University Diaries wrote about this chick years ago. She’s finally – minutes ago – been hauled into court. I guess it takes awhile to pull together a 24-count federal indictment.

Karen Pletz is apparently one of those rare university presidents who steals from her university. And when you’re prez, you can really steal. There are documents to be forged, vouchers to be fiddled, charitable contributions to be falsified… Pletz was a bank executive before she became president (salary: $1.2 million) of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and she knows how to do all this shit.

Yes. Of course I’ll follow the testimony in this case. The details will be amusing.

Why is this post’s title The Taking of Pletz’s Lexus?

The U.S. attorney’s office is seeking forfeiture of Pletz’s Lexus convertible.

Why is this post’s category TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE?

Because she couldn’t have it done it without them.

… about the university as a setting for organized crime.

A lobster shell golf ball for use on cruise ships.

The Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship Series.

Until he was fired, Junker “was paid $592,000 to stage either two or three football games a year.” In 2008, Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earned $645,386 “for staging one football game.”

… in an Economic Principals post about Harvard professors and lucrative international consulting. The first claims that Lawrence Summers lost Harvard’s presidency in part because of his involvement in the Andrei Shleifer scandal:

After its mission to advise the Russian government on behalf of the US State department collapsed in 1997 amid a welter of conflict of interest charges, Harvard closed its Institute for International Development. After losing a long court battle [and having to pay the government tens of millions of dollars as a result], and partly as a consequence of it, the university relieved Lawrence Summers of his presidency (but made him a university professor) and revoked economics professor Andrei Shleifer’s endowed chair.

This is the first time UD‘s read someone connecting Summers’ loss of the presidency to the Shleifer case. I certainly hope it’s true, because I’ve been baffled for years, reading the details of that scandal, as to why Summers suffered no consequences. But maybe he did.

The second returns us to the much-discussed question of the Harvard-dominated Monitor Group, and its ties to Gaddafi:

In a statement last week, Monitor wrote that “just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya.” That was certainly true in Cambridge. What dissenting Libyans in Tripoli witnessed was a parade of well-paid visitors flattering their half-mad dictator, and a squad of Harvard-connected consultants bent on creating a National Security Organization for the government, designed to augment the existing security apparatus with a new corps of MBA-trained personnel officers.

It does look pretty unseemly… Richly rewarded Harvard professors pumping up an extremely, I may almost say ostentatiously (to quote Lady Bracknell) half-mad dictator…

In 2006, a psychiatrist who wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association about conflicts of interest among many of its authors heard back from an editor there. Conflict of interest? WTF?

So conflicted doctors hook your patients on drugs that fuck them up. So?

[In my practice, I see] young men who have breast lesions and abnormal breast development from atypical antipsychotics; [I see the results of financially motivated prescription] in sudden unexpected deaths, or “suds,” from psychiatric drugs in individuals who had no risk factors for sudden death; in tic and dyskinetic movement disorders in kids arbitrarily prescribed stimulants, and the huge weight gain and symptoms of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults who receive a sedative, such as quetiapine, for sleep.

So?

This man, Bobby Lowder, remains on the board of trustees at Auburn University. Read all about him here.

The latest sex and money for Auburn players scandal is coming soon to a tv screen near you. Bobby Lowder has instructed Auburn to have no comment in response to the players’ allegations.

Auburn: The shame of the nation.

Just-fired Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker explained to a group of investigators that the $1,241 he charged the bowl for “a visit to a high-end Phoenix strip club” was a legitimate business expense:

We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments… It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.

Sports Illustrated lists Junker’s activities as CEO:

[F]unneling money to politicians through bowl employees; coaching witnesses, and altering documents during [an earlier] investigation … taking junkets to college football games with politicians and their families — all on the bowl’s dime. On page 210 is a charge that the bowl footed the $33,188 bill for Junker’s 50th birthday party, a four-day bacchanal in Pebble Beach that had, according to one attendee, “absolutely no business purpose.”

But they’re all like that: “The Sugar and Orange Bowls have also recently come under withering criticism for the excessive compensation of executives and extravagant expenditures.”

