'...Chances are, many athletic directors across the country are studying the Minnesota stadium situation and trying to figure out whether they might be able to swing a similar deal. Could KU’s Memorial Stadium, for example, soon be named for some bank or generous contributor? It’s not out of the question; look at the situation at Oklahoma State, where the naming rights were tied to the $125 million gift of Boone Pickens!

Considering the importance KU’s athletic director places on money, surely he is thinking about ways to put the name of some individual or company on the side of Memorial Stadium or maybe even Allen Fieldhouse. For $25 million, $50 million or $100 million, who knows?


...What is the sales value for the KU athletic department or the university itself? How long will it be before corporate naming rights are granted in the Big 12 Conference, and how soon will there be corporate names on KU’s Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse or Kansas State’s Bill Snyder Family Stadium and Bramlage Coliseum?

Look at the extortion tactics in Allen Fieldhouse and the skyrocketing price for basketball tickets. It doesn’t matter what a person may have given last year, because there is an annual re-evaluation of seat prices, and the highest bidder gets whatever seat location he or she wishes.

Increasing numbers of longtime KU academic and sports supporters are saying enough is enough. Some are known to have changed their wills and long-range giving plans to KU, but apparently, the administration sees nothing wrong with the high-pressure tactics. Who knows what the eventual damage to KU will be? Of course, most of those responsible for the gouging on KU athletic tickets and those who approved the plan will be gone when the next major KU capital campaign comes along. The damage will be done for others to try to repair.'

An Eastern Oregon University professor and a student say they were raped by a university administrator.

The alleged victims are suing the man, the university and the board of higher education for more than $200 million.

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Robert Davis, allegedly raped the two women on successive nights at a conference in Atlanta.

The plaintiff's stories are similar. They say that Davis forced himself on them after they'd fallen unconscious, possibly after being drugged.

Both say they woke up during the attack but were unable to fight back.

University officials say they've placed Davis on paid administrative leave during an internal investigation.

Attorney Martin Dolan is representing the plaintiffs. He says the suit names the university and the board of higher education because they ignored previous complaints and were lax in enforcing sexual harassment policies.

Martin Dolan: "At least in the case of one of the plaintiffs' cases, the allegation is that those rules were not sufficiently implemented."

The student plaintiff is suing for more than $107 million. The professor for just over $100 million.

When it comes to New Mexico university presidents - two of whom were forced to resign this year before their contracts were even close to ending - isn't the silence just deafening?

Yet aren't New Mexicans entitled to some explanations?

Here we have, earlier this year, former University of New Mexico President Louis Caldera and now, this past week, former New Mexico Highlands University President Manny Aragon forced to empty their desks and take contract buyouts. But we don't really know why.

Obviously, there were unresolved conflicts between the two presidents and their respective boards of regents.

Obviously, the regents aren't talking, and neither are their institutions. Personnel issues are confidential, they plead.

Obviously, both of these men got attractive golden parachutes to make sure their exits had nice, soft, well-heeled landings.

And, obviously, the public - which pays the bills - doesn't have a clue what went wrong.

The French distinguish themselves, both statistically and anecdotally, ahead of Germans, Britons and even Americans in their obsession with blogs, the personal and public journals of the Internet age.

Just why the French have embraced blogs more than most is anyone's guess, but explanations range from technical to historical and cultural.

Sixty percent of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40 percent and little more than a third in the United States, according to Comscore, an Internet ratings service.

Likewise, French bloggers spent more than an hour in June visiting France's top-rated blog site, far ahead of the 12 minutes spent by Americans doing the same and less than 3 minutes for Germans, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

More than three million Internet users, or more than 12 percent of those online in France, have created a blog, according a study released in June by the ratings agency Médiamétrie.

"You cannot be elected president of France without a blog," said Benjamin Griveaux, director of Web strategy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister who in 2004 was among the first politicians to start a blog. "Blogs have not replaced traditional media, but they are absolutely necessary for every politician."

Some even harbor a faint hope that flourishing online discussions might curb the French population's penchant for taking to the streets in protest.

