Like the guys in The Hangover, Chicago State University and the University of Louisville wake up every morning amid mysterious and elaborate wreckage.

In the case of Chicago State it doesn’t help that the state of Illinois is currently without a budget; but over the last decade or so Chicago State has fucked itself up royally with no help from things like budget standoffs. One of the nation’s great drop-out factories, Chicago State goes way past corrupt to inexplicably self-destructive. It can always be found spending heavily on whistle blower cases it always loses. In order to spend even more, it’s pressing its latest losing case up to the state Supreme Court. All of this while handing out potential layoff notices to everyone on campus.

At Louisville, some members of the board of trustees are finally organizing to give that school’s grotesque president the heave-ho. The president’s fellow good old boys on the board are launching some hilarious attacks on these critics.

[Bob] Hughes alleged that the dissident trustees are elitists who didn’t go to U of L and wouldn’t send their children there, and that they are trying to replace Ramsey with someone who is related to one of the trustees.

The intellectual elite! At a university! And they won’t send their kids to one of America’s most depraved universities!

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UD thanks Wendy.

Scummy for-profit universities are by now a notorious national scandal; Paul Campos reminds us that that you can get the same thing in a law school:

[S]chools accredited by the American Bar Association admit large numbers of severely underqualified students; these students in turn take out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans annually, much of which they will never be able to repay. Eventually, federal taxpayers will be stuck with the tab, even as the schools themselves continue to reap enormous profits.

It’s the very same scheme as the college scheme we’ve followed on this blog for years.

Campos features an amazing story that could have come out of North Korea (or, even worse, Chicago State University). The worse a university (the worse a country), the more repressive it is, particularly about threats to its propaganda machine. A candidate for dean at arguably America’s worst law school (one of the for-profits) not long ago tried to give a truth-telling presentation to its faculty. As the candidate spoke about the school’s astonishingly, cynically, low admissions standards, the school’s president stood up and told him to stop immediately, to leave the room, and if he didn’t leave, the president would call security.

The life of mind’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it? America can be proud of its ABA approved law schools and their commitment to the robust exchange of ideas…

I mean, to be sure, if fellow travelers, fair weather friends, and enemies of the state happen to appear among us, it is not only our right but our duty to rise up as one and eliminate them from our midst…

Low-ranking not for profit law schools, Campos points out, are pretty much just as brazen in their sordid profit-taking.

A glance at New England Law’s tax forms suggests who may have benefited most from this trajectory: John F. O’Brien, the school’s dean for the past 26 years, whom the school paid more than $873,000 in its 2012 fiscal year, the most recent yet disclosed. This is among the largest salaries of any law-school dean in the country. (By comparison, the dean at the University of Michigan Law School, a perennial top-10 institution, was reported to make less than half as much, $420,000, in 2013.)… Richard A. Matasar, a former dean of New York Law School, was, until his resignation in 2011, quoted regularly in the national press about the need to reform the structure of legal education, even as he collected more than half a million dollars a year from a school with employment statistics nearly as poor as those of [for-profit law schools].

The sport of competitive plagiarizing is upon us, in which people accused of plagiarism use the same software their accusers used, in order to demonstrate that everybody plagiarizes. In fact, some people plagiarize more than the accused do, so why are the accused being singled out?

How many of these objects of plagiarism claims, though, can lay claim to the title of provost? Your chief academic officer may herself be a plagiarist?

This must be Chicago State University, corrupt dropout factory extraordinaire. (Background here.)

So the provost is suing the school that passed and is now investigating her degree (privacy issues), which for CSU means another embarrassing high-profile lawsuit to go with the free speech one FIRE just filed against the school, and the just-concluded one in which a judge made CSU pay a whopping three million dollars to a campus whistle blower against whom the institution retaliated.

I’m sure the taxpayers of Illinois, who pay for this school (I don’t think it has any students anymore… maybe a few…?), take comfort in the fact that the money they’re paying for the provost’s salary is going to someone who apparently plagiarized less than some of her classmates.

The coach of a Chicago public high school whose basketball team won and then forfeited the city championship asks, reasonably enough, why his particular school should have to take the fall for the failure of the entire Chicago public school system to keep player eligibility records.

[T]he school district is missing most of the paperwork required to show team and player eligibility, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show. The district ignored initial requests for the data and later released it.

