USC says its deficit is more than $200 million

LAT:

“experiencing significant shifts in federal support” for its research and other programs

...

USC’s expenses have “significantly outpaced” its revenue for several years.

...

In interviews, two university employees acknowledged how grave the federal funding losses could be — but they also cited several pricey projects that they believe have hurt USC’s finances. Those endeavors include the construction of the Bloom Football Performance Center, which broke ground in November; the installation of enhanced security measures in the aftermath of spring 2024 protests over Israel’s war in Gaza; and the opening of the university’s Capital Campus in Washington, D.C., in 2023.

Football team has gotten worse every season under Lincoln Riley:

7-6

8-5

11-3 (with terrible bowl loss) 

Allegations that there were years of warnings that the San Diego Unified School Superintendent had engaged in multiple acts of sexual misconduct

NBC has a long article on the blame game.

The following month, the district received another letter, this one signed by a group of anonymous school principals. They accused [the superintendent] of sexually harassing women he supervised and exchanging sex for promotions and job security.

The district neither investigated nor shared the hotline report, nor the principals’ letter, with the school board. 

...

“[The superintendent] served this district for 30 years … and it was important to the board to recognize that service,” [the Board president] told us. “And we also needed to communicate that he was no longer fit to serve, and that it was no longer in the best interest of the district to move forward with him as superintendent. Both of those things were true to the board.”

Southern California high school students marched off campus for the second time this week demanding answers as to why their principal and vice principal are missing

High school students in Boyle Heights marched off campus today -- demanding answers on why their principal hasn't been at the school for about a month.https://t.co/tfRp9m5SbB pic.twitter.com/yojkLGWJ0S

— KCAL News (@kcalnews) May 31, 2024

CBS (the articles I've seen don't hint as to what's going on, but uniformly indicate the students like the principal):

Students say it's been about a month since Principal ... has inexplicably been gone, and they want to know what happened, and they want him back in time for graduation to sign diplomas.

In a student-written official list of demands, they say the vice principal has also not been at the school.

Whistleblower learns NBC's voice-masking technique could be defeated

Embedded in my book excerpt today, there's a cautionary tale for journalists about the lengths some people will go to unmask and punish your confidential sources.

Even when the source is a fourth-grade teacher saying we shouldn't bothsides the Holocaust. https://t.co/vhfRH4LpFC pic.twitter.com/TUtwXtn38G

— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) May 9, 2024

Great story about going to trucking school in Texas

By Emily Gogolak for Harper's. Packed with stark numbers and colorful details:

It has also opened the doors to deep managerial surveillance, like cameras that face not only out toward the road but in toward the driver, monitoring their eye movements, and baseball caps that monitor their brain waves.

....

The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent. ... The median annual pay for a trucker today is just shy of $50,000, which, according to Belzer, is less than half of what truckers were earning in 1980 when adjusting for inflation.

...

Later that day, during lunch, someone dropped off three pit-bull-mix puppies, and Yanis claimed one and carried it around like a baby. She named him Bonito. There was one more up for grabs, dark gray with blue eyes and a white spot on its chest, and it clung to me when I picked it up. Rey looked at us. “Pit bulls make good truck dogs,” he said.

...

To explain my nervousness, I told a few guys about the time in high school when I accidentally drove my mother’s car into our house, pressing on the gas instead of the brakes while trying to ease into the garage and putting a giant crack in the living room wall.

“Oh, that’s your name, that’s your CB handle!” one of them shouted, referring to nicknames truckers use on citizens band radio, a service for short-range communication. “Thru-the-Wall!”

Immediately, Rey came up with an alternative: House Hunter.

University of Arizona president says they wildly miscalculated their budget

From the most detailed write-up I saw about a confrontational meeting with incredulous staff:

The university had initially projected having 156 days of cash on hand for this fiscal year. As it turned out, their model was off by $240 million dollars. Instead, the UA has just 97 days of cash on hand, the new model estimates.

“I did know we were spending money, but I thought we had reserves to spend money on,” [the university president] said. “But this is a big miscalculation.”

...

[The university president] told faculty members that the university is losing money on students who in high school had a GPA between a 3.75 and 4.0 because of the amount of merit money and financial aid they are awarded.

