… What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough?”

William Deresiewicz, New York Times

… because school administrators with fake degrees usually look for jobs in nowheresville sorts of places, and Wasser managed to become (until he was found out) superintendent of a large New Jersey school district. Doc Pendley, who came to the wee Columbia California school district burnishing a LaSalle University degree (the LaSalle scam operated out of Louisiana before its operator went to prison), is far more typical.

Pendley’s bullshit degree is only the beginning of Columbia’s problems.

Pendley and the Board of Trustees have faced criticism within the past several months for their handling of a May 2010 criminal incident involving Pendley’s 24-year-old son, Brennan, who worked as an after-school aide at Columbia Elementary.

Brennan pleaded guilty in June of last year to having sex with a minor, then an eighth-grader, in a classroom.

Since then, comment at district board meetings has centered on John Pendley’s hiring of his unqualified son for the job…

I cover it all the time on this blog, because it occurs all the time. The latest high-profile case: Romania’s brand new education minister. Apparently he lifted large chunks of other people’s scientific papers.

The scandal comes after the new Social-Democrat prime minister was forced to drop his first candidate for the education portfolio after she was accused of plagiarism.

Of course it’s doubly embarrassing because it’s the education minister. Triply embarrassing because the first candidate for the position has also been accused.

How to explain the pan-plagiarist movement across Europe? And China? And Korea?

etc.

Here’s one theory: America is an anti-intellectual country; in places like Romania, intellectuality has extremely high status. In the US, if you want to make a status statement, you will buy an expensive car; in Europe… well, in Europe you’re likely to do this as well… But you will be as anxious, if you’re European, to display a Ph.D. as you will a Porsche. With everyone scrambling to get advanced degrees, the temptation to cheat becomes huge.

Yes, we’ve got plenty of plagiarists here at home; but it’s beginning to look downright endemic in other parts of the world (I can’t keep up with the Chinese and Korean cases).

Teamwork. That’s what it is.

… is the name UD‘s blogpal Allen Frances gives the tendency of the people at the American Psychiatric Association to toss every human behavior they can think of into the soon-to-be released update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The new DSM will guarantee every American man, woman, and child forty acres, a mule, and a diagnosis.

Everybody gets to be something: depressed, pre-psychotic… Everybody gets the same diagnostic-labeling start in life. The children of the very rich will no longer get diagnosed before those of the middle class; everyone starts out with ADD or executive functioning disorder or what have you, and parity is maintained throughout the subsequent years, with adolescent, young adult, middle-aged, and elderly diagnoses following each American all the days of her life. As Frances writes, this “radical expansion of the boundaries of psychiatry … will increase by tens of millions the number of people presumed to be suffering from mental disorders.”

The key is indeed diagnostic exuberance, or what others have called psychosprawl. The combination of a regularly updated official manual massively increasing our diagnosable behaviors, under-informed pill-happy primary physicians, and unremitting advertising, means a psychotropic harvest the likes of which this country has never seen. To picture it, replace the turkey in this woman’s hands with a steaming tureen of tricyclics.

Police say they were called to investigate a bar fight at The Eagle’s Bar and say they came upon [Eastern Washington University football player Chandler] Gayton urinating on a wall down a nearby alley.

As officers approached him, Gayton pulled out a 9mm gun. He initially held the gun with both hands pointed towards the ground.

Officers say they ordered Gayton to drop the weapon multiple times, but that he did not immediately respond. He eventually put the weapon down.

Guy really doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s peeing.

Handing the name of your university’s sports venues over to the local biotech, banking, or fried chicken establishment in exchange for money – making your university one humongous advertising vector – is, well, pathetic, but so what. There’s only so much whining we’re going to do here about the corporatization of the university. And after all this is a capitalist culture, and the university reflects that culture, blah blah.

To be sure, things get a little dicier when you’re stuck with the Kenneth Lay Chair in Economics, or even the Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History.

