… at the University of California Irvine, refused to take state-mandated sexual harassment training.

“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.

“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”

Irvine removed supervisory responsibilities from him, threatened to reassign his courses, to put him on leave, boppity boppity boppity…

Eventually, McPherson did take the course, mainly because he became convinced his refusal was hurting some of his staff scientists. But he remained infuriated at the “coercive behavioral training,” which he called “insulting to the intelligence” and “a demeaning fraud.”

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McPherson might have been factually wrong that this no doubt squalid training session violated his rights as a tenured professor; but he was certainly right to call it squalid, and to protect his intellect, his individuality, and his own way of looking at things, from the state’s sensitivity facilitators.

With his irritable, articulate, and maybe slightly crazy refusals, McPherson represents the greatness of tenure in the American university. He is what he is, believes what he believes, and doesn’t care what his deans say. Far from finding tenure attractive because he yearns for lifetime job security (indeed at one point in the farce McPherson almost left Irvine for Buffalo), McPherson likes tenure because it makes it more likely that his right to privacy, and his freedom to resist various forms of bureaucratic intrusion, will be respected.

What McPherson is protecting, above all, is the sanctity and complexity of independent thought. He knows that however mentally defended he manages to make himself throughout the harassment session, his mind will in some important sense never fully recover from its exposure to staggeringly reductive simple-mindedness about the world. Tenure goes a very long way toward shielding Alexander McPherson from the idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy of much of institutional life; it even goes some distance toward protecting him from the consequences of his hatred of idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy. Tenure – and Scottishness – have given McPherson the confidence to hate bullshit and love truth.

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But tenure, Naomi Schaefer Riley argues in The Faculty Lounges, has just the opposite effect on American professors. It makes them lazy, cowardly, and truth-averse. Wedged into an enviable permanent sinecure, the tenured professor leans back and relaxes for the rest of her career, lecturing from yellowing notes, rewriting the same politically correct babble in journals no one reads… Oh, and running the university. As Riley describes it, the tenured faculty lounges about, nibbling on grapes or whatever… and at the same time holds all the power at the university. She talks about “the almost unchecked power of university faculties,” about administrators who “have no power,” and argues that only the abolition of tenure will check the irresponsible, complacent, self-interested machinations of professors. The faculty lounges and lunges.

Yet how to square this Oblomovian oligarchy with Benjamin Ginsberg’s argument in The Fall of the Faculty that “Power on campus is wielded mainly by administrators,” with faculty “shunted to the sidelines”? Ginsberg attacks the corporatization of the university, its takeover by anti-intellectual bureaucrats who, in their quest for power and money, ignore professors; he wants professors to get their asses out of their labs and libraries long enough to retake their schools.

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Of the two writers, UD finds Ginsberg more convincing. Though he overstates the power and menace of administrators, the salient numbers are on his side, especially the insane growth of such positions at universities in the last few years. Riley might take comfort from the fact that tenure is steadily shrinking all by itself, without her having to break a polemical sweat. Administrators way up; tenured professors way down – that’s the way it is.

And it’s too bad. Because although of course Alexander McPherson is an extreme example, he nonetheless symbolizes well enough the subversive sangfroid of the free, even insolent, intellect. As our universities winnow people like McPherson and stock up on vocationally-minded, business-minded administrators, they risk their own demise.

As in – you know – the famous final lines of that Stevie Smith poem, Not Waving But Drowning:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Two recent books about American university professors span the waving/drowning thing in their very titles: One’s called The Faculty Lounges, and attacks tenured American university professors as larking about and waving at suckers with real jobs; the other, The Fall of the Faculty (reviewed here by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott), has us drowning in administrative “blight.”

I’ll have comments about both of these books later on today.

Alma mater, ’tis of thee…

“The doping, the raping and the shooting,” is how he refers to his last few months at Oklahoma, where he was 157-24-1 and won three national championships. He points out with his rebel streak that “the academia, the presidents and the board of regents” always get upset when he describes that time that way, but the descriptions are accurate and efficient, if cold. The people around the library always get a little uncomfortable when the athletic department is unmasked like that and brought out into the light, but Switzer has spent his life around the good and bad of sports. He knows this ugly, beautiful beast. And he cuts to the heart of some issues when he points out that the coach who doesn’t loosen his morals is going to lose to the one who does – or, like [Miami’s Randy] Shannon, lose his job.

“Why did you recruit the guy who shot his roommate with a .22?” he begins. “Well, if I hadn’t, he would have been playing at Notre Dame, Texas or Texas A&M. He was the No. 1 defensive back in the state. Started as a freshman. He was a great player. Did a dumb-ass act, probably because he was on drugs …”

On to the raping …

“The first one, two or three she had sex with, that was OK,” Switzer says. “But the fourth or fifth or sixth, she says, ‘No,’ that becomes rape. She should have never been in the dorms. The guys who brought her in there, they went to prison and served their sentence.”

Switzer loses his place.

“Oh, what was the other one?” he asks.

The doping …

“Oh, Charles Thompson was set up – great player, great QB – in an FBI sting. Talked into doing it with a bunch of buddies, thugs that came from high school. Set him up because they were three-time losers and they had a bug on him. Basically, they were trying to get me and my program. He relented after turning them down a dozen times.”

The shocking condition of Greece’s universities – a corrupt, violent, state tax collection system – has finally mobilized legislators. They’ve passed a strong reform bill, insisting on admissions standards, administrative autonomy and accountability, limits on the number of years people can be students, rational curricula, etc., etc.

