John D. Colombo, a University of Illinois law professor who has written about tax exemption and college athletics, says he doesn’t think the IRS action will fundamentally alter college athletics business. But he adds, “Audits are never comfortable. Just the IRS being there asking questions makes people nervous.”

Fine, yes, uncomfortable. Yes, nervous. But your coach is all right. The luxury boxes are all right. Get a grip on yourself.

The IRS has begun audits of more than 30 colleges that could include examinations of how schools determine the compensation of highly paid employees, including coaches and athletic administrators, according to an agency report.

The audits could include scrutiny of business activities that potentially can be seen as unrelated to schools’ primary purpose. Among the activities is the sale of corporate sponsorship packages that include athletics or are arranged by athletic departments.

… Colleges and Universities Compliance Project, which the agency said was part of a larger effort to review the largest, most complex organizations in the tax-exempt sector. Last year, the agency published a study concerning tax-exempt hospitals. [See post directly below this one.]

… The IRS interim report noted the large number of schools with an athletics coach among the five highest-paid employees who aren’t officers.

USA TODAY surveys of football coaching compensation have shown the average pay for a head coach in the NCAA’s 120-school Football Bowl Subdivision has risen 46% over the last three years, to $1.4 million in 2009. For the 65 schools in the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, average pay for a head coach for the 2009-10 season was nearly $1.3 million, USA TODAY found…

All sorts of Nosey Parkers have been nosing around universities lately. There’s that group that looked at how several universities not only ran their endowments into the ground, but contributed quite significantly to the nation’s recent economic meltdown. There’s the IRS investigation of non-profit hospitals I wrote about earlier today.

And now university coaches. Is nothing sacred?

Glenn Gass, a music professor at Indiana University, is too diplomatic to say the other part of this. Not all professors are passionate, or care whether students learn anything. These professors are happy – grateful, really – to Powerpoint their way through fifty minutes of Laplandic silence.

Gass speaks.

“It drives me crazy as a teacher to see a bunch of glowing laptops, and they’re doing a bunch of things that aren’t related to class,” Gass said. “If you really want to learn, you can’t do something else while you’re listening.”

An IU lecturer, Michelle Mosely, speaks:

“I don’t allow laptops at all in my class,” she said. “It’s a distraction. I don’t even allow cell phones or laptops on their desks.”

Mosely, like Gass, has fairly large classes, and she said students in large classes believe themselves to be invisible in the crowd.

Mosely penalizes her students for using laptops or cell phones in her class, which results in a verbal warning, deduction of participation points or students being asked to leave her classroom and not receive credit for that day.

… at Health Care Renewal says most of what needs to be said about the latest university overcompensation story, this one at the University of Maryland.

Here’s the Baltimore Sun account, which includes a statement from Governor Martin O’Malley:

This is an outrageous case of excessive executive compensation in a public institution. This sort of ‘golden parachute’ has no place in the public sector.

Lucky Temple University now gets this retiree, who says he “completed the Program for Health Systems Management at Harvard University,” but I can’t find that program.

Sometimes he renders it lower case: program for health systems management.

I’m looking all over the School of Public Health at Harvard, but I can’t find it. Has it changed its name? What sort of degree was conferred? This is the closest thing I can find.

… and you’re walking through it with hundreds of Baltimore ladies, and nothing looks anything like what you remember from your visits to your Aunt Delores all those years ago, you get a floating feeling. As though your past in this house didn’t happen.

And then you turn toward a little hallway, a hallway across from the secret whiskey passage the architect built (the house went up during Prohibition), and suddenly there’s a painting of her, done in the ‘fifties, showing her glorious beauty. She was blond, with Asian eyes, very elegant.

(Watch this to the end to see the painting of Delores.)

This brings her back for a moment – her sweetness, her bright, open joy in life.

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

Toward the end of her life she hoarded things, and the rooms were full of dusty boxes. Her children packed these away. Then the designers came in and installed an art deco bureau, a thickly fabricked wall, a three-curtain window, a nautical bathroom with stencilling.

There was no way, under these several chic layers, I was going to be able, all by myself, to reanimate the woman who lived for forty years in this house on a seven-acre hill overlooking a highway.

