Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock.

Here’s our most recent information on WKU:

There will be a lot of empty seats at LP Field in Nashville tonight when the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky open the 2011 football season at 9:15 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, 40,262 tickets were available at Ticketmaster.com, including nearly 10,000 in the lower level. The stadium, where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, holds 68,798 fans.

They’re desperately handing out free tickets so the stadium won’t look like a funeral home.

UD‘s friend Maurice sends her the most delicious article retraction statement she’s ever encountered. It’s via the site Retraction Watch, and it appeared in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology:

Volume 48, no. 11, p. 4200–4206, 2010. We hereby retract this article. After publication of the article, we realized that we had failed to cite the article “Epidemiology of candidemia in Brazil: a nationwide sentinel surveillance of candidemiain eleven medical centers” by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, B. J.Park, S. A. Nouér, B. Arthington-Skaggs, D. A. da Matta, D. Warnock, and J. Morgan for the Brazilian Network Candidemia Study (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). This article should have been cited as reference 9 in the References section instead of the article by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, R. Salomão, M. L. Branchini, R. Richtmann, A. Derossi, and S. B. Wey (Diagn. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 34:281–286, 1999). Moreover, we realized after our article had been published that major parts of the text had been plagiarized almost verbatim from Colombo et al. (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). Prof. Cisterna and Dr. Ezpeleta express their deep and sincere apologies to Prof. Colombo and his Brazilian Network Candidemia Study team, to the clinical microbiology community, and to Journal of Clinical Microbiology readers for this embarrassing situation. In addition, we state that Jesus Guinea, Julio García-Rodríguez, Juliana Esperalba, and Benito Regueiro should not have appeared in the author byline, as they contributed to the paper only by supplying isolates and clinical data for the patients and were not involved in the writing of the paper.

Retraction Watch muses on the ethics of guest authorship:

[T]he question of whose name appears on a manuscript is clearly political and jealously guarded. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But does the person who collects the data really deserve less credit than the lab head who was on sabbatical while the vast majority of the work was being conducted, or the section chief who likes to stick fingers in every pie simply to accumulate numbers on a CV?

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UD thanks Maurice.

… about the University of Miami scandal. Here’s a typical one:

I grew up on two major items on the vast American sports smorgasbord – major league baseball and college sports. In my case, the direct spectating involvement was more college basketball than football, although I was exposed to some very interesting football events when my father was an assistant athletic director at Villanova in the early ’50s…

Ah yes I remember it well… It was stinkin’ crooked then and it’s stinkin’ crooked now and I love it… Because I’m an American! Aren’t you an American?

We are Americans. We want this in our lives.

What?… Say again? Louder?… You don’t want it in your life? Or at least in your university?… What are you Canadian or something? Sit down shut up and listen … Ah… Let’s see… It was ’52 I think… No, maybe ’53…

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Here’s another old fart:

The scandal “only strengthens my support,” said attorney George Lott, a Miami alumni whose family is another major donor. “I think UM alumni, students and faculty will come together as a family and we will get through this together.”

If only we could have a scandal of this magnitude every five years or so! Alumni support would be through the roof.

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Let’s leave Pops and Old Fart on their rockers and go with the youth vote. Here’s a lecture from a dynamic hypercapitalist on why all of life is a market and corruption is a who-gives-a-shit byproduct of markets.

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It’d be interesting to hear these guys on, say, the drug war in Mexico.

Pops: Cocaine? We’re Americans. We want this in our lives. Why, I remember a lovely trip the wife and me took to Oaxaca one summer…

Old Fart: The drug wars bring us together as a family.

Hyper: Hey baby it’s a great big dirty world get real all markets produce corollary damage…

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Essentially all of these guys are signalling that if anyone tries to do anything about their game they’re going to go weewee in their pants.

Fay Vincent gets it said.