As the opinion writer in my headline notes, the most staggering fact about Greek universities (scroll down for earlier posts about them) is their purposelessness. Of course in response to the legislation their complacent stakeholders have moved to shut them down, trash them, etc. But how to tell the difference between this and the status quo?

A lengthy, thoughtful account of the expensive, destructive, technology revolution in our schools.

… dealer.

[The University of North Carolina’s] problem can no longer be cast as a terrible farce in which big-money college sports runs sneak plays behind the backs of the bespectacled and bewildered professoriate.

Did professors get in the game, participating in the corruption of both the university and the students they are supposed to shape?

A Duke University economist broaches the subject.

A local person comments on an article welcoming yet another year of on-field nothingness and off-field bankruptcy to Missouri State University (background here).

MSU, with its recent history of sports accounting scandals, is gearing up for another Samuel Beckett season (I can’t go on I’ll go on), degrading itself to the big boys in sure-to-lose games in order to pick up a check; sending its latest interim interim interim president out to say to the press that they’ve got to keep football because it gives the school band something to do… And because a program like MSU’s “helps build student spirit” …

… and they’ve got excellent noses for it. The new Kansas State University mascot – a catwoman who appears at football games and tells you to recycle – smells not merely of propaganda but of heavy-duty moral scolding. Just the sort of thing you want at a sports outing.

Subjected to mass ridicule, EcoKat has been quietly put down by her university handlers. Long live freedom.

UD cannot improve on this comment in response to the latest from America’s most hick-laden university, Central Arkansas.

… says the sheriff. He doesn’t expect a professor to be a fugitive from justice because of his just-discovered big-time meth distribution business. Professors don’t have weapons caches, body armor, and huge wads of cash in their houses. Professors aren’t presidents of bikers clubs.

Pshaw. Do you read this blog? Over its lifetime UD has covered stories of professors who had live bombs in their houses; professors who on the first day of class told students to write down their Social Security numbers and hand them forward. So that the professors could rob them.

As for drug use: University Diaries has covered stories of professors so disabled by cocaine or alcohol while lecturing that students had to escort them to the emergency room.

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Yes, universities tend to produce more white than blue collar criminals — The insider trader on the board of trustees is fast becoming a paradigmatic postmodern American university figure … There’s Friend-of-Donna, Nevin Shapiro. Yeshiva University couldn’t honor Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff enough until that dark night when it had to go through all its web pages and erase their names and pretend they never existed…

You can certainly expect more faculty members to steal from their grants than to distribute drugs. But the drug distributors are out there.

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One point about this particular guy. Starting last year, if Cal State had bothered to look, it would have discovered he routinely came to class late and rambled and was beginning to piss off students.

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

In 2002, the person in charge of billing at the UT Southwestern medical school brought a whistle-blower suit against the school, alleging that “audits between 1993 and 1997 found that surgeons in as many as 16 UTSW departments were submitting [Medicare and Medicaid] bills for postoperative care, deliveries and other operations they did not perform.”

For various legal reasons, the Justice Department didn’t pursue that suit; but here comes a more recent one, from a former surgical department chair, claiming

UTSW was improperly charging Medicare and Medicaid for resident supervision that faculty doctors weren’t providing before, during and after surgery.

He also accused Parkland of permitting the lax oversight and using surgical consent forms that misled patients into thinking faculty doctors, rather than residents, would operate on them.

Without admitting guilt, the hospital has just settled this one, for $1.4 million.

Some parents of suspended University of Miami players can’t help noticing that their kids are getting hammered while their highly paid coaches remain at large. With Miami in mind, Tom McMillen, in the New York Times, is appalled that “Bloated college sports budgets, with coaches who earn millions of dollars, often more than college presidents, have created a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, with the result that colleges are losing control over their own athletic programs.”

Similarly, recent law graduates – huge swathes of them unemployed and in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars – are noticing that their law professors continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while failing to produce many employable students.

It is kind of an amazingly sweet deal for these two university employees. You hire a coach at three million dollars a year and he gets that even if his team loses every single game. He’ll get more the next year, even with total losses, because breaking his contract and finding a new coach will cost too much money. Then he’ll get even more the next year with the same win/loss record. I mean, eventually they’ll fire him, but he’ll rake it in for a long time before that happens.

The tenured law professor has it even sweeter. Over the course of five years, only half of her students, say, get jobs. She snuggles into bed at night secure in the thought of a low course load and regular salary raises despite hundreds of idle young people suffering under the weight of immense loan repayments because she and her school were unable to train them well enough to make them attractive to law firms.

You’d think a market correction would come into play in both of these arenas. If coaches are corrupt and hurt their players, or if coaches win too few games, shouldn’t their three million dollar salaries take a hit? If law professors teach at schools half of whose graduates remain unemployed for years, shouldn’t their hundred and fifty thousand dollar take home take a hit? No, you say! Silly UD! Both of these groups are eminently re-employable! Universities need to be scared, onaccounta if that law prof gets huffy enough she can just up and take a job at Cravath! NO university football or basketball coach is too corrupt or inept to fail to get another lucrative position!

Well, first off, this isn’t at all necessarily true. Things can get a little undignified even for high-profile coaches. And a law professor at a substandard school (the ABA will accredit anything) doesn’t have many options.

And second: Why would you want to tempt fate (lawsuits from UM players are going to happen, and lawsuits from unemployed law school grads are already happening) by keeping such people at your school? Wouldn’t you prefer reasonably paid, competent employees?