…hits respectable schools.

Yeshiva University, especially under the Bernie Madoff/Ezra Merkin regime, blazed the trail here.

… in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

More fun stuff from sports factory University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Ah, big-time athletics. The front porch of the university! Beeeeeeg money maker! Applications for admission go through the roof!

Eh bien. It’s hard to keep up. But let’s see:

The biggest problem Penn State’s president had before his school’s storied athletic program caught up with him involved his having flown a private plane to Harrisburg in order to tell the legislature that his school was really hurting financially.

So he was a little tone deaf! It’s not like he said in a 2001 email that
“it would be ‘humane’ to avoid alerting social services” to allegations against the now world-famous Jerry Sandusky – who, you may recall, until recently had a flavor of campus ice cream named after him…

Athletics has already brought Penn State so much. It may now make it the first American university to have a president brought to trial for failure to report a crime.

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Paul Frampton gets one; Jerry Sandusky gets one. Everyone gets one. Bless the DSM.

Sandusky’s defense team also filed a motion to allow evidence that he has histrionic personality disorder…

From the New York Times:

[T]he mild-mannered [dean of Tunisia’s Manouba University, Habib] Kazdaghli shows little inclination to back down. He is not about to give up one of his much needed classrooms so the students can have a prayer room, especially, he said, when such facilities exist nearby. Nor is he willing to allow female students to wear veils in class, as Salafists demand.

“How can you teach a student when you cannot see her face — or give an exam when you don’t know who it is?” he said.

UD‘s friend Jonathan sent her news of the sudden resignation of the president of the University of Virginia. UD was intrigued by this part of the university’s official statement about her departure:

We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.

There’s more stuff in the statement about needing “a much faster pace of change.”

Obviously Virginia’s MOOC policy wasn’t a central part of this decision, but UD finds it striking that the university singled it out. It suggests that all ambitious universities are – or should be? – thinking about MOOCs.

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For UD‘s series of posts on her own MOOC, go here.

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Related.

… would wait a decent interval before the it had nothing to do with Auburn football bullshit started up. But here it is, bright and early Monday morning:

This is not a sports story. It has a sports element, but it is not a sports story.

As such, it is not a reflection on college athletics or Auburn specifically. It is a reflection on our society…

Auburn football players, past and present, were involved, but that is not the story. The story is that young people have had their lives snuffed out far too soon. The story is that we as a society have issues that need to be addressed.

… The sadness and anger that is being expressed today, the questions that are being asked, should be focused [on] the loss of lives, not that some of those involved, some of those who died, used to play college football. To make the sports angle the focal point of this story is to miss the greater issue at hand.

If you’ve read University Diaries for awhile, you know what I call this tactic: Going Cosmic. This thing that happened, this problem that confronts us, can’t be understood (the writer uses the word ‘senseless’ four times in his senseless opinion piece) or even in a modest way solved. No, no… it’s society, society, society.

It doesn’t occur to this fool that Auburn is a society, a self-enclosed world designed to generate bad outcomes. Its board of trustees is full of former Auburn football players. For decades the school was for all intents and purposes run by Bobby Lowder, a football-obsessed trustee. Cheating is endemic – player payments, bogus courses, you name it.

You want to understand the heart of Auburn society? Here’s an ESPN writer:

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Senseless! Tragic! Society’s to blame! Or, to quote again from this unconscionable local opinion piece: “What’s the world coming to?”

Oh Lordy Aunt Bee yes what’s it coming to??? I declare I need smelling salts.

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Tons of these coming in now. Just a senseless random event having nothing to do with Auburn’s football culture.

This writer is particularly pissed that an article in the New York Times about the murders quotes someone suggesting that “guns and marijuana appear to be a part of the culture around the Auburn football program.”

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Auburn football and guns? Nah.

… in my latest Inside Higher Ed post.

Read it here.

… is a dangerous place.

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Updates are coming in. So far it looks as though three people are dead and several wounded. Current and former football players seem to have been involved in the fight over a woman that set off the shooting.

In the most recent sports school scandal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill has asked a professor who offered pretend courses to football players to pay up.

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told trustees Friday that Julius Nyang’oro was asked to repay $12,000 for teaching a 2011 summer course as an independent study rather than a lecture.

Does anyone really think this guy — who was chair of his department, and who will be allowed to retire with full honors at this end of this year despite the fact that he taught tons of bogus courses — is going to pay the university this money?

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Longer article, with many important comments, here.

… attacked Mona Eltahawy’s article as overstatement.

Her article.

And what happens when women try to assemble in Cairo.

You can say that again.

This will likely be a pretty big story – an eminent literature professor is arrested for prostitution, with mug shots provided of him in drag and out of drag.

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Max Reinhart is 65 years old. UD predicts that he will retire.

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Keep in mind that the University of Georgia is a public university, in a state with a very conservative legislature.

Aunt Voula captures the problem of for-profit non-profits. Just as she doesn’t realize that lamb is meat, for-profit non-profits don’t realize that profit is profit, and therefore that profiting from running a non-profit organization makes it not not-for-profit. If you catch my drift.

This very category confusion (for-profit / not-for-profit) has tripped up the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a putative non-profit long run for the personal profit of its director. Le tout Dallas is shocked and offended that the director has now been forced out and forced “to repay the medical center for every cent of his inappropriate spending.” How dare taxpayers humiliate this man by prying their money out of his hands!

Burqa Bourbon and Clitoridectomy Claret.

… has sprouted a diagnosis.

UD‘s amazed it’s taken so long. The eminent University of North Carolina physicist has been in prison for weeks for drug smuggling and yet only now does the sluttily obliging medical establishment put out for him. UD has no doubt that within minutes of her being arrested for, say, jaywalking she could find a doctor to diagnose her with … let’s see, what’d they give this guy… schizoid personality disorder.

Frampton’s friends aren’t really helping him.

“He doesn’t even drink, except perhaps wine with dinner, and he’s concerned about his health and goes to a gym,” [a colleague] said. “He is completely dedicated to his research and his students, and for the moment, since his divorce, to chasing girls.”

A divorced gym-membership-holder with his dick hanging out. How could anyone believe such a person capable of criminal conduct?