'The [Duke lacrosse] incident, straddling at once the quintessential social flashpoints of race, class and gender, has led community and university leaders to fear that the progress they have made in recent years in improving their relationship will be swept away in the storm'.

‘Athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, according to an Indianapolis Star analysis of the 2004-05 athletic budgets of 164 of the nation's 215 biggest public schools. Without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. Most would have lost more than $5 million.

Additionally, taxpayers indirectly subsidize athletic departments because college sports are exempt from federal taxes, based on their tie to education. The exemption particularly benefits big schools, which receive up to 40 percent of their athletic revenue from donations, most of which are tax-deductible. At Indiana University, for example, donations constitute 21 percent of revenue; at Purdue, 27 percent.

Also untaxed is the massive amount of television money that fuels college sports. All told, that's hundreds of millions of untaxed dollars.

Critics find this inappropriate. They say college sports have largely become a business of mass entertainment -- such as this weekend's Final Four in Indianapolis-- that shouldn't receive an education-based tax exemption. In a time of rising tuition and stagnant state support for higher education, they say sports shouldn't be propped up by so much money generated outside athletic departments. Some students have fought sports-targeted fees, including at IU, which will discontinue the requirement for the 2006-07 school year.

"The subsidies grossly overestimate the role of intercollegiate athletics in higher education," said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor and leading sports economist. "This should be something that absorbs a much smaller share of outside resources."



…The average deficit [across schools] is $5.7 million. Among the money-losers were Indiana and Purdue, and two schools in this weekend's Final Four, UCLA and George Mason.

Economists who studied The Star's findings cautioned that comparing bottom lines is difficult because of inconsistencies in what schools report. They also stressed that no accounting form is perfect.

At the same time, many thought at least some of the deficits were probably greater. They were skeptical that athletic departments fully accounted for the use of services funded by the general university, including administrative time and services.



…College sports have been tax-exempt since schools began competing in the late 1800s. The NCAA was granted the same exemption in 1956, when it was just starting to learn about the commercial potential of televised football.

Now, critics say, sports have strayed too far from their nonprofit purpose of education to qualify as a charity. They note that the NCAA pays high salaries -- Brand makes $870,000 -- and competes with for-profit pro sports leagues in areas such as television and sponsorships.

"In the case of big-time college sports, the activity itself is becoming increasingly non-educational," said University of New Haven Professor Allen Sack, a starter on Notre Dame's 1966 national champion football team. "But as long as Myles Brand can argue that the University of Michigan is under the same umbrella as (small schools such as) Wesleyan University, he can cloak the issue."



…Questions have also been raised about the general university money that finds its way to athletics. Some economists and accountants are skeptical that everything shows up on the athletic budget -- for instance, use of the university attorney and rent for buildings.



…Zimbalist, who has published 14 books, including "Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-time College Sports," said, "I don't think there's any empirical evidence that says the overall quality of a school improves as a result of having a Division I athletic team or even a successful Division I team." '

'Of course, the Duke stuff is big news. I hate the lacrosse guys. When I was at Duke they were your standard lacrosse players, but I think they've gotten [. . .] worse. When we go down every year for a football game, we see them because for every football game they show up dressed in leather and all this S&M gear. It's really fucked up. The first time we were down there, a bunch of them [. . .] were bombed [and] came by our tailgate and tried to steal our beer. So I'm not shocked to see those assholes do something like this.'

' Before UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton moved into her university-provided house on campus last year, she demanded dozens of improvements …


...The $30,000 dog run has already been a point of controversy. UC President Robert Dynes told lawmakers last month that it was supposed to cost only $7,000, but said the project "got out of whack." '

'If jocks rule [at Landon], the boys who play lacrosse now are kings. The game, played with netted sticks and a hard rubber ball, can be as violent as football but with fewer pads. It requires the finesse of soccer and adds the brutality of rugby.

In the last two decades, coach Robinson “Rob” Bordley has built the squad into a national powerhouse. Lacrosse Magazine named it the top team in the country in 2000 and 2001. At the time of the cheating scandal, Landon had not lost a conference game in ten years.

Landon attracts promising students who want to excel at sports. Lacrosse stars get into Princeton, Duke, and the University of Virginia. Lacrosse helps the school raise big money from alumni.

"What brings in money better than a great sports team?” says one alum and donor to the school. “It’s not that they had a great school play but that they won the big game. Right or wrong, it’s true.”


...Alumni, students, and parents interviewed for this article say cheating is not unusual at Landon. Pressure to get good grades is high; the boys know one another well and want to help out; and the faculty is not eager to catch cheaters and turn them in. Adding to the pressure are strict grading policies that make it hard to maintain high grade averages.

“I certainly had the impression there was a culture of cheating when I was there,” says film producer Castaldi. “I failed a Spanish class that others got through by cheating.”

Says Damon Bradley: “More often than cheating, we run into plagiarism from the Internet. Cheating is not something we see in large numbers by any means.”

Cheating has become enough of a problem that a businessman who sent several sons to Landon was moved to write a six-page letter to the school’s board of trustees early this year. Most of his boys had had positive experiences there, but one had been expelled for cheating. The man, a former member of Landon’s board, had investigated.

“Without exception, everyone we talked with told us that there was widespread cheating throughout Landon,” he wrote. All of his sons “over a fifteen-year period of time said that cheating was rampant in each of their classes and had gotten worse over the years.”

The board never responded to the letter; board chair Henry Dudley refused the letter writer’s request to appear before the board on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent.'

'I listened to the news from France, and sighed over the latest outbreak of self-destructive, irrational protest playing out on the streets of Paris.

[T]ake a look at the placards, listen to the shouted slogans. This is a reactionary revolution, demanding not change, but its opposite. The students want to turn back the clock to the France of their parents, and grandparents - to some golden age, when jobs were for life and the state took care of all ills. This is militant, car-burning nostalgia.

…Reading the Belgian press yesterday morning - I could not read the French newspapers, because they were on strike - I came across an opinion piece by one Céline Moreau, "youth co-ordinator" of the FGTB, a trade union.

Her piece picked up the great buzz-word of the current French protests, "précarité" -which means something like bleak uncertainty, and carries a sense of horror at life outside the state's swaddling embrace.

Ms Moreau heaped scorn on the trial work contract that is at the heart of the French protests. This contract, she wrote, sprinkling her text with exclamation marks, allows an employer to hire a young worker for a trial period of two years, and allows them to be fired without explanation!

How could one plan any life decisions in such a world, she asked. "How could anyone contemplate major life changes - moving into their own home, having a child, asking for a loan - if they were in such a total state of uncertainty?"

I have shocking news for Ms Moreau. Millions of young Americans wake up each morning, knowing they can be fired without reason. Those same Americans will move halfway across the country, without blinking, for a better job, a bigger house, even better weather. Tellingly, "precarious" Americans are more prepared to have children than Europeans.'

'The trouble with the WB series "The Bedford Diaries" isn't the sex, it's the curriculum.

The courses at Bedford, a fictional college campus in New York City, include an elective seminar titled "Sexual Behavior and the Human Condition" (video diaries, not Havelock Ellis) and a survey course, "Urban Public Health" (Valtrex, not Venetian canals). The only hint of a Western canon in the premiere is a course that mentions 17th-century Spanish portraiture. (At least it's the Prado, not Prada.)

But basically, "The Bedford Diaries" is Harold Bloom's nightmare...

…All of [the main characters] enroll in the hottest course on campus, the seminar on sexuality taught by Prof. Jake Macklin (Matthew Modine), who calls his classroom a forum for "revelation and personal exploration." In each episode, at least one of the students makes an intimate video confession as part of the class work. Professor Macklin also makes a video diary about his own sex life…'

After AIDS was identified and had claimed hundreds of lives in New York and San Francisco, Bruce went through a period of severe anxiety, in which the slightest symptom seemed a harbinger of death. He was scrupulous about practicing safe sex with hustlers, not so much to protect himself from them as vice versa. He applied a ritualistic standard of cleanliness to his sexual encounters. In all moral dilemmas or debates he explicitly invoked the standards of “the ethical Jew,” here above all. As the years passed, he showed no signs of illness and remains healthy today. But I will never forget a daffy exchange in 1984 as I drove him from Manhattan to Syracuse for our twentieth high-school reunion, the first time we had seen our WASP sirens and tyrants since graduation. Somewhere between Albany and Utica on the Thruway, I tried to distract him from his obsessive examination of his dry skin patches and minutely swollen armpit glands. Listening to the radio, I vaguely asked him, apropos of nothing, “Did Pat Benatar have a nose job?” He peevishly shot back, “Does she have a face? They don’t operate on mice.”

'Here are some papers that were delivered at the annual CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication). With so many college students graduating without the ability to compose a coherent paragraph, one might assume the focus of the convention would fall upon writing skills and rhetorical structures. But for a fair portion of the entries, we get something else.

One paper is entitled “‘Register Your Penis’: Using Critical Discourse Analysis to Uncover Gender Conflict,” and the description runs, “As part of a larger thesis, this paper focuses on the “Penis Registry,” an activity introduced by CSU, Chico’s Women’s Center in support of Take Back the Night (TBTN), a nationwide university event . . .”

Here’s another one, showing us that there is no topic to which the race isue may not be applied: “Race, Rhetoric and the Digital Divide: From Digital Writing to Blogging.” And this: “Classroom and Race Issues for Building Community,” and this: “alternative Rhetorics: Postcolonial, Race, Womanist.”

And what would a general humanities conference be without something on the Middle East, as in: “Rhetoric and the Question of Palestine,” with a description containing the requisite sneer quotes--"The continuing saga of violence and bitterness known as the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ is less a matter of contested land than it is a matter of contested reality, framed in rhetorics that lead to radically different moral conclusions.”

And, to display hipness, we need some pop culture stuff, if only to show our appreciation of its subversive potential. Here is “Disturbing the Peace: Hip Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy,” and also “Rhetorics of Reception: Three Cases from Popular Culture” (two of them being the films Barbershop and Million Dollar Baby).

And, finally, for the political slant, there is a panel on “Towards A Progressive Politic in High School English Classrooms in Chicago.” Can one imagine a session at CCCC that begins “Towards a Conservative Politic”? '

USC President Steven B. Sample has resigned his relatively new seat on the board of the J. Paul Getty Trust, citing conflicting duties.

In a three-sentence resignation letter dated Feb. 28, Sample said his responsibilities to USC "make it impossible for me to continue" as a Getty trustee. His resignation was effective immediately, and he declined to comment Tuesday.

Sample joined the Getty board in September 2004. Trustees typically serve four-year terms. A series of controversies in recent months — including a continuing probe by the state attorney general and the resignation of the trust's President Barry Munitz on Feb. 10 — have made being a Getty trustee a thornier job.

Since Munitz's departure, veteran Getty administrator Deborah Marrow has served as interim president.

Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said the trust's board "will be having discussions" about the search for a new president at its next meeting in May, "but they've not yet begun that process."

Cinderella's Dirty Secret
College basketball's little guys are
just as corrupt as the powerhouses.

By Jacob Leibenluft


The big story of this year's NCAA Tournament has been the rise of the "little guys." Small-fry programs like Bradley, George Mason, and Wichita State have knocked off traditional powers like Kansas and North Carolina. Not only have these upset victories been fun to watch, we're also told that they represent the triumph of virtue in college sports.

"The better the little guys play, the better it is for the tournament and college basketball," wrote the Washington Post's John Feinstein. "We've long since lost our belief in the myth of the 'amateur student-athlete,' " explained ESPN.com's Tim Keown. "But once a year, Northwestern State hits a 3 at the buzzer and we believe again. We root for Bradley and George Mason because they're good stories, and because they seem a bit purer than the bulk of the field." The Chicago Sun-Times' Greg Couch even argued that Bradley's victory brought about the "return of innocence" to the sports world.

