… has fixed my WordPress page, so links and all the other stuff are now working.

“… College athletes, many of them African-American, are brought to college as hired guns, under the guise of getting an education. The entire charade is sustained for the sake of helping the NCAA maintain its multi-billion dollar professional sports league.

Yes, I said professional, not amateur. Any league that earns money on par with the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB is a professional sports league. NCAA coaches, commentators and administrators – mostly white – earn six and seven figure salaries while simultaneously robbing athletes of their educations, their futures, and the money that they and their families have earned. In order to avoid paying taxes on their revenue, the NCAA spends millions on marketing to convince us that their multi-million dollar corporate extravaganzas are polite little weekend activities that students barely remember to keep on their schedules. All the while, Tyrone Smith attends four years of college and doesn’t even learn how to read.

… The NCAA needs independent oversight. The federal government should take the lead and give meaningful disciplinary power to individuals who care more about education than winning percentages. When schools like The University of Kentucky choose to pay millions to coaches like John Calipari – who has consistently violated NCAA rules and carries a horrific graduation record – they are making their intentions… clear …”

Boyce Watkins:

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/12/educational-mission-of-ncaa-is-great-scam-of-21st-century.php

“…In the 2007-08 school year, nearly 80 percent of major athletic programs reported operating deficits, with programs in the red losing an average of $9.9 million, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Add the recession, which has affected state appropriations and private giving at most colleges and universities, and college sports face unprecedented economic challenges.

A recent NCAA report noted that even football-generated revenue does not cover the operating cost of the football team at 44 percent of the institutions playing major-college football. Such figures would be worse if the millions in debt for stadium improvements and other facility enhancements were included. These are hardly profit centers at most institutions.

Now, consider all this in an environment where athletics costs are escalating at all but a few institutions while academic budgets are being cut and student fees and tuition are being raised. NCAA data show that the rate of increase in athletics spending in Division I programs is three to four times greater than the rate of increase for academic budgets. That is neither acceptable nor sustainable…”

***************************

Oh hell sure it is. I can’t tell you how many times UD’s been lectured by readers about how acceptable and sustainable the situation is.

And anyway, the two writers of this opinion piece in the Washington Post —

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121803510.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

— don’t take up the real problem. They’ve done the numbers, but they haven’t done the ethos.

You’re up against a deeply corrupt and deeply embedded culture. Pontificating about how it’s not sustainable is like an Italian politician telling constituents the Mafia isn’t sustainable. Sure it is.

**************************

Apologies for the bare-bones look of this post. I’m having trouble getting a good window to open in my WordPress dashboard.

… the Swedes, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Swede.

Then they came for the Scots…

Whoroscope, a poem by Samuel Beckett,
will be the UD category
into which we toss small stories
like this one,
from the University of Southern California.

Small stories within the big saga
of the university’s prostitution.

… is at it again, giving the local newspaper such a runaround on their conflict of interest policy deliberations that the paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has sued.

The University of Wisconsin’s medical school and its supporting foundation are violating the state’s public records law by refusing to release faculty comments about a proposed conflict-of-interest policy, according to a lawsuit filed Friday.

The suit was filed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and reporter John Fauber, who has written extensively about the relationships between drug companies, medical-device makers, doctors and medical schools. It seeks a court order to make the comments public.

… UW’s medical school and its doctors have been the subject of a yearlong series of stories in the Journal Sentinel.

… Critics believe the money drug and medical-device companies pay to doctors and medical schools leads to higher health care costs, in part by increasing the use of expensive brand-name drugs as well as more so-called off-label use, when a drug or device is used for a purpose not approved by the FDA…

… How her lit crowding fairylands sink through the space-silence
To build her palace, till it twinkles in starlight —
Too frail for a foot
Or a crumb of soot.

Then how his muffled armies move in all night
And we wake and every road is blockaded
Every hill taken and every farm occupied
And the white glare of his tents is on the ceiling.
And all that dull blue day and on into the gloaming
We have to watch more coming.

