Wall Street Journal.

UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more…

How can UConn football lose money with an advertising deal with IMG that pays the school $7 million annually? And UConn, through apparel and merchandise sales, can almost count on another $2 million every year.

[The U Conn athletics director comments that] “[F]ootball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball is a tremendous source of pride for our university and the state of Connecticut and for 200,000 alumni….”

From Cambridge News:

An ancient piece of rock art – unlike anything previously found in Eastern England – has been unearthed in a Cambridgeshire village.

The hand-sized artefact is thought to be 4,500 years old, and it was found by a woman taking part in a weekend geological course run by Cambridge University at Over.

It is a slab of weathered sandstone, with two pairs of concentric circles etched into the surface – a motif which, according to archaeologists, is typical of “grooved ware” art from the later Neolithic era, in 2,500 BC…

… All the PowerPoint slides and chat rooms in the world can’t replicate the power of an in-person learning experience, and it’s hard to see how a cyber UC degree would have the same status as a regular one. UC faculty members are skeptical now, but in the future, employers and graduate schools will be. Complaints about how a cyber college would dilute the university’s status and dumb down learning helped bring down a similar project at the University of Illinois after two years.

… [T]his endeavor could be profitable. There is also the possibility that it could be a disaster…

The editorialist reviews the growing research pointing to the distinct possibility that online learning sucks.

If you want the truth about online university education, don’t ask administrators. They have obvious, unstated, reasons to adore it. Just ask students. They also adore it, but they tell you why.

From an article in a University of Texas newspaper about why online courses are so popular with students:

… Maura Ryan, a third-year UT Journalism major, [says,] “The lack of lectures makes online classes less educational. You really are teaching yourself the material so you aren’t able to get the expertise of a professor besides talking to him over email.”

Ryan confirms what many UT students regard as common sense — that online classes really are “so much easier than live.” Her current Psychology of Advertising class is “a lot less time” than her face-to-face classes, and consists of “really short lectures where everything is on PowerPoint.”

University faculty are also expressing concern. As student demand for online courses skyrockets, the level of faculty approval of this educational option remains low.

[A recent] report pointed out that less than one-third of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education, a statistic that has been constant over the past six years.

About a third of contributing academic officers admitted that they believe that online learning outcomes are inferior to their live counterparts.

Public schools have a greater percentage of students enrolled in online classes than private institutions. They also express a higher level of confidence in these courses. In schools with more than 15,000 students, 61.3 percent of chief academic officers rated online learning outcomes as equal to face-to-face outcomes.

With one in four current college students taking at least one Internet course, online education programs are becoming a critical long-term strategy to many public schools.   [Keep movin’ movin’ movin’ – Though they’re disapprovin’ – Keep them doggies movin’…]

Sarah Frankoff is a senior Broadcast Journalism major who cites UT’s long list of required courses as a reason for using an online option to complete her foreign language requirement.

After trying to take a live Spanish course at UT, Sarah decided it was “way too difficult and time consuming,” and is now in an online course because Spanish is “not a priority” in her field of study. “I think online classes are a great way to get less important courses out of the way.”

UT Extension’s website touts the possibility of completing the Business Foundations Certificate or completing prerequisites online as benefits of online learning. They cite today’s economy as a reason to get ahead with online learning. [Gt yr diploma qwik! Tday! Y wait?]

Sure, it’s a little unnerving to live in University of Central Florida student housing, but what if everyone moved out and demanded a refund because another chem major was discovered using explosive chemicals in his room to make meth?

Rather than panic and begin making demands, ask yourself: How good is the UCF chem department? What’s the student’s GPA in his major? He hasn’t detonated the building yet, and he seems to have a very solid, established business going.

… unable to continue generating income.

A former chancellor of Bournemouth University has been charged with an £11,000 fraud over the parliamentary expenses scandal.

Lord Taylor of Warwick reportedly claimed money for visiting his sick mother in the Midlands even though she had died in 2001.

The Crown Prosecution Service has been investigating the claims since they were made last year, and it announced yesterday that he has been charged with six counts of false accounting…

Zardari (with whom UD spent an afternoon at Blair House many years ago when his wife Benazir Bhutto was visiting the United States), himself has a fake degree, like much of the Pakistani political elite.

I guess it’s always been a kind of tradition there, pretend credentials.

The Pakistani press has lately decided to make a story of it. You can see that Raisani up there is pissed.

… Rehoboth Beach this morning.

It’s titled The Burqa, and Being in the World.

You can read it here.

