… you will recall, threatened to sue Harper’s Magazine over an article about the university’s notorious budget problems. Cooler heads – i.e., students – prevailed, and the suit (Joshua Reinharz darkly suggested that “that the article’s author, Christopher R. Beha, was motivated to write an article casting Brandeis’ finances in a negative light because his aunt Ann Beha’s architectural firm was rejected by the University in its bid for a 2004 building project.”) never happened.

But universities continue to make this sort of mistake, with Canada’s York the latest example. Again a university has taken umbrage at a magazine article – in this case, an article which called the campus “a hunting ground for sexual predators.”

That’s strong language, to be sure, but I suspect “literary license” covers it, and, in any case, a lawsuit costs a lot of money and will ultimately be a high-profile way of keeping the issue of campus safety in the news.

Why is Brandeis so inept? UD has followed several Brandeis stories over the years (the Rose Art Museum fiasco, the Donald Hindley fiasco… the president who threatened to sue a magazine because of an article he didn’t like) and they tend to be about administrative ineptitude. Here’s another one.

Because its journalism department had to make “an emergency hire” (Huh? If you can’t find a replacement at the last minute, you cancel the course rather than picking someone up off the sidewalk.), it picked up this chick – an alcoholic with a serious rap sheet. A friend of a friend of someone in the journalism department recommended her.

Scot Bemis up there in the headline explains it all very clearly for us. It’s illegal to ask applicants about their criminal backgrounds. However, if you ask applicants about their criminal convictions, they have to tell you about them…

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, no one asked this woman anything. But you could Google her, the way a Brandeis student journalist did.

Ross’ criminal background, according to her blog as well as multiple newspapers, includes numerous convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence, conspiracy to aid an escape from jail and conspiracy in attempting an escape from jail. On Feb. 28, the day after she was placed in protective custody in Waltham, she was arrested for operating under the influence and operating a vehicle after her license was revoked for drunk driving, according to the Barnstable Police Department.

The Barnstable Police Department confirmed that Ross has been convicted of OUI more than four times; under Massachusetts law, that many convictions requires a lifetime suspension of the involved individual’s driver’s license.

… Despite the fact that information about Ross’ arrests is publicly available through her blog, Google searches and public records, nobody at the University knew about her criminal history before hiring her, according to multiple University officials.

All this info got stirred up when Pippin Ross was found “intoxicated and unresponsive” in her car on campus. She’s been fired.

… resigns.

Brandeis posts at University Diaries here.

… of so much online education.

Excerpts, from the student newspaper:

… With continuing budget problems, some may consider avoiding online education a bad move for Brandeis. Adding a few extra hundred students and going online could possibly fill some of the budget gap without having to build extra housing or hire extra faculty. Proponents of the online system claim that it could offer education to the poor and underserved. But despite all of these benefits, there are serious problems with online education.

The problem with online education is a matter of parity. Those on campus get a much fuller education than those sitting in a remote location taking online courses. Most of the learning in college takes place outside of the classroom. Speakers come from all over the world to impart their knowledge to eager students and faculty on the Brandeis campus. Unless Brandeis were to film all of those moments and offer them to students, those taking Brandeis courses online couldn’t really claim to have the Brandeis experience.

Interactivity is the next problem. In an online course, you can ask the professor questions and take part in group exercises. But talking with a group of fellow students over lunch is difficult if the participants are dispersed around the state or country.

First-class lecturers and interactivity create an atmosphere of ideas that is essential to the liberal arts education.

… According to U.S. News and World Report, Brandeis has a graduation rate of 85 percent. The graduation rate for the University of Phoenix Online is abysmal: According to statistics from the California Postsecondary Education Commission, only 281 students graduated out of 6,578 enrolled, putting the graduation rate at 4 percent. Those are the sort of numbers that could tarnish Brandeis’ reputation as a first-rate educational institution.

… The real-world college experience cannot easily be brought online-from speakers to late-night bull sessions to being involved in extracurricular activities. Brandeis should not belittle the quality of its education by going online and putting its students in danger of the lower-quality education and higher dropout rates that define the online college experience.

On its website, Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum styles itself as “an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art widely recognized as the finest of such collections in New England.” Now you can color it gone — the Boston Globe is reporting that Brandeis, a highly rated private school in Waltham, Mass., is going to close the museum this summer and sell off its collection of more than 6,000 art works.

