“If you want to be a private doctor, be a private doctor, but if you’re a teacher, be a teacher,” [a university lawyer] said.

Und so weiter. It’s easy to find observers puzzling over the stubborn tendency of people who want to make a lot of money to also want to be professors. From the perspective of high-profile medical researchers who have developed lucrative ties to pharma, continuing to be a shittily paid professor (a few hundred thousand a year, versus millions from sitting on do-nothing corporate boards, pushing sketchy drugs and devices, and receiving all manner of other underhanded forms of payment in exchange for conferring an aura of legitimacy over what pharma does) would seem an obvious waste of time. And yet in many cases you don’t get to that coveted position of legitimacy-aura-conferrer without also first having gathered unto yourself the selfless idealistic purely intellectual aura academia gives you. You have to gird yourself with the symbolic capital of the university before you can generate real capital by passing yourself off as the neutral not-profit-motivated objective evidence-based independent respected expert pharma needs to gain FDA approval for oxycontin.

It’s a kind of Catch-22: You have to keep being a professor for pharma to want to use you as a classy unimpeachable kind of thing; but being a professor is a Real Fat Pain in the Ass. Universities are thrilled you’re bringing in a lot of corporate-sponsored research money, of course; but universities can’t look like the pharma-whore you are. They’ve got that whole… lemme look back over that list I just wrote… that whole selfless idealistic purely bumpadah bumpadah to keep going or they lose their non-profit tax status and a whole lot of other goodies. Universities have to make sure that they don’t look like institutions set up to house the profit-making activities of medical entrepreneurs, so they cook up rules to monitor how much outside money you’re making plus how much time you’re spending doing business off campus. Since many medical faculties are making money hand over fist by moonlighting for pharma, they rather resent the intrusion.

The way they deal with this intrusion is by the simple expedient of ignoring outside income/outside time reporting rules. It’s not as though only a few miscreants do this; chairs of departments do it. At some schools, everybody’s doing it.

Take this guy.

One UC Davis professor of veterinary medicine allegedly ignored the [reporting] requirement. In 2014, the UC Regents sued Dr. Jack Snyder in state court, accusing him of making — and keeping for himself — more than $1 million in unreported income from clinical work and consulting in multiple states, including California, Montana and Hawaii. Snyder, who is known for his expertise in equine surgery and has provided veterinary care for equestrian events at the Summer Olympics, frequently missed scheduled meetings, clinical shifts and laboratory classes without receiving prior approval, the complaint states.

In court documents, Snyder denied the allegations and said the university had not been harmed in any way.

Parker White, a lawyer who represents the university in the pending case, said the university does not discourage faculty from doing work outside the university, but it wants to take the profit incentive out of it. The primary responsibility of veterinary faculty should be their teaching and clinical duties, he said.

“If you want to be a private doctor, be a private doctor, but if you’re a teacher, be a teacher,” White said. “He’s not here showing the students how to be doctors.”

Synder left the university shortly before it filed suit in 2014. Last year, the federal government indicted him for filing false tax returns and tax evasion.

LOLOLOL.

… the list of university leaders settling their greedy asses on corporate boards and drawing big money from them for doing nothing (except cutting into their university time by going to Hawaii for corporate junkets) is very very long; and even though they keep getting caught failing to disclose their several, often conflicted, board seats, these people keep doing it cuz man you don’t know greed and how it can drive you! You can’t hope to understand!

The latest corporate board scandal comes out of already insanely scandal-plagued University of North Carolina system, with its fake classes and shit. Take a place that’s already in deep doodoo and drive it yet farther underground: This has been the mandate of new head guy William Roper, who jest can’t seem to ‘member all the boards – some of whom do business with his institution – on which he has settled his ass. The local lamestream media insists on sticking its nose into his affairs, looking at forms he’s failed to fill out, etc., etc., and he’s pissed – as pissed as Shirley Ann Jackson used to get when people called her out (she had her people call her critics racists). From the height of his ass-cooling dignity Roper has issued statement after statement and you know what? It’ll work. UNC has suffered few negative consequences because it’s a jock-sniffing academic joke; Roper will suffer few negative consequences for his greed and deceit. UNC is what it is and life – in all its glorious scumminess – goes on.