Let's take a closer look at Bradley University, that great restorer of innocence. Patrick O'Bryant, the Braves' 7-foot-tall NBA prospect, was suspended for eight games earlier this year for accepting money for work he never did. Three other Bradley players were found to have accepted excessive payments. (The school claimed the players didn't realize they were receiving too much money.) After the Braves' second-best player, Marcellus Sommerville, transferred from the University of Iowa in 2003, his father told the Peoria Journal-Star that Bradley coaches engaged in illegal tampering, encouraging Sommerville to switch schools while he was still enrolled at Iowa. Starting point guard Daniel Ruffin was forced to sit out his freshman year when the NCAA refused to accept his test scores.

At least Bradley graduates 73 percent of its players—a figure many of its fellow Cinderellas can't come close to matching. The plucky Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers, who dominated Oklahoma in the first round, have a graduation rate of 28 percent. Bradley's Missouri Valley Conference rivals at Wichita State (50 percent) and Northern Iowa (30 percent) don't fare much better. Only two schools in this year's tournament failed to graduate any black players that enrolled as freshmen between 1995 and 1998 (the most recent period for which data is available): Northern Iowa and Nevada, both mid-majors. By contrast, four schools managed to graduate 100 percent of their players in that same period. Three of them are the basketball factories Illinois, Florida, and Villanova; the other is the Patriot League's Bucknell, which only started awarding basketball scholarships three years ago.

Much of the little guys' appeal comes from the fact that the players don't turn pro after their sophomore year and the coaches don't get paid big bucks. But that has less to do with morals than opportunity. Mid-major players don't emerge fully formed from a magical peach-basket-laden gym in rural Indiana, ready to hoop it up and hit the books with equal enthusiasm. They come from the same shady prep schools and junior colleges as the major-conference studs—they're just not quite good enough to get recruited by the top-tier teams. (Sometimes they even come from the major-conference schools. Wichita State has players who once suited up for Illinois and Marquette.) And there's no more mercenary figure in sports than the mid-major coach. Every year, a small-time coach or three—Kent State's Stan Heath, Nevada's Trent Johnson, Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Bruce Pearl, the Tulsa coach du jour—happily parlays a tournament run into an opportunity with a big fish.

What separates the mid-majors from college basketball royalty isn't scholar-athlete purity. It's two more tangible things: history and money. Mostly money. What happens when a mid-major gets flush with dough? It morphs into Gonzaga, a school that quickly and eagerly adopted the same skewed priorities as its big-time brethren. Constant hype on ESPN? Check. A recruiting scandal in the recent past? Check. A coach that gets paid more than twice as much as the university president? Check.

If Duke and UConn are the Yankees and Red Sox of college basketball, then Bradley and Wichita State are the NCAA's Royals and Tigers. They have less money and less talent than the sport's bluebloods, but that doesn't make them any more honest. Upsets make the NCAA Tournament great because they're unexpected. Just stop telling me that Cinderella's heart is pure.

A business professor at the University of Southern California was arrested on Friday by the FBI on charges of swindling students and others in a real estate fraud, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Barry Landreth, who had taught real estate finance and development at the university, stole at least $1.5 million in the first 10 months of 2005, telling students and other investors he would buy land in Chicago and Las Vegas and then sell it for large profits, an FBI affidavit said.

Instead, he transferred all the money into his personal account without buying the land, the FBI said.

Landreth was arrested at his home, where he kept a stable of show horses.

The university said in a statement Landreth had worked part-time at the school. Most recently, he taught a course in the Marshall School of Business and was currently on administrative leave.

When will these [March Madness] players attend class? Will they be studying physics on the bench during timeouts? Will they be arguing about the Protestant Reformation while practicing layups? I don't think so. Doesn't it bother anyone - their parents, their professors, university officials - that they are missing nearly a month of school?

…I work out daily and avidly follow the New York professional teams. As a teacher, I encourage my students to play something - anything.

But I don't support college teams. The whole environment seems unseemly to me. It would be nice if players practiced for a couple of hours after classes and had a weekly Friday night game. But that world disappeared long ago, if it ever existed.

Today's "amateur" college game forbids players from collecting endorsements, but it allows coaches to serve as hosts on television shows, incorporate their clinics and moonlight for companies such as Nike, which pays a handful of big-name coaches between $120,000 and $200,000 yearly to distribute free shoes to their players. And what happens to the players?

Many of the players weren't "college material" when they were admitted. And not only were they admitted, but many were given scholarships (blocking out deserving students who actually wanted an education). Only a tiny percentage make it to the pros. And the others? I shudder to think.

In the wonderful documentary "Hoop Dreams," which followed the lives of two basketball players during their school years, there was a particular scene that drew great laughter from the movie audience. One of the high school players, a sad, inarticulate, lost young man, was asked what he wanted to major in at college. Head down, he mumbles, "Communications."

Shleifer [...] played sometimes indistinct and overlapping roles as he lobbied in favor of his projects and advised both the United States and Russia while making investments for his own personal gain, all the while presenting himself as independent analyst and author. The endowment funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate, and mutual funds -- many of the same areas in which he was being paid to provide impartial advice.

[T]he strange saga of Harvard's involvement in US aid to Russia in the 1990s is more than a scandal about Summers and Harvard. The case illustrates the overall failure of the US accountability system.... [It illustrates] the web of interconnections that enabled Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, a friend of then Treasury official Lawrence Summers, and a close-knit group of Russians and Americans to largely shape US economic aid policy and Russian economic "reforms" while managing virtually the entire nearly $400 million US flagship economic aid project. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials.

This maze of networks guaranteed the Harvard players their success in the 1990s. It also enfeebled the multiple investigations of their activities during the same period. Although the US Justice Department filed suit in 2000 (following a three-year investigation), alleging that Shleifer and Harvard had conspired to defraud the US government, the case came to a head only last summer with a negotiated settlement that required the university to pay $26.5 million in fines and Shleifer to pay $2 million. And despite being versed in Summers's entanglements, in 2001, the Harvard Corporation, with sole authority to hire and fire the Harvard president, appointed him the university's president....The Harvard case points to the failure of modern democracy to adapt its monitoring and accountability systems to a new breed of players exemplified by Shleifer.

Tenure-track faculty members teach only 40 percent of classes in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences, according to a report by a graduate-student union at Penn that has been fighting for university recognition. Lecturers on short-term contracts teach almost the same amount, the report says.

As a result, the group argues, students at Penn are not getting the education they are paying for.

"Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead."

Depending on where you look, Washington State University head baseball coach Donnie Marbut claims to have a master's degree, a teaching certificate or both.

In reality, he has neither.

He's lauded in official team biographies as a university baseball MVP, most inspirational player and all-conference infielder.

None of that is true either.

And there are other issues in Marbut's past that raise questions, a Seattle Times investigation has found.



[Before we get into the details: UD does wonder when the bullshit about university sports and character building is going to end. Many universities have given themselves over to liars, crooks, and conmen like Marbut. The only thing special about this case is that the university knows and acknowledges what he is but remains steadfast in its love for him.]


At Edmonds Community College, where Marbut coached until 2003, he used the school's facilities for his own gain, and witnesses say he took cash from groups that used the college fields. In another instance, he submitted a phony invoice to get Edmonds to pay for protein powder for players — a purchase the college had warned him was improper.

Marbut denied any financial improprieties. Of the false academic and athletic claims, he said some were errors by others, some he didn't notice and others were his own honest mistakes. [How were these “honest”? “mistakes”? This is how a seasoned petty crook talks.]

“I never was one to read a bio. ... I never thought I was important. Now any time anybody quotes me or says anything about me or writes anything about me, I'll do a better job of watching it," he said. [Huh?]

Marbut, who led Edmonds Community College to a league championship before joining the struggling Cougars as an assistant coach in 2003, has inflated his academic and athletic accomplishments for years.

The Times found he has listed the false academic claims on handwritten job applications and on typed résumés, and he's allowed the misleading athletic accomplishments to be repeated for years in team media guides and on the Cougar Web site.

Officials at Edmonds Community College said that, despite a recent state audit criticizing athletic-department finances under Marbut, they didn't know about the phony invoice, improper payments or false academic claims.

"During Donnie's tenure, none of this came up. If it had, we would have dealt with it harshly," said Edmonds Community College President Jack Oharah. [You didn’t notice a state audit?]

…Yet in Pullman, administrators say Marbut's $77,000-a-year job is safe.

"A couple of these things are errors in judgment by a person who has a lot of potential but who was young and ambitious and didn't really think things through," said Marcia Saneholtz, WSU's senior associate athletic director. "He will continue to be our baseball coach." [All WSU students can now expect the same understanding from the school when they lie and cheat.]


When Marbut became WSU's head baseball coach in May 2004, he was given a mandate to rebuild a baseball program that had dominated its division a decade earlier, but had finished last in the Pac-10 the previous five years.

Although the team finished last again in 2005 with a 21-37 record, Marbut managed to recruit a dozen top prospects for this year's team. [Wait for the inevitable article about how corruptly he managed this feat.] This year, the Cougars are off to their best start since 1994, with an 18-6 record and conference play starting Saturday.

Audit released

Last September, the state released its audit of the Edmonds Community College athletic program, covering the years Marbut was a coach and athletic director. The audit faulted the athletic department for poor recordkeeping and financial oversight. And it concluded that Marbut had profited by using college facilities to run a private baseball camp, a violation of state law.

The office forwarded Marbut's name to the State Executive Ethics Board for investigation in December. The board has not yet decided whether to review the case, said director Susan Harris.

After the audit, The Times obtained Marbut's personnel files from Edmonds and WSU. Those and other documents revealed the numerous false claims about his achievements.
Nine different records wrongly state that Marbut earned a teaching certificate, a master's degree or a graduate degree from St. Martin's College in Lacey, Thurston County.

In five of the records, the errors appear on forms or résumés that he himself filled out or created. Three are handwritten job applications he submitted at Edmonds Community College, in June and September 1999 and November 2001. One is a résumé he submitted to WSU in 2003. And one is a biographical data sheet he filled out for the university's Human Resources Department.

Marbut, 32, acknowledged that he never earned a teaching certificate or any other graduate degree. He points out that his coaching jobs have required only a bachelor's degree, which he does have.


…He said his WSU boss, assistant athletic director Saneholtz, told him it wasn't a problem.

Saneholtz said she did not recall that conversation. [Compassionate… and forgetful.]

At Edmonds, Marbut said, his supervisor, associate dean Nicola Smith, knew he didn't have the teaching certificate but told him to write it down anyway when he applied to be athletic director.

Smith responded: "I would not be in a position to tell someone to falsify a job application." [But it looks as though I did anyway.]

MVP claims

The misrepresentations don't end with Marbut's academic accomplishments.

WSU and Edmonds team biographies assert Marbut was chosen most valuable player on the Portland State baseball team in 1996 and most inspirational in 1997. Both bios also claim Marbut was named an all-Pac-10 North division infielder in 1996.

Two of those awards, the MVP and infielder honors, actually belong to a man Marbut hired last year to be his volunteer assistant coach: Matt Dorey, who played second base for PSU in 1996. The most inspirational player in '97 was third-baseman Darren Case, according to PSU records.

…Marbut blamed the WSU errors on the college Sports Information Office.

WSU Sports Information Director Rod Commons said mistakes in media guides do occur, but he couldn't explain how the Marbut errors happened or why they weren't fixed.

Ilsa Gramer, a former graduate student who was responsible for sports information for the WSU baseball program, said coaches must sign off on the media guide before it goes to the publisher. Marbut's biography appeared for two years without being corrected, Gramer said.

Marbut had no explanation for the Edmonds inaccuracies.


[It’s a long article. I’ll spare you the details on the protein supplements he tried to peddle and his off the books field rentals and other, er, personal enrichment activities.]