The University of Miami had the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge, etc. Many universities have dealt (some of them, like Seton Hall, repeatedly) with the embarrassment of questionable names on rooms, buildings and arenas, on academic chairs, on programs, on honorary degrees, on whatever.

But it’s one thing to deal with the consequences of honoring over-zealous capitalists; it’s another to honor authoritarian regimes whose fundamental political identity is outrageously at odds with the values of American universities.

A National Review writer notes that Harvard has a Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations:

The Sultan of Oman shackles his nation’s media with one of the most restrictive press laws in the Arab world, and Freedom House rates the sultanate, on a scale of 1 (freest) to 7 (least free), a 5.5, making it “unfree.”

Then there’s the Saudis:

In 2005, Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz gave $20 million to both Harvard University and Georgetown University to establish centers for Islamic studies. At Georgetown, the prince’s gift funds the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the university’s vaunted School of Foreign Service. Saudi Arabia may be an American ally in the Middle East, but it is also one of the most repressive nations in the world. Leaving aside Saudi Arabia’s gross violations of the rights of all its citizens, the royal family doesn’t appear to have any more than an academic interest in “Muslim-Christian understanding”: The kingdom lacks even one Christian church.

The atrium of American University’s School of International Studies is named after the crown prince of Bahrain, another scandalously repressive country.

So I guess the point the NRO guy is making is that it’s hypocritical at best and a betrayal of fundamental values at worst when a university takes immense cash from authoritarian regimes and in exchange glorifies the names of those regimes. (Some British universities were, most recently, willing to do this with Gaddafi’s Libya.) The basic deal involves the university using its clean reputation to help cleanse not very sweet-smelling political units. And of course the deal can evolve into the university gradually incorporating nice thoughts about these units into their curricula; or let’s say overlooking some less than pleasant aspects of those regimes (Women in Saudi Arabia? You say there are women in Saudi Arabia? I didn’t see any when I was there…).

… the chancellor of Syracuse University had Jamie Dimon give the 2010 commencement address. She defended her decision by saying:

It is rare that a university is able to bring a speaker with a birds-eye view of, and extensive on-the-ground experience with, a major global challenge.

Now that Dimon’s irresponsibility has produced a globally destructive two billion dollar loss at his massive bank, UD thinks it’s time for Chancellor Cantor to invite him back. Thanks to her, Syracuse already has the distinction of having been the only American university to honor this man in this way; and if her criterion for the choice of speaker continues to be someone who has immediate experiences of major global challenges, the choice of Dimon is better than ever. His bank has just created a major global challenge.

Maybe she should have invited Simon Johnson instead. He certainly had useful things to tell her.

Meanwhile, Syracuse can take pride in the fact that it did its small bit to encourage Jamie Dimon to “preen and flash along … until [his] hubris causes the next [financial] disaster.”

Oh but it does, it does. Southern Methodist University does nothing but go backwards, as it digs an over one hundred million dollar hole via out of control athletics, and then makes students pay for it. You can sort of sense the student writer’s rage as she notes that students have no access to this financial information, and as one university rep after another to whom she speaks responds to her with contempt and condescension.

In an accompanying article, this student says it best:

“I think it’s insane that our money continues to go into a black hole of mismanagement that we don’t even have access to see the specifics of,” he said.

SMU athletics is losing money hand over fist; the yahoos who run it spend like drunken sailors. Why should they give a shit about students!

Insane really says it. The people the student journalists talk to make absolutely insane remarks to them. Here’s my favorite, from the Athletics Policy Committee Chair:

“It’s like what I teach, which is history of the Soviet Union — we want reform, but nothing seems to work until the whole thing collapses, and maybe that’s what’ll happen with this.”

Thanks, man. SMU students will be sucked dry for a shitty education until the Romanov dynasty collapses, and then things will get better.

Southern Methodist University is fucking nuts.

A debate about banning college football took place at NYU last Tuesday.

[Buzz] Bissinger and Gladwell won in a romp. Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against.

