Some universities are such class acts that UD has trouble covering them. Take the massively inappropriately named Kean University.
Kean’s on probation because… well… because everything, including having a president who apparently lied on his cv and blamed the lies on his staff. My headline is taken from an article about the board of trustees having enthusiastically backed the president in his time of trial. What a relief for him to know that only Kean students are expected to act with integrity.
Oh, plus the university’s associate vice president for academic affairs is a plagiarist. A top-flight plagiarist, though. When stealing large chunks of text, she’s careful to replace the name of the school in the original text with the name Kean University.
Source document:
“It is vitally important to Parkland that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to help retaining students is the ability of Parkland to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work.”
VP Academic Affairs document:
“It is vitally important to Kean that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to helping to retain students is the ability of Kean to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work.”
She even found an obscure school (top-flight plagiarists know to look for obscure sources for their material) to steal from!
Despite all her hard work, the woman has been asked to resign. I’m sure the accreditation people won’t notice this latest awkwardness.
… has always been a problem for American universities, especially in the heartland. The University of Iowa’s amber waves of grain alcohol (UI, the nation’s number one party school, has an enthusiastic promotional relationship with Anheuser Busch) are getting ruffled lately by folks who think using your university as a promotional arm of the gambling industry as well as the alcohol industry is unseemly. The university points out that it’s all very nuanced:
Iowa … is paid to advertise Riverside Casino & Golf Resort, but removes the word “casino” in signs at Kinnick Stadium.
So what’s your problem?
And as for all the scratch-ticket game deals between the Iowa Lottery and UI … hello? Have we heard of ca-pi-tal-ism? UI’s got a brand new Adzillatron, and the only naughty thing college students love that isn’t being shriekingly massively constantly hawked on that screen is sex.
UD understands, however, that UI is in negotiations with Roxxxie’s Iowa State Fairest of Them All Bawdy House even as we speak. The plan is to drop the word “bawdy.”
… has died.
UD‘s 2007 interview about her can be found here.
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From a Paris Review interview:
Oh, Germany last year, my God! That was the most disastrous trip. It was some academic institution in Germany. I said to them, “Look, I want to do what I always do. I’ll read the story and then I’ll take questions.” They said, the way academics always do, “Oh you can’t expect our students to ask questions.” I said, “Look, just let me handle this, because I know how.” Anyway, what happened was typical in Germany: We met at four o’clock in order to discuss the meeting that was going to take place at eight. They cannot stand any ambiguity or disorder — no, no! Can’t bear it. I said, “Look, just leave it.” The auditorium was very large and I read a story in English and it went down very well, perfectly okay. I said, “I will now take questions.” Then this bank of four bloody professors started to answer questions from the audience and debate among themselves, these immensely long academic questions of such tedium that finally the audience started to get up and drift out. A young man, a student sprawled on the gangway — as a professor finished something immensely long — called out, “BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.” So with total lack of concern for the professors’ feelings I said, “Look, I will take questions in English from the audience.” So they all came back and sat down, and it went well . . . perfectly lively questions! The professors were absolutely furious. So that was Germany. Germany’s the worst, it really is; the end.
Surely you didn’t think the emerging details of the Virginia State University attack (at a banquet) on an opposing team’s quarterback would make things look better? Not only does it seem to have been a planned, group assault against a totally unsuspecting single individual (he had left the luncheon to use the bathroom), but in its immediate aftermath, at a public event honoring various players and their conference, the two teams came close to an all-out melee.
And look. I can understand (see this post’s title) how distraught onlookers might tell reporters that it reflects badly on historically black universities; but, as a daily chronicler of American universities, I can assure you that this event, while certainly a step forward on our path toward the brutalization of institutions of higher learning, differs little from the hazing and rioting endemic on a whole bunch of campuses. Hazing, rioting, and, for sports factories like VSU, the games themselves brutalize our schools. In this particular case the opposing quarterback got his lights knocked out the day before the game, under dramatic circumstances; but of course he’s getting them knocked out, little by little, whenever he plays. A fine thing for universities – to be the means of delivering brain injury to their students.
Anyway. The comment thread on the article to which I’ve linked you is also instructive. Just as plenty of people think Richie Incognito did what needed to be done to toughen up a cowardly teammate, so a number of commenters don’t see the what the big deal is here. Why cancel the game just because our team got together and beat the shit out of the quarterback the day before? Use your second-string quarterback.
