As for student representation in the Rectorate, this is another privilege given to students that essentially ties the hands of university administrations. Students seldom agree with administration decisions. For instance, the issue of hiring private security staff for campuses in 2014 was met with violent reactions from party youths. No security staff was ever hired. As for Rectors and Rectorates, they cannot even report thefts taking place in campuses. When computers are stolen from university premises, university administrations report that “they are missing,” because theft is too strong a word to use.

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Can’t argue with the results.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …

Early [last Monday] morning, some 15 people occupied the [University of Athens] computer center, holding hostage the email accounts of faculty members, students and administrative personnel, including those of the University of Athens hospitals. With a few exceptions, nobody has condemned what has happened, and no university officials have dared appeal to the authorities, for fear of retaliation. Physical violence and bullying is so common in Greek universities and across Greece that almost nobody dares react anymore.

This blog has covered – as much as it can bear to – the fate of universities in Greece [scroll down]. Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, explains the typically vicious response to the prospect of an electronic vote on university reform.

The most destructive brain drain is of the young. Since 2008, ever more young people (mostly in their 20s) have gone, often to foreign universities. “When I left to study abroad in 2006 I was the odd man out,” says a young Greek lawyer. “Now I thank my lucky stars.” Greece’s archaic education system and strikes have held back those who pursued their education at home. Exams have been delayed or cancelled. Some students are a year or more behind in their studies.

Now they’re even worse.

The shocking condition of Greece’s universities – a corrupt, violent, state tax collection system – has finally mobilized legislators. They’ve passed a strong reform bill, insisting on admissions standards, administrative autonomy and accountability, limits on the number of years people can be students, rational curricula, etc., etc.

As the opinion writer in my headline notes, the most staggering fact about Greek universities (scroll down for earlier posts about them) is their purposelessness. Of course in response to the legislation their complacent stakeholders have moved to shut them down, trash them, etc. But how to tell the difference between this and the status quo?

… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.

To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.

Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.

Lots of countries have lousy universities, but Greece is a real scandal, given the nation’s history and cultural significance. Lately it’s been trying this and that – it’s even allowed private universities to operate!

It has also, most recently, legislated against “dormant students,” hundreds of thousands of people who’ve remained enrolled for ten, twenty years while doing absolutely nothing. Fully half of Greek university students retained this status until the government finally decided it was kind of stupid.

So they’re inching along. But it’s a fundamentally corrupt, demoralized system, so good luck.

That’s because for decades Greek fans have been killing people and torching cities and all. The hapless government thinks a temporary pause and some more security cameras will bring Peace in Our Time, but this latest scheme will work out just as well as Chamberlain’s. I guess it’s real hard to confront the only thing to be done with a significant population of nihilist shits: No. More. Soccer.

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A BAD CROWD

Since that’s way rad an idea, let me say a bit more about pre-modern and postmodern crowds, and how they’re making crowds themselves obsolete.

The Greek football fans generate primitive, pre-modern crowding, all about atavistic drives among men. We had one of these recently in the States — the mass shooter at the Super Bowl victory parade was just, you know, hormones, spoiling for a fight.

Any scenario that surrounds fundamentally aggressive men with other young men will bring out the AK47 (that’s new — primitive cavemen had rocks), or, outside of gun-drenched USA, knives. And not just random young men: It was a signal cultural moment when the sixty year old owner of a soccer team got angry and ran onto the field during a game, with a gun in his outstretched hand to kill a referee.

You understand – yes? – the message Savvidis sent to all random hormoned-up young men? What I’m doing is a highly charismatic act.

You make matters worse when you present these people with established ‘enemies’ – opposing domestic or foreign teams. They don’t have to – like the Super Bowl shooter – go looking for enemies. You’ve set up a war for them to fight in, collectively, cuz they’re part of… a crowd.

And it’s an all-male, all-young crowd, right? Didn’t use to be, but over the years women children and older people have arrived at the conclusion that Greek soccer stadiums are not conducive to longevity, let alone a fun afternoon. So now you’ve concentrated the scariest element of society into loud sweaty excited rageful quarters.

So Greece is simply farther along in the evolution toward the end of crowds: It has watched for decades as its soccer matches – increasing numbers of them – devolve into fatal violence. It has tried everything, including, indeed, the end of crowds. The country is coming off of a two-month moratorium on soccer attendees.

But now that they’re letting these incredibly dangerous groups of people back in, what do they think is going to happen?

So, you know, we’re getting the stern announcements about enhancements of the police state they’ve already set up in the stadiums – vast numbers of security cameras, police, mandatory digital identification, weapon checks, blah blah.

Will it work? Keep your eye on Miami’s spring break. It’s happening right now. Those crowds are so awful that Miami released this ad a couple of weeks ago, and has made clear that it does in fact want the total end of those crowds. We don’t want you. Don’t come here. AND here are all the police state goodies we’re throwing at you if you come anyway. Let’s see if it works. Might make the guys madder, you know.

