AS UD got off the Farragut North metro train this morning and trudged up the perpetually non-functioning escalator, she pulled her fare card out of her jacket pocket and got ready to insert it into the exit gate.

At the exit gate, she saw something she’d never before seen in a metro station. The station manager had positioned himself inches from departing passengers and was saying to every one of them, in a very loud voice: GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! GOOD MORNING!!! THANK YOU FOR USING METRO. HAVE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY. BYE NOW. THANK YOU. MAY YOUR DAY BE BEE YOO TIFUL. THANK YOU.

UD felt vaguely threatened by the blast-effect of this good will and said nothing, as did most everyone else. But one woman met and raised the stakes. AND GOOD MORNING TO YOU! GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! Shook his hand.

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

Although she thought she’d put plenty of money on her fare card earlier at Grosvenor station (after twenty-five years, UD doesn’t know the fare from Bethesda to Foggy Bottom; she just puts a bunch of dollars on the card), she was short a dollar. Off to the AddFare machine.

The AddFare machine takes only singles and fives. UD had a single, but it was so faded and thinned that the machine rejected it. She had no fives. She had tons of twenties.

No problem. She’d do the thing with change. Scrounging the bottom of her bag, she came up with all sorts of coins. But they turned out to be euros.

Nothing to be done but interrupt the station manager’s greetings with her problem. She crept up to him as he buoyantly readied his shtick for the next batch of exiters. She felt oppressed by her stupidity (if she were smart, she’d use a SMART card) and guilty at interrupting his shtick…

He took one look at her woefully waving her card, opened the exit gate, and bellowed JUST GO ON THROUGH. YOU’RE FINE. GO ON THROUGH. HAVE A BLESS-ED DAY.

But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.

With a tip of the hat to Mark Emmert.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

UD thanks Norm for the link.

Forbes:

[T]he Sugar Bowl paid its director $645,386 in 2009, a year in which it received a $1.4 million government grant yet still lost money. [The] Orange Bowl [spent] $756,546 on travel that same year, and another $100,000 or so on postage and shipping.

… It’s a shocking tale of greed, excess and entitlement in college sports. Almost enough to give the BCS and big-time college football a bad name.

As if that was possible.

… at Fortune, whose editors explain, in reprinting an article from 1986, that “with the hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam fighting insider trading charges in a Manhattan courtroom and one of Warren Buffett’s top executives, David Sokol, resigning under suspicions about his personal trades, the lessons from the 1980s still ring true.”

… [T]he business school ethicists may be as much a part of the problem as of the solution. Their main message starts off with the reasonable exhortation that the future managers in their classes must prevent the creation of cultures of corruption at the outfits they’ll help run. Corporate cultures powerfully affect employee behavior, students rightly are told, so you mustn’t have reward systems that encourage misreporting of revenue and expenses or that promote cheating on government contracts. But in practice all this talk about how employees are creatures of their culture ends up by tacitly accepting the notion that the individual employee really can’t be held personally responsible for his actions. The result is to genuflect piously to the idea of ethics without requiring any person to be ethical.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel takes a look at an academic unit of the University of Wisconsin — the Pain and Policy Studies Group.

…[D]octors in the addiction and pain fields say the [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group pushed a pharmaceutical industry agenda not supported by rigorous science.

“They advocate for policies that benefit pharmaceutical companies and harm pain patients and the public health,” said Andrew Kolodny, an expert on opioid addiction.

… Their efforts helped create a climate that vastly expanded unproven medical use of the often abused drugs, said Kolodny, chairman of psychiatry at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York.

The group gets bundles from the relevant drug companies, though they’re a little spotty about disclosure.

Just to remind you:

… [Opioids] became so common that in 2007, 700 milligrams of morphine or its equivalent were prescribed, on average, for everyone in the country.

That’s enough to give every man, woman and child round-the-clock dosing of Vicodin for three weeks.

Unintentional overdose deaths from opioid analgesics grew from 2,901 in 1999 to 11,499 in 2007, by far eclipsing deaths from heroin and cocaine combined. Opioid deaths follow a track that is almost identical to the growth in sales of the drugs. In addition, an estimated 1.9 million people abused the drugs or had dependence problems between 2007 and 2009.

You know, Joseph Stiglitz (among others) has been warning about the effects of gross wealth disparity in the United States.

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent… While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades — and more — has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Look at many American universities – especially their sports and medical components – to see how outrageous and growing wealth-concentration has corrupted and distorted that institution… That sad institution, to which we continue, sheep-like, to give our tax dollars because somehow, like its comrade-in-intellectuality, the NCAA, it’s non-profit… Harvard’s endowment may stand at around thirty billion dollars, its last president may have pursued a multiply-millioned hedgie career while running the place, some of its highest-profile professors may spend more time cultivating client dictators than they do teaching, but Harvard deserves the taxes of every one of those middle-class losers with their falling incomes…

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

And speaking of consulting, here’s the University of Nevada and its system of med schools and hospitals on the front page of today’s New York Times. After a heart device company began paying monthly fees of $5,000 to various med school professors there, the university started using that company’s device. The hospital’s CEO didn’t know and didn’t care about this conflict of interest, although now that the federal government is investigating these matters, and, you know, right after the main faculty money-maker was “contacted by this reporter,” the faculty member told the pathetic CEO about the money (‘“We never delved into that level of the relationship,” [the CEO] said.’).