Everyone’s all ooh wow ooh about St Thomas University’s CFO resigning her position at that way-Catholic school rather than leave the board of AR-15-mad Smith and Wesson. (She was given an ultimatum from the school.) Everyone’s like: Look! She chose assault weapons over a church school!

But read the fine print, kiddies. Smith and Wesson (they’ve given themselves some new all-natural name… who knows why? … it’s like… can’t remember but it’s like Gentle Valley Breezes…) pays people willing to be associated with it upwards of $100,000 a year — and you and I know what service on a corporate board entails: Two free trips to Hawaii to sit in a room for a half hour and get excited about how much shit (here, AR-15s) the corporation’s selling.

If you had to choose between actually working – as a chief financial officer – and sitting on your ass all year and still pulling in a hundred thou, what would you do? Plus you get all the free AR-15s you want.

You’ll never get anywhere with university football until you focus with laser-like clarity upon the Major Kongs riding their schools to oblivion; and the Chronicle of Higher Education knew it had a winner when it decided to feature in particular the head of Georgia State University. This frenetic delusional man will go on bleeding his indifferent-to-football students for more and more sports fees until they all decide to drop out and attend schools run by sane people.

Meanwhile, though, Mark Becker will build the world’s largest empty football stadium.

Mr. Becker’s bold idea to reduce the [escalating student] subsidy: Spend even more on athletics. He wants to build a football stadium for his team about a mile from the campus. He envisions a modern, 25,000- to 30,000-seat facility that offers a lively game-day environment. He also wants a baseball field and a soccer field, retail shops, and student housing.

Don’t imagine anything can be done to stop the madness. GSU’s trustees no doubt consider the man a genius, and no one else is in a position to do anything about him.

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With this win Fresno State solidifies Hawaii’s last place position in the West Division Standings.

A school like Hawaii is an even more interesting case. Hawaii proves that even a team with no fans, a virtually unblemished loss record, and a school-bankrupting budget, will keep playing.

A regent here, an athletic director there, has hold of the reality of the University of Hawaii football program.

The University of Hawaii Athletics Department’s budget, which is projected to lose as much as $3 million in [2014], may not be big enough to support a Division I program, a member of the university’s Board of Regents said Thursday.

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The University of Hawaii’s football program may shut down as a result of tough financial conditions, athletic director Ben Jay said at a [2014] Board of Regents meeting Monday afternoon.

The AD was fired (at UH, they’re always getting fired) not long after he said this, and we haven’t heard a peep out of the trustee since he uttered those discouraging words.

Got to keep up the fantasy, even as UH’s last game (58-7 home loss) was played in a close to empty stadium and has issued in the expensive firing of yet another coach (at UH, they’re always getting fired).

Got to build a new stadium.

The university [recently] unveiled … renderings of a proposed 30,000-seat multi-purpose stadium to be built at an unnamed site at an estimated cost of $165 million and $190 million.

With the latest loss and the latest firing, UH’s football program, argues one observer, has hit “truly rock bottom.” But UH’s ability to dig deeper into deficit and depravity every year (watch that new stadium project take off) tells us that there are still plenty of moveable rocks above the bottom. UH can dig much, much farther before it actually encounters the abyss.

If, in the world of university football, one can even talk of an abyss.

… is where we’ve gotten at a lot of our institutions of higher learning in this country, and it’s a way-strange situation.

Of course we pay much more attention to cheaters staging games in full stadiums. Everyone’s gassing on about the University of North Carolina what a shocker a fine institution bites the dust blahblah… But you could argue that it’s the critical mass of shitkickers like the University of Hawaii and Ball State, with their own scandals, their massive sports budgets, and their microscopic bleacher sections that should draw a bit of attention.

But then Ball State doesn’t even pay attention to itself. It’s in the business of hiding how much it makes students pay to subsidize the empty stadiums.

Even with income from concession sales; NCAA allocations; $1,050,000 in guarantees paid out by Army and Iowa for road football games; private gifts; paid parking; school general funds and other sources, there remains an $11.6 million budget shortfall.

Hidden fees collected from students will make up that deficit, funding 65 percent of the budget adopted this summer by the board of trustees.