Then everything in the rubbish-heaped world
Is a bridesmaid at her miracle.
Dunghills and crumbly dark old barns are bowed in the chapel of her sparkle.
The gruesome boggy cellars of the wood
Are a wedding of lace
Now taking place.

************************************

This is the end of Snow and Snow by Ted Hughes.

It’s true that all this snow, falling and falling, makes the world a wedding.

The world I’m looking at from my front windows doesn’t have dunghills. Take away the lace and it’s evergreen, or azalea.

***************************************

Snowed in, we watch things.  Snow builds itself up
into slim hills along our split rail fence and inches up
into cone hats in our flower pots. Ania took this picture
as the dog walked in front of the camera.

This morning the street was absolutely silent.  White,
empty, silent.

*************************************

Gradually people on skis and sleds and people walking dogs who were dressed in winter jackets began to appear.  The town truck pressed its plow against Rokeby Avenue.

While Mr UD shoveled a path from the front door to the car,  I went to the stack of twigs and logs I keep on the deck, and brought bits of it in for a fire. I tossed a twig to the dog.

It’s five o’clock now, and the world’s become gray and blue as well as white. Up and down the street, holiday lights flash a little gold against the snow. People have gone back inside their houses.

… about brainless but brawny University of Oregon.

… At the University of Oregon, academics has taken a backseat to athletics. Despite the generosity of Nike founder Phil Knight, who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to the school, Oregon has gone on such an athletics building spree that it has had to postpone a long-term project to renovate student housing. That’s because the university has hit its debt limit of $200 million.

“We literally can’t go out and ask for more bonding authority for the academic side of the campus,” said Nathan Tublitz, an Oregon biology professor and the co-chair of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a reform group that’s often critical of the culture of college athletics. “The mission of the university is to educate students and perform cutting-edge research,” said Prof. Tublitz. “To be spending so much money on an auxiliary enterprise is not only scandalous, it’s criminal.”…

Remember Yeshiva University’s late-night online erasure of the names Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin from their list of trustees?

It happened exactly this time last year. (If you click on the link to my blog entry, and then click on the entry’s link to Yeshiva’s list, you won’t get the blank page you got when I wrote the post — YU had so much erasure to do, I guess they figured they’d better start from scratch. You’ll get their latest list of trustees, which includes the dead Sy Syms.)

Yeshiva’s board remains secretive and conflicted, so UD‘s assuming the school is keeping their TRUSTEEDELETE software at the ready.

Meanwhile, it’s a larger problem, the business of putting Hedgie Houdini on your board.

One sees the attraction. These guys have private fortunes in the billions, and not only might they give you some, they’ll maybe work their money-making magic on you.

The downside’s equally obvious: You, a venerable university, might find yourself with a very, very, very high-profile crook on your board of trustees.

And sure: You can do what Yeshiva did. You can delete their names as soon as the shit hits the fan, and then you can declare yourself a victim. You can refuse to discuss what it means about your university that it made the century’s biggest financial crook “treasurer of the Yeshiva University Board of Trustees and chairman of the board of Sy Syms School of Business,” as Yeshiva’s student paper noted last January. You can refuse to deal with it. But fact is, Yeshiva’s reputation has been in the tank ever since.

A better approach might be to see the shitstorm coming and act in advance.

Brown University, for instance, houses Steven Cohen on its board of trustees. A jolly, happy-go-lucky guy who never goes anywhere without a security detail and almost never goes anywhere anyway (the adjective constantly affixed to his name is reclusive), Cohen’s been dealing with legal trouble for years, and lately with one thing and another it’s getting out of hand.

If you ask UD, Brown should not have let greed blind it.

Meanwhile, get ready with the TRUSTEEDELETE.

… asks readers who Notre Dame’s next football coach should be.

Here’s one of the answers the bloggers got.