… the University of Louisville (background on this university here, here, here, here, here) are shocked to hear that UL’s current recruiting coordinator might have been deeply involved in the Nevin Shapiro University of Miami scandal (his last job was at Miami).

The reporter who broke the story about the University of Miami and Nevin Shapiro says to NPR:

But the reality is the NCAA is comprised of – it’s the universities. It’s the institution. It’s the presidents. It’s the power conferences and the conference commissioners, and in some way, shape or form, it’s – there’s no getting around the fact that they are all in bed together. You’re asking a governing body to look over universities that essentially help to establish that governing body’s power in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of an awkward marriage between the people who are expected to enforce are also made up by individuals who at – you know, at some point in their lives typically had worked within university structures, and I think that’s sort of what creates a lot of the gray area that people tend to attack when they go after the NCAA.

That’s the important thing. That’s what makes all of the university sports scandals so particularly, so intensely, disgusting. The NCAA isn’t a bunch of jocks acting like jerks with whom academic leaders are in constant conflict… because, you know, jock/intellectual… they’re naturally at odds, etc. … No. The NCAA is American university presidents. They run the fucker.

Here’s the NCAA logo.

Here’s what it should be.

From the New York Times:

“I don’t know how you repair this,” said State Senator Peter W. Galbraith, a Democrat who represents the village [of Williamsville, Vermont], walking along the road on Tuesday.

… “When are we going to get out of Afghanistan?” [a resident whose house was ruined] asked Mr. Galbraith, a former United Nations representative in that country, as he came by. “Frankly, I really am focused on the world, and it really helps you put things in perspective. No matter how much we lost, it’s nothing compared to the starvation in Somalia.”

Everyone’s upset because Peevy – a UK athletics public relations guy – went and got all peeved with a UK student reporter who had the gall to interview a couple of basketball players without getting Peevy’s permission.

Yeah, just a couple of amateur college athletes, but there’s a big, big big old public relations machine right behind them, and you don’t, like, just, you know, call them… I mean, are you crazy?

When he found out that the reporter had committed journalism, Peevy punished him and his newspaper by withholding various other forms of access to the team.

The Associated Press Managing Editors group sent a letter to Kentucky’s Director of Athletics:

This is a level of abuse of free speech not tolerated at universities in other states and is particularly abhorrent at a taxpayer-owned institution…

Peevy does this sort of thing all the time – whenever anyone dares to do some independent reporting.

Because of course you need to control the news very closely when your franchise is filthy top to bottom (scroll down). You don’t want a free press reporting on what’s going on. Peevy is seeing to that.

… UD prepares for her first day of teaching.

With power restored to Garrett Park, Les UDs left their hotel yesterday afternoon. They spent the early evening hours raking leaves and dragging limbs off the lawn.

The fox was at the top of UD‘s half acre exploring a mass of branches that fell across the open green near the deer and mourning dove encampments. Moving the branches will take some doing, and UD‘s not ready for the task.

The task of thought – dark, poetic thought – is like the elegant wary predatory movement of a fox… Now here, now here, and now here in the dark head, thought like a nocturnal animal’s body feels out what’s hidden there amid vast silent clearings. This twig, that leaf. The poetic body comes about its own business, brings sly hot perception to its own cold mental darkness, and the poem – like the dark snow under the fox’s paw – is printed.

… is totally worth a read. Garvin summarizes the pay college athletes argument:

The sky’s the limit [on salary]. And they shouldn’t be distracted by having to go to class, either, or even having to read or write.

He crunches the numbers colleges will need to anticipate:

The average NFL player’s salary, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported earlier this year, is about $1.9 million. If colleges wind up paying even a tenth of that — a lowball guess — that means that the University of Miami football team would need a payroll of $16 million just to cover the 85 scholarship players the NCAA allows. (Though, if we’re doing away with the requirement that players be able to write their own names, I don’t know why we’d be nit-picky about silly things like roster limits.)

UD‘s laughing out loud here.

And don’t forget taxes!