UD‘s favorite part of this story is the location chosen for the championship game: Chicago State University (scroll down).

Talk about a cosmic convergence!

… Chicago State University, bankrolled almost exclusively by taxpayers (it has vanishingly few students, and is losing them at a rate of about 20% a year, so it’s certainly not getting much in tuition), stands out. I guess it stands out because it’s a university, and most of us continue to assume that universities have more dignity or whatever than other public institutions.

It may be because of this moral/emotional over-investment of ours that a Chicago judge and jury have recently come down so very hard on outrageously corrupt and inept CSU. As Jodi Cohen reports, having found in favor of a whistle blower –

[James Crowley was] awarded $2 million in punitive damages and $480,000 in back pay after a jury decided last month that he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by university president Wayne Watson and other top officials.

– the judge has now decided to increase Crowley’s award.

Circuit Court Judge James McCarthy decided to double Crowley’s back pay, as allowed under state law. Crowley had been earning $120,000 a year when he was fired. McCarthy also Tuesday ordered Chicago State to pay $60,000 in interest on the back pay. That brings the total payout to just more than $3 million.

The judge will rule following a hearing set for May on whether Chicago State should also pay Crowley’s attorney’s fees, and on terms of reemployment.

“It is quite clear from the verdict that Mr. Crowley is to be given his employment back,” the judge said.

The term slam dunk comes to mind. The sentence Someone is really really pissed. comes to mind.

Yet why (as UD has asked more than once before on this blog) does CSU exist? Why has it not been folded into another university? Why has it not been shut down? CSU is as much of a scandalous tax syphon as any for-profit school-for-scandal.

You become a paranoid police state.

Chicago State University – graduation rate barely above ten percent – has just issued an email to its faculty:

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.”

Shades of North Korea.

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Update: Chicago State decides it doesn’t want to be North Korea.

University Diaries has already written about the outrageously mismanaged Chicago State University, with its thieving presidents and desperate faculty and students.

Really desperate faculty. They recently begged the governor to fire the school’s entire board of trustees, in order to stop the trustees from appointing another putrid president. The governor ignored them.

But whatever else might be wrong with the new guy, he did do some auditing.

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He found out that a local politician has run off with one of CSU’s statues.

Officials from Chicago State University stopped just short of accusing State Representative Monique Davis of statue theft.

Davis, who recently made headlines because she allegedly owes $500,000 in back rent to the Chicago Board of Education, has in her possession a $25,000 statue of an African slave that belongs to Chicago State University.

And she’s refusing to give back the artwork, the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed reports.

Chicago State University Police Chief Ronnie Watson tried to collect the 400-pound bronze entitled “Defiance,” but, perhaps poetically, Davis refused to relinquish the rendering of a slave girl in shackles with whip marks on her back.

… CSU originally purchased the statue to adorn its financial aid center. They used state funds that were set aside for the school.

But that doesn’t explain how Davis ended up with the bronze. She can’t explain it either, or, rather, she declined to explain it to Sneed.

… Newly installed president Wayne Watson, who is trying to revamp the school’s management procedures, uncovered the missing statue during a financial audit.

As far as UD can make out from reading a variety of accounts of this matter, Davis simply loves the statue. She loves it madly. She loves to look at it in her office. She has bonded with it and feels it belongs to her.

A plaything of hacks, Chicago State University has apparently been kicked around one too many times for its long-suffering faculty.  They’ve only just evicted President Elnora Daniel – a party girl with a penchant for long, university-subsidized Caribbean cruises – and now the school’s hopeless board of trustees wants to unload another hack on them.

It’s not every day that a faculty pulls itself together to ask the governor to remove its entire board of trustees, and to halt the appointment of its next president, but that’s what CSU’s professors have done.

Chicago State University faculty took the unusual step Tuesday of asking Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the university’s board of trustees.

The unanimous request from the Faculty Senate, which comes days before trustees plan to announce their decision on the next university leader, also asks Quinn to stop the board from hiring a president.

Chicago State faculty and students have argued they were excluded from the presidential search process and have criticized the two finalists as local political insiders. On Friday, 13 of the 15 members of the campus’ search advisory committee resigned in protest.

The finalists are Carol Adams, secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Wayne Watson, the retiring chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.

