terrapinsanity.com

Noname Street? Really?

From: “Information Alert”
To: “UMD Alert Users”
Subject: Traffic Alert
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:07:30 -0500

A major traffic event is taking place between stadium dr/Noname st on Paintbranch dr avoid the area & take alt route

Sent by UMD Alerts to Traffic (E-mail, Pagers, Cell phones) through UMD Alerts
… powered by the Roam Secure Alert Network

The above issued 30 to 40 minutes after fire crews responded to a report of fire at AV Williams Building, next to the Wind Tunnel. Perhaps one of those landmarks might have been more useful to orient people.

Today’s Gazette reports that USM made social security and credit card numbers for 8,000 prospective students openly available on the internet over a three year period, as exposed in a legislative audit.

(Entertainingly, administrators’ internal view seems to evidence more concern that this conclusion was exposed in Annapolis than for the data exposure on the internet.)

What a great way to make prospective students feel welcome here!

To quote some students living on north campus: “Who was the genius that decided the Duke game had to be on first day of classes?”

Indeed! But as we pointed out to them, College Park is not a campus with an athletics problem. It is an industrial sports operation with a campus problem.

We often write about budget ironies – administrators who raise tuition or donations in the name of excellence or student opportunities, but who then spend out on exclusive buildings, exclusive parties or expensive sports programs before going off to celebrate victory (of their shakedown, not sports.)

One of the expensive assistant coaches hired in the last year may have celebrated just a little too much. The Baltimore Sun reports assistant men’s basketball coach Dalonte Hill has been arrested for DUI.

Here’s a man paid more than almost all faculty members in the state of Maryland to work on something completely unrelated to (if not at odds with) educational programs. Now he won’t be working even at that, at least for the near term. The same article reports he won’t be with the team in the upcoming games, pending a campus review of the situation.

Chancellor Kirwan’s ‘megamail’ fundraising message rolled out this morning to all employees, asking for donations to Maryland Charities. He reminds us, as “remarkably generous and civic-minded men and women”, that:

[T]he demand for the essential health and human services MCC organizations provide continues to expand. Whether it be food and shelter for the needy, heath care for the elderly and infirmed, or assistance for our veterans, there remains tremendous
unmet need in our communities.

We agree. But judging from the newly-razed president’s house (making way for an event facility), lavish parties feting transitions of administrators, and immense buy-outs of athletic staff contracts in order to cherry pick an elite even if non-academic operation, Brit must have sent a very different fundraising letter to the one-percenters.

Lots of emergency text alerts today as the community was notified of a fire in JM Patterson building. Good information scramble this time, and we’re glad there are no reports of injuries. We all still need to learn details of what happened but … one detail is awkward. JM Patterson is home of (drum roll please) the Fire Protection Engineering program.

Oops.

In response to the campus decision to build a new president’s mansion (err, “event center” – yeah, that’s it, event center), yesterday’s Post LTE had what seems to be a representative view: “The president’s fancy new house may be meant to win over donors, but what it says about priorities is further reducing my interest in donating.”

Unfortunately, leadership continues to demonstrate how they still don’t get it. John Lauer, head of the Foundation through which funds are being laundered, defends the actions (and at the same time demonstrates how they don’t get media relations either – hammering home the same wrong message and stretching out the bad press into more news cycles.)

Lauer is pretty explicit: he and his fellow one percenters think it is just gauche to have their exclusive wine-and-cheese events in an old building, or one of the many other “event centers” where they might have to share. Rossborough Inn, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, the Grand Ballroom in Stamp, the Atrium in Stamp or reception areas specifically crafted for this purpose in new buildings like Knight, Kim or Van Munching. Good Lord … hold activities where rich donors might actually see students? The humanity of it all! We all know that the only time it is appropriate to see students is when they are busing your table for minimum wage or cheering a sports team (so long as you are safely ensconced in your expensively-build skybox in Byrd Stadium.)

Heaven forbid that Mr. Lauer and his crew be forced to erect tents in order to gain the exclusivity they deserve. Students in substandard classrooms must clearly wait in line behind such priorities. These millionaires need their own place, and UM’s campus leaders are just being sensitive to their needs.

Congrats and a tip of the hat once again to Freeman Hrabowski’s UMBC chess team for placing well (second) in a prestigious national competition. In the last decade they have been regulars in win, place or show at the national level, and garner some great visibility for campus scholarship along the way.

Today’s news cycle handily illustrates some contrasts between UMBC and College Park campus leadership, contrasts which are increasingly noticed around the state even if not in the rarefied reaches of Main Admin. At the same time readers learn that UMBC canvasses donors to support chess scholarships which enable nationally-recognized cerebral achievements, they learn that UMCP canvasses donors to support construction of a new President’s Residence. With a reported price tag of $7.2 million, the move is described by campus as necessary because the old residence was a “lousy place to throw a party.”

Scholars who lack updated facilities for research, students who study in classrooms with leaky roofs or live in housing with untenable plumbing, and staff who have endured years of furloughs while working under the whip of tone-deaf, self-absorbed leadership will all sleep easier tonight knowing that their president will soon have a better place to throw a party.

Taxpayers will surely see other kinds of news from these campuses over time. After all, this is just one news cycle. Or as chess-master Hrabowski knows it, just the next move in a long game.

We’re sure the student athletes in under-performance programs (you know, ones that graduated students instead of make money for the all-controlling athletics association) feel okay for eliminating their sport so the athletics association can get new artificial turf on practice fields, to the tune of $1 million (thanks for that, Diamondback.)

College Park is well known for its willingness to serve Democratic Party needs, for which our campus leaders get accommodation now and then. We provide gainful employment for officials who are in a holding pattern between administrations, we generate studies to give political cover to policy moves sought by the Party, and we set up a nice backdrop when the party needs a scenic photo-op with images of youthful support.

Sometimes what we do is spill the beans.

That happened in a recent advertisement from the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, an operation inside our Engineering School. Mtech is promoting a new “clean energy challenge” and as part of that sent out advertisements linking to its web page, which announced “As part of the Obama Administration’s effort to support and empower the next generation of American clean energy entrepreneurs, the Department of Energy awarded $360,000 for the $100K ACC Clean Energy Challenge …” (We saved the full advertisement, which you can see by clicking on the image below.)

Spending $360,000 for a $100,000 challenge. Yeah, that’s about right for this administration.

It took a day but the web page was subsequently changed to remove this language. Clearly, someone had a “what were you thinking?” conversation with Mtech. At time of this writing, however, their web site retains the rest of the party pandering, which is the energy event’s kick off with a screening of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Serious scientists on this campus study climate change, and we’re shocked that they would be willing to have the value of their work overwhelmed with the public image of someone who right, wrong or indifferent now serves as America’s top junk science huckster. Will researchers in the science college even be allowed to add an asterisk to this Mtech kick off? Doubtful. To most observers, UM climate research will be hitched to the Al Gore junk wagon.