… (as UD has always called it) has disappeared as a university (few students attend; almost no one graduates) but continues to thrive as a taxpayer-sponsored kleptomania/litigation machine. Corruption, virtually the only game on campus (uh, plus basketball), must be kept quiet in order to sustain itself, so the school’s constantly suing or threatening to sue students, professors, and administrators who tell the truth about what’s going on. CSU loses the suits, of course, and has to pay (the good people of Illinois have to pay) big settlement and legal costs.
Here’s the latest payout, the result of the school suing two faculty bloggers who did not conform, wrote CSU, to the “high standards of civility and professionalism [that] are central tenants [sic] of the University’s values.”
And now they have another new athletic director! One of thousands!
Among [the new AD’s] first to-do items will be hiring men’s and women’s basketball coaches. The women’s program, coached by Angela Jackson for 15 seasons, lost a Division I-record 59 games in a row over the last three seasons before ending the streak in February. The men’s program let go of [its last coach] after the Cougars went 3-29 in his eighth season.
How do they even field teams?
Why does a school that’s so bad it’s practically non-existent have an athletics program?
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Ask the taxpayers of Illinois. Maybe they can tell you why they’re paying for this guy.
In August 2012, [Chris] Zorich agreed in court to pay back more than $300,000 in unaccounted [charitable foundation] funds. In July 2013, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for failing to file federal income tax returns from 2006 to ’09.
Stealing from Chicago State is certainly a tradition among quite a few of the people who work or have worked there. I guess Chicago State, and the taxpayers, appreciate traditions.
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Or ask a philosopher. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…
It’s beyond comic. It’s beyond tragic. It’s beyond tragicomic. At this point, Chicago State University’s den of thieves – a bunch of people educating virtually no one, all at Illinois taxpayer expense – is simply a national disgrace.
And as yet another high-ranking CSU administrator – this time the dean of the school of pharmacy – is accused of the theft of money (in her case, money intended to help minority pharmacists), those of us following this school (read my Chicago State University posts for background) have got to ask where the stewards of state taxpayer money are in all of this.
The Student National Pharmaceutical Association contends Carmita Coleman, Chicago State’s interim dean of the College of Pharmacy, siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization’s bank accounts for clothes, food and trips during five of the years she was executive director.
… [T]he alleged theft was discovered in late 2016 as the organization and Coleman were embroiled in a separate legal battle over the association’s leadership. [She refused to step down. Lucrative position, plus she must have known she’d get discovered if she lost the gig.]
Coleman was appointed executive director of the student association in 2006 and re-appointed four times, most recently in 2014.
National association leaders moved in late 2015 to appoint a new leader of the student group. Coleman, in response, tried to rewrite the bylaws to sever the two groups and allow the student organization to appoint its own director.
The national association in early 2016 went ahead with the appointment of a new director, Kimberly Lewis, a North Carolina-based pharmacist and professor. Coleman, however, refused to resign her position or turn over control of the association’s bank accounts, financial documents and other proprietary information, according to the federal lawsuit.
The national association sued Coleman in Cook County Circuit Court last May to try to oust her, records show. By October, according to the federal lawsuit, Coleman had agreed to step aside and transfer the bank accounts to Lewis in exchange for dismissing the state court litigation.
When Lewis came to Chicago to transfer two bank accounts to her name, the agent told her three other accounts for the student association recently had been closed, according to the lawsuit.
Lewis asked to see statements for the other accounts and found pending charges for a Carnival cruise …
Ladies and gentlemen of the great state of Illinois: I give you the dean of the school of pharmacy at CSU.
UD doesn’t know who the NYT thinks it’s helping – or hurting? – by running this bizarre hard-luck story about the CSU women’s basketball team. Barely a team, losing every game, attracting no audience, representing a school that – through every fault of its own successive corrupt leaderships – has destroyed itself, this group of players deserves our sympathy. Indeed, it deserves our outrage. But ultimately it deserves to be put out of its misery, along with the virtually empty institution that fails even minimally to prop it up. Almost no one attends, or graduates, from CSU. This scandalous drop-out factory continues to cost the taxpayers of Illinois serious money, most of which goes to on-campus fraudsters and off-campus lawyers.
CSU (here are UD‘s posts over many years about the place) is a little corner of North Korea in America. It cannot afford to keep the heat on. It’s a desperate deadbeat. It will not talk to the press, and it chills the free speech of its professors. Crazy North Korea launches missiles; crazy CSU launches football teams and marching bands (yes – it has plans to spend its no-money on these).
But let’s suit up!
The announced crowd at Jones Convocation Center, a first-rate arena, was 230, but the atmosphere was expectant. Players and coaches on both teams and a number of fans wore pink to promote breast cancer awareness. Allen, the Cougars’ best player, had been cleared to return after the effects of a concussion subsided.