"With so many blogs, I'm hoping for fewer protests and strikes in Paris this fall," said Loïc Le Meur, a pioneer French blogger and European managing director of the blog-hosting company Six Apart. "If people can express themselves online, then maybe they don't need to block the streets."

French blogs stands out in other measurable ways. They are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their U.S. counterparts, said Laurent Florès, the French-born, New York-based chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands.

"Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion," he said. "French bloggers never compromise their opinions."

They also passionately debate why they blog so much. One common explanation in the blogosphere is that there are so many French Internet surfers to begin with. Last year the number of French people online passed the halfway mark of the total population of 61 million, with 85 percent of Internet users in May using high-speed broadband at home, according to Médiamétrie.

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year. ... Tuition tax credits and grants have not produced more graduates in the past and they will not do so in the future. Bridget Terry Long of Harvard meticulously studied the Clinton administration’s education tax credits and concluded that they did not increase enrollment. Sarah E. Turner of the University of Virginia concludes, “Very broad-based programs such as tuition subsidies or across-the-board grants to low-income students are likely to have minimal effects on college completion while imposing large costs.”

You have to promote two-parent stable homes so children can develop the self-control they need for school success. You have to fundamentally reform schools. You have to expand church- and university-sponsored mentoring programs and support groups.

[T]he obsessive focus on college education bespeaks a certain cowardice and calculation in Democratic circles. College is a cost that primarily affects the middle class and the well-to-do but, particularly in the private context, is hefty enough that it can be burdensome for both. Talk of making it more affordable, while ostensibly aimed at subsidizing the poor, is really a poll-tested way to speak to the politically potent middle- and upper-income quintiles -- it's a way for the Democratic Party to speak up the income ladder, where the votes are.

The whole thing is a basically coded appeal, framed in terms of economic uplift so all can feel progressive while supporting something for themselves. If we spent one tenth the energy working on high school graduation rates, we'd have both a more powerful impact on the truly disadvantaged and a more significant impact on college attendance. The problem is, the middle class and the upper class aren't worried about their kids graduating from high school, and so talk of those problems doesn't resonate with large swaths of the electorate. And that all points to the underlying dynamic here and elsewhere in Democratic rhetoric: Progressives now try to address poverty in the context of the middle class -- they seek out economic issues which could aid the poor but have plenty of relevance up the income ladder. In doing, they ignore the most destructive and entrenched pathologies and problems, as those tend to be rather rare among higher income earners, and for that reason much more damaging to those caught in their grip. The ultimate problem here is that the poor rarely votes, while the middle class does, and it's damn hard for politicians to figure out how to focus the electorate on things that aren't their problem.

[C]ommenters never agree with my college-skepticism. For starters, let me say I have no objection to increasing the number of college graduates in the United States. One thing I do worry about, though, is this. Right now a hefty proportion of kids do go to college. When you try to increase the number of college-goers by subsidizing college attendance, the tendency is for the vast majority of the subsidies to accrue to families that would have sent their kids to school anyway rather than to the marginal families who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford it. Since college-bound kids come, as a rule, from wealthier families than do non-college kids, these schemes can often resort to upward wealth redistribution. The specific Clinton/DLC plan mostly avoids these problems, which is good, but I still think it's a strange thing for progressives to be prioritizing given that you can only focus on so many things at once.

The thing of it is that as you can read in Third Way's report (PDF) on "The Politics of Opportunity," Americans are already quite well-educated: "American students spend an average of 13.8 years in formal education—more than any other industrialized nation in the world except Norway" (see also Education at a Glance from the OECD). There's a real education problem in America concerning our large number of high school dropouts who, economically, end up doing quite poorly. But the economic problems we have vis-à-vis other rich nations -- rising levels of middle-class insecurity, enormous inequality, declining levels of social mobility -- aren't plausibly attributable to a shortfall in the number of people attending college. The statistics show that we have more people attending college than other countries do already.

