… are the words of wisdom you need to hear as you seek to understand what has been going on in Morgantown. From her you-are-there perch in WVU’s sociology department, Karen Weiss has written Party School, a first-hand account of what Clifford Geertz might have called “deep play” at America’s colleges. These are excerpts from an interview she gave at Inside Higher Education:

Many residential universities, such as the so-called party schools … have become so well-known for their super-charged party environments that it would be very difficult to change the culture without negatively impacting enrollments that are now dependent upon the lure of this party scene. Moreover, many of the disruptive behaviors that I document in the book (e.g., burning couches, riots) have become “traditions” for both current students and alumni. As such, traditions are very difficult to change.

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[People who live in bad neighborhoods] feel terrorized, they change their routines to avoid certain streets, they don’t leave their homes at night. In many college towns, residents are beginning to experience similar problems (albeit less life-threatening) as a result of a minority of extreme partiers who make life uninhabitable [I think Weiss is conflating two phrases here: life unendurable and neighborhoods uninhabitable.] for their neighbors.

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While it is easy to see why bar and club owners are reluctant to eliminate drink specials or other promotions – after all, they make their profits from student drinking – it is more difficult to understand why university administrators, police and local town officials have not been more effective in reducing some of the problems caused by the party subculture. In the long run, it really boils down to a rather controversial reality: the party school is itself 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.

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That last bit is way important. All prospective university students interested in drinking know where to go – Cal State Chico, UWV, University of Georgia, University of Texas, almost anywhere in Wisconsin – to fit in. It’s like – who doesn’t know that Key West is a better place to drink yourself silly than Salt Lake City? And just as Key West’s business model – the thing it does to attract tourist dollars – involves the provision of alcohol every five steps or so down Duval Street, so central to UWV’s business model – the thing it does to attract applicants – is the provision of alcohol five steps off campus in every direction. Many of its most high-profile traditions (Weiss cites couch burning and rioting) are about alcohol.

You expect eighteen year olds who may have chosen WVU because the joint is gin-soaked not to drink gin once they get there?

You expect UWV to change its business model?

As Weiss points out, it’s not just a business model. It’s a way of life.

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Update: DRC, a reader, updates UD on the student. He has died.

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Don’t forget: The president of West Virginia University is Gordon Gee.

Here’s my earlier post about students there protesting her $225,000 fee for giving a speech on campus. (Or, as Ruth Marcus lowballs it in the Washington Post, “flying by private jet to pick up a check for $200,000 to stand at a podium for an hour.”)

And here, from an article you should read in its entirety, is an excellent statement of what I’m calling the Spending Down problem:

There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

American university students will stop being shocked by politicians and other celebrities being paid $300,000 to give a speech at UCLA when they can be made to understand the Why would I? problem. This guy solves it by pointlessly stashing it away. Imelda Marcos solved it by buying up all the shoes in the world. Our universities’ foundations solve it by paying $300,000 for a dinner speaker.

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UPDATE: Noam Scheiber calls it “the plutocracy problem.”

The remarkable synergy between the values of universities and the values of big-time football is there for all to see: Commitment to free, independent thought, to dissent, to reason over violence, to sober deliberation over intoxicated impulse, to academic seriousness leading to the completion of advanced degrees, to academic integrity, etc., etc. And nowhere is that synergy on clearer display these days than at Washington State University, whose athletic director has compiled an enemies list of people who aren’t “on board and believing in what we’re doing.” No bowl game tickets for those people. Dissenters have been placed on a no-tickets list.

The list is based on “a crimson-letter file of any particularly snarky emails that haven’t properly embraced the new way.” As another true believer – this one from Rutgers – writes in one of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite pieces of prose:

Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in.

It’s the ethos that’s made North Korea such a success, and you’ll find it at almost all of America’s great football schools too – get with the game or get fucked.

One local writer doesn’t quite get it:

This is inspired marketing for a program that’s had almost as many empty seats as occupied ones for its last two home games.

Most schools rank donors for ticket eligibility on a priority list.

The place that’s foisted a decade of bad football on its audience suddenly has a blacklist.

[The AD] means it when he says he has to change the culture. But who knew what he had in mind was vindictiveness?