WAMU 88.5, UD‘s local public radio station, features UD‘s town, Garrett Park, on its Metro Connection show today at 1:00.

Here’s its teaser:

The Simple Life in Garrett Park

[Simple Life? UD leads a quiet but not simple life. Few people in Garrett Park lead a simple life.]

Nestled behind the Music Center at Strathmore, the cozy neighbor of Kensington and Rockville in Maryland, lies Garrett Park. [Already a confusing sentence. The writer – who likes cliches (nestled, cozy) – apparently means that Garrett Park is the neighbor, but the sentence reads as though the Music Center is the cozy neighbor.] This little town in a big city sits on 400 acres. Nearly as many houses make up Garrett Park and, according to the Census, there are fewer than one thousand residents.

It’s a place filled with the ringing of chapel bells – except when the bell gets stuck – and the rumble along nearby train tracks. Garrett Park has played home to inventors and authors, including Donal McLaughlin, the 102 year old who designed the emblem of the United Nations, and author of the children’s classic Ferdinand the Bull.  [Longtime readers know that Les UDs own Munro Leaf’s house… Good thing this wasn’t a television thing, since by now my lawn probably looks pretty shitty…. Maybe the reporter will mention our two topiary bulls sitting in the pachysandra out front — tributes to Leaf.]  This quiet preserve, filled with trees and children at play, is historically registered and for the most part completely unknown. Andrew Hiller goes to town.

… in here, but UD‘s nowhere near a good enough poet to write it.

I think we need Walt Whitman for this one. Can’t think, at the moment, of a contemporary poet up to the task.

Hedgies, noting the same grotesque corruption in the for-profit education sector that the United States government has noted, are betting that the industry will soon fall as low as the homeless people it recruits for its entering classes.

Short sellers are betting that a combination of new laws withholding federal tax dollars from schools that don’t graduate anyone (the schools rely almost entirely on tax dollars), and HUMONGOUS rates of loan default on the part of their hapless homeless (one expert anticipates defaults of “$275 billion in government loans over the next 10 years”), will put these corporations on the same skid row their recruiters haunt in search of bodies to which to attach federal loans.

“People have worked out that these companies are overvalued. They’ve put on bigger and bigger short positions as the price keeps going down. And they have been right because the price keeps dropping, [says one observer].”

A for-profit executive complains that the short sellers “are hiring people who are semi-disguising who they are and not being candid with people about their role in trying to drive down the stock price of certain companies.”

To which UD responds:

1.) I thought you liked the free market. You’re always touting it in what you write about your industry. You put down traditional universities because they don’t operate by the clear cool astringent free market principles you do, which is why, you boast, you’re doing so well compared to those elitists…

The free market is why for-profit university presidents make six million dollars a year, while Drew Faust makes $800,000 or so to run Harvard. Now you’re getting all snivelly because hedgies operate in the same free market you do?

2.) You’re upset about people who aren’t candid? You, who troll the mean streets of America looking for desperate losers and signing them up for humongous loans?

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Update: Inside Higher Ed has an excellent account of the current controversy.

… emails from a number of University of Wisconsin medical school professors in response to a new policy banning them from giving promotional talks for drug companies. While not as riveting as the Mel Gibson tapes, these emails definitely have their moments.

“This is insulting,” one doctor said in an e-mail. “This is beyond ludicrous. … I have kids … and, simply put, I will no longer be able to afford to work for” UW.

The doctor, who supplemented what he described as his “sub-standard” UW pay with drug company income, said the policy was being forced on him and other physicians by “self-appointed witch-hunters” without a faculty vote.

“Do we really want to function like Cuba or Venezuela?” the doctor wrote.

UD likes this one because of the pathos of this man having kids and a substandard income as a doctor at the University of Wisconsin. How will his kids survive if he only makes… I dunno… $200,000?

The political commentary is thought-provoking too. Take a doctor’s moonlighting income away, it’s

HELLO FIDELITO!

Here’s another one.

“This is complete insanity,” wrote [one] doctor, who also works as an associate professor with the medical school. “Do we still live in a democracy?”

This is possibly a psychiatrist. This doctor shares the concern of the other one about the direction our country’s headed.

There’s an elegiac feel to the next comment.

This prohibition will effectively kill the evening dinner talk…

That’s the promo talk where pharma buys you a major dinner and talks up close and personal with you about the glories of its new, undertested, overpriced drug.

