terrapinsanity.com

The Sun reports two UMBC employees have resigned after an audit exposed problematic expenditures, potentially on personal items. The matter is referred to the Attorney General. According to the article, the initial audit triggered other checks at UMBC which revealed a number of students had not been charged for tuition and fees. This of course violates the first rule of business (“cash the check!”)

A bit awkward, this coming out not as a result of USM oversight of the system members…

Amidst all the discussion of doomsday budgets, hiring freezes, new furloughs, new cuts to already stripped health benefits and more, there’s one thing Main Admin is happy to have lost on the radar just now. Being almost out of sight …

What's that just peeking over the trees?

But not quite.

It’s construction on the new President’s Mansion, and as you see below it is coming along swimmingly.

Never mind staff furloughs. Think of all the construction jobs we're making!

The General Assembly is set to convene in special session starting tomorrow morning, and likely will implement a mug-the-rich plan to cover all the other expanded spending priorities (none of which unfortunately seem to involve paying full employee health benefits or effecting emergency repairs on classrooms.) We’ll soon know whether budget negotiators will reach a compromise – maybe they can raise taxes and implement more furloughs. But won’t the party for campus leadership just be grand when the check arrives from Annapolis and their new facility is done?

And if they let the foliage grow just a little more, then Presidential Partiers won’t be distracted by the sight of the great unwashed when they look back in our direction, in whose name they party.

The Diamondback finally got the memo on something quietly enacted on campus months ago, a change in standards for determining whether an act of sexual misconduct has occurred. The student code of conduct was amended to lower the bar for a determination, from “clear and convincing evidence” to “preponderance of the evidence.”

The move itself is seriously troubling, as is made clear by quotes from proponents who obviously seem strongly interested in inviting complaints. “[I]t could result in an innocent person being found guilty. But I think sexual assault is such a big issue that it’s worth the risk.”

Really?

What happened to that old liberal mantra about better ten guilty men go free than one innocent person be jailed? That’s only for acts that aren’t really inappropriate in the eyes of those in charge, and pandering to victimhood is always fashionable in the eyes of campus leadership these days, so UM hews to the party line out of Washington. That’s where policy enforcement is driven by the mindset articulated by (now former) EPA administrator Al Armendariz, who famously stated:

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. … So, that’s our general philosophy.”

The Obama administration – and now President Loh – is thus clearly inviting women who perceive they have been wronged, rightly or wrongly, to come forth so some men, guilty by gender even if not deed, can be made an example of.

We’re glad to see this get some attention, but on this reporting the DB still fell way short. It covered nothing of the national controversy which has grown around the Obama administration’s regulatory extortion, enacting as a funding requirement the mandate which no legislator could possibly get enacted into law because it doesn’t pass constitutional muster. (The DB instead portrays this as a routine regulatory change. It is anything but!)

The DB also gives no treatment to any question of process violations to enacting this change on campus. Apparently President Loh just did it. Informed readers would like to know when there was ever a discussion with the Senate (hint: there wasn’t) and if not, then why we have a Senate in the first place. Readers might like to hear about legal analysis from General Counsel which might have helped us understand the campus legal exposure to actually using this unsupportable standard. It may sound trendy and uplifting to some now, but it will sure suck if the university loses a huge lawsuit for erring in a determination after following extra-legal procedures. Are we at risk? (Hint: we likely are.)

No, in this matter President Loh again shows he will roll for politicians faster than a $3 hooker rather than ask hard questions, stand up for standards we ostensibly believe in (as articulated in the strategic plan), and build community by engaging those who work and live on our campus. And you would never notice such things by reading the Diamondback or Faculty Voice.

… and unsurprisingly, it isn’t great news either. Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a column about the total disconnect between college football and academics. That itself is not news – really, who of us actually thinks football enhances our preparation of tomorrow’s thought leaders? – but how special it is for the author to use Maryland as the case study to illustrate insane practices.

Yes, there again is the write up of our allocation of millions for buying out coach contracts, build-out of elite sports-boxes at the stadium (that we can’t fill), and sacrifice of other sports programs on the altar of football. President Loh is on his way to building quite a national reputation!

In this morning’s Diamondback: “Specter said officials want to wait to hold a forum until they sign their term sheet with Cordish Companies.” That’s Rob Specter, Vice President for Administrative Affairs, aka, one of President Loh’s kneebreakers, informing the community that first they intend to make the fundamental decisions about East Campus development – you know, the kind of decisions that get put in contracts with developers like Cordish – and then they’ll hold meetings to tell us the way it is going to be. What possible value is student input at that point? What value can it have after the campus has already bound itself in a development agreement?

Specter made an early name for himself by famously insisting that it is okay for campus officials to plagiarize documents from other campuses in our official publications. As such, his role as the point man on projects like this mean they start under a cloud of credibility issues on day one. The process revealed today only confirms the fears of skeptics who believe that integrity matters.

The Diamondback reveals what everyone should have figured out the moment President Loh rolled on the Purple Line plans coming through campus: The “M” must go. But don’t worry. The facilities person in charge, Facilities Management Director Carlo Colella, assures us the change will be an “enhancement” even though we don’t yet know where it will be.

Well that’s comforting.

Leadership will actually be relieved if the community can focus concerns over things like the iconic traffic circle on campus, since that can be moved for comparatively little expense, and the whole time people blather about that they will not be protesting against the far greater problems we will experience from Metro’s unprecedented at-grade crossings embedded in a pedestrian-rich environment like a college campus. Wait until they lay on you that, for safety, maybe they better put up safety barriers after all, cutting the campus in half.

But no worries. Carlo will surely emerge to tell us that is an “enhancement” too. That’ll make it all better.

UMBC’s president Freeman Hrabowski has just been listed as one of Time magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People, continuing his rise to prominence for (now quoting the Sun article quoting Time) “turning a humble commuter school into one of the nation’s leading sources of African Americans who get Ph.Ds in science and engineering.”

Congrats to Freeman on yet another well-deserved recognition!

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?

UM’s cut to competitive sports in order to save cash for the all-important football program gets more ink today, as the Post reports on competitive cheerleading. We are described as among the first in the nation to advance cheerleading as a sport nine years ago, something few other schools have followed and which is not recognized as such by the NCAA. This report comes on the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the federal law mandating equal opportunity in education for both sexes.

Last month the average balance of outstanding student loan debt carried by Maryland residents topped $33,704 – the most in the nation. This is according to the most recent quarterly report from Credit Karma, a consumer credit management company.

Count us as not surprised. For all practical purposes the flagship campus, which should have been pumping top talent into the state over the last decade, has been touted by Admissions as a great party school, and Maryland’s best young talent has responded accordingly – they increasingly go out of state for their education, and often don’t come back to pump their correspondingly superior economic benefits into the state. While we spare no expense to recruit foot coaches for appeal to jocks or top food courts to appeal to entertainment-oriented youngsters, anything which might appeal to scholars has been cut. The present report is consistent with a view that we’re giving kids a great time when they are here but not doing much to help them get on with a career that helps them paying bills later.

We need a Provost who cares about scholarship, and that caring would start with a full re-org of Admissions.