… asks UD‘s blogpal Ophelia Benson about a cleric who encourages the murder of gay people and positively insists that by eight years of age girls must be hidden behind the burqa.

Well, it’s an old story, British universities sponsoring the ideas of men who think like this – seems every time UD turns around a school is tussling with on-campus prayers that call for the death of apostates, etc., etc.

Now, in both of these cases there has ultimately been a sensible response: Mr Kill the Filthy Dogs has been cancelled; and the other university has asked that the content of prayers be submitted in advance. But the thing just keeps happening – British universities sponsor events that segregate women and prohibit them from asking questions, sponsor speakers who want to murder adulterous people… I mean adulterous women… I mean women accused of adultery…

Anyway. Maybe these most recent responses suggest that the British are getting some backbone.

Luigi Frati, the Rector of La Sapienza University in Rome, has become one of the most notorious figures in [a] scandal which local media have dubbed “Parentopoli” – or “Relative-gate”.

A doctor by training, Professor Frati has, both as rector and formerly as head of the university’s medical faculty, overseen the promotion of his wife from being a local high school history teacher, to becoming Professor of Medical History.

His daughter also gained a post as Professor of Legal Medicine – without any specific medical education. And his son was made an associate professor in cardiology aged just 31, one of the youngest Italians to gain such an appointment.

He has denied claims of nepotism, insisting that all his loved-ones just happen to be the best qualified.

“The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through.”

There are many illuminating statements in this interview with a German ghostwriter of dissertations.

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Markets work in funny ways.

Instead of creating a backlash against ghostwriters, however, cases like Guttenberg’s have actually had the opposite effect. His case was actually how many people first learned about the existence of doctoral ghostwriters at all. Since the beginning of the 2000′s, the number of ghostwriters … has risen and prices have fallen for the service.

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The interviewed ghostwriter shares the self-justifying bullshit that gets him through the night.

“Everything is for sale: sex, people, doctorates. I am only a cog in the wheels of capitalism.”

You keep telling yourself that, honey.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …

Does anyone actually think that the people assigned to review bribe-taking in exchange for directing European Union research money to cronies are anything other than corrupt themselves?

Early [last Monday] morning, some 15 people occupied the [University of Athens] computer center, holding hostage the email accounts of faculty members, students and administrative personnel, including those of the University of Athens hospitals. With a few exceptions, nobody has condemned what has happened, and no university officials have dared appeal to the authorities, for fear of retaliation. Physical violence and bullying is so common in Greek universities and across Greece that almost nobody dares react anymore.

This blog has covered – as much as it can bear to – the fate of universities in Greece [scroll down]. Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, explains the typically vicious response to the prospect of an electronic vote on university reform.

Tourism is dwindling. Who wants to vacation among bands of bearded savages raiding embassies, staking their black pirate flag over universities or burning trucks carrying beer?

… because his University of Puebla economics degree is a fake.

They’re keeping med schools open, but that’s pretty much it. The entire sector is state-funded (the state wants to open things up to privatization, but the unions say no), so I guess the state can go ahead and kill it. Behind this astonishing event lie months of strikes by professors and students, and behind those strikes of course lie years of complex civil unrest.

Sri Lanka had better be careful. Enough of this and its people will begin to resemble the citizenry of Nevada.

Abidi is the head of a university in Tunisia. UD knows it’s ethnocentric of her, but she finds the idea of murderers running universities quite scandalous.

… at a university in Jordan. Daily brawls, with buildings on fire and serious weapons in play. Depending on which report you read, it’s tribal violence, or Saudi students pissed that campus women aren’t in burqas, or a combination of these things, or who the hell knows.

“… [T]he deep structural failings of Italy — an inefficient public sector, a poor demographic outlook, lousy universities, a calamitously slow judicial system — will take years to put right.”

This blog has covered the lousy universities.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558237

Responding to a question about his summer plans, [Chief Justice] Roberts quipped that he thought his planned trip to Malta to teach a class was a “good idea.”

From the New York Times:

[T]he mild-mannered [dean of Tunisia's Manouba University, Habib] Kazdaghli shows little inclination to back down. He is not about to give up one of his much needed classrooms so the students can have a prayer room, especially, he said, when such facilities exist nearby. Nor is he willing to allow female students to wear veils in class, as Salafists demand.

“How can you teach a student when you cannot see her face — or give an exam when you don’t know who it is?” he said.

… in Turkey. She has no idea why, but her referral log has lit up with tons of readers from there, all of them interested in her analysis of the Don DeLillo story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”