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

… [Jason] Whitlock said college football was the “highest level of the melting pot,” uniting people from varied backgrounds in a common cause (“the poor and the rich, the black and the white, the Jews and the gentiles”). Bissinger later playfully challenged him, “If you can name four Jews who played football, you win the debate.”

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

More here.

You can sort of see why the good guys won. The other side was smart enough to avoid most of the classic character-building bullshit you hear in defense of college football, but this left them with few arguments.

“If you believe in freedom, you can’t have the ‘free’ without the ‘dumb,’ … They go hand-in-hand. Freedom allows us to do dumb things… You can put football with cigarettes, alcohol, and porn.”

Well, that’s just fine and pretty and fine and just the sort of thing we want hanging around our universities.

Mr. Buatta did turn down a job for a “pizza king,” who wanted the Prince of Chintz to design a kind of dungeon in an A-frame house on Long Island. As Mr. Buatta recalled: “I told him, ‘I don’t do this. I do English style.’ And he said, ‘What kind of a meatball are you?’ I heard later he’d been found dead in his car.”

So here’s this: I am a huge fan of Don DeLillo. I would say acolyte, but as far as I know, there is not yet a Church of DeLillo where I might light candles and hum reverently.

A writer for the LA Times takes the words out of my mouth.

If you read this blog, you know that the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies group has always been a mite controversial, with its love of drug industry money and its intellectual enthusiasm for that industry’s pain pills. It’s just the sort of academic unit pharma craves in its never-ending quest for respectability (and respectability is quite the holy grail when every year you pay out billions of dollars in marketing violations). Here are all the smiling PPSG people who don’t want to talk to you anymore.

And why not? Because Charles Grassley doesn’t like the fact that much of America is addicted to, or on its way to being addicted to, painkillers, and he sent PPSG a letter because he really wants to talk to them about it.

The groups that were sent letters on Tuesday included the American Pain Foundation, a patient advocacy group, and the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin. (The foundation’s board last week voted to close because of “irreparable” financial problems.)

Among other activities, the study group, which at one time received large contributions from Purdue Pharma and other opioid producers, lobbied for changes in state laws making it easier to prescribe the drugs.

Well, they can shut the thing down… But when Congress calls…

UD wouldn’t mind knowing what the University of Wisconsin has been doing all these years while PPSG pill-popped its merry way through their halls. Has the university heard of conflict of interest?

Haven’t written about it in awhile, but longtime readers know that this blog has a tea category (click on TEA to read previous posts on the subject) … And that I drink mainly Marco Polo, from Mariage Frères… And that I like to plan visits to tea plantations, etc.

Cam Muir is a biology professor at the University of Hawaii who, in his spare time, has been growing and processing tea on a tiny plantation located on volcanic slopes. His wife seems to be the genius behind the project, but Muir’s scientific background has also contributed.

[Eliah Halpenny] said few if any insects or predators exist, and the Big Island of Hawaii provided just the right amount of rain, and fertile volcanic soil. Which is why, she added, that “I jumped at the possibility.”

That’s how Big Island Tea was born on the Northeast slope of Mauna Loa Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes on the planet. Halpenny said, “With my husband’s ecological and scientific background and my horticultural interest, we have grown and learned how to process tea over the past 10 years — with a passion.”

Harrod’s has just bought up all of their crop. It paid $90,000 for 22 pounds of tea — a staggeringly high price.

Which is impressive, of course. But more impressive to UD is the whole feel of these lives lived amid smoke plumes. Like W.S. Merwin, these people found their Hawaiian plot of land and set about doing what they loved on it. This photo from the plantation says it all.

War is Peace.

And Ignorance is Strength when you’re a football school. The University of Utah, which cancels all classes to accommodate games, announces to the world that football “provide[s] us a pathway to showcase our academic excellence as well as our athletic strength to a much wider audience.”

The University of Utah! So committed to academic excellence that we say fuck you to professors and students who want to use the campus to hold scheduled classes.