UD loves the wizened philosophical approach the Ball State spokesperson takes:

“Human fascination with organized sports reaches back centuries to the days of the Coliseum and the first Olympics,” Ball State spokeswoman Joan Todd said. “It is not a situation we created…”

UD loves that – the profound informed approach, so characteristic of a university setting… It’s like… I don’t know, put pornography in that sentence and it’ll work too – Our university didn’t create the age-old human fascination with pornography, but robbing our students blind in its pursuit is an obvious academic imperative…

As always, though, you have to go to Hawaii for the shittiest shitkicking out there. Truly no one attends their games; every week brings a new coach (hell, a new university president), a new buyout, a new scandal, a bigger deficit. Why aren’t people noticing Hawaii? It’s a far ickier story than UNC, even by university athletics standards.

The University of Hawaii-Manoa has a $31 million deficit and growing. Its big athletics program is a morgue, a wasteland, a joke. Its latest interim chancellor (you haven’t seen administrative turnover until you’ve seen Hawaii) has a statement to make:

Some have suggested cuts to the athletic budget and system administrators’ salaries, but [Robert] Bley-Vroman said the deficit requires more structural solutions. “There are big forces here, and they have to do with the society’s view of education and who’s going to pay for it.”

Yes, it’s a big, big… cosmic problem, and until we as a nation reconceptualize the entire ground of university education as such, cutting the athletics budget is pointless.

[T]he special treatment for the top conferences raises important questions for state taxpayers and UMass Amherst. The Minutemen moved up two seasons ago to the Football Bowl Subdivision, the same level as Ohio State, Alabama, and Texas. But with the team still drawing only 15,000 fans a game to Gillette Stadium, the Globe reported last December that the university will have to cover $5.1 million of the team’s $7.8 million budget this season, much more than originally anticipated. Now that the sand has shifted once again under the foundation of college sports, with new incentives for top players to go elsewhere, it would be prudent for UMass to reassess. Without further changes by the NCAA, there is no chance UMass will be able to stand on an equal playing field with the Ohio States, Alabamas, and Texases of the college sports world.

Er, it seems to mean that U Mass should end its farcical, bankrupting football program. As at the University of Hawaii, there’s no there there, but the nothingness still costs a fortune, and that means soaking taxpayers, students, and students’ families.

But in both cases – U Mass and Hawaii – there’s no way they’re going to shut down the football programs. That would be prudent, and prudence is not what these two places are about. (Follow all their shenanigans on this blog by putting their names into my search engine.)

You’ll find them at all sports factories, periodically emerging from the stygian gloom to express their concern that – as Youngstown State’s professors put it recently – “the university’s athletic budget is increasing while everything else is decreasing.”

When you realize that YSU’s professors put this concern to their new president, who is a football coach, it’s easy to see why, like cicadas, they spend most of their lives underground. Why go there? Why bother? To get screwed over and die?

They’re just as concerned at the University of Hawaii.

Most UHM students look to us for their classes, yet we are being brutally defunded to pay for embarrassing mistakes, poor management, and ill-conceived growth within the Cancer Center and the large athletic programs.

For years we’ve made a point, on this blog, of covering UH’s amazing athletic programs… It’s not that those programs are different in kind from lots of other university revenue sports programs; it’s the total emptiness for ever (to quote Philip Larkin) that UH has attained which sets it apart.

That’s the question. Certainly the entire Westfield State University board of trustees should go. But there must have been others at the university who hired as president a man whose character and actions were already fully known.

… [Evan] Dobelle [got] into similar trouble for his lavish spending at previous jobs, including at the University of Hawaii and the New England Board of Higher Education. In Hawaii, the board of regents unanimously voted to terminate his seven-year contract in 2004 after just three years because of his wasteful spending and ever-shifting explanations…

“There has been a lack of accountability, lack of fund-raising progress, lack of a sense of stewardship, ignoring the most basic policies,” then-regents chairwoman Patricia Lee said, according to the minutes of the Hawaii board’s June 15, 2004, meeting. “But, most importantly, his dishonesty and lying are most troubling.”

How stupid does your institution have to be to hire a person with this record?

He … commissioned a portrait of himself, contacting a local artist in 2013, and sent the $777.75 bill to [Westfield State’s] foundation after the fact. The portrait remained in a closet to be unveiled at an event for the 175th anniversary of the university in 2013. After Dobelle resigned, school staffers didn’t want the painting and shipped it to Dobelle.