Anyway, so Greece. So what was once supposed to be A GAME, a certain thing, a sports gathering, is now – you understand? – a kind of lord of the flies free for all held perilously in check by insane levels of surveillance technology plus a very large, very frightened, security force. The players are scared, and not just the ones dreading racist chants. The referees? Forget about it. You know that groups of them have gone on strike because of the attacks.

So my thing is who’s kidding who. Eventually it won’t just be Savvidis packing heat. Obvious escalations of an already lurid situation are on their way, and we know from security’s inability to stop a mass shooting at the Super Bowl parade that guns are too quick and easy and lethal to police.

Think security will find weapons and confiscate them? Haha. Check out how many smuggled guns are discovered every day at all of America’s airports. People are always trying, and think about how many guns the TSA isn’t finding.

When crowds become impossible, what are your choices? You can try identifying and excluding the evil doers, but you’ll never get them all, and of course they’re evil enough to figure out how to get into the stadium no matter what you do. You can get to North Korean levels of police state apparatus, I guess (lines of soldiers with guns pointed at the crowd throughout? torture chambers below the locker rooms?), but this won’t be very… pretty. No, UD is thinking that Greece (and other countries) will have to shut down the whole thing.

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Our highly advanced postmodern crowds are a whole other thing. It’s their innocence that gets you. They are sitting ducks, awaiting the Las Vegas shooter, the Prague shooter, the Highland Park shooter. They are gathered to enjoy a concert, a parade, or just a sunny afternoon on the campus of Charles University. Massive, extensive, the highest of high-tech firepower rains down upon them from a heavily fortified genius who has thought everything out to guarantee he’ll be able to shoot for a long time and kill a lot of people.

I don’t think American parades or outdoor concerts have a very long shelf life either.

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Oh, and on the subject of Greek violence — We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the petrol bombs being thrown at police, even as we speak, in opposition to the government’s shocking intention to allow private universities to operate freely in Greece.

Yes! What’ll they think of next? Private, as well as, public universities!

Most Greeks are in favor; over 40,000 of the smartest young Greeks currently study abroad, having fled the squalid corrupt national system. (Put Greece university in my search engine.) Competition might wake up the dead public campuses and reverse the brain drain, but who would want to do that?

It’s not the sort of location you want to visit often; but it’s important to remind ourselves of the bizarre fate of the academy’s iconic homeland.

Most recently, the Athens Bar Association released the following desperate statement:

“The prevalence of lawlessness in [our universities], due largely to the total indifference of the state, not only humiliates and devalues public higher education in our country,” but is an affront to the state itself …

Because of the country’s absurd asylum law, under which police can’t enter universities, campuses have become graffiti-ridden organized crime hotspots. “[D]elirious or half-dead addicts” abound. Violent anarchism against professors and students is also a biggie:

On Wednesday morning, professors and students of the School of Philosophy gathered at the entrance of the campus in order to prevent [anarchists] from entering the premises. Nevertheless, the anarchists entered forcefully and took over classroom 516 again, just as they had done the previous two Wednesdays.

Greek universities have been sordid and comatose for many years. Soon they’ll just be dead.

What a remarkable story is the ransacking of Greek universities! On one side, civilization; on the other barbarism:

Vandals Ransack University Campus in Thessaloniki

The Greek university literally sinks under the weight of its defacement, as in this photograph of the National Technical University of Athens.

Perhaps most remarkable about this story is the fact that no one covers it. Why isn’t there a front-page story about the sordid erasure of thought – in Greece of all places – in the New York Times magazine?

When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.

Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.

Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.

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James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.

I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.

Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:

Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…

At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.

The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.

More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.

UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.

UD hasn’t encountered many totally corrupt American universities. We’re not like Italy and Greece, where one can find schools whose main function is to transfer all available funds to the institution’s leadership. The closest we’ve come is the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and even there they’ve had to shutter much of their shake-down operation after endless unpleasantness with the FBI. (I’m of course talking here only about legitimate universities. The for-profit tax syphons are almost entirely about transfer of all possible funds to management and investors. Whole other category.)

But the University of Louisville, some of whose students and faculty, as a local reporter notes, are “reeling” from one financial or sexual scandal after another, is emerging as America’s new UMDNJ. And it might be instructive to pause at its latest scandal – high-level med school resignations in the wake of an FBI investigation into allegations that (in the words of the only worthwhile UL trustee – a man who subsequently left the board in disgust) a university vice president “owns a piece of a company getting paid by a part of the university that he controls.” It’s alleged that he and several of his UL cronies have essentially stolen around eight million dollars from the university.

No bid contracts and bogus high-paying jobs to friends and family also seem to be part of this particular scandal. But that’s the typical threesome at corrupt schools, where no one’s around to stop you from total corruption:

1. conflict of interest for personal enrichment;
2. no bid contracts to cronies (these often feature kickbacks to you);
3. the creation of pretend jobs for cronies and relatives.

At schools like UL, you don’t do just one or two of these things; you do them all.

How does a school become systemically rotten in the way UL is systemically rotten? How did things get so out of control in virtually all areas of the school’s operation? (I’m not even going to talk about UL athletics, which has been a sewer for years.)