“If you look at the band from 3.75 GPA to 4.0, there are a lot of students here that pay nothing,” he said. “We lose money on every one.”

Athletics has also been a drain on the financial resources of the university, [the university president] told the faculty, most of whom spoke out against the $55 million loan made by the university to the athletic department during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That money, [the university president] said, has not been paid back “fast enough.”

The deeply strange reason Berkeley students disrupted the game against USC today

I assumed it had to do with the middle east, but not at all--this article goes into salacious detail:

A growing group of UC Berkeley students has been staging a months-long protest campaign demanding that the university bring a suspended Spanish and Portuguese professor back to campus. They’ve shared testimonies highlighting how influential [she] has been both as a mentor and as a leading scholar at a school with few Latinx faculty.

...

But records obtained by KQED paint a troubling picture of what led to [her] suspension. Over three investigations, which looked into behavior that began in 2018 and continued through 2022, the university found [she] had repeatedly harassed, stalked and retaliated against ... an English and Comparative Literature professor at UC Davis, and then violated orders not to contact him.

......

[The Davis professor] has stirred his own share of controversy.

The Chronicle also has a write-up.

Today's news and jokes

Once had a Professor leave the room so we could rate him but before he left he put up a slideshow of his kids lol pic.twitter.com/YJvsQaMZJ6

— Collin (@CMG_WV) September 5, 2023

Three suicides in seven months at probably L.A.'s most prestigious private high school

A terse write-up, noting the third death. The school had enacted various policy changes after the second, including that grades couldn't drop fourth quarter. Tuition starts at $46,900, not counting substantial fees.

Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the lieutenant governor after the professor was reported by a politically-connected student

Texas Tribune:

The Texas A&M system confirmed the series of phone calls and text messages that led to [the professor]’s investigation was kicked off by [the] Texas Land Commissioner ..., a graduate of UTMB’s medical school. The Tribune confirmed her daughter, a first-year medical student at the time, attended [the professor's] lecture. [The Texas Land Commissioner] served six years in the Texas Senate with [the Lieutenant Governor], who endorsed her run for land commissioner last year, and she recently attended [the Texas A&M Chancellor]’s wedding in May.

...

[The professor] has spent more than two decades as a pharmacist in Japan, Missouri and elsewhere, and has taught college students in Texas for more than a decade. She now teaches at Texas A&M while working as an ambulatory care pharmacy director at a free health clinic in Bryan.

She has helped bring millions of federal research dollars to the university, and last year Texas A&M’s pharmacy school named her the early career researcher of the year.

Philadelphia charter school allegedly manipulated its admission lottery to exclude entire zip codes

Inquirer:

It previously was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education.

...

The lottery particularly disadvantaged Black residents.

Some incredible quotes from the president of Bard College in New York as he defends seeking money from Jeffrey Epstein

NYT:

“Would we accept money from Jeffrey Epstein today? No,” [the college president] said, describing the former donor as a “monster” and “truly evil man.” “We had no idea, the public record had no indication, that he was anything more than an ordinary — if you could say such a thing — sex offender who had been convicted and went to jail.”

Mr. Epstein had been very publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14.  

...

“That is a humiliating experience to go back over and over and over,” [the college president] said, adding, “We’re completely at the mercy of the very wealthy.”

...

“He enjoyed humiliating and dangling prospects,” [the college president] said, adding, “He was sadistic. He absolutely strung me along.”

The serial killer in Davis is believed to a third-year student who had just been dismissed from the school

CNN's summary of the arrest. And from the school's announcement:

The person ... was in his third year at UC Davis until April 25, 2023, when he was separated for academic reasons. 

Flyer for a Harvard event encouraging graduate students to apply for federal food assistance

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A post shared by Center for Wellness & Health Promotion (@harvard_wellness)

Vice:

Another issue is that SNAP Benefits are generally only available for U.S. citizens (with few exceptions), and a good portion of Harvard’s graduate students are international. “It’s very much inequitable, because around 30 percent of grad students are international, and they’re not eligible to apply”

*Previously: Harvard, Boasting $40 Billion Endowment, Lays Off Dining Hall Workers Due to Coronavirus

A Florida charter school principal wrote a $100,000 check to an internet scammer posing as Elon Musk, says she's "very smart" and was "groomed"

CBS:

A-rated with just under 1,000 students and a huge waiting list. The principal who has guided it all these years is a superstar in many circles, but a huge lapse in judgment has cost her her job.

