The first time an SEC school’s fan base violates the [don’t-rush-the-field] rule, the institution will now face a $50,000 fine, which is 10 times more than the previous penalty. The second offense carries a $100,000 fine, and any subsequent offense will result in a $250,000 fine.

[The University of South Carolina] already has two offenses …

“So if it happens again, we would be subject to that third offense which is $250,000,” Jeff Davis, Associate Athletics Director for Operations and Facilities… “So that would come out of operating funds, and would be a huge blow.”

A local newspaper does an end of the year tip of the hat to one-hell-of-a-mess South Carolina State University. Although basically bankrupt – financially, intellectually, and certainly morally – it continues to spend money it doesn’t have on athletics.

I mean, SCSU has no money at all. It’s tens of millions of dollars in debt. It’s on probation. Its board chairman’s on his way to jail, and its chief counsel just got six months’ probation. The state’s going to give it some bail-out money, but it won’t be enough, and students are fleeing in droves.

But the games must go on.

I hope most of us can agree that these two outcomes would be less than optimal.

Yet the hard-headed report just issued by the Education Trust suggests that we’re certainly headed there. Fancy schmancy schools don’t take in enough Pell Grant people and risk becoming gilded ghettos. Why should the American taxpayer subsidize that? Trailer park techs take in little besides poor people, many of whom never graduate. The students default on their big government grants. Why should we subsidize that?

So, reasonably enough, the authors of this report argue that if after a certain number of years a university can’t graduate anyone, or a university graduates only the sort of people who need little help from us to pay for their education, we should withdraw tax support from those places.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few moments. Ne quittez pas.

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Hokay. Here’s the deal. It’s a great report – clearly written, tough-minded. The authors are correct that – since accreditation agencies won’t do their bit and shut down drop-out factories like Texas Southern University, a school the Education Trust report features – the federal government needs to shut them down via refusal of tax subsidies. Certainly the free market is doing its bit – enrollment at schools like Texas Southern is tanking – but, hard as this is to believe, it’s true that Texas Southern University and the many schools like it will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe. They will continue to function with only faculty, administrators, and football players. They will mutter vaguely about online programs or something.

And why will they continue to exist?

Look no further than Garnet F. Coleman. There’s a Garnet in every crowd, the local pol who believes in the “strong status of our proud institution, Texas Southern University” and makes sure hapless taxpayers keep throwing their money down a hole. Garnet thinks it’s fine that TSU is incredibly ineptly (and sometimes corruptly) run; fine that its athletic program (why does a school like this have athletics at all?) is deeply in debt, blahblahblah… Because TSU does so much good by failing to graduate students whom it burdens with lifelong debt…

In one of its more shameful editorial decisions, the New York Times two years ago agreed to play along with this madness. Sent a reporter down there who, without comment, quoted TSU’s president saying this:

He said his administration is taking a more hands-on, student-centric approach that should improve academic achievement, which he said had not previously received sufficient attention. Despite what the graduation rates suggest, Mr. Rudley said the campus is in the midst of a renaissance.

The reporter also gushed about new campus buildings, better maintenance of public spaces, etc. Yes, a renaissance was happening right now.

Or in a minute or two. Be patient, be patient.

The Education Trust people now introduce the startling proposal that we no longer wait, that we acknowledge the wasteful scandal of schools like TSU and shut them down.

Texas Southern University … fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

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Then there’s the other end of the problem: Rich kid schools.

Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, in 2011 fell in the bottom 5 percent of all colleges in its enrollment of low-income students: 10 percent. Yet equally selective institutions like Amherst College and Vassar College enrolled more than twice as many low-income students, 23 and 27 percent respectively. We see the same variation in the public sector. The University of Virginia, which ranks in the bottom 5 percent on service to low-income students, enrolled only 13 percent Pell students in 2011, whereas the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Binghamton enrolled 20 and 26 percent Pell students…

And here’s a fascinating mystery:

There are high-achieving, low-income students whose academic credentials place them well within the band of elite colleges’ current admission standards but who for a variety of reasons do not apply to or enroll in these selective institutions. Nearly two-thirds of low-income students with high grades and SAT scores do not attend the most selective institutions for which they are qualified, compared with just over one-quarter of high-income students with similar academic credentials.

Counterintuitive, huh? You’re a genius from Missoula but you don’t go to Harvard, which is desperate for you. Why not?

Well, begin by reading this essay by Walter Kirn, a kid from Minnesota who accepted an offer of admission from Princeton. Although UD has difficulty believing the story Kirn tells about being kidnapped by a castle-dweller, she finds the rest of his account of being middle-class at Princeton credible. Not only were these four years of social hell – of being made to feel poor and outcast – they were intellectual hell as well, as Kirn tells it.

We laughed at the notion of “authorial intention” and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend — or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

Or, as its originator put it, There’s no there there.

How do you make a university disappear?

In the age of the simulacrum, there are many ways.

