Given the direction the University of Virginia is taking, as its hedgie honchos remove its apparently popular and competent president two years after hiring her, UD recommends Jamie Dimon as her successor.

If you’re finally in the mood, here are UD‘s recent Bloomsday posts.

She and Mr UD are packing up to go back to Washington for UD‘s Bloomsday gigs at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club.

… begins to assume a notoriety uncomfortably similar to “current Goldman Sachs partner.” One feels a twinge of concern for Barnard College’s president, the latest academic to fall for the hundreds of thousands of do-nothing dollars in personal compensation the place is going to give her just for shedding some academic respectability on the firm’s, uh, activities. (What do you get for going beyond sitting on your ass? What do you get for reading a speech someone wrote for you? “Goldman Sachs paid [ex-Harvard president Lawrence Summers] $135,000 for one speech.” Something for Barnard’s president to shoot for.)

I mean, it’s awkward. Here Barnard’s prez sits on the Goldman board of trustees, but the head of Goldman Sachs has to cancel a talk he planned to give at her school because

Students at Columbia University, across the street from Barnard, had organized a week-long protest against Blankfein called “School the Squid,” which included discussions about corporate greed and power abuse, the student-run Columbia Daily Spectator reported on its website today.

Goldman Sachs, which was the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history before it converted to a bank in 2008 after the collapse of smaller rival Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., set a pay record in 2007 when it awarded Blankfein a $67.9 million bonus.

A 2009 article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine labeled the company “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

Ruth Simmons, another Goldman trustee, got out while the getting was good; but Barnard’s president has just jumped right in… And why not? As Rajat Gupta and Peter Kiernan can tell her, being a former Goldman Sachs partner is pretty much as bad as being a current Goldman Sachs partner. It seems to follow you around.

Barnard College. Judge us by the company we keep.

Professional grieving process is a new one on UD, but you can’t deny the beauty and pathos of the phrase. I wonder if it’s in the latest DSM…

If you are still processing professional grief two months after someone’s been fired, consult your mental health professional…

Ah, law school. Read all about it.

The Great Law and Med School Publication Pumping Machine is a scandal UD should say more about on this blog. The subject usually comes up in relation either to conflict of interest at med schools, where faculty pharmawhores have their articles ghostwritten by the industry, or to guest authorship, where junior professors add the names of senior professors to their articles even though the senior professors did nothing. (These are two reasons why it’s routine for some med school professors to list 800 publications.)

Are they lacing it with male hormone? In the last two years, five naughty faculty boys at Kansas University have been censured, two for plagiarism, but the rest for fights and shit. A few more of these and KU can field a faculty hockey team.

Captain would definitely be this guy, until recently chair of pharmacology:

[He] used PowerPoint slides at a faculty meeting that featured images of soldiers with guns pointed outward from a circle indicating that those inside the department must protect each other.

We’ve all heard the tired phrase second-strike capability, with which professors titillate themselves while discussing whether colleagues will be able to publish a second book. This is far more stirring morale-wise, with its graphic representation of the relationship between faculty and administration.

UD‘s friend Jack sends her this breaking news from the campus of the University of Alberta: Three security guards were shot to death a few hours ago in an attempted robbery of an armored car in front of a bank machine. The location was a combined shopping mall and residence hall. A student who lives in the residence hall is quoted in my headline.

A few quick points about this developing story.

Don’t forget that Canada has a high level of private gun ownership.

Should universities not build shopping mall/residence hall combinations? This isn’t much of a solution. All urban (and many suburban) campuses have banks and bank machines, or are adjacent to these things. In the lobby of the campus building housing UD‘s office, there’s a Bank of America ATM. Whenever she sees uniformed men working on it, she thinks about how vulnerable they are (she is). But universities like George Washington University (four blocks from the White House) are so vulnerable in so many ways it’s not even funny. No one talks about dismantling these campuses.

There’s a real issue here having to do with notification of students, faculty, and staff. Woo claims she wasn’t notified:

On twitter, the university said that those within ‘close proximity’ were notified. i live in hub and i witnessed many of these events. i, along with many other students, did not get any sort of emergency notification. i am extremely disappointed in the lack of concern the university places on student safety.

