It's funny 'cause it's kinda true…

This tidbit from The Onion was forwarded to me from a non-academic friend of mine:

“University Implicated in Checks-for-Degrees Scheme.” To quote the lead:

“The University of Michigan has become the 17th institution of higher learning to be implicated in the checks-for-degrees scandal rocking American campuses, representatives from the Department of Justice reported Tuesday.

“‘We have strong evidence that the University of Michigan granted academic degrees to students in exchange for hefty payments, often totaling tens of thousands of dollars,’ Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said. “‘In the process, thousands of graduates have emerged with degrees, but few or no skills applicable to everyday life. And many are as unprepared to enter the job market as they were when they first enrolled.'”

And a bit later on in the article:

“‘A course in Chaucer can be a fascinating examination of medieval mores and the evolution of the English language,’ Comey said. ‘Such knowledge, however, has little application in larger society. Students can graduate with majors in creative writing, Latin, women’s studies, and history, yet still not know how to fix a sink, sew on a button, or even properly feed themselves.Virtually the only opportunity graduates have to apply their arcane knowledge takes place during discussions over coffee with their peers, or attempts to impress members of the opposite sex at parties.'”

The EMU President's House (again): It's No One's Fault, Apparently

See this article in the Ann Arbor News,“EMU not likely to be punished.” It’s a sort of “good news/bad news” piece, in my opinion. The good news is it is unlikely that the students, faculty, staff, and other folks at EMU who were victimized by this stupid house project will suffer punishment from the state in terms of funding cuts and the like. According to the article, “auditing officials said it is a difficult statute to enforce because universities receive state appropriations in a lump sum and control how they are distributed.

“‘It is a violation of the statute, but pragmatically, it’s difficult to track because appropriation funds may not be distinguished from any other revenue source once in the university’s hands,’ said Michael Becker, an administrator with the Auditor General’s Office.”

That’s good because the fear was that the state would use this as an excuse to slash our budget. Now it looks like they’ll need a different excuse (like the fact that Michigan is running a billion dollar deficit that has to be closed by October or something like that).

The bad news is that, apparently, the house debacle was no one’s fault. In a press conference on Tuesday, hillip Incarnati, chairman of the EMU Board of Regents basically said that no wrong-doing happened, he wishes the board had been better informed, but they weren’t and that’s that. And Incarnati also insists that Kirkpatrick’s resignation had nothing to do with the house:

“Asked if Kirkpatrick should have been fired due to the findings in the audit, Incarnati said he didn’t think that was appropriate. ‘What would you discharge someone for?’ Incarnati asked. ‘There was no violation of policy, and there was no usurping of authority.

“‘One might argue that from a board standpoint we would have liked to have known those alternative funds. Does that give rise to a termination?

“‘My opinion is that it does not, particularly when you look at all the other good that the university (experienced) during Dr. Kirkpatrick’s four years as university president.'”

Oh, another little tidbit from the article that I think is nice. The EMU administrative-types have been saying categorically since Tuesday that no student funds were used to pay for the house project. And yet as the newspaper article put it, “the audit states unequivocally: ‘The University House project did require the use of operating revenues, which are derived from student tuition and fees and state appropriations.’ About $3.7 million of the $5.3 million came from student tuition, fees and the state, according to the audit.”

So, just in case you’re keeping score with this, let me sum up:

* Kirkpatrick blows into town four years ago, and while everyone says he had nothing to do with the decision, suddenly the most important building project on EMU’s campus (and seemingly in the history of the institution) becomes this stupid house.

* This house cost WAY more money than the institution could afford even in the best of times, plus it is stupid-looking, grandiose and gaudy and bloated, a classless boob of a building behind a Walgreens off of the main drag through the county.

* It appears that it just sorta “happened.” It isn’t Kirkpatrick’s fault because the board of regents initiated the project, but it isn’t the board of regents fault because they were simply not informed of the cost over-runs.

Obviously, that’s a crock, and I think the fact that Incarnati is unwilling to take responsibility or even assign responsibility says a lot about him.

My only hope is that this passage from the article is also true:

“The audit will prompt a renewed push for a resolution calling on the eight EMU regents to resign, said Rep. Paul Gieleghem, D-Clinton Township, who introduced it last spring. The resolution was referred to the House Committee on Higher Education, and Tuesday Gieleghem submitted a written request to the chairman to take up the issue, he said.

