Moving right along in Saudi Arabia.

… the University of Rhode Island – routinely admit people who riot at the drop of a hat. These schools are big sloppy drunks.

First out of the gate this academic year is the storied URI:

[S]everal students were injured while fighting with broken beer bottles by smashing [them] over one another’s head. Students milled about throughout Fraternity Circle, with bystanders coming to watch the fights break out.

The URI officer stationed at the event called for backup and all on-duty URI officers responded — a lieutenant, sergeant and six officers parked in the streets, but students refused to disperse.

URI officers began using pepper spray on the crowd to get students to disperse, and several students were attended to by EMS for related injuries.

…a Nation Institute Fellow who uncovered apparent conflict of interest and, ultimately, undisclosed outside income at the New York Times.

The Times Jerusalem bureau chief was also – until he dropped it as a result of Blumenthal’s article – a client of an Israeli speakers bureau. The firm pitched stories to the bureau chief, some of which he covered.

This was bad enough by way of giving the appearance of less than total objectivity on the part of a reporter covering an incredibly contentious part of the world. But Blumenthal’s piece also had the effect of uncovering other delinquency.

[Ethan Bronner] did not tell his editors about his relationship with Lone Star … because he did not think joining a speakers bureau had to be disclosed. Indeed, the ethics guidelines do not specifically require it. But the guidelines do require Times staff members to provide an accounting to editors if they earn more than $5,000 of speaking fees in a year. Mr. Bronner acknowledged he was “delinquent” in failing to do this, saying he believed he was obligated to account only for any single speech for which he was paid more than $5,000, another requirement of the policy.

Wow. So this guy believed that if he gave a bunch of speeches in a year, each of them pulling in five thousand – with a yearly total payment of, say, $150,000 – he didn’t have to declare this income to the Times because no one speech paid more than five thou.

He’s running a news bureau?

… has been eyeing with interest the story of a University of Connecticut student robbed at gunpoint inside a campus building.

It’s really rare for people with guns to rob people inside of academic buildings. UD‘s been blogging about universities for years, and she can’t recall a case.

The student has now admitted making it up.

… an email a law professor sent to one of his or her students.

UD should say that there’s no sourcing on this email. The blog Above the Law doesn’t identify its origins – school, professor, student. But someone sent the email to the blog, and the blog wrote about it, and I’m going to assume that the incident and the email are for real.

Background: A tenured law professor at an American university said some things in class that a student found offensive. The student complained to the Dean of Students. The professor now writes to the student:

I got an email yesterday from the dean that a student in this class complained that I have not been letting you out of class promptly at 10:20 and that I made off-handed, non-PC references to Parkinson’s and ADD. First, let me say that I will try to be more aware of both these matters.

But seriously – did you really have to go to the dean to complain? Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do but don’t you think you are old enough to fight your own battles? Don’t you think I am receptive enough to be addressed directly? Are you going to go to momma and poppa if a partner at a law firm treats you wrongly? Seriously??

SOS says: This email begins promisingly enough. The writer is straightforward, direct, non-pretentious. Non-PC is a bit on the defensive side, but let it go. The professor is good enough to try to be more aware, etc.

As with the press release from the nightclub (see the post directly below this one), the writer should have stopped here. Good writing is in part about getting out while the getting’s good. One way to think about this is: What exactly do you want to say to the person or group reading what you’ve written? What exactly? Otherwise, what do you want to get off your chest? Take out all of the chesty stuff. Write with your head voice, not your chest voice.

A professor might legitimately want to convey to a student the importance of fighting your own battles. But this – and, actually, everything else in this email – would have been better conveyed in person.

I mean, if the point of this email is that the student should deal as directly as possible with human conflict, why is the professor making matters worse by writing this down? If the professor wants to claim that he/she’s “receptive enough to be addressed directly,” why not extend that courtesy to the student, and simply talk to him/her after class or something? Inevitably, an email from a professor is going to be more intimidating than sitting down and chatting like a human being.

But the really big bad in this email, of course, happens here:

Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do…

UD hates the word inappropriate. But this is so that. All the professor does here is betray his/her anxiety/grandiosity… I’d call it infantile…. A sort of nyah-nyah. Not exactly the sort of thing to reassure the student that this professor is receptive.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The day after a university athlete is killed inside your apparently overcrowded nightclub, go ahead and write your own press release if you’d like. But before you release the release, have someone who knows how to write one read it over.

If you don’t, what you issue may be a rambling defensive statement rather than the terse acknowledgement of the event/pledge to work with the police that it should have been. It may include the strikingly bad proposal that the same club host a party in memory of the person killed there.

Come and support this young man and his life at the A-List Lounge, dates to be announced.

A burqa-wearing Frenchwoman has declared her intention to run for the presidency against Nicolas Sarkozy.

Kenza Drider styles herself the Freedom Candidate.

Her campaign literature shows her in her full veil standing in front of a line of police – an act made illegal by French legislation banning the burqa in public in April.

This memory of Robert Wilson, a physicist who in 1969 testified, in front of a congressional committee, on behalf of a proposed particle accelerator.

[Senator John Pastore asked] Wilson — a veteran of the Manhattan Project — … “Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?”

