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.

… must dive below.”

And UD does, she does dive below – way, way below, as must all writers who follow University of Tennessee basketball.

In finding Bruce Pearl, their latest coach, UD has had to dip substantially below what she thought was the bottom of the barrel, UT-sportswise, but it turns out there is no bottom of the barrel.

Having fired Pearl, UT will now reward him with one million dollars. From a comment thread:

[C]ommit minor violations but lie to investigators and cause them to become major violations; subject the school to be the butt of jokes; lose signees, commit additional violations while under investigation; put UT basketball in a terrible position regarding recruiting, scholarships, attendance, etc., for years to come, and get paid a million dollars.

So this Korean academic just got out of jail for embezzlement, and for forgery of a Yale doctorate. Here’s what she says about the doctorate in her just-published memoir:

In her book, she admits that someone else wrote the thesis for her, but says she never had any doubt about the authenticity of the degree. Yale confirmed the diploma was a forgery in 2007.

“Though I neither got the degree through hard work nor wrote the thesis by myself, I paid tuitions, submitted papers, finished a thesis defense in front of three Yale professors, not to mention that I passed graduation tests,” she writes.

I’m having some trouble unpacking this re: authenticity.

Milena Penkowa [scroll down for earlier posts] happened on his watch.

Actually, The Ratwoman didn’t just happen on his watch. Hemmingsen did a good deal to enable her vicious ways. And when caught out on his enabling, he lied about it.

The legal investigation into Hemmingsen’s management was sparked by suspicions that arose when he and the rest of the university’s management nominated Penkowa for a prestigious research award in 2008, even though they knew that she had been reported to the police on charges of embezzlement and forgery.

Hemmingsen initially said he didn’t know that Penkowa had been reported to the police, but later he admitted that he knew about it.

Earlier, in 2002, after a faculty committee, smelling a rat, rejected her thesis, “the university’s then dean of faculty Ralf Hemmingsen intervened and sought an external review of Penkowa’s thesis by two other researchers. They were critical of the committee’s decision, arguing that there was no clear evidence of research misconduct. Penkowa resubmitted her thesis to a different committee of researchers not based at the University of Copenhagen and passed…”

How do you get promoted from dean to rector at the University of Copenhagen? You do Milena Penkowa’s bidding.

Understandable, though. Penkowa was having “an intimate relationship with a Science Ministry official,” and you want to be sure to behave slavishly toward anyone shtupping a Science Ministry official…

Although the university’s board of directors says everything’s fine now that Penkowa’s been sentenced, nothing to see here, the new Science Minister, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, has lost faith in the board and will “increase supervision” of the university.

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How do things like this happen?

They happen when your university is so provincial as to make Lower Slobbovia look like Paris.

… emptiness.

Conventional universities are forced into this one-to-many, someone lecturing to a timetable, because they have buildings to fill… In the online world you don’t need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don’t need to be trapped into a lecture timetable…

Gradually, determinedly, the online heroes lead us out of the darkness of the past.

… China.

… the supermoon (Image 5 is best); but I got back to Garrett Park in time to see (five minutes ago!) a brief, massive hailstorm, complete with thunder and lightning very near my house. The hail battered hard against the house.

My backyard deck is sprinkled with glow-in-the-dark hailstones.

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Update: Parthenon Moon.

Looks like the University of Tennessee may be firing Bruce Pearl. Not because of his (cough) ethics problems, but because he’s not winning games.

Voice of the people:

Perhaps the Administration well knows the college’s reputation cannot have them turning any more blind eyes to the magnitude of corruption in the UT Athletics Department. The national attention on the issue will certainly pull anyone down into the whirlpool to flush the UT Athletics system’s corruption.

NO ONE IS worth a crap is going to take the program over with all the trouble it is facing…

These two local commenters point out that the problem is not confined to games lost. That Pearl plays dirty is of course well-established; but this in itself doesn’t distinguish him from most big time university basketball coaches. As the first commenter notices, there’s a … call it a context problem at Tennessee. If them boys hold onto Pearl, they run the risk of attracting so much attention to the university that folks will start gettin’ a whiff of the whole damn UT athletics septic tank.

The second commenter makes the better the cheats we know point. Eventually a school’s reputation goes so far down the tubes that no even vaguely ethical coach wants to touch it. The commenter cautions that UT might want to hold on to Bruce if it doesn’t want to be forced to hire someone who makes him look like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Worst book title ever?

I know. Duh. But what’s really strange at sports factories like the University of Kentucky is that obfuscation has hardened into cult of personality authoritarianism, complete with pretend oversight committees and pretend boards of trustees. Athletic directors tell the president what to do and the president does it.

UK is one of America’s Potemkin Village universities.

A local paper reviews the accomplishments of the departing president of the University of Kentucky.

UD comments in parenthesis.

Take Todd. Since his hiring, UK has had one of its longest stretches without an NCAA investigation. [What an achievement! What’s it been – more than a year?] But with UK sports, calm is a relative term. In just the past four years, Todd has had to manage uproars over basketball coach Tubby Smith’s departure, the hiring, firing and $3 million settlement for the next basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, and the hiring of John Calipari, which was shortly followed by news that his most recent Final Four appearance had to be vacated. Calipari was not sanctioned in the Memphis matter. [So we’re between NCAA investigations PLUS Calipari wasn’t sanctioned! Was Todd a great president, or what?]

Then there was the controversy over coal magnate Joe Craft’s organized donation of $7 million for the new Wildcat “Coal” Lodge, which led one of Kentucky’s most famous authors, Wendell Berry, to withdraw his papers from UK. [Ah hell who gives a shit about that.]

Most recently, Todd gave [the UK athletics director] a $125,000 raise on his annual base pay and extended his contract until 2019, which put Todd at odds with his own Board of Trustees in the last few months of his tenure.

More legacy at the link.

… in this suit.

Harming patients through over-drugging is a small price to pay for happy hours with the Lakers.

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Do you have high-prescribers on your medical faculty?

Sure, it’s none of your business — it’s a privacy issue. Fine.

But it might be worth looking into if you want to avoid getting your university’s name dragged into cases like this one.

… on your graduate students or your many jealous competitors is SO the done thing. UD, who has covered reams of these stories over the years of her blog, sees it again and again. When pushed to the limit, when faced with evidence in a courtroom, academic members of what Boris Badenov called the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union will swing wide, swing desperately…

The University of Copenhagen’s Milena Penkowa has lost her job and lost her criminal case.

She continues to insist that she did not attempt to “frame an innocent 24-year-old student assistant [for Penkowa’s own] embezzlement by fabricating documents, e-mails and account withdrawals in the student’s name.”

She’s a brain scientist… And it must be admitted that her behavior from the beginning of her remarkable fraud journey (type Penkowa in my search engine) has been a fascinating cerebral puzzle.

She faces another criminal case: She apparently lied about the rats she used in her experiments.

Rats. You can’t make this shit up.