No, no, no – it’s not vindictiveness. And it’s not a moronic marketing strategy. No, no, no.

You are looking at it the wrong way. The Democratic People’s Republic of Washington State University is a benevolent, misunderstood state. It seeks, via shunning, to educate dissenters so that they may join the glorious new way.

This is also what re-education camps are for, and UD is certain the AD has these in mind too. Otherwise it would look vindictive.

In his letter, President Joel wrote that the current fiscal crisis will force YU to “reframe the way we educate.” Joel noted, “conventional models crumble beneath the weight of fiscal hardship,” and discussed the need for a “new strategic vision” to increase revenue and efficiency in new graduate programs and online education.

This blog has followed, with disgust, Yeshiva University’s longtime irresponsibility in every imaginable institutional sense – hiring, trustee appointments, presidential compensation, intellectual freedom (put YESHIVA in my search engine for details). Now the Post-Bernard Madoff bill’s come due, and the only thing missing from the president’s statement is his acceptance of responsibility and his resignation.

“Yeshiva has suffered philanthropic walkouts,” writes the school paper, putting the matter diplomatically. Remember Andrew Sole’s letter, written all the way back in 2008, to Yeshiva? A letter the school blew off? Sole called for the resignation of the entire board of trustees.

… [H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.

In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.

The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees.

Fuck that! said Yeshiva. We like our boys (it’s almost all boys; they all seem to be in each others’ pockets; and one of them – Zygi Wilf – just got convicted of racketeering). We’ll just go our own way, and Sole can drop dead.

(This must have been one of the strategies featured in Leadership in the Non-Profit World, a class Yeshiva’s president gave just last January, with a guest lecture from the former president of George Washington University, a longtime defender of Yeshiva University’s way of doing things. Here’s President Trachtenberg. [You need to be a CHE subscriber to read the full contents of the article.])

But Yeshiva has dropped dead. Expect it to go almost entirely online, in the cheesiest, most desperate, way.

What’s next for Evan Dobelle? He has spent his way through the University of Hawaii, and through obscure and now much-impoverished Westfield State. Like Patricia Slade at Texas Southern University and Peter Diamandopoulos at Adelphi University, Dobelle arrives at obscure schools with his chest thrust out and starts talking about his important connections and how unless your school gives the president wads of cash for luxury goods no one will respect you.

Dobelle spent more on [a] 2008 Asia trip alone than the $92,000 that Governor Deval Patrick spent to take two dozen officials on a trade mission to Britain and Israel in 2011. But Dobelle said the only unusually expensive item was the luxury hotel bill in Bangkok, and there was a reason for it: The consultant who helped plan the trip said that Thai officials wouldn’t take Westfield State seriously if they didn’t put on a good show.

“She would say, ‘Who the f— will come and listen to Westfield State when they only have time for Cornell? You better set yourself up in a way to show a certain degree of prominence and respect to them,” recalled Dobelle. “So fine, that’s what we did.”

Verbatim out of the Slade/Diamandopoulos book of you gotta spend money on me to make money. They all peddled this line, as did way-high-living American University president Benjamin Ladner.

Todd Wallack, Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s nemesis at the Boston Globe, contributed to its detailed account of Dobelle’s doings. Wallack seems to be making a specialty of swinish academic administrators. He’ll always be able to find work. Just in the eastern seaboard area.

It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.

College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.

Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.

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If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:

Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.

Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.

Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.

It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.

UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.

After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.

I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…

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It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.

Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.

So, nu, would it have killed you to cooperate? I mean, since you didn’t cooperate (which would have meant, far as I can tell, a not-outrageous amount of work on your part), you now have two problems: You got the lowest possible ranking on a national, high-profile, ed-school ranking; and you look as though you knew what was coming so you… didn’t cooperate.

George Washington University was among the lowest-ranked programs in the country. It received this warning from the council: “No prospective teacher candidates should entrust their preparation to these programs because candidates are unlikely to obtain much return on their investment.”

Here’s some stuff about the rankings:

Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations. Education secretaries in 21 states have endorsed the report… The review was funded by 62 organizations, led by the Carnegie Corporation and the Broad Foundation. The National Council on Teacher Quality analyzed admissions standards and inspected syllabuses, textbooks and course requirements and rated 1,430 programs on a scale of zero to four stars.

