Left of Centre

A Victory Media Friendly School

2011-07-10T20:49:00.000-04:00

In the comments to my post on The Best Colleges ranking, I received a heads-up from jhicks23 about another questionable accolade which The Penn State Propaganda Portal has recently pimped:

G.I. Jobs magazine has designated Penn State a military friendly school for 2012. It is the third straight time the Pittsburgh-based publication has recognized the University's programs and services designed specifically to help active-duty military service members and veterans pursue an education online through Penn State's World Campus.

I decided to take a closer look at how G.I. Jobs magazine's military friendly school list works.

According to the Military Friendly Schools website, G.I. Jobs starts with a list of 7000 colleges, universities and trade schools nationwide and narrows these down to around 1000 schools. The explanation of how this is done is a bit vague. It supposedly involves "exhaustive research" by the G.I. Jobs Military Friendly Schools Team. And that research "includes government agencies and private entities which administer education benefits and a comprehensive survey administered by G.I. Jobs. A Military Friendly Schools Academic Advisory Panel, consisting of five higher education administrators, helps determine survey questions and weightings." What does it mean for the research to include government agencies and private entities? Does it mean that the data used in the research comes from these source? No mention of to whom the survey is administered. Anyway, once they somewhat mysteriously assemble the data they use a set of criteria to winnow the list down to about 1000 schools. It is worth noting that the schools on the list are not ranked. Here is the nominal reason for that

We purposely do not use a numerical ranking system as we encourage student to use our resources as a starting point for seeking education. School choice is not a one-size fits all process, so we built the Matchmaker tool to help narrow down the field.

Up to this point everything seems on the up and up. If we take G. I. Jobs at their word the collect and analyze data to come up with a list of schools for vets to select from by purely objective means.

It is the next step in the process where things get dicey. Once the list of military friendly schools is assembled G. I. Jobs sends out a media kit to the schools on the list soliciting advertizing from them. Here's the pitch from that kit

Through its many established brands, long experience, deep relationships and unparalleled rating system, Victory Media’s print and web media products serve as the foundation for any school serious about recruiting the military and veteran student. If you’re one of the 20% of all schools nationwide which made the Military Friendly Schools® list, congratulations on such an elite achievement. Our media products, which start at only $990 per year, stand ready to carry your recruiting message to the enormous and valuable military student market. Only Military Friendly Schools® can run advertising in the print version of the Guide
to Military Friendly Schools® and www.militaryfriendlyschools.com. All other media are open to all schools.

[...]

In September 2011, the Military Friendly Schools® list will be released nationally to the press. Your school is encouraged to issue its
own press release to promote your inclusion.

That's Penn State's press release that I linked to back in the first paragraph.

Here's the menu of advertizing options from the kit.

From Drop Box

We see here the real reason that G. I. Jobs doesn't assign ranks to the schools. They want to give schools that advertize with them an advantage over those that don't advertize with them. So even if one is generous in assuming no manipulations are involved in compiling the list, we see that the manipulation comes in at this stage. And how big of an advantage do schools that pay for advertizing have over those that don't? Well, here's what the folks at G. I. Jobs provides a partial answer in their media kit.

From Drop Box

How much does this all cost? Other than the reference to $990 per year in the above quote from the kit, all prices have been redacted from the publicly available media kit.

But apparently no one at G. I. Jobs had a background in military intelligence, they redacted the prices by pasting opaque images over them which I was able to edit out with a PDF editor. The uncensored kit is here and here are the price lists from that uncensored kit.

From Drop Box

So has the Penn State World Campus spent any money on advertizing with the nice folks at G.I. Jobs? You betcha

From Drop Box

Note the "add to my school list" button. Schools that don't advertize don't get one of those which make it harder for vets to compare the schools that don't pay to those that do.

How much has Penn State spent on these ads? Once more I turn to the Snyder Reports which, unfortunately, do not give a definitive answer to the question. Penn State has been on the list three years running 2009-2010, 2010--2011 and this year, 2011-2012. This years payments will show up in a future Snyder Report, either the 2011-2012 report or the 2012-2013 depending on if the check for his went out before or after July 1^rst this summer.

What about past years? According to the reports, Victory Media, the publisher of G.I. Jobs, was paid $24,235 in fiscal year 2007-2008 (p. 471). If the military friendly list came out during the summer of 2009-2010, then this payment predated the World Campus' first appearance on the list. If this is the case, one must wonder how Penn State's prior advertizing with G.I. Jobs influenced its first appearance on the list. And the payment of $17,226 in fiscal year 2008-2009 (p. 551) could be for either of the first two years on the list.

No matter how you slice this, Penn State World Campus is certainly a Victory Media Friendly School.

Graham's in Terrible Shape....Just Pass the Damn Thing for God's Sake!

2011-06-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

On Monday, Democrats in Harrisburg held up funding for the four state-related universities and The Old Main Government Bribery and Cajoling Unit sprung into action as doctors rushed to the Schreyer House to attend to Graham's skyrocketing blood pressure. A letter was sent to state lawmakers with the urgent message, "Graham's in terrible shape....just pass the damn thing for God's sake!" Ok,not quite, here is what they wrote, (via)

This has been a most difficult budget season, and it is safe to say that no one is entirely satisfied with the budget bills you will be asked to vote on over the next several days. It is important, nonetheless, to complete your work this week by making sure that the non-preferred bills are passed in a timely fashion — that is, before the end of the fiscal year.

It did the trick, the Dems folded. Local Democratic representative Scott Conklin said through his spokesman that he didn't want the guilt of being responsible in someway for Graham's stroke..... if you read between the lines, that is.

State Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Rush Township, had said that he would not
support any state budget unless it included level funding for Penn
State. But the letter from DiEugenio and DiRaimo "has certainly affected
his thinking," Conklin's chief of staff, Tor Michaels, said earlier
Tuesday.

Michaels said Conklin would give the correspondence some weight.

And everyone lived happily ever after....well, at least until the tuition bills go out.

Democrats in Harrisburg are trying to Slowly Kill....

2011-06-27T18:20:00.001-04:00

....Graham.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting today that

State funding for the University of Pittsburgh and three other
universities could be in jeopardy as Democratic lawmakers flex what
little muscle they have in a Capitol controlled by Republicans.
Democrats are rebelling against a GOP cuts to the state-related
universities, the only spending bills that require a two-thirds vote of
each chamber.

"There isn't any doubt that this is the one place where Democrats can
wield some power. It's the one place where they do have leverage," said
G. Terry Madonna, political scientist at Frankin & Marshall College
in Allentown. "This could get very dicey."

Democrats are threatening to use their votes to get Republicans to
allocate some of an estimated $650 million surplus to state-related
universities as well as other education and health programs.

But if Democrats block passage, Pitt, Temple University, Lincoln
University and the University of Pennsylvania could wind up with
nothing.

I'm guessing that about now Graham is wishing that he followed his dream and joined that circus right out of high school.

[Update 6/27/2011 10:18 pm: The Dems blocked passage of funding for the state-related universities this evening. No word on Graham's mental and physical states.]

The Best Ranking Money Can Buy

2011-06-17T18:41:00.003-04:00

In early April, the lead story in the Penn State Faculty and Staff Newswire, a product of The Old Main Propaganda Shop, was about a top ranking awarded to the Penn State World Campus by Best Colleges.

The same day the Collegian also ran a story about the World Campus and Best Colleges and the reporter got Graham to weigh-in on the ranking.

Penn State President Graham Spanier wrote in an email that World Campus has been a great success and established itself as a premier online program since its launch.
“We have already served tens of thousands of students with high-quality courses,” Spanier wrote. “I’m pleased to see that it has been recognized for its achievements.”

I had never heard of Best Colleges and neither had Don Heller, Director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. While I was digging around to see what I could find out about Best Colleges, he was emailing Lisa Powers, Director of ~~Public Information~~ Bullshit, at The Old Main Propaganda Shop with a warning:

Last week, Penn State issued a press release touting its World Campus' selection as the "the No. 1 online institution for 2011." This designation was conferred by the website, TheBestColleges.org, which I had never heard of before - and I've seen lots of different rankings over the years. So I spent a little bit of time going through the website, and after about 30 minutes or so, I sent this message to Penn State's Director of Public Information:

I read your press release, and not having heard of Best Colleges, took a look at the website. Unless you have some information establishing the validity and/or reputation of the website, I d be a little cautious about how much you want to promote the WC and other rankings from this site. While they say We do not accept paid placements for our school rankings, it appears to me that this is a site supported entirely by advertising fees from universities. When you do a search for any of the degrees they show there (not the rankings, but a degree search), no matter what the degree, you get a list of for the most part for-profit and online universities, and very few of what most of us would consider more traditional universities whose quality and rankings are more universally recognized.

Here are the criteria they say they use to calculate the rankings for the 25 best online universities:
We ve relied on the following criteria to generate our online colleges and universities rankings: student satisfaction (as measured by graduation and retention rates), peer and instructional quality (as measured by acceptance rate and student-teacher ratio), affordability (as measured by tuition costs and availability of financial aid), and credibility (as measured by years of accreditation, reputation and awards).

To be blunt, this is garbage. Graduation and retention rates are not measures of student satisfaction, any more than acceptance rates and student-teacher ratios are measures of peer and instructional quality.
We can all agree there are problems with the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but they are at least considered reputable by most parties. I would be cautious about trumpeting rankings from Best Colleges externally unless you know more about this organization (which I d be interested in hearing).

Don Heller

One can imagine that Lisa responded to Don with Old Main's fallback position whenever they are faced with a ranking problem...."Oh, pshaw...we don't take theses things seriously," and she might have even tossed in a we're so glad you brought the error of our ways to our attention. But apparently no one set Graham set straight or he refused to see the error of his ways, because at the last Board of Trustees meeting in May he bragged to the Trustees that

Students also have embraced Penn State s World Campus, which was named the No. 1 online institution in 2011 by the Best Colleges.

My research into Best Colleges confirms Don's suspicion that these rankings are paid for by the universities being ranked,or at least some of the universities being ranked. .

It turns out that Best Colleges is an arm of EducationDynamics, a marketing firm which primarily works with for-profit education sector, but also has some non-profit clients, and which hides behind various domain names. Here's an example of their work under the name EducationConnection.com

By the way, this particular ad caught the attention of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin who said on the Senate floor that

"The ad that just really troubles me shows a lovely young woman who says you can go to college in your pajamas.... You don't even have to get out of bed to go to college, and she's got a computer on her bed there." He added that "I don't believe anybody should fall for that, but some must, and they end up signing up for these for-profit schools, getting deep in debt with a worthless diploma when it's all over."

Tracing EducationConnection.com to EducationDyanamics is straightforward because the domain is registered to EducationDynamics and the EducationConnection is promoted on the EducationDynamics website.

But the trail from Best Colleges to EducationDyanmics was a bit harder to trace. The domain is registered to a Ryan Caldwell in Sea Isle City, New Jersey who does business as SeaWaves Technology LLC. SeaWaves looks like a firm that will do anything web related for a buck. For example, it offers Wi-Fi to B&B's in this Jersey shore town, web design, web hosting and variety of other services . Amongst the websites maintained by SeaWaves, is Grad School Journal, Business School Journal,Health Careers Journal,Super Scholar,College Happenings and Top Colleges Online. It's a good bet that Ryan doesn't generate much of the editorial content for these sites. So who does?

All of these sites, as well as The Best Colleges site,can be traced back to EducationDynamics. For example if you use the "Degree Wizard" on the Best Colleges site it takes you to the a subdomain of elearners.com , thebestcolleges.elearners.com/online-degrees, and elearners.com is part of EducationDynamics. In fact, if you poke around on any of SeaWave Technology's education sites you will eventually find yourself at a subdomain of elearners.com.

How does SeaWaves make money on these sites? According to the blog at SeaWaves it is lead generation.

SeaWaves is currently exploring the higher education niche with a new website called http://topcollegesonline.org/ Top Colleges Online\ The goal of the website is to provide visitors with information about online education and well as to assist them in choosing a college to attend

The online education niche will offer us an opportunity to diversify our business away from volume based cpm [cost per thousand impressions] advertising and to focus on lead generation opportunities in the profitable higher education industry. Our goal is to quickly build one of the highest quality resources for prospective students on the Internet

We are looking forward to this new challenge.

Here is how lead generation works.

There are agencies that specialize in providing qualified leads to businesses. The process of lead generation is actually very easy. An agency develops a website or partnerships with several websites in which they promote and advertise your product or service. A consumer finds these directories or informational sites and they are able to complete an online quote request form.This form is submitted to the agency. The buyers information is verified and matched to the appropriate providers. These matched leads are then sent via email to the prospective providers with full contact information and purchasing requirements.

LeadWatchLive is EducationDyanamics lead generation software designed specifically for the education sector.

It should be of no surprise that Best College Top 25 Online rankings is part of EducationDynamics lead generation operation. For each of the 25 schools , there is a link for more information (For example, here's the page the more information link for Boston University lands on.) and for all but six schools the more information page has a request more information button which takes you to request form ( Here's the BU request form).Those request forms are hosted on a subdomain the EducationDynamics domain elearners.com. For these 19 schools, there is little doubt that they are paying for the leads generated by the rankings.

Of the six schools without a request form, two, Penn State and North Carolina State, have links to the school's own websites and the other four have no links at all. It's not clear if these schools paying anything to EducationDynamics.

But why would Best Colleges drain away leads and income from the paying schools by placing a link to Penn State and NC State's website for free? This isn't a charitable operation, after all. For example, consider the Penn State main campus page at elearners.com. Penn State isn't getting something for nothing there. The page has generic information on Penn State and a linked list of areas in which Penn State has specialized accreditation, but all of those links take you to lists of schools that have clearly paid for their listing. The page has no links to the Penn State website.

It's reasonable to wonder what EducationDynamics received in return for the linking to the World Campus in their ranking of Penn State. Did Penn State pay Best Colleges for the ranking?

It's possible, since Penn State has used EducationDynamics services in the past. According to the fiscal year 2009-2010 Penn State Snyder Report (p. 197, Vol. III, Part A) , Penn State Outreach, the unit in which the World Campus is housed, paid EducationDynamics a total of $55, 940. The same year International Affairs paid $2,500 to EducationDynamics (p. 148, Vol. III, Part A).Outreach also paid $12,566 in fiscal year 2008-2009 (p.530, Vol. III, Part C) and $7,000 in fiscal year 2007-2008 (p. 445 Vol. III, Part B) to EducationDynamics, while International Affairs paid the company $1,200 in fiscal year 2008-2009 (p. 392, Vol. III, Part B).

Because they've done business with EducationDynamics in the past, Outreach and the folks at the World Campus are certainly familiar with the work of this company, which means that even if they didn't pay for the ranking they no doubt knew that this ranking is bogus.

To see exactly how bogus, consider this. If you don't like the Best College Top 25 Online School rankings for 2011, EducationDynamics has you covered with The Best Degrees Top 25 Online Schools in 2011 All of the schools -Penn State isn't ranked- but two in this list have have request forms and for the two that don't the links to for these schools take you to advertizements for other schools.

Despite the fact that the folks in Outreach and the World Campus should have known the the Best Colleges ranking was a fraud, it was World Campus that broke the news of the ranking on their homepage on April 1^rst of this year. (The link is no longer up at World Campus,but I archived the page. ) And Outreach went all in on the bullshit in the Collegian article.

Director of Outreach News and Communications Dave Aneckstein said World Campus is excited and appreciative to be regarded as the No. 1 online program in the country.
Aneckstein attributed the success to the growing number of course and program offerings as well as the accessibility of appealing to learners across the world who may not be able to attend a formal university setting but are still looking for the same education.
“We’re very pleased to be considered the top online program and also to have a number of individual programs ranked so high,” Aneckstein said. “We do a lot of work for online students and we’re really appreciative.”
As far as the ranking drawing in a larger number of students, Aneckstein said he wasn’t sure — but the No. 1 title definitely shines a positive light on Penn State and its growing online presence.

In the end however, the real story is that Old Main was warned that this ranking was likely bogus and Graham pimped it to the BOT, nonetheless. Of course, if you have been reading this blog for anytime, you are aren't shocked, after all, this is way of the Nittany Weasel. Even though Old Main's failure to heed Don's warning is of no surprise, further investigation is certainly warranted into this scam and Graham's role in it.

Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2011

2011-05-31T22:03:00.001-04:00

I'm back.

It's that time of year when Penn State releases its annual Right-To-Know Report. True to Graham's commitment to transparency the report was released at the end of business on the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend in a image PDF which can't be searched. As has become a tradition here at Left of Centre, I've transformed the report to a searchable PDF and uploaded it to Scribd (2010, 2009). Behold:
Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2011

Here's the compensation data for Trustees, Officers and Key Employees.

Here are the salaries of the officers

Here are the top 25 salaries,

New this year is this tidbit:2158 individuals had reportable compensation of $100,000 or more.

Look for more postings soon here at Left of Centre. I have a post in the works on Graham cheating on the University's reporting requirements to the Commonwealth and another one on a suspicious ranking which came out about a month ago.

More Dreck From Beck

2010-10-13T22:20:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck responded, on his radio program, to the Donald Duck remix posted below by raising the question of....well....

"If I'm not mistaken," Beck said, "some of these remix videos, it's very interesting, I believe, get federal funding."

That's almost as funny as the video. Anyway, the above video is a response to Beck's innuendo.

This Should Scare the Shit Out of You....And Motivate You....

2010-10-08T22:14:00.001-04:00

Steve Benen, one of my favorite bloggers and who you should definitely be reading, conceived of this and his friend Bill Simmon put it together.

Brilliant

2010-10-03T10:23:00.001-04:00

Via Henry at Crooked Timber.

