Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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UPDATE.

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Another update.

There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.

At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.

This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.

Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)

A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.

The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).

NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…

Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.

Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”

Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.

When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.

University Diaries has been covering executive bonuses at Duke University. Earlier posts are here, here, and here.

From a comment thread about the Duke bonuses in the Duke newspaper:

Dr [Victor] Dzau is a director of four major corporations (sample Pepsi) earning more than $1 million in fees each year in addition to his Duke salary and his bonus. When you consider the boards meet regularly (usually 10 or 12 times a year) in distant cities, … this [is] an undue diversion of his attention.

The experts agree. From a recent New York Times article about university presidents and chancellors sitting on corporate boards:

Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent research firm focusing on corporate governance, [says], “it is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” [when you sit on many boards]. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.

Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards… “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”

… [There is now] a movement to limit the number of boards each president serves. In the University of California system, for example, the Board of Regents voted in January to restrict board membership for its chancellors to three.

Raymond D. Cotton, a partner at the Washington law firm Mintz Levin who specializes in presidential contracts and has represented about 250 institutions, says he recommends to universities that they write into contracts that the president can serve on a maximum of two boards.

Duke is rewarding Dzau for not being on campus.

Almost got away with it, too; and I’m sure he’ll be able to swing something like this again. Just needs to lie low a bit. Like Sarah Ferguson.

Les Wyatt, the former [Arkansas State University] president, [is] making $150,000 a year though living in Dallas and not teaching while on paid leave… [He is also] head of an outfit marketing on-line courses for colleges and universities.

….American University System … had listed Wyatt as “president and chairman.” AUS is an on-line education firm that has listed Arkansas State as a client. The listings were removed from the website after reporters asked about them. ASU faculty have raised questions about a possible conflict of interest, since Wyatt is still on the Arkansas State payroll, now as a professor on “compensated leave.”

The listings were removed from the website, and now Wyatt has been removed from Arkansas State’s payroll, faculty there having noted that this is one hell of a knock your socks off conflict of interest.

Plus real universities don’t consider going to Dallas to run your business research leave.

[Faculty concerns about] conflict of interest were brought up when last month it was discovered Dan Howard, interim chancellor of ASUJ, was serving on the board of a subsidiary of [Academic Partnerships, a for-profit company running online courses at ASU], and Les Wyatt, former ASU System president and current ASU professor emeritus of higher education and art history, was found to be serving as president and chairman of American University System, another AP subsidiary.

Fan-fucking-tastic deal for these guys — and for Arkansas State faculty onliners, who get thousands in compensation for generating online courses, and nada for generating off-line:

[F]or each course developed with AP the department chair for that course currently receives $1,000, faculty members developing the course receive $4,500 and departments receive bonus payments of $500.

… Jack Zibluk, professor of journalism and Faculty Senate president-elect, pointed out faculty only receive compensation if they develop online courses. Faculty members developing traditional courses taught in the classroom receive no extra compensation for their work.

The real beauty of this deal – as soon as Howard and Wyatt can wriggle out of the hands of a few faculty malcontents – is that Arkansas State will be a fully online university before you can say Kaplan Test Prep.

The IRS is examining the University of Texas at Austin for executive compensation and matters related to taxable income, preliminary offering documents show. Mack Brown, head football coach, the highest-paid state employee at $5.1 million per year, earns almost seven times more than Francisco Cigarroa, who’s paid $750,000 as chancellor of the University of Texas System.

… The IRS mailed questionnaires to 400 nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excellent chancellor of the University of Maryland is too kind. Human failing, bad judgment, all very nice, but let’s call it what it was: Greed.

I mean, the dean of the UM law school ran the place. So… what was it John Kenneth Galbraith said about corporate compensation? “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

State university system officials have asked the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Law to return $60,000 in unauthorized compensation and have referred questionable payments totaling $410,000, which were revealed by a state legislative audit, to the attorney general’s office for review.

Chancellor William E. Kirwan revealed those actions and apologized for the audit’s findings at a hearing Thursday before the House subcommittee on education and economic development. He pinned responsibility for the $410,000 in payments on the recipient, former law dean Karen Rothenberg, and on David J. Ramsay, departing president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore…

Yes, Ramsay, like SUNY Binghamton’s Lois DeFleur, is getting his ass out of there toot sweet. “Rothenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday. The university said Ramsay will not be granting any interviews.” Legislators “could recommend withholding some of UMB’s $182 million budget, pending action on the audit items.” They’re waiting to see whether Rothenberg will cough up the $60,000 — first installment toward an ultimate payback of all the hundreds of thousands.

Details here. “[W]hen a highly paid employee of a state university receives an extra 350 large in a single year, and nobody tells the legislature, shouldn’t a state university president expect a report like this to follow?”