What, you said we don’t have to cooperate with that fly-by-night Carnegie Corporation… ?

Isn’t the business of being in denial about how bad they are one of the big reasons many ed schools are so bad?

So now your only option is to dump on the Carnegie and the Broad and all those education secretaries… Only we know what we’re doing… They don’t know what they’re doing…

Here’s what you should have done:

The University of Michigan’s School of Education was one of the few institutions that willingly gave its materials to the National Council on Teacher Quality. “There was no particular reason not to,” said Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball. “This is one of society’s most important topics.”

Let UD give you some advice, not that you’ll take it: Apologize for not cooperating (or at least give some reason for not having done so that doesn’t make you look dumb) and say that while you think the rating unfair, it’s one of many useful sources of criticism available to the school, and will be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, you’re going to have a bumpy pr ride for awhile, and you should be thinking in broader terms about how to manage it. One thing to do would be to publish and defend elements of your curriculum. The head of GW’s teaching program should right now (or in a few hours; it’s 4:13 AM) be preparing an opinion piece to be sent to the Washington Post which in measured terms explains and defends the school’s curriculum, admissions philosophy, etc.

UD will now check out GW’s teacher training curriculum. She’s happy to speculate about what might have set off the Council.

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UPDATE: The Washington Post is scathing:

The council’s methodology was developed over eight years, relying on a review of course descriptions, syllabuses, student-teacher observation instruments and other materials. It came under immediate attack as incomplete and inaccurate from institutions of higher education. Such criticism is rich considering that many of these same institutions fought tooth and nail to keep materials from researchers. “Tremendously uncooperative” is how Kate Walsh, president of the council, described many institutions, which refused to share textbooks or course descriptions. The council had to file open-records requests; many private institutions that are not subject to Freedom of Information requirements opted out. What were they trying to hide?

… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.

All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.

Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.

Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.

Nevada, our most mentally challenged state, is about to spend eight hundred million dollars on a 60,000-seat stadium for one of the losingest university sports teams around: University of Nevada Las Vegas football.

In an era where it’s been proven time and time again that building new sports and entertainment facilities doesn’t necessarily immediately create a return on investment — in fact, it often does the opposite — there is still no hesitation to go with the bigger is better model of property development.

It will feature a 100-yard long Adzillatron – the entire length of the field. It’s one thing to hurl shrieking sixty-yard long ads at captive audiences; at one hundred yards, there’s really no getting away from them.

The best commentary UD has so far seen on this comes from a reader of SB Nation:

It’s pitiful.

But we’re Vegas and we do stupid shit like this all the time.

Coates warms to his theme:

“If we are going to allow charitable donations, we should think about what the ultimate purpose of those donations happens to be,” Coates said in an interview. “When one thinks of charity, they don’t think of charity flowing to the head football coach of a big state university.”

Coates also questioned muni financing for stadiums. “Using the borrowing power of the state and tax-exempt interest to build stadiums for sporting events isn’t the real purpose of the university, either,” he said.

The state of Washington, which isn’t totally insane, refused to pay through direct taxation for a University of Washington stadium renovation which will sideline and rip off students, but will be wonderful for corporations.

The university will do the deed anyway, taking advantage of indirect tax subsidies.

And here’s the horseshit from the university about how lucrative the new stadium’s going to be.

The Huskies estimate that the new suites and premium seating will raise $16 million a year in donations.

Additionally, the athletic department projects that other stadium-related revenue, such as ticket sales, naming rights and concessions‚ will increase by $17 million, or 57 percent, to $47.5 million annually, according to Assistant Athletic Director Carter Henderson. That will more than cover payments on the stadium debt of $15.9 million, the school says.

That’s absolutely gonna happen.

And it’s mainly because the rat finks and the squealers and the stoolies are suddenly crawling out of the woodwork and describing what actually goes on at schools that have long since whored themselves to sports but continue telling themselves they’re legitimate universities. One of the tutors at North Carolina Chapel Hill has decided to speak to the press, and you can read details of Nyang’oro Nation here. One of the football players at the University of Minnesota has written a long letter explaining that he’s transferring because he’s tired of being savaged by Coach Jerry Kill. A Washington State player spills the beans about our old friend Coach Mike Leach.

