…We pay [UW president Mark Emmert] more than he could ever possibly need, while students are being priced out of the seats.

Yes. That is the brilliant strategy that the University of Washington, at a time of terrible financial difficulties, has adopted.

… [Missouri] Gov. Jay Nixon doesn’t appear to be interested in choosing a new poet laureate who comes with controversy. His application for the post includes questions asking an applicant whether there’s anything in his or her background that could embarrass the governor.

Nixon’s spokesman, Sam Murphey, said the questions are standard for anyone seeking appointment to a state board or commission.

He did not return follow-up phone calls, nor did he respond to e-mailed questions asking for specific examples of what might embarrass the governor.

Application forms for poets laureate in other states do not ask similar questions.

Walter Bargen, the outgoing poet laureate who was appointed by former Gov. Matt Blunt, said he did not have to fill out an application, but he and his wife did agree to a Missouri State Highway Patrol background check. Blunt’s staff also asked whether there was anything they should know about. Bargen told them, “I grew up in the ’60s,” and that he once used the word “nipple” in a poem…

From Crosscut, Seattle.

An editorial in North Jersey:

… The same state university that has gone into deep debt to expand its football stadium now is seriously considering a massive overhaul of its athletic center. This is a very bad idea.

The Rutgers Athletic Center has not been expanded since it was built 31 years ago. A bigger and better center may be desired, but now is not the time. The proposed expansion includes a new basketball practice facility, adds premium and club seats, replaces the playing court and scoreboard and creates an atrium that would house retail stores and a hall of fame. New coaching offices also would be built.

To date, there are no estimated costs for the ambitious plan, but Rutgers hopes private fund raising, plus income from the sale of premium and club seats, will pay for the project. Where have we heard that before? Ah, yes, Rutgers’ football stadium.

The expanded stadium was going to be financed with private funds. But the money didn’t materialize and the university had to borrow much of the needed $102 million. Has no one inside the athletics department noticed the recession?…

The University of Cincinnati’s sports program will need up to $11 million in new funding every year to be competitive in the Big East Conference, but it still is running a deficit every year and owes millions of dollars from past overspending.

A new report also shows that UC’s Athletic Department is losing about $3.5 million a year and has amassed a $24 million debt, mainly from a shortfall in construction of the Varsity Village complex on campus.

… UC will start construction soon on a new sports complex along Jefferson Avenue that will include football practice fields, but a potential expansion of Nippert Stadium – and whether UC can afford a project that could cost up to $50 million – looms over the program…

… is a classic disorder among degree fraudsters.

UD‘s been saying for years that if you want to get by with a diploma mill degree or just a degree you made up out of your head, you need to keep your sheepskin stats low.

UD understands it’s tempting, as long as you’re manufacturing your own awards, to give yourself three or four or five. But the danger is that if anyone investigates you, all those PhDs will look odd.

Currently a lad of 31, Jason Walker “taught three undergraduate courses, as well as one graduate course” in some medical subject or other at the University of Victoria. This was in 2006, so he was what? 27? But already at 27 he had ” two or three doctorates in forensic and behavioural sciences and medical epidemiology.” These and earlier degrees were from a variety of schools:

Among the academic institutions Walker has claimed to have studied at are the University of Victoria, the University of Calgary, McMaster University, the University of Toronto, Yale University and Smith College.

Smith College is an all-women liberal arts institution in Massachusetts.

I guess he liked the anonymity of the name Smith.

Anyway, Walker recently gave expert advice in some child custody thing in Canada, and someone in some office checked up on him, and now he’s in deep Vancouverian doodoo.

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

Update:

… [P]olice became suspicious about his academic background when someone looked closely at a University of Toronto degree on his office wall, spokeswoman Sgt. Julie Fast said.

“It says it’s a Ph.D. in ‘philiosthy.’ That is how it’s spelled,” she said…

UD says philiosthy is a variant of philioque, itself a variant of filioque. This was a theology degree.

The man who until recently managed Wesleyan’s investments wrote this to his wife in an email when he still worked at Wesleyan.

He was excited about the extra money he was about to make (Wesleyan paid him $500,000 or so, sickeningly low when you consider that his peers at Harvard until recently got thirty million dollars a year) from — just like Phyllis Wise and Mark Emmert at board-seat-crazy University of Washington — sitting on a bunch of corporate boards.

This guy, Tom Kannam, also opened up tons of new businesses while working for Wesleyan (he billed Wesleyan, according to a lawsuit the college has filed against him, for travel and other stuff associated with these ventures), and generally seems to have regarded his Wesleyan job as a kind of stupid side gig he held onto because it gave him access to information and connections that moved his real money-making activities along.

The Kannam family emails Wesleyan’s gotten hold of and presented in its suit are wondrous to behold. When Kannan tells his wife that Wesleyan has just updated its conflict of interest policy and that the policy looks really serious, she responds: Oucheroo.

