You can read the university president’s crap [see post below]; or you can get the real deal. Here.

… is writing colorless, anonymous, committee-generated nothingness. You’d think a university president would know this.

… Thug U, but the University of Miami – the original Thug U – still shows you how it’s done.

University of Miami linebacker Ramon Buchanan, who was arrested early Friday morning in Coconut Grove, allegedly told a Miami police officer, “I’m a UM football player and I don’t give a [expletive] what you do. I’ll get out of it. [Expletive] the police.’’

Details.

And after all, writes a fan, putting it in perspective, “Very different from a confirmed AK 47 shooting.”

…. is this year’s Mellon Lecturer. Beard has been a great advocate of University Diaries — many of my British readers got here via her links and kind words.

Beard’s own blog is an outgrowth of her interest in classical studies — and in everything else.

Who must answer this call and begin the reform? That’s easy – college and university presidents. They must take a stand and expect severe, unjustified criticism. They must summon courage to defend the best part of the academy and return athletics to a wholesome place in American higher education. And those of us who love college competition and want to restore it to health must encourage them, support them and take on their critics. While they do the right thing, we must cover their backs!

There’s a sweet, dreamy, retro feel to the prose of John A. Roush, president of Centre College. When the subject is big-time university sports, “metaphors of illness are apt,” he writes; and the only cure is presidential courage. He ends with this defensive play where we all huddle around the presidents and keep them safe while they expose their rears to severe criticism…

Shouldn’t that be the job of the stupendously rich NCAA? Don’t they have the money and the power to protect university presidents as they defend what’s left of their schools against the plague?

Well, of course the NCAA has that power.

UD proposes that we all write opinion pieces in which we dream aloud about their using it.

Where else would he be a professor but at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, mother ship of corruption in one of our most corrupt states? Scroll down to find your guy, and strap yourself in for one hell of a ride as Srinivasan adds thousands to your bill with each passing minute!

Others need a cockatoo.

Thanks, Bill.

Yikes! Let’s get this guy off our backs, pronto! Just a volunteer appointment; didn’t teach; didn’t see patients… In fact, he was the first Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Toledo to do nothing! Nothing! Never heard of the guy!

Oscar Linares is now on trial for having “operated a large-scale prescription mill out of the clinic on Laplaisance Road, prescribing OxyContin and other painkillers to up to 250 patients a day, and [having] fraudulently billed Medicare for more than $57 million.”

At the Linares clinic, “employees were given $25 bonuses if the clinic processed more than 200 patients a day.” “Parking attendants were hired to help direct traffic.”

His faculty affiliation at the University of Toledo is featured in the first paragraph of the Toledo Blade article about him, as well it should be. That university gave the guy respectability and cover. Other universities are doing the same thing with other pill mill owners. This blog will provide coverage of each of these professors – as the government catches up with them.

An English professor, writing in the Times Union, chronicles SUNY Albany’s intellectual disintegration, and, in the process, comes up with a fitting new motto for the school (see my title).

UD has only one editorial suggestion:

EDUCATING DRUNK, UNCRITICAL HALF-LITERATES BY DESIGN

… the Wharton School.

Look for Wharton in the wiretaps.

… is the spectator sport.

Here’s a tax-exempt organization that does little other than make the world safe for big-time university athletics corruption (note its president’s hard-hitting response to the Education Secretary’s latest proposal about the droves of basketball players who don’t graduate).

Ralph Nader’s proposal to eliminate athletic scholarships and replace them with need-based money was a great opportunity for the NCAA to, say, reject the idea as overbroad, but express understanding of the motivation behind it, given the corrupt and destructive nature of much big-time university football and basketball.

Instead, the NCAA did another cynicism number. If the response to government officials wanting to reform a university-based system that fails to graduate huge numbers of high-profile athletes is to say jackshit about it and move on, the response to someone like Nader is to pull out all them nice girls on the swim team who graduate one hundred percent and you better believe it baby! Why is that mean man going after them nice girls?

The 145,000 student-athletes who receive athletics related financial aid each year are in fact students first — as evidenced by the fact that in almost every demographic they graduate at higher percentages than their counterparts in the general student body. …[T]hey are students, just like any other student on campus who receives a merit-based scholarship.

Don’t talk to me about football and basketball! Let’s just put all the athletes together into one big 145,000-person pile and note that most of them graduate! How unfair to pull out of that pile the few who play … What did you say? Which sports? … Oh yeah. Football and basketball. Why the obsessive focus on those sports? They’re just like any other…

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

Why is the NCAA so cynical?

Because it works. No one, Mencken wrote, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.

[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.

Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”

Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”

Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:

The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.

Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?

Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.

Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.

Bristol University’s new cow simulator.

The top executives for the top 15 for-profit colleges pulled in $2 billion last year. Two billion dollars, practically all taxpayer money.

And that student loan money?—the default rate at these for-profits is 43 percent!

So, only 22 percent graduate and 43 percent default on the loans, leaving us holding the bag because students have been sold a bill of goods by slick marketers.

You already know all of this if you read University Diaries. Just reminding you.

Right after having seen a tepid performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf last month, UD turned to Taylor’s Martha and admired it all over again.