FYI

2010-09-23T09:51:00.001-04:00

From the Patriot-News:

....Democrats will send Vice President Joe Biden to State College on Tuesday to rally young voters at Penn State event.

Housekeeping Note

2010-09-20T12:04:00.001-04:00

Sorry about the sporadic postings, but my day job is keeping me rather busy at the moment. Once I hit my stride at work, I should return to a more regular schedule here.

In Case You Were Distracted by All of the Hockey Porn Today...

2010-09-17T23:27:00.001-04:00

....I would like to draw your attention to this tidbit from this morining's Board of Trustees meeting.

In a worst-case scenario [next year], if the federal-stimulus funds disappear and the resulting hole goes completely unfilled, Penn State could face "the most significant budget cuts in our history," Spanier said.

Graham didn't see fit to mention this little fact in his latest propaganda film. You would think that a film ostensibly about the state of the university would work that in somehow. But no, it was all ponies, rainbows and empty pride. By the way, I wonder if Graham bribed Micheal Bérubé with the promise of unlimited ice-time to get him to debase himself in that film.

Obscene

2010-09-17T21:47:00.001-04:00

That is the only word I can think of for the $88 million tax deductible gift Penn State received to build a hockey arena and to support the University's entry into men's and women's Division I ice hockey. I'm aghast.... Think of all of the better uses to which this money could have been put....Don Heller did just that...go read what he has to say.

Only the 109th University in the World, But the Third Party School in the Country

2010-09-15T22:29:00.002-04:00

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings were published today. Here is how the the Big Ten schools finished overall.

15. University of Michigan
25 Northwestern University
33 University of Illinois Urban-Campaign
43 University of Wisconsin
52 University of Minnesota
66 Ohio State University
106 Purdue
109 Penn State
122 Michigan State
132 University of Iowa
156 Indiana U

The Big Ten's newest addition, the University of Nebraska, didn't make the top 200 schools.

I will have more to say about this on Friday and I'll also weigh in on the recent WSJ corporate recruiter rankings of universities.

And latter this month the long awaited NRC graduate program rankings are scheduled to be released. How will Penn State do? Old Main already knows since the data was released to univerisities earlier this week. My guess is that The Old Main Propaganda Shop is working overtime getting ready to brag and spin as needed once the public gets a look.

Das Bloat: Administrative Size and Cost at Penn State

2010-09-12T22:38:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of my regular commenters sent me a link to a study by the Goldwater Institute on administrative bloat at American universities. I've been playing around with the data from the report to see how Penn State fits into the overall pattern of spending on administrators.

The data used by the Goldwater Institute comes from Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. The report compares administration size in 1993, the earliest year for which IPEDS data available, to size in 2007, the most recent available data at the time the report was issued. The Institute uses two measures of administrative size, the number of administrators per hundred students and administrative cost per student. According to the Institute,

In the employment tables in this report, the “Administration” column consists of the IPEDS categories of “Administration/Executive” and “Other Professionals.”Other Professionals clearly fall within an administrative category because they are defi ned by IPEDS as “persons employed for the primary purpose of performing academic support, student service, and institutional support…. Included in this category are all employees holding titles such as business operations specialists;buyers and purchasing agents; human resources, training, and labor relations specialists; management analysts; meeting and convention planners; miscellaneous business operations specialists; financial specialists; accountants and auditors; budget analysts; financial analysts and advisers; financial examiners; loan counselors and officers; [etc.].” Under any reasonable defi nition, these employees are engaged in administrative functions but clearly not directly engaged in teaching, research or service.

[...]

Unfortunately, the spending categories in IPEDS are not identical to the employment categories, but we have done our best to map them into similar groupings. For the expenditure tables in this report, the “Administration” spending consists of the “Academic Support,” “Institutional Support,” and “Student Services” categories in IPEDS.

The Institute examined both private and public universities. I've restricted my analysis to public universities and I've dropped those schools for which data was missing for one or the other year.

So whats the story with regard to Penn State?

First let's look at the number of administrators per one hundred students in 1993 compared to that metric in 2007 as shown in the first graph.

In all of the graphs of distributions shown below, the green bands show the first quartile, median and third quartiles. You can mouse over the graphs to get information about other universities.

In 1993, Penn State had 6.20 administrators per one hundred students which was below the 75^th %-tile of 6.40 administrators per one hundred students for that year. By 2007, that number had jumped to 10.70 administrators per hundred students which was substantial above the 75^th %-tile which had risen to 8.50 administrators per one hundred students. A better picture of how the number of administrators has changed overall in academia and where Penn State fits in in the shift can be seen in this scatterplot.

Clearly, while Penn State has porked up on the number of administrators, it is not close to the worst offender.

Next the distribution of cost of administration per student is compared for the two time periods . The seventy-fifth percentile of administrative spending per student went from 4,661 in 1993 to 6,247 in 2007. Penn State's administrative spending per student was already well outside the middle of the 1993 distribution at 5,002. By 2007, that number had ballooned to 12, 556.

The extent to which Penn State went from being a big spender on administration in 1993 to being ostentatious in 2007 can best be seen in the following scatterplot.

To recap, the size of Penn State's administration as measured by the number of administrators per 100 students grew substantially between 1993 and 2007 shifting from the upper end of the middle of the distribution to the upper end of the distribution, but the cost of administration per student, which was already in the upper end of the distribution in 1993, blew up by 2007.

Housekeeping Note

2010-09-11T12:02:00.001-04:00

...sorry about neglecting the blog. It's been a busy week for me, but I hope to have a few new posts up before Monday. In particular, one of my regulars sent a link to some data on administrative bloat at universities. I've started the process of analyzing it, which requires that I transform tables in a PDF to Excel, I might have something to say about it depending on what the analysis reveals. Anyway, have a good weekend and check back for updates.

More of This, Please!

2010-09-07T18:35:00.001-04:00

Joe Sestak: Toomey a "Bag Man for the Ultra Rich."

(via The Pittsburgh Comet)

Something is Rank

2010-09-07T10:54:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning to update you on the reaction from The Old Main Propaganda Shop on Penn State plummeting from 7^th place last year to 35^th place this year in the Washington Monthly National University Ranking.

First, let's go back to 2007 when Penn State finished fifth in the ranking due to the erroneously high Pell Grant percentage used by the magazine for Penn State. Here's the reaction.

"It's something that Penn Staters should be proud of," Penn State [Bullshit Artist] Geoff Rushton said. "It uses scientific criteria that measures how universities impact the nation, and Penn State has done very well. "

Geoff had to know that the Pell Grant percentage was off by just shy of a factor of two , yet he was counseling pride on the part of Penn Staters. I'll cut him some slack since empty pride is the Penn State way and even empty pride can be used to separate gullible alumni from their money.

Now, let's compare this to the reaction this year.

"I have to say that rankings as a whole are something that we don't take too seriously," [Penn State Bullshit Artist Annemarie] Mountz said. "We don't look for ways to rise in the rankings."

Not too seriously, Annemarie? Why does Penn State maintain a Web site Where We Stand:Current Rankings? The site,which was updated last month, still has the 2009 Washington Monthly ranking and not the 2010 ranking. Why is that? You and Graham have to know that the 2009 ranking, like all of that magazine rankings before this year, is based on a too high Pell Grant percentage for Penn State. It's a lie to leave it up.

By the way, a couple of years ago I pointed out that Penn State slams the Princeton Review rankings as not being scientific whenever its party school ranking draws unwelcome attention to the University (Rushton's quote above is a not too subtle dig at Princeton Review), yet Penn State listed other Princeton Review rankings on the site which made the University look good. Shortly thereafter, The Old Main Propaganda Shop scrubbed the Princeton Review rankings from the site. Guess what? Princeton Review is listed again this year. I guess they figured no one was paying attention anymore....don't even begin to think about erasing anything this time, Annemarie, I've notarized the site.

The fascinating claim by Annemarie is, "We don't look for ways to rise in the rankings." No, of course not, Annemarie.

Dickinson School of Law (DSL) is being offered a $60-plus million new home on the Penn State campus in State College if the university's board of governors agrees to forsake Carlisle.
Board approval is the only thing that stands in the way of the proposed relocation by fall 2008.
An agreement made when the law school and the state-affiliated university were merged in 1997 says the 169-year-old school will remain in the Carlisle in perpetuity unless the governors vote to go to another site.
In a 28-page memo marked "Confidential For DSL Board Members Only" in preparation for a Nov. 21-22 board meeting, law school Dean Phil McConnaughay tells the board that the university "is prepared to assume the entire cost of a new facility without any repayment" if the law school "completes the design of a new facility within the next 12 months."
The crux of the dean's argument favoring an exodus from the borough is strongly rooted in U.S. News and World Report magazine's third-tier ranking of the school and "a languishing reputation" that caused "DSL grads" in one firm to inform McConnaughay about "their law firm's decision not to hire any longer from our law school because of our low rank."

Penn State was willing to spend $60 million to boost DSL's US News and World Report ranking and ultimately it spent an unknown amount in a legal fees and a pr campaign to abrogate the original merger agreement and to win the right to build a second campus at University Park at the cost of having to renovate the Carlisle facility. That construction cost $100 million.

What's a little fiddling with the way it reports its Pell Grant percentage to boost its Washington Monthly ranking in comparison to that?

Happy Labor Day

2010-09-06T07:00:00.001-04:00

As a Labor Day treat, I give you a real rabble rousing speech from someone who stands firmly against excessive corporate profits and tax cuts for the wealthy and for wage growth, Social Security, unions, fair employment practices and federal school lunches.

Happy Labor Day
(via Donkey Edge and h/t Digby)

I'm Voting for Sestak....

2010-09-04T10:59:00.002-04:00

...anyway...no surprise there, I'm sure. But here is one more reason to do so, via Adam at StateCollege.com.

Joe Sestak believes Penn State and the other state-related universities in Pennsylvania ought to be more transparent about their spending, the U.S. senatorial nominee said Thursday.

"Everybody should be transparent," Sestak, a Democrat, said during a campaign stop at the Centre County Grange Encampment and Fair. "That would discipline a lot of things. ... I think it incentivizes better behavior because it's open."

[...]

But "my take on it is, we just need to know more," Sestak said. He said public calls for government accountability -- in general -- are among the most repeated refrains he hears on the campaign trail.

If elected, Sestak said, he will work on the university-transparency issue. He said it fits into his larger emphasis on encouraging federal-government accountability. That drive for transparency, he said, asks the question: "If you are taking federal money, how transparent are you?"

Of course, the details matter and I look forward to hearing exactly what Joe has in mind.

Letting a Commenter Do My Work For Me

2010-09-03T22:47:00.001-04:00

There's a slow motion back and forth going on between my regular commenter MoonDragon and teabagger extraordinaire psumba on the comment thread of this post. I highly recommend giving it a read. MoonDragon has far more patience than I do when it comes to arguing with our paranoid defender of all things Palin and he/she is doing a very good job of of it. Here's a taste,

Everyone getting the same shot you had is problematic, considering disparaties of the original circumstances from which people start (I, myself, was very lucky - caring parents, choosing a major that didn't become obsolete before graduation, remaining relatively healthy.) Government can help remediate some circumstances, particularly of institutional, disadvantage. Support of such policies is one of the family values I inherited from caring parents.

I hope your students learned about unions in their studies, that may be the only way to a better life than that of their parents. The decline of the middleclass parallels the decline of union membership.

The biggest boosts to the "ruling elite" over the last few years have been in the tax code that has fed the growing gap between the top 2% and the bottom 98%, especially the recinding of the "death tax" is particularly amusing, as it is creating a defacto aristocracy. Just watch an episode of BRAVO's NYC Prep.

It's the railing against unions and taxes on the top 2% by the Tea Party, two things that will help people get back in the game, amuses me.

Why do I call psumba paranoid, you may ask? Well, consider these remarks. This is from his first response to my post about him from over a month ago.

You must really have some "juice" to have the CDT take down the Palin article & comments that the above remarks were posted against ...

This one is from three days ago.

What was represented as my original posting was really my fifth posting in a long thread. Hence my compliment to Veblen about getting the original article taken down ... destroying the context of the original remarks.

Of course, I had nothing to do with the vanishing comment thread. The CDT puts most of their articles behind a paywall after two weeks and the comment thread for an article vanishes when the article goes behind the paywall. But psumba's first instinct was to accuse me of conspiring with the powers at the CDT to victimize him and more than a month latter he still thinks that he's the victim of a conspiracy to make him look bad....did I mention that psumba is huge Glenn Beck fan, too?

On a Related Note

2010-09-02T23:15:00.001-04:00

After reading the last post on Texas A&M's capitulation to corporate interests, one may ask what is the future of public higher education? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece up this evening which looks at that question.

The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."

The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.

And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.

During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.

This is not a pretty picture, but I think it may be an accurate one.

Elsewhere In Academia

2010-09-02T16:40:00.001-04:00

The Texas A&M system is about to introduce a radically new way to rank professors.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member's salary. When the document -- essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members -- is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

"If you look at what people are saying out there -- first of all, they want accountability," [Frank] Ashley [,the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System,] said. "It's something that we're really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on."

This does not begin to measure if students are learning, in fact, it should result in a system in which students are guaranteed to learn less.

Does anyone think that hiring a shitload of contingent faculty, paying them a pittance and putting them in front of several hundred students is the best way to teach students? Because that obviously dumb approach would undoubtedly lead to a very favorable outcome on this metric and therefore is one likely end result of the use of this metric, particularly in the humanities where the opportunities for large outside grants is severely limited.

In the sciences and engineering, one might expect that faculty will be encouraged to seek out industry funding which may do little if anything to push back the frontiers of knowledge. This could be particularly problematic in the medical school, where conflict of interest arising out of pharma research is a growing national problem. This metric induces the wrong incentives all around.

This is not the first boneheaded idea introduced at the Texas A&M system recently.

[A]wards of between $2,500 and $10,000 to faculty members based on
anonymous student evaluations... was implemented at Texas
A&M University [in the fall of 2008] and has been expanded to all
A&M System campuses.

Can you say grade inflation?

This is Texas, which has been screwing up education for year through the Texas State Board of Education's textbook standards, so there should be no surprise that the dumb is seeping into the Texas higher ed community. By the way, both of these ideas come from a list of seven proposal introduced by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, which shares a board member with the Texas A&M board regents, Phil Adams who is also a major contributor to the Governor Rick Perry's reelection campaign. The good news is, that unlike the situation with the textbooks which impact textbooks nationwide because of the size of the Texas market forces textbook publishers to write their books to accomodate Texas, there is no natural mechanism for this to spread outside of the Lone Star state. Nonetheless, there may be pressure from the rightwing business community for other state's to adopt these ideas. Hence vigilance is required.

Stupid On Parade

2010-09-01T10:12:00.005-04:00

It's like they rounded up everyone's dumb relatives and bused them off to DC last week.

By the way, doesn't the guy with the binoculars look and sound like Leon Panetta's fatter, dumber brother? Or, just maybe, it was Leon doing some undercover surveillance of the rally...think about it, binoculars?...better get out the chalkboard, Glenn.

The video comes via TBogg, who noted that

Someone once said:
If the terrorists are smart, they will give up on trying to attack us and just sit back and wait, because eventually our entire country is going to be so stupid that people will start sticking their tongues in wall sockets just to see what electricity tastes like.
We are way past that now.

That someone was very wise.

GT:National Security Demands That We Assure That the Next Generation of the Koch Family Has the Assets to Continue the Fight on the Middle Class

2010-08-31T10:57:00.003-04:00

GT spoke last night at Penn State on national security which he interpreted very broadly. Let's compare and contrast a couple of his statements.

First up:

"What my generation is providing you, unfortunately, is a legacy of debt," he said. "It's just not American.

He said the Obama administration needs to present -- and Congress needs to enact -- a responsible budget.

Meanwhile, Thompson said, if steep estate taxes are reinstated next year, a family passing a farm from one generation to the next may be forced to pay a 45 percent levy. That threatens to take still more farms out of business, a trend that could force more reliance on imported food over which the U.S. has little control, Thompson said.

To sum up, GT wants to deal with the national debt by adding $1.3 trillion dollars over the next ten years to the national debt by stopping a reinstatement of the estate tax. To be fair, perhaps GT just wants the tax to go back to last year's level, then the cost to the US Treasury over the same time span would be $609 billion. He justifies adding this huge burden to the national debt, which he himself says is "not American," by suggesting that the tax will impact family farms.

But it is estimated that that in 2011 the estate tax, if reinstated at 2009 levels, would only effected 110 family farms and small businesses and these estates on average would pay a rate of 11.3%. (The 45% number that Thompson uses for the tax rate only applies to the portion of the estate in excess of $3.5 million and of the portion above the threshold much of it can be shielded from taxes.) Further, there is absolutely no evidence that farms would have to liquidated to pay for the estate tax. In 2001, the American Farm Bureau Federation could not cite a single example of a farm being sold off to pay the estate tax and the CBO has estimated that under the 2009 conditions only a handful of family farms would not have sufficient liquidity to pay the tax, but it said that it likely overestimated this number since the it couldn't include certain assets held in trust.

The take away is that GT thinks that it is in our national security interest to help the Koch brothers pass on their wealth to their heirs so that those heirs can continue the family war against ordinary Americans.

watertiger has....

2010-08-29T21:39:00.002-04:00

....a way with words.

This country has contracted a nasty STD after being fucked by the Bush
Administration. Beck and Palin and their ilk are the aggressive,
inflamed genital warts that will never respond to treatment.

~~Here, here!~~ Hear, Hear!