Look at the photos that accompany the article to understand how inflated that 230 figure is. Ask yourself why the writers of this piece are trying to excite us with the expectant atmosphere, the breast-cancer awareness, and that gutsy post-concussion return.
There’s nobody home. There’s only some well-meaning Manhattanite at her breakfast table, trying to make sense of this theater of the absurd.
The NYT should be ashamed of itself, playing CSU for a scrappy up-and-comer in order to help keep a failed, expensive, and deeply destructive institution alive.
UD has said many times on these pages that corrupt, insane, and paranoid Chicago State University is America’s little North Korea on the Chicago Southside. Just as that country is an experiment in whether secretive ignorant madmen can run a state, CSU is an experiment in whether a similar grouping can run a university.
The two places have another characteristic in common – when you visit either location, there don’t seem to be many human beings about. I guess everyone’s in prison in North Korea, whereas in the case of CSU virtually no one applies or enrolls, which is another innovative aspect of that university: Can you run a public institution of higher education with no students?
UD has, in these pages, answered that question with a resounding yes: You can run a university without students. If the taxpayers of Illinois don’t mind continuing to fund the operation, you can simply have administrators fussing about with this and that – is the air conditioning system working? etc. – and the trustees can continue to hold their Top Secret meetings (which would not in reality be held – only alluded to in speeches from the latest Dear Leader).
[L]ast week [CSU’s] board of trustees approved a separation agreement with Thomas J. Calhoun Jr., who had been named president of the university just nine months earlier.
“But why was he asked to leave?” asked furious students and faculty at Friday’s board meeting.
To which they received a reply that was like an insult.
“Everyone agreed it’s in the best interests of Dr. Calhoun and the university,” said CSU Board Chair Anthony Young.
What does that even mean?
It was The Unanimous Will of the People. By Total Enthusiastic Acclamation the People Decided it was in The Best Interests of the State for Dr. Calhoun to go. Dr. Calhoun Accepts his Fate with Humble Trembling Gratitude and has Begged to enter a State Reeducation Farm so that he can Confess his Deviationism and Learn from the People How he can Better Serve the State.
Chicago’s most scandalous university (see earlier posts about it by typing Chicago State University in my search engine) boasts a provost who allegedly plagiarized significant portions of her dissertation.
While he said it seems unlikely that [Angela Henderson] was “trying to pull a fast one,” the work shows that she does not have “a full and complete understanding of academic protocols and scholarly expectations.”
“That is a problem if that person is provost of a university,” [Daniel] Wueste said.
With its risible graduation rate (around 10%), its disappearing student body, its constantly shifting but always inept and crony-ridden administration, and its useless board of trustees, Chicago State boasts virtually every attribute of a truly terrible university. As its own faculty rebels, Chicago State’s paranoia grows out of control. The university’s spokesman, asked to comment about the plagiarism allegations, said “[W]e are talking about a series of claims made by some individuals who have shown they will go to great lengths to undermine any member of this administration in any way they can.”
Too right. The claims have been openly made by CSU faculty members who want legitimate people running the university. These faculty members are indeed trying to undermine the administration. It ought to be undermined.
… once again cracks the whip. You recall its directive to faculty last year:
In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”
The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.
Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”
And they meant it, baby. Chicago State has a 10% graduation rate, and much else besides, to protect; and now you’ve got some faculty undermining the peace-loving progressive masses of CSU by starting a blog!
A blog written by Chicago State University faculty members that has been critical of the school’s administration was sent a “cease and desist” notice by university lawyers …
[CSU] said the blog “violates the University’s values and policies requiring civility and professionalism of all University faculty members.”
Cage demanded that site administrators “immediately disable” the blog and provide written confirmation of that no later than Friday to “avoid legal action.”
UD trusts free speech advocates are all over this one. I’d say it’s an outrage, but everything about CSU is outrageous and it still syphons huge tax dollars from the poor citizens of Illinois. So it’s wasted breath.
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Scott Jaschik takes note.
For twenty years, the state of Illinois has been on the verge of doing something drastic about Chicago State University. Through seven million CSU presidents, fourteen million embezzlement scandals, twenty million expensive whistle blower lawsuits, and thirty-seven trillion misappropriations of taxpayer-provided funds, CSU has kept on keeping on. And now comes its most amazing accomplishment: The reduction of a university to a Samuel Beckett play.
Go to its campus and see the windy nothingness of Waiting for Godot. No one is there. Occasional buildings rot among the weeds.
Wait a few moments and onto the stage wander Vladimir and Estragon, two trustees who for the last decade have been sniping at each other about what’s best for the school. Listen in on their endless irritable exchange, an exercise in hilarious self-delusion about the Endgame their project has become.
Chicago State University poses the question: Can a university exist without students?
And the answer is: Actually, yes.