Right now college athletes don’t pay taxes on their scholarships because their schools sports programs are tax-exempt. But once you start paying the players (and especially if all pretense that they’re getting an education is dropped), the IRS will certainly want its cut. And that will include the value of the scholarship in addition to whatever salary they’re getting paid. A year at UM costs about $55,000 these days; at current tax rates, that means a UM football player would be around $12,000 in hock to the IRS before accepting another cent.

Bravo, Hagerstown Community College. Kaplan came at you, melons bobbling, wanting you to direct your graduates their way.

Kaplan’s chief executives, after all, have to maintain their tens of millions of dollars in personal compensation, and they can’t go trolling homeless shelters for tax-money-bearing eager minds anymore. So they came up with this let’s cooperate! idea…

But in a blunt email to Kaplan, HCC (I wonder what the prez of HCC makes a year, compared to the zillionaires at Kaplan) has said no way.

As Kaplan moves ahead with its new marketing plans, please do not state or imply HCC is a Kaplan partner or that the HCC faculty or staff are suggesting our graduates consider Kaplan as the next step in continuing their education.

We tell our students, quite frankly, that there are much better transfer options for them to consider. In summary, we do not believe Kaplan’s partnership offer is in the best interest of our current or former students.

Asked to elaborate, an HCC spokesperson alluded to the for-profit industry’s notorious

recruiting efforts, financial-aid programs, job placement rates, and other business practices. Just this month, the U.S. Justice Department and four states filed suit against one for-profit school, stating possible violations to the federal Higher Education Act.

She also mentioned that Kaplan’s more expensive than the schools HCC traditionally recommends.

Why does it cost so much???

ZILLIONS of reasons.

It’s not just that it will finally address the scourge of “lugging stacks of books across campus.”

In the words of its one of its faculty members, “People shouldn’t be discriminated for where they chose to live.”

Julie Bindel, The Guardian.

On leaving academia seven years ago I vowed that I would never use PowerPoint again. I still speak at conferences, though, and have been known to rant at organisers when asked in advance for my PPT presentation. I inform them that I will be turning up with a set of index cards on which I have jotted down key points, but will not be boring my audience to tears with fiddly slides consisting of flying text, fussy fonts or photo montages.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in having a real discussion about ideas as opposed to force-feeding an increasingly sleepy crowd with numerous graphs and bullet points projected on to the nearest wall. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother showing up to hear a colleague elucidate on their thesis, when we are helpfully posted an advance printout of the presentation. As the speaker is building to a crucial statistic, delegates have long finished and are doing the crossword instead.

So we’re in a hotel again tonight.

The sky over the Rockville Pike is a mild blue with thin clouds, but the stands of trees among the malls are still shaking.

“The NCAA is starting to crumble internally. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, especially the athletes.”

The problem with this comment, from the head of the Drake Group, is that is misdescribes things in a pretty basic way.

The NCAA is stronger and richer than ever. With the new billion dollar tv deals, and with its retention of its absurd non-profit status, the NCAA is thriving beyond belief, and will continue to do so.

Why will it continue to do so? Because almost no one in this country – and certainly no one with any power – cares about what’s going on in big time university athletics. People want their games. They want them bad. They couldn’t care less what else the games bring.

University presidents know this. Tom McMillen, in the same article, says “You have coaches making salaries that are often 25 times more than what the college president at his school makes” as if he thinks this will get a rise out of someone. It hasn’t. It won’t.

What UD means is… If it were going to, it would’ve. Know what I mean? If I said There are dozens of universities in America which barely exist except as lucrative athletic programs, would that upset you? Galvanize you to action?

Or look at it this way: UD loves Barack Obama. Can’t wait to vote for him again. But Obama is a jock who loves big time university sports and – far as I know – has done nothing but heap praise on it.

And Congress? LOL.

This doesn’t mean you stop protesting the situation. It means you need to be honest about how deeply bad it is.