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Update: Financial details on the scandal here. Here’s the heart of it:

Rothenberg’s base compensation is listed in university records as being the following: 8/2003: $288,925; 8/2004: $304,161; 8/2005: $327,246; 8/2006: $365,000; 7/2007: $408,450; 7/2008: $485,778; 9/2009: $485,778.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Median Salaries of College Administrators By Job Category and Type of Institution 2008-09. For law deans, the median salary reported is $266,895.

Rothenberg’s base salary, already above the 2008-09 median in 2003, increased 68% in the next 6 years. It increased 33% in just the two years between 2006 and 2008 (so much for the argument that the whopping additional payment in 2007 that was disguised as a sabbatical payment was somehow necessary as a retention bonus).

Her current reported salary ($485,778) nearly doubles the national average for the position. It is 2.33 times the salary earned by the next highest paid tenured faculty member at the law school (which is $208,055). It is 4.4 times the salary earned by new faculty members at the law school ($110,000).

Rothenberg never earned a salary greater than $200,000 at UMD before being named the interim dean. She never had a minute of administrative experience as a dean or an associate dean at any law school before her appointment. She never appeared as a finalist in any dean search at any other law school in the U.S. during her tenure. She left the UMD deanship without another administrative position anywhere to go to. And yet, in just 7 years of being the dean, she earned more than $2.5 million dollars, not including the extra sabbatical and research grant payments questioned in the audit, and not including the value of expense accounts and benefits….

[These numbers] are completely off the charts — they are wholly outside and beyond any standard industry practice or customary compensation policy at American law schools.

… is becoming a phrase to strike fear — or at least intense irritation — in the hearts of universities all over the United States. Whatever you think of his take on health care and other issues, Senator Charles Grassley is a fierce warden of public money, and he repeatedly goes after universities he suspects of wasting or in other ways misusing it. He writes them Grassley Letters asking them to account for what they’ve been doing with taxpayer money.

It’s usually when UD‘s talking about multiply-billioned Harvard, or football factories like the University of Alabama (which just cancelled a bunch of classes so everyone can go to a championship game), that she reminds readers of the remarkable tax breaks our campuses enjoy. They enjoy that non-profit status because they’re committed to the high ideals of educating citizens and generating important research. When it turns out that they’re just as committed to hoarding cash as they are to education, or when they ignore the whole education thing in favor of football, we should care. It’s our money they’re playing with.

America’s public universities of course don’t exhibit the structural corruption of, say, Greek and Italian universities. For the most part our schools are extremely cleanly run, it seems to UD; but Grassley and his staff have certainly uncovered questionable financial practices, and the ongoing story of the University of California San Francisco medical school is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The UC system has agreed to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a financial review at UCSF, after a U.S. senator raised concerns about allegations of money mismanagement and university officials making misleading statements to state leaders.

The allegations came from Dr. David Kessler, who was fired from his job as dean of the UCSF School of Medicine in 2007. Kessler had repeatedly questioned what he said were “financial irregularities” in the dean’s office budget.

In a letter to UC President Mark Yudof on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that he’s pleased that UC has agreed to an outside audit at UCSF, but noted several “troubling matters” at the university. He said UCSF administrators appear to have provided “misleading” statements to the California Senate.

… [Kessler’s] allegation relates to the dean’s discretionary funding budget, which he has said was millions of dollars less than what he’d been promised when he was hired in 2003. He conducted his own financial analysis in December 2004 and said he found an $18 million annual discrepancy…

These are large sums of money, and if it’s true that they’re missing, it would be good to know where they went.

Yet how can that be true? The author of this update on the nothingness of the Italian university system, a British professor who teaches in Trento, notes that the Italians have no trouble with the “buffoonish” Berlusconi, leader of their whole country. The fact that their higher education system is a black hole is a trifle.

Like the Greeks with Marietta Giannakou, the Italians have at the moment a minister of education so appalled by the country’s brain drain, and by what’s left in the country’s universities now that almost all of the smart students and professors have gone away, that she’s determined to do something. But, again like Giannakou, Mariastella Gelmini is unlikely to get anywhere. Corruption, insufficient funds, you know the deal.

The article describes what Italy has now:

… Parliament is full of superannuated professors itching to water down the proposed reforms.

[Gelmini] wants universities to be less like the Civil Service and more like businesses. To this end, she is proposing that rettori (elected vice-chancellors) should be limited to an eight-year term and be flanked by a professional general manager. The administrative council of the university will become a de facto board of directors, with at least 40 per cent of its members drawn from outside the university. It is intended that public-spirited business people will serve. University senates will occupy themselves purely with academic concerns. Given that many Italian universities have bankrupted themselves, this is no bad thing.

Second, Ms Gelmini wants to professionalise the staff. Professors will dedicate 1,500 hours a year to research and teaching, outside consultancies will be curbed, professors who do not meet standards will miss pay increments, and teaching and research assessment will be tougher. Farming out teaching to unqualified assistants will rightly be banned….

They’ve got crass cynical no-showism down to a science in Italian universities. Hard to see how, with a clown running the country, you change that.