The New York Times seems determined to keep writing about the scandal of university presidents serving on multiple corporate boards. Good.

The piece has a headline and a sub-headline.

The Academic-Industrial Complex

A Fear That Academics are Distracted Directors

Some analysts worry that academics are possibly imperiling or compromising the independence of their universities when they venture onto boards. Others question whether scholars have the time — and financial sophistication — needed to police the country’s biggest corporations while simultaneously juggling the demands of running a large university.

Why do the presidents do it?

Moolah.

Bigtime.

The attractions are clear for the president: lucrative extra pay and useful networking, among other reasons. For a dozen hours or so each month for each board served, in addition to preparation time, and their wise advice, they can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University and the first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs board until she stepped down this year. In 2009, she earned $323,539 from her Goldman directorship, including stock grants and options, as calculated by Goldman, and left the board with stock worth at the time around $4.3 million. This is in addition to her salary from Brown, $576,000 this year.

[Shirley Ann] Jackson earned $1.38 million from her directorships, comprising both cash and stock. That’s in addition to $1.6 million from her day job, including bonuses and other benefits.

Plus you learn new things! One president who was on Merck’s board says: “It was one long seminar in the sciences and molecular biology.”

Great. But if you were taking a seminar, why did Merck pay you? Why didn’t you pay Merck?

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Why do the corporations do it?

Universities are among the few institutions trusted by the public …and companies believe they can associate themselves with this quality by installing an academic on the board.

“Corporations think this is a way of enhancing their prestige and legitimacy, especially in the case of Ivy League presidents,” he says. “I suspect that’s the principal motivation. It’s probably not for their business sense.”

John Gillespie, who has written a book on corporate boards, “Money for Nothing,” says academics are often selected for another reason — because they are less likely to rock the boat than directors from the business world.

Academics may be trained to ask tough questions in their own fields, but when confronted with tricky business issues far above their level of expertise they “often become as meek as church mice,” he says.

Right. They’re learning things. They’re taking one long multi-million-dollar seminar.

One expert on corporate boards does not mince words about one of this blog’s favorite board-sitters, Brown’s Ruth Simmons.

… Goldman Sachs was hurt having Dr. Simmons as a director because she lacks financial expertise and was focused more than she should have been on other things like the firm’s philanthropy… “That seat could have been held by someone who understood derivatives.”

But she was learning!

As for the exceptionally greedy Jackson of Rennselaer:

“[I]t is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” on so many boards. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.

Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards, although he is reluctant to single out particular directors or companies. “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”

As academics serve on a greater number of boards, there is also an increased chance of reputational risk if a company runs into difficulties.

“Woe to the university president who would sit on BP’s board,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Erroll B. Davis Jr., chancellor of the University System of Georgia, was on the BP board for 12 years, though he stepped down in April, just days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, causing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His retirement, however, wasn’t enough to protect him from being named, along with other directors, in a small number of lawsuits filed against BP over the disaster.

Plus… He’s only a business professor at Harvard, but… Bill George! Here’s looking at you!

And don’t forget Ruth Simmons. She’s left the Goldman board, but she’ll probably be named in various lawsuits against it.

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I think Phyllis Wise, who has compromised herself and her university by sitting on Nike’s board, puts the matter best:

“Many years ago, academicians tended to be dreamers,” she says. “We assumed somebody else would figure out where the money was going to come from. That notion is no longer the case.”

I mean, I think Wise intends to refer here to the money that comes to the university. But UD prefers to read her statement differently.

Those poor silly old dreamers! They never got rich.

That notion is no longer the case.

… Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

… No longer free to exercise it myself [Judt has Lou Gehrig’s disease], I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right — and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm found a good example of nospeak in reading blogs that were responding to the recent Saudi fatwa advising women to breastfeed men.

There is of course strict gender segregation in Saudi Arabia; but if a woman suckles a man, he becomes ‘family.’ Thus, as a Saudi woman, I will now be able to interact with men unrelated to me, so long as I first breastfeed them.

Here is how one blogger responds to this grotesquerie.