Works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg are part of the cache that will come on the market as Brandeis strains to plug what’s reported to be a budget deficit as high as $10 million.

…A major Brandeis donor, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, was hit hard by investing with financier Bernard Madoff, the alleged Ponzi-schemer. It had given more than $3 million to Brandeis in 2007, according to media reports.

And if Merkin also puts his Rothko collection up for sale? Talk about a Modern Movement!

On one level it’s more hysterical overreach in the face of people who merely argue that American children should learn basic literacy; but the sentence has a value-added something. “The pleasure of illiberal dependency” sounds not quite right as the opposite principle to “the pleasure of liberal autonomy.” What more easily rolls off the tongue is something like the rigors of illiberal dependency; for an ignorant, isolated, impoverished life of lockstep obedience to rabbis cannot – the writer would I guess say should not – be easy. (Hatam Sofer declared, “Every­thing new is forbidden by the Torah.”)  You’re after a life which – with its strict rituals and rules and repressions – represents a daily rebuke of modernity’s shapeless hedonism.

Of course, the writer also intends sardonic irony, for we all know that the seeming pleasure of free — read deracinated — societies quickly turns to ashes as secular modernity’s inescapable meaninglessness and loneliness drives all of us outside of yeshivas to suicide. Indeed we are incessantly assured of the rich communal meaningful happy lives within fortress u-o; and yet Shaul Magid notes that these assurances, like a recent one by Liel Leibowitz in Tablet, are “purely speculative. [Leibowitz] has never lived in [an ultraorthodox community] (I have) and his judgment is a purely romantic, or more likely opportunistic, view of one gazing in from the outside.” Sounds as though Magid didn’t think his community was very happy.

Would you be happy if you were kept from learning anything about the world you share with all of us outside fortress u-o? To read the writer’s account of modern university education, for instance, is to try to wrap your head around a world where schools like Yeshiva, Touro, Brandeis, Baylor, Liberty, Ave Maria, Hillsdale College, and many other religiously serious institutions do not exist. ALL colleges corrupt, which is why your high schools need to aim for total illiteracy – the inability to sign your name on your SAT test:

[P]reventing college is the point. Ḥasidic parents are absolutely opposed to their eighteen-year-old sons or daughters attending college for the entirely rational reason that college consists of a complete immersion in a culture antithetical to Ḥasidism…

Come, come. The other reason – you fail to note it – is that the community makes sure eighteen year old girls are already arranged-married and knocked up, with no future to look forward to but more kids. How entirely rational.

As we settle in for the trial of Malka Leifer, ultraorthodox school principal/child rapist – an event distinguished from SCADS of orthodox and ultraorthodox child/teen sex abuse cases all over the place only in that Leifer is a woman – we need to prepare ourselves for the articles in the American, European, and Israeli press about Okay! Now we’ve REALLY turned a corner with these people! With the eyes of the world following so many lurid high-profile orth. and ultraorth. cases things are REALLY going to change in these notoriously child-sex-abusive sects!

Vey, mes petites. Do a little reading on cults. Abuse rates are obscenely high among the super-strict, closed, sexually hyper-repressed because… I mean, hasn’t this sentence already, even before it finishes itself, answered the question it’s posing? Do I need to specify the precise menu ingredients here?

Okay.

1. Take a completely masculine cult, a cult where men are most of the time alone among themselves and hold total power (via the local rabbi overlord who holds power over the men) over women and children.
2. Blend in a reproductive rather than loving/pleasurable sexual relationship with these men’s wives, causing serious sexual repression problems among the men, whose daily lives, often involving no real work, allow them plenty of time to sit around fantasizing about sex with girls and boys who aren’t brood mares.
3. Check to make sure that both the husbands and wives in this group have been raised sexually repressed and sexually ignorant, and married off insanely early, so that their sexual/emotional maturity level is … elementary school?
4. Put them in a twisted patriarchal world that regards male sexual access to children as unscandalous, or, if scandalous, OUR scandal, which we will hush up rather than stop or report to the authorities. Men will be men. The ways of the lord are strange. It’s probably good for the kids.
5. Make the child victims utterly, unbelievably, innocent and ignorant. They don’t know what’s going on, much less know to report it. If, after years of being raped, they figure out something illegal is going on, they have probably also figured out that if they tell anyone, they and their family will be socially tortured and then thrown out of the cult.
6. Make everyone afraid – their parents, who might have noticed this or that bleeding vagina or anus; their friends, their teachers – make them and everyone in their world afraid. Does this all sound a touch Gothic to you? Are we being melodramatic? ….. Hello? Are you listening? This. Is. A. Cult. It’s no different from any other cult. Virtually all powerful men in all cults have access to/control the bodies of the most vulnerable cultists. Nature of the beast.
7. Make sure that the ideology of hatred/indifference toward, and exploitation of, local, state, and federal authority runs deep. Only the rabbi overlord has any moral/legal legitimacy. Whatever else is out there can fuck itself. (Hot off the press example: Although the authorities seem finally to have caught up with their notoriously criminal leader for his latest offenses – he has already spent two years in jail for his earlier ones – Israel’s ultraorthodox will certainly keep Aryeh Deri as their leader. I mean, who gives a shit that he breaks laws left and right. What laws? Who cares??) Only with this attitude do you guarantee that the rape of children will proceed normally.