If you ask UD, this can only happen when absolute ignorance of – maybe even contempt for – the nature of a university prevails not only in parts of the local culture (that y’all and shut ma mouth land) but in the president’s office and on the board of trustees. UMDNJ was run by brainless Jersey wise guys; UL seems to be run by corporate backslappers. Even now, with the school in absolute tatters, UL has chosen as its spokesperson a look on the sunny side nitwit who attacks the press for its negativism, denies anything’s the matter, and says stuff that’s too stupid to parse:

“I’m not willing to cross that bridge and give you any information that’s going to appease your accusations.”

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A school run – flamboyantly run – largely to make money for the people who lead it will attract unsavory people. Unsavory people want to work at places like UL, since it seems unlikely that anyone at the institution will impede their corrupt activities. This is the way that corrupt schools stay corrupt, and indeed tend to become more corrupt. They attract corrupt people.

UD predicts that UL will, under this extraordinary pressure, finally ditch its president, who has lost all vestige of institutional control. But getting rid of him will cost the school many millions of dollars, and the chance of replacing him with anyone better is small.

They don’t seem to embezzle any more than employees in other settings, but it’s our job here at University Diaries to cover acts of embezzlement at universities egregious enough to make the evening news.

There are some countries – Greece comes shriekingly to mind – where being a university president seems to mean little more than taking the money the government gave you to run the place.

UD‘s not sure how corrupt Hong Kong is along these lines, but the University of Hong Kong certainly let its chief of surgery steal a lot of money before someone decided to try to make him stop. Before being found guilty of misconduct and false accounting, John Wong Kin-ling had quite a run.

Uh, let’s see… He was close to the university’s dean of medicine, from whom he apparently learned his trade:

… Lam Shiu-kum … fell heavily from grace in September 2009 when he was jailed for 25 months for pocketing HK$3.8 million in donations meant for medical research ….

Probably got a few pointers from that guy… Then…

Problems about accounting have dogged Wong for a while, and certainly since 2007. That was when he was accused of using donations – believed to be from James Tien Pei-Chun’s family and meant for research – to purchase a Lexus car, though he returned the vehicle to the school.

One insider told The Standard’s sister publication East Week: “Doctors would open different accounts to manage income, but there was no monitoring.”

Another source claims Wong once admitted that he had traveled first class to meetings overseas.

… [T]he four charges he faces – and has denied – in District Court are a tangle that involve a former assistant jailed for embezzlement, a private surgical training center, his driver-cum- helper, taxation authorities and others.

The former executive officer is June Chan Sau-hung, jailed for 22 months in 2010 for embezzling HK$3 million from the training center. She has been testifying for the prosecution against Wong.

… [Charges] include not notifying the police of Chan’s embezzlement. Wong said he had felt sorry for Chan as she was struggling with family responsibilities and wanted to help her repay the money she had taken.

It’s also alleged Wong directed HK$730,000 from the account of the training center – Unisurgical, in which he’s a director and shareholder – to pay his own helper-cum-driver for five years.

Wong said that although his driver was hired as a domestic helper he also picked up guests the university had invited to forums from the airport and their hotels. So he had the [training center] pay half of the salary.

And travel expenses incurred by Wong, it’s alleged, were handled in a way to deprive the Inland Revenue Department of some HK$120,000. But Wong said secretaries and other staff had handled such matters.

Funny money stuff at universities is usually some sad assistant to some sad assistant grabbing ten thou from the kitty and blowing it at Walmart’s. You’ve got to get to the higher managerial levels (see American University president Benjamin Ladner) for the good stories.

The Independent provides more detail about Greek universities:

… [A]cademics and concerned citizens are increasing calls for authorities to revise – if not scrap – the so-called asylum law which in recent years has allowed extremists to seek haven within university campuses, turning them into launching pads for their offensives against police.

“This has to stop,” said Ioannis Karakostas, a professor of law and deputy rector of Athens University. “These extremist elements are abusing the law to suit their own agendas and not the founding spirit of the law, which is to shelter and shield free thought.”

The rector, Christos Kittas, was attacked last Saturday when about 100 masked anarchists stormed the soaring green gates of the university – seizing control of the marble neo-classical building amid violent riots sparked during demonstrations commemorating last year’s police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15.

Because of the law, thousands of officers and riot police stood idle, watching youths destroy the building, tear down the Greek flag, set it ablaze and then hoist a black-and-red anarchist banner over the university’s rooftop. The televised scenes sent shock waves across the country, fanning debate on the controversial asylum law.

“I felt dead inside watching people who could be my grandchildren or students commit crimes and vandalise the shrine of free thought,” Mr Kittas said on Wednesday.

To the fury of the “anarchists”, the board of directors at Athens Law School have proposed a raft of bold measures to shield the institution from further attacks including student identification cards intended to ward off militant intruders…

What’s most striking to UD about the unbelievable Greek story – beyond the violence – is the apparent nothingness of the violent forces themselves. Various journalists give them various names — “anarchists” in those telling quotation marks, anti-government forces, radicals — but from what I can tell they’re nihilists who like to bludgeon people and burn buildings.