I am certainly not an expert in Islamic law or religion, nor do I write this in order to contribute to the stereotypes propagated in the West or claim cultural superiority. There are cultural differences I don’t understand, thus I try to reserve my judgement.

One wonders what sort of pronouncement from a community leader would be bizarre enough for this writer to respond with something other than politically correct vacuity. What sort of statement, what sort of policy, might prevent her from retreating into know-nothingism (cultural differences I don’t understand)? Does she understand anything about how women live in Saudi Arabia?

If she really can’t understand the difference between women told to breastfeed all unrelated men with whom they come into contact and women not told to do that, I think it would be better for this writer to retreat all the way, into silence. Certainly if she thinks withholding any judgment of this fatwa is enlightened, that judging a cleric who tells women to do this would express an unacceptable sense of cultural superiority, she would best say nothing at all.

As it is, her nospeak conveys not merely the intellectual insecurity Judt describes. It conveys the utter erosion of moral capacity.

It’s a category on University Diaries. See it? And that’s because over the years UD has covered so many stories of generous MBA guys getting their names on university buildings, and then, when it turned out the money was a small part of an empire of stolen goods, getting their names sandblasted off the buildings, that she decided to collect all of the stories under one heading.

And here’s yet another one.

Ten years ago, the University of Michigan inaugurated Sam Wyly Hall. At the ceremony, the business school dean kvelled about “what the University of Michigan helped [Wyly] to do.”

Well, what Wyly and his brother have done – let’s see if we can be exact about this – what they’ve done, see, is “illegally trad[e] millions of securities of public companies while they sat on the company boards. The SEC complaint accuses the two of using a system of offshore trusts and subsidiaries to hide their interests, selling more than $750 million in stock over a 13-year period. The complaint charges that they used inside information about the pending sale of [one of their companies] to reap more than $31.7 million in profit…”

So… sandblast the whole name off? Expensive. Embarrassing. UD has a better idea. Just change one letter.

WILY HALL

There’s almost nothing good to say about the for-profit education industry, as this pithy account makes clear. Senate hearings on the government shakedown scheme are ongoing.

… do not, as this local opinion writer makes clear, add up to a strategic plan. He’s reviewing a just-released document from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Here’s the document.

Here’s his comment.

How in the heck are they going to pay for all this?

A school that watched its athletic scholarship donations decrease by half from 2007-08 to 2008-09 has a lot of money to come up with. Paying for Buzz Peterson and his assistants. Don’t forget about Benny Moss, too. Another $600,000-plus to cover the rescinded out-of-state tuition waivers.

Yet, Mehrtens, DePaolo and everyone else at UNCW have been vague and evasive when it comes to the finances. This document continues that trend.

How are you going to increase season-ticket sales by 50 percent over a five-year period?

What incentives would you give prospective Seahawk Club members to increase its roster to 2,015 by 2015 (from 777 earlier this year)?

How do you target alumni to grow endowments by 10-15 percent year?

Are there truly “new sources of funds” to adjust coaches’ pay?

What does developing a three-year budget forecast for revenues and expenditures do to the next two years?

The gap between this chirpy document and the reporter commenting on it reminds UD of all the athletic gatherings she’s attended over the years. Whether NCAA or Knight Commission or any of the other organizations, the feel is that of a dressed for success pep rally.

Many of the people in university athletics don’t seem to know the difference between cheer leading and research, between WE WILL ROCK YOU and statistics. They’re in an orgasmic miasma, panting happily away on the field while their programs curl up and die.

This absurd disparity between self-satisfied DARE TO BE GREAT bullshit and the limp, sketchy reality of many university sports programs is currently captured by Coach Rick Pitino’s testimony at an extortion trial.

Author of multiple dress for success books, Pitino…

Eh. Read it for yourself.

UD spends her life reading novels about how complicated and vulnerable human beings are. She doesn’t hold it against Pitino that he fucked up. She’s attacking the sickening hypocrisy and unaccountability of an industry that’s killing universities.

Almost.

Western Kentucky University drew UD‘s attention years ago, when a brave faculty member, Robert Dietel, stood up at a regents’ meeting to try to stop the school from switching to Division I-A football. (The link takes you to an old post – 2006 – which doesn’t make clear that, except for the final paragraph, it’s taken from a local newspaper article.) He was shouted down by the idiots who run the school.

Now proudly I-A at enormous expense to the students, WKU is “the only winless team in the country in 2009.” As the local writer explained in 2006:

To stay in Division I-A, WKU will have to average 15,000 fans at its home games. But it hasn’t even been filling L. T. Smith Stadium, where attendance has been 10,279 so far this year and was 12,795 last year — despite all the interest built up as the school won the 2002 NCAA Division I-AA national championship and went on to complete 10 consecutive winning seasons.

Let’s see how ticket sales are going now.

[The team] sold about 7,300 season tickets this year. Last season they topped out at 7,506 — a significant drop from the 8,648 sold in 2008.

You shouldn’t let idiots run universities. An obvious truth, but it seems to need restating.

… in Andrew Hacker’s remarks here. He’s being interviewed about his forthcoming book (August 3) attacking American universities. But UD would take issue with a few things too.

Yes, “there are just too many publications and too many people publishing… And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article.” (UD has written about the articles-on-steroids problem, and related over-publication issues, in these posts.) Hacker’s right to argue that undergraduate teaching is as important as publishing (actually, he argues it’s much more important).

His attack on tenure, though, isn’t as persuasive.

Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.

Obviously it’s hard to be anything other than anecdotal about this sort of thing. How do we measure the useless wimpiness of a person? I would just suggest the following:

There are reasons American universities dominate all the world rankings, and these reasons have to do with much more than our country’s wealth. I don’t mean to discount our wealth, but anyone who tells you that American universities dominate the global quality tables merely because we’re filthy rich is simply wrong. Hacker’s right that there’s a lot wrong with our universities, and that trends are downward; but anyone writing about our schools has to reckon with the fact that many of them are spectacularly good. They didn’t get that way by being top-heavy with terrified little weenies. Tenure deadens some people, for sure; others (see Eva von Dassow) it seems to embolden.

Hacker’s right that students should get a liberal arts, not a vocational, degree. If they want a vocation from the word go, they should go to a vocational school (more and more universities are transforming themselves into vocational schools, to be sure; but if students protested this, it might stop). He’s certainly right that big time sports fuck everything up.

At a college like Ohio State … undergraduates pour into the stadium for the big Ohio-Michigan game. They paint their faces red and blue and all the rest. But what are they cheering for? Victory in a football game. Michigan is actually a much better university than Ohio State — its reputation, its medical school, its law school, and so on. It makes you wonder whether Ohio is putting so much into its sports teams because its academics really aren’t so great.

Got to make the best of a bad situation, as Gladys says.

Hacker’s too much of a hippie about grades (they’re evil; toss them), and he’s too random on the subject of admissions (drop applications into a hat…).

But I love his final comment about some students arguably not being ready for college.

Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It’s the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way.

… I teach at a city college in New York, where we come very close to allowing virtually anybody who applies to walk in. I say, ‘This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job.” Some people say to me, “Your students at Queens, are they any good?” I say, “I make them good.” Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it’s remarkable how you can make up the difference.

I agree. Much of the curricular crap at universities finds its justification in the students-aren’t-ready thing… Students aren’t interested… So we make our professors clowns and have them teach the Harry Potter books… Or we give students laptops and let them play on Facebook while we do deadly PowerPoints in front of them…

Hacker’s right that the only thing that can change this scenario is a real teacher.

… plagiarize.

A new fatwa has overcome the prohibition of gender mixing in unsupervised areas among unrelated people: Women may now breastfeed men with whom they come into contact, thus creating a ‘family’ bond which makes the man and woman related and the contact permissible.

Although too old to teach under these circumstances, UD looks forward to reading Rate My Expressers.

Hard initially to get hold of her nipple; once locked on, very good.

Slow. Too much class time spent pumping, sucking. Female students look bored.

Plays favorites. Feedings should be fairer.

Talks endlessly about how much better she lactated when she taught at a more selective school.

Milk production fine, but men sleepy after, and professor seems unable to wake them. What are they teaching in ed school these days??

Robert Conquest condenses Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps’ rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

Christopher Hitchens quotes it in his memoir.

Unfortunately for investors like Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, crazed rapacious thieves who pitch university money managers don’t typically have flashing eyes and floating hair. They tend to look more like this (via the Wall Street Journal).

This is Paul Greenwood, the compleat yellow bow tie white collar criminal.

In February 2009, UD covered the sad tale of Carnegie Mellon’s money manager journeying to the Greenwich office of this guy’s firm to, as Bloomberg put it “try to locate the school’s money.”

Greenwood had it.

Paul Greenwood, a former executive at WG Trading Co., pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges that he and his partner misappropriated millions of dollars in funds.

Mr. Greenwood admitt[ed] to taking “upwards of $75 million” for his own personal use.

… [A] court receiver’s preliminary assessment of the total investor losses in the case puts it in a range of $800 million to $900 million…

The universities might get a teeny bit of it back. Maybe.

Excerpts from the best denunciation of the burqa I’ve so far read. It’s by Feisal G. Mohamed.

… Liberty of conscience limits human institutions so that they do not interfere with the sacrosanct relationship between the soul and God, and in its strict application allows a coerced soul to run its course into the abyss. In especially unappealing appeals to this kind of liberty, bigots of all varieties have claimed an entitlement to their views on grounds of tender conscience.

… The burqa controversy revolves around a central question: “Does this cultural practice performed in the name of religion inherently violate the principle of equality that democracies are obliged to defend?”

… Lockean religious toleration… expects religious observance … to conform to the aims of a democratic polity. We might see the French response to the burqa as an expression of that tradition. After a famously misguided initial attempt to do away with all Muslim headwear in schools and colleges, French legislators later settled down to an evaluation of the point at which headwear becomes an affront to gender equality, passing most recently a ban on the niqab, or face veil — which has also been barred from classrooms and dormitories at Cairo’s Al’Azhar University, the historical center of Muslim learning.

… Our various social formations — political, religious, social, familial — find their highest calling in deepening our bonds of fellow feeling. “Compelling state interest” has no inherent value; belief also has no inherent value. Political and religious positions must be measured against the purity of truths, rightly conceived as those principles enabling the richest possible lives for our fellow human beings.

So let us attempt such a measure. The kind of women’s fashion favored by the Taliban might legitimately be outlawed as an instrument of gender apartheid — though one must have strong reservations about the enforcement of such a law, which could create more divisiveness than it cures.

… [S]ome [religious] belief provides a deeply humane resistance to state power run amok. To belief of this kind there is no legitimate barrier.

Humane action is of course open to interpretation. But if we place it at the center of our aspirations, we will make decisions more salutary than those offered by the false choice between state interest and liberty of conscience. Whitman may have been the first post-secularist in seeing that political and religious institutions declaring certain bodies to be shameful denigrate all human dignity: every individual is a vibrant body electric deeply connected to all beings by an instinct of fellow feeling. Such living democracy shames the puerile self-interest of modern electoral politics, and the worn barbarisms lurking under the shroud of retrograde orthodoxy…

… [University students no longer know] how to take notes from research material. A dependency culture on teachers [has been] created, facilitated by PowerPoint and its non-Microsoft equivalents Keynote and Impress. When these students arrive at university, many academics perpetuate the problem. A lack of planning and preparation for a teaching session means too many walk into a lecture with a memory stick of PowerPoint slides. They have not written a lecture. They have written PowerPoint slides. They think these two things are the same. They are not. We see similar problems in conferences. Researchers are meant to present scholarship to colleagues. Instead they project PowerPoint slides.

… [For teachers] the default setting is [now] PowerPoint. …Think about the lectures, seminars and conferences you have attended in the past five years. Think about how many presenters used PowerPoint slides as notes for speaking. They either spent the entire session glued to the podium or looking back to the auditorium’s screen. Both systems perpetuated a single flaw: they read the text visible to the audience. Such an action is offensive to those who take the time to “listen” to a session.

This flaw in presentation and speaking leads to the final – and most serious – problem for our students. Such presenters have written their entire script on PowerPoint slides. Students recognised this strategy. Therefore, why should they attend a lecture or seminar when everything that is said is on the slides? That is not laziness on the part of a student. They are being logical. There is no benefit in attending the class.

The unfortunate consequence of this decision is that students lose – or do not gain – the ability to take notes. The decision by school teachers to present not only the key ideas from the curriculum, but notes from textbooks via PowerPoint slides is having an impact at universities…. [W]e have generations of students arriving at university unable to take notes from monographs and articles.

The writer concludes by touching on UD‘s PowerPoint-as-Burqa theory. UD argues that the burgeoning popularity of both the mobile person-hiding machine and the PowerPoint machine involves a growing terror of public interaction in itself. Not merely public speaking. Public anything.

Public speaking initiates fear. At conferences, I see experienced speakers shaking and sweating. I wonder why they put themselves through it. Similarly, preparation for a teaching session is stressful, time consuming and requires continual reflection. We as teachers are never good enough. We must improve. But PowerPoint creates a coma of conformity and a cap on student expectations of their learning environment.

Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor, argued that PowerPoint “lifts the floor” of public speaking and at the same time “lowers the ceiling”. Students do not see appalling lectures, but neither do they see the brilliant. Journalist Francisco van Jole was even more definitive, describing PowerPoint as: “Viagra of the spoken word…a wonder pill for flabby lectures.” Like Viagra, PowerPoint only appears to benefit the user. The little blue pill triggers unfortunate side-effects such as light-headedness, indigestion, lower back pain and seeing an aura around objects. Similarly, PowerPoint medicates a nervous and ill-prepared speaker. What about the side-effects on students? For all the celebration of student-centred learning, PowerPointed teaching passes without comment.

All PowerPointers, like all burqa-wearers, look alike. They are asleep to the world, inside their coma of conformity.

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UD thanks Bill.

The Minnesota football team announced Tuesday night that its home-and-home series with Texas in 2015 and 2016 has been cancelled due to “a contract impasse concerning video rights.”

So reports the University of Minnesota paper.

And the bad news doesn’t stop there. The university just built, at amazing expense, a huge new football stadium. The president has spent most of his time since they built it trying to decide who gets to drink alcohol there — only rich people, or rich people plus students.

But no one has worried about ticket sales. After all the university justified the amazing expense by saying that football is so popular students and alumni demand a bigger stadium.

This morning, UD‘s friend Bill sends her this.

Student ticket sales slump, half unsold

The University of Minnesota has currently sold about 5,500 of the 10,000 student tickets available. That’s roughly 1,000 tickets behind last year’s sales at this time.

… For some students … excitement over the new stadium isn’t enough to overlook the team’s poor performance.

“I’ve just given up on this football team,” said University graduate student and former season ticket holder Carl Mullen-Schultz. “I’ve decided to focus on our basketball team.” …

You know what this means. The university will spend millions more on pr and advertising. They’ll increase student athletic fees by hundreds of dollars. The university’s president will dress up like a clown and invite people to throw water balloons in his face for a thousand dollars a pop.

Wanna know one very basic way in which UD decides whether a news article about universities will appear on University Diaries?

Okay, I’ll tell you.

If, while reading an article, UD laughs out loud, chances are she’ll run it. This isn’t always true, but it’s often the case.

Frinstance, here’s a story about the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee basketball team, plus some faithful retainers, going on a trip to Italy. Athletics has an eight million dollar deficit; students pay higher and higher athletics fees. But somehow the program has $160,000 to send the guys to Italy over the summer. The Student Association is pissed.

“The fact that the UWM Athletics Department continues to spend outside of its means is troubling. The department simply cannot afford to go on such an extravagant trip regardless of where the money is from.”

Yeah see the money for the trip is private, explains the university spokesman. So it’s okay! None of your beeswax! Shut up about it!

…. Uh, but if you have the capacity to raise that kind of money privately… and uh if you’re raising money not to pay down your debt but to take the boys to Rome… uh…

And here’s where UD started to laugh. She put the laugh line in her title. It’s from the same spokesman. We need this outing for cohesiveness, life experience, and personal growth!

Every effing cliché in the book!  If that guy doesn’t win Administrator of the Year,  something’s very wrong at the University of Wisconsin.