There’s the process this blog has long called Online Makeover. You phone it in. You put it all online. You go the University of Phoenix route. Plenty of respectable universities are well on their way to this form of disappearance. Their professors outsource their grading to a drudge in India. They outsource the actual running – call it teaching – of the course to for-profit vendors under contract to their university. Vendor-provided “facilitators” do everything, and professors do nothing; they merely clock in to their online course occasionally to satisfy their supervisor that they’re doing something … For, as the language of an AAUP draft report on online changes notes:

Online teaching platforms and learning management systems may permit faculty members to learn whether students in a class did their work and how long they spent on certain assignments. Conversely, however, a college or university administration could use these systems to determine whether faculty members were logging into the service “enough,” spending “adequate” time on certain activities, and the like.

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And speaking of professors as supervised clockers-in, reason number two for the disappearance of the postmodern American university can be understood by considering what’s going on lately at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: mandated spot inspections of classes.

To prove the legitimacy of classes, administrators have fanned out to hundreds of classrooms to verify that students and professors are present. Some departments even discussed bringing in photographers to document classes, according to one professor, Lew Margolis, a faculty member in public health.

As the real university ceases to exist (in UNC’s case, under the weight of hundreds of no there there courses for athletes and assorted others), professors must do their bit to persuade accrediting agencies their university does actually exist…

We DO believe in UNC! We DO we DO we DO we DO!

See, here’s what they’re up against:

[One University of North Carolina student took a class] in the fall of 2005 on Southern Africa that never met. He was a Florida native and undergraduate student paying out-of-state tuition at the time. He wrote the university seeking a tuition credit to make up for the education he did not receive.

[Julius] Nyang’oro was the professor…

“I visited (Nyang’oro) once, when he approved my topic and told me we would not have any scheduled meetings or talks, only that I could contact him if I had a problem,” Ferguson wrote.

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Universities aren’t universities because they can show that they have coaches; they’re universities because they can show that they have professors. Thus professors, at the postmodern American university, become – symbolically – the most important group on campus, routinely wheeled out to show the world that their university exists. While contract facilitators gradually take over the teaching, it will be the postmodern professor’s job to pace the campus pensively, ideally wearing an academic gown, as the professors at the College on the Hill, the central location in Don DeLillo’s iconic postmodern American novel White Noise do.

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Even when the postmodern American classroom exists, it may not really be anywhere in any meaningful sense. I’m talking about professors who do meet their students, human being to human being, but then instantly turn out the classroom lights, fire up the PowerPoint, put their heads down, and read out loud, while their students gaze at sports and porn on their laptops, play on their smart phones, or take advantage of the setting to get much-needed sleep.

The sleep thing goes to a third significant way in which universities disappear: They go from party schools to party businesses.
A professor at simulacral University of West Virginia explains the shift:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

There have always been party schools; the new thing, the thing that makes the party school go from partying to disappeared, is the university as party business, the recruitment and retention of students largely as a function of the provision of alcohol. Places like the University of Iowa, which are basically already distilleries, have had to weather a little dissent from students and faculty, but you can’t argue with the revenues, and UI is clearly recruiting students big-time on the basis of its alcoholic rep. So the synergy here is hung over students plus PowerPointing professors… At the distilleries, there’s really no reason to hold any non-virtual class. These schools will go, or are going, online. The one surviving form of human to human contact at these schools will take place in their stadiums.

Well, the local media’s got hold of the Charles Bennett story, and people in South Carolina think it’s a bit odd that after Bennett was booted out of Northwestern University for stealing grant funds (background here), the University of South Carolina turned around and picked him right up, giving him an endowed chair and a salary of close to $300,000. Crime pays.

USC’s spokesman came out with the brilliant response I quote in my title. The school can’t comment on any phenomenon that doesn’t involve USC. The allegations are a matter of public record, everyone’s commenting on them, but USC has a policy of not commenting on anything in the world that happens that doesn’t involve USC.

I guess the principle extends to hiring at USC too — since whatever Bennett did in Chicago doesn’t involve USC, he’s in. When Bennett steals USC grant money, then USC will review his position… Because then it will involve USC…

The University of Hawaii has it all; and its last president just gave up – years before her contract’s end – in the face of it. Now UH’s clueless trustees will spend months and lots of money trying to come up with an interim president and then a (cough) non-interim one…

A common theme at Thursday’s meeting was that the university needs to return its attention to students.

Now there’s an idea!

One trustee pointed to “abysmal graduation rates.” Enrollment’s declining on virtually all campuses. Over the last eleven years, tuition has gone up 141%. Much of the money seems to have gone to administrators.

Regent Jeffrey Acido, the board’s sole student member, also stressed that the university lacks a culture in which students feel committed to the school and its mission.

Now a Ph.D. student in his 10th year at UH, Acido said that he’s regularly had professors tell him to leave the university because of Hawaii’s dismal job prospects or because he has greater academic opportunities elsewhere.

“It kind of hurts because I believe in this institution, but (the university needs) to cultivate a culture in which you breed amazing students with faculty that encourage you to stay and not leave,” he said.

He recalled visiting campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley or Harvard, campuses at which he felt that “culture of commitment.”

“But I don’t stand toe to toe with them,” he said. “That culture has to expand. That culture has to multiply.”