… now has over seven hundred students.

… the morgue classroom. This is a classroom headed by a professor reading PowerPoint slides aloud and students playing on their phones and laptops. It is Death Perfected. It is the postmodern university interaction par excellence. Read and learn:

Walking by a classroom one day I saw a student sitting in the back row of the room, simultaneously wearing iPod ear buds and texting on her iPhone — which was sitting on top of and thus “hidden” by her Macbook (with the browser opened to her Facebook page)…

… I looked for the professor — and, yes, there he was, standing at the front of the room progressing a Powerpoint slide presentation with lots of bullets followed by perhaps three or four words. And he would use the laser pointer to indicate the specific word(s) he was reading aloud (which was odd, since presumably each of the students was technically literate) and he would then move on to the next slide. Tenured around the time of the Crimean War, he had definitely seen his share of students come through the university. But still, I wondered: Don’t you know? Don’t you care? Aren’t you, in theory, supposed to be teaching them — instead of just playing with your techno-toys while they parallel play with their own?

A Lehigh professor describes the death chamber to a T.

Yeah, we just thought you might be interested, next time you think about publishing an opinion piece the University of California Davis medical school doesn’t like… We just thought you might be interested to know that we can destroy your life…

The Movie.

… if you need a little pick-me-up about university football, complete with excited invocations of ‘shirtless boys,’ read this. Its title is It All Begins With Football, and ain’t it the truth. This one little essay will put all your angst right in the shade and get you pissing your pants all over again for the team.

With the beginning of the Sandusky trial, the rhetoric-fest also begins. The outrage expressed months ago, when the story broke, now expresses itself again, often with an emphasis on the pathetic obsession with football in Happy Valley.

They’re pointing the same thing out about pathetic Auburn: “The shooting has shaken Auburn, a city of 53,000 that revolves around the football team.”

You’d never know there were universities in these locations.

[I]f all this is true, Sandusky was allowed to operate for years because other men decided there was something more important than innocent children.

Football.

Indeed in what way can it be said that universities, as we understand them, are at these locations? These are places where people are driven by blind fanaticism toward patently unworthy objects. It’s hard to get farther from the ethos of the university.

… as Mrs Potts sings, and I’m talking here specifically about the venerable tendency of some units of some universities to conceive themselves – not evolve into, but define themselves from the word go – as handmaidens to commerce. To put it genteelly.

They’re not made up of researchers with established interests. They’re made up of people who look around at government and industry and say Whaddaya want us to say?

Medicine and economics are the most likely places to find these generators of client-friendly research, but almost any part of the university might harbor them. SUNY Buffalo for instance recently sort of magically generated this new institute, the Shale Resources and Society Institute, “without consultation with the faculty senate or … putting an advisory board in place.” The hastily assembled Shale and Society specializes in producing fracking is beautiful research – and, since this research comes out of a respectable university, the fracking industry waves it about and insists on its legitimacy.

Some SUNY faculty members are unhappy about this. One of them says: “We should make sure that our research efforts don’t look like industry public relations efforts.”

Here she talks about how California’s great public university system got her started:

Fortunately, the semester fees at UCLA at that time were extremely low. I worked in the library, at a dime store, and at the bookstore. I was able to complete my undergraduate degree without going into debt. I took courses across the social sciences and graduated after three years by attending multiple summer sessions and by taking extra courses throughout. In my last year as an undergraduate, I graded Freshmen Economics.

Getting off the ground wasn’t easy:

[I]t was very hard for any department to hire a woman in those days. Fortunately, the [Indiana University] Department of Political Science later needed someone to teach Introduction to American Government on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday mornings at 7:30 a.m. They appointed me as a Visiting Assistant Professor to do that. After a year of teaching freshmen, they asked me if I would be Graduate Advisor and moved me to a regular appointment at that point.

Ostrom contributed to the framing statement of the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, run every year by Peter Levine and Mr UD.