… “No sir, I don’t believe so.”

“Nothing at all?” Pastore asked.

“Nothing at all.”

Pastore pressed further: “It has no value in that respect?”

… “It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

The incident introduces an essay in Scientific American about “the sheer joy of discovery, of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, as essential a component of the human spirit as the greatest works of art, of music, of literature.”

… even for the inside guys.

Former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, his heart aching over the death of Dave Gavitt, Big East founder and his best friend, went on ESPN and WFAN the other day with all emotional guns blazing. He said college athletics is controlled by football, money and greed. He called it absolute chaos. He said that until two years ago he would have argued that college presidents had loyalty and integrity. Not anymore.

… in the New York Times. Across the page from Brooks, Paul Krugman takes up the same theme: Without a willingness to behave in a few non-self-serving ways, citizens of capitalist economies are going to bring their affluent democratic cultures crashing down around them. Krugman notes that between 1979 and 2005

the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. … In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

The claim that “the rich have a right to keep their money… misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society. … [The wealthy presumably] have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future…”

(Krugman alludes to this Elizabeth Warren video.)

As to whether the wealthy feel as though they’ve got much stake in the nation’s future… Well, read Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites… or The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus. It’s definitely not a slam dunk. Here’s Lasch:

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

… have columns facing one another and playing off one another nicely. The Social Contract, headlines Krugman; The Amateur Ideal, headlines Brooks. Both writers want to say that in some realms of life capitalism’s competitive market ethos should be suspended; that, underlying all of the purely financial contracting among us, a social contract impels us to act in self-sacrificing ways for the good of the polity.

David Brooks regards the university as one of the most social contracty places in America, and well he might. Universities are non-profits, enjoying immense tax and other advantages, because the state defines them as privileged locations of social good. Unlike the justly detested for-profit schools, universities aren’t in it to make a buck. They’re dedicated to educating people. Brooks even thinks they have a moral mission:

As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.

UD understands how religious schools might perceive themselves as having explicitly moral missions (Catholic Seton Hall, for example, despite having had to blast more imprisoned alumni names off of buildings than any other school in America, and having hired one of the foulest coaches known to humankind, presumably sees itself in this way.) but she does not believe the non-religious university has – or should have – a moral mission. See Clifford Orwin for a nice expression of her views.

Brooks says what he says about withering because he, like everyone else, sees the amoral hypercapitalist joke amateur university sports (basketball and football, that is) has become. He laments, in a pointless way, the withering of the character-rich amateur university sports tradition. Couldn’t we bring that back? Its “lingering vestiges”? Even in the face of billion dollar tv contracts?

Lingering vestiges. Aren’t they kind of like whispering hope? Durn pretty language. But really.

How is Brooks going to gather up and preserve the lingering vestiges? Reverse the ten-year, billion-dollar contracts? Has Brooks noticed what the most popular major in America is? It’s business. Brooks doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the American student:

College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passion, not coldly calculating professional interests.

No – it’s thrilling because it’s played by essentially professional players who are really good. And listen: Who spouts moral mission language at the university? It really isn’t faculty, or even administration. It’s precisely the clever sports programs. Go there – to your six-million-dollar coaches and money-under-the-table boosters – for all of the moral mission, character-building language you can stomach. UD‘s been there – at a host of university sports conferences – and she’s heard it all. If Brooks wants to play right into the hands of Nick Saban he can go on gassing about moral character. Nick’s right there with you. He’s been there waiting for you.

Until we can pivot our eyes back to what universities are – intellectual institutions – we’re going to stay all misty-eyed as Nick Saban and Jim Calhoun (Coach sets an example, you know! Here’s one of Calhoun’s hero recruits. Really made good. Lectures British civil servants! All because of the early example set by the richest public employee in the state of Connecticut!) lecture us on how universities are places that make us better men.

I’ll write about Krugman in a moment.

… and so are his university buddies.

… by reason of insanity is that her students reported she’d taught a class in her usual fashion – reading from the book, mainly, but nothing out of the ordinary – just before she opened fire on her colleagues.

(Click on the category of this post – Amy Bishop – for background.)

… making big strides and getting big attention.

Next up: US of A.

Just where do the pesky buggers go?

Well, whether it’s OSU, or any seriously sporty American university, it’s about lawsuits. (Can you imagine how many University of Miami tuition dollars are going to lawyers and public relations people and penalties and all?) The stinkier the program, the higher the cost of covering the stinkiness, or, when the smell escapes, trying to pay your way out of the malodor-closet.

Ever since Brother Tressel had his cover blown, OSU has been spending mightily along these lines. Among their many outlays: Dealing with an ESPN public records lawsuit.

ESPN stated in the lawsuit that producers at the sporting news network had made several public records requests for all emails sent or received by President E. Gordon Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, compliance officer Doug Archie and former head coach Jim Tressel, that included the keyword “Sarniak.”

Ted Sarniak is a businessman in Jeanette, Pa., closely associated with former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor.

… In addition to documents containing the word “Sarniak,” ESPN also requested several documents without success. ESPN said some of their requests were wrongfully denied for being overly broad.

And OSU said… and then ESPN said… For every “said,” add ten thousand or so dollars.