[From earlier news coverage: “Donald Pettis, president of Chicago State’s alumni association and an advisory committee member, said that only one of the 14 committee members voted for Adams. None voted for Watson…”]

Rev. Leon Finney, the Chicago State board chairman, did not respond to a request for comment…

Yeah, why comment. Really, why bother. Who cares.

Let’s start with delight: One of UD‘s heroes, Steven Pinker, has started a defense of free speech group among faculty there. Everyone’s got an eye on Stanford and Oberlin and multiple other stagers of politically coercive campus melodrama, and all self-respecting centers of free inquiry need to take an explicit stand against these enemies of freedom. UD’s beloved University of Chicago is a pioneer here; Harvard and other schools follow UC in strong unmitigated statements, rules, and organizations deployed to resist right and left ideologues – some of whom, grotesquely, were hired by these same universities – who are always trying to shut/shout down free thought and free expression. Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom (which includes econ prof Jason Furman, whose Cambridge house UD knows well, because for years it was owned by her buddy Peter Galbraith) rightly anticipates, and readies itself to fight, mindless and destructive fanaticism.

On the disgust front, there’s yet another greedy egomaniac who can’t think of anything to do with three hundred million dollars other than give it to an institution worth significantly more than fifty billion dollars in order to get his name on a building and get some tax benefits. Vomit.

Not to mention.

Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.

Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…

This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:

We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.

Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.

Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.

It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.

Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.

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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.

“Shamima Begum should not be banished – banishing people belongs in the dark ages, not 21st-century Britain,” complains a person who thinks keeping Begum – a veteran ISIS member – out of England is a bad idea. But the British courts have now ruled unanimously that she can’t come back; she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, they point out, and should go and claim it. That ain’t banishment.

And anyway – England’s full of sharia law councils, and their decisions are way dark ages — at least for women! The more power England gives sharia courts, the darker the ages right in your own home town, hon. So no lecturing us about 21st-century Britain. To be sure, we ain’t in the ninth century – the century in which Begum opted to live – but, as the Council of Europe notes, we’re definitely backsliding.

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UPDATE: And here’s how not to argue that Begum belongs back in England. Let’s take a close look at Aina Khan’s argument.

Headline: Shamima Begum is a product of Britain. She should face justice here.

What’s the logic of this? In an ecstasy of violence Begum repudiated England and joined the Islamic State. Just because the origins she rejected were British, she has to be tried in Britain? No. No reasonable trial can in any case be conducted, since no records exist of her activities in ISIS territory.

She’s a victim of child grooming by a death cult. And her banishment tells all ethnic minorities that they’re not seen as fully British.

Who says? Pure speculation, the bit about grooming. I mean, so she was a teenager. That doesn’t mean she was, in Khan’s word, “naive.” Richard Loeb was 18 when he murdered Bobby Franks. He wasn’t treated like a naive victim of grooming. The bit about her fate sealing the dire fate of all ethnic minorities in famously tolerant Britain is just bullshit. Fear mongering.

Khan says the public was “dismayed” when in an interview Begum boasted of feeling nothing when she saw severed heads. Let’s look at some sentences from the Cambridge Dictionary which use the word dismay.

She discovered, to her dismay, that she had locked her keys inside her car.

They enjoyed the meal but were dismayed by how much it cost.

She discovered, to her dismay, that her exam was a whole month earlier than she’d expected.

We discovered, to our dismay, that the ISIS member was fine with severed heads.

Last one doesn’t quite work, does it? Not quite strong enough.

[W]e need to know why a straight-A teenager from east London would willingly leave Britain to embrace a death cult.

Richard Loeb was a brilliant, straight-A teenager at the University of Chicago. Like straight-A Shamima, he felt great curiosity about/attraction to sadistically killing people. Smart doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, does it? Is it possible Aina Khan doesn’t know this? Is it also possible she’s unaware of the contradiction involved in arguing that Begum was super-smart and au même moment so sub-basement stupid as to find an ISIS come-on irresistibly seductive? Weawy?

The rest of her opinion piece is more insistence that the Begum precedent means that if Khan, as a minority, jaywalks, she could be sent back to the country where her grandparents were born. Gevalt.

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It gets worse. At least Khan bothers arguing her case. This dude doesn’t even try. Way to come across like a scolding, arrogant, elitist.

This was, you recall, Mike Royko’s famous proposed motto (Where’s Mine?) for the incredibly corrupt city of Chicago; it now clearly stands for the tragic city of Baltimore, whose already-hapless mayor has revealed not only her personal corruption, but – along the way – the corruption of the University of Maryland medical system board of trustees.