It’s odd that Acido has been hanging around UH for ten years; but put that aside. He has detected the problem, the fundamental cause of all the UH embarrassments UD has chronicled on this blog. (Put Hawaii in my search engine for details.) But what he’s calling for – a setting of intellectual seriousness – is unlikely to emerge at UH. Hawaii’s one of those states – like Nevada, Montana, and South Carolina – with a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and corruption. To make matters worse for Hawaii, it is, like Alaska (another state with terrible universities), much too far from the mainland for any of us to pay attention or care. Hawaii is doomed – university-wise – and would therefore do best to appoint a total insider its next president. Someone who will leave it alone to continue stewing in its own juices.

One wild and crazy state.

… South Carolina State University continues to boast of its association with Phillip Adams, severe CTE-sufferer and mass murderer. The school wants everyone to know that he got his first pummelings on their campus – pummelings that would, in the fullness of time, turn Adams into a psychotic killer. Awwww.

But university football does so much more than shred young brains. It typically generates endless fulminating corruption/lawsuits, and just as typically eats up much of a university’s revenue. At the University of Miami, which, to be fair, is a sewer of both football and non-football corruption, they’ve just impoverished the faculty to give an eighty million dollar contract to a football coach.

True, when you’re on trial for having used your position as chair of a university’s board of trustees to steal large sums of money, getting the word out on what a great guy you are is going to be difficult.

I think I’m paraphrasing Jonathan Pinson’s defense attorney correctly…

He’s off to prison for five years; but South Carolina State University, one of America’s most pointless and corrupt dropout factories, keeps grinding on.

From a letter to the editor of a South Carolina newspaper. The subject: Events at South Carolina State University.

[SCSU President Thomas] Elzey has made two incredulous declarations to all viewing from near and afar: “SCSU will not close, and I will not resign.” Though he emphatically states these, he has control of neither.

The writer means incredible. Elzey has made statements that we cannot believe. Things are incredible – experiences, statements.

Incredulous refers to the human condition or feeling of not being able to believe something. I am incredulous when I hear Elzey say incredible things.

Had Elzey said I cannot believe what is happening to me! Everyone thinks I should resign! – then he would have been declaring his incredulity.

Local commentary on verge-of-extinction South Carolina State University.

Like the ability to hear when you’re close to death, football, at the dying university, is the last thing to go.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm is a mad fan of super hyper dainty language brought to bear upon the raucously vulgar. It maketh her laugh.

Columbia [South Carolina’s] mayor has broken his silence about a business partner convicted this week on felony racketeering charges.

Mayor Steve Benjamin said he regrets going on a trip that included a visit to a Florida strip club with Jonathan Pinson, a former South Carolina State University trustee…

The mayor’s name came up frequently in Pinson’s trial, even though he was never charged. Some of the most salacious accusations came from a developer who testified that he took Benjamin and Pinson to Florida, where they visited a strip club.

“I regret being present for certain aspects of the previously referenced trip. I should have used better judgment,” Benjamin wrote.

Certain aspects of the previously referenced sojourn would have been better… But it’s still great.

“I want to let every parent know, every parent know, that this probation will not affect the university, it will not affect our academic offerings and it will not affect the value of the degree,” said [South Carolina State University] President Thomas Elzey.

I mean, if you’re wondering just how far you have to go to catch the eye of an accreditor, take a look. Decades of arrant criminal mismanagement and outright theft to the point where they’ve basically killed the institution. That’s what it takes.

And, you know, it’s not as though we’re talking revocation of accreditation or anything. It’s only probation because (cough) we’re just starting to get a little concerned here…

I guess they noticed the Pinson trial or something…

Background on South Carolina State University here.

.. (UD‘s taking that designation from the headline of a recent article about South Carolina State University) could be understood to include pretty much every university ever, uh, covered by this blog. Harvard poor mouths. Yale poor mouths. UD‘s university – George Washington – recently found the cash to buy the Corcoran Gallery of Art; but last month UD attended a meeting where a professor said “if it weren’t for our students from China, I’m not sure the university could continue to be viable.” People say these things when they’re pitching new revenue-enhancing programs, or when they feel more comfortable hoarding than spending the endowment.

On the other hand, UD has covered a few universities which do indeed seem on the brink, though even they aren’t really. How often does a university close? Yeshiva University, embittered lover of rich bitches Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, has been downgraded by Moody’s with such calendrical regularity that the Moody’s Downgrade Days Calendar threatens to replace the Hebrew one. South Carolina State – one big ol’ inept corrupt money-hemorrhaging machine – is certainly in deep doo-doo, but the long-suffering taxpayers of that state will bail it out in order that it may live to stage sports events again.

A significant driving force behind the $13.6 million deficit was a $6.67 million shortfall in last year’s athletic program.

[President Thomas] Elzey said the university is considering eliminating its women’s golf program as well as assistant athletic coaches. Elzey said the university is seeking private donations to help support women’s golf.

“It hurts me to do that,” Elzey said. “I don’t like the idea of retreating back in an area I love dearly, which is golf.”

His institution’s dying and he’s worried about his dead hand shot.