More worries about feeding children no doubt underlie the next email, in which an orthopedic surgeon complains about the policy putting a cap on what they can make in their promo talks (an exception to the no-talks thing was made for this specialty):

That exemption – which was added to the proposed policy after pressure from orthopedic surgeons – allowed those surgeons to make up to $500 an hour making presentations and teaching for device makers.

In one e-mail, a doctor objected to the $500 an hour rate, saying it was too low and “clearly ridiculous.” The doctor said it should be at least $1,000 to $2,000 an hour.

Seems a bit ungrateful to UD. They got a special exception and everything. But now that she rolls it around in her head a bit… yeah… okay… five hundred dollars an hour is clearly ridiculous. Payment should start at $2,000 an hour. No! Payment should start at $100,000 an hour.

UD is unclear why the university was so eager to keep these emails private that the local newspaper had to sue for their release.

The records recently were turned over to the Journal Sentinel in a settlement of a lawsuit the newspaper filed against the university … in December, after [it] refused to release the documents…

The [associated university] foundation [which was also sued] agreed to pay the newspaper’s attorneys’ fees of about $12,400.

Why hold them back and then undergo the embarrassment and expense of a lawsuit that any idiot could have told them they’d lose? This isn’t Cuba or Venezuela yet, buddy! We have public record laws here!

And isn’t it good for students and patients at the university to know how dedicated its medical staff is?

From its symbiotic relationship with shady online for-profit colleges [Background on the for-profit scandal here.] to its plan to make itself an online school, the University of California at Berkeley is moving smartly along the path to self-prostitution.

Step One:

University Regent Richard Blum has an investment firm.

… Blum Capital Partners has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million—nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.

… John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, Calif., comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”…

Blum’s not talking. He’s not talking to this guy, from Sacramento News and Review, and he’s sure as hell not talking to this guy, from the Los Angeles Times.

Should an important official of what is arguably the most prestigious system of public higher education in the world also be a leading financial backer of an industry that has been coming under intense regulatory scrutiny because of persistent allegations of fraud?

Or put another way: If the chairman of the World Wildlife Fund held significant investments in, say, BP, wouldn’t people wonder exactly what he thought about how to balance environmental protection and oil industry regulation?

Step Two:

Berkeley’s not only investing public money in the for-profits; it’s modeling itself after them. Put everything online; hire whoever to teach the stuff; advertise the Berkeley brand all over town.

Its professors are rightly worried. Some of them have written a worried opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The UC Board of Regents will discuss this week a proposal by the University of California president’s office for an ambitious plan to market UC online. The proposal entertains the vision of an eventual online bachelor’s degree that could tap new students throughout the world, from “Sheboygan to Shanghai.”

In fact, the track record for online higher education is very uneven.

Uneven? UD, as readers know, is less diplomatic. She has long called online classes the poor white trash of education. If you want to know why, click on my poor white trash category.

The Berkeley professors can see what’s coming.

[T]he university runs the risk of destroying its reputation and excellence in the name of marketing a brand.

But hey. When a major big time regent has been kissing up to the for-profits for years — when, in a way, your university has become financially dependent on the kindness of the for-profits — you shouldn’t be surprised when administrators start suggesting that Berkeley should make them its model.

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UD thanks her friend – once her student – James Elias for the initial link about Berkeley’s online venture.

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Update: “[W]hat do these investments say about Blum’s vision for higher education?” asks Michael Hiltzik, author of a long article in the Los Angeles Times about University of California Regent and zealous investor in for-profit education Richard Blum.

Let’s think about that one.

Blum represents just about the most selective undergraduate institution in the world, Berkeley. Berkeley is simply the pinnacle of higher education — and it’s public. It’s one thing for small, insanely rich Princeton to offer a great education. I mean, Princeton does, it does offer this, and it deserves all the praise it gets. But Berkeley, to the enormous credit of California taxpayers, offers something similar. And it doesn’t have the legacy profile of the Ivies. It doesn’t make lots of special room for the children of the rich and well-connected. It doesn’t create the sort of culture Walter Kirn describes here.

Berkeley is, if you ask UD, inspirational. It’s probably the closest thing we have in this country to an admissions meritocracy.

What is the investment philosophy of Berkeley’s highest-profile regent? What does that philosophy tell us about what the LA Times reporter calls his vision for higher education?

Well, I’d say it’s a vision profoundly at odds with what Berkeley has long stood for. It’s elitist and cynical. Blum’s investment strategy says the following to UD:

I’m going to generate lots of money for a few of the most highly selected students in the country on the backs of millions of ordinary citizens being ripped off by substandard institutions. It’s a winner-take-all-the-education world. Let the losers pay the price.