While WSU administrators stand by Marbut, they acknowledge the coach's past has followed him to Pullman.

As the state ethics board considers taking up Marbut's case, Saneholtz, the assistant athletic director, said the controversy may impact WSU's ability to recruit players.

"We are concerned about all the hearsay and innuendo that has been generated in the baseball community that could be unfairly damaging to our baseball program," she said.

40 Percent of Campus Master Plan
Going to 2 Percent of Students

Although student athletes make up about 2 percent of OSU’s student population, 38.2 percent of the money allocated for the five-year Campus Master Plan will go to the athletic village, the sports complex for athletes’ use.

Gary Shutt, director of communications, said although a slightly larger amount of money is going toward athletics than academics in the five-year plan, donors are simply giving their money where they see it’s needed.

“We’re having to play catch-up,” Shutt said. “Our athletic facilities are way below those of other Big 12 schools. Fortunately, we’ve had donors who’ve stepped up.”

…“Athletics are for all students, and when students go to games, it’s part of their OSU experience,” Shutt said. “While they may not actually be running on the track, they are still participating in athletics.”

…Allison Hechtner, elementary education freshman, said she thinks it is sad that donations to academics are sometimes overlooked in favor of athletic donations.

“I think the mission of the university has been distorted,” Hechtner said. “Instead of being based on academics, it’s now based on athletics and entertainment.”

Embattled Professor Ward Churchill has agreed to engage bestselling author and sought after speaker David Horowitz in a series of formal debates organized by Young America's Foundation and Students for Academic Freedom. The series of debates will kick off at George Washington University in Washington D.C. on April 6 in the Continental Ballroom.

I swear I was drunk seven days straight.

Cool.

Last year, the university commissioned the Urban Land Institute to study the development potential for the Square 54 site. ULI concluded the site is "far too valuable for anything less than a signature project."

It endorsed plans by GW and developers Boston Properties and KSI for an 800,000-square-foot, mixed-use project that would include ground-floor retail, office space, apartments and a grocery store.

ULI experts also support raising the campus density cap to a level slightly higher than the university has requested in its new plan.

GW has asked the city to ease the density restrictions on its campus to allow for more student housing, offices and classroom buildings. If the zoning commission denies the university's density request, GW would have to look at using its valuable Square 54 site for university-related uses.

In recent years, the university has been under pressure to grow revenue based on additional tuition dollars, which translates into increased enrollment -- exactly what the neighborhood is opposed to. By developing Square 54 to its full potential -- and leasing it for 60 years to Boston Properties and KSI -- GW would generate a funding stream that could alleviate tuition-based revenue pressure and slow the influx of new students.

The most powerful economies of "Old Europe," including France, Britain and Germany, are struggling to keep up with a huge expansion of higher education in Asia, a new report has found.

The survey, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, warns the members of the European Union to increase spending on schools and universities and tackle a crippling lack of social mobility within their societies, or put future economic growth in jeopardy.

"The time when Europe competed mostly with countries that offered low-skilled work at low wages has gone. ... Today, countries like China and India are starting to deliver high skills at low costs," the report said.

There is "no way" that Europe can stop rapidly developing countries from producing "wave after wave of highly skilled graduates … This is profoundly changing the rules of the game," said the study, compiled for the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank which aims to make Europe more competitive.

"France and Germany, which make up 35 per cent of the European Union's €11.6 trillion [£7.37 trillion] economy, are no longer among the world's leaders in developing knowledge and skills," the study says.

Of the world's top 20 universities, using the most widely cited index, only two - Oxford and Cambridge - are situated in Europe, the report notes.

We witnessing a cultural tragedy unfold. The French carry a Utopian ideal in their collective heads about what it means to be French. They are self-appointed defenders of Europe's real republican virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their rightful place is as Europe's leaders, and the state, embodying an idea of France, is the nation's master puppeteer.

None of this works in 2006. The state, as all others in Europe, is circumscribed by global market forces. France is only one of 25 EU member states and the way liberty, equality and fraternity have been delivered since the 1950s has to be recast.

…French students find themselves in the same ambiguous position as their country. Their only solution to the challenge of modernity is to defend the status quo to the last, even if it is evident it is malfunctioning.

Next week, European heads of state meet to advance the so-called Lisbon agenda, by which Europe committed itself to becoming the most dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. It is an empty farce.

"Schools of education mis-prepare would-be teachers in many ways. They deprive those would-be teachers of the opportunity to learn more important, substantive things during their undergraduate years; they require students to take hugely time-consuming courses of dubious intellectual value; and they inculcate would-be teachers in the educrats’ pernicious ideology. It’s an ideology that insists that virtually all of America’s social problems derive from institutionalized prejudices; that most knowledge is “socially constructed;” and that children are best taught by allowing their natural creativity to flourish, rather than by actually trying to teach the habits of self-discipline and mindfulness. Substantive knowledge and real skill in areas like mathematics, reading, and writing are clearly tertiary concerns at best for most teachers, because they are less than tertiary concerns for SOEs.

…A message to fellow provosts, college presidents, deans, and college trustees: let’s ring down the curtain on the SOEs. You have nothing to lose but your least-promising students and a cohort of faculty members who veer between giddy and grandiose ignorance. The students and faculty members worth keeping can find their places elsewhere in your college."

To ordinary Russians, Western-sponsored "democracy" meant watching helplessly while "liberal" elites looted the country and transferred vast fortunes to Western banks, to the profit of Western economies.

Harvard University, for example, is very belatedly investigating the conduct of professor Andrei Shleifer, who allegedly profited corruptly from a U.S. government-sponsored Russian privatization project on which he was an advisor. Shleifer was long protected by Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who as President Clinton's Treasury secretary himself helped push Russia's monstrous variant of privatization. If U.S. scholars are — rightly — outraged by the Shleifer case, imagine how ordinary Russians feel.

"U.S. officials are calling the Thursday seizure of 671,000 tablets of ecstasy at the Washington-British Columbia border part of an increasing new smuggling problem.

"The ecstasy is significant," said Mike Milne, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "The marijuana . . . we've just kind of gotten used to that over the last few years.

"The new trend we're seeing up in western Washington coming down from British Columbia is a rise in ecstasy over the last few years. It's just grown in leaps and bounds," Mr. Milne said Friday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized 210 kilograms of the drug as well as 375 kilograms of marijuana as part of a routine check Thursday night at Blaine, Wash., 40 kilometres southeast of Vancouver.

The drugs were found in 21 drums stashed among a total of 128 drums in a truck with Canadian licence plates. The manifest recorded the cargo as shredded scrap plastic.

While the truck driver and passenger were briefly detained, they were later released. No charges have been laid yet, Mr. Milne said.

Officers became suspicious after doing a gamma ray scan of the truck and ordered it to a loading dock for a complete examination. During that search, officers found the drugs.

"They were in bags inside the drums," Mr. Milne said. "Some of them were hockey bags, some of them were not concealed at all."

Lynn Gardner, an official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, called the seizure "significant."

"Narcotics smuggling from British Columbia continues to be a major... enforcement priority. Our continued vigilance has once again paid off."

Mr. Milne said use of ecstasy in the state is a growing problem.

"Certainly we're seeing more and more of it being smuggled in from Western Canada. We're certainly on the lookout for it," he said.

Mr. Milne said U.S. officials are working with the RCMP to see if the drugs are being manufactured in Canada or being trans-shipped through Canada from other countries.

He referred questions about what is being done to combat that problem in Canada to the RCMP.

The RCMP could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

The smuggling of drugs across the border south of Vancouver has not been far from the news in the past year

In January, U.S. customs officers charged two 17-year-old Canadians after they seized 5.3 kilograms of ecstasy concealed on them when they tried to cross the border in a vehicle.

The two male youths face state charges in Whatcom County.

Officers arrested the pair after examining the vehicle and doing personal searches.

And in a story that made news around the world, border officials found a drug tunnel running from a Vancouver suburb into Washington state.

The last of three men charged with digging the first sophisticated drug-smuggling tunnel under the U.S.-Canadian border pleaded guilty two weeks ago.

Timothy Woo faces at least five years in prison and a maximum fine of $2-million (U.S.) when he is sentenced for conspiracy to smuggle marijuana, as do Francis Devandra Raj and Jonathan Valenzuela, who previously entered guilty pleas.

The Surrey, B.C. men were arrested last July.

Authorities said they had just finished the 109-metre tunnel north of Lynden, Wash., which ran from the living room of a home on the U.S. side to a boarded-up Quonset hut on the Canadian side."

'Gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos, who recently came under fire from his own sister for calling himself a self-made man, is now taking back a statement he made on his Web site that he paid his own way through college.


The official bio on Mihos’s campaign Web site, www.christy2006.com originally contained the following sentence about the Stonehill College grad: “Christy paid his way through college by playing the saxophone, bass guitar, clarinet, and bouzouki (a long-necked mandolin) at Greek weddings.”


But sometime this month, the online bio for Mihos, a millionaire convenience store magnate who recently launched his official bid for the Corner Office as an independent,was amended, and the sentence was taken out.


Yesterday, Mihos told the Herald the sentence was axed because it is not true.


“Like many college students, my parents paid my tuition, and I am eternally grateful for it,” Mihos told the Herald. “I did have some part-time jobs while at school, and that’s where I got some of my spending money.”


Last month, Mihos’ sister Marlene Mihos Bucuvalas contacted the Herald to blast Mihos after reading her brother’s quote: “I’ve never had anything handed to me in my life.”


“We were all given things,” Mihos Bucuvalas said, adding that their father, Peter Mihos, gave his three children proceeds from real estate sales and gifted ownership of Christy’s Markets to his two sons. “My parents did so much for us.”'

TSU regents placed President Priscilla Slade on paid leave after a nine-hour private meeting Thursday and asked attorneys to expand their investigation of her spending.

Slade is expected to remain on paid leave at least until May 5, the next regularly scheduled Texas Southern University board meeting. In the interim, the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm's investigation that was limited to her spending $85,000 furnishing and $138,159 landscaping her new home is being broadened to other purchases Slade made with university money.

…TSU leaders will also hire a state auditor for a full external look at the school's finances, officials said.

No interim president was named Thursday, but the board appointed a four-member administrative team to sign off on TSU expenditures.

Both Slade and regents refused to comment on the announcements or Thursday's lengthy discussion, which included a preliminary report from Bracewell & Giuliani on how Slade spent school money on furniture, landscaping, audio-visual equipment and a security system for her Memorial Park-area home.

The property, located on a 17,675-square-foot lot on Terrace Drive, was worth $424,000 last year when it was just a vacant lot, according to tax records.

Slade repaid the landscaping bill after regents questioned the expense. She has said the university mistakenly paid the bill without her knowledge. (Would that have been when the bad check writer was CFO?)

Credit card statements released last month showed Slade spent $94,000 on meals, hotel rooms, event tickets and other entertainment-related expenses last year — nearly double the amount allowed by her employment contract.

In her seventh year as TSU president, Slade earns a base salary of $250,000 a year. She also received a $14,400 a year car allowance and $48,000 a year for housing expenses.

…Several regents have already been called in for questioning by the Harris County District Attorney's Office, which is conducting a criminal investigation that could take months.

…"That money could have been used to develop students better," [one student] said. "This administration has its priorities in the wrong places. This administration has its priorities in landscaping and furniture."

'Rioters [in Paris today] set fire to a bookshop and destroyed the terrace of a café in the square in front of the Sorbonne University in the Latin Quarter.'

has passed ‘AN ACT relating to private school licensing…’ The vote was strongly in favor of the bill: 51 for, 7 against in the House and 27 for, 3 against in the Senate. It was signed by the governor a few days ago.