Football is starting to harm ND.

… In general, college football at the highest level is now so corrupt that the NCAA cannot control it, and the universities, supposedly bastions of academic integrity and higher learning, exploit the labor of young adults, many with few options, for personal and institutional gain. A majority of teams that went to bowls last year graduated <50% of the players. Meanwhile the nature and frequency of injuries suggest that the kids are not viewed as much more than fodder, necessary casualties to keep the alumni happy and contributing. [T]he continuing effort to field a dominant football team in a fundamentally corrupt environment is eating away at the soul of the institution. ND should get out of football and focus on academics.

From The Nation:

…Italy’s economy is floundering, with small businesses going belly up, 2 million jobless and no prospects at all for the young (up to 50 percent of young people are unemployed in some regions, and university graduates are fleeing the country). While across Europe governments are pouring funds into research, universities and the knowledge economy, and into green and sustainable growth, Italy is doing nothing…

It’s about students and professors and art and derangement.

Actually, it’s not up quite yet.

Hold on.

****************

Here it is.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an opinion piece in the Texas A&M student newspaper.

Most Aggies pride themselves on the aesthetic appeal of campus. Both antiquated and modernly [Antiquated and modernly are weird choices. Antiquated sounds critical, and I don’t think the writer means to be critical. Modernly is a word, but a very awkward one. How about old and new?] designed [Drop designed.] buildings are surrounded by large open cobblestone walkways and courtyards dotted with old growth trees, at least for now. [The meaning of at least for now is obscure. Until the sun explodes and destroys the earth?] But this lovely campus has a dark side some will find hard to swallow. [The combination of abstract figurative language — light and dark — with the homely, physical hard to swallow is unlovely. Also, since the opinion piece is about to be about oral and other forms of sex, hard to swallow is not a good choice.] Often as most students go about their business, illicit and anonymous sex occurs publicly in the very buildings we call home.

A quick search through the personals section of Craigslist might [will would be better] reveal more of this world than readers [might] care to know. The use of study rooms in Evans for sex is better known, but these activities spillover into every corner of the University. To truly realize the extent of what goes on behind closed doors, visit the men’s bathroom on the second floor of the Academic Building.

A casual observer might never notice the walls separating the bathroom stalls across campus are made of incredibly hard material, largely stainless steel or some form of faux marble. But a few weeks ago, the walls of the aforementioned [Drop the evil aforementioned.] bathroom were replaced with thick plastic. In a shorter period of time a large 8″ hole along with several smaller peep-holes have been cut and melted into the walls. [New paragraph for next sentence.]  As early as the eighties, anonymous public sex has been happening on campus, and a lot of it. Even older generations of Aggies know about the reports and rumors about various places on campus being used for public anonymous sex. [Anonymous public sex, public anonymous sex — we’re getting redundant. Need to find different ways to say this.]

During an interview with a professor who wished to remain anonymous, the seriousness of these sexual exploits became obvious. The professor told a harrowing tales [Tales should be singular.] about one night in the late 80s, when he and his three young children were in the Academic building and went to use the restroom. Upon entering in [Drop in.] the restroom he encountered several males openly performing various sex acts. Needless to say he was mortified. In fact, the older classroom doors that [Drop that.] had grates in them making it very easy for one to bend wide enough to reach through and unlock the door for larger “engagements.” [Why quotation marks around engagements? Is he afraid we’ll think he’s talking about people thinking of marrying?] Decades later, the glory hole carved into the second floor of the bathroom of the same building tells the same story.

Efforts to curb public cuckolding [You can sort of see why he used cuckolding, which means the act of cheating on your spouse. Cuckolding sounds a lot like cockholding.] on campus seem to have been, at best, modestly successful. Online posts and personals provide countless chances for a homosexual encounter, and the details of even browsing these messages are too graphic to repeat or even believe. But since these sexual opportunities seem to attract largely the gay community, the situation begs the question: why Texas A&M? Our school is ranked the 8th most conservative school in America by the Princeton Review, and seems like an improbable location. To answer this question, I interviewed a poster of a similar craigslist.org advertisement. [The writer, with his hard to believe and improbable, reveals a rather loose grip on the situation.]

