… Going Cosmic.

Miami shouldn’t be given the death penalty, as Sports Illustrated argued again 15 years later. It’s big-time college athletics that should be.

The basic move is: We can’t do Local X until we totally solve Universal X.

It’s a fantastic deflection exercise, beloved of people who are always saying things like Better the evils we know.

Another mission statement for the University of Miami (and many other campuses), courtesy of the coach of the Orlando Magic.

Colleges shouldn’t be farm systems. It doesn’t make any logical sense. But the schools don’t want to be blatantly in the situation of being professional sports even though they already are professional sports. They just want to disguise it, so they hide behind education. But, really, all you want is enough of your athletes to graduate so it looks like that’s what you care about. Anyone around sports knows it is all a bunch of bull[expletive]… The alumni want the illusion, and so does the school… But the kids know it is all bull[expletive]. Everyone does.

To judge by the particulars of an eight-year spree of lawlessness by one of your boosters, your football program has no regard for the rules, and your administration has no ability to enforce them.

… [Y]ou must shut the program down…

(Say what you will about the Miami Madoff, but Shapiro may be right: Cheating is even worse in the SEC, where, he says, “the money is an endless river.”) …

Truth, good writing, and all the right ideas.

All wasted.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.

[M]ost of these guys don’t get very good educations, because playing on a D-1 football team is basically a full-time job – at least as time-consuming (and certainly more dangerous) than most full-time jobs. Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.

The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.

The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

It’s hard to say. This directory page is the best I can do, and it might not be the same guy. But a news article about him says he’s an “assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine.”

As you probably know, medical schools are notorious for handing out the title “professor” to pretty about anyone who hangs around the hospital wearing a white coat. This courtesy isn’t a very good idea, especially at a time when doctors are being arrested for running pill mills all over the country (especially in Florida). Castronuovo faces ten years in prison for writing oxy prescriptions like a bat out of hell.

Lots of stuff on our lawn and in our forest to bring inside. We’ve made a reservation at a hotel for tomorrow – in case power goes out in Garrett Park. People walk along Rokeby Avenue carrying bags full of paper towels. We worry about trees falling on our house.

The predictable has happened with eight Miami football players being ruled ineligible for this season.

… Why is Miami president Donna Shalala still eligible for this season?

Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.

At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.

Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.

The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.

The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.

The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.

The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.

This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.

Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?

What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.

They’ve finally gotten what they want at the University of Utah: A football team successful enough to empty their classrooms. Cancelling all classes on this season’s opener, crows one Utah vice president, is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Yes, by God, we’ve done it! We’ve finally figured out how to make the Utes so popular that there’s no point in holding classes while they play!

Sure, there are a few pissed professors. And students. But think of the money! The exposure! Now everyone knows how the University of Utah feels about its educational mission!

Another new semester, another lap around the laptops in the classroom issue.

Steve Kelman, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes a pretty sensible post about them. He tells us, in a parenthetical whisper, of rumors involving this or that entire school banning them… Universities will increasingly ban them, for all the obvious reasons Kelman cites and more (they keep you from paying attention and learning anything; they distract the students around you; they are seriously rude, etc., etc.); but for now most schools are shilly-shallying. They know how horrible mobile devices are in class, but they’re afraid of pissing off students if they ban them… and, after all, it makes the schools feel like idiots to have spent so much money and rhetoric on the glories of classroom laptops and now to have to admit that they invested their money and their rhetoric unwisely.

But do not fail to note that in Kelman’s second example the pressure is coming from the students themselves. They know more intimately than professors just how these devices are being used, and if they have a smidgeon of intellectual seriousness they want them out of their faces.

Here’s Kelman’s policy, as stated on his syllabi:

In class, use of laptops to take notes is fine. However, use of laptops in class to check e-mail, surf the Web, use Facebook or Twitter, text, etc. [is] unprofessional and disrespectful to everyone in the classroom. All mobile devices must be switched off during class.

(He uses “mobile devices” to cover iPhones.)

The problem with this policy is that almost no one will follow it; so Kelman has condemned himself to life as a policeman.

[W]e medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.

Universities should consider whether their medical faculties include people who, either through involvement in corporate ghostwriting, conflict-of-interest shilling for the pharmaceutical industry, or questionable experimental practices, are contributing to this vile trend by lending an impression of research neutrality to it. Don’t let your university be used in this way. As with the Joseph Biederman fallout at Harvard, it will ultimately hurt your school.

That does capture it. And the value is totally monetary. For the rest… well, start with the University of Miami. And work your way down.

The escalating TV dollars are reshaping the amateur realm of college sports. With more money at stake, coaches say, the pressure to win is rising. Head coaches have long earned multimillion-dollar salaries, but now the TV money is cascading into the ranks of assistant coaches. Gus Malzahn, the offensive coordinator at Auburn University, college football’s defending national champion, has received a new deal valued at $1.3 million annually. Schools are also pouring money into stadium renovations and new training facilities.

Yes, UK’s now richly retired last president gassed on endlessly about how UK was on the verge of becoming a top-twenty university. How could it not soar into that empyrean? It spent most of its money on corrupt coaches and apathetic administrators. It embarrassed itself on a regular basis. It spat on the state’s most important living writer, Wendell Berry. Ain’t that how it’s done?

Actually, no. As this commenter – on an article about the newest faculty member on the university’s board of trustees – points out, Todd’s master plan trashed the school’s ranking and offered students an ever more amply paid, notoriously corrupt, sports program, coupled with angry, undercompensated faculty. Not really a recipe for a high US News and World Report outcome, though perhaps UK’s administration believes that the magazine uses sports wins in determining rankings.

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

The new trustee, Irina Voro, points out that the school treats faculty like “bumpkins.” Plus she “cited a Russian proverb: ‘A fish starts to be rotten at the top.'” Plus, she said that “a friend who is a former UK auditor couldn’t decipher the UK budget that is furnished to each UK trustee.”

Well, only a bumpkin wouldn’t realize that when you’ve got a sports program like UK’s, a lot of sleights of hand are called for.

Treating the student as a customer, and shifting to what students want in the moment’s popularity, does not serve Kansas. Shifting university resources to the 200 students who today want to be crime-scene investigators, thanks to “CSI” on television, will produce 190 graduates without a job. Closing down a physics department because it only produces a few nuclear physicists, when we desperately need every one and many more, directly damages the future of Kansas and our country…

State universities should not be commercial storefront operations advertising the latest fad curricula. State universities serve a public good.

An Emporia State department chair notes that universities are not supposed to be customer-driven.