I going to do about him though…), she found herself using the ambassador as a stage prop, making him her Bloom. She cocked a finger in his direction with each complaint.

This certainly amused the crowd. I think it amused the ambassador, but I’m not sure.

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

I like performing Molly. After many years reading her thoughts, I think I am in love with her. Bloom and Stephen are Mr and Mr Gloomy Gus; Molly perks things up considerably with her unstoppable erotic drive.

The danger in reading Molly is melodrama. Overdoing it. The temptation is to be vulgar – either sexually or sentimentally. Molly is explicit, but she’s not out there.

I think what’s most striking about her – especially at the famous conclusion of the soliloquy – is her happy relationship to her own past. Her memories of her sexual power excite her, and indeed Molly gets the last word in the novel not only because she insists on living a full emotional, aesthetic, and erotic life, but also because she loves what she has been, cherishes her exotic past, and, in recalling it, delights and renews herself. At the end of Ulysses, Molly is ready for another day.