… is a for-profit college (and if you read University Diaries, you know about those skeezy joints) whose founder – a Tennessee state senator – seems to have stolen gobs of federal grant money in order to pay for every stage of the beautiful cycle of life (wedding, honeymoon, divorce). In a heavily religious press event (no questions, please!), Robinson and her spokeswoman describe a martyr for whom we are asked to pray and pray and pray. Pray away the Hey did you really use $600,000 of taxpayer money to buy a Louis Vuitton handbag, a Jeep Renegade, a Jamaican vacation, and an end to your personal debt? Pray it away! Give God the burden!

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* More on the Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds here.

… chronicled in this book, are entertaining places, and no doubt this new year we’ll continue following them at their most efficient, at the nation’s for-profit colleges.

But this country’s Centers for the Absorption of Corporate Funds deserve equal attention. Indeed these are arguably even more entertaining places, because while the federal government simply acts the well-meaning idiot as it dispenses hundreds of millions of dollars to hedgies pretending to run schools, corporations are often brilliant operators with bad motives — and it’s always more fascinating to watch the strategic villain than the bumbling good guy.

UD doesn’t claim that corporations looking for academic respectability in order, for instance, to hook America on opioids, always exhibit strategic brilliance. Crucially, they must identify research units within American universities able to balance compromised data (papers and presentations must uncover the urgent necessity plus the safety of massively increased pain pill intake) with the continued appearance of scientific integrity, a scheme fraught with difficulty. It’s not uncommon for reporters, and even politicians, to notice that a place like the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies Group is an almost wholly owned subsidiary of pharma, as it stashes away more and more OxyContin money while pumping out more and more Oxy Rocks! research.

Coca Cola, fast food, over-prescribed anti-depressants, over-prescribed anti-psychotics for toddlers, Dr. Shkreli’s Miracle Elixirs… All of these substances need whitewashing, and the university is where that happens. When things get too obvious, or when from the start they’re mishandled (remember what brought down Virginia’s last governor), the Centers suddenly shut down, or suddenly announce they’ve decided to stop taking corporate money…

… Funds to begin to make sense of a scandal like Sul Ross University. A terrible school with a graduation rate approaching zero, a school only lately on probation, Sul Ross naturally is all about athletics.

Back in November the entire football coaching staff was fired. Then the president of the university resigned days later.

There’s no there there, at Sul Ross, which opens the door to local bullies and boosters and hangers-on. No one’s saying exactly what happened (maybe everyone on campus is too addled to know), but the local press suggests the latest Sul Ross administration ran away because

There were claims that coaches were physically and verbally abusing players, that athletes were being bribed to incriminate coaches, and that coeds were being pushed to have sex with recruits.

Yadda yadda. Bottom line: When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, boys will get up to trouble. And Sul Ross is all about boys.

It’s odd to UD that Sul Ross is about anything. I mean, anything you and I have to pay for.

… used to chronicle the antics of a university unit he called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds.

As UD‘s said on this blog before, no one absorbs federal funds — and pockets them — better than for-profit colleges. They’re absolutely brilliant at taking tax money and then failing to educate and graduate students.

It’s an amazing enormous con, and you’d think the government would do something about it, and it will do something about it as soon as it can … I dunno… pull itself together to do something about it.

One thing our mainly clueless Education Department has noticed is that university accrediting bodies (federal money doesn’t start flowing to your investors until you get accredited) are jokes. If I paid them enough, accreditors would accredit my ass.

Robert Shireman, deputy under secretary for education, said in an April 28 speech to higher education regulators that he feared accreditors don’t have the “analytical firepower” they need to fairly assess the schools they oversee.

Likening the accreditors to credit rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities in the financial crisis, Shireman said the school agencies have an “inherent conflict of interest,” as they are funded by the institutions they are meant to critique.

Fees to join [one such group], for example, start at $17,500, according to the group’s website. Annual dues include a $2,500 base, 50 cents per full-time-equivalent student and $75 per degree site.

In a recent letter, the Office of Inspector General

blasted [a large regional accreditor] for approving Career Education Corp.’s (CECO) American Intercontinental University despite expressing serious concerns about its credit hour structure. The letter, which echoes a December preliminary report, says the accreditor’s failure to define a credit hour–the basic measure of a class’s rigor–allows schools to inflate a course’s value, improperly designate full-time student status and over-award federal student loans. Two other regional accreditors were criticized on similar grounds last year, including the group that previously accredited American Intercontinental.

Analytical firepower. LOL.

But they’re really not. Only a few Moo‘s come along in one’s lifetime.

UD has lately been enjoying Stubborn as a Mule, a first novel by Harvard law professor R.H. Fallon, Jr.

Mule goes after – among other things – the Chicago School of Economics.

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This New York Times review seems to be announcing another good academic satire, this one very topical, and also pertinent to an ongoing preoccupation of UD‘s — conflict of interest in academic science.

Tech Transfer is by Daniel Greenberg, a science journalist who for many years wrote for the New York Times.

Even at the Times he had a satirical bent; he wrote, in some of his columns, about a university unit called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds. The Center’s director, Dr. Grant Swinger, specialized in “instantly redirecting his center’s activities to whatever scientific fad was highest on legislators’ priority list. He would have been first to set up a stem-cell research institute and get the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to promise him a building.”

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The new university president in Tech Transfer quickly learns the non-negotiable demands of his faculty:

These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.

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The real center for the absorption of federal funds these days is of course the for-profit higher education industry.