The deputy chief operating officer of the Baltimore City schools (salary $135,200) explains that since the advertisement for his job didn’t say his university degrees had to be from accredited schools, his BA and MBA diploma mill degrees were just fine.

The school system agreed; but then the Baltimore Sun went sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, and suddenly DCO Kevin Seawright has moved his ass clear out of the office. He’s taking his skills to private industry.

Remember. Public schools, fire departments, the military: None of these places gives a shit about diploma mill degrees. They don’t even know what they are. All of these organizations boast Kevin Seawrights.

Okay, take a gander.

This wildly popular painting shows Jesus holding the divinely inspired American Constitution and glaring at a group of bad people downstage, right. Near the bad people lie scattered papers — Supreme Court decisions vesting political authority in the Court rather than God.

One bad person reads The Origin of the Species.

Prints of the painting have been displayed and sold at the Brigham Young University bookstore. Until recently.

[An] adjunct art professor at BYU found the piece way too politically charged, and expressed concerns to the bookstore that it was a propaganda piece for the tea party.

Her main concern was not Christ holding the Constitution, because most Mormons believe God had some role in the American founding, she said. Instead, her biggest problem was with specific ideological details portrayed…

There’s the “good” student who is holding a copy of Cleon Skousen’s book, “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which has been heavily promoted by Glenn Beck and somewhat “adopted” by the Tea Party, she said.

Among the “bad” people is a professor holding a copy of “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin.

“For a university to have that promoted as a bad thing, where half the biology department probably has you read that, just seemed really out of place for BYU,” she said…

The art professor – clearly one of the downstage people – is not the only person at BYU who wanted this painting out on its ass. Once she looked at it carefully and complained, other people looked.

Faculty and administrators and store staff are embarrassed. They’re embarrassed that their bookstore stocks and displays outrageous kitsch that – alter a few faces and book covers – could have come out of North Korea.

The store’s decision not to stock this print anymore has so enraged l’artiste that he has pulled all of his work from the store. So there.

… named in honor of erstwhile Yeshiva trustee Ira Rennert, intends to be, says its webpage, ‘a gateway to the “real world” of entrepreneurial business.’

It doesn’t get any realer than Rennert’s latest venture: A private museum on his Sagaponack estate (already the largest residence in the country).

Rennert has run into a problem, however:

[Rennert] has been instructed by [town] officials to cease construction of a museum on the 63-acre property. A village building instructor discovered Rennert’s plan to build when he noticed a concrete pumper truck on the property. “There has been no attempt to file a permit for any… type of structure,” the village official told the Post.

… and the basic moral imperative to call out corruption when you see it, all professors — all free thinkers — should be keeping a close eye on the University of Minnesota’s treatment of Professor Carl Elliott.

That institution spends most of its time, of course, deciding whether the common folk or just the elite can get drunk at its football stadium. But occasionally, around the edges, UM has academic issues.

Elliott, just awarded a Harvard fellowship to study corruption in clinical trials, has criticized the university’s management of an industry-sponsored drug trial. The university’s response has been, first, to refuse to investigate his claims and, second, to attempt to intimidate him.

UM has so far just done some throat-clearing on the intimidation front, but it will eventually start bellowing. University Diaries will follow along as it finds its voice.

The risk of getting leprosy from an armadillo is low.

… the aftermath of massive tornadoes through Tuscaloosa.

… a Columbia University English major, examines the complex psychology of writerly constraint in the face of scandals that demand a strong response. Gutterman wonders why, even having seen Inside Job, and gotten angry about the apparent involvement of Columbia University professors in conflicts of interest and non-disclosure, she took so long to write about it.

[T]he most insidious kind of censorship—the hardest to recognize, the hardest to combat—is self-censorship, the persistent imaginative failure that prevents us from even recognizing what we should be writing about.

In the Internet age, bravery in student journalism is not trailing a military unit on the Iraqi front lines. Rather, it is the willingness to address controversial issues as they surface, not once these points of view have become popular. Our brand of fear—which is frankly selfish—censors our thoughts almost unnoticed. Next time, let’s skip the delayed reaction. I for one hope to do better.

… and its expensive, successful effort to get their kid (now President Trump’s son-in-law) into Harvard. (The New York magazine article from which I got the quotation below is mainly about the jail time Papa Kushner has racked up. Money and influence can get you into Harvard, but apparently cannot always keep you out of jail.)