Tragicomic, really, since the latest confirmation of the link between urban collapse and systemic corruption comes from sales – make that non-sales – of children’s books the mayor wrote (maybe – maybe someone else wrote them for her), self-published, and then sold in bulk for permanent storage in a warehouse to the same UM med system on whose board of trustees she sat.

Nothing unusual about that arrangement, though — huge numbers of trustees were self-dealing through the hospital system. The head of the UMMS board of trustees is doing mucho harrumphing about “managed conflicts,” but the phrase managed conflict has about the same persuasiveness as the phrase managed massage in the mouth of Robert Kraft.

I mean, it’s better than the cake. The developing story of the latest fake hate assault has much more drama than the mere addition of some anti-gay icing.  Yet it’s the same contemptible attention- and money-seeking behavior (the cake guy sued Whole Foods; once WF proved he homophobed himself, it countersued), and UD has learned over the course of this blog that the business of staging things is sickeningly common. And of course incredibly destructive to efforts to take seriously actual hate crimes.

All the way back in 2004, UD covered the Professor Kerri Dunn business, when she spray-painted her car with swastikas etc. and everyone at Claremont McKenna rallied on her behalf and worried about incipient fascism until the guys who happened to be taking a walk nearby at the time she did it told the police about watching her paint her car. An education professor at Columbia University, under threat of dismissal for plagiarism (of her students!) hung a noose on her office door and claimed to be the victim of a hate crime. A conservative student at Princeton wrote himself some really nasty, anti-conservative letters and enjoyed right-wing martyrdom until he had to admit the truth…. Croyez-moi, I could go on! And on!

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UPDATE: Now this I really don’t get. Washington Post, headline:

I DOUBTED JUSSIE SMOLLET. IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT I MIGHT BE RIGHT

Heartbreak is ridiculous. Anger’s the ticket. The Post editor continues:

I tried telling myself that it is possible that two assailants were walking around downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in January in 10-degree weather, waiting for a black victim. In addition to that, they were stalking around with a bottle of bleach and a rope. And ultimately, the prey they selected was an actor on a show that they must’ve been somewhat familiar with, because they were able to not only name the show but also know that he played a gay character. Never mind the fact that he was likely bundled up because again: Chicago, January, 10 degrees. Also, after he fought to get away, he left the rope around his neck until he got to the hospital.

This ain’t doubt; it’s close to certain knowledge he was bullshitting. And he wasn’t new to bullshitting. Mature political actors – people like newspaper editors – don’t go into denial when people do bad, illegal, and destructive things; nor do they enter into heartbreak when what seemed obviously the case turns out to have been the case. When weirdly flagrant and flagrantly weird events occur, serious people respond with skepticism.

This is more like it:

Commentator Kmele Foster put it this way on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday: “Two in the morning, almost the coldest night of the year, you were attacked and someone conveniently had a rope? My heart goes out to anyone who gets attacked, but it’s totally appropriate to exercise a bit of skepticism and to exercise a bit of patience in waiting for the facts to develop around this story.”

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As for the legal implications:

Attorney and CBS2/KCAL9 Legal Analyst Steve Meister says every state penalizes fabricating a crime and the trouble this case has caused is serious.

“That’s felony conduct because you caused a lot of people a lot of problems and you cost the city a lot of money and you took time away from what cops could have been doing to solve real crimes.” Meister says.

He says every state’s laws vary as do the penalties. In California a felony conviction for lying to a police officer is punishable by up to three years in prison.

UPDATE:

This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

… among faculty and staff. At our most career-criminal schools, like the University of Louisville, the theft starts at the top (UL is currently trying to use the courts to claw back a few of the millions their last president apparently swiped) and moves briskly and efficiently through various heads of programs (who can forget Dean Felner?) and also into – no kidding – athletics.

UD has learned over the blogging years that the less legitimacy – hell, the less reality – something calling itself a university has, the more the random people hanging around this random place will steal. Schools with a graduation rate approaching zero percent – for instance, Southern University, with its beloved, larcenous band leader – and schools approaching zero enrollment, like Chicago State University, will be the national theft standouts.

Obviously, as the school tanks, very few conscientious people will want to have anything to do with trying to run it. You end up hiring rogues, hastening the process of decline.