… from an insider.

[T]he leaders of [for-profit] companies, schools, and departments do not typically see their main function as furthering the education of students and their success; some do things that put finances over learning, and that’s when trouble, the media, and politicians strike.

… Those who work at not-for-profit colleges generally cannot get monetary bonuses for doing their jobs and are certainly not stockholders with a personal stake in the schools’ quarterly earnings. They get a promotion or a raise for doing a good job but not a separate check, and their admissions officers do not get cash bonuses.

Mubarak finally resigns.

The mood is upon our MBA schools once more. Happened after Enron and it’s happening again. The B-School Boys are running around like insider traders with their expert networks cut off, squawking about how many of their graduates are going to the slammer for financial sleaze. What to do? What to do?

So once again here’s this horseshit about changing the curriculum to make the guys compassionate, caring and the rest of the c‘s: We’re going to create “leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials.”

Here’s how we’ll do it: We’ll take really smart 25-year-olds who should have learned basic morality when the rest of us did – when we were five – and we’re going to put them in groups and make them work together and this will make them caring compassionate competent and characterlicious. Plus we’re going to make them take courses in which we lecture them on right and wrong and how right, even if it earns you less money, is better than wrong.

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

Okay. So listen to UD on this one. It’s very late in the day, they’re entering a global capital market of a certain sort, etc., etc. There’s only one way you can get the attention of these guys. It’s cheap and it doesn’t involve messing with the curriculum. Actually it costs nothing.

Inaugurate a Guest Lecture series in which famous financial felons are whisked from prison for the day to talk to the guys. The felons get a little time off their sentences for each gig. If they turn out to be strong motivational speakers, they get lots of gigs and get lots of time taken off.

Since there will be a strong market in this activity, and since our jails are full of financial felons, MBA students have an embarrassment of riches speaker-wise. Each semester they must choose, from twenty guest felons, three talks to attend. Make it two. Make it four. But it’s a requirement. You have to go to some of these shows.

The felons do what Gore Vidal calls “a patter of penitence,” put up scary PowerPoints of them still in their gym shorts being led away in handcuffs, talk about how many people’s lives they’ve ruined, etc., etc.

If at some point in their presentation they are unable to cry – not loudly, but in a quiet manly way that the guys will relate to – the school should not ask them back. The idea is to scare the fuck out of the guys, and to appeal to what vestigial human emotions they may have left.

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As is always the case in stories like this, Harvard University is the focus. So let me address myself to that institution in particular.

If President Faust wants her MBA students to care about corporate responsibility, here’s what she does:

1. Hand a significant chunk of Harvard’s close to thirty billion dollar endowment over to global charities. If you spend it down, your own institution will look less douchey.

2. Acknowledge that your predecessor was a scandalously acquisitive capitalist who, as president, modeled that behavior for other people at the university. (“…[President] Lawrence Summers …made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks ‘too big to fail.'”) Pledge to avoid that sort of behavior at the top of the institution in the future.

… in response to the university’s denial of a request from its bioethics faculty.

… values.

… One of the most painful parts of his illness is its timing. [UCLA Professor of Japanese Michael] Marra is 54, and said he has just begun to give meaningful lectures – when he was in his 20s and 30s, he was still piecing together puzzles in his research.

… He will stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., answering e-mails from students who are studying in Japan. And last week, he started a new project: organizing a book for the 20th anniversary of the Center for Japanese Studies.

Though he hopes to finish out the quarter, Marra told his students at the first class meeting that this might not be possible. He said they were free to drop the course and left the classroom for several minutes. When he came back, everyone was still in their seats.

UMDNJ’s still boasting about its state of the art anesthesiologist, Barry Ray. Ray’s the latest university physician to turn himself into a pill mill, and, what with America’s outrageous oxycodone appetite, he’ll be far from the last.

This is one university story – medical professors as drug dealers – from which you might be inclined to avert your eyes. But it’s an important, and growing, campus fact.

Them good ol’ boys at UK keep the good times rolling.

It’s certainly not being done out of respect for the sensitivities of faculty and staff, who have undergone years of low or no pay increases. Nor for the students who have seen hefty tuition increases during his tenure.

… is I guess what you’d call it if a public university were under pressure from a state legislature to sell a very valuable Ezra Pound manuscript in its possession… But what do you call it when it’s a Pollock?

Proceeds from the sale [of Jackson Pollock’s Mural, valued at $140 million,] would go into a trust fund that would provide scholarships to University of Iowa undergraduate art majors from Iowa.

Can this painting really be worth $140 million???

An art professor comments:

“It will never happen because it would be a terrible disgrace to the state and people of Iowa,” he said. “What I think is that we should sell Kinnick [football stadium] to Illinois or sell the State Capitol. That would be much more reasonable.”

… honest.

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

Update: The University of Hartford newspaper seems to be offline at the moment.

… is now up at Inside Higher Ed.

Title: LASCHED.

… attacks laptop use in class.

… reading a biography of Christopher Lasch, and writing a piece about it – and him – for Inside Higher Education.

I’ll link you to the piece when I’ve finished it, later this evening.

… a member of Eastern Michigan University’s board of regents hasn’t been to a meeting in two years. EMU doesn’t say much when the paper asks for a comment… I guess nobody’s ever been kicked off the board before, says EMU’s spokesperson… Ho hum…

But… as long as you mention it… I guess we’ll can his ass! Okay!

Same paper, a few hours later:

Eastern Michigan University Regent Mohamed Okdie has resigned due to health reasons, Gov. Rick Snyder’s office said today. The resignation is effective immediately.

An AnnArbor.com report published this morning showed that Okdie hadn’t been to a meeting in nearly two years and attended just six meetings out of 20 since he was appointed to the university’s governing board in November 2007 by then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

I mean, yeah! Shit! We hadn’t noticed. Thanks.

… 43%.

But WSU knows where to invest its resources: A stupendous salary for the basketball coach.

A letter writer to the Dayton Daily News ridicules the gotta pay market prices explanation coming from Wright State:

[C]ollege sport is not a market… If it were truly a market endeavor, there would have been no, or very limited, public monies or tax exemptions involved to set up and support the enterprise…

With college sports, there is a captive audience, subsidies through student fees and university overhead and questionable tax deductions and tax advantages through their association with a nonprofit education institution.

There is also the general issue the IRS is apparently addressing in an ongoing audit of college and universities for reporting (or not) related business income, including stadium advertising income for sports and athletics, and the tax deductions received by donors to college athletics.

She concludes by calling sports at universities like Wright State an “ongoing corruption of the college mission by incompetent administrators and compliant businesses and politicians.”