UD sometimes feels as though she should issue warnings:
WARNING: THIS UNIVERSITY IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH
U Mass Amherst, Chico State, University of Rhode Island: Certain schools feature violent people – often violent drunks – and should be avoided.
Virginia State, where only a few months ago two students were hazed to death, should definitely come with a warning. At a recent event celebrating its athletic conference, its football team beat an opposing quarterback so badly the game that had been scheduled for the day after the banquet has been called off.
The guy “was allegedly beaten by a group of Virginia State football players in a bathroom of a WSSU campus building during the CIAA football banquet.”
Winston-Salem State Chancellor Donald Reaves said in a statement Friday night, “I am saddened to report that at today’s CIAA pre-championship game luncheon held at the Anderson Center of the WSSU campus that our starting quarterback, Rudy Johnson, was viciously beaten by one or more members of the Virginia State football team.
“There is no excuse for the behavior of the Virginia State players. One suspect has admitted to his role in the attack and has been arrest on criminal assault charges. The University Police Department is attempting to identify the other VSU players who were involved. Today’s event was supposed to be a celebration for both teams and for all the players who were being recognized for an outstanding season. The actions from the Virginia State players certainly changed the outcome for everyone.”
Most teams wait until they’re on the field before beating the crap out of the quarterback. VSU can’t wait.
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Wow. Yet more violence at Virginia State University.
Just sayin’! Not sayin’ Rule By Females would necessarily be better. But when you run a blog about universities and it’s all about undergraduates like Richie Incognito and trustees like Steven Cohen and coaches like Mike Rice you do wonder about Rule By Males.
When you see – frequently – headlines like this
WHY REPLACE A STADIUM THAT’S
ONLY HALF-FULL ON GAME DAYS?
it has to go through your head to consider whether men are led through life by anything other than dicks and wallets. I mean, why are Colorado State University and the University of Nevada Las Vegas (scroll down) going to build massive expensive empty new stadiums? CSU Athletic Director Jack Graham’s “dream of playing with the big boys,” says one local critic, really shouldn’t result in a university spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a slightly better located, slightly expanded, void.
Various fans explain to the newspaper that they go to the games, they get excited when they go to the games, and they get excited by the thought of competing with other schools on the basis of the magnificence of their stadiums …
This Quinnipiac University student has a point. It makes no sense for professors to have strict attendance policies in classes where attendance is pointless.
But of course precisely classes in which attendance is useless tend to be those with the strictest attendance policies. After all, the entire class – not just this student – can reason their way to non-attendance of a class in which attendance is pointless. And they do; they do.
Which leaves the professor in an embarrassing position. She comes to class to turn out the lights, put her head down, and read aloud her prepared PowerPoint script. She seems to think that’s what Quinnipiac is paying her for: She is to appear twice a week, set up a PowerPoint, and read the slides out loud.
But if there are no students in the room, she not only enters, twice a week, a theater of the absurd; she also worries that word will get around that although her enrollments look fine, the reality is that no one attends any of her classes.
No one is going to be more frantic about mandatory attendance than this woman; it’s the only way she can maintain the fiction that she’s a professor and not a robotic data dumper. Of course she’ll encourage her students to use their laptops during class (she’s way tech-friendly; it’s so cutting-edge… So much better than turning on the lights and looking at people and talking to them … ), which will soften the blow for them… Give them something to do while she’s reciting the alphabet.
… (see the post directly below this one), its highest-profile honorary degree recipient, its 2010 commencement speaker, has been running one hell of a public relations campaign. Ask me anything! Ask my bank anything!
These are some of the tweets J.P. Morgan received (before hurriedly shutting the account):
“What’s your favorite type of whale? #AskJPM,” said The Atlantic’s Matt O’Brien.
“Is your “Chief Compliance Officer” alive? Has anyone checked to see if he’s in his office? #AskJPM,” said Salon’s David Dayen.
“Does Jamie Dimon pet a small cat and laugh ominously while he’s ruining poor people’s lives? #AskJPM,” said blogger Tim Donovan.
Some others:
Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?
If it came out Jamie Dimon had a propensity for eating Irish children, would you fire him? What if he’s still “a good earner”?