As I understand it, the bill requires a post-secondary institution in Wyoming and/or granting degrees to Wyoming citizens to be accredited, or to be a candidate for accreditation. I believe the exemption for religious schools only permits them to offer degrees in theological subjects.

Momentum may be building to undo plans for TCF Financial Corp. to have a naming rights agreement for a new on-campus football stadium at the University of Minnesota.

State Senate leaders have introduced a bill that would prohibit the university from using private money for the $248 million stadium if the donors are allowed to determine the stadium's name, a move that could unravel the stadium's financing.

A year ago, university officials announced that they had reached an agreement with TCF that, over 25 years, would bring $35 million from the bank in exchange for naming the facility "TCF Bank Stadium." (Has a nice ring to it, no?)

But Sen. Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, said that the stadium's fortunes were being hurt because legislators were privately uncomfortable with the TCF agreement and that the stadium ought to be entirely funded with public money. Pogemiller is being joined by Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar. (Goddamn Minnesota socialists.)

Rep. Ron Abrams, R-Minnetonka, who sponsored the university's stadium proposal, said that while he does not support Pogemiller, the issue is dividing legislators. Abrams said the university's School of Management is named for the late Curt Carlson, the Carlson Companies' founder.

"Who do you think that was named after, or which companies were involved there?" Abrams said.

Pogemiller said the stadium's naming agreement, however, takes the issue a step too far.

"Naming a public facility in a business deal after a private corporation -- I do believe that's a problem," he said. A plan to charge students a fee to help fund the stadium, along with the naming rights agreement, were the two provisions "in the way" of approving the plan, he said. (Ah yes. The student athletics fee.)

"Nothing is happening on the stadium," Pogemiller said. "They don't have anything going right now."

Though university officials said the bills do not yet appear to have widespread backing, they acknowledged that the proposals could insert a major complication into the stadium's chances this session.

Richard Pfutzenreuter, the university's chief financial officer, said the university is concerned that the proposals would not only jeopardize financing for the stadium, but also would have a chilling affect (the writer means “effect”) on other attempts to obtain corporate and philanthropic contributions.

"We're a little nervous," added Pfutzenreuter, who said legislative opposition so far is confined to "a pocket here, a pocket [there]."

"We still absolutely believe that the plan we have is the best one," he said.

TCF spokesman Jason Korstange said that the company will not get involved in the debate and that there is no indication it is being driven by political opposition to TCF Chairman Bill Cooper, one of the state's most influential Republicans and a former state party chairman. "We just hold to that commitment," he said. "Quite frankly, it is the university's deal."

For now, it may be difficult to determine just how critical the issue may become.

"I think a lot of other legislators are quietly uncomfortable with that kind of stuff," said Rep. Tim Mahoney, DFL-St. Paul, who said he intends to introduce language on the House floor asking that the naming rights agreement be eliminated from the plan. "I'm not sure if I am going to vote for [a stadium] with a corporate name on it."

Under the university's proposal, the 50,000-seat stadium would be built with $99 million in state money and $149 million raised by the university. Of the $149 million, university officials said that they have secured $53 million in corporate and philanthropic contributions and that they would get another $53 million from a plan to charge students $50 a semester in fees to support the project. Once state funds are committed, Pfutzenreuter said, the university will seek the remaining $43 million from private donors. (A bit vague that, eh? Seek the remaining 43 mill from private donors? What happens to the student fees if that doesn’t work out?)

Abrams said he plans to push the stadium proposal forward, but acknowledged that critics are "grabbing hold of" the student-fee and naming-rights provisions. "It's going to be a debate that we're going to have," he said.


At the Capitol

On Tuesday, the university's challenges in getting the stadium approved were on display at a meeting of the House Capital Investment Committee. Chairman Dan Dorman, R-Albert Lea, said that the university is not making its priorities clear and that it is trying instead to separate the stadium from its other academic-related building requests.

University President Robert Bruininks defended the separation. "I would urge this state not to make it a choice between academic and nonacademic priorities." (And why not?)

Dorman said he, too, has problems with the naming rights agreement. "The more I look at it, the less I like the plan," he said of the overall stadium proposal. "It's starting to look like there's more and more problems with the way it was configured."

Harvard University has a $25 billion endowment and in 2003-4, only 6 percent of its undergraduates were of sufficiently modest means to qualify for Pell Grants. While Pell eligibility varies based on a number of factors, only 5 percent of Harvard undergraduates that year came from families with incomes less than $30,000.

At Trinity University, in Washington, there’s a lot less money in the bank — but a much larger share of students are getting Pell Grants. The endowment is about $9 million. In 2003-4, fully half of Trinity’s students were poor enough for Pell Grants, and 26 percent came from families with incomes less than $30,000.

If the comparison makes anyone in Cambridge squeamish (or just has someone objecting to the comparison’s fairness), that’s precisely the point of a new Web site, Economic Diversity of Colleges …


…[T]he new data drive home that many of the most prestigious and most wealthy colleges in the country — public and private — aren’t necessarily the leaders when it comes to educating low-income students…

…Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity, says that she thinks “it’s shameful” that the wealthiest institutions in the United States aren’t educating more low-income students. “They make the big headlines when they drop the loan requirements for students, but that’s a drop in the bucket, considering their condition,” she said.

Pickens recently donated $165 million to renovate the football stadium and facilities for other sports, but Holder said the day-to-day operation is the burden of other supporters.

"Facilities is one part of the puzzle," Holder said. "The other part is an operating budget. That's the responsibility of every fan and supporter we've got.”

Donors wanting football tickets will face much of the cost. For box seats at Boone Pickens Stadium, annual donations will be $2,500, up from $1,000 last season. Donations for seats between the 40-yard-lines increase from $500 to $800 per ticket. Overall cost for a seat on the 20-yard-line, including a $25 increase for donations from $100 to $125, go from $356 to $445.

And for the first time, lower level seats between the goal line and 20-yard line require a $100 donation.

"The majority of people we ran this past asked why," said Joe Muller, associate athletic director for development and external affairs.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. --Police charged a university official after he allegedly bit a man in the calf when the man stopped to help him after a car accident.

Robert E. Mays, 64, an associate dean at the University of Southern Indiana, was charged with battery and operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. He was released from Vanderburgh County jail on a $100 bond.


…Mays was driving on U.S. 41 in northern Evansville Tuesday night when he hit a vehicle in front of him, according to police reports. No one was injured in the wreck.

A passer-by who stopped to check on Mays tried to stop him from returning to his car.

Mays then bent down and bit the man's calf, leaving a bruise and teeth marks, police said.

Police said Mays refused to take a breath test.

Why did Larry Summers get forced out of the Harvard presidency? There were many reasons, starting with Mr. Summers's impolitic remarks about women's ability in the sciences. He also annoyed the faculty by suggesting that they teach more introductory-level classes, not just narrow courses about their research specialities.

But as Mr. Summers must have known, mere exhortation will never change university teaching. Although we all give lip service to classroom instruction, there's simply no reward in it. Teaching doesn't advance your career.

In fact, it holds you back. As Penn State University scholar James Fairweather has shown, professors who spend more time on instruction-related activities make lower salaries. The more time you devote to research, meanwhile, the more money you earn. These numbers hold constant across different types of institutions, from so-called "Research-One" universities to liberal arts colleges.

And don't think teaching will help you win tenure, either. Indeed, young professors are often warned that a strong commitment to the classroom might actually hurt their chances for promotion. "If you excel at teaching, someone will undoubtedly think you're putting too much into your teaching and you should be doing research," one respondent told University of Southern California scholars William Tierney and Estela Bensimon, who have written about faculty evaluation. Privately, then, many faculty admit to neglecting their instruction. "I could be better," one young professor confessed, "but if I spent my time improving, I wouldn't get tenure."

Sure, we collect student evaluations and occasionally observe one another in the classroom. But nobody believes that these "measures" measure anything. A poor score on a student survey usually means you're a lousy instructor, but even the worst teachers can sometimes garner decent marks by going easy on the kids after midterms. And faculty almost always give each other rave reviews. [If he’s right about this, then the massive expansion of mandatory, lengthy, and often multiple end of semester teaching evaluation forms in most universities is a real scandal. And I think he’s right.]

"It's screwy," one professor confided to Tierney and Bensimon. "We're working as if this is Lake Woebegone - all the faculty are above average." Indeed, 90 percent of American college professors say they're better-than-average teachers. They can't all be right. [Every college and university department knows perfectly well which of its professors are bad teachers. It’s only a matter of having the will to do something about them -- dock them pay, take them out of the classroom and make them full-time administrators, attempt to improve their teaching (though UD thinks it unlikely that really bad teachers can be transformed into good ones), etc.]

How did we arrive at this strange state of affairs? The story begins about a century ago, with the creation of the modern American research university. Modeled largely after German universities, where many leading American educators had studied, these new institutions privileged original scholarship over teaching. "It is to the discoverers, in far greater measure than the transmitters, that the world is under obligation," declared a professor of Latin at the University of Chicago in 1902.

Some proponents stressed the social utility of new knowledge, which would help the United States improve health, housing, transportation, and more. Others celebrated scholarship for its own sake, not for any practical application. "Remember the research ideal, to keep it holy!" intoned another Chicago professor, echoing the sacred Jewish injunction about the Sabbath.

But to attract students - and to pay the bills - scholars were still required to teach. Some professors happily accepted this duty; more often than not, however, they downplayed or ignored it. Asked what he would do with the undergraduates who had gathered in his laboratory for instruction, one Johns Hopkins University professor quipped, "I shall neglect them."

He was joking, of course, but only in part. And the joke will continue until we devise new ways to evaluate and reward teaching. [Getting into bs territory here.] As my New York University colleague Ken Bain has written, all professors should have to "construct an argument" for their teaching - just as they do for their scholarship. [This kind of exercise is doomed to doltish ed school levels of discourse.] This argument would explain the objectives of their courses, the classroom strategies they use, the ways they measure student learning, and so on. [Objectives, strategies, measurement - I know of no truly great professor who thinks or teaches like this, no great course that can be reduced to this.] Like any good argument, it would draw from evidence gathered during the course: syllabi, tests, and student comments. [This is a recipe for turning your best, most independent teachers into file-cabinet bureaucrats.]

Second, tenure committees need to make such evaluations matter. In my 15 years as a professor, I've met many good teachers who were denied tenure for lack of scholarship. But I've never encountered a good scholar who didn't get tenure because he or she couldn't teach.

Over the past hundred years, universities have devised intricate peer-review systems to judge scholarship. [These are often themselves bogus, based on simple article and book and grant counting. Do you think anyone actually read what Ward Churchill published, or took note of the quality of his publishers?] Yet we still don't have a serious method to judge - or to reward - our work in the classroom. [Actually, we’re beginning to. Online reviews look more and more attractive. You don’t need all that paper-pushing, easy to distort bullshit about incomes and inflows. Just have advisors chat with students on occasion about their professors, and keep checking things like Rate My Professors.] And until that changes, nobody will be able to improve college teaching. Not even the president of Harvard.

'A self-described sentencing expert who claimed to be a consultant for numerous Center City criminal-defense lawyers was arrested yesterday after a Philadelphia grand jury accused him of defrauding the city courts out of almost $400,000.

District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said Richard Gottfried and three alleged accomplices preyed on the lax procedures of some lawyers and city judges to bill the courts for presentencing investigations and other consulting work he never performed.

Abraham called Gottfried, 49, "the great pretender," alleging that he used a "diploma mill" to provide a résumé that included a purported law degree and state psychologist license.

The investigating grand jury issued a presentment recommending that Gottfried be charged with corrupt organizations, forgery, criminal conspiracy, theft by deception, tampering with public records, and bribery.


…According to the grand jury's report and presentment, Gottfried first appeared in Philadelphia in about August 2000 and began contacting criminal-defense lawyers in Center City offering his services as a "sentencing mitigation specialist" who could perform presentence investigations or testify as an expert at sentencing.