Is any of this helping you understand why rates of child sexual abuse in orthodox and ultraorthodox communities are outrageously high? … To the extent that we can begin to measure them, that is, given the absolutely locked shut status of these cults… I mean, they’re not exactly going to cooperate, or disclose, or anything. It’s just child rape, for goodness sake.

And listen. If non-cultic communities cared at all about generations of raped children, they’d solve this.

And the solution isn’t that difficult. They need to take the Voting Blocs Detox Pledge:

I, important politician, pledge to overlook the fact that hundreds of thousands of these people vote as one for me/my party, and I pledge to move against them legally anyway. I pledge to put the interests of raped children above my partisan advantage.

[R]eplacing an expression with negative connotations is like swatting away gnats, because those same connotations regularly coalesce on the new term as well. Crippled was changed to handicapped; after a while, this needed replacing, and thus came disabled; today terms such as differently abled attempt yet again to elude the negative associations some assign to physical disability. This is an old story, one that the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls a “euphemism treadmill.”

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Hedonic treadmill definition here.

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And can this be true? No way does UD have the grit to read the actual document.

Do [the Brandeis Language Police] really intend to stigmatize the singing or playing of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”? Or to banish the expression rule of thumb because of an obscure and probably false folk etymology — namely, an antique British law that allowed men to beat their wife as long as the instrument used was no wider than a thumb?

Corey O’Hern, director of Undergraduate Programs for the Sackler Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, emphasized the importance of the Institute in fostering collaboration between departments at Yale. According to O’Hern, there is a lack of grants supporting such research on the national level. “The funding, independent where it’s from, has been crucial to developing this interdisciplinary research and training,” said O’Hern. “The thought of it going away is scary, stressful and sad.”

Corey? Do you know what Yale’s currently hoarding in its endowment? Do you know that your university sits on thirty billion dollars? If you don’t realize that Yale doesn’t need Sackler money, I find that scary, stressful and sad. Just ask Andrew Kolodny:

Despite benefits from the Sackler Institute, Kolodny maintained that Yale has a moral impetus to rename the program. “Yale University, if they are taking money from the Sacklers, they are taking blood money,” Kolodny argued. “That money came from the marketing of the Sackler family’s activities which led to millions of people becoming addicted and thousands of people dying.”

“I think Yale University can afford to give the Sacklers back their money,” he added.

For Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Purdue’s wrongdoing is the Sacklers’ wrongdoing. As the inventors and owners of Purdue, the Sacklers deserve the “lion’s share” of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, he said.

He explained that the United States’ opioid epidemic is as severe as it is because the medical community began aggressively to prescribe opioids in the ’90s in response to what Kolodny deems a “brilliant marketing campaign” carried out by Purdue. He said the company has faced legal consequences for some of the specific ways in which it marketed OxyContin, but it was never punished for the “nonbranded marketing” they performed by persuading the medical community to feel more comfortable prescribing opioids.

Ah, the morgue classroom. This Brandeis student is experiencing, in “four out of the five classes that I am taking this semester,” what UD calls the morgue classroom, where the professor gazes earthward and intones, while the students gaze at their laptops and drift off.

The morgue classroom is as silent as the grave – more silent each class session, since, as this student goes on to note, there’s no reason to attend.

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Yes, those who attend the dying body, that drifting keening Greek chorus, become fewer and fewer, ultimately stranding the designated mourner at the front of the congregation, humiliated by her aloneness.