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

But here was Wally, her son, who had met our ‘thesdan delegation at the shuttle and accompanied us on our tour. Once I’d seen the house, I stood in the bright sun at its entryway and talked to him about her.

Landscape designers had hauled masses of potted plants up the house’s steep driveway. Ferns and hostas and black eyed susans surrounded us as we spoke.

“Yes, she had sheep.”

“To keep the grass down?”

“Not really. Just to add atmosphere.”

“Tell me about the shepherd.”

“When my parents bought the place, a mildly mentally disturbed man, John Baldwin, was just … here. He’d been the groundskeeper for previous owners. Lived in his car. He came from Baldwin Maryland, named for his family, an old and prominent family. He’d worked out this place to be, this odd life to live… And my parents of course took him on, gave him things to do. When they got the sheep he became the shepherd…”

“Tell me the story of the fire.”

“It was Christmas Eve and we were all downstairs. We huddled at the fireplace, and my mother read The Night Before Christmas to us…

We had tons of cats, and we were sort of gradually aware that they were going nuts upstairs for some reason, making lots of noise, jumping around. When we finally went up the steps, we were met by a wall of flame.

We raced out of the house.

Someone who saw the flames from the highway had already called the fire department, so as we ran down the driveway we were met by a big red fire engine.

One of the firemen had been playing Santa in a neighborhood gathering that night, and he’d gone directly to the station when he heard the alarm. I was so excited to go from listening to my mother read about Santa to seeing him in the flesh!”

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

Misfortune – divorce, the death of a child, other things – harried her in her later years, and I said to Wally, “I’ve always thought of her as having had a sharper fall than other people. Because her starting point was so high. Everything seemed perfect to me. I remember feeling that way, looking at her life then. I was too young to feel envy, but, you know. Enviable. Beauty, money, a sweet and loving disposition, lovely children… In the background, a placid flock of sheep.”

“Yes. She had it all for awhile.”

… for Baltimore. I’m visiting the 2010 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Decorators’ Show House.

I knew this house, most of my life, as the house in which my Aunt Delores lived. (Longtime readers know that UD was born in Johns Hopkins Hospital and raised in Baltimore.) It’s an odd place, and I always enjoyed visiting her there. She died a year ago, and as soon as the BSO is through with it (this is their big fundraiser), it’ll be on the market.

The house had been remade, room by room and field by field (Delores had sheep!), by scores of designers. UD, accompanied by various ‘thesdan family members, will now go there. I’ll write about it when I get back.

A former professor takes issue with a local paper’s argument

that virtual classrooms with unlimited enrollment and little maintenance would assist state universities live within a restricted budget …

Designing interactive online learning modules increases costs for the time of faculty and technological experts. Add in server usage fees and the 24/7 tech support for daily student access and downloading problems. Research has shown that online enrollment should be maximized at 20 students for best student-faculty interaction, far less than the usual concrete classroom.

The time-intensive nature of online interactions add[s] to student and faculty workload and cause[s] problems for students who cannot balance work, family, friends, faith and school. To be successful in online courses requires good reading comprehension and writing skills. Students who do not have these skills drop out and need to re-enroll at a later date, creating more problems for student progression and class enrollments…

This writer overlooks, however, the boots-on-the-ground reality of many online courses: Hundreds of students handled by one professor; the professor so overwhelmed, and so incentivized to pass students, that she doesn’t much care (notice?) whether they’re learning anything; an insultingly low level of intellectual interaction; the system’s inability to determine whether the person who says she’s taking the online class is who she says she is… In short, if you want to make your university one big correspondence course which hands out degrees to the largest possible number of students without making them learn anything or even verify their identity, online’s the way to go.

… will be announcing, later today, his run for Vermont State Senate.

From the candidate’s statement (not yet published):

Vermont’s unique natural beauty, so special to all of us who live here, is our most important economic asset. Environmental protections must be strengthened and, in particular, the highest priority must be placed on state-private partnerships to preserve large tracks [SOS thinks he means tracts] of undeveloped land. Farming in Vermont must be made far more economically viable.