Within a year, the grand jury reported, Gottfried began getting work, especially from lawyers with court appointments to represent indigent defendants. Gottfried obtained a city business-privilege license and a tax account as a mitigation specialist.

In December 2001, the grand jury found, Gottfried leased an office at 924-28 Cherry St. already used by two defense lawyers and Miller, the criminal investigator.

One of the lawyers, Fred Harrison, retained Gottfried in March 2002 for a capital murder case. But before Gottfried could testify, the grand jury found, the prosecutor researching the backgrounds of defense witnesses discovered that Gottfried's law degree from the University of Wexford was bogus; the university was a mail-order diploma mill.'

Michigan universities paid more than 500 professors $23.2 million to be absent from the classroom during the 2004-05 school year, even as the state's economy nosedived and parents and students struggled to pay double-digit tuition hikes.

And lax systems are failing to make sure professors use their sabbaticals -- paid time off intended for research, expanding skills and recharging mental batteries -- in ways that benefit universities and students.

Critics question the value of sabbaticals as college affordability recedes and professors already are relieved of many routine tasks by graduate students and other assistants.

"Why do people in higher ed have to recharge their batteries when people almost nowhere else in the world recharge them?" asked Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University and author of the book, "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much."


At Michigan's 13 public universities, 558 full-time faculty members received paid sabbaticals in 2004-05, a Detroit News analysis found. That's about 4.4 percent of full-time instructors.

The $23.2 million cost -- calculated using sabbatical and pay records The News obtained under Michigan's Freedom of Information Act -- represents only the salaries paid to professors while they were away from their jobs. When health insurance and other benefits are included, the cost of the sabbaticals increases to about $31 million.

The $31 million, which does not include the cost of temporary instructors frequently hired to fill in for absent professors, represents less than 1 percent of the 13 universities' 2004-05 general fund expenditures of $3.9 billion.


But Michigan's cash-strapped colleges socked students with tuition and fee hikes this year of between 7.5 percent and 19 percent. The schools blamed cuts in state funding.

Sabbaticals are approved time away from the university, typically used to conduct research, publish books and articles and upgrade skills. Proponents say they allow professors to gain fresh insights they share with students, and are critical to attracting and retaining top-flight professors and researchers.

But critics say professors typically work only nine to 10 months per year, their teaching loads have dropped dramatically since the 1960s and their schedules already allow ample time to conduct most research.

College sports… cost a lot, and when it comes to vying for the money needed to keep big-time athletes in whirlpools, the field is slanted heavily toward state schools. This is especially true in football, where only sixteen of the 117 schools in Division I-A — college football's highest level — are private.

Most private schools simply cannot afford the multiple millions it takes to pay for the equipment, 80-plus scholarships, and six-figure (or higher) coaches' salaries needed to compete on the highest level.

Unfortunately, success in football leads to dominance in lots of other sports because football offers a big profit, a rarity in intercollegiate athletics. The result is that mammoth, football-playing public schools are increasingly dictating terms in all Division I sports, including basketball, the only other profit-maker.

…[S]tate universities have much bigger student bodies — and therefore alumni bases and football crowds — than private schools, in large part because taxpayers absorb so much of their costs. So megaversities like Florida State and the University of Georgia have more than 26,000 undergraduates, while private schools like Duke and Vanderbilt have only about 6,000.

But having the size necessary to fill stadiums and arenas with tens-of-thousands of fans is just the start of state schools' advantage. Being able to build palatial stadia is next.

To be fair, much of the funding for state megaversities' facilities comes from student fees and private sources. But don't be fooled. Money is fungible, so as a practical matter taxpayers are subsidizing everything on state university campuses. Students are able to afford heftier athletics fees, for instance, because taxpayers are handling so much of kids' educational costs. Similarly, private donors are able to concentrate resources on athletics because taxpayers are covering academic needs.

Even with all these hidden advantages, though, states still sometimes decide to put taxpayer dollars directly into college sports. The state of Pennsylvania, for example, recently spent $53 million to help build a 12,500-seat basketball arena at the University of Pittsburgh. And don't look now, Minnesotans, but Golden Gopher football boosters are lobbying the state to take $100 million from you to help build them a new football stadium.

The fleecing of taxpayers for sports, of course, is the most disgusting part of this story. But for thousands of small schools and their fans the tale is also sad because, for them, the joy of intercollegiate athletics is slowly being destroyed by megaversities that take public dollars to drive the little guys off the courts and fields.

Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford, lamenting the plight of small Catholic colleges, recently captured that feeling of loss. Though long ago driven out of football, he wrote, until just a few decades ago small schools were still able to compete on a level basketball court. But then "the NCAA expanded its field, big television money came in, and large state institutions that had never cared much for basketball wanted a bite out of the apple."

Now, "even the richest Catholic colleges have trouble competing for the best players when the big-time public schools can offer state-of-the-art facilities, special team dorms, even chartered game flights. Frankly, it's taken a lot of fun out of college basketball."

With plans calling for almost 39,000 square feet in the main building, plus an 1,165-square-foot pool house, the home that Joseph M. Jacobs, a 53-year-old hedge fund manager, wants to build for his family on 11 acres in the Conyers Farm section of town would be twice the size of Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch and would top the Greenwich mansion occupied by Leona Helmsley, the self-appointed queen of a real estate empire.

Whether the Jacobses' homestead turns out to be the town's largest depends on how one measures. (Be glad you're not the tax assessor.) Do finished basements count? What about guest cottages, barns and gazebos? Should ice rinks and twenty-car garages count as much as other structures?

Still, the unbuilt house has come under fire from neighbors whose own homes easily surpass the 10,000-square-foot mark. They say there is insufficient foliage to screen the mansion from the road. Another complaint is that the planned facade stretches about 220 feet from end to end.

"It's just a huge departure," said George James, a next-door neighbor who told the town planning and zoning commission in December that the new palazzo-style home would undercut the "rural character" he has worked hard to preserve in the century-old farmhouse he owns near the Jacobses' property line. Mr. James also owns a much newer 20,000-square-foot mansion behind the farmhouse, when enclosed areas are counted.

Barry Hawkins, the general counsel for the Conyers Farm homeowners' association, which is made up of the development's residents, told town officials at that meeting that other homeowners also had problems with the proposal. "It is too large, it is too in-your-face, it is too visible," he said.

…Roger J. Pearson, a former first selectman of Greenwich, offered some support for the house. In a letter to town officials, he expressed hope that the furor was not built on "manufactured issues to suit the purposes of neighbors who upon completion of their own amply sized residences become instant conservationists."

…[Another resident], whose 31,600 square feet of living space in the north part of Greenwich is one of the largest homes on the tax rolls, has sparred occasionally with neighbors, but backed down last fall when they objected to his plan to encase his tennis court in a bubble for year-round use.

But the Jacobses have inspired fierce opposition.

Town records show the couple downsized four kitchens and two laundries that town officials deemed excessive and redesigned a drainage system. The couple had a harder time showing that the proposed septic system could handle an 11-bedroom main house and secondary structures.

They notified Ms. Fox's office on Feb. 13 that they were temporarily withdrawing their request for a special permit, required when a planned structure exceeds 150,000 cubic feet, as theirs does, to address the concerns of town officials. "I do intend to refile," Mr. Jacobs said on Friday.

One thing the couple has not done so far is shrink the plans for the house, which now includes his-and-her dressing suites; a five-car garage; a home theater; a staff lounge; and most spectacularly, a 3,600-square-foot indoor gym, complete with its own squash court, golf simulator, massage room, beauty parlor and indoor pool, with views of a sunken garden.

The current design may make it hard for them to win the consent they need from the Conyers Farm homeowners association, which represents members of the 1,500-acre development, built on a former dairy farm that straddles the Connecticut-New York border. Conyers Farm has long had extensive guidelines, backed up by restrictions in the landowners' deeds, aimed at maintaining the development's country look. Lots in Conyers Farm must be 10 acres or more. Glimpses of homes and stables are all that should be visible from the road.

Sentries limit access to all but a few of the 70 or so homes that make up the development.

…Gigi Mahon-Theobald, a neighbor who presides over the planning and architectural review committee of the homeowners' association, said her group advised the Jacobses to remove the side wings or wrap them behind the house to minimize what would be visible from the road and polo fields. On Friday, Mr. Jacobs said, "Trust me, it won't work."

He said he wanted a home that would be suitable for entertaining and have room for his children's friends and his future grandchildren to sleep over. "We have one guest room," he said of his current 5-bedroom house. "I go down in the morning and there's people sleeping on sofas."

Mrs. Mahon-Theobald said the association recognized that the Jacobses paid $5.5 million for their lot and it was "not in the business of trying to turn people down." But she did not recall a project in Conyers Farm "that aroused anywhere near the depth of passion really that this one has. It's really kind of an uproar."

Those sentiments were on display at the December meeting of the planning and zoning commission. There, Charles Campbell, Jr., Mr. James's lawyer, ridiculed claims made by Mr. Jacobs's lawyer, Thomas Heagney, that three of the four kitchens were actually kitchenettes and could be further downsized into wet bars.

"I doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs are going to want their five live-in staff people to have coffee with them in the main breakfast room down on the main floor," Mr. Campbell said.

Frank Farricker, a commissioner of planning and zoning, marveled, "Are there really four kitchens in the house?"

"Depends on how you're defining a kitchen," Mr. Heagney replied.

LEWISVILLE -- In what can only be briefly described as a seance, about a dozen people gathered at a dimly lit church and tried to conjure up the dead. One saw visions of a man without a face; another felt a dead girl come into the room and try to tell her grieving mother that everything is all right.

The group delving into this paranormal realm was led by a University of North Texas tenured professor and her graduate students, who believe that ghosts don't haunt, they heal.

Counseling professor Jan Holden facilitates these "induced after-death communications," or IADCs, and said she has seen them help people deal with the loss of loved ones. She gives a sympathetic ear to people who say the dead have come back to them.

"There is just no basis to say this is not a legitimate area of research. Thousands of people have had after-death communications, and probably what's most hurtful is a culture that doesn't prepare people for these experiences," said Holden, coordinator of the counseling program at UNT's College of Education. "I have no reason not to believe it's real."

But Holden, who has been at UNT since 1988, said she's more interested in the beneficial, therapeutic effects of IADCs than in ghost hunting.

Reaching a dead friend

Holden patiently watched and offered encouragement as one of her former graduate students led Elli Covelli into an IADC. The 54-year-old Dallas woman was trying to find out whether a friend, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, shot himself by accident or on purpose.

Covelli's eyes followed as Lisa Lane's hand moved slowly back and forth. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, just as Lane instructed, but nothing happened.

"He ain't here. There's nothing. I'm not getting anything," Covelli said. "It's going to be four years, and I don't have any answers."

They tried again. Nothing.

She tried several more times and started to see something.

An elevator took her up to a garden lush with purple flowers. There was a faceless man on a swing. Covelli believes it was her friend.

"I kind of think that was who was on the swing next to me because I got this warm, fuzzy feeling," she said….

A K-State psychology professor was arrested Thursday on charges of stalking a former member of the K-State track and field team and violating a protective order.

John Uhlarik, 63, was arrested at about 11 a.m. Thursday at his home, 2340 Park Drive. He was arrested on reports of continual intentional, malicious and repeated following or harassing of the victim, according to a release by the Riley County Police Department.
RCPD officers also served a search warrant at Uhlarik's home.

The protective order dates back to 2004 when Uhlarik was arrested for stalking the same victim at Ahearn Field House.

After the incident in 2004, Uhlarik was suspended with pay from teaching his classes at K-State for the remainder of spring 2004.

Stephen White, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the university is aware of the situation.

"We are assessing the situation and monitoring it as well," he said.

White would not comment on whether Uhlarik would be suspended again.