As long as the people of Illinois are willing to continue subsidizing a university run solely for the faculty and administration – ultimately of course run solely for the administration, because someone has to do the job of eliminating all of the faculty positions – there’s no reason why CSU can’t go on forever. Or at least for a very long time. The trick will be to eliminate faculty positions… very… slowly… In order to justify the continued existence of the administration. When you run out of faculty, simply hire more faculty – you need an administration to do that – and then gradually eliminate that faculty.
Rinse. Repeat.
This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:
Bernard Madoff
Theodore McCarrick
Bill Cosby
Lance Armstrong
Sepp Blatter
Donald Trump
Sheldon Silver
James Levine
Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).
But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?
What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.
And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!
It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.
Five months and one day after Jordan McNair collapsed at a Maryland football practice, D.J. Durkin, the head coach who oversaw the system whose failure led to the offensive lineman’s death, was reinstated to his job. That decision was made over the reported protests of university president Wallace Loh, who didn’t mention Durkin’s name at a Tuesday press conference and was told he’d be fired if he didn’t follow the regents’ recommendations…
[One of the football program’s trainers] allegedly used homophobic slurs and threw everything from food to weights to vomit at players, while other unnamed coaches forced them to watch graphic videos of “serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals.”
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Chicago Trib:
[For the University of Maryland,] being guided by the memory of a 19-year-old whose death was wholly and completely preventable means that the football coach who oversaw a program built on — among other things — demeaning players should be welcomed back. So here comes the inconceivable: DJ Durkin, back on the sidelines…
[T]he University of Maryland — in its entirety — is delusional…
“Greetings, mothers of prospective Maryland football players. Come in. Have a seat. Let me flip on this video of animals disemboweling each other, just to get you in the right frame of mind. Oh, sorry, is there puke in that trash can? Allow me to fling it across the room. That should do it. Would you like a candy bar? No? I insist. Seriously. Eat this &$%@#! candy bar!!!!!!!! Or else!!!!!!!!!”
… That DJ Durkin remains the football coach at the University of Maryland defies common sense and common decency. That Damon Evans remains his boss as the athletic director means Maryland has installed a leader who is defined more by his mistakes than his successes. And the entire university system has exposed itself.
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It’s all chaos, degradation, and continued danger, and the whole world is watching. Take a look at today’s Google News page for the University of Maryland.
A Forbes writer gets it right: Unless you’re Clemson and Baylor and Nebraska and the other total-football-and-nothing-else schools, you’re eventually going to find yourself deep in the same sort of shit Maryland’s in right now.
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The hot mess in all its glory.
Two things almost for sure:
1. Durkin will go.
2. This entire episode will end up costing the university at least ten million dollars, plus endless further costs arising from multiple lawsuits.
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Headline on this one: IN AN AGE OF REFORM, MARYLAND SAYS IT’S FINE WITH SLIME
President Loh …. advocated that Durkin be dismissed. Instead it’s the president who’s leaving. The coach, beggaring belief, gets to stay. Unknown is whether he can find anyone willing to play for him, now or ever again.
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The Maryland head football coach, who in the very best-case scenario, was so incompetent at overseeing a program that he allowed it to turn into one so toxic and so physically dangerous to players that it killed one, but who was so competent at instilling a culture of “fear” that players and subordinates were too afraid to speak up with their concerns, was reinstated on Tuesday, along with everyone else who bears responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death.
… As for why the board of regents appears so committed to Durkin, well, look no further than his contract. The coach is in the third year of a six-year contract that pays him about $2.5 million annually. If he were to be bought out, it would cost the school $5 million. If he were to be fired without cause, it would cost 65 percent of his remaining salary, or, again, about $5 million. If he were to be fired with cause, there would likely be an expensive and protracted legal battle. It is no wonder, that at just about every program, a football coach has more job security than a university president: He makes more money.
Maryland football does not turn a profit. It had run, for years, at a multi-million-dollar deficit, but believed that moving to the Big Ten would make it the money-printing machine it always believed it could be. But so far, by all reports, it’s barely breaking even, and has committed to years of serious expenses paying off its fancy new football facilities. The board of regents appears to believe the program cannot afford to take the hit of paying off Durkin to leave, and the likely accompanying loss in donations from insane boosters, on top of the inevitable lawsuit from McNair’s family. The regents announced yesterday, in so many words, that doing the right thing would cost too much money.
… 25-year-old Shane Colombo, a native of Sun City, California, was in the 7600 block of North Clark Street in the Rogers Park neighborhood at about 8:25 p.m. Sunday when he was caught in crossfire between two people, Chicago police said. A statement from the university said Colombo was waiting at a bus stop.
Colombo was struck in his abdomen and was taken to Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston, where was pronounced dead at 9:02 p.m., police said.
