terrapinsanity.com

Notable and quotable at the WSJ: “The college admission process is hard. It’s particularly hard on a lot of young Americans because the college admissions process is the event that demonstrates how much they are surrounded by hypocritical lying weasels.” (Apologies if the full text is behind a paywall from where you access the web.)

The author, commentator Walter Russell Mead, refers chiefly to everyone surrounding the students over their formative years, showering them lots of positive, uplifting but otherwise meaningless praise about their abilities, achievements and potential – all of which its the wall when they must compete in an objective arena where good try might not be good enough.

But that’s where we come in. At University of Maryland, you can keep living the dream! Yes, our Admissions operation is staffed entirely by people unrelated to that pesky business of creating successful outcomes, so there is no danger of bumping into a real scholar who might inadvertently leak news about the emperor’s fine clothes. (Don’t worry if you don’t understand that reference. You’re swell just the way you are!) At College Park, we accept people who lack preparation for our programs, and are careful to ensure enough well-prepared students are turned away so everyone will know how important we are.

How can this work? We’re living the dream ourselves! We’re the state’s flagship campus, and we’re spectacular.

Finally some media attention for the flagship that doesn’t involve campus leaders promoting underage drinking in bars, holding sports programs hostage to donations from well-intentioned parents, or lamentation over other campuses in the state winning national accolades. We refer you to the Kevin Bacon do-good challenge, which brought $10,000 in donations to a worthy cause identified in the competition for which Bacon served as judge (en route to performing at a bar in Annapolis.)

Let’s just not look too closely at how much more than that the campus just spent on public relations consultants and expenses so that $10k could be given out. But hey, don’t we feel good this morning?

Kevin Bacon helping us overspend tax dollars to show how selfless we are, Angela Davis speaking in the dean’s lecture series in the evening of the same day … is there some kind of pattern here?

It happened again. Last night (evening of April 16) Lee Tune, spokesman for the campus, mailed out the TODAYS NEWS notice to subscribers, ostensibly to summarize how UM has been in the news for “Weeks of April 7 to April 13″ (sic). Click on the links, though, and you can’t find out about the comet research or students who were feted by Glamour Magazine as promised. (Leave aside how students being feted in Glamour Magazine helps our school’s image as a place of scholars.) You’re taken to the page

http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/um_in_news/

which still summarizes the news for the week before that (March 30 through April 6.)

Put in perspective, the campus PIO can’t even correctly send out last week’s news, much less what’s going on right now or could be coming up. And we wonder why other media aren’t picking up on our claims of greatness?

The Washington Post coverage begain:

At a bar named Looney’s, more than a week after just about every other major high school player announced his college choice, in a circus-like atmosphere, the University of Maryland football program landed its biggest recruit in years when Good Counsel’s Stefon Diggs announced his intention to play in College Park.

Really? At a bar?

Is there any more effective way to promote a party atmosphere on campus than to bring high school draft picks to a local watering hole to announce his plans to play football at College Park? Forget the wink and nod – way too subtle. Set the party at a student hang out immediately adjacent campus and make sure you have a packed house. Have the athletic foundation pick up tabs on food and drink. (Not to worry, we can cancel another low-priority sport to pay for it.) Make sure your coaches do media reports from there too. Go Terps!

Does this mean the campus now wants professors to recruit scholars from, say, Montgomery Blair High School science magnet program by partying with them at local bars? Huh, wonder what local principals would think about that. Didn’t the faculty senate just have a long discussion about the problems of promoting underage drinking? None of that particularly seems relevant any more.

Yes, campus leaders are changing the environment. Yesterday they got coveted statewide media coverage at the Sun, featuring photos of the most famous UM alumni. Number four on the list, ahead of legislator/scholar Tom McMillen or even Jim Henson? Len Bias, whose claim to fame is his death of a cocaine overdose while partying after being recruited to play basketball by the Celtics.

Now that’s some serious partying, and recruiting high school athletes like Stefon Diggs in local bars seems like we are trying to keep up the tradition. Maybe someday Diggs will be just as famous as Bias.

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.