“Gieleghem said he was against any effort to withhold state money from EMU. ‘It would be more of a penalty to students rather than resting it on the shoulders of the management team who should take responsibility for their bad judgment. That’s the regents.'”

My Blog Is Actually Useful to Me

Frequently, I wonder about the value of blogging. I vacillate between feeling that keeping a blog is a good “pre-writing” and thinking activity and feeling that keeping a blog is an elaborate procrastination exercise. I suppose it is a bit of both.

This morning and this afternoon, I started thinking/remembering that I need to plan for a grad class I’m teaching in the fall called “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice.” It’s a course I’ve taught several times before, but I haven’t taught it in over a year and it is a course that I knew I needed to update. So, as part of being productive and procrastinating simultaneously, I looked through about a year’s worth of blog entries, trying to remember what it was I came across that I thought might be useful for that class. I found it a really helpful exercise. I realized that in the course of a year or so of “surfing around” and occasionally jotting down some comments on different sites that I have put together a big chunk of potential readings for the class. And I also realized, as I was looking through this stuff again, that I had kind of forgotten about some things that I ought to include in the revised version of the class.

I’ll still have to pick out some books to use for the class (I think I’ve just about done that), there will still be a course packet, and I still have to work out all of the assignments. But a lot of that goofing off with the blog looks like it might tangibly pay off this fall.

Okay, no more entry here– back to grading.

New Adventures in Dieting: A Few Changes/Announcements

-13.5 pounds

With the new blog space, I decided to make some changes from the way I used to keep track of my diet on my unofficial blog. First, I decided to stop keeping track of the “day” number I’ve been on the diet. Too complicated. The simplest way to put it is I started the South Beach Diet in earnest March 28, 2004, I took a break from the diet when I went with my family to Hawaii (the break lasted a bit longer than the trip, from June 6 to June 23), and then I got back on the dieting wagon about three weeks ago.

Second, I decided to just go back to counting my total weight lost. Originally, I was going to start counting my weight loss starting with my return from Hawaii. But that proved too complicated; one of my loyal readers told me they were kind of confused about how much weight I had lost all together. So I’m back to that figure. What that means is since I started this thing, I have (as of this morning) lost 13.5 pounds. I had gotten down to -15 pounds, I gained about 3 pounds in Hawaii, and I’ve lost about 1.5 pounds since we’ve been back.

So it turns out the last loss I reported was indeed a bit of a fluke.

I think I might have to accept the .5 to 1 pound a week weight loss until fall term starts because I’ve found it too hard to stick religiously to the “phase 1” part of the South Beach plan with all of the various things going on this summer. Besides various holiday events, festivals, and parties, we are making a road-trip to Iowa to see my parents and my side of the family at the end of the July and Annette’s parents coming for a visit the first week in August.

The school year gives my life a bit more discipline, especially in terms of a “regular schedule,” so my hope is I can stick on the more lenient “phase 2” plan yet this summer and then more easily move back to the more disciplined “phase 1” plan at the beginning of September. I’d like to lose more than a pound a week yet this summer, but I guess I’ll have to take what I can get.

Pardon me, is that a couch in the front lawn, or are you just happy to see me?

One of my favorite local blogs, “Ann Arbor is Overrated,” has been just obsessed for the last month with the talk in Ann Arbor of banning couches from outside of houses. Here’s a link from yesterday’s entry on the topic, but they go back to June and they show no sign of ending.

I’m not sure what is more amusing: the obsession with the couch ban discussion or the fact that the couch ban is a point of some discussion in U of M student circles in the first place. But I will make two observations. First, it seems clear to me that we can narrow down the writer(s) of this anonymous blog down to someone who has a couch on their porch.

Second, a lot of this seems to me to boil down to the different perspective of “renters” (and most students are of course in this category) and “owners.” When you rent your home, you don’t really care a whole lot about things like couches in the front yard, your yard or anyone else’s yard. But when you own your home, you care a great deal about things because a big tattered couch on the front porch of the house next door effects the dollar value of your home. Of course, living next to student housing doesn’t help your property values a lot in the first place…

Anyway, my take on this is pretty simple: I’m a home owner, and for the time-being at least, I live in Ypsi.