Uhlarik's bond was set at $5,000.

A candidate for the board of selectmen is coming under fire by some who say he misled the public about his educational background.

Arthur Barnes, a former Salem fire chief, said yesterday he got a master's degree in business administration from Belford University in 2002 thinking it was a credible institution. The program, however, awards degrees online at a low price without completing any classes. It is not recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Web site — www.belforduniversity.org — offers master's degrees based on "life experience" for $479. Users are asked to submit their work experience on the Web to qualify for the degree. And if there is no work experience, they can still get a degree by finishing an online multiple-choice test.

The program even lets users choose their grade-point averages. A 3.0 GPA is free, but they can earn a 4.0 for an extra $75. The program also promises to ship the degrees out within a week.

Barnes said he went through the program after learning that his studies at the National Fire Academy could qualify him for the equivalent of a master's degree. At the time, he said, he thought Belford was credible and decided to go with it because of the low price.

Now, he said, he realizes the degree might be illegitimate, but his experience is enough to qualify him for a master's. He finished the executive fire officer program in 1998 and got an associate's degree from Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Mass., in 1976. He said he chose the Belford program in 2002, knowing that he'd be retiring from the department soon and wanted something to demonstrate his education that future recruiters could understand.

"If somebody wishes to discount the diploma ... that's fine, but the work that I did to earn a diploma was certainly legitimate," he said.

Stephen Campbell, an outgoing member of the budget committee, is one of Barnes' critics. He said, after looking at the Web site, that there was no way anybody could think the degrees are legitimate. Anyone who believes they are, he said, isn't qualified for the office.

"There is no one above the age of — let's be generous — 8 who didn't know what they were doing was wrong,' Campbell said. "No one thinks you can earn a master's degree for less than $500 in seven days, so Arthur Barnes is either not ready for the responsibilities of a selectman or he's making up stories."

Campbell said he got a master's in management from Purdue University in Indiana in 1981, after earning a bachelor's degree in political science in 1979. The bachelor's degree to 3 ½ years to earn, and the master's took two years, he said. He said he doesn't think Barnes' work at the fire academy qualifies him for a master's.

"I'm under no delusion that you need a college degree of any sort (to serve as a selectman)," Campbell said. "What I do require of the candidates is that they tell the truth."

...[T]he choice of basketball coach will determine not only the health of the men's basketball program, but of the entire IU athletic department--and to some extent the entire university--for decades to come.

…"At Indiana, basketball has been the driving force in terms of how much money has been generated," not only for the athletic department but for the university as a whole...

…There hasn't been much good news coming out of Indiana's athletic department recently. Three football coaches and three athletic directors in five years helped put the department in financial distress, and unrest has swirled around the men's basketball program since Bob Knight's firing in 2000.

It's difficult to draw a direct connection between those problems and overall giving to IU, in part because large, one-time contributions can skew the picture. But the university has seen annual contributions drop from $220 million in 2001 to $150 million in 2005.

Local IU alums say that for the giving tide to rise in Bloomington, the university must restore stability to the athletic department and the basketball program in particular.

…problems in the athletic department, particularly the basketball program, cast a pall over the entire university.

"The trauma around the whole Mike Davis situation detracts from what they're trying to do down there," said Stitle, whose family has attended IU for three generations. "It's always portrayed negatively. Never positively. I think that has a negative impact on the morale of the faculty and alumni."

"…Basketball is the lynchpin to everything at Indiana,” [comments one insider].

A former top White House aide was arrested on Thursday in the Maryland suburbs on charges that he stole merchandise from a number of retailers, the police in Montgomery County, Md., said Friday.

The former aide, Claude A. Allen, 45, was President Bush's top domestic policy adviser until resigning last month. Known as a rising conservative star, he previously served as deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, and in 2003 the White House announced its intention to nominate him to a seat on the federal appeals court based in Richmond, Va. Democrats raised questions about the nomination, and it never came to a vote.

The police said Mr. Allen was seen on Jan. 2 leaving a department store in Gaithersburg, Md., with merchandise for which he had not paid. He was apprehended by a store employee and issued a misdemeanor citation for theft, said Lt. Eric Burnett, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department.

A statement issued on Friday by the police said store employees saw Mr. Allen fill a shopping bag with merchandise and put additional items into a shopping cart. He then sought, and received, a refund for some of the items and left the store without paying for others.

The Police Department said that as a result of an investigation it opened after the initial incident in January, it found that Mr. Allen had received refunds of more than $5,000 last year at stores like Target and Hecht's. Mr. Allen was arrested on Thursday and charged in connection with a series of allegedly fraudulent returns. The police said he was charged with a theft scheme over $500 and theft over $500.

"He would buy items, take them out to his car and return to the store with the receipt," the police said in the statement. "He would select the same items he had just purchased and then return them for a refund."

…Mr. Allen went to the White House after his nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stalled in the Senate. The nomination never came to a vote, in part because some Democrats raised questions about comments he had made in 1984, while working for Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. He had been quoted as saying that Mr. Helms's opponent that year was vulnerable because his campaign could be "linked with the queers."

The fascinating front-page article on Omar Williams's undistinguished academic career ["A Player Rises Through the Cracks," March 5] before being accepted by George Washington University left one vital question unanswered: Precisely what courses has he taken at GW that have him on schedule to graduate in May? Given his lack of academic achievement before arriving at George Washington, and the time demands placed on him by its basketball program, it is difficult to believe that he could have successfully concluded any genuinely college-level course. It seems that the courses taken by many so-called student athletes at Division I schools are of precious little educational value and serve simply to ensure athletic eligibility.

...publiciz[e] what classes student-athletes [are] taking, their teachers and academic advisors, and their grades in those classes.

Basically, everything but the athlete’s name would be disclosed under The Drake Group’s vision. Refraining from naming names, [Executive Director B. David] Ridpath said, would make the focus on the institution, not the athlete.

“Even to some of the most jaded viewers of college athletics, the APR [Academic Progress Rate system] in principle and on the surface sounds like a really good idea,” Ridpath said. “What we’re not getting at is what is going on under the surface.”

The APR keeps track of athletes staying eligible and in school by way of a point system. A score of 925 is thought to translate to an appealing graduation rate.

Ridpath, though, said there was more to it, and references a recent Washington Post story regarding Omar Williams, a basketball standout at George Washington University.

Williams has maintained eligibility at the elite private institution and reportedly is set to graduate in May, despite not graduating from high school, earning no grades at three different prep schools and being the subject of numerous sources saying he has no interest in academics.

“How is he making it at a school like George Washington?” Ridpath said. “We want full transparency of what’s going on behind the scenes."

About 2 a.m. one sleepless night, sophomore Jordan Nott checked himself into George Washington University Hospital.

He was depressed, he said, and thinking about suicide.

Within a day and a half of arriving there, he got a letter from a GWU administrator saying his "endangering behavior" violated the code of student conduct. He faced possible suspension and expulsion from school, the letter said, unless he withdrew and deferred the charges while he got treatment.

In the meantime, he was barred from campus.

"It was like a stab in the back," he said. He felt they were telling him, "We're going to wipe our hands clean of you."

His response has college administrators around the country taking notice: Nott sued the university and individuals involved. The school violated federal law protecting Americans with disabilities, the complaint argues. The law covers mental as well as physical impairments.

In essence, it says the school betrayed him by sharing confidential treatment information and suspending him just when he most needed help.

In court documents filed this week, the university's attorneys defended the actions taken, denied that Nott was disabled and suggested that his conduct might bar his recovery. And they asked that the charges be dismissed for the individuals named -- mostly administrators and counselors. The university policies might seem impersonal, spokeswoman Tracy Schario said, but they are designed to keep both individuals and the community safe.

Suicidal students have always forced tough calls. But with shifting legal ground, growing threats of lawsuits and increasing numbers of troubled teenagers entering colleges, many administrators are even more worried about how to handle them.

'Ohio State was placed on three years' probation Friday for using an ineligible player, a ruling that wipes out records from four NCAA tournament appearances by the men's basketball team — including a trip to the 1999 Final Four.

...The Buckeyes won't be barred from postseason play as a result of using the ineligible player from 1999-2002 under former coach Jim O'Brien. However, the school will have to repay tournament revenues of about $800,000 for the four years in which Boban Savovic played. He received improper gifts, including housing and cash, from a booster.

Ohio State must [also] take down the 1999 Final Four banner which hangs from the rafters in Value City Arena.'

A group of University of New Hampshire students, parents and alumni gathered at the State House yesterday to ask Gov. John Lynch and lawmakers to do whatever possible to save the four varsity sports cut last month from the school's athletic department.


...Some alumni and students suspect that the university's plan to build a $25 million to $35 million football stadium "will distract the athletics department and will require even further cuts." Alumnus Brian Lucey, who grew up in Concord and graduated from UNH in 2000, called the plan "fiscally irresponsible."

"They want to build up their two main sports, basketball and football, into something bigger,"said Lucey, a former swimmer. "That may just not be possible."

Scarano has maintained that the money for the stadium is separate from the money for the sports teams.

…libertarian solution [to the] academic fraud of college athletics. [E]liminate all standards… Let colleges suit up for four years any able-bodied player whether or not he bothers to see the inside of any classroom … Universities as fine as George Washington [have] accepted clearly unqualified players… [whose] term papers [are] written for them [by] jock loving enablers on the faculty. …Why don’t we make honest men of college athletes? Some simply aren’t capable of college work.

Swimmer Jenny Thompson, America's most decorated Olympian, is rejecting a high honor from the University of New Hampshire to protest the school's decision to cut its men's swimming team.

Thompson said she is turning down the Charles Holmes Pettee Medal, the highest honor given by UNH's Alumni Association. Thompson did not attend UNH.

"I grew up in New Hampshire and was proud to be an Olympian from the state. The message from the largest university in the state is that it doesn't support Olympic sports, and I can't really accept an award from a university that does such a thing," she said Tuesday in a brief telephone interview.

…The university also is eliminating men's and women's tennis and women's crew and cutting the men's ski team in half as it tries to erase half of a $1 million annual shortfall.

A review of UNH athletics showed the program was stressed because it had too many teams -- four more than the average Division I school, Athletic Director Marty Scarano said when he announced the cuts in late January.

Several protesters said Tuesday that UNH's football and men's basketball teams both run huge deficits, while the men's swim team only costs $56,000 a year.

…University spokeswoman Kim Billings said the cuts were painful, but the university needs football and basketball to maintain its Division I status and remain in America East, which are priorities. She also said the university will honor the students' athletic scholarships if they want to remain at UNH and help them transfer if they don't.

Right now, every student pays an annual fee of nearly $700 to support the athletics program, although only 675 of about 10,500 undergraduates play varsity sports, she said.

…The university predicts more cuts if it cannot close half the annual deficit with better fundraising and ticket sales, she said.

Newark Police Lt. Thomas LeMin said two of the suspects were armed with shotguns when they barged into a fellow teammate's home at the Park Place Apartments not far from the university's campus. The theft of steroids and other controlled substances appears to be the primary motive for the robbery, LeMin said.

The alleged victim told The (Wilmington) News Journal he has been dismissed from the team, apparently for possessing steroids.

University of Louisville students were told in 2002 that their annual $50 athletic fee would expire this summer.

But now U of L may not keep its promise, and some students wonder whether their $1.5 million contribution to sports programs could be better spent on other campus activities or even offset rising tuition.

…U of L President James R. Ramsey would not comment about the fee, saying through a spokesman that the school is still working on its budget for 2006-07.

He told the trustees last month the fee is set to expire this summer, but Athletic Director Tom Jurich's contract says the money would be available to the athletic department.

Jurich's contract runs through 2016 and can be renewed annually after that.

Jurich declined to comment, referring questions to Ramsey.