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

Update: Peter writes to thank UD: “The problems of autocorrect.”

“It’s quite easy to pick on us because everyone he wants to pander to already thinks we’re overpaid Marxists,” said David Burdige, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University and member of the school’s Faculty Senate. “If you’re trying to appeal to a particular group of people, then picking on the university as being bastions of leftwing thinking and depravity, it’s sort of like shooting bears at a garbage dump. You’re guaranteed to score points.”

A professor in Virginia’s public university system responds to the attorney general, who has “[challenged] university policies that bar discrimination against gays and lesbians and [used] a civil subpoena to demand documents from a former University of Virginia professor known his scientific work on global warming.”

In this recent post, UD described a
17-year-old neighbor of hers, Gabe
Mandel, foraging through UD‘s acre
in search of edible wild plants for
his ambitious and creative cooking.

Gabe has now hit the big time.
The Washington Post

has a long article about him.

With plenty of pictures and
plenty of wonderful details.

Excerpts:

… [L]ast year, the Walter Johnson High School junior scored an internship at Murray’s Cheese in New York, then spent a month working at Cafe 2 in the Museum of Modern Art. Mom keeps a scrapbook of it all. Its most recent entry was Gabe’s two-page spread in the March-April issue of Bethesda magazine as one of 10 “Extraordinary Teen” honorees.

“I just like cooking. A lot,” he says. “Whatever I make.”

What Gabe is making these days is inspired by what grows close to home. After devouring the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and a similar Smithsonian guide the way he does cookbooks of progressive chefs such as Thomas Keller and David Chang, he was soon picking sweet woodruff, gill-over-the-ground, jack in the pulpit, fiddlehead ferns, wild ginger, sourgrass, Japanese knotweed and bamboo shoots.

“I think ‘wild’ is going to become the Next Big Thing,” he said on a muggy spring morning as he tromped through neighbors’ yards, reciting fun facts about each treasure. “I started foraging because there are so many flavor profiles we never use. Did you know that some plants develop flavors as defense mechanisms?” No trespassing was involved; Gabe has bartered samples of his cooking for access.

“We are happy to have him come and take bamboo,” said Joan May while she sipped her morning coffee on the porch and watched the young hunter crunch through tall, leafy stalks to reach the tender shoots.

“You want the ones that grow in the shade,” he said. “But they need to be boiled, because they contain cyanide.”

The ‘hood is also where Gabe gets to work on his knife skills. A year and a half ago he walked into Black Market Bistro with a résumé, newspaper clippings and lots of ideas. Chef Donald Dennis hired him to do prep two days a week. “He came in with a head full of knowledge,” Dennis says. “He’s fun to have in the kitchen. Certainly a lot of energy. His skills are developing, and his parents are very supportive. A lot of parents push their kids away from this industry.”

… As their son nears resolution of the looming College Question, the Mandels have huddled especially close. Visits to the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., the New England Culinary Institute, Johnson and Wales, the French Culinary Institute and New York University’s food studies program have been checked off the list. Traditional culinary schools don’t seem like a good fit, but neither does a regular liberal-arts institution, where Gabe would have to work at a restaurant to keep his hand in food.

“I’m leaning toward a gap-year option,” Gabe said last week. “I want to see the world.”

For now, he is looking forward to a second summer stint at MoMA’s Cafe 2 and to a seat at the StarChefs.com 2010 International Chefs Congress, to be held in New York this fall.

His folks got him tickets for his birthday.

… Texas.

Bernard Madoff and Elie Wiesel were fellow trustees at Yeshiva University.

Like some other trustees at YU, Wiesel invested with Madoff. He lost millions.

Did the two men know one another? Yes. They dined together a couple of times, after which Wiesel invested with Madoff.

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

Would it make sense for a playwright to be intrigued by the historical intersection of two such different, high-profile, Jews?