So okay. Here are a couple of names for you. Diamandopoulos. Slade. So now we have the names of three university presidents who came in with crushing egos and big talk and proceeded to strip everything on campus except the interior wiring. Can even schools like Hawaii and Westfield State learn from this?

Clueless academic bastion of one of America’s most corrupt and incompetent outposts, the University of Hawaii is constantly losing presidents, chancellors, and – most of all – money.

Tom Apple, chancellor of the flagship campus, is now fired after two years of a five-year contract, so buying out those last three years will represent yet more pointless expenditure.

And when it comes to pointless expenditure, only the public university systems of Hawaii’s mentally challenged sister states – Nevada, New Mexico, and Alaska – compete. Put hawaii in my search engine for all the gruesome details of this truly comatose institution.

… asks Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest; and it is a question a number of law professors have been posing lately about law students, whose duty is to set us (law profs, that is) a good example by paying $50,000 and up (plus living expenses) a year for law school, and then being unemployed or taking a public interest job that may pay close to nothing.

As you probably know, law jobs are collapsing in this country, largely due to far too many law school graduates constantly being added to the job-seeking pool. Some schools are looking for ways to respond to this problem. Others are not.

In response to this New York Times opinion piece, written by two law school professors who basically deny the problem, Paul Campos first debunks their optimistic statistics, and then remarks:

The most nauseating aspect of …this [op-ed] is the gelatinous patina of sanctimony the authors slather onto their exercise in profoundly anti-intellectual — if “intellectual” is taken to mean “minimally honest” — hucksterism. “Legal education is still an excellent choice for those committed to serving others in a rewarding career,” they primly observe. Yes, it’s certainly been an excellent choice for them. Let’s take a moment to contemplate how well these public-spirited scholars are doing for themselves by “serving others.”

The first person Chemerinsky hired onto the UC-Irvine faculty when he got this self-abnegating enterprise rolling five years ago [Erwin Chemirinsky, notes Campos, is dean of a brand new law school that, “in a hyper-saturated legal employment market,” [charges] $47,300 in resident and $53,900 in non-resident annual tuition.] was his wife. In 2012 this dynamic academic duo pulled down a combined salary of $597,000 from the University of California’s perpetually cash-strapped system.

Meanwhile [the co-author of the NYT piece] took home a salary of $320,000, so it’s safe to say a career in public service is working out OK for her as well.

Obviously there’s plentiful comic territory here for those who enjoy either Wildean languidity about class privilege or straightforward Tartuffian riffs on hypocrisy (if you haven’t read Brian Tamanaha’s hilarious classic on this subject, do so).

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Add to Chemerinsky’s hearty assurance that all is well the rage of University of Oregon professor Robert Illig at the possibility that he and his colleagues in the law school might not get raises this year. The blog UO Matters quotes from two emails Illig sent to the faculty in which he worries about the possibility that the dean of the school (this might be a faculty proposal rather than something from the dean; it’s not clear at the moment) might take away raises and invest them instead in enhancing job prospects for recent graduates.

I feel that having given up the chance at a seven-figure annual income [for a six-figure one] is charity enough for the students.

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Campos wonders if Illig’s thing is “an elaborate parody.”

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More information on the faculty resolution.

There’s no nothingness like University of Hawaii nothingness. Nothing happens, and Hawaiian students and taxpayers pay through the nose for the privilege.

There’s big nothing – like the Stevie Wonder scam – and there’s small nothing, like the $64 student fee for nothing.

A UH student noticed a big jump in his fees one semester, and he went to the local investigative news reporter (there’s no there there to go to at UH itself). She immediately established that the fee was bogus (outright theft or incompetence, you make the call) and immediately got a hell of a comment from a high-ranking nullity on campus. That’s life, he said. Sometimes in life you pay for stuff you don’t get.

… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

After the successful extra-point attempt went into the stands, the mostly-empty stadium provided its loudest ovation of the night in support of the fans who tried to keep the ball away from security by throwing it around the seats.

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UPDATE: The situation at this particular university event is drawing a lot of commentary. Read some of it here, and revel again, on this Christmas day, in the blessings of being an American taxpayer.