When people start talking, they encourage other people. Things could get… ugly? Ugly is what big-time university sports has been for decades.

Things could get really ugly.

It’s awkward. How entangled do universities want to get with businesses like Millennium?

A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating Millennium Laboratories of San Diego, a fast-growing private company selling urine drug testing services to pain clinics across the United States.

The company not only is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of health care fraud but also for intimidating former employees, one who was portrayed in a slideshow at a company meeting as a corpse in a body bag…. [It is also accused of] getting doctors to order unnecessary urine tests [– the testing, amid an epidemic of pain pill use, reveals whether patients are abusing the drugs –] and charging excessive fees to Medicare and private insurers.

I mean, nothing wrong with industry money, but you do want to keep an eye on the particular representatives from industry offering it.

Millennium sales tactics [it is alleged] included a chart showing doctors how much they could boost their own income by increasing the number of urine drug tests they ordered. For instance, a $15 payment to test for one drug could balloon to about $800,000 a year if 20 people a day were tested and each urine sample was tested for 11 drugs, the chart said.

It is a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Keep prescribing the pain pills — the medical profession almost has the entire American population on them — and then, concerned at the shocking escalation in their abuse, make your patients pay for urine tests. It’s funny to think about how America’s hundreds of thousands of pill mills will be giving the test to make sure their customers are taking their Oxy and Roxy. If you’re in the urine testing biz, like Millennium, you get them coming and going, as it were.

So, you know, a very becoming business altogether, and if you’re Duke or Washington you might want to keep an eye on the Justice Department proceedings and ask if you want to continue whitewashing the reputation of these outfits.

These can be twisted, inept, inventive, off the charts; but the classic university fraud – UD has no idea why, but she’s been covering university frauds for a long time – involves the director of an engineering-related program, a guy, who creates a fake company and gives his grant money from the federal government to that company and then uses it to buy a condo on a golf course and a Lexus and a whole lotta other shit.

Not that I want to beat up on my already unranked institution, but George Washington University experienced exactly such a fraud just a few years ago.

Since these always go according to a rather strict formula, you’d figure schools would have guards posted at the doors of their directors of engineering programs, but I guess this is not considered good form. In any case, it keeps happening, with Morgan State University the latest case.

A full-time engineering professor at Morgan State University was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday in an alleged scheme to defraud the National Science Foundation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding.

Manoj Kumar Jha, 45, who oversees the university’s transportation engineering graduate program, according to the university’s website, allegedly fabricated an elaborate research proposal on behalf of a private company he founded and then applied for funding through the NSF’s Small Business Technology Transfer program, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office…. Jha received $200,000 to conduct the research but instead allegedly made personal mortgage and credit card payments, paid his wife $11,000 for work she didn’t do and wrote himself a $6,000 check, prosecutors said.

Jha, who is also the founding director of Morgan State’s Center of Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research, also applied for $500,000 more for the project but did not receive it, prosecutors said.

And what a tangled web we weave!

In March 2011, Jha allegedly sent back faked time sheets for a purported research scientist as well as a copy of a faked expenditure ledger “in which he allegedly entered fictitious research expenses in order to conceal the fact that NSF funds had been converted to Jha’s personal use,” prosecutors said.

As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.

… begins, with its hastily appointed new president, Zeithaml (the name translates roughly into Time + Castrated Ram).

In the tradition of Bobby Lowder at Auburn, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld at CUNY, and Gene Powell at the University of Texas, Helen Dragas, head of Virginia’s trustees, seems to be a paternalistic anti-intellectual with power issues. These people occasionally arise in positions of authority at universities, and it is always a catastrophe.

If you want to anticipate the likely plot trajectory of this catastrophe, go back to the history of American University’s board of trustees when the now-notorious Benjamin Ladner was AU’s president. That long ugly expensive story featured clueless rich trustees pumping Ladner full of cash and privileges (keep in mind that even vast academic salaries look pathetic to real estate moguls and hedgies) until his profligacy became a national scandal. Getting out of the scandal took ages and did terrible damage to an already scandal-scarred university. Conflicts among the trustees were open, protracted and farcical, with this one and then that one leaving in a huff, etc. Expect a similar soap opera at Virginia.