This story combines drug smuggling with academic point scoring – a new combination, I think.
A professor of physics at the University of North Carolina is in an Argentine jail because Buenos Aires airport police discovered an elaborate compartment in his luggage into which a lot of cocaine had been placed.
[Paul] Frampton says the cocaine had been cleverly built into a piece of his luggage without his knowledge, but he declined to say how it might have gotten there, saying that revealing details might harm his defense.
Frampton says the UNC provost has done little to help him, and has in fact stopped his pay. Why?
[Bruce] Carney had long been jealous, he said, because Frampton had earned tenure much more quickly and because Carney’s academic accomplishments were paltry compared to his own.
“I am one of the most published physicists, and really he hasn’t done much that is of interest,” Frampton said.
The provost is sorry he’s in jail … and is also sorry “to hear that Frampton had been missing the meetings of the general relativity class he was supposed to be teaching.”
Frampton responds that only one student signed up for it. Possible reason here.
Fear of money drives the current presidential scene, here and in France. Panicked flight from your hundreds of millions of dollars has taken hold of two leading politicians, each of whom has palmed the problem off to a surrogate – the Missus. Carla Sarkozy calls herself and her husband “modest simple folk,” and Ann Romney doesn’t consider herself wealthy. Their comments have set off a laff riot.
There are a couple of other ways of approaching this problem. One is to assert that any allusion to money is déclassé, vulgar, beneath one, beneath everyone. Refuse to talk about it.
Another – the Eric Cantor thing – is to assert that any allusion to money is a sign of petty envy on the part of the mentioner.
Both of these approaches are preferable to the business of pretending you’re not rich.
The University of Georgia is a strange sad place on the best of days, a sports- and booze-sodden universe, its lawns scattered with the remains of the last tailgate… But even by its own surreal standards, the theft of a forklift kind of pushes the envelope…
They’ve been looking for the thing for a month… It weighs 22,000 pounds and was, the university announced today, stolen by a university employee. (What’d he do? Drive it out?)
The article doesn’t say whether the university recovered the forklift…
How do you hide a forklift? Did he sell it?
[I]n April 2010, Romney gave a speech at Claremont McKenna College, one of America’s great undergraduate institutions. [The speech was titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.] The only item of interest is that Romney accepted payment from them: an $11,475 honorarium. There’s nothing wrong with Romney accepting such payment from a non-profit institution, and it was clearly a bargain rate when compared with some of his other gigs. But it makes you wonder why he didn’t do it for free. He also accepted payment from the non-profit Quest Educational Foundation. Quest provides tutoring and mentoring to high-school students in Florida and Romney spoke at their annual fundraiser (Gingrich was a speaker at the 1999 event) for a $35,771 fee.
Romney, this Weekly Standard writer points out, is worth $250 million. The writer clearly has in mind the suggestion that extremely rich people might want to support worthy non-profit causes rather than drain them of scarce funds – might want to support them not merely by accepting invitations to give speeches, and by bringing star power to their fund raising events, but by waiving any fee.
Can we make the case for accepting a fee under these circumstances?
Well, plenty of people will make the none of your effing business argument. It’s a private transaction, our economic system is called capitalism, the guy’s free to accumulate capital. Blow it out your ass.
There’s also the nothing is valued unless it costs something argument. Placebos cost almost nothing to make and for millions of people probably relieve their depression as effectively as expensive anti-depressant pills. But if you knew you were taking a free pill for your depression, that would depress you more! Free means worthless! Or it means you’re not really clinically depressed, which is also depressing.
For many commodities, the magic seems to reside in their price.
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Or, you know, in their pain. Why would you want to join a university marching band if you weren’t first beaten almost to death before you were allowed to join? The pain of hazing confers value on the group. In a similar way, the problem with placebos is that they have no side effects. If weird unpleasant shit isn’t happening to you, you can’t be treating your depression.
… lead the headlines at Brown University, where two inexplicable things are happening. Keller remains on the faculty, and a masturbation “spree” is afoot. Ahand?