"The question [in a Chronicle of Higher Ed forum] is whether Web-log commentary helps or damages an academic's career. It is a shameful question. Intellectuals should not be worrying about "careers," the tenured among us least of all. Despite the First Amendment, which only really protects one from the government, most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. Journalists are fired all the time for taking the wrong political stance. That is why most bloggers employed in the private sector are anonymous or started out trying to be so.


...Being in the middle of [debates on the Middle East], trying to help mutual understanding, is what I trained for. Should I have been silent, published only years later in stolid academic prose in journals locked up in a handful of research libraries? And this for the sake of a "career"? The role of the public intellectual is my career. And it is a hell of a career. I recommend it."

One dreams of returning to the university. The tree-shadowed walkways. The shared goals of learning. The sexual and somatic adventuring. Ah, the student life.

In early May, I received an unsolicited invitation to join Trump University, which sounds like the kind of institution you might find parodied on the comics page. (In fact, it has been mocked in ``Doonesbury.") This wasn't like the letters my sons received when they were in high school, inviting them to apply to universities. This was an acceptance letter, a ``personal invite" from Donald Trump, contingent on my coughing up $40. Which I did.

You probably think I've been kicking back at my summer job bagging groceries while classes were out of session, but Trump U doesn't slow down. ``Focus is very important, and momentum," TU chairman Donald tells us in one of his many communications. TU is about learning, 24/7, with no shortage of face time with Himself. If you call watching little streaming video clips of Donald pontificating face time. Which, in a sense, it is. His face. Your time. Your money.

Here's what you get for the initial buy-in at TU: video Trumptalks on subjects like ``Dealing With Failure," ``Creating a Great Brand," ``Career Advice , " and ``Salesmanship." Sample pabulum: ``There's nothing like a great salesperson. I put them up with the greatest people in the world."

You also receive a subscription to ``Inside the Trump Tower," a newsletter chock full of windy little essays. I especially enjoyed the moronic outing, ``The End of the MBA is Nigh!" by business guru and self-promoter extraordinaire Tom Peters . It's a quick piece of nothing fluff that never mentions the author's own MBA from Stanford University.

All over the website -- because that's all TU is, a website (www.trumpuniversity.com) -- chairman Trump rattles on about the value of extramural ``education" like TU. To recycle the slur often directed at President Bush, Trump is a man who was born on third base who later made much of hitting a home run; his father was a successful New York real estate magnate and Donald has a graduate degree from the Wharton School.

Inevitably, he blogs: ``Britney [Spears] has seen better days. She performed four or five years ago at the Trump Taj Mahal and she was great. Now it seems as if everything's slipping away from her. Britney, don't let that happen. Don't let it slip away. Keep your head on straight." Can you imagine Larry Summers bloviating about Madonna? Maybe he should have.

And, of course, Trump's favorite subject is . . . Trump. In one of his homilies, he celebrates the Top Ten Books on Entrepreneurship. The first six books were authored by, yes, Donald Trump.

Another ``benefit" of matriculating at Trump U is receiving a near-constant stream of e-mails and occasional phone calls from TU staffers trying to sell you more courses. Shortly after I enrolled, TU president Michael Sexton invited me ``to purchase a remarkable audio/video course available exclusively from Trump University. For the first time ever, Donald Trump has created a complete eight-week course on how to get rich." I continue to receive invitations to enroll at TU, even though I am already a student. A slip-up at the dean's office, I guess.

I called Sexton, and he picked up on the first ring. From his office at the Trump Building on 40 Wall Street, Sexton semi-apologized for the blizzard of come-ons I'd been receiving. ``We want to get people to take the first step and enroll for a course," he explained. He said TU had ``perhaps been a little overexuberant" in hyping its exciting new products. ``We've had feedback that we should be cutting down on the touch points," which I am guessing is businesspeak for ``people have been complaining about the spam."

``We don't spam anybody," he insisted. Just hours after he said this, I received yet another spam invitation for me to join Trump University. I forwarded the e-mail to him, with the comment, ``Michael, if this isn't spam, what is?" I have yet to hear back, but I know how busy university presidents are these days.

Careers are at stake because winning is far more important to a coach's job security than graduation rates. In some places, those are not just the jobs of the coaches, but of the college presidents as well.

The