Is it the ability to throw anyone out of their home that drives you, or just the satisfaction that you know you COULD do it?
How many homeless people did you create in ’08?
Will the firm explore new markets, like selling candy-backed securities to babies w/o disclosing the lack of chocolate in the bonds?
Did you not realize that The Smartest Guys In The Room was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for mass theft?
Sure. There’s more.
Quick! You’re in a room with no key, a chair, two paper clips, and a lightbulb. How do you defraud investors?
Sorry we ruined your hashtag event, if you could just apologise for your plunder of the global economy, I think we’d be even.
Given the # of reg violations + scale of fines paid across the bank, please explain why the board hasn’t been replaced by livestock?
Enough already!
What’s it like working with Mexican drug cartels? Do they tip?
How do you decide who to foreclose on? Darts or a computer program?
As a young sociopath, how can I succeed in finance?
And:
why did u think this would be a good idea
It’s because of the intellectual luster he lends the place. Challenged on the pathetic graduation rates of the students for whose progress he’s responsible, he explains:
“If everybody stays, our graduation rate is great… But some guys just don’t stay. If somebody had an answer, I’d love to hear it.”
Boeheim earns close to two million dollars a year for his policy of saying
1. If they would graduate, they would graduate; and
2. Fuck if I know.
… and fine sunrises too, like the one I enjoyed early this morning, walking to the commuter train steps from my house (Mr UD usually drives me to the metro, but he’s out of town).
I’ve been so busy from morn ’til night these three days that it’s been hard for me to blog… I watched last night’s sunset from an incredibly well-appointed meeting room on the top floor of a fancy building at George Washington University, where I sat listening to sales pitches from online vendors who’d like to run programs at GW. Yes, GW is exploring all sorts of online initiatives, and UD has been asked to be part of this exploration because of her modest MOOC acclaim.
Yet if you read this blog with any care, you know that despite her online poetry lectures, UD is way skeptical of online education. So she is an oddball, a misfit, a brother from a seriously other mother, on this particular committee… Though she thinks she may be of some use to it, since her elaborate resistance to what these vendors represent is perhaps representative of a certain slice of the professorati, and GW might as well know what to expect by way of trouble as it tries to get some of this stuff up and running.
Still, UD is reflective enough (though just barely) to wonder, as she squints paranoiacally at this techie parade, whether she herself is sort of like totally well like over. Hopelessly twentieth century. Apparently everyone’s supposed to want to learn things by sitting by yourself and playing Sesame Street-like games and watching coached professors on a screen. Or on a phone or whatever. Everyone’s supposed to be dying to have a university-level discussion that’s organized like the opening of the Brady Bunch except that instead of the Brady Bunch it’s your fellow discussants. Students want this. Students demand this. Said the techie parade.
And actually there’s a lot to like if you’re a certain kind of professor. UD gathers that some online teaching will appeal to the self-important among us – displaced German university professors who enjoy being fussed over by a team of people whose job it is to sense what they will like and do that thing for them… Who will, let’s be honest, actually write and even sorta teach the course for them if they would like… Who’d run interference in such a way that they’d never have to get all down and dirty with, well, students… Bothersome things like that…
And, you know, it’s like that Monty Python thing… I s’pose I’m very old-fashioned… very old-fashioned… (Did I make that up? I can’t find the source of it.) But I just can’t wrap my head around it.
… once again cracks the whip. You recall its directive to faculty last year:
In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”
The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.
Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”
And they meant it, baby. Chicago State has a 10% graduation rate, and much else besides, to protect; and now you’ve got some faculty undermining the peace-loving progressive masses of CSU by starting a blog!
A blog written by Chicago State University faculty members that has been critical of the school’s administration was sent a “cease and desist” notice by university lawyers …
[CSU] said the blog “violates the University’s values and policies requiring civility and professionalism of all University faculty members.”
Cage demanded that site administrators “immediately disable” the blog and provide written confirmation of that no later than Friday to “avoid legal action.”
UD trusts free speech advocates are all over this one. I’d say it’s an outrage, but everything about CSU is outrageous and it still syphons huge tax dollars from the poor citizens of Illinois. So it’s wasted breath.
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Scott Jaschik takes note.
New to teaching, I was proudly gazing at a sign on my office door proclaiming “Assistant Professor Grossman,” when the department secretary knocked.
“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” she asked.
“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”
Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune