Domenico Pacitti included this tidbit in an article which attempted, ten years ago, to touch on some of the most sordid crimes of Italy’s almost entirely sordid university system.

Pacitti points out that no legal remedy exists.

Adding more laws to the 200,000 already in existence has already proved futile and even counter-productive: in Italy breaking the law is literally a way of life and asking for it to be upheld is considered offensive. European derecognition of Italian universities as bona fide institutions would be the logical step to take.

Far from having been derecognized, the startlingly corrupt – even by Italian standards – San Raffaele has become the prime minister’s pet university. His daughter just graduated from the school.

The prime minister’s eldest daughter by his second marriage was awarded her philosophy degree by the San Raffaele Life-Health University after submitting a dissertation on the concepts of well-being, freedom and justice in the work of the Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen. Roberta de Monticelli, who holds the chair of philosophy of the person at San Raffaele, said that after declaring the results, chancellor Luigi Verzé had turned to Barbara Berlusconi “asking her if she thought a faculty of economics could be founded at the San Raffaele based on the thinking of the author on which she had written her thesis, and inviting her to become a teacher”.

De Monticelli claims she was not just kept from examining Barbara Berlusconi; she was kept even from seeing her thesis.

“The first candidate was programmed for 9.30am. My presence on the panel, however, was scheduled from 10am onwards,” she said. “I understood then that the first [candidate] was going to be Barbara Berlusconi.”

The professor said that she had asked to see the thesis written by the prime minister’s daughter “but there were no more copies”.

A man in California bought a collection of never-before [seen] Ansel Adams negatives at a garage sale for $45 and now they’re worth $200 million.

Inside Higher Education interviews Eva von Dassow about her recent powerful statement to the University of Minnesota’s clueless, condescending regents.

… [W]hile cuts are being ordered, she said [in her filmed presentation to the university’s leadership] that the new frugality “leaves undiminished the numbers of vice presidents not to mention the salaries of coaches. No, these highly paid positions are not to be reduced. Rather, the university must shed faculty,” she said.

Von Dassow is part of a new organization at the university – Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education. These people have figured out the contents of the strategic initiative.

1. Put the kiddies online.
2. Invest most of our money in sports.
3. Support only vocational, money-making programs.

“[R]unning a multimillion-dollar enterprise of de facto minor league football and basketball teams that essentially serve as uniformed billboards has exceedingly little to do with the curation and advancement of human knowledge.”

I’m with this guy, but would go further. Along with the bogosity of amateurism, dispense with the bogosity of studentism. Universities would continue to have teams, but the teams would be autonomous of the university, made up of full-time professional athletes not yet old enough to enter the major leagues.

… this book.

Or, I mean, they should. Their university, after all, was dumb or corrupt enough to make Bernard Madoff, and his comrade in crime, Ezra Merkin, trustees of the school. The Markopolos book will help Yeshiva’s students understand how Madoff was able to turn their university into a laughingstock. It will help them understand how to avoid having that happen to their university in the future.

Unfortunately, far from dealing openly and honestly with its embroilment in Madoff, Yeshiva airbrushed him and Merkin from its history, hoping, I suppose, that no one would notice the positions of trust and authority these men held at that school for years.

It’s a shameful story, as Yeshiva alumni with integrity, like Andrew Sole, know.

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Here are many UD posts about Yeshiva University and Bernard Madoff.

Institutional history is different at different institutions. For some institutions, it means memories of beloved professors or emotional alumni reunions …

For Florida State, it means fond recollections of cheating scandals, and the millions of dollars the university spent unsuccessfully appealing associated NCAA sanctions. It means reflecting on years of corrupt trustees, and bringing to mind those local firms that specialize in declaring almost all of the athletes FSU sends to them learning disabled. And, as the title of this post suggests (it’s a comment made by an FSU booster), institutional memory at FSU means remembering how the university deals with its generations of criminal athletes.

This FSU person, for instance, can’t remember a first arrest being enough to throw anyone off the team; so although Nigel Carr has just been hauled in for having committed many illegal acts in the space of a few hours the other night, FSU sports fans seem pretty sure he’ll still be able to play.

Many of the players seem to cluster in the rather mysterious Humanities and General Studies field (UD has clicked around on the Drexel site, and can’t find a simple listing of courses for this major). These two guys, for instance, are HGS majors.

Whatever these two are learning, their major is clearly not educating them in some important basics.

Security cameras, for instance. They don’t seem to know about security cameras. Where cameras tend to be located. How they work.

I’ve had that phrase from James Taylor’s song Walking Man in my head all day. Because one thing or another from morn til night hasn’t been right.

I’ve been staying in a ‘thesdan hotel for a couple of days – electrical trouble in Garrett Park – and as I chatted on the phone this afternoon with Mr UD (the Civic Studies Institute at Tufts just ended; he’ll be back from Boston soon) I looked idly out of my fourth floor window at the Rockville Pike.

“That has got to be the ugliest black cloud I’ve ever seen,” I said to him as I caught sight of a fast-moving mass off to the left. Behind it churned thick gray clouds. “Wow.”

The moment we finished talking, the cloud swooped onto the Pike – it looked as though someone had suddenly released canisters of tear gas – and a frightening wind and rain storm came up.

The speed of the thing! In an instant it was something out of Hurricane Andrew — vast horizontal rains, trees bending all the way down, stunned traffic edging away from the street, lightning streaks, a long horrible howling sound…

Clang. The electricity in my room shut down.

Should I go to the lobby? What if the door’s key card is electrical? I wouldn’t be able to get back in. On the other hand, I felt vulnerable in my room.

I called the front desk. “Stay in your room,” the woman said.

The storm quickly passed; the sun came out. I sat by the window and read Hitch-22. But the electricity stayed off, and the heat of the room became uncomfortable.

The front desk had no idea when PEPCO would get to the hotel, but they knew that an immense area was without power.

I packed, got a cab, and took another hotel room – a place in downtown ‘thesda which does, for some reason, continue to have electricity.

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All of this is by way of explaining why you’ve not heard much from me today.

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Update: La Kid and her friend Maura will join me in my hotel room. Maura’s family’s house is without power.

The University of Louisiana at Monroe is about to lose its sports-mad president, and people like this woman, speaking at a public meeting about the school’s future, worry that ULM’s tendency, even under the current president, to spend more on academics than athletics will continue. It might even grow! You might get a new president who spends distinctly more on academics than athletics.

… Donna Cathey made an impassioned plea for support of the Warhawks’ sports programs. “The next president needs to understand the importance athletics plays in the role of the university. We spend a disproportionate amount of money on academics.”

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UD finds a sentence from this university’s welcome page strange.

Increased student enrollment, campus revitalization, avocation of online degree programs, and the expansion of the state’s only publicly supported College of Pharmacy, are just a few of the areas in which President Cofer has provided leadership during his tenure.

How do they mean avocation? They avocate online learning.

Avocate, essentially an obsolete word, means to “call off or away; to withdraw.”

Which is great, IMO, since online is a shitty way to learn.

But I suspect the University of Louisiana does not mean to say this.

Time to find out what it feels like to have sun on your face.

When Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was found to have plagiarized parts of one of his books, he issued a self-aggrandizing apology (It happened because of a “well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience.”) and suffered no consequences at Harvard. Indeed his colleagues rushed to his defense.

After Tribe got trapped the other day in a supermarket elevator for a few minutes, he announced that “They need to be publicly accountable.” No doubt he will sue.

Tribe has never been held accountable for stealing someone else’s work. He figured he could get away with it. His colleagues got angry at the journalists who discovered it.

Now, because he was inconvenienced for a few minutes, he’s pontificating about public accountability.

“Yes, it’s promotional, but it’s educational,” said Dr. Lawrence Glad, a Uniontown-area gynecologist who was hired as a speaker for three of the four drug companies last year and received $74,916, the third highest amount in southwestern Pennsylvania. “I think we have some critical skills for our patients beyond who bought my last bagel.”

Biz Journals

… about the syndicates that run football and basketball at American universities, defenders of the racket have been fighting back.

In this opinion piece, the writer argues that university football should break free of the NCAA altogether:

… Now before you think they will set up a wild, wild west operation, remember that university presidents will be figuring this out. They lose their jobs when the football program is out of control and brings harm to the school’s reputation.

Presidents lose their jobs (for which they are paid, say, $600,000, while the football coach is paid four million) when their team loses games because the president puts the school at a competitive disadvantage by trying to introduce financial and academic reforms. (“All this ugliness is allowed to happen, in part, because university presidents, so-called educators, have ceded control to coaches who are treated as deities and are accountable to no one.”)

Without the NCAA, this writer argues, each school will handle rule-breaking its own way. For instance:

[W]hen a backup offensive lineman on a championship team cheats on an online course, gets caught and is declared ineligible after the fact, that single player [won’t] cost his school numerous scholarships, years of rebuilding and possibly a national title… [It’s all just a] a few wayward teens and a couple unscrupulous agents…

Have to take issue with one, too.

Cheating, bar fights, football titles – it’s about teamwork. It’s not going to be just one guy. A university football player doesn’t walk into a bar by himself and beat the shit out of someone. His teammates are there to kick in the guy’s balls once he’s down.

The same principle applies to cheating, a group effort involving academic tutors distributing tests in advance or calling out answers to the players while they’re in the exam room together. Often the faculty is in on it. It takes a village.

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Despite our differences, I share the opinion writer’s contempt for the NCAA.

I just think the writer needs to give more thought to the perennial question of order vs anarchy.

Right now you’ve essentially got the Myanmar junta reining in the syndicates. State-sponsored violence, as well as corruption and repression are rampant, to be sure, but blood isn’t absolutely flowing in the streets.

Once you lose central control, rival gangs will go at it very hard for dominance, and UD fears that the university’s ethos of quiet deliberative thought may be imperilled.

Even? Especially.

UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.

Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.

The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.

Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.

But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.

UD wonders – if your whole career is the college sports beat, do you ever get to write anything that’s not sarcastic?

… It was a bit priceless — pun intended — that Alabama Coach Nick Saban (annual salary: $4 million) went on the offensive Wednesday, bemoaning how money is ruining this quaint little sport.

Saban was joined in this particular rant by Florida Coach Urban Meyer (annual salary: $4 million).

… [I]t’s almost professional college football season…

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Update: More sarcasm.