THE VERY MODEL OF THE ONLINE SUBPRIME PARTY SCHOOL? According to University Diaries, that's the University of Central Florida.

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

A New York Times report on methods to maintain academic integrity concludes with an anecdote that might suggest "degrading, intrusive, and stupid" cuts two ways.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

Here you sit with your transcript full of As and your body covered with ink, and here I sit in my power suit. Tell me what's stronger.

The University Diaries recommendation is unlikely to please Central Florida's management.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

That way, there would be no physical classes to cancel in the event of a weekday football game.

It's more likely, however, that Central Florida is a harbinger of things to come. The editors at the Northern Star endorsed class cancellations for Tuesday Night Football. Headquarters is either made of sterner stuff or preoccupied: classes met as usual all day, and some of the parking lots that are sometimes cleared for football were left to their usually assigned purposes.

I wonder if they'd be as quick to endorse Central Florida's staffing decisions. Their total enrollment is twice Northern Illinois's. Their economics department offers degrees up to the Ph.D. Their economics faculty have a few more people than we do but note: no assistant professors there. Good luck grooming department chairmen or possible deans or directors of graduate studies in 15 years.