We’re talking here in particular about William Resh, who describes the $60,000 a year or so he gets from the device maker as “nominal.”

Which takes us back to Stiglitz. If you’re in the one percent, money that would look not at all bad as a yearly salary for the failing middle class is nominal, nothing, eh, fluff, nada, peanuts, funny money. I guess that’s why the CEO didn’t delve. Pocket change. Who cares.

… complete with wishful thinking …

[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.

… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:

They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.

And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:

I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”

Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.

Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.

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

SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.

Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.

What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.

… With the advent of the computer and PowerPoint, we got lazy. Instead of using the slides to present visual images of what we were talking about, we used them more as notes we could share. In short, we increasingly read the bullets off the slides and forced the audience, who likely could read much faster than we could talk, to read along with us.

Most PowerPoint-assisted talks are deadly dull — particularly if they’re given by speakers who have done them so many times they seem to have forgotten what the words actually mean, and even their minds seem to wonder as they parrot back what they read on the screen.

Instead of making talks more compelling, interesting or exciting, PowerPoint often turns them into torture. I’m quite sure some of the talks I’ve seen over the years using PowerPoint would be banned by the Geneva Convention.

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

More PowerPoint Pissoff: From a lawyer under pressure to use PowerPoint to train police recruits and officers.

[T]here is little to no research to show that PowerPoint aids learning, retention or application of information.

… [T]ext on a PowerPoint slide competes with and distracts from what you’re saying. But, you say, if I’m simply reading the text aloud, there’s no competition. Maybe not, but if all you’re going to do is read your PowerPoint slides aloud, save everyone time and just email the presentation to your learners.

There’s much to like in this story of plagiarism in a British prison.

A prison source said lags took poetry ‘very seriously’ and were furious when poems were ripped off.

He said: “It wasn’t just the prison worker who complained, it was at least eight prisoners…”

Spring hopes eternal, as it were. So there are all these poems and songs about disappointment, as the world regenerates but you – despite your hopes – do not. Or not very much. College boys are writing sonnets… But I’m on the shelf…

From the many-petaled bouquet of disappointed spring poems, take this one, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

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

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of downs and fleuries, signifying nothing…

Rather bitter, aren’t we? Well, as the heart grows older, natural beauty in itself isn’t enough to subdue morbid thoughts. The post-romantic poet neutrally observes the crocus; she ain’t reveling in it. She notes the killing spikes, not the flowers.

The flowers probably aren’t out yet – it’s early spring…

Too early, as in the amazing Ted Hughes poem about the spring, in which he recalls gathering daffodils with Plath – to sell them – and the way the daffodils, like Plath and Hughes, were weirdly premature … or, better to say, immature. The whole poem regrets, abhors, the poets’ arrogant, oblivious immaturity, their belief that they inhabited a world of perpetual spring and daffodil windfalls.

We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

Sure, says Millay, there’s no death – it’s apparent (as in observe, note her almost comically dry language) that the earth is ever-renewing. But since we’re not…

And actually the earth isn’t either:

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too…

That’s Philip Larkin, The Trees. He’s talking about trees bursting into life each April.

Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing…

A tale told by an idiot, brain eaten by maggots. And then the poem shrinks to its smallest bit as the poet comes out with it: Life in itself / Is nothing… Like Leopold Bloom, soulsick at the futility of human existence as he surveys men in a pub stuffing their mouths: No-one is anything.

Only one thing interrupts our tidy step-by-step declension – ridiculous April, that idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. Babbling brooks, farcical flowers. A total jerk, Spring.

… tries to protect his school from becoming affiliated with Click-Thru U. He will lose this fight, but how good of him to wage it.

[Western Governor’s University] does not offer a college education. A college education is about going through a process that leaves students transformed. That’s why it takes time. Learning is hard — brain research demonstrates that real learning requires students to struggle with difficult material under the consistent guidance of good teachers. WGU denies students these opportunities. In fact, its advertisements pander to prospective students by offering them credit for what they already know rather than promising to teach them something new.

By giving students opportunities to take courses in the arts and sciences, college prepares graduates for more than just their jobs. College graduates are expected to be capable of making sense of the social, political, economic and scientific challenges facing their country and world. Unlike at WGU, our college students do more than fulfill a small set of technical competencies. They become thoughtful citizens and human beings…

… notes the love affair between the right and the for-profit tax siphons. [Subscription]

[F]raud appears to be a standard element of the business model. Since the government guarantees almost every loan regardless of whether the students can pay it back, the institutions have an incentive to sweep in as many students as possible, regardless of their prospects of graduating. … The question at hand is whether the federal government should apply some performance metric to its college loans or simply hand out cash willy-nilly. Amazingly, handing out cash willy-nilly has become the conservative position in this debate.

Otherwise, you risk losing your temper.

Yesterday, the SEC went after an FDA chemist who made a mint trading on inside information about approved and unapproved drugs.

Mr Liang is accused of using confidential information about clinical trials of new drugs to trade the securities of 19 pharmaceutical companies ahead of 27 public announcements.

Today, a friend of UD‘s sister sent her an email: “This guy’s wife made my wedding cake!”