…Trustees approved a $25 fee for 2002-03 that would rise to $50 by 2005-06 and expire after that without explicit renewal by the trustees.

They also called for a possible fee renewal proposal to be discussed with student government before any action by trustees.

But then-interim President Carol Z. Garrison signed a contract with Jurich that said the university would provide $1.4 million in tuition revenue to the athletic program each year starting in 2005-06.

In June 2004, Ramsey extended Jurich's contract through 2016. That revision said the athletic department would receive all the money generated by the student athletic fee -- "$50 per student per year. Thereafter, such fee shall not be less than $50 per student per year."

Bill Brammell, a senior and Student Government Association president, said students were not consulted.

"They didn't even wait to evaluate it, and when they evaluated it they left us out," Brammell said.

Brammell said he thinks students are willing to continue paying the fee but only if it is used for students, such as to improve health services or child care on campus.

"What we'd really like to do is reduce our commitment to athletics," Brammell said.

Detractors complained the project was over-developed for university athletics, with plans for a new football stadium and a renovated basketball arena set in place, and held only sketchy afterthoughts on academics, with mere placeholders marking future sites of academic buildings. Complaints were exacerbated by revelations that student fee increases will be used to fund a majority of the opening construction phase for Saluki Way, which includes the building of the stadium and renovation of the arena, along with a new student services facility.

Faculty Senate President Robert Benford said some camps still discuss whether the campus should retain a football program - or any intercollegiate sport - not because of failure but because they don't think NCAA athletics mesh with the university's main purpose.

"Should universities be involved in big-time entertainment? Is that the mission of the university?" Benford said.

Harvard's reputation for disinterested scholarship has been severely gored by the shadowy manipulations of the self-serving cabal who forced Mr. Summers's premature resignation. That so few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty members deigned to speak on the record to The Crimson, the student newspaper, illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.

As the recent multi-million-dollar Russian reform fraud scandal involving his close friend and fellow economist Jones Professor of Economics Andrei Shleifer ’82 illustrates, Summers also has an ethics problem. This is perhaps most starkly evident in the way that he worked to maintain a fortress of secrecy around him while employing Washington-style political tactics as a way to embarrass or humiliate colleagues. In Summers’ inner circle, economics is about power rather than principle. And this debilitating corporate worldview—where market values are more important than moral values—constitutes the real threat to Harvard’s reputation and standing.

…As faculty members, we must articulate clearly and persuasively the reasons for our own discontent with the president. Moreover, we must take student grievances seriously by engaging undergraduates in conversation—publicly and privately—in an effort to restore their confidence in us as educators who are fully committed to Harvard’s long-term health. We must demonstrate our desire to work closely with students to reform the undergraduate curriculum, and we must devote ourselves more assiduously than ever to good teaching and advising. Together, we must work to make Harvard the institution it can and should be—a place of higher learning where critical debate coincides with mutual respect, where moral values triumph over market values, and where transparency replaces secrecy. We have a better chance of accomplishing all of this now that Larry Summers is gone.

An archetype of the worst that creative writing professors can be, Arsenault is a blatantly bad teacher and a committed drunk, who ought to be kept far away from students. But to them, he is a swashbuckling hero, and when this small-town university denies him tenure, his student acolytes take up their cudgels and fight.

…Arsenault expects everyone to tolerate his eccentricities, most especially his drinking, along with his frequent absences and omissions. He has a habit of not showing up for class and of skipping office hours. An attention junkie, he requires constant approbation.

Narcissistic to an extreme, he is vicious in his appraisal of other Canadian poets, dividing them into two camps, "hucksters" and "the real thing," with himself trumping true authenticity. He performs an endless aria of the "I'm a misunderstood genius" opera.

…I would not dare to gesture toward any actual persons, living or dead, on whom the character of Arsenault, his black despair, his drinking, his manipulation of students, might be modelled. In some ways, the character is reminiscent of the Maritime poet John Thompson, whose work is quoted in the epigraph. [There must be a word for this rhetorical gesture -- saying you wouldn’t dare do something and then immediately doing it.]

One summer day in 2004, the president of Miami-Dade County's only public university traveled to state Sen. Ken Pruitt's office in Port St. Lucie to lobby for more school funding.

Instead of using his state-issued Buick for the 2 ½-hour drive, Florida International University President Modesto ''Mitch'' Maidique chartered a private plane. Then, for the 13 miles between the St. Lucie County airport and Pruitt's office, he hired a chauffeured ``Diamond Limousine.''

Total cost of the trip: $1,616. Total travel time each way, according to his itinerary: two hours, 15 minutes.

It wasn't the first or last time Maidique traveled in style. Over the past four years, he has spent thousands of FIU's dollars on private planes, limousine services and guest rooms at some of the world's most luxurious hotels, according to a Miami Herald analysis of his travel records.

…Over the past four years, records show, he has stayed at The Plaza in New York, the St. Regis in Washington and the Ritz in Madrid -- where his taxi bill ran more than $1,000. He has taken a 14-hour limo ride in Connecticut and a four-day trip to Paris that cost $6,700.

In 2003, for a lunch meeting at former FIU board chairman Armando Codina's Connecticut summer home, Maidique spent $474 for a night at the Four Seasons Pierre, a five-star hotel in Manhattan.

Then he contracted a limousine service for 14 hours, 15 minutes, charging $1,248 to the foundation. Maidique said that Codina's house is in this "absolutely unknown" place, so he hired a Connecticut driver and paid for the time it took to make two round trips.

In all, the luncheon, to discuss a proposed medical school and other FIU projects, cost $2,678...

"There's a big difference in speaking to someone on the telephone and speaking to someone in person," Maidique said.

Kind of scatterbrained. Too into high concept stuff and not too big on technique. I slept with the TA though, so that was cool.

If newspapers were run like [universities], by committees of tenured journalists unconcerned with circulation and ad revenue, we wouldn't spend much time trying to improve the weather map or the news summaries or movie listings. We'd all be too busy writing 27-part series to be submitted for peer review by the Pulitzer board.

A criminal justice professor at Grand Rapids Community College has resigned after showing a video in class of a man having sex with a pig, students and a faculty representative said.

A school administrator confirmed that Samuel Naves, 47, resigned Feb. 17, but would not comment on why he left.

However, students and a faculty leader said the resignation had to do with the video. They said Naves was teaching an introductory criminal justice class earlier this year when he was going through video files on his computer.

The video appeared on a projection screen and students begged Naves to show the 10-second footage, according to the accounts.

Faculty association president Fred vanHartesveldt said the incident occurred this year. He said Naves was known for a blunt teaching style.

"His pedagogy was to teach real life," vanHartesveldt told The Grand Rapids Press. "His classes were very earthy. Some students took to that very well, and some students didn't."

Naves, who had worked at the college since 1997, declined to comment to the newspaper.

As a scholar of early Greek culture and writing, Thomas Palaima knows well the story of the plague that the god Apollo visits upon the Greek army in Homer's "Iliad."

Greek king Agamemnon's insulting treatment of a priest is to blame, but nobody has the courage to explain this to Agamemnon. Only when the warrior Achilles promises to provide protection from Agamemnon does the prophet Calchas agree to speak up.

It's still true today: Most people are reluctant to question power. Palaima, 54, a professor of classics at the University of Texas, is not one of them.

He is challenging a new university president, UT's governing board and a sacred institution — Longhorn sports — in a campaign against what he regards as the outsized role of intercollegiate athletics.

Among his beefs are the following:

The low graduation rates of some athletes. About 61 percent of freshman student athletes entering UT in the 1998-99 school year graduated, according to NCAA statistics; 74 percent of UT freshmen overall graduated.

The practice of charging fans up to $75,000 for a stadium suite, with 80 percent of that amount considered a charitable donation for income tax purposes. The free seats given to regents and other VIPs at a value of more than $1 million a year. The policy allowing athletic programs to retain the vast majority of more than $80 million in annual revenue instead of contributing more for academic purposes.

That a lawyer, rather than an academic, oversees athletics. A culture that insists upon first-rate performance in athletics but seems satisfied with a No. 52 ranking among national universities by U.S. News & World Report.

Especially galling to Palaima — pronounced pahl-EYE-muh — were decisions by the regents last month to approve a raise of more than $390,000 in salary, now $2.6 million, for football coach Mack Brown, and to authorize a $149.9 million expansion of the stadium.

Those actions came a few weeks after the Longhorns won the Rose Bowl, securing their first national championship in football in more than 30 years.

Palaima doesn't buy the explanation that athletics pays its own way without consuming any taxes or tuition money. "I'm a sports fan. I played baseball all my life," Palaima said.

"But the athletic programs have grown into a monster."

It's largely a one-man campaign, fought in e-mails, in various campus settings and in opinion columns written for the Austin American-Statesman and other publications.

When Palaima questioned UT President William Powers Jr. at a faculty council meeting last week on the role of athletics, no other professors spoke up.

Powers said Palaima raised worthwhile questions but defended the university's policies. Powers, who took office Feb. 1, also promised to provide a more detailed analysis of male athletes' academic performance.

The lack of public support from colleagues doesn't thrill Palaima.

"It's very easy to marginalize a single voice," he said.

On the other hand, it's not hard to understand why even tenured professors might be reluctant to get involved.

"Anytime you make waves, you're not making friends. You're viewed as an oddball," said Michael Granof, an accounting professor and friend of Palaima's. "For most of the faculty, athletics does not affect their vital interest. They've come to the University of Texas knowing what it is, and they expect it."

Palaima might have a point on whether athletics is truly self-funded, Granof said.

"If you were to full-cost it, taking into account all of the benefits athletics gets that are not included in the budget, most notable of which is land, I suspect virtually all programs in the country would be in the red. On the other hand, what's very hard to measure is the goodwill athletics brings."

Edwin Dorn, a professor and former dean of public affairs, said Palaima reflects the views of a substantial portion of the faculty.

"To some extent, he's beating his head against the wall because it is very hard to envision a major change in the relationship that big public universities have with athletics," Dorn said. "He can, however, have some influence at the margin. It's very important that athletics programs are held accountable for the academic performance of their students."

Palaima said he learned his sense of right and wrong from the Roman Catholic Church in Cleveland, where he grew up the son of a postal worker. Although he transferred his emotional and intellectual devotion to the study of humanities in college, a certain reverence and piety stuck.

Like many classicists, Palaima has broad interests. He is equally comfortable quoting Euripides and Dylan. One of the courses he teaches is titled "Myths of War and Violence, Ancient and Modern."

He said he replies to every e-mail he receives in response to his commentary pieces, often copying the exchange — after deleting the sender's name for privacy — to more than 300 people on his e-mail list.

His honors include a Fulbright fellowship and teaching awards from UT's alumni association and honors program. But it was the announcement of his MacArthur fellowship, nicknamed the "genius grant," that prompted the university to recruit him 21 years ago, shortly after turning down his application for a faculty position.

"That gave me a sense of the whimsy of life," he said.

Glimp Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser, who has frequently spoken out in Summers’ defense, said on Wednesday that the issue of anti-Semitism was “never the slightest thing on my mind” during the crisis that forced Summers out.

It was Glaeser who helped revive the charge last month, when he told The Crimson that a magazine exposé on fraud allegations against Summers’ friend and fellow economist Andrei Shleifer ’82 was “a potent piece of hate creation—not quite ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ but it’s in that camp.”

Glaeser said on Wednesday that he regretted making the comparison, which recalled a notorious anti-Semitic hoax that first appeared in a Russian-language newspaper in 1903. The similarity he meant to point out, Glaeser said, was “that people use defamatory information for their own political objectives.”

“I spent a lot of time in the last week apologizing about this, and just feeling awful,” he said.

Arts and science faculty members voted by a wide margin Thursday to express "no confidence" in the leadership of Case Western Reserve University president Edward M. Hundert over budget and other issues.

