Foreclosures show the problem with universities as "businesses"

The latest dispatch from the foreclosure fraud front shows the problem with making universities more businesslike, especially with things like endowed professorial chairs.

Here's how to buy off a professor, if you're the banksters:

Joseph R. Mason, a finance professor who holds the Louisiana Bankers Association chair at Louisiana State University, said that concerns about proper foreclosure documentation were overblown. At the end of the day, he said, even if the banks botched the paperwork, homeowners who didn’t make their mortgage payments still needed to be held accountable.

“You borrowed money,” he said. “You are obligated to repay it.”

Uhh, if the paperwork is fraudulent, we don't know who owes money, Profy-Woffy. We don't know if anybody owes. We do know that people have been evicted from homes on which their mortgages were up to date, or even paid off!

That's the problem with corporately-endowed university chairs, universities being run more like businesses, the chancellors and presidents who want to do that, etc.

Why academics shouldn’t predict the demise of “old media”

With a company offering flat rate, unlimited course offerings online at just $99 a month, academics, intellectuals and pundits who want to proclaim the pending demise of “old media” in general and print media in particular should look in their rearview mirrors before offering any more prognostications.

Even without online classrooms entering version 2.0, colleges and universities have indicated in the last couple of years their intent to use adjunct faculty for more and more of their teaching positions in the future. So, without too much schadenfreude, some of the pundits may want to join the misery of media-world layoffs, etc.

And, there are other similarities. Yes, while it’s a stereotype, the “old,” “mainstream” media did at times come off as a cult, priesthood, or keepers of the flame, choose your metaphor.

But, don’t universities, “old,” “traditional” universities, vs. more explicitly for-profit models that mix bricks and mortar with modems and mouses, like the University of Phoenix, let alone vs. online-only collegiate learning centers, come off in exactly the same way?

Short answer? Hell, yes.

Longer answer is that there are differences.

The media, even at its peak, never had anything comparable to North Central or other collegiate accreditation agencies. Agencies that, at the beck and call of bricks and mortar, have no compunction about bullying the new, online-only learning centers.

Read the full, in-depth analysis piece for examples of this bullying and various ways in which some of the online-only collegiate learning centers (I’m not ready to use the word “universities”) are either doing creative partnerships or else are fighting back.

Given that North Central, et al, are already putting these folks to a degree of scrutiny they never turn on State U., if one of these online centers gets bought by a financier with deep enough pockets, you WILL see an antitrust lawsuit.

Corporatization of universities diminishes confidence in their results

A Stanford prof recently published a study saying ethanol could have more ozone problems than gasoline. Problems, though? Yes.

ExxonMobil has given $100 million to fund Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Program. True, the ethanol study wasn’t funded by that money, but Exxon and co-funders, including Toyota, have five-year exclusive rights to the program’s discoveries. Mark Jacobson claims he exposes what E-M stands for, but what if the XX starts pulling back some of that $100 million?