… Colombo was planning to join Northwestern’s psychology Ph.D. program as an incoming student this fall, according to a statement from university officials. He received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and was in the process of moving to Chicago from New York, where he was a researcher at Columbia University’s Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.
… news that UM’s football team is boycotting the rest of its season (the little that’s left) unless ten suspended players are unsuspended, and unless it gets an apology from the school’s president for having suspended the players in the first place, ol’ UD‘s been pondering this one.
This is a new one on her. A university football team, en masse, refuses to play or practice, goes on strike, puts a jock school’s big-money super-ticket on ice. All at once a hundred and twenty glutes hamstrings and quadriceps enter the inactive list.
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The announcement made for a spectacular visual. With trembling hands a wide receiver read from a sheet of paper, while behind him loomed suited-up troops.
The next day the university’s president issued a vaguely conciliatory statement, and today (Saturday) he has issued another, less conciliatory, statement. Here’s what he’s trying to convey to the lads.
Even though the courts decided there was insufficient evidence to go after a bunch of players who seem to have been involved in a gang sexual assault against a student, the university can do its own punitive thing. The team’s thing is that the guys are unjustly condemned since the courts turned down the case; the school’s thing is fuck that this place has had a shitload of sex problems from players as well as coaches in the last couple of years and we can’t afford to look as though we’re doing nothing.
I mean the school doesn’t say that; it doesn’t say that a random half-attentive blogger like UD can scroll through her University of Minnesota posts and be astounded by the number of sex scandals its sports teams have generated lately, but c’est entendu. It’s like Baylor or Penn State – do you really think this nation’s galloping-fucktard campuses are going to let the next run of rapes slide? We’ve got a critical mass problem here. We’ve got a money problem here. You know how much clean-up costs? The latest estimate for rapeabilly rapscallion Baylor is $223 million. (UD thanks JND for the link.)
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So. A few more comments on this story if I may.
The team’s gotta be counting on a groundswell of support from students, alumni, the local community. They might not want to hold their breath. Fuck Fatigue has set in, UD suspects, as well as General Gross-out. Whatever else you want to say about the incredibly detailed university report on the events of that night, it for sure makes for nauseating reading. It even features a high school student, a person the team’s trying to recruit. One of his possibly future teammates is quoted saying “it was good the recruit was having sex because that might make him more likely to come to the university.”
Shades of the University of Louisville, our first official house-of-prostitution university.
Another reason we probably shouldn’t expect much support: There isn’t even that much interest in the game. After having built an insanely expensive new stadium because that would bring in huge numbers of fans, UM has watched the stadium steadily empty of spectators even as UM has got a huge debt to pay back on the place.
Datz right – tanking football game attendance is a national trend. But add to that the peculiarly off-putting business of rooting for a sorta scummy team and you’re talking rows of dead bleachers.
So the team isn’t playing and the students aren’t watching – a quintessentially postmodern moment here, no? Simulacrum City. Animatronic fans and billion-dollar gifts from trustee venture capitalists are going to have to keep the show going.
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UPDATE: That was quick. Boycott over.
UD‘s gotta figure that the guys had a chance to read the university’s report on the incident. I ain’t kidding when I say it’s stomach-churning. Maybe you don’t want to put yourself on the line for the people featured in the report.
UD admires the team’s solidarity in defense of their teammates. But anyone making their way through the eighty sickening pages describing what these guys actually seem to have done will conclude they’re not worth fighting for.
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It’s all over but the satires.
At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”
[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.
Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.
Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.
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What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.
But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.
It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…
But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.
Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.
Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.
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Some like it hot.
Hot and bloody.
It’s the Baylor way.
This blog has followed the ever-tanking fortunes of dropout factory Chicago State University forever. So scandalous is this joint that its faculty have begged for the entire board of trustees to be dumped.
Faculty members have also started a great blog, Crony State University, where the endless degradations of life under a North Korean style dictatorship are chronicled.
One of many similarities between CSU and the DPRK is their shared belief that their university/country is the best in the universe, that life there is glorious, that other universities/countries look enviously upon their magnificence and seek to emulate them, etc.
This attitude makes the troubling persistence of internal dissidents an unendurable insult to the Mothercampus. The dissidents (as one of the CSU blog writers – attempting to respond rationally to the charge of sullying – notes in my headline) must be publicly shamed. They cannot be allowed to continue making slanderous statements such as this:
[B]y the end of [CSU’s latest] disastrous presidency in 2016, the school’s enrollment should decline to around 4,000. Obviously, the question of how long the state will allow Chicago State to exist as it hemorrhages students is one that all of us should consider.
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Today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed (UD thanks a reader for forwarding this) (oh, and you need to have a subscription to read the article in full) takes note of the the latest hilarity at CSU: The trustees have closed the faculty senate.
That’s it. Out of business. Shut the fuck up forever.
Onward, brilliant peace-loving masses of CSU!