Of course you know – don’t you? – that most morgue classrooms feature mandatory attendance policies. How else can you keep them gathering, again and again, at the dark silent river?

Shall we gather at the river?

Give me one good reason.

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You’ll flunk the course if you don’t.

Galbraith’s famous observation is also true of some university presidents. Like the guy who just left Brandeis after only five years.

[W]hile faculty were subject to caps on salary increases, Lawrence’s compensation soared from about $589,000 in 2010 to $878,572 in 2013, the last year for which data is publicly available.

You do wonder about people sometimes.

With the help of a researcher at the National Center for Education Statistics, the [Jewish Daily] Forward identified six universities with characteristics similar to Y.U. — private, not-for-profit, four-year universities with high research activity and a student body size similar to Y.U.’s.

Among those schools, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and Brandeis universities more than doubled their endowments between 2003 and 2014. Rice University’s endowment grew by 88%.

One other school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which has struggled financially in recent years, saw its endowment grow by just 29%.

Since [Richard] Joel took over Y.U. in 2003, Y.U.’s endowment has grown by 20% overall.

Put yeshiva in my search engine to discover the myriad causes of this amazing outcome.

… much more eloquently than ol’ UD can, on this blog devoted to the importance of higher education, that a reasonably serious college education might really help you be less stupid throughout your life. But Don Young also reminds us that democracy means people are free to choose the political leaders they feel best represent them; and in always returning this man to Washington, Alaska has made its sense of itself clear.

Back in 2011, in one of many similar embarrassments for the state of Alaska, Young called a congressional witness’s testimony “garbage,” and addressed him by the name of the university at which he teaches. Called him Mr Rice. The witness, Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice, responded.

“It’s Dr. Brinkley, Rice is a university,” and “I know you went to Yuba [Community College in California] and couldn’t graduate — ”

Then it was Young’s turn to interrupt. “I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair,” he told the witness. “You just be quiet.”

Brinkley countered: “You don’t own me. I pay your salary. I work for the private sector and you work for the taxpayer.”

See, that’s democracy too. Stupid aggressive people run the risk of encountering smart aggressive people – people who know the difference between a king and a congressman.

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You know how during his presidential elections, Barack Obama’s opponents are always calling him a professor? Because you wouldn’t want an intellectual, a smart, non-representative, non-Don-Young sort of person running America? Another Alaskan, Sarah Palin, called Obama “professor” repeatedly. Remember what Michael Kinsley wrote at the time?

If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?

Alaskans have every right to be represented a man so stupid that he has become a national laughingstock. That’s representative democracy at its best. This country’s proud anti-intellectual tradition was famously articulated by Senator Roman Hruska in defense of Nixon’s nomination of Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court:

When Senator Hruska addressed the Senate in March 1970, speaking on Judge Carswell’s behalf, he asked why mediocrity should be a disqualification for high office.

“Even if he were mediocre,” Mr. Hruska declared, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”

If Alaskans have dipped significantly below mediocrity in Don Young, that is entirely up to them. But whether it’s Young, or perennial presidential hopeful Donald Trump, the rest of us have an equal right, like Brinkley, to laugh at these buffoons. (And yes, I know Trump went to good schools. I said a good education “might” help you.)

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Update: Wow. Telling people to shut up turns out to be Young’s whole thing!

Gloria Poullard approached Young to ask him about a profane speech he gave last week at Wasilla High School, in which the congressman offended students by arguing that suicide was caused by a lack of support from friends and family.

“You know, it really put a hamper on my faith in you because my elders voted for you, and this is my state, I’m an Alaska native,” Poullard said to Young, according to video of the exchange from local TV station KTUU. “How do you feel within yourself, what possessed you to even make a comment like that? My nephew just committed suicide.”

Young shushed her and shook her hand, to which Poullard responded “You don’t tell me to shush.”

You just be quiet.

Shush.

Wow.

But UD – an extremely proud American – notes with delight that in both of these encounters the tinpot dictator’s efforts to shut up a world which disagrees with him elicited a fast firm fuck you. Brinkley, Poullard: Yes.

Jill Abramson has elected not to attend commencement ceremonies at Brandeis University, where she would’ve received an honorary degree this weekend…

… Brandeis previously canceled plans to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s rights activist who frequently criticized Islam.

Dear me. Between various cancellations and regrets, Brandeis seems headed for an all-male commencement.