Sure. And Deb Margolin, a writer from Yale, wrote a play, Imagining Madoff, in which she imagined the imprisoned Madoff recalling a long conversation he once had with Elie Wiesel. As Margolin describes it, the conversation as written was about morality, with Wiesel the embodiment of goodness, and Madoff evil, or something like that. Certainly Margolin has said that she intended her fictionalized Wiesel to convey integrity in contrast to Madoff’s sleaziness…

Yet Wiesel calls the play “obscene” and has threatened a defamation lawsuit, as a result of which the play’s Washington performance has been canceled.

Elie Wiesel, champion of liberty, has bullied a production of an artwork out of existence.

He refuses to speak to the press about this.

(He hasn’t got much of a defamation case, as this lawyer interviewed by NPR points out, but you never know.)

(By the way, the lawyer NPR interviews says something wrong:

And I guess the [legal] argument [Wiesel] would make is, look, I was a victim of Bernie Madoff. I invested – my foundation invested money in the foundation. It was an arm’s length transaction. I didn’t know the man. This play makes it look like I’m his friend. I’m having late-night conversations with him. We’re discussing things, which never happened.

While it doesn’t sound as though they were exactly friends, from what UD can tell they not only dined together twice but knew tons of people in common, sat together on a university board, and … well, Wiesel deeply trusted this man. He gave him all his money. “We thought he was God,” said Wiesel, after the fact, of Madoff… )

The play will appear, with the Wiesel character under a different name, later this summer in Hudson, NY.

… Hey! I might be able to attend that! I’ll be at our Upstate house in August…

While writing this post, I’ve been discussing with Mr UD whether we could go to Hudson to see the play. He seems to think so. A matinee maybe, since it’s around a two-hour drive…

I told him about the Washington cancellation. “If Wiesel is eager to dissociate himself from Madoff,” said Mr UD, “what he’s done will have exactly the opposite effect.”

… Barcelona.

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

… We know there is no Koranic injunction to cover the face, and we watch helplessly as organised brainwashing is leading to the blanking out of female Muslim presence and individuality from the public space.

… For me, the overwhelming argument against the burka (and various coverings for children, another growing abomination) is that there is such a thing as society. Community fetishes cannot override social communication, connection, obligations, equality, duties and understanding. Security and safety-measures too require facial identification. Politicians need to get assertive and argue that they believe in non-racist, universal human development. Effective policies to halt the spreading habit (in both senses) will then naturally follow.

And reformist Muslims too should speak up more frankly without fear or favour. A traditional Pakistani friend of mine – who always wears the shalwar kameez – recently refused service from a burka-ed librarian in one of our big libraries. The next time she went in, the face was no longer hidden. Maybe our new government should consult her. She could teach them how resistance, not acquiescence, gave us our past freedoms and will preserve our present ones.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent

… from the Museum of Modern Art

in Paris.

Inside Higher Education provides a plot summary of the time-honored tale of a giant sports program swaggering a campus and sucking all the money out of it.

“O giant,” say the professors. “Don’t kill us.”

“Ho, ho,” says the giant. “I won’t. By the hair on my chinny chin chin I’ll balance my budget. Sit down in my chair and watch my self-sustainability increase.”

The professors don’t want to sit in the giant’ s chair, but they do not want to make him angry.

Ten years pass.

“O giant,” say the professors. “Your subsidy has increased to 35 million dollars.”

“ROAR,” says the giant, showing his teeth.  “The coach was getting picked off by SMU.  We had to increase his salary to ten million dollars a year.   We haven’t resolved the lawsuit the last coach brought against us, and that costs five million dollars a year.  The teams aren’t doing well this year and no one’s buying tickets …  You do the math.”

Police arrested Tiffany Lynn Gaubert, a 22-year-old unaffiliated with the University of 170 Constant Drive in Thibodaux, for disturbing the peace by intoxication after receiving complaints of someone overturning a motorcycle at East Campus Apartments.

The owner told police Gaubert tipped the motorcycle. Gaubert denied toppling the motorcycle and blamed it on a squirrel.

Gaubert, who police later learned was drinking vodka and Dr Pepper, said she was trying to feed barbecue to the squirrel when it ran off and knocked the bike over, said Sgt. Blake Tabor, LSU Police Department spokesperson.

She then became hostile toward the officers and was arrested and issued a misdemeanor summons for disturbing the peace.