When Jared applied to college, Charlie was determined to get him into the most prestigious schools, and he called in favors to achieve his goal. In 1998, Charlie made a $2.5 million pledge to Harvard. According to The Price of Admission, the best-selling book written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, Charlie asked New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg to lobby Ted Kennedy to put in a call to Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons on Jared’s behalf.

Alex Pareene, in Salon, reviews this history in light of Trump’s attack on Obama’s Harvard admission.

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

And baby, I gotta tell you. UD has been covering universities for a long time, and the big affirmative action story is Kushner’s kid at Harvard, Ralph Lauren’s kids at Duke, and scads of other money admits. The Laurens are what’s called a “development family.”

Background here.

They will lose this round. UK’s destiny is way Adzillatron. But the faculty is fighting. If they’re in it for the long haul, they will eventually win.

You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

In keeping with Jeffersonian tradition, a hedge fund manager tears down a recently built 44 million dollar house to build a bigger house.

His architect explains:

Architect Jaquelin Robertson of Cooper Robertson Architects told the Sagaponack architectural and historic review board that the new home would be a cedar-shingled two-story Georgian Colonial-style house and compared the mahogany window trim to renovations at President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, according to minutes from the board’s March meeting.

I for one refuse to worry about the future of a country whose founding values are so scrupulously maintained.

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

Update: A role model for America’s future business elite.

… you’re a better man than I am.

… in this article from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus newspaper.

… “I have a blanket policy: no phones in my class for any reason, period,” said Chris Bell, director of the Oral Communication Center. “Laptops are fine, but I walk around a lot and I have grad TAs with me a lot of the time. Any of us ever see you doing anything other than taking notes, automatic full letter grade loss for the overall course. No questions, no excuses. My class is not your ESPN time.”

… “As far as phones go,” [said Todd Waters, a GTA,] “I have no tolerance whatsoever. Texting on a cell phone is the single rudest thing anyone can do to disrupt any communication context, including when the teacher is speaking, but primarily when another classmate is speaking/contributing to discussion. Basically, it’s a big, fat, massive [sic] you to everyone.” …

… has made for great UD viewing. It’s as if the people running the most corrupt of the spectacularly corrupt Bowl Championship Series games said to themselves What sort of writing can we produce to make UD optimally happy?

Put aside the alliteration-extension clever writers chronicling fiestal filth have already put into play. That’s a fun, but rather thin, amusement.

Look instead at the sudden renaming of the “Fiesta Frolic,” a golf junket for the NCAA (you wouldn’t want these guys actually overseeing what you do), to “Valley of the Sun Experience & Fiesta Bowl Seminars.”

MAKE MY DAY.

I mean here you get not only the gravitas of ancient history and myth (Valley of the Sun), but intellectual seriousness (seminar)… Frolic? Who said frolic? Did you say frolic? We speet on your frolic!

Then there’s this amazing bit of prose from the head of the Fiesta Bowl’s board of directors – a man who, fittingly, also runs an outfit called Waste Management. It’s one thing to underground diapers; it’s another thing to shovel this much shit.

Duane plucks real hard on our heartstrings throughout his defense of the sublimity of the Fiesta Bowl. I’ll let you read for yourself his sobbing insistence that they’ll come out of this better men. But I do want to reproduce Duane’s final lines.

… I received [an email] last week from Air Force Lt. Col. and Fiesta Bowl Committee member Bob Whitehouse, stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq.

Half a world away, in the midst of an armed conflict, Lt. Col. Whitehouse sounded a rallying cry for his beloved Fiesta Bowl.

“In the face of adversity,” Whitehouse wrote, “We can either crumble and fail, or we can rise above it and reach even greater success.”

Our choice is clear.

Dr Johnson! Thou should’st be living at this hour.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Update: They’re canceling this year’s event.

Requiem for a Frolic.

A Boston Globe editorial concludes:

[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them.

How was that again?

[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. [Yes. The paper is right to stress this primary point.] It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. [UD thinks something dumb like this probably was the original motivation. Since that time, she’d argue, some professors have grown quite, quite fond of a technology which removes students from their teachers’ sphere of responsibility. In many cases, a student with a laptop is essentially a student who’s absent….  Laptops make it so that professors don’t have to teach – especially if the professors are themselves using PowerPoint. They walk into a room and read slides aloud while students do fuck all on their laptops.] This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them. [This last statement will bring out all the I’m an adult and can do what I want; don’t talk down to me language from students and their cynical, laptop-lovin’ profs. How dare a university have codes of conduct!]