An official announcement from Penn State:

The Office of Physical Plant (OPP) at Penn State will resume its crow relocation program this evening (Wednesday, Jan. 6). Large groups of crows have been gathering in the vicinity of Ford, Moore, Cedar and Chambers buildings, and near West Halls, Rec Hall, the HUB-Robeson Center and Pond Laboratory. Occupants of these buildings may experience the loudest noises as OPP’s sonic harassment efforts begin.

OPP’s anti-crow team will begin its efforts on the north side of Old Main at 7:30 p.m.; the campus community can expect to hear loud noises in the early evening as University employees launch anti-crow pyrotechnic noisemakers intended to convince the crows move to less problematic locations. Pyrotechnic operations may continue for several weeks until this objective is met.

OPP’s goal is to drive crows to a stand of trees east of the Visitor’s Center on the University Park campus. Small groups of highly trained OPP employees will be conducting the relocation operation and will be wearing distinctive green safety vests. Once the crows have vacated a location, crow effigies will be hung to dissuade the crows from returning. Light towers will be erected in the targeted relocation woods east of the Visitor’s Center to make the area more appealing to the crows.

No crows will be harmed in this operation. The public can expect some disturbance from the noisemaking activities and possible crow infestation if the crows attempt to re-roost in populated areas.

In addition to OPP’s efforts, the College of Agricultural Sciences is employing propane cannons at the dairy barns and at the the Organic Materials Processing and Education Center (OMPEC). These cannons produce loud blasts to scare crows away. The cannons may be used for most of the day, seven days a week, throughout the rest of the winter.

Last year about 3,000 migrating crows landed at Penn State’s University Park campus, creating unsanitary and unpleasant conditions. OPP’s goal is to discourage this mass roosting…

Here’s a list – Ten Warning Signs of a Bad Professor – that does a pretty good job of covering the main characteristics of poor or indifferent instructors.

I can think of a few other things, like uses too much technology.

Speaking of which… UD‘s blogpal Veblen sends her this account of PowerPoint use in the American military.

… of vicious fanatics and their role in campus life.

The BBC:

… [A] working group …will be formed from university vice-chancellors and other academics [to] consider how to achieve the balancing act of preventing campus extremism without undermining the right for students and staff to hold free debates.

The group will “consider how universities can work with all relevant organisations, nationally and locally, to ensure the protection of freedom of speech and lawful academic activities, whilst safeguarding students, staff and the wider community from violent extremism”.

… Among the issues to be considered will be invitations to outside speakers – and whether controversial views should be banned…

Controversial isn’t quite the right word, implying as it does two sides to a question. There is no Should All Homosexuals Be Slaughtered? controversy, is there?

We invited Mr X to campus so that he can help our students understand why, as opposed to what some people argue, the answer to civilization’s problems lies in the mass murder of gay people…

FSU’s appeal has failed.

… The NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee said Tuesday the cooperative efforts of the university in the academic cheating scandal involving 61 Florida State athletes failed to outweigh the aggravating factors in the case.

“The case also included impermissible benefits, unethical conduct by three former academic support services staff members and a failure to monitor by the university,” the NCAA statement said.

Twenty-five football players were among the athletes who cheated on an online test in a music history course from the fall of 2006 through summer 2007 or received improper help from staffers who provided them with answers to the exam and typed papers for them…

A Massachusetts pharmacy college instituted a ban on clothing that obscures the face, including face veils and burqas, weeks after a Muslim alumnus who is also the son of a professor was charged with plotting terror strikes.

The policy change at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services, announced in a campus-wide e-mail last month, went into effect Friday.

… The policy would effectively ban face veils, as well as burqas and niqabs, which either cloak the entire body or cover everything but the eyes…

UD hopes this is only the first American university to ban the degrading and dangerous burqa.

He’s more than reached that tipping point where accumulated institutional embarrassments demonstrate the failure of his presidency.

There’s the graduation rate.

There’s Rick Pitino (scroll down).

There’s the last dean of the school of education. (Background here.)

This list (I’m sure I’m missing stuff) describes a university president totally asleep at the wheel. Why hasn’t he been fired?

The University of Oregon newspaper interviews Stephen Stolp, executive director of support services for student-athletes at the school, about the new student-athlete learning center building, which features, writes the reporter, “many reminders of students who balanced athletics and academics and came out on top in both: names are engraved and painted on the walls, the floors and even the mirrors.”

“There’s a lot of umbrage to the past,” Stolp said.

Right after you figure out homage was intended, you get this:

Eugene Sandoval, a design partner at the Portland-based architecture firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, headed the design team for the center. Before he and his partners began designing, he traveled to universities all over the country to draw inspiration. He found that “the more astute the university, as far as academic prowess and achievement, the more their buildings are a representation of our culture.”

UD read Sandoval’s comment to Mr UD. Mr UD looked thoughtful. He said: “That probably meant something.”

… the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident writer.