Keller, as readers of this blog know, is one of the three official biggest baddest boys of academic medicine (along with Joseph Biederman and Charles Nemeroff). All men have undergone titanic struggles with conflict of interest regs, and in the process drawn plenty of attention to their schools, as well as to the quality of their research.
The latest effort to draw attention to the Keller scandal involves the non-profit Healthy Skepticism, which has written a letter to Brown asking its assistance in getting an apparently ghostwritten Paxil article by Keller retracted. Brown has been sitting on its hands.
Which you can’t say about the people involved in what reporter Lucy Feldman describes as “College Hill’s inexplicable months-long masturbation spree.”
This bizarre story from non-bizarre eastern Ohio would appeal to Franz Kafka.
The owner of an animal farm has been found dead (we are not told how he died, and so are free to imagine his own animals attacked him), and many of his animals have escaped. Armed police are driving around in pickup trucks and shooting at “bears, lions, tigers … cheetahs… wolves, giraffes, and camels.”
On Tuesday, commuters reported spotting bears and wolves along I-70.
A surreal tale for Halloween.
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UPDATE: This gets more Kafkaesque by the moment.
The guy opened all the cages and then killed himself.
A University of Pennsylvania professor died over the summer, but the university forgot to cancel his course. Students bought the books, showed up… and waited.
While waiting, they received an email from an administrator telling them their professor was dead.
They got the email while they were waiting in the classroom. Yup, they bought the books, showed up for class, and BAM, your Blackberry goes off with the news that the very guy you’re waiting for is dead and now you have the afternoon to go back to your dorm and think about your own mortality. That’s the worst part of this story — you can’t even go out and party after you get the news and be all, “Whoo-hoo class is canceled! Pack the bowl!” A guy actually died.
… Moo: the lost chapter.
Five Truman University students who thought they were going to spend the summer measuring hog odors in northern Missouri have lost their jobs because of a long running dispute between the hog farm operators, nearby residents and state politicians.
The chancellor of North Dakota’s university system could definitely express himself less windbaggedly; but that’s a small embarrassment. He has two big embarrassments to deal with, so forget the way he talks.
First big embarrassment: Turns out that if you so much as use a bathroom at ND’s Dickinson State University you’ll be enrolled as a full-time student and given all A’s.
Enrollment-technique-wise, the simplicity of physical capture is an improvement over the for-profits’ convoluted psych-ops. Just – comme disent les bouddhistes – Be Here Now.
Second big embarrassment: The president of Dickinson State is doing a Bootsie Mandel. He refuses to leave, even though the chancellor has fired him.
… where the state Medical Practice Board is holding hearings into whether the director of the student health clinic “failed to supervise a physician’s assistant who was improperly prescribing prescription opiate medications to students.”
And dat ain’t all. Try to figure this one out. They’ve had to delay the hearing because a panel member has a conflict of interest. The conflict? This person “had participated in a related hearing involving a UVM health clinic employee that the board also was investigating.”
Since when is participating in a hearing related to the hearing you’re hearing a conflict of interest? And – okay – a second UVM health clinic person is also under investigation… But wait. Actually, the board’s executive director isn’t sure whether the COI “involved the [first employee's] case or that of a third clinic worker, whose case did not result in the filing of formal charges.”
Got that? If I’m getting the math right, we’re talking about four student health employees who have been or are being investigated: The possibly negligent doctor, a physician’s assistant, and… two others?
Developing…
UD‘s old friend Jonathan sends her this update of the University of Northern Virginia story.
In a sort of echo of American University’s Richard Berendzen, who, when president of AU, boasted, in a series of obscene phone calls, about sex slaves in his basement, the “chancellor” of “the University of Northern Virginia” (both chancellor and university are fake, making this story less thrilling than it would be if UNV were something other than a visa mill with joke accreditation) has an actual bondage and discipline dungeon in his basement.
A commenter on The Smoking Gun website says it all: “It’s good to see he’s maintaining a healthy work/life balance.”