“I am a very smart lady. Well-educated. I fell for a scam,” [she] said.

[She] told a packed audience she was taken in by a fake Elon Musk, someone posing online as the space pioneer. Someone she'd been talking with for at least four months despite being warned by staff that the person was a fraud. She claims he groomed her.

...

Fortunately, the school's business manager...got wind and stopped the check before it cleared.

*Previously: The CEO and chief operating officer of Texas’s largest charter school network were fired after a financial audit 

Charming story about a 23-year-old being convinced to try getting a university degree by his 19-year-old cousin

Derek Owusu telling his story for The Guardian. Here's how it starts:

I wasn’t doing very well and was explaining this to my cousin, who was now my client – we spoke during most of our training sessions to extend his rest periods. It was during one of these interludes that he started going on about the benefits of university and how well he was doing. He was 19 and I was 23. My only thought while he was talking was how smart he must be, and how much I enjoyed talking to people who were at university.

Then he asked me why I didn’t go to uni: “Study exercise science, then you’ll be better than all these dead PTs in here,” he said. No chance, I thought. 

...

But he was already convinced. Soon after, he arrived at my house with his sister – not unusual, as we always chilled together, though she didn’t usually borrow my laptop for so long. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was writing a personal statement. What’s that? “For uni,” she said. “I ain’t going to uni,” I insisted.

Two weeks later, I was putting my things in the back of my cousin’s car, enrolled as a mature student at the University of Bolton, accommodation paid for – all sorted by this 19-year-old who had some delusional faith in what I was going to achieve in higher education. He dropped me off, helped me unpack, and said he’d pick me up when I graduated. He also gave me a Qur’an and a Bible, to bless the room twice.

A Massachusetts high school hasn't been able to turn off its lights for over a year because no one can fix the special software it relies on

NBC:

One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.

...

“The lighting system went into default,” said [a school representative]. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”

[The school representative] said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.

...

“The teachers were complaining because they couldn’t dim the lights to show videos and movies on the whiteboard,” [a student on the school newspaper] told NBC News. “The teachers now try to get around it by unscrewing light bulbs. 

Real missed opportunity for them to not create a new light bulb-themed mascot or sell some novelty tees. 

"At eight elementary schools in [Salt Lake City], enrollment is sitting below 50% capacity"

Tribune:

The district has lost 13% of its enrollment, or about 3,000 kids, in just the last five years

...

After years of declining enrollment, the district will begin the process to shutter schools

"In order to reap millions of dollars in fees, universities are partnering with betting companies to introduce their students and sports fans to online gambling"

NYT looked at specific universities:

a top executive at Caesars Sportsbook, said in an interview that the email was sent to underage students by mistake. “We were very disappointed that it happened

...

The deals came together largely in private, The Times found, with minimal discussion on campus about their potential impact on students, athletes and the integrity of college sports.

To secure these partnerships, athletic departments depend on the companies that handle the promotional and advertising rights for their teams. These companies, which arrange all kinds of deals with sponsors, act as middlemen. They negotiate the agreements with betting companies and take a cut, sometimes in the millions of dollars, of whatever money changes hands.

Unlike public universities, which are subject to government disclosure rules and freedom of information requests, the sports-marketing companies are privately held. That means the terms of the deals they strike don’t have to be publicly disclosed if the universities are not a party to the contracts. (University athletic departments have routinely sought to shield their dealings and often route some of their most complicated contracts, including lucrative television agreements, through intermediaries like athletic conferences.)

...

“With the multimedia rights holder, public institutions ... no longer have to disclose all those sponsorship deals,” he said in an interview. “This helps with the sponsors being able to spend what they feel is appropriate without having the public or employees or stockholders question that investment.”

"50 students at an El Paso high school may have to take the [SAT] again – after their tests flew out of the UPS truck transporting them"

"Our employees are working to recover as many tests as possible"