You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to follow all the sleaze in big-time university sports. Here at University Diaries, we do our best…

Professors at the University of Vermont are outraged that the president and board of trustees have just given a $320,000 salary to the recently hired dean of the business school.

$320,000 is way above average for b-school deans, and UVM has only sixty business school students.

And it goes without saying that UVM, like most universities these days, is in big financial trouble, with talk of layoffs, salary freezes, etc.

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Greed and status-mongering. The pillars of the American university.

The weather is glorious – sunlight everywhere and a soft wind. But UD is under the weather, stuck in bed and mainly sleeping.

Unless the head of the NCAA announces he’s had enough of the farce and is dismantling the organization, UD will lie silent until she regains her strength.

A review in Slate of the collapsing market in law degrees makes the opening of new law schools at UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts (and they’re not the only ones) all the more disgusting. All of these schools come equipped with the standard current law school package of extremely highly paid professors and under-employed, debt-ridden students.

Law school professors are beginning to look très Marie Antoinette.

Some people have called for the ABA, which accredits anything with a pulse, to be replaced by an actual accrediting agency. That would certainly be a good start.

From Cornell…

… to Kentucky.

Once you’ve run a charter school into the ground, it’s time to retreat to your campus cubicle.

Coggins has ignored calls and e-mails seeking comment from the Orlando Sentinel. When a reporter visited Coggins at Stetson last week in attempt to discuss his role with Imani, he slammed his office door and said he was calling campus police.

Coggins specializes in cultural competence, and I gotta tell you that this behavior seems at the very least culturally insensitive.

Fun with the NCAA.

Thanks, Dirk, for the link.

As I follow the unnerving news out of Fukushima, I think of James Merrill’s Prose of Departure, a late, morbid poem, describing a visit of his to Japan. (The poem isn’t available in its entirety online. Here’s another excerpt from it.)

Radiation – both remembered, from Hiroshima, and felt in every afternoon’s sun – is the black and blindingly white, the despairing and the appalling, correlative to the poet’s dread about friends back in the States who are dying.

The recognition of life’s “date line,” impending death, “comes flashing up” on the poet, like “the next six-foot wave in an epic poem.” He needs “a form of conscious evasion,” a “composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.” Watching a Noh play, the poet embraces the evasion of art, in the form of an actor who “will relive moonlight, storm and battle, and withdraw, having danced himself to peace.”

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Later that night, as he observes the moon cloud over, spiritual and aesthetic composure fail the poet; he cannot evade “A dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall.”

The next day, at a shrine, when he “place[s] incense upon [a] brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash,” the poet

tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear

life —

Burning, the burning of the body and the soul, the holy smoke of what was once the holiness of a beloved friend – for the poet, there’s absolutely no evading this. From now on, each section of the poem will feature counterpoints between exotic immediacies and homeland premonitions. With brilliant wordplay, Merrill will twist his perception of a painting (in this instance, View of Fuji) to fit his fatal mood:

Syringe in bloom. Bud
drawn up through a stainless stem…

Not spring, but syringe; and syringe, with the proximity of bloom and bud, will have us read bud as blood… drawn up… a pipetting syringe… The stainless stem suggests not purity so much as hospital sterilization.

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As the poem concludes, the poet makes explicit not only death, but the irradiating evisceration of our humanity:

The prevailing light in this “Hiroshima” of trivial symptoms and empty forebodings is neither sunrise nor moonglow but rays that promptly undo whatever enters their path. 

This killing radiation is the worst form of energy in existence; all of the Proustian nuance, the artful evasive beauty, we give life in order to give it life, is knocked out. The poet imagines the x-rays his friends are undergoing, rays which, “in their haste to photograph Truth… eat through” all of their cultural apparel, all of their existential theatricals. (“[B]eing enchanted by the magic of experience provides a reason to live. Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself ‘the biological advantage of being awestruck.'”)

“What’s the story, Doc?”
— dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light.

Prose of Departure ends in a kimono shop, with the poet and his lover enchanted by “the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path.”

Dark and light again, then, with a benign and storied lightness applied, generated, made up, by the artist, as a kind of defiance of both radiation’s momentary flash and death’s permanent darkness.

Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth, before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric

star-puckered moral —
white, never-to-blossom buds
of the mountain laurel —

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.