The vote by professors representing about 9 percent of the full-time faculty is nonbinding. Only trustees can terminate his contract.

The college of arts and sciences faculty voted 131-44 to express "no confidence" in Hundert's leadership and 97-68 to express "no confidence" in John L. Anderson, provost and vice president.

Faculty members opposed to Hundert have expressed concerns about budget deficits and uneven fundraising on the campus of nearly 10,000 students and schools including medicine, dentistry, nursing, management, law, engineering and graduate studies.

Hundert said he took the vote seriously and was determined to listen to faculty complaints. The support of the trustee board expressed at a meeting earlier in the week remains unchanged, Hundert said.

An early critic, physics professor Lawrence Krauss, said the vote reflected faculty concern over the university's direction. "We feel there needs to be a change in direction," he said after the vote held at a closed-door faculty meeting.

Hundert said earlier in the week in a campus e-mail that some $17 million has been cut from the university budget and Case faces a possible $40 million recurring annual deficit, or 5 percent.

Hundert became Case's president in 2002 and previously served as psychiatry professor and medical-dental dean at the University of Rochester and taught at Harvard medical school. Anderson served until 2004 as engineering dean at Carnegie Mellon.

The health of any single university is no large matter. But in this market, the top players set the terms for everyone else. If the Ivies and Stanford and the top state universities continue to do things the old-fashioned way, schools farther down the food chain have to do the same, or risk losing their best faculty members. It's a little like the early stages of a Ponzi scheme: Everyone wants to keep it going as long as possible, and the odds are it won't end just yet. My generation of academics (I'm 47) will get ours and then, probably, get out before the crash--just as GM's managers in the 1950s got theirs, then went on to rich retirements. But woe to those who come after us.

No academic job has really worked for me. I am no good at politics. I am overly sensitive to criticism; occasional biting comments in my evaluations almost always overshadow the accolades.

I despise the student-as-customer mantra of the day. I loathe writing 11-page syllabi [Ah! The Syllabum Omnium!] in the futile attempt to document learning outcomes as if it were possible to prepackage the essential alchemy of the classroom.

…the innumerable meetings, reports, self-studies, external- and internal-evaluations, five-year strategic plans, and assorted other "objective" measures of success…

…Metropolitan State's president [recently] proclaim[ed] in his weekly radio address [weekly radio address? Is he the president of the United States?] that, to keep up with the for-profit educational sector, professors needed to do a much better job of delivering product, not when it was "convenient," but whenever our "customers" (formerly known as students) demanded it.

My president had just announced to the community at large that I was lazy and doing a bad job. I was now going to have to keep up with the for-profit Joneses. Internet classes. Saturday classes. Satellite campus classes. Night classes.

…I began the purge.

On the first day, after a huge latte, and armed with a dust mask, I went through every bookshelf in my home office and pulled out my favorites, a few classics, my essential canon, and some texts I thought my son might need when he goes to college. I put those aside and was absolutely merciless with the rest.

Out came large shopping bags with big, sturdy handles. Into the bags went everything else: books I had not opened in years, books I thought useless or poorly written, books that had bored me to tears. I piled up the bags in the hallway as I literally deconstructed my shelves, and then loaded the castoffs into the car so I would not have time to ponder the consequences of my actions. There would be no buyer's remorse for me.

…My dusty old bookshelves, file cabinets, giant-kitchen-table-as-desk, and huge, very uncomfortable office chair, at which I used to sit for hours, grading, ranting, and raving, are all gone. So are the rants and raves.

Absent the physical and psychological paraphernalia of my former melancholy, I am master of my domain. I have, quite literally because I can reach them now, thrown open the windows, blown out the cobwebs, and shed some light on my present circumstances.

Congratulations to Jacob T. Levy who has accepted an appointment as Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Political Science Department at McGill University. A former member of The Volokh Conspiracy, Levy is one of my favorite commentators at places like Crooked Timber. Last year, when both he and Daniel Drezner were denied tenure at the University of Chicago, it seemed to suggest that Ivan Tribble was right about academic blogging. Now that both Drezner and Levy have landed on their feet – Drezner at Tufts and Levy at McGill – Tribble looks less persuasive, pathetic even.

The ability to handle complex reading is the major factor separating high school students who are ready for college reading from those who are not, according to a new report.

…In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate.

…The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college entrance test. Based on that test, only 51 percent of students showed they were ready to handle the reading requirements of a typical first-year college course.

Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, was always a vocal Summers supporter, and she couldn't but allude to her dissatisfaction with current state of Harvard politics. In a lecture on Franz Kafka's The Trial, she remarked (rough quotation):

"Perhaps the most disturbing thing about The Trial is [Joseph] K.'s resignation to his fate. What happened to man who was so fiery at the onset of the story? At the end, like our former president, he gives up without a fight."

She got a few laughs, but mostly an awkward silence fell on the room. She apologized, visibly upset, and tried to articulate perhaps her feelings on the matter or why she had referenced Summers. It was actually sad to see her, clearly full of emotions about a battle that was over before it had begun. She, like many of the undergraduate body, at least wanted Summers to fight back, to stand up for his actions. Like K., he goes quietly to the slaughter that he once seemed so determined to fight.

The chairwoman of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents criticized a key state senator yesterday, accusing him of meddling in university affairs and trying to pressure regents up for confirmation in the Senate.

During the discussion over whether to suspend the national search for a new UH president and offer the job to interim President David McClain, board Chairwoman Kitty Lagareta praised McClain for standing up to Senate Higher Education Chairman Clayton Hee over the Legislature's transfer of a single faculty position from UH-Manoa to UH-West Oahu.

Lagareta went on to accuse Hee of trying to influence board members up for confirmation before his committee, saying regents were told through intermediaries that their votes on the president and a Navy research center could affect their confirmation.

However, Michael Dahilig, the only regent officially up for confirmation this year, said Hee (D, Kahuku-Kaneohe) and members of his staff did not threaten him.

"In no way do I feel the senator's office has been grossly inappropriate," Dahilig said.

He said he would expect hard questions about his votes, and that Hee has every right to ask those questions.

Hee said Lagareta is speaking without knowing the facts.

"She may wish to personalize it, and that's unfortunate," Hee said. "Her fantasies are getting the best of her."

The terms of two other regents -- James Haynes II and Myron Yamasato -- expire this year, but Gov. Linda Lingle has not yet announced if she will reappoint them or select new regents.

Lagareta said Haynes, who may be reappointed to the position, was also told by intermediaries that his votes on McClain and the Navy University Affiliated Research Center could affect his confirmation.

Haynes did not return a call asking for comment.

After the meeting, Lagareta said she said what she did because "I feel like I'm representing my regents, who have all had back-door lobbying and accusations and threats and bullying."

One other regent position remains vacant since last year, when the Senate rejected interim regent John Kai after two hearings before Hee's Higher Education Committee.

The feud between Lagareta and Hee may go back to those confirmation hearings, when Lagareta was openly critical of Hee and of the distribution of tickets for a Hee fundraiser to the regents.

Hee and Amy Agbayani, a former part-time Hee staff member who also works at the university, apologized for sending the fundraising tickets.

Lagareta, who was then vice chairwoman, asked the board for a formal resolution expressing their concern over the situation. However, the board let the matter drop and did not consider the resolution.

Just days after taking office in 2003, Attorney General Jim Petro ordered the University of Akron to replace four law firms, even though the university's top lawyer had warned that the changes would be costly and inefficient.

Petro dismissed the university's concerns and ordered much of the legal work, including patent cases, transferred to Roetzel & Andress, a politically wired firm that had to scramble to assemble a patent law department. At least two of the firms said they believe they lost the work because they refused to contribute to Petro's campaign.

The disagreement is detailed in never-before-disclosed e-mails in which university general counsel Ted Mallo pleaded with Petro to keep the four firms, which had represented the university for years. The university's board of trustees voted unanimously to release the correspondence Tuesday in response to a public records request from The Plain Dealer.

After the newspaper asked for the records, Petro advised the university that they were not public.

He said they fell within attorney-client privilege.

Trustees agreed the privilege applied but should be waived.

The e-mails reflect Mallo's frustration as he tried to persuade Petro to change his mind.

In a Jan. 14, 2003, e-mail, Mallo told President Luis Proenza and trustees that a change in patent lawyers "would have a significant education curve and cost."

In a Feb. 13, 2003, e-mail to Matt Cox, who coordinated outside legal work for Petro at the time, Mallo noted that the Roetzel firm did not have a patent department.

Kenneth Preston, associate vice president for research, complained to Mallo in a June 3, 2003, e-mail that Petro's office had given Kent State University flexibility in the use of outside counsel.

"We, on the other hand, appear compelled to put all of our fortunes in the hands of one person in the Roetzel firm," Preston wrote. "And we know that the Roetzel firm is trying to hire young associates to pick up the workload. None of this bodes well for providing us with a high level of experienced assistance."

After Tuesday's trustees' meeting, Mallo said he could not estimate how much money and time the changes cost the university, but he said it was "significant."

Petro specifically ordered the hiring of Roetzel and the replacement of Renner Kenner Greive Bobak Taylor & Weber, an Akron-based firm that specializes in patent and other types of intellectual property law.

In the e-mails and interviews, General Counsel Mallo praised Ray Weber, the Renner lawyer who oversaw the patent work, and expressed concerns that Roetzel lacked the expertise to do patent work in the areas of polymers, engineering and chemistry.

Although attorneys general tend to honor state agency and university re quests for out side lawyers, the attorney general makes the final call.

Petro vehemently denies any link between political donations and special counsel work, but Weber has maintained that he lost the business because he ignored the Petro campaign's fund-raising requests.

He and fellow Akron lawyer Jack Morrison, who also lost special counsel work to Roetzel, said they were interviewed by the FBI last month, and both said they told agents they believe Petro punished their firms for not supporting his campaigns.

Morrison said that Petro personally told him that his firm, Amer Cunningham, would have to "sit out" for a year but could earn the business back through donations.

Morrison is a member of UA's board of trustees but abstained from Tuesday's vote.

The flap over the pricey patent lawyers is the latest in a string of controversies over Petro's system of hiring private lawyers, known as special counsel, to help with state legal matters.

For decades, Ohio attorneys general have used special counsel appointments to reward political allies and contributors. Under Petro, however, some have complained that he and his associates have used heavy-handed tactics to raise money. Morrison was among the first to complain publicly.

Petro, who is seeking the Republican Party's nomination for governor, has called for a dramatic overhaul of public colleges, saying they are financially inefficient and offer too many duplicative degree programs.

Even in light of the warnings in the e-mails, Petro's office on Tuesday continued to defend his decision to spend more to replace the law firms.

Petro's first assistant, Michael Grodhaus, issued a statement saying that he recommended replacing the Summit County firms "rather than have any political party chairman make those decisions for us."

Grodhaus was referring to the firms' ties to Summit County Republican Party Chairman Alex Arshinkoff, a longtime political foe of Petro's.

Petro has suggested that Morrison manufactured his story at Arshinkoff's behest.

Morrison is Arshinkoff's personal lawyer, and Weber has been a reliable donor to the Summit County GOP.

The other two firms that were replaced are Brouse McDowell and Roderick Linton.

To help counter Arshinkoff's clout in Summit County, Petro formed an alliance with Roetzel, a powerful law firm that sits atop Arshinkoff's enemies list.

The firm has hosted fund-raisers for Petro, and its lawyers gave $53,500 to Petro's campaigns from 2002 to 2004. Once Petro became attorney general, the firm became one of the leading recipients of state legal contracts. In fiscal 2004, Roetzel placed No. 3 in total state legal business, getting $1.6 million in work. It had never before placed in the top 10.

Morrison's firm, Amer Cunningham, saw its special counsel work drop from $356,827 in fiscal 2003 to $29,368 last year, state records show.