The poster spoke only on the condition of anonymity, and so will be referred to as Mike. Mike is 26 years old and a life long resident of Bryan and he does not, nor ever did, attend any higher education. Mike responded to the question of why Texas A&M campus with several explanations. The main point was that College Station is the perfect distance between Dallas, Austin and Houston. As for the location, it would not seem odd to anyone to see people of all ages walking around campus all hours of the night.

Also, perhaps due to the aforementioned conservative tendency of the towns, there seems to be a larger number of homosexuals in the area than the general population realizes. Most have not come out yet and many have no intention of doing so. [Wonder why not.] Mike added there is no fear that they will be caught, and because of that he is able to “meet up with” up to 15 new partners a semester. I concluded by asking Mike why this anonymous sex had to be on campus. Certainly there were more safe and sanitary places for men to enjoy each other’s company than a bathroom. Mike told me that there was more thrill in using public facilities and that he has a “good thing going” with no intention of ever stopping.

There will always be people like Mike who take advantage of an open door policy, [Comma should be a semi-colon.] a larger question is where are the University Police who patrol campus 24 hours a day? [Check the stalls.] Public sex has occurred long enough at A&M, and instead of simply fixing vandalized facilities, our fees and tuition should go towards stopping it. The University needs to put back those fancy non-permeable walls, and actually make their security employees do their job to protect the students, faculty, and staff from having to be subjected to these seedy and illegal sex acts.

************************************

By the way, the op/ed’s headline:

A HOLE DIFFERENT WORLD.

This, from January 2006, is the first of many posts (type Saluki Way into the search feature) University Diaries has featured on only one of the many benighted aspects of that most-benighted of American university campuses, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — its ridiculous sports expenditure.

Here’s an update — a letter to the editor of the student paper, from an English professor there.

According to SIU President Glenn Poshard, SIU may probably [may probably is awkward] close in March or lay off large amounts [should be numbers] of people … He is quoted as stating, “This isn’t a panic situation; nobody is panicking here.”

This may be true for SIU’s higher administrators who will certainly not be laid off. But for the majority of faculty and staff in an already depressed economic region, this is a very worrying time. Should the worst happen, Carbondale would probably become a “ghost town” [no need for quotation marks] after losing its chief source of revenue.

In the light of the recent high-salaried appointment of a new chancellor (who may not even have a job to go to in June) despite a supposed hiring freeze, another solution is possible.

What about temporarily transferring the $35 million dollars allocated to the Saluki Way sports project to alleviate this urgent budget crisis?

This project is opposed by the majority of faculty and students on this campus, and in a time of economic recession, sports should be the lowest item on the agenda.

It would be one of a number of necessary efficiencies Trustee Bill Bonan II has urged. Should the economy recover, this project could then go ahead. The issue remains whether sports or education is the main priority on this campus at this particular time.

… Surely the economic well being of people is far more important in a time of economic depression …than an irrelevant sports stadium that has nothing to do with educational quality.

Mack Brown
Won’t back down
He wants five million now.

UT’s
Faculty
Is having one big cow.

“We thought we
Were a university!”

You really thought that?
Wow.

********************************

A resolution criticizing the $5 million pay package for University of Texas football coach Mack Brown as “unseemly and inappropriate” was approved in an unofficial vote at a Faculty Council meeting Monday despite an impassioned defense of the package by UT’s president.

… The resolution was approved 23-15, with four abstentions.

… “College sports is widely viewed as an out-of-control train on a collision course with academia,” said David Hillis , a professor of integrative biology. “Right now, UT is stoking this train to make it run ever faster.”…