Even MORE Bad News about the University House

Just when you thought that news about the house that Sam and Pam built couldn’t get any worse, news of the state audit showed up in the Ann Arbor News today. This is really something else, too much to really summarize effectively, but I’ll note a couple of points:

  • “The audit found that the total cost for the project was $6 million, $2.5 million more than the $3.5 million approved by the EMU Board of Regents.”
  • “Operating revenues were used to finance the project without approval being obtained from the state. From the time the project was first announced, the university pledged that no state money or tuition dollars would be used to finance the house. But according to the audit: ‘…the project did require the use of operating revenues, which are derived from student tuition and fees and State appropriations.'”
  • “Some $1 million from future corporate royalties helped finance the house. In the past, those monies benefited student programs such as the Student Organization Center and were used to purchase student computers in the library. “Directing the royalty revenue to the University House project reduced the university’s ability to fund similar initiatives,” according to the audit.” It isn’t in the web article, but the article in the paper points out that this $1 or so million comes from soda and credit card companies allowed to sell their wares on campus.

Let me pause here to note two things. First, officials at EMU and on the EMU Board of Regents deny that any student tuition funds were used to finance the house. This audit– which is the only one that is remotely neutral on the whole thing– concludes otherwise. But beyond that, it’s clear that the administration is being disingenuous when they make the claim that this didn’t cost students anything. Every dollar spent on the house, regardless of where the funds came from, represents a dollar that could have been spent on any number of other things, including holding down tuition.

Second, it seems incredibly shameful to me that such a significant portion of the house was financed with soda and credit. Two of the biggest problems in general we have in this country are fatness and debt, and one of the most significant reasons why students at schools like EMU drop out is they get themselves in financial trouble in part because of the credit card offers plastered around campus.

Okay, back to the list:

  • “Rep. Scott Shackleton, R-Sault St. Marie, the chairman of the Joint Capital Outlay Subcommittee, said possible consequences would be cutting of the proposed $72.6 million slated for Eastern Michigan University operations in next year’s budget.

    “‘I think there’s going to be some legislators who are concerned, who say if there’s no consequences to Eastern on this, what message are we sending to the other universities about being responsible and being accountable?'”

I understand how Shackleton feels, but if the state carries through on its threat, the result will be that the likes of me and my students will be punished by the idiotic decisions of the board of regents and the upper administration. Argh.

Welcome to the new “unofficial/life” blog!

I’m shifting over to blogger as my blogging software for a variety of reasons, most of which have more to do with my “official” blog and which I discuss here in some detail. My old “unofficial” blog space will stay in place, though you’ll notice that this blog is now not so much “unofficial” as it is about the rest of my “life” that isn’t work. Hard as it is to separate those two things…

I’ve got a couple of things to figure out with this site, though. I need to monkey around with the archive files to make it work and I’m not sure how I feel about the layout yet. It’s supposed to be sort of the “opposite” of my official blog in terms of the look, but I don’t know. It might change. Anyway, here it is.

Tearing Down Fences

As I mentioned about a month ago on the previously Official Steven D. Krause Blog, Sam Kirkpatrick resigned as president of EMU in the middle of June. The scuttlebutt on campus is that it really was something of a surprise to people like the provost and there is wide-spread displeasure that the board of regents agreed to a $500,000 or so “golden parachute” package. And there have been PLENTY of less than flattering letters to the editor in the Ann Arbor News about the deal and EMU in general as of late.

But on the whole, Kirkpatrick’s departure has been positive. Right now, the faculty union (the EMU AAUP) is negotiating a new contract, and while there’s a long way to go, I’ve heard through the grapevine that the talks have gotten more “positive” post-Kirkpatrick.

And I noticed another literal tearing down of a fence the other day. While Sam and Pam (Kirkpatrick’s wife) were installed at the infamous “House” (for more on that, see this previous entry, and this one from way back last December), there was often some kind of campus security out front and also a chain-link fence that surrounded the property. The fencing obviously wasn’t part of the original plan; it had the look of a temporary barricade put up in an effort to fend off protesters, actually.

Anyway, that fencing is gone. Maybe it will be back in a couple more years, the time it will probably take to hire a new president. But it’s nice to see it gone for now.