GT "Respecting the Pain and Suffering" of 9/11 Emergency Responders

2010-08-29T09:21:00.002-04:00

As I noted earlier this month, GT joined 158 of his Republican colleagues to defeat a bill which created a fund for the 9/11 emergency responders who have health problems due to the toxic environment created by the collapse of the World Trade Center. At the time, GT hadn't explained his vote and I wondered which Clown Caucus approved talking point GT would point to if he was asked to justify his vote. This week at a townhall meeting in Philipsburg we got an answer to that question.

Thompson said he understands what first responders experience in a situation, as he is a licensed Emergency Medical Technician and a volunteer firefighter.
He said he understands the emotional and physical trauma experienced but also said that the bill was not well crafted and he was concerned about where the money was going and what it paid for, which was not clear to him in the bill.

That's pretty fucking vague. And it looks like GT didn't do his homework on this one, since his excuse is not on the the list of Clown Caucus approved talking points (PDF). The closest item on that approved list of reasons not to vote for the bill is item #3. It must be tough remembering all those rationales for voting no.

The fact is that the bill is very clear on both where the money is going and what it pays for. Both geographic and temporal eligibility requirement for receiving the money from the fund are clearly spelled out and a detailed list of health conditions which are covered by the fund are given. The one open area is cancer which takes a longtime to develop. Hence at this time there is no epidemiological evidence to tie 9/11 to cancer risks. You can learn more from this CBO report on the bill and the bill itself.

By the way,

...Thompson also briefly talked about the controversial mosque and community center proposed to be build in New York City near ground zero. He said that it is a local decision of the city and the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over it. However, he also said that he didn't think those involved were respecting the pain and suffering that is still occurring there and that should have been taken into consideration.

GT has a funny way of respecting the pain and suffering of those 9/11 emergency responders.

What Do Teabaggers Want?

2010-08-28T21:57:00.001-04:00

Steve Benen, one of my favorite bloggers, has a must read piece on today's rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Here's a sample.

For a year and a half, we've seen rallies and town-hall shouting and attack ads and Fox News special reports. But I still haven't the foggiest idea what these folks actually want, other than to see like-minded Republicans winning elections. To be sure, I admire their passion, and I applaud their willingness to get involved in public affairs. If more Americans chose to take a more active role in the political process, the country would be better off and our democracy would be more vibrant.

But that doesn't actually tell us what these throngs of Americans are fighting for, exactly. I'm not oblivious to their cries; I'm at a loss to appreciate those cries on anything more than a superficial level.
[...]
This is about giving Americans who work hard and play by the rules more opportunities.

I'm all for that, too. But would these opportunities include the chance for hard-working Americans to bring their kids to the doctor if they get sick, even if the family can't afford insurance? No, we're told, not those kinds of opportunities.

This is about the values of the Founding Fathers.

I'm a big fan of the framers' generation, who created an extraordinary nation. But if we're honoring their values, would this include their steadfast commitment to the separation of church and state? No, we're told, not those values.

This is about patriotic Americans willing to make sacrifices for the good of their country.
That sounds reasonable; sacrifices can be honorable. But if we're talking about patriots willing to sacrifice, does that mean millionaires and billionaires can go back to paying '90s-era tax rates (you know, when the economy was strong)? No, we're told, not those kinds of sacrifice.
[..]
Movements -- real movements that make a difference and stand the test of
time -- are about more than buzz words, television personalities, and
self-aggrandizement. Change -- transformational change that sets nations
on new courses -- is more than vague, shallow promises about "freedom."
[..]
The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about
something. The fact that it's not altogether obvious what that might be
probably isn't a good sign.

As they say, go read the whole thing.

Phds Aren't All Brilliant and Teabaggers Aren't All Teetotalers

2010-08-28T14:32:00.002-04:00

About a month ago, I had a post highlighting the CDT's most teabagelicious commeter, psumba, who showed up in comments here to defend himself. He wrote, in part,

Let's see ... I'm charged with:

- anti-intellectualism - as a student, I was considered to be quite intellectual. In fact, I did earn two simultaneous undergraduate diplomas from Penn State in four years ... in two demanding fields from different Penn State colleges. What happened ...

To which one of my regular commenters, MoonDragon, wrote,

I will take your word for it that you have the degrees you claim. Earning a college degree is an achievement in and of itself, however it isn't proof of intellect. Your statement may be evidence of being highly trained, but isn' t proof of either education or intellectual capacity. Pardon the anecdote, but I know more than a few Phds who are dumber than dirt.

Today we no longer have to depend on MoonDragon's anecdotal evidence concerning dumber than dirt Phds. From Kevin Drum comes this Quote of the Day, from the man behind the Teabagging curtain,

...Dick Armey, PhD University of Oklahoma, former economics professor at the University of North Texas, and former Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives:
One of the things that we see as we look at Glenn Beck's work that's been fascinating to me, is we see a more true and accurate history of the United States, and we see it documented at levels of rigor that, in fact, one would expect out of Ph.D. dissertations — it is serious, scholarly work....[Liberal critics] don’t have to argue with Glenn Beck. They have to argue with his documentation and they can’t match that level of rigor.
Somebody just shoot me now.

Digby adds,

It has often been rumored that Dick Armey is a falling down drunk and his behavior on TV certainly suggests that he's on something. I'm guessing it's acid...

What is it with Teabaggers and alcohol? Here's psumba

You should have taken me up on my offer last Fall to have a drink together the last time that I was in State College.

Once Obamacare Goes into Effect Maybe We Can Finally Afford to Do Something About That Terrible Hack Afflicting the Fifth District

2010-08-26T22:36:00.005-04:00

From Blogger Pictures

Well, GT is at it again, bullshitting his constituents. I've been having a bit of a back and forth over at the CDT for the past few days over a lie filled letter GT wrote "explaining" one of his votes on energy policy. I hope to build on my comments over there for a post here sometime soon. In the meantime, let's have a go at this tweet. (By the way, the link in the tweet takes you to the Web site of the Republican members of the Education & Labor committee where they've posted a portion of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The whole article is here. )

The good news is that I don't really have to do much work to clean up the load that GT's shoveled our way, since the invaluable Kevin Drum dealt with this particular pile of bullshit yesterday.

We're not talking about university health centers here, we're talking about actual health insurance policies. And if you read through the rest of the story, you find that most students are insured through their parents' policies. According to the GAO,
"only 7 percent bought their own policies or purchased school-based
plans." Add to that the fact that so far there's no real evidence that
healthcare reform will seriously impact student health policies anyway
(colleges are merely "warning" that it might) and that a lot depends on
the rules HHS sets, which is all part of how healthcare reform is designed to work. HHS rule setting is a big part of the process and was always intended to be.

So: do I expect vast hordes of angry students descending on Capitol
Hill? No. Do I expect HHS to sit around and do nothing about this? No.
Do I expect that some reasonable set of rules will be worked out in the
end? Yes. Do I expect that critics will take any notice of the fact that
yet another scare story about healthcare reform will turn out to be
overblown and ridiculous? No indeedy.

Why does GT insist on bullshitting his constituents?

For You Oldtimers Out There

2010-08-26T10:44:00.001-04:00

From StateCollege.com,

Rustum Roy, the founder of Penn State's Materials Research Lab, has passed away, the university announced Thursday morning.
He was 86, according to Penn State.

Rusty was always a character and a self-promoter, but he sure did a good job of tweaking Old Main's nose over the years and for that he will be missed.

It's Beginning to Look Like Penn State Exists Solely For THON

2010-08-26T10:35:00.002-04:00

Today's Collegian has a half-assed story on Penn State's precipitous drop in the Washington Monthly National University Ranking. The reporter, Micah Wintner, makes no effort to explain why the University dropped like a rock from 7^th to 35^th place. Basically the story is Penn State drops in Washington Monthly ranking....hey, look over there THON....economic impact...wait!... is that Graham playing the washboard?

You would think that explaining the drop would be the obvious angle on this story. Let's review, this is from my post last year on the ranking.

This brings me to Social Mobility which clearly is what drives Penn State in to the top ten schools on the overall ranking and something ain't right here. Anyone who has spent any time in Happy Valley over the past fifteen years knows that the Main Campus of Penn State is increasingly populated by upper middle class and upper class students. It's gotten so bad that the University Faculty Senate issued a report a couple years ago on Access and Affordability. It did not paint a pretty picture.

Then there is the 2006 report from Education Trust, Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equality in the Nation's Premier Public Universities, which I blogged about at the time. Penn State received and overall grade of an F and an F on low income access. The Old Main Propaganda Shop wasn't happy.

The grade on low income access was based on the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at the University Park campus in 2004 which stood at 18.0%, according to the report, compared to 33.6the% of all college students in Pennsylvania with Pell Grant that year. The report also noted a trend toward less access at the Main Campus of Penn State. In 1992, the percentage of students with Pell Grants at the flagship campus was 22.2% compared to 27.7% overall in Pennsylvania.

Washington Monthly has the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at Penn State in 2008 as 25%. Has the University dramatically improved low income access to the Main Campus in the last four years? It is highly unlikely.

The Education Department keeps track of this statistic. For 2008, the total number of recipients of Pell Grants at all campuses of Penn State stood at 16,707 or roughly 25% of system-wide enrollment. (You can download the Excel file here.) That percentage is very likely to be lower at University Park and higher at the branch campuses.

Unfortunately, the most recent data on Pell Grant with a campus breakdown from the National Center for Educational Statistics is 2006. It shows substantial inequality amongst the campuses from a high of 63% at the Shenango campus in northwestern Pennsylvania to a low of 14% at the University Park, the flagship campus. However, the percentage of students with Pell Grants at the University Park campus has been very stable around 15% from 1999 through 2006, hence it is likely that the current percentage is significantly lower than the 25% system-wide number used by the Washington Monthly.

You can find a comparison to the other Big Ten schools plus Berkeley for 2006 here.

I think that it is reasonable to concluded that the Washington Monthly over estimated the percentage of Penn State University Park students on Pell Grants...

So this year Washington Monthly got the Pell Grant percent right and Penn State plunged in the ranking. How hard was that?

Next question, what does that low Pell Grant percentage tell us about Penn State fulfilling its mission under Graham?....hands....anyone....com'on people....did anyone do the assigned reading?

Drat! Spoiled Again by Veblen

2010-08-24T23:41:00.002-04:00

For the past five years, Washington Monthly has ranked universities according to their purported contribution to society. Penn State has done very well in the ranking: 2005, 6^th place ;2006, 3^rd place; 2007, 5^th place; 2008, a presidential election year, the ranking was not done; 2009, 7^th place.

Penn State has been very proud of finishing in the top ten every year. The headline at The Penn State Propaganda Portal the first year that the ranking came out was, "Penn State ranks near the top of magazine's rankings." The next year the headline was more specific , "Penn State third in Washington Monthly national rankings." In 2007, Graham figured that there's money to be made from Penn State's high finish in this sweepstakes. His spiel to fat cat donors included this,

...the University has improved the lives of countless citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond. In fact, Washington Monthly has ranked Penn State third among all American universities and colleges for fostering social mobility, public service, and economic growth.

Last year The Penn State Propaganda Portal returned to declaring that "Penn State seventh in Washington Monthly national rankings"

I've discussed the faulty nature of this ranking in the past on several occasions. The biggest problem with the ranking is on it social mobility scale which uses the percentage of students on Pell Grants in both components which which make up the scale. There have been some problems with the percentages used by the Washington Monthly. The Pell Grant percentage reported for Penn State, 25%, was for the entire school. The actual percentage for University Park has been closer to 15%. You can read my critiques here, here and here.

This year Washington Monthly made an effort to get the Pell Grant percentages right and......drum roll, please............Penn State's Pell Grant percentage, as reported this year, is 13% and Penn State drops like a stone in the ranking to 35^th place.

Here's your challenge. Help out The Old Main Propaganda Shop by writing a headline for this year's press release announcing Penn State's finish in the Washington Monthly ranking or help out Graham directly by suggesting how this 37^th place ranking can be used to separate the filthy rich from their money.The title of this post is my headline suggestion, leave your suggestions in the comments.

Credit Where Credit is Due

2010-08-23T22:21:00.001-04:00

This looks like a good idea.

"As our community moves forward to address the challenges of dangerous drinking, we acknowledge that many students' use of alcohol may align less with the one-time alcohol abuse incident, and more with the reality that they may be suffering from an addictive abuse of alcohol," said Damon Sims, vice president for student affairs at Penn State.

"This fall, the Division of Student Affairs at Penn State will provide space for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

It's a small move, but even if it doesn't solve the alcohol abuse problem here, if it helps only a handful of students, it will be worth it. Kudos to Sims.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Party School, Damon Sims, Alcoholics Anonymous

This Will Work Out Well

2010-08-20T11:53:00.002-04:00

Earlier this week at Ag Progress Days, Graham announced the formation of a new Penn State research and outreach center^[1] focused on the Marcellus Shale. The purpose of the center, Penn State's Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR), according the to The Penn State Propaganda Portal is

....to work with state agencies, elected officials, communities, landowners, industry and environmental groups to protect the Commonwealth’s water resources, forests and transportation infrastructure while advocating for a science-based and responsible approach to handling the state’s natural gas deposits.

A center such as this could be very valuable if it is trusted by all parties involved. One of he factors which will determine whether there will be trust is the funding sources for the center. The press release linked to above notes that initial funding for the center is internal.

Penn State has committed major resources to establish and staff the Marcellus Center (MCOR) with support from the colleges of Agricultural Sciences and Earth and Mineral Sciences, the Penn State Institutes for Energy and the Environment (PSIEE) and Penn State Outreach, Spanier said.

Additional funding from PSIEE and the Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI) at Penn State is underwriting investigation of human/social impacts and environmental issues related to Marcellus development by teams of cross-disciplinary collaborators ...

But eventually, as noted by The Penn State Propaganda Portal, Penn State hopes to leverage this investment, "The goal of these research seed grants is to develop proposals for external funding agencies." This is where things get a bit sticky.

External funding agencies suggest that the center is interested in obtaining government grants which would be a good way of avoiding conflicts of interest, but Graham actually elaborated on this in his remarks at Ag Progress Days.

Spanier said the center does not yet have outside funding, but the university hopes to get financial support from the state and the industry.

Financial support from industry, what could go wrong with that?

Earlier this summer, there was an outcry over an Penn State economic impact study of the Marcellus Shale which was funded by industry and very likely grossly over estimated the economic impact.

On two separate occasions, the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center counseled law makers to disregard the conclusions of these two “Penn State studies” because of their funding and bias. The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry produced a parallel study on employment, “Marcellus Shale Industry Overview,” which estimated only a small fraction of the touted jobs. Neither Pennsylvania College of Technology’s “Marcellus Shale Workforce Needs Assessment” nor Penn State Cooperative Extension’s “Potential Economic Impacts of Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania” supports the exaggerated claims of these two industry funded papers.

The report also advocated against the implementation of a severance tax on drillers, which the drilling industry opposes.

If Penn State wants this center to be seen as an honest broker, then it must eschew all industry funding.

But being an honest broker may not be what is on Graham's mind. There's money to made in the Marcellus Shale and where there's money to be made Graham will try to get a little taste. Consider that the Office of the Vice President for Research at Penn State maintains a database of University research centers, institutes and facilities for industry to find potential research partners which includes the Astrobiology Research Center. If they are dreaming of making a couple of industry dollars on Astrobiology, imagine the wet dreams they are having in Old Main over the Marcellus Shale.

[1] This link to the CDT article, published on August 19th, 2010, will evaporate in about two weeks. You can access the article after that at NewsBank which is available free online at Schlow Library or the Penn State library.

Technorati Tags: The Penn State's Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, Penn State, Spanier, Marcellus Shale, conflict of interest

Someone Here at Penn State....

2010-08-19T19:54:00.001-04:00

....should ~~steal~~ borrow this idea and adapt it to Penn State. I give you the University of Binge Drinking Web site.

Welcome to the University of Binge Drinking! Here you will become oriented in the dangerous drinking that occurs on our property. You will learn about our policies that take our state laws and modify them so that they allow us to look the other way, the insane amounts of money we make from those binge drinkers, and finally the skyrocketing crime that results from our recklessness, but it is important to remember that's all the 19 and 20 year olds fault.

Go take a look at the site...you won't be sorry that you did.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, University of Iowa, Party School, Alcohol Abuse

Sorting Out the Convoluted Web....

2010-08-19T11:38:00.002-04:00

...well, not so much.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

News Corp. Gives Money to Republicans

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Technorati Tags: The Daily Show, Glenn Beck, Fox News, GOP

Setting an Example

2010-08-18T00:47:00.001-04:00

Carnegie Mellon University's President Jared L. Cohon will step down on June 30, 2013 after sixteen years in the job. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,

Penn State University President Graham Spanier called Cohon "one of the great leaders in American higher education in the modern era."

While Cohon had this to say about his retirement,

"It's just time," Cohon, 62, said during a conference call with reporters. A CMU tenured-faculty member, he plans to teach courses spanning civil and environmental engineering and public policy.

"Sometimes individuals can go on for longer than they should," Cohon said. "Universities need new leaders from time to time. They need people with fresh ideas."

Graham I suggest that you listen real close to this great leader's words of wisdom and consider following in his footsteps....as fast as you can.

Technorati Tags: Graham Spanier, Jared L. Cohon, Carnegie Mellon University

The Media Finally Reports on a GT No Vote and Gets a Quote From Him

2010-08-17T20:24:00.003-04:00

Last week House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) called the House back into a rare August session to vote on an emergency funding bill for Medicaid and education. The bill passed, despite GOP opposition, and Obama signed it into law.

In Pennsylvania, its passage staved off a financial catastrophe.

The Pennsylvania Legislature approved a budget for 2010-11 based on the hope of receiving $850 million in Medicaid funding.
Gov. Ed Rendell, who once predicted as many as 12,000 layoffs if no additional Medicaid money were received, has said that, with $600 million, some layoffs are still possible next month. The governor and legislative leaders are expected to meet to decide how to close that gap.

But GT voted against the bill, and thanks to WENY-TV in Elmira, New York, we know, for once, what GT says about the reason he voted the way that he did.

Northern Tier Congressman Glenn Thompson voted against it, saying it's spending more money at a time when the country can't afford it. “This is about the fact that we're experiencing challenging times fiscally.” Thompson says, “and when you experience challenging times, everybody has to tighten the belt.”

However the Congressional Budget Office says while the bill does add to the deficit over five years, in ten years, it would break even and actually reduce the overall deficit

Well, there you have it, we, in the Centre Region, have to rely on an out-of-state TV station to get GT's bullshitting on record.

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), emergency medicaid education bill

If a Drunk Penn State Student Falls in an Alley and "This American Life" Isn't There to See It, Does Penn State Still Have an Alcohol Abuse Problem?

2010-08-17T19:31:00.005-04:00

I am a little late on this, but earlier this month the Princeton Review Party School Ranking came out. Penn State dropped from first place last year to third place this year. That mean's that the national spotlight will now shift away from Penn State to the University of Georgia, this year's top school. We'll have to wait and see if Old Main's will to deal with the alcohol abuse problem around here , which was dialed up last year after the first place showing in the Party School Ranking, the alcohol related death of freshman Joe Dado, and a revealing portrayal of Penn State's party culture on This American Life, diminishes now that the public relation problem has been solved to some degree.

It's worth noting the Penn Staters are taking the drop in the ranking in stride. Here's Jake Wiest a junior architectural engineering major in a letter to the Collegian.

The review relies on a survey that states an average of 325 students per school filled it out. First, we must assume everyone filling this out is doing so in an honest manner, not just to talk up the school's party scene. Assuming this, than a poll of less than 0.8 percent of the student population, a horribly inadequate number, determined our ranking.
I'm not saying that we would've stayed at No. 1 had more people filled out the survey -- perhaps quite the opposite. I'm saying who cares. Both the university and student population should put little stock into this overly hyped and insufficient survey.

Jake echos Penn State Bullshit Artist Geoff Rushton reaction,

"How do you scientifically gauge something like this?" Rushton said. "I don't think you do."

[...]

For Rushton, the rankings not only hold no real legitimacy -- they also have zero purpose.

The ranking is not representative of all students, he said, as many students drink responsibly.

"It's kind of insulting to our students, who are very bright, hard-working and dedicated to their studies," he said.

But Jake takes a very different lesson away from this observation about the lack of scientific legitimacy of the ranking,

I say the students should just keep doing your thing; everyone knows we party harder than the University of Georgia and Ohio University anyway.

I've gotta say, I think Jake's got a better grip on the reality here than Geoff does.

I mean it was a couple of those very bright, hard-working and dedicated recent Penn State graduates that used their talents to come up with this.

During their time here, some Penn State graduates engineered a way to drink liquor without actually tasting anything -- and they say it may become the next social staple for college students across the nation.

Their product is the SLIZ Cup -- a "drinking vessel designed to eliminate the cringe between taking a shot and reaching for the chaser," said Anthony Vella, one of the product's creators.

It's a cup on top, with a straw for the handle.

To get the shot and chaser experience, co-creator Maurio Foire, Class of 2010, said users pour the alcohol into the SLIZ cup, add a non-alcoholic beverage and then drink quickly through the straw before letting the drink mix.

[...]

Inventing, marketing and selling SLIZ has been quite the experience, Vella said. The group got the chance to learn hands-on about entreprenuership, meet some interesting people along the way and "probably had too much fun conducting the necessary 'market research' which came with a lot of vodka," he said.

Hey, I know you're curious about the SLIZ Cup, so here's their Web site.

Anyway, I'll keep an eye on Graham and Old Main this year to see if they slack off in their efforts to deal with Penn State's alcohol abuse problem.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Princeton Review Party School ranking, Spanier

Xtians Are Weird

2010-08-16T19:51:00.002-04:00

Here's a thought provoking report from yesterday's CDT (This link will die in about two weeks, after that you can go to News Bank, which is free online at Schlow and Pattee, if you really want to read the whole article.).

When Dannah Gresh tries to convince 8-to 12-year-old girls about the importance of sexual purity, modesty and not blindly following peer pressure, she’ll have some new partners.

They’re animated. They’re anthropomorphic. They’re vegetables.

Gresh’s “Secret Keeper Girl Live: The Pajama Party Tour,” which will debut in State College on Tuesday, will include characters from VeggieTales, a Christian-themed animated video series that mixes pop culture references with moral themes. The video series has spawned a television series, books, CDs and two movies.

“We’re just honored out of our minds,” said Gresh, a State College resident, relationship coach and author who founded the nonprofit Pure Freedom with her husband, Bob.

VeggieTales officials approached Gresh several months ago, while she was doing a show in Nashville. The two main VeggieTales characters are Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber, and their stories have included a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph (who had a gift for understanding dreams) that’s set in the Wild West, parodies “Bonanza” and focuses on the importance of overcoming hardship

A new VeggieTales character, Sweetpea Beauty, will focus on teaching girls about the importance of inner beauty, Gresh said.

The hell with Sweetpea Beauty, I'm really curious how Larry the Cucumber fits in with the promotion of sexual purity in girls and I wonder if Larry has anything to do with the secrets which are kept.

Technorati Tags: Humor, Dannah Gresh, Bob Gresh, Secret Keepers

Well, What Do You Think of the Changes Around Here?

2010-08-15T00:50:00.001-04:00

Let me know in comments what you like and don't like about the new site design.

Technorati Tags: Housekeeping Note

In Our Backyard

2010-08-13T13:05:00.001-04:00

Things may not be going too well next door.

LOCK HAVEN - Faced with declining state financial support, Lock Haven University has told its faculty union that layoffs - or retrenchment, in bargaining terms - are possible.
The school has until Oct. 31 to notify the 264 professor-faculty members of the local chapter of the Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and Universities Faculties if job cuts will be made.
In a prepared statement issued to The Express, university Interim President Dr. Barbara B. Dixon said, "As part of its ongoing actions to address projected budget shortfalls in the next three years ... retrenchment cannot be ruled out during the 2011-2012 academic year because of financial considerations, elimination or consolidation of academic programs and courses, program curtailment or other reasons."
The announcement was sent by letter to Dr. Mark Cloud, local APSCUF chapter president.

This is a reminder that the worst of the Great Recession may still be ahead of us and that it may hit closer to home next year when the stimulus funds for higher education dry up.

Housekeeping Update: I've upgraded my hardware and now I'm in the process of getting everything just right. Over the weekend, I should finally be getting around to redesign of Left of Centre. In the meantime, blogging will remain light.

Technorati Tags: Unemployment, Higher Education, Lock Haven University

Housekeeping Note

2010-08-08T22:53:00.002-04:00

Blogging will be light this week. I'm in need of a long overdue hardware upgrade that I hope to accomplish sometime this week. Faster hardware, I'm hoping, will greatly improve my productivity.

Once the hardware is upgraded, I'm planning on a redesign of the blog. I have heard complaints about how hard the white on black is to read and I'm finally going to do something about it. My overall goal in the redesign is to have the look of the blog to be similar to my Twitter homepage. There will be a tiled background image like the one on Twitter. And the color palette will be the same. Go over to Twitter (Link fixed.) and let me know in comments what you think about the color palette in general and its readability in particular.

In addition, Blogger now has static pages on to which I'll be moving much of the material in the two right hand columns. I'll add a horizontal navigation bar at the top of the blog from which the pages will be accessed.

If any big stories break, like Graham announces that he's chucking it all and joining the circus, I'll be sure to post. Otherwise don't expect much until at least the second half of the week.

@CongressmanBS

2010-08-05T23:42:00.002-04:00

GT is at it again.

From Blogger Pictures

When people ask him "How can we justify tax cuts[?]" he responds with bullshit. Let's take a closer look at this.

First, let me concede that GT is almost correct when he says that more than 50% of those that will be affected by allowing the Bush/Cheney tax cuts to expire on high income taxpayers are small business owners. Almost because the figure applies to taxpayers that claim small business income. Not all of these taxpayers are, in fact, small business owners.

Setting that aside for the moment, let me be clear that that this is not the same as 50% of small business owners will be affected by the expiration of the tax cuts, but my guess is that many who read GT's tweet get that wrong impression. And GT, or more likely a smarter staffer, probably was aiming to induce that misunderstanding.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reports that a large proportion (33%) of taxpayers claiming small business income either have incomes too low to pay taxes or are in the lowest tax bracket. In fact, 14.5% taxpayers claiming small business income claim the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income workers.

How many taxpayers claiming small business income will be hit by the expiration of the Bush/Cheney tax cut on high income taxpayers? That would be 1.9%, again according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But about half of these taxpayers aren't small business owners. Included in this number are high income investors who receive part of their income from investments in small business. As the Tax Policy Center noted, of the 1.9% of taxpayers with

...small-business income who face one of the top two tax rates are merely passive investors who have nothing to do with running the business. This is because the Tax Policy Center data cited above use the Treasury Department’s relatively broad definition of “small business.” Under the Treasury definition, for example, the $84 of income President Bush received in 2001 from a passive investment in an oil and gas company7 made him a “small-business owner.” About 35 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes above $200,000, and about 58 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes over $1 million, received some or all of their business income in the form of passive investments. The Treasury definition also counts as “small-business income” the fees that CEOs are paid for sitting on corporate boards.

From Blogger Pictures

So we see the reason that more than 50% of taxpayers who would see their tax bill go up after the Bush/Cheney tax cut expires are "small business owners" is that many high income earners get some of their income classified by Treasury as coming from a small business even though they are not small business owners.

How much would extending the Bush/Cheney cuts for ten years cost the US Treasury? That would be $678 billion.

An how many jobs would we get for that price tag? Not too many would be my guess. Recall, that during the whole Bush presidency while these cuts were in effect, which included, let us not forget, the housing bubble, the rate of job creation never matched that during the Clinton years.

But I'd still be interested in hearing how many jobs GT thinks this $678 billion give away to the rich would create and why?. Comon', give us a ballpark figure GT.

(h/t Kevin Drum)

Technorati Tags: Bush/Cheney tax cut extension, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5)

For GT Legislatin' is Like Paintin' by Numbers

2010-08-04T20:43:00.001-04:00

Last week GT joined 158 of his Republican colleagues to defeat a bill which would have created a fund for 9/11 emergency responders who have health problems due to the toxic environment created by the collapse of the World Trade Center.

As with his no vote on extending emergency unemployment insurance, GT has not seen fit to issue a press release explaining why he has voted the way he has on this. He hasn't even a twitter twatted, his favorite form of keeping constituents abreast of the depths of his mind. I'm guessing he isn't too proud of the vote and hopes than no one in the local press notices it. A pretty good bet around these parts.

You can find the background on the bill here and what other wingers in the House have said about their no votes here The reaction of both Democrats and Republicans are here and a Democrat responded in detail here. Then you can try to guess which Clown Caucus approved talking points (PDF) GT would check off as his reason for voting no, if forced to explain his "reasoning."
(Cartoon via watertiger at Dependable Renegade ,a very funny blog which I highly recommended.)

Technorati Tags: 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5)

Times Must be Really Tough at the CDT

2010-08-03T13:45:00.002-04:00

Bob Heisse blogged today about attending the AP's Managing Editors board meeting in NYC this past weekend. What's interesting is how he traveled to and from the Big Apple. Bob

...took the Megabus for the first time to and from New York and had a nice ride. The New York stop right outside Penn Station was organized and effective in letting passengers know about their departures.

Now that's frugal.

Technorati Tags: Centre Daily Times, Bob Heisse, Megabus

Shale Schlocked

2010-08-02T20:45:00.001-04:00

OMG!!!! We're goin'a be rich!!! Stop your worrin' 'bout drinkin' water and such.

That's the way wingers want Pennsylvanians to react over the Macelleus Shale. Consider uberwinger GT, who recently tweeted,"On House Floor to discuss 60 year history of natural gas hydro-fracking, record of zero confirmed groundwater contamination & DEP oversight." Stories like this one from The Patriot-News today are important as reminders of the reality behind this gold rush mentality.

Marcellus Shale gas drillers in Pennsylvania commit an average of 1.5 regulatory violations per day, according to a report from the Pennsylvania Land Trust, based on Right To Know requests to the Department of Environmental Protection.

In the last two and a half years, drilling companies were cited for 1,435 violations -- 952 of which were considered most likely to harm the environment, according to the report.

Nearly half of the violations were related to improper erosion and sedimentation plans and improper construction of wastewater impoundments that contain fracking water. These impoundments were improperly lined or not structurally sound.

[...]

In one instance, the Department of Agriculture quarantined a Tioga County farmer’s cattle because they could have ingested the frack water that leaked from the impoundment.

There were 155 citations for discharging industrial waste onto the ground or into commonwealth waters.

There were 100 violations of the state Clean Streams Law.

East Resources Inc. of Warrendale had the highest number of violations with 138, followed by Chesapeake Appalachia LLC, a subsidiary of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy, with 118, and Chief Oil & Gas LLC of Dallas with 109.

Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas, the company responsible for contaminated drinking water wells in Dimock, was fourth with 94 violations.

The list of companies with the worst performance records in terms of the number of violations per well drilled was topped by J-W Operating Co., of Dallas, which drilled only one well and racked up 11 violations. Citrus Energy Corp. of Castle Rock, Colo., averaged seven violations per well, and Penn Virginia Oil & Gas Corp. of Radnor averaged four violations per well.

And DEP may not be the protector that some would have us believe. Go read the article for more.

Technorati Tags: Macellus Shale, Ground water, DEP, violations

Captains of Erudition

2010-07-31T21:24:00.001-04:00

The New York Times (via University Diaries) ran story today on the increasing number of university presidents who sit on multiple corporate boards. As you may recall, Graham sits on at least three separate boards.

Then there are the corporate boards that Graham sits on. In 2008, he made $270,9800 in compensat[ion] as a director of US Steel and last year he pulled in another $170,000 from the gig. ...He has also sat on the board of Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania for a number of years and it was announced this summer that he was appointed as a director of FM Global,an insurance company, which according to the press release announcing Graham's appointment does business with Penn State. Unfortunately, these are not publicly traded companies, hence the compensation of a director is not disclosed by either...

The Times article discusses what's in it for the corporations, whats in it for the presidents-hint: hundred of thousands of dollars annually is big part of it- and what could go wrong for the universities.

Amongst the reasons that corporations like university presidents on their boards

...according to James H. Finkelstein, a professor in the George Mason School of Public Policy, probably the biggest reason companies have sought out academics is the prestige they bring. Universities are among the few institutions trusted by the public, he says, and companies believe they can associate themselves with this quality by installing an academic on the board.

“Corporations think this is a way of enhancing their prestige and legitimacy, especially in the case of Ivy League presidents,” he says. “I suspect that’s the principal motivation. It’s probably not for their business sense.”

So a president on the board helps to burnish the image of the corporation. Amongst the problems that board service can cause a university is a

... chance of reputational risk if a company runs into difficulties.

“Woe to the university president who would sit on BP’s board,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

So the downside includes damage to the university's reputation. Think of it as The Law of Conservation of Total Reputation.

There are other reasons that corporations like to have university presidents on their boards.

John Gillespie, who has written a book on corporate boards, “Money for Nothing,” says academics are often selected for another reason — because they are less likely to rock the boat than directors from the business world.

Academics may be trained to ask tough questions in their own fields, but when confronted with tricky business issues far above their level of expertise they “often become as meek as church mice,” he says.

Put another way, university presidents are pushovers. Pushovers on a board increase the likelihood of a scandal and a scandal will hurt the reputation of the university run by the pushover. It's a nonlinear phenomena.

And these scandals and corresponding damage to the reputations of universities are not hypothetical, "Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University and the first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs board until she stepped down this year."

The risk of a damaged reputation seemed to be an issue when Dr. Simmons announced in February that she was stepping down from the Goldman board.

At the time, Goldman was being battered by questions about its involvement in the financial crisis and the lucrative pay it doled out to executives and employees even after the firm had received a huge taxpayer bailout. As a director, Dr. Simmons was partly responsible for approving Goldman’s bonuses during the boom years — including the $68 million pay package awarded to its chairman, Lloyd C. Blankfein, in 2007, the largest ever on Wall Street.

And then there was this.

Erroll B. Davis Jr., chancellor of the University System of Georgia, was on the BP board for 12 years, though he stepped down in April, just days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, causing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His retirement, however, wasn’t enough to protect him from being named, along with other directors, in a small number of lawsuits filed against BP over the disaster.

“There is a big risk to academics when they serve on boards. They especially attract criticism when a company gets into trouble,” said James Kristie, editor of Director & Boards, a trade publication. “They are more harshly criticized because they are supposed to be the smartest guys in the room.”

Keep in mind that these presidents wouldn't be on these boards if it weren't for their position as presidents of universities. and they are gambling the reputations of their institutions for personal financial gain. I'm looking at you, Graham.

Technorati Tags: Academia, Corporate Boards, New York Times, confilit of interst, Spanier

An Ember Reignites

2010-07-27T21:55:00.001-04:00

Earlier this month I posted a video of Eva von Dassow, professor of Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota lambasting the Regents of that University for their poor treatment of the humanities. When I saw the traffic to that post, titled She's On Fire, shoot through the roof- it stayed there for several days, by the way-my first thought was, "Damn, who knew there were so many immolation fetishists in the world?" But that wasn't it at all. It turns out that the powerhouse science blogger PZ Myers had also posted the video with a link to Left of Centre. So today, when traffic again spiked to that post, I thought, "Hey, a high traffic site has linked to the video and to Left of Centre again." And this time I was right. I'm a quick learner.

Inside Higher Ed did a piece on von Dassow's presentation to the University of Minnesota's Regents today and linked to Left of Centre. IHE interviewed von Dassow who gave a bit of background on her motivations for speaking up and it got a reaction from an unnamed UMN spokesperson who said that the the bigwigs were unmoved by the presentation. The IHE piece is well worth a read, particularly for some very smart comments from John Thelin, professor of Higher Education at the University of Kentucky, and others.

Technorati Tags: University of Minnesota, Eva von Dassow

State College 2040: A Dystopian Vision

2010-07-26T22:59:00.001-04:00

Adam's Monday column at StateCollege.com is hilarious this week. His vision of the Borough and University thirty years on is dead on. He tweaks his fellow StateCollege.com columnist, Accuweather meteorologist and global warming denialist, Joe Bastardi, but Penn State gets most of the barbs, while Borough Council suffers some collateral damage. It's hard to for me to pick a favorite part, but his comes close.

That revenue has been especially helpful as the Penn State administration pays down the university's construction-related debt, now estimated at $6 billion -- up from the $1 billion range in 2010.

About $75 million of that debt stems from the Fraser Centre project in downtown State College, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week.

You may recall that the project struggled to get off the ground in 2010, before Penn State took it over. Once the university gained control, however, construction began rapidly in late 2011.

Penn State scrambled the earlier plans for Fraser Centre, which had included condominiums and retail space. In their place, the university has made Fraser Centre into the headquarters of a never-ending capital campaign.

The campaign, known in 2010 as "For the Future," became "For-ever" by 2011. Fraser Centre has become an effective home base for the ever-more-critical fundraising efforts, helping the university to lubricate potential donors in exquisite social lounges and expansive bars and restaurants

Go read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: Penn State, State College, StateCollege.com, Adam Smeltz

A Musical Interlude

2010-07-24T14:19:00.001-04:00

Blogging will be light to non-existent over the weekend.

Technorati Tags: Wilson Picket, Mustang Sally

I Personally Know...

2010-07-23T12:01:00.002-04:00

....is a phrase which should be avoided in arguments unless you are willing to provide specific information which will allow others to judge the reliability of your personal knowledge. Hence anonymous commenters should never use this phrase, but it is, none the less, one of the favorite means of argument amongst the ignoratti at the CDT. Here's the CDT regular Fred on unemployment benefits extensions this morning.

...Unemployment benefits are becoming the newest welfare program extended for no other reason then to persuade more voters in November to vote dem. I personally know of several unemployed folks who will not begin to look for another job until their unemployment benefits expire.

This is pretty typical stuff over there. They love their anecdotes about lazy acquaintances

The connection of welfare to unemployment benefits, as I discussed the other day, suggests that he doesn't want his money helping out brown folks, while the anecdotes about lazy folks leads me to believe neither does he want his money helping out some guys down at the bar that he doesn't like...so screw everyone, as far as Fred is concerned.

As an antidote to these anecdotes about the indolent, I suggest reading the The Breadline Blog written by by a former reporter for a small western Pennsylvania newspaper who was laid off from his job and is now in the ranks of the long term unemployed. The blog was featured earlier this summer in the Wall Street Journal. The Breadline Blog will put a much different face on our current economic problems than the 'baggers want you to see.

Technorati Tags: Tebaggers, wingnuts, unemployment benefits, welfare

Teaching a Pig to Sing

2010-07-22T23:05:00.002-04:00

I'm sorry I was side tracked over at the CDT again this evening trying to educate a Teabagger, or it might have been a garden variety wingnut.... political cladistics is tough. I really didn't want to. I left a snarky reply earlier today to the said dimwit, I think that covers most conservative subtypes these days, since reasonable conservatives are all but extinct, with no intention of engaging them. But then I just couldn't help myself...I had to take them to school. As you might expect, the pig still sings off key.

In the future, I'm going to try to focus my energies here and ignore the ignoratti. For now, you can go over to the sty and see if you can get LessIsMore to hit high C.

Technorati Tags: Teabagger, wingnut

Outback at the Forefront of a GOP Meme?

2010-07-21T18:54:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, the Senate overcame the Republican filibuster of the legislation to extend emergency unemployment benefits and Mitch McConnell tried to divert attention of the Republican's unprecedented opposition of the extension by linking the long term unemployed to Obama's policy, in the process calling these individuals "chronically unemployed." Kevin Drum wondered today if there might be something more to McConnell's choice of words.

...talking about "chronic" joblessness is also a way of suggesting that some of the unemployed are shiftless and lazy. Someone who's "chronically unemployed" isn't your unlucky next door neighbor, it's those guys in the ghetto or down in the hollow who just hang around all day and have never held an honest job in their lives for more than a few weeks at a time. Are these the kind of people you want to run up the national debt for?

I didn't think so. But guess what? Democrats do!

Well, it's hard to say with certainty if this is the game McConnell is playing, but , it just so happens, I was engaged in a back and forth over the past couple of days at the CDT (Hence my absence here.) with one of their regular's, outback, who helps to make the comment threads there a fever swamp, which makes Kevin's speculation very plausible to me.

outback explicitly linked long term unemployment to minority receipt of welfare,

We need to make sure our Unemployment system doesn't turn into another welfare program. Remember how the advent of welfare destroyed the drive and initiative of many minorities....they have yet to recover from that setback

It is clear that if McConnell is engaging in a bit of dog whistle politics there are dogs like outback who are prepared to hear the signal loud and clear.

I called outback out on the racist undertones of his comment

Yep, it's the welfare that's to blame...but, but, but...I recall that there might seems to be something else that cause blacks some problems. Now what was it? Oh yea, now I remember, slavery. But what's slavery when compared to the devastation of welfare?

It's funny how the non-racist outback first thinks of minorities when he thinks of people suffering from welfare's debilitating effect on initiative. If I did know better-after all he's told me repeatedly not to stereotype teabaggers as racist, so it really can't be that he is one-I'd swear that he has a stereotype of blacks, Mexicans and other minorities as lazy. But it's good to know that he doesn't think it's their fault...they're victims of welfare in his mind...but don't call him a racist.

But proving racist motivations, when they aren't overt, is a difficult thing. outback, who must be called racist quite a bit, was prepared to defend himself by pointing to Bill Clinton.

I sat in an audience in 1995 and heard a speaker make the direct connection between welfare dependency and destruction of the social fabric in the African-American community.

You might have heard of him...he is that prominent Teabagger and notorious racist....Bill Clinton.

Did Clinton say anything remotely like what outback claimed and if so, in what context?

The rest of our exchange was my attempt to pin down outback on where he heard Clinton speak in 1995. He steadfastly refused to provide any information on where he heard Clinton directly connected "welfare dependency and destruction of the social fabric in the African-American community."

I've examined Clinton's major speeches from 1995 and while he spoke of welfare reform in his SOTU speech, as he often did over the years, there is only one speech in which he talked about race and welfare together. That was his October 16th Address on Race Relations delivered at the University of Texas at Austin where he spoke this single sentence on race an welfare

It's not racist for whites to assert that the culture of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and absent fatherhood cannot be broken by social programs unless there is first more personal responsibility.

If this is the speech that outback sat in the audience for, and I think that that is a good assumption, outback must have heard this as absolving him from any responsibility for musings on race.

But beyond that Clinton didn't blame welfare for the "destruction of the social fabric in the African-American community." He pointed to "culture welfare dependency" amongst other problems which must be broken by personal responsibility. In fact, Clinton's speech supports not outback claim that it was welfare that don' it, but my point that the root of problem is slavery. (This might be why outback was so reluctant to provide the information on where he heard Clinton speak.)

White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began with unequal treatment, first in law and later in fact. African-Americans indeed have lived too long with a justice system that in too many cases has been and continues to be less than just. The record of abuses extends from lynchings and trumped up charges to false arrests and police brutality. The tragedies of Emmett Till and Rodney King are bloody markers on the very same road. Still today, too many of our police officers play by the rules of the bad old days. It is beyond wrong when law-abiding black parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are paid by their own taxes.

And blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong when African-American men are many times more likely to be victims of homicide than any other group in this country, when there are more African-American men in our corrections system than in our colleges, when almost one in three African-American men in their 20's are either in jail, on parole, or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system, nearly one in three. And that is a disproportionate percentage in comparison to the percentage of blacks who use drugs in our society. Now, I would like every white person here and in America to take a moment to think how he or she would feel if one in three white men were in similar circumstances.

And there is still unacceptable economic disparity between blacks and whites. It is so fashionable to talk today about African-Americans as if they have been some sort of protected class. Many whites think blacks are getting more than their fair share in terms of jobs and promotions. That is not true. That is not true.

The truth is that African-Americans still make on average about 60 percent of what white people do, that more than half of African-American children live in poverty. And at the very time our young Americans need access to college more than ever before, black college enrollment is dropping in America.

Viewed in this larger context, one can infer that Clinton saw welfare dependency, such as it was at the time, as the consequence of the destruction of the African-American social fabric, not its cause. The cause was rooted in slavery and it is perpetuated through continued unequal treatment.

Whether or not McConnell intended the phrase "chronically unemployed" it to be a dog whistle signal that the long term unemployed are indolent like the folks in the ghettos and hollows, as Kevin speculated, it is clear that there are those like outback who will hear it as such. Just as he thought he heard Clinton affirming his own skewed view of race and welfare.

Technorati Tags: Emergency Unemployment Benefit extension, Sen Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Kevin Drum, welfare, racism

GT's Hamlet: To 'Bag or Not to "Bag: That is the Question

2010-07-18T22:06:00.001-04:00

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

GT might find himself in a bit of a bind over Michele Bachmann's (R-Loony Tunes) Teabagger Caucus thing. Isn't that right, GT. If you join many of your better informed, and I might add more rational, constituents might think you're bit of a loon. On the other hand, if you don't join your Teabagger supporters, or as you once called them liberty-loving patriots, might think that you really aren't one of them. I say, go ahead join and don't worry about us better informed constituents, we already think you're bit of a loon.

(H/T FeliciaK from Newsy.com for the heads up on the video)

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Teabagger Caucus

This Should Be Fun

2010-07-16T23:46:00.001-04:00

Think Progress reported this morning that yesterday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Crazytown)

.... filed paperwork to start a House Tea Party Caucus in the current 111th Congress. Possibly taking a cue from Kentucky Senate GOP hopeful and fellow Tea Partier Rand Paul, who recently said he might start a similar caucus in the Senate if he were elected, Bachmann sent a letter to the Committee on House Administration in an effort to “formaliz[e] the [Tea Party] movement within the federal government.” The letter read:
I would like to register the House Tea Party Caucus as a Congressional Member Organization for the 111th Congress. The House Tea Party Caucus will serve as an informal group of Members dedicated to promote American’s call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government. Presently, I will serve as the chair of the House Tea Party Caucus.

I'm curious if GT, who already serves in the Clown Caucus alongside Michele, will be joining her new Teabagger Caucus. GT if you are planning on joining you better hurry, the first ten to sign up get a complimentary lawn chair.

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tea Party Caucus, Teabaggers, wingnuts

This is Nuts

2010-07-15T18:40:00.001-04:00

Penn State is doing more than $765 million in annual research and the claim that we would jeopardize a stellar international research reputation over a small research project is a pretty big stretch[.]-Penn State Chief Bullshit Artist Bill Mahon as quoted by the AP.

This video features Penn State nutritionist Penny Kris-Etherton extolling the health benefits of eating pistachios ostensibly, at least in part, based on her recently published research.

Penn State ran its first press release on Penny Kris-Etherton's research on pistachios and cholesterol back in May, which I discussed here. In a nutshell, Kris-Etherton research into the link between pistachio consumption, higher levels of blood antioxidants and lower levels of oxidized low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol failed to find the effect she was looking for. Why does this failed investigation deserve not one, not two, but three separate posts, the last with the above video embedded, at The Penn State Propaganda Portal? Before I answer that question-no fair looking at my previous post, let's review Kris-Etherton's research on pistachios.

It had already been established that pistachios lowered the level of LDL cholesteral, i.e. bad cholesterol, and raised high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, i.e. good cholesterol, in individuals with elevated levels of cholesterol, in the latter case in measured against a low fat diet. A high level of LDL is a well-known risk factor for coronary artery disease, thus the name bad cholesterol, but it is less well-known that there is much stronger association between oxidized LDL and coronary heart disease.

Enter Kris-Etherton. Pistachios are loaded with antioxidants. The question that Kris-Etherton asked is, do pistachios lower the level of oxidized LDL beyond the amount one would expect from the overall lowering of the LDL level? Her work confirmed the earlier research on the diminution of the level of LDL In addition, she found that the level of certain antioxidants in the blood were raised in a pistachio diet. However, she found no statistically significant association between the antioxidant levels and the level of oxidized LDL in the pistachio diet when the overall lower level of LDL was controlled for. That is Kris-Etherton did not find the effect that she was looking for.

It would hardly seem appropriate under the circumstance to engage in a PR campaign to promote findings which weren't found, but that's exactly what Kris-Etherton with the help of The Old Main Propaganda Shop did.

In the first press release, she claimed,

Pistachio nuts, eaten as part of a healthy diet, can increase the levels of antioxidants in the blood of adults with high cholesterol, according to an international team of nutritional scientists.

"Our previous study showed the benefits of pistachios in lowering lipids and lipoproteins, which are a risk factor for heart disease," said Penny Kris-Etherton, distinguished professor of nutrition, Penn State. "This new study shows an additional effect of pistachios so now there are multiple health benefits of eating pistachios."

While the press release does not come out and say that the increase in the levels of antioxidants in the blood of adults with high cholesterol is a health benefit of pistachios, these two paragraphs are clearly written to lead the reader to that inference.

But that press release contradicts that inference.

"Currently, studies on antioxidants do not show major benefits," said Kris-Etherton. "Maybe we are not studying people long enough. Maybe there is something in the food that travels with the antioxidants. The
antioxidant story is very disappointing to the scientific community."

The reason for the disappointment is that studies on specific antioxidants currently do not show health benefits, but epidemiological studies seem to indicate benefits. Many people feel that we have not
figured out antioxidants yet, said Kris-Etherton.

If antioxidants are important, then pistachios fit the bill as antioxidant-laden food.

So on the one hand, Kris-Etherton tells the readers that there is no evidence that antioxidants show major health benefits and on the other hand, Andrea Messer, the Penn State Bullshit Artist that wrote the press release, tells the reader that the press release would be correct if one assumes to be true that which the research failed to show to be true. Pretty neat.

But, in the two more recent press releases, all of the information about antioxidants showing no major benefits has been removed. In the second press release, the two misleading lead paragraphs remain and in the third, the misleading information is split between the headline and the caption on the video.

In the video embedded in the third press release, Kris-Etherton steers clear of any implication concerning the higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of oxidized LDL. But she introduces a new twist in an effort to promote the supposed benefits of elevated serum antioxidants, reduction in free radicals. This is something her research never even looked and, again, there is no evidence of a health benefit from antioxidants neutralizing free radicals.

The Western Pistachio Association also issued a press release on the study. (The have a video, too, but it's really rough.) It was even more explicit in claiming a health benefit for pistachios due to their high level of antioxidants. The headline on the release is "New Research Unveiled in The Journal of Nutrition Reveals Pistachios Protect the Heart in a New Way: Rigorous Study Shows "The Green Nut" is Rich with Antioxidants Linking Consumption to Reduced Risk of Cardiovascular Disease." Kris-Etherton is quoted in the release, too.

"In the past, many studies have focused on the role of lipids and cholesterol in heart disease," said Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton, researcher at Penn State University’s Department of Nutritional Sciences. "Pistachios are the only nut that give you significant amounts of lutein and zeazanthin -- 342 mg per ounce. They also provide 6.4 mg of gamma tocopherol. This study validates the significant antioxidant benefits of consuming pistachios. We plan to continue to explore the positive role pistachios play in the American diet."

Notice the pattern here? Kris-Etherton is very circumspect when making claims about her findings in these releases, here claiming not a health benefit, but rather an antioxidant benefit, meanwhile the authors of the releases make exaggerated claims about her findings.

The problem for the Western Pistachio Association is that the FDA regulates what type of health claims can be made about foods on their labels and, in the case of nuts, the FDA has turned down a request that from the International Tree Nut Council to make the following claims with respect to pistachios amongst other tree nuts and peanuts,

"Diets containing one ounce of nuts per day can reduce your risk of heart disease."s
"Eating a diet that includes one ounce of nuts daily can reduce your risk of heart disease."

due to a lack of scientific evidence. The FDA did approve the following limited claim for these nuts.

"Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts [, such as name of specific nut,] as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease. [See nutrition information for fat content.]"

Clearly, from a marketing standpoint, an equivocal claim is superior to one that hedges. So the Western Pistachio Association funds research in the hopes of coming up with the evidence needed to get FDA approval for the stronger claim. When the research doesn't provide the answers needed to persuade the FDA, they ignore the findings and issue misleading press releases that the FDA has no control over. No need to waste all that money spent from the marketing budget on that research now is there?

And Kris-Etherton plays along, trying to keep her hands clean, in the whole dirty business,while letting her benefactors know that, "We plan to continue to explore the positive role pistachios play in the American diet." and she might add, we hope you keep funding us.

But even worse, Kris-Etherton with the help of The Old Main Propaganda Shop uses Penn State's "stellar research reputation" to help the Western Pistachio Association sell a few more nuts in the hope of a few more dollars for a "small research project." and maybe as a bonus an all expense paid trip to some exotic land, too.

Yep, quite a stretch there, Bill.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penny Kris-Etherton, pistachios,

If You Don't Like Zydeco....

2010-07-14T13:35:00.001-04:00

...hell, even if you do like Zydeco, you should head over to StateCollege.com where Adam has an interview with Michael Mann.

Technorati Tags: Climategate, Michael Mann, StateCollege.com

Buckwheat Zydeco

2010-07-14T13:21:00.001-04:00

Okay, I know what you're thinking, "Shit, I don't come hear to listen to Zydeco!" Don't be so impatient, I'm working on something that's taking bit more time than expected. Anyway, try to learn to like Zydeco, it goes very well with the humidity.

Technorati Tags: Buckwheat Zydeco, music

Queen Ida

2010-07-13T21:55:00.001-04:00

..more trenchant analysis and snark coming soon. In the mean time, enjoy a little Zydeco...and Graham this is how a washboard is played.

Technorati Tags: Queen Ida

Hey GT, Do You Agree with Tom?

2010-07-12T11:11:00.001-04:00

GT, to my knowledge, still hasn't explained his vote against extending emergency unemployment benefits, but Tom Corbett current Pennsylvania Attorney General and Republican nominee for governor recently gave his opinion on extending unemployment.

"The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there," Corbett told Harrisburg radio station WITF at a campaign stop in Elizabethtown. "I've literally had construction companies tell me, 'I can't get people to come back to work until . . . they say, "I'll come back to work when unemployment runs out." ' "

Let's leave aside the anecdotal nature of Tom's evidence and ask, does Tom have a point, is there any real evidence that extending unemployment insurance in the current economic environment contributes to unemployment? The answer is yes, but the effect is not very big and it effect is offset by larger and more important ones.

According to a recent paper (via Ezra Klein) by two economists at the Federal reserve bank of San Francisco, Rob Valletta and Katherine Kaung,

As of the fourth quarter of 2009, the expected duration of unemployment had risen about 18.7 weeks for job losers and about 17.1 weeks for leavers and entrants, using the years 2006-2007 as a baseline. The differential increase of 1.6 weeks for job losers is the presumed impact of extended UI benefits on unemployment duration. ...The implied increase in the unemployment rate is quite small, slightly less than 0.4 percentage point, indicating that without UI extensions, the measured unemployment rate would have been 9.6% in December 2009 rather than the observed 10.0%.

Ezra notes that "Using the most recent estimate of the size of the labor force, a 0.4 oercent increase in the unemployment rate represents 614,964 people. This is not a trivial number..."

But, you knew there had to be a but, there is another thing to be considered here, the stimulative effect of unemployment benefits. Once again I give you Ezra,

With that process, [Moody's economist Mark] Zandi estimated that each dollar spent on extending unemployment benefits generated $1.61 in economic growth. Extending benefits had the third-greatest bang-for-the-buck of any component in the stimulus package, after increasing food stamps and subsidizing work-sharing, both temporary measures. To quote Zandi, "No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency UI benefits." The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the impact on poverty of the extension and found that it saved a total of 800,000 people from falling below the poverty line. So far, then, unemployment benefits have been very effective at stimulating the economy and reducing economic misery among affected families.

Let's put this on the scales. On the on side, extending unemployment insurance leads 614,964 people to remain unemployed about 1.6 weeks longer. On the other side, extending unemployment insurance each dollar spent on extending unemployment insurance generates $1.61 in economic growth and the extensions have prevented 800,000 people from fall below the poverty line. I'd have to say the the scales tip overwhelmingly in favor of extending unemployment benefits in the current economic climate.

But Tom would rather play the resentment card. He wants to stir up Teabaggers with this pleasing tale, "I've literally had construction companies tell me, 'I can't get people to come back to work until . . . they say, "I'll come back to work when unemployment runs out.' "

So GT, do you agree with Tom? Did you vote against extending unemployment because you think your unemployed constituents are lazy? Your constituents, employed and unemployed alike, want to know what you really are thinking. You are thinking aren't you?

Technorati Tags: Tom Corbett, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), extended unemployment benefits

Wang Dang Doodle

2010-07-11T23:24:00.001-04:00

Koko Taylor, Hound Dog Taylor and Little Walter 1967

Technorati Tags: music, Koko Talyor, Hound Dog Taylor, Little Walter, Wang Dan Doodle

This One's for You, psumba

2010-07-11T11:26:00.002-04:00

From Blogger Pictures

If you were ever curious about the personalty type of a Palin supporter and defender I strongly recommend that you peruse the musings of CDT commenter psumba. The anti-intellectualism, the seething resentment of educated elites, the wounded little boy, the sense of victimhood and much more are all present in this man's comments. These comments are hilarious and sad at the same time. Here's a recent one

... we certainly don't have a qualified President serving today! The job of President is largely a figurehead ... with little real power. It is often said in Washington that "the President proposes and Congress disposes". This is why changing "the system" must come from the grass roots ... from everyday people who are not captives of "the system".
.
The attraction of Sarah Palin is simple ... she is one of US ... who had & took the opportunity to be elected to office. She's no more perfect than any other one of us. She represents someone who is truly outside of the sphere of the "professional politicians" who have never faced the issues that we face every day. She's not from money, not a lawyer, and not from the Ivy League!
.
More importantly, she has lived her beliefs. Rather than abort her Down's Syndrome child, she chose to carry him and bring him into the world. I respect this. She represents that values that the founders of our country possessed ... that, now more than ever, we really need to rediscover and embrace!
.
In the same way that Barak Obama was symbolic of America's move to a "post-racial" era, Sarah Palin is symbolic of the rise of the common people over the professional politician. This is why she will be unfairly ruthlessly savaged by the establishment media ... and the effete class that counts you as a member.

They make a good summertime read...go have a look, you can help him believe that his sense of victimization is justified.

(Cartoon via Crooks and Liars)

Technorati Tags: Humor, Palin, wingnuts, psumba

For the Record

2010-07-10T00:55:00.005-04:00

It was announced at yesterday's Board of Trustees meeting that Penn State had collected $203 million in donations during fiscal year 2009-2010, an amount which was claimed to be a record. The amount is in nominal dollars and, as we learned last year when it was announced that Penn State had collected the second highest amount ever in fiscal year 2008-2009, the record is not going to hold when all monies are converted to constant dollars.

Last year when the giving time-series was converted to constant dollars using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) the amount collected turned in to be the sixth highest amount collected in the ten year time span,not the second highest amount.

As you can see in the graphs below, this years nominal record amount is only the fifth greatest amount collected since fiscal year 1997-1998 when the CPI is used to convert nominal dollars to 1998 dollars.

The CPI underestimates the rate of inflation for universities. Therefore the Commonfund has developed the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) to track the rising cost of running colleges. The HEPI rises faster than the CPI. Hence when nominal dollars are converted to 1998 dollars with the HEPI the record turns into the seventh highest amount collected.

In this light, Graham doesn't seem so much like a high horse-power money raising machine so much as a worn out plow horse ready for the glue factory.

Remind me again why Graham received a 12.9% raise.

(The data for fiscal years 1999-2000 through 2008-2009 comes from the 2008-2009 President's Report on Philanthropy. The data for fiscal years 1997-1998 and 1998-1999 comes from the 2006-2007 President's Report on Philanthropy. The number of this year comes from yesterdays press release. The CPI conversion was done with this Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator. The HEPI conversion was done using the HEPI data found here.)

Technorati Tags: Penn State, philanthropy, Spanier

She's On Fire

2010-07-09T18:57:00.002-04:00

With the Penn State Board of Trustees meeting today, I think this video of Eva von Dassow, professor of Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota and critic of the University of Minnesota's central administration's budget and academic priorities, speaking at an open forum before that schools Regents is worth a view for a few reasons.

First is her dramatic flare.

Second is the reasoning behind her on fire presentation. That reasoning can be found in more detail at the second link above. Readers may want to bookmark that link to refer to when Old Main starts making cuts at Penn State.

Third is the novelty, to Penn Staters, of the idea of an open forum at a Regents meeting. Could you imagine the control freak Graham allowing such a thing at a Board of Trustees meeting? Me neither.

(h/t Bill Gleason, aka Bonzo, a friend of this blog and another critic of UMN's central administration who blogs at Periodic Table and Periodic Table Too.)

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Eva von Dassow, University of Minnesota

A Couple of Observations on Graham's Remarks to the BOT

2010-07-09T11:04:00.002-04:00

The Board of Trustees are meeting today in at the Du Bois campus. The big ticket on the agenda are tuition rates for the upcoming year. There's no news on that or much else coming out of meeting yet, beyond Graham's opening remarks.

Graham's discussion of applications and admissions did grab my attention for two reasons, one rhetorical, the other substantive.

As you heard throughout the year, our application and enrollment numbers look very strong for this year’s class. It is clear that this is another record setting year in the number of admissions applications received by Penn State.
Graduate applications are ahead of last year by 10 percent, and we have received more undergraduate applications to date than in any prior year. Applications to Dickinson are up 31 percent and applications to Hershey are up 7 percent. Out-of-state minority applications are ahead by 7 percent and Pennsylvania minority applications are ahead 8 percent. Total applications, for all campuses, are ahead by 6 percent compared to 2009.
Acceptances have been on pace so we fully expect to achieve the target of 7,350 new students for University Park summer and fall, and Commonwealth campus acceptances are shaping up to be record highs.
Out-of-state acceptances overall are up 17 percent compared to last year for University Park. This means that out-of-state students will comprise one-third of the incoming class. Almost 10 percent of the entering class will be international students.
Out-of-state paid accepts at the campuses are up 8 percent, which includes an increase in the international cohort. Most campuses will continue to accept applications and make offers into the summer. We will keep you informed as the numbers progress.

Note that Graham managed to talk about applications without repeating his favorite lie that Penn State is the most popular university in the country.

More substantially, I'm not sure what to make of Graham's claim that 17% increase in out-of-state acceptances over last year means that out-of-state students will comprise a third of the incoming class. Last year 34%,i.e. a little more than a third, of freshman were from out of state.

Is Graham trying to downplay an actual increase in the percentage of out-of-state students in the new freshman class, have things actually not changed as a result of the increase in the percentage of accepts or is something else at play? Someone should ask Graham about this.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Penn State Board of Trustees

Is GT Looking Out for His Constituents in His Own Twisted Way?

2010-07-08T12:36:00.002-04:00

From Blogger Pictures

On July 1^rst, GT voted with 141 of his Republican colleagues and 11 Democrats against the restoration of emergency unemployment compensation. Fortunately, 241 Democrats and 29 Republicans voted in favor of the bill. Unfortunately, the Republicans in the Senate successfully blocked the bill from coming to a vote. So the long term unemployed sit this summer in limbo.

GT, so far as I know, has not explained the reasoning behind this vote, but it is clear from the table below that he; owes many of his constituents an explanation. While the Pennsylvania Fifth Congressional District is home to Centre County the Pennsylvania county with the lowest May 2010 unemployment rate, 6.5%, it is also home to Cameron County the Pennsylvania County with the highest unemployment rate,14.8%. In fact, of the seventeen counties which are in, or part of which are in, the 5th 11 are above the median of the county rates and 15 are above the overall Pennsylvania rate of 9.1%. Further, the unemployment rates increased from April 2010 in all of the counties in the 5^th with the exception of Cameron which decreased from 15% in April. But that was likely due to people dropping out of the workforce. So the employment situation in GT's district is bad and many of his constituents will be hurt by the action of Republican colleagues in the Senate. An action which his vote shows that he supports.

So why did GT vote to screw his constituents? There are several possible answers which I will explore in a future post.

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), emergency unemployment insurance extesion

It's Summertime And The Livin' Is Easy....

2010-07-07T12:52:00.002-04:00

....and the blogging is light.

I find it odd that there haven't been any stories on the reorganization of Penn State Great Valley in the media and, as of today, the Web site for that campus makes no mention of it.

I'm working on a post on GT's vote against extending unemployment insurance, perhaps I'll get something up tonight or tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, enjoy this great performance by Janis.

Penn State Subverts the Rules

2010-07-06T00:14:00.001-04:00

Graham recently told BlueWhite Illustrated's Phil Grosz that

I’ve always been alarmed and disconcerted by the dishonesty that we see around intercollegiate athletics. There is cheating that goes on and there is rule-breaking that goes on. It has to stop.

Just because there is a lot of pressure on coaches to win doesn’t justify any of it. People can have the opportunity to win by operating a clean program.

We do it at Penn State.

Apparently though, that deep concern for running a clean program doesn't extend to the research side of things. The New York Times reported today about the ways in which Congresscritters have found ways to get around a ban against giving earmarks to profit-making organizations by channeling the money through nonprofits. Guess what? Penn State is a player in one of the scams.

In Pennsylvania, General Electric is likely to get as much as 80 percent of a $2 million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning GE locomotives. At the suggestion of the company and the university’s lobbyist, according to a Penn State professor, the university is listed as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, as was done previously. GE executives made a series of political contributions to Representative Kathy Dahlkemper, Democrat of Pennsylvania, days after she submitted the earmark request.

Well, Graham what do plan on doing about this?

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Earmark Ban, GE

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

2010-07-03T11:21:00.002-04:00

Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers at Jazz Fest in New Orleans.(Via Steve Benen)

Technorati Tags: Steve Martin

Layoffs Anticipated at Penn State Great Valley

2010-07-03T00:28:00.002-04:00

There was a Friday night dump about Penn State Great Valley from the The Penn State Propaganda Portal, which is full of talk of "respond[ing] to the emerging needs of the region, changes in the way higher education is delivered, and opportunities for greater collaboration with other Penn State campuses in southeastern Pennsylvania." You had to read nearly to the end of the 437 word pile of bullshit to get to the chase in the penultimate paragraph.

These changes to accommodate demand will result in some future personnel reductions in certain programming areas, particularly in the area of support staff.

BTW, changes are a comin'.

The reorganization of the Great Valley campus is part of Penn State's continuing evaluation of University programs and operations that has been ongoing for more than a decade. To date, the University has identified more than $190 million in cost savings, with plans to identify substantial additional reductions annually in the years ahead.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Great Valley, Layoffs

This Just In....

2010-07-02T21:47:00.001-04:00

....Penn State is considering, as a cost cutting measure, eliminating the option of joining the Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System for new employees. (BTW, this is another scoop from Adam.) If this were to go through it would create a situation in which two staff assistants sitting across from each other in an office would be paying different prices for their retirement plans, just like the airlines with seat pricing. It can't be that Graham is really considering this, since he recently said,

"....We really can't have an imbalance like that, where a person is paying one price and the person in the seat next to you is paying another price. I know that might happen in the airlines, but I don't think that would fly in a university office too well."

Oh wait, he didn't say that about university offices, he said it about footballs stadiums. That's a whole different ball of wax.

Anyway, this is one policy that Graham can't enact unilaterally.

The state retirement code allows Penn State employees to enroll in the state retirement system, SERS spokeswoman Pamela Hile said. She said only a change in that code could eliminate the option for Penn Staters.

And such a change would require approval by the state Legislature. The matter hasn't gotten that far yet.

Be sure to keep an eye on StateCollege.com for more on this story as it develops.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, PSERS

WTF?

2010-07-02T13:02:00.001-04:00

At the end of this piece at StateCollege.com, on the 2% merit raises that Graham, who recently received a 12.9% raise, is promising Penn State's nonunion employees, is this

Now, with the news that state funding will be level for 2010-2011, it's not clear exactly how tuition rates may shake out.

"Right now, the (university) budget office is crunching numbers," [Old Main Bullshit Artist Lisa] Powers said. " ... I can't say for sure where the tuition increase will end up, but they're working diligently to keep it in the (three- to four-percent) range."

Is that true, is the budget office still crunching numbers on this years budget? Penn State's appropriations for this year are exactly what the Governor originally proposed way back in January. There were no last minute surprises. Old Main should have had the numbers crunched on this scenario months ago. Consider that Old Main didn't even wait for its appropriations to pass the General Assembly when it announced back in early June that it was cutting Ag extension jobs based on Rendell's proposed budget. Something's odd here. What gives?

Well, it's possible that the options are all so bad that Graham's paralyzed and can't decide what to do. But that's not my guess as to what's going on. I think that Old Main Bullshit Artist Lisa Powers is doing what comes naturally;she's reflexively lying.

What do you guys think?

Technorati Tags: Penn State, tution, Spanier, Rendell,

Mann Cleared

2010-07-01T22:40:00.001-04:00

The Penn State report on the allegation of research misconduct is out and Mann has been cleared on all counts. Sometimes even Penn State does the right thing. The report is here. And you can read what the climate experts are saying at variety of places. Here are my recommendations:

Climate Progress runs down the long list of those who owe Mann an apology;
Rabett Run excerpts some what he considers the key bits of the report;
Deep Climate also weights in with their summary.

And finally DESMOGBLOG which writes,

Despite their success in elevating this nontroversy to the national level via Fox News and other right wing media, every single independent investigation of the climate scientists involved has since cleared them of any misconduct and verified the science underpinning the IPCC’s consensus position that manmade climate change is real.

Now the fun begins as the wingers pop blood vessels and spew spittle at their computer screens as they try to type WHITEWASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Oh what pleasure.

A Slow News Day

2010-07-01T13:10:00.003-04:00

There isn't much going on in the news today, other than that the Collegian reported this morning that Old Main will release the findings of the fat cat alumni and wingnut General Assembly folks pressured investigation into the hacked emails of climate scientist Micheal Mann sometime today. I had hoped this would have happened before lunch so that I could comment on it, but unfortunately it hasn't and it's too nice a day to hangout waiting for it to happen. If the report is dumped at days end, I'll try to get something up on it latter tonight or tomorrow morning.

Go enjoy the beautiful weather.

Technorati Tags: Climategate

Why Not Joe?

2010-06-29T22:42:00.001-04:00

I know what you're saying to yourself after reading my last post, "Hey, Graham ain't the right guy to be selling STEP to working-class folks like me. Old Main shudda sent JoePa out to charm us plain-folk."

Well, you know that was Plan A. There were supposed to be three "Evenings With Joe Paterno" this spring and before each of them, STEP was on the agenda. Unfortunately, all three of these events had to be canceled because...Well, I'll let Graham explain.

"Coach Paterno has had intestinal issues this summer that have forced him to limit his efforts to team activities and therefore some of his personal appearances have been cancelled," university president Graham Spanier said Monday night in an e-mail.

That's right, Joe hasn't been able to stop shitting himself since Graham told him he'd have to help explain to people why a 500% increase in that tax deductible kickback was really all so working-class.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Paterno, Seat Transfer and Equity Plan,

STEPing on the Working-Class

2010-06-29T12:37:00.003-04:00

Old Main must be very worried about the blowback from the Seat Transfer and Equity Plan (STEP), which raises the kickback required to get season football tickets by 500%, since they've sent out Graham, a man with the cojones to say,"I assure you, we don't do anything very lavishly at Penn State. We're very working-class when it comes to what we do," to do a damage control interview with BlueWhite Illustrated.

Let's review some of Graham's working-class bona fides.

First off, Graham just received a contract extension which boosted his salary by 12.9% from $620,000 to $700,000. Com'on, what UniMart clerk hasn't received an $80,000 raise in one year? This is working-class through and through. No?

Then there are the corporate boards that Graham sits on. In 2008, he made $270,9800 in compensate as a director of US Steel and last year he pulled in another $170,000 from the gig. ...not bad for our working-class hero. He has also sat on the board of Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania for a number of years and it was announced this summer that he was appointed as a director of FM Global,an insurance company, which according to the press release announcing Graham's appointment does business with Penn State. Unfortunately, these are not publicly traded companies, hence the compensation of a director is not disclosed by either. But this sort of thing is commonplace amongst the working-class. Staff assistants at Penn State are always being tapped to serve on corporate boards.

Of course, we can't overlook Graham's role as the sometimes washboard player in the Deacons of Dixie, a local Dixieland jazz band. This is a very down to earth hobby, very working-class. The Deacons are working-class to the bone. They often preform at the W.C. Handy Festival in Florence, Alabama and what's more working-class than driving to Florence in a beat up RV?

Now, Graham didn't make the trip that year. When he did make the trip, he didn't think the RV was working-class enough. Here's Graham's concept of working-class travel.

I understand Lear Jets are all the rage amongst retirees on fixed incomes...very working-class.

Like I said, it takes a man with a big set of cojones to live the way Graham does and then to claim that "We're very working-class when it comes to what we do." Graham doesn't know working-class.

The real veblen is....

2010-06-28T10:46:00.001-04:00

...I can't tell you. But Adam's column at StateCollege.com today is based on an email interview I did with him last week, so if you want to find out a bit more about what makes me tick head on over there.

And welcome to all of those who are visiting Left of Centre for the first time after reading Adam's column. Have a look around and come back if you like what you find. By the way, comments are encouraged, whether you like what you read, hate what you read, or have something to add to what you read.

Technorati Tags: StateCollege.com

What Are Graham's Plans if the Bottom Falls Out?

2010-06-27T12:04:00.003-04:00

Last week senate Republicans blocked a jobs bill which also contained enhanced financing to the states for Medicaid. Because the states are barred from changing eligibility standards on Medicaid, cuts will have to come from elsewhere in the budget if Congress doesn't act soon. Our own Ed Rendell told the New York Times,

“It’s a bloodletting.”
[...]

In Pennsylvania, which is confronting a $1.6 billion revenue shortfall, the elimination of the additional Medicaid financing would mean having to come up with $850 million, Mr. Rendell said.
Because the state has already made more than $2.5 billion in cuts since the fall of 2008, when the economy went into a freefall, Mr. Rendell said layoffs were inevitable, not just at the state level but the local level.
“It’s going to be huge teacher layoffs, money to our universities, money to the counties and cities, municipal workers, firemen,” he said. “It would be enormously destructive.”
Mr. Rendell fretted that the resulting fallout from the loss of federal money would bring a halt to three straight months of job gains for the state.
“I know everyone cares about the deficit, and so do I,” he said. “But they care about the deficit until the cuts hit home.”

So Graham, what are your contingency plans should these cuts come about?

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Medicaid cuts, Rendell, Spanier, Pennsylvania,

The Full Grassley-Harkin Letter

2010-06-26T00:00:00.001-04:00

As I wrote in the previous post, I think the investigation into The Big Ten's tax-exempt status, now that the conference realignment is a done deal and The Big Twelve didn't blow-up, is a dead letter-pardon the pun. But I would be remiss if I didn't give you a link to the Grassley-Harkiin letter at the Daily Iowan which also has a nice summary of its contents.

Technorati Tags: Sen. Charles Grassley, Sen. Tom Harkin, The Big Ten Expansion,

The Big Ten and Chuck Grassley's Encroaching Senility

2010-06-25T23:31:00.001-04:00

A bit more on the IRS and The Big Ten. Actually, a bit more on Senator Chuck Grassley and the Big Ten. Most of the speculation around the sports world today is that Grassley and Harkin made the request to the Big Ten for financial data on June 10^th before Nebraska was made the offer to join the Big Ten, because they were upset that Iowa State wasn't in the running to be the twelfth member of the Big Ten or alternately that the Big 12 might desolve leaving ISU out in the cold. The zietgeist is best captured by the DesMoinesRegsister.com.

It turns out that on June 11^th Grassley gave an interview to Radio Iowa on the topic. The reporter tells us Grassley's concern is the realignment "...could bring the demise of the Big 12 and hurt remaining schools like Iowa State University." So the zietgeist is on the mark.

In hindsight, this interview is really interesting for what it reveals about Grassley.

Grassley says, “I’m not one that starts out with the idea Congress ought to or can solve every problem that we have and so I haven’t come to a conclusion of Congress doing anything.” He says there are some angles that could be investigated which may delay or prevent the conference realignment.

“The tax exempt status of these non-profit organizations and the other one is whether or not any anti-trust laws would be violated,” Grassley says. “In the case of anti-trust laws, Congress isn’t going to bring any action under anti-trust laws. That can only be the Attorney General, if there’s a reason for doing it because anti-trust laws have been pretty much the same for 120 years and we don’t prosecute, we only make laws.”

The bit that I've bolded isn't in quotes; its a paraphrase. But according to the reporter, Grassley believed that some sort of an investigation might delay the realignment.

But is Grassley truly concerned that the actions of The Big Ten might jeopardize its tax-exempt status?

Critics of the conference change-ups remind that public universities are supposed to be focused on education, not on sports and making money. Grassley agrees. “Obviously, a tax exemption is for a specific purpose,” he says. “In the case of educational institutions, it’s for the education of kids, so does this in any way promote the education goals of the university?” Grassley says Congress can look into anything but it isn’t necessarily a good idea, and he clarified his comment on tax exemptions.
“I’m not looking for Congress to take action,” he says. “I’ve been asked by people is there anything Congress can do anything about it? I don’t know until you look into it and maybe even after that I’d say it’s not something we ought to get involved in. Lastly, I want to make clear I’m not trying to do anything about tax exemption. In fact, I’m just the opposite. I want to promote tax exemption.”

That's the rhetorical equivalent of a broken field run. Grassley is telling the reporter, the day after he began an informal investigation into the tax-exempt status of The Big Ten, but a couple of weeks before that investigation became public knowledge, that Congress could look at the tax-exempt status of The Big Ten, but he doesn't think that it's a good idea for Congress to get involved and, in fact, he supports the tax-exemption. Wow!

Look, I really hope that he and Harkin carry this investigation through, but my guess is that now that the Big Ten expansion is a done deal and The Big 12 hasn't fallen apart this thing is going to go quietly away. But the real take away here, after watching Grassley's broken field running while he was negotiation HCR with Max Baucus, and now reading this, is that Grassley is getting senile.

Technorati Tags: Sen. Charles Grassley, Sen. Tom Harkin, The Big Ten Expansio, tax-exempt

The Big Ten Draws the Attention of the IRS

2010-06-25T19:16:00.001-04:00

Someone in an IRS office outside of Washington, DC searching on the keywords "Big Ten Expansion" landed on Left of Centre today. The searcher took a few minutes to read the posts On the Big Ten Expansion and a Toothless Faculty Senate and The Big Ten Expansion:Athletic Tail Wags Academic Dog and was on his merry way.

This piqued my interest. Was it a government bureaucrat and college sports fan killing some time on a summer Friday afternoon or was this guy doing his job? And if the search was job related , what job was it exactly the bureaucrat was doing? So I did my own search on the same string and it may be that the IRS guy was working on this.

Iowa's two U.S. senators are asking Big Ten Conference officials to disclose their expansion plans and release financial information about the league's cable television network.

Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Tom Harkin made the request in a June 10 letter they sent to Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany....In the letter, Grassley and Harkin questioned how the Big Ten's expansion efforts fit with its nonprofit status. Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees tax-exempt organizations.

Well, it's good to see that I'm not the only one concerned with big time college sports raiding federal coffers. And I hope my posts helped him to begin to dismantle the tax break for big time college sports. Hey, I guy can dream can't he?

Technorati Tags: Big Ten Expansion, Tax-exempt, Big Ten Network, IRS, Grassely, Harkins

Graham Has Found a Way to Get More Federal Tax Money for Penn State Without the Hassles of Haggling for Earmarks or Competing for Grants

2010-06-23T11:05:00.002-04:00

Longtime Penn State football fans are outraged, outraged I tell you, by the 500% increase in the fee required to get season tickets for Nittany Lion football games from $100 to $600 per year, i.e. the Seat Transfer and Equity Plan (STEP).

A fan with four seats near midfield who has been paying $400 in Nittany Lion Club dues will see that price jump to $2,400.
"We can't afford that," said 84-year-old Jim Williamson from Bellwood, a 1946 PSU graduate and season-ticket holder since 1960. "It's just not possible. On our income, we can't do it."
This fall will be the final season, therefore, that Williamson buys his four season tickets.
"I hear a lot of people say, 'I'm not going to renew my tickets,'" Williamson said. "I know there are a lot of people waiting for tickets, but it's going to be interesting to see if they can maintain about 110,000 there for games.
"They're just taking a big bite out of everybody. I don't understand it. It's to hell with everybody. If you can't afford it, get out."
Some seats cheaper
Season-ticket holders still can purchase tickets for the $100 minimum contribution, but they will have to move to other parts of the stadium.
"I won't move," said Williamson, whose seats are in section WF near the 35-yard line. "I picked those seats out in 1960, and I'm not going up in the end zone. That's the dead zone."

I share their outrage, although I never set foot in Beaver Stadium on Saturdays for football games. I'm outraged because Graham has unilaterally decided to stick it to taxpayers. Since 1988, 80% of such donations have been tax deductible.

In 1986, U.S. Rep. Jake Pickle, a UT alumnus and member of the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote an amendment to the tax code that made the pre-ticket contributions 100 percent tax-deductible - but only for fans buying tickets to University of Texas and Louisiana State University games (U.S. Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana was also a sponsor). Two years later, Congress extended the write-off to all universities, although it lowered it to 80 percent.

Since then, donors to university programs - individuals and corporations - have enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for contributions linked to college sports events. An increasingly vocal group of critics contends that the untaxed money is in effect a public subsidy that encourages universities to spend more freely on an athletics arms race as schools build bigger and fancier stadiums and arenas.

The river of spending is fed by many tax-free tributaries. This year [2007], football fans will pay about $15 million to the Longhorn Foundation in contributions qualifying them for season tickets. That's a potential $12 million tax break for fans to watch UT football.

Luxury suite leases also qualify their buyers for the 80 percent tax deduction. Tax experts say about 60 percent of a skybox's cost is deductible by donors (the actual value of the room is not). This year, suite sales at Royal-Memorial Stadium will bring UT $10 million in income - about $6 million in potential tax breaks for fans to watch football from a private room.

That's right, Graham is taking more money away from the federal coffers at a time of record high budget deficits. I'm sure all the fiscally conservative Teabaggers in the Nittany Nation will share my outrage and demand that the Congress eliminate this massive give away.
Technorati Tags: Penn State, Seat Transfer and Equity Plan, IRS tax rules, Spanier

Clowns on Parade

2010-06-22T12:14:00.001-04:00

Com'on GT, tell us, do you agree with your buds in the Clown Caucus?

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), GOP, BP, Republican Study Committee

GT, a Member in Good Standing of the Clown Caucus

2010-06-21T22:29:00.003-04:00

With only his power of persuasion Obama was able to get BP to place $20 billion in an escrow account as a down payment toward covering the costs of recovery from the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.Republican Study Committee, of which our very own GOP hack GT is a member, react to this accomplishment? I'd have to say not well.

“BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics. These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control. It is the same mentality that believes an economic crisis or an environmental disaster is the best opportunity to pursue a failed liberal agenda. The American people know much better.”

Sure Rep. Joe Barton (R,TX-06), another member of the RSC, took a lot of heat for repeating this "shakedown" claim during his apology to BP, but the whole thing originated with GT's little wingnut club. That's right the official position of GT's club is that holding BP responsible for its actions is tantamount to making it a& victim of Obama's "brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics." However, GT has been quiet on the matter. Someone needs to get GT on the record, does he stand by the RSC statement or does he disavow it?

Technorati Tags: Rep Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), BP, Republican Study Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tx6)

The 2010 Penn State Stairs Report

2010-06-21T21:42:00.001-04:00

Every February the General Assmebly publishes financial data for the four state-related universities, known as a Stairs Report, in a PDF format. I have been converting the data for Penn State to Google Docs spreadsheet format in order to facilatate the analysis of the data and posting the links over to the right. Typically, I do this within a week of the publication of the data. This year I was slow off the mark. It's finally up today.

Technorati Tags: Penn State Stairs Report

The Big Ten Expansion: Doing My Part to Keep the Debate Honest

2010-06-18T20:05:00.003-04:00

Since the big topic of discussion is whether UNL is up to snuff academically and all sorts of claims will be made about the quality of that institution, I've added the Common Data Set for Nebraska to the list of Big Ten Common Data Sets to the right. This should help in fact checking the various claims and counter claims about Nebraska's academics.

Speaking of academically up to snuff, Adam has a good piece today on this subject over at StateCollege.com. As usual, he gets some great quotes. My synopsis of what people told Adam: Of course, Nebraska is academically weak, but so was Penn State when we joined the Big Ten and look at us now; It's perfectly understandable that us loose lipped faculty weren't consulted, because these things are too important to trust us with; Yeah, it would have been nice to have an academic powerhouse like Virginia...c'est la vie. You want to add more teams to the league? Ain't goin'a happen on my watch.

I might have more on the particulars found in Adam's piece latter. Or I may not. It depends on how the weekend plays out.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Big Ten expansion, Nebraska

The Big Ten Expansion: Athletic Tail Wags Academic Dog

2010-06-18T11:49:00.001-04:00

The Penn State Propaganda Portal announces this morning that

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has accepted a unanimous invitation from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the academic arm of the Big Ten, to join the consortium effective July 1, 2011, the same day the university will become a member of the Big Ten Conference.

Following the Big Ten Council of Presidents/Chancellors approval of UNL’s application to join the athletic conference, the matter of CIC membership was referred to the CIC provosts for action. The provosts, who govern the CIC as a "board of the whole," voted unanimously on June 16 to invite UNL to join the consortium.

I await the day that the CIC adds a university and the Big Ten follows up with a quick invitation to the new school. Yeah, like that'll ever happen.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Big Ten Expansion, Nebraska, Spanier

Keeping Track of the Comings and Goings in Centre County

2010-06-16T22:34:00.001-04:00

Via Kevin Drum, Forbes has an interactive map which shows the migration pattern for each of the country's counties. Below is a screen capture of the pattern for Centre County, PA.

The red lines indicate a net migration out of Centre County while the black lines indicate a net migration into the county. The interactive version of the map is here. Mousing over another county in the interactive map gives details of the migration to and from Centre County, PA.

I have nothing deep to say. Go play. It's fun.

Technorati Tags: Forbes Interactive Migration Map

Refining the Pitch on Ag Extension Job Cuts

2010-06-16T12:12:00.002-04:00

Last week I wrote about Old Main's strategy of placing blame for the cuts in Ag Extension jobs at Rendell's feet, although Rendell had given Old Main the flexibility to shift money around in the budget which could have been used to prevent these cuts.

On Monday, Adam at StateCollege.com devoted his column to this topic. He got the following pushback from Penn State Bullshit Artist Lisa Power.

This all begged the question: Can't Penn State just move some state money around to prevent the job cuts in agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, at least this year?

I asked Lisa Powers, the university's chief spokeswoman.

Simple answer: No, it won't happen, she said.

Powers explained it this way:

Overall state funding for Penn State isn't climbing. So if the university were to move some extra state dollars into agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, it would have to take those dollars away from general-education uses -- that is, undergraduate education.

And that, Powers said, would force an even heavier tuition expense onto students' shoulders. Penn Staters already pay among the highest -- if not the highest -- tuition rates among public universities in the U.S.

Powers said the situation presents "a direct trade-off."

"It's a decision that we decided a long time ago that we're not going to make," she said. Plowing more state money into agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, and taking it away from undergraduates, would be "like having students pay a tuition increase to pay for mushroom research in Chester County.

"Our greater obligation is to the students," Powers said.

Beyond that, she explained, "it's been a longstanding, obvious agreement that we rely on state, federal and county-partnership resources" to finance agricultural research and Cooperative Extension in Pennsylvania.

Lisa has effectively said, "Our spin about it being the governor's fault is bullshit. We are the ones who have decided not to save those jobs." Good, for Lisa.

She also said the the choice for Old Main is between undergraduate education and extension. This is a false choice. There aren't just two categories in the internal Penn State budget: Ag Extension and Undergraduate Education. There are other areas in the budget where money might be taken for Ag Extension. My guess is that Old Main presents this false dichotomy because it knows that the constituency for Undergraduate Education is much larger than the Ag Extension constituency. The framing of this as a choice between undergrads and farmers allows Old Main to appear to stand up for one large constituency while pissing off a much smaller constituency. Bad for Lisa.

But there is something even more disingenuous about this loud proclamation,"Plowing more state money into agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, and taking it away from undergraduates, would be "like having students pay a tuition increase to pay for mushroom research in Chester County." It's not as if Old Main would shift money from the General Funds Budget, which is made up primarily of tuition money and state appropriations, to anything other than Undergraduate Education. Yeah, right.

For example, Old Main has been using General Funds money to support Outreach. This is from the Penn State Strategic Plan for the next five years. (PDF page 57).

Penn State, as the Commonwealth’s land-grant university, has long fulfilled a role as the major provider of outreach services to the people of Pennsylvania. This long-standing commitment has continued despite decades of falling state support as a share of the University’s General Funds budget. As state and federal funding for Cooperative Extension has largely stagnated over the past decade and more, reductions in programming have had to occur in order to cover the increased costs of faculty and staff compensation including fringe benefits. Increasing contributions from county governments have not been able to offset these declines. University funds have also had to cover more of the increasing overhead costs.

Similarly, the wide range of other University-sponsored outreach programs have grown over the past decades to the point at which, overall, Penn State operates the largest unified outreach program in the nation, reaching one out of every two households in the Commonwealth. This has meant growing costs for faculty and staff salaries and benefits of those employed in Outreach, and for growing costs of University overhead on operations, despite the considerable successes that Outreach has had in securing extramural funding for many of its programs.

Given the increasing costs of tuition and living expenses for Penn State students and the associated difficulties of funding their education, along with the declining share of state funding for outreach programming, the University can no longer rely on student tuition to support the internally funded Outreach programs to the extent it has previously. Accordingly, all other Outreach programs centrally supported by E&G funds will be placed on the same financial model as Cooperative Extension, with the University’s contribution to programming capped at the 2009-10 level going forward from that date. That is, increased Outreach salaries and fringe benefits must come from extramural sources, or be taken from the base funding the University will continue to provide, until such time as public funding for the University increases beyond inflationary levels in higher education.

Now the new strategic plan calls for Old Main to cap the amount of tuition dollars going to Outreach , but still Old Main has been using and will continue to use tuition dollars to support Outreach.

So Lisa is bullshiting people when she ask them to believe that Old Main would never divert undergrad tuition dollars away from undergrad education. It has been doing exactly that and it will continue to do exactly that. Worse for Lisa.

Why does Old Main think it can get away with this bullshit? It might be because the information needed to get at the truth,when it is available at all, is fragmented and I'm the only one paying close enough attention to piece things together.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, job cuts, Pennsylvania Proposed Budget 2010-2011, Rendell, Agricultural extension

On the Big Ten Expansion and a Toothless Faculty Senate

2010-06-15T11:30:00.002-04:00

I'm sure by now you know that the Big Ten is expanding and Nebraska is the new kid on the block. All of the schools involved insist that the expansion isn't just about big sports money. No, they say academics were considered too when Nebraska was extended the offer to join. Michael Sanseriono at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes closer look at the claim that academics was part of the decision. He cites a couple of academic rankings which puts Nebraska at the bottom of the Big Ten, but that isn't really what caught my eye, you really have to take rankings with a grain of salt. The more damning thing is that there was no evidence of a consultation with the academic side when the decision was made.

I found this quote from the current chairwoman of the Penn State University Faculty Senate particular informative, not only with respect to the decision making process in the expansion of the Big Ten, but also in the way decisions are made at Penn State in general.

Jean Landa Pytel, chairwoman of Penn State's University Faculty Senate, said the school's faculty has not been consulted about conference expansion.
"This is an athletic issue," Dr. Pytel said. "We're the academic arm. That is purely a business decision. ... We haven't been involved in the conversation, so I guess I have to have faith in the president that he knows what he's doing."

Let's see. Shortly after Graham arrived he merged Hershey Medical Centre with Gessinger Health Care. That merger had to be dissolved in about a year. At the same time, he merged with Dickinson School of Law and praised the strength of DSL. Five years latter he decided that the DSL was in terrible shape and he had to abrogate the merger agreement and move the law school from Carlisle to University Park to fix the problem. A big fight ensued. Then there is the Village at Penn State. A retirement community that Graham decided to build. It recently defaulted on it bonds.

Faith is an amazing thing isn't it? But who exactly is it that provides a check on Graham?

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Nebraska, Big Ten expansion, Spanier

Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010:Revised

2010-06-11T11:17:00.003-04:00

Old Main posted its revised Right-To-Know Report this morning. The two family members whose compensation had been left of of the original report are Sandra Spanier, Professor of English and Graham's wife, Michele Kirsch, Director of Operations for the Schreyer Honors Colleges and wife of Senior VP of Development Rod Kirsch.

Sandra Spanier's salary the 2008 tax year was $126,813 which placed her in the middle of the pack of full professors in the College of Liberal Arts.

Michele Kirsch's salary for the 2008 tax year was $83,171. The Stairs Report does not have the average salary of administrators in the Honors College because there are only three and the in categories with three or less employees no data is given. However, in the other academic support units the average salaries in the Executive/Administrative/Managerial category range from a low of $79,245 in Outreach to a high of $96,708 in the Libraries. In that context, Kirsch's salary does not appear out of line.

While there's no story here, the question of whether Old Main made a reasonable effort to ascertain if any family member of trustees should have been reported is still open, but I doubt that we'll ever get answers to that. So this is likely the end of line on this story for this year.

Also see StateCollege.com and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more on this story.
[Updated: 6/11/10 9:30 pm]

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010 , Revised Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010, Spanier

Revised Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010: Background Information Part II

2010-06-11T00:45:00.001-04:00

I thought that while we are waiting for today's document dump , as I said below, I'd provide some context and background information to help people analyze whatever Old Main decides to give us. (Part I is here.)

As of Wednesday, we know that Old Main will acknowledge in its revised RTK report that there are two family members of influential people at the Penn State who either received payment from the University in a business transaction or who are employed by and received compensation from the University in fiscal year 2007-2008. Is this list of two individuals exhaustive? This question is almost certainly unanswerable with information in the public domain, but here's some context for those who may want to ask questions of those who know the answer.

The number of family members of influential people with business income or compensation listed by Pitt and Temple are six and one, respectively. These numbers are in line with Old Main's claim of only two family members. No red flags here.

Did Old Main make an honest effort to determine all family members of influential individuals with business income or compensation? The IRS only require an annual survey to determine if such relationships exist. From the instructions for Schedule L, page 4.

The organization is not required to provide information about a business transaction with an interested person if it is unable to secure the information regarding interested person status after making a reasonable effort to obtain it. An example of a reasonable effort for Part IV is for the organization to distribute a questionnaire annually to each current or former officer, director,trustee, and key employee listed on Form 990, Part VII, Section A, that includes the name, title, date, and signature of each person reporting information and contains the pertinent instructions and definitions for Schedule L, Part IV. The organization is not required to distribute such a questionnaire to organizations or individuals with which it does business, but who are not current or former officers, directors, trustees, or key employees of the organization, in order to have made a reasonable effort or this purpose.

It would be worth asking about the reasonable efforts Old Main made in its attempt to fill-out Schedule L, Part IV.

If the answer is that they used a questionnaire as described above, then the follow-up should be may we see a blank copy of it.

If the answer is that as part of their conflict-of-interest policy the Board of Trustees must report the business transactions of family members, then you should be aware that the Bylaws of the Board of Trustees has a narrower definition of family member than does the IRS and the reporting thresholds for business relations are different and no provision is made for reporting relatives employed by the University. You can find the IRS guidelines in the instructions for schedule L and the appendix of the instructions for the Form 990. The Bylaws are here. The relevant part is Article 6. So if this is their answer, it is an admission of their failure to make the reasonable effort demanded by the IRS.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010, Spanier

Revised Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010: Background Information Part I

2010-06-10T11:43:00.001-04:00

I thought that while we are waiting for Friday's document dump I'd provide some context and background information to help people analyze whatever Old Main decides to give us.

As of yesterday, we know that Penn State will acknowledge in its revised RTK report that there are two family members of influential people at the Penn State who either received payment from the University for a business transaction or who are employed by and received compensation from the University in fiscal year 2007-2008.Graham's wife Sandra, an English prof, as I've already reported, will certainly be one of these individuals. Whatever amount she is payed, the question will arise, is it too much or too little? Here's your context for answering that question.

According to the 2009 Stairs Reports, during the 2007-2008 fiscal year there were 155 full professors in the College of Liberal Arts and the average salary of the full professors was $124,316. Unfortunately, the Stairs reports don't give anymore information on the salary distribution. Hence, it will difficult based on this to determine if Sandra's salary is extremely small or large unless it is way out of line. Fortunately for us, each year the University Faculty Senate issues a report on faculty salaries which does contain some additional information on salary distributions. Here's data for the full professors in the College of Liberal Arts for the Fall of 2008.(PDF page 16)

Number=158
First Quartile=101,373
Median=121,860
Third Quartile=150,120
Average years in rank=9.8

There's about a $50k spread in the middle of the distribution. If Sandra's salary is substantial more than $50k above the third quartile or below the first quartile that would be a pretty good indication of an extreme salary and a reason to start looking for answers from Old Main.

There is a complication because these numbers are college-wide. The distribution within the English department will be different. But this should only matter if her salary is on the boarder between extreme or not.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010, Spanier

Placing the Blame

2010-06-09T23:11:00.001-04:00

On Monday, The Penn State Propaganda Portal announced that

Ten people are losing their jobs and dozens of additional positions are being eliminated through attrition as a result of budget shortfalls in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences caused by state appropriations that have not kept pace with rising costs.

[...]

In the current fiscal year, the college's state appropriation for agricultural research and extension was flat at 2008-2009 levels.

The governor's proposed budget for 2010-2011 again includes flat funding for the college. However, college administrators say without greater state support, rising operating and pension-related costs will create a budget shortfall of $11 million as of July 1, 2011, requiring a 20 percent reduction in agricultural research and extension programs in the 2011-2012 fiscal year. This would equate to more than 160 positions in the college.

"Unlike Penn State's undergraduate education programs, these programs do not receive tuition dollars," McPheron said

The take-away is that that the workforce reduction is caused by flat appropriations for the college which are expected to remain so this year and that the shortfall caused by rising costs cannot be made up for by hiking tuition. Hence it is the governor's fault that these people are losing their jobs.

Historically, it has been true that the Commonwealth's budget for the University has line item appropriations and that the appropriations for for agricultural research and extension line item has been flat recently. But this year, the governor has eliminate line items from the proposed appropriations for Penn State (Proposed Budget PDF page 521) in order to give Old Main more flexibility to deal with its flat funding. Therefore it is not true that, "The governor's proposed budget for 2010-2011 again includes flat funding for the college;" it simply includes flat funding for the University as a whole.

This means is that Old Main could have shifted money into the College of Agriculture budget from elsewhere in the budget to support agricultural research and extension, but has chosen not to do it. This may or may not have been a smart thing to do, but this year it was Old Main's call not Rendell's.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, job cuts, Pennsylvania Proposed budget 2010-2011, Rendell, Agricultural extension

Old Main to Come Clean: Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010 Will Be Revised.

2010-06-08T13:03:00.003-04:00

Via the invaluable Adam Smeltz at StateCollege.com

Penn State on Friday will file an amended and expanded version of its annual Right-to-Know report, spokesman Geoff Rushton said Tuesday.
Rushton said the amended report, to be filed in Harrisburg, will disclose the salaries of two university workers who are family members of key leaders at the institution. The report also will be posted on the Penn State website, he said.

...more once the report is available.
[Update: 06/08/10, 10:50pm. Bill Schackner at the Post-Gazette also has the story.]

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Right-To-Know

The Outside Legal Counsel That Aided the Trustees in Determining Graham's Compensation is....

2010-06-07T17:48:00.003-04:00

Like I said below, Adam Smeltz's StateCollege.com piece on Graham's contract extension is full of nice little tidbits. For example, the Trustees used

...the services of outside legal counsel, [Penn State Bullshit Artist Lisa]Powers said, to help them gauge fair-market value and demand as they set presidential compensation.

The truth is I don't know who the outside legal counsel is. But shortly after I put up the post, Who Decided to Give Graham More Time?, the blog had a visit from the Cleveland office of the law firm Baker and Hostetler. Here's a screen capture.
It just so happens that one of Baker and Hostetler's areas of practice is executive compensation.

That doesn't mean that Baker and Hostetler is the outside legal counsel used by the Trustees. Heck, someone over in the Cleveland office may have been trying to check up on the competition. But if they were the outfit used by the BOT that would go along way in explaining the Trustees' decision.

You see, some of the lawyers over a Baker and Hostetler might have trouble spotting a con artist.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Most people don't fall for the African inheritance scam where a huge sum of money sits in a foreign bank account waiting to be claimed -- but at a price.
But some do.
Nine people, including several from the Cleveland area, sued a Solon woman and two lawyers this week claiming they duped the plaintiffs into helping the woman recover $14.5 million left behind in the African nation of Burkina Faso.
The lawsuit, filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, claims Willia Burton and two attorneys from Baker Hostetler in Cleveland persuaded the plaintiffs to give her more than $1 million. The money was for legal fees and other payments necessary to recover the inheritance left to Burton by her father. Each contributor was promised "a huge return," the lawsuit states.
It's been five years and none of the nine has seen a dime.

Food for thought, anyway.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Compensation, Penn State Board of Trustees, legal counsel

Spanier Has 'Overwhelming Support' For Contract Extension, Aide Says; Or Does He?

2010-06-06T19:38:00.002-04:00

Is the BOT "overwhelmingly" behind Graham as Penn State Bullshit Artist Lisa Powers insisted to Adam Smeltz yesterday? Maybe. Maybe not. Here's why it's unknowable.

According to the BOT Standing Order IX (1)(f)(5),

Expectations of Membership. In exercising the responsibilities of trusteeship, the Board of Trustees is guided by the expectations of membership, each of which is equally important:...Speak openly within the Board and publicly support decisions reached by the Board.

I believe in legal circles that's called the toe-the-line rule. Since the BOT Standing Order VII(13)(a) allows the Board to meet in secret when considering employment matters, those "within the Board" discussions about Graham will never be heard outside the Board. Any dissent "within the Board" gets channeled into high blood pressure.

So the next time you're talking to a Trustee and they start telling you what a super guy Graham is and how they never tire of him pulling a nickle out of their ear and how lucky the University is to have his services and what a great racquetball player he is and on and on and on, shake your head knowingly and smile, because you know Penn State puts the bot in BOT.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Board of Trustees

Who Decided to Give Graham More Time?

2010-06-06T12:35:00.002-04:00

In my rush to snark the other day, I failed to note some interesting tidbits in Adam Smeltz's StateCollege.com story on Graham's lifetime presidential appointment. Here's one: Who exactly is charged with deciding Graham's future?

[Penn State Bullshit Artist Lisa] Powers said a small committee of trustees considers presidential contract extensions in consultation with other board members. The committee includes the board chairman or chairwoman, the vice chair, the immediate past chair and the chair of the board's Committee on Finance and Physical Plant.

Who holds these position at this time?

Steve A. Garban, Chairman
John P. Surma, Vice Chairman
Linda B. Strumpf, Chairwoman Committee on Finance and Physical Plant
James S. Broadhurst, Immediate Past Chairman

These are the people to blame.

With the exception of Garban who is an alumni trustee, all of these people are business and industry trustees and Garban, as Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations/Treasurer Emeritus of The Pennsylvania State University, is an Old Main insider. There is no one representing the interests of the working people of the Commonwealth who it is the University is supposed to serve ....and it shows.

And why might Graham sellout the interests of the working class? Well, here's an interesting fact. John P. Surma is CEO/Chairman of Board/President/Director US Steel and Graham is a Director of US Steel. ...and drumroll please...In 2009, the compensation for a director of US Steel was $171,000.00 and the previous year it was $270,980.00. That didn't show up on this years RTK report. You see it is so much more lucrative to serve the interests of the fat cats than it is to serve the interests of working people. And by show'in Graham a little lov'in, Surma might get a little lov'in back from Graham.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, conflict of interest, John Surma, US Steel, Spanier

BOT & Graham BFF

2010-06-05T12:10:00.001-04:00

Adam Smeltz at StateCollege.com reports this morning that the Board of Trustees really, really, really likes Graham.

Penn State President Graham Spanier had "overwhelming support" from the university trustees when they agreed to extend his contract, university spokeswoman Lisa Powers said late Friday.

Also according to Adam, Graham plans on sticking around after he steps down as president.

It's not clear if Spanier wants to conclude his presidency in 2015 or later. But "my current plan would be to rejoin the faculty and go back to teaching and research when my tenure as president is completed," he wrote via e-mail.

...no doubt to manage his legacy through the recently created Graham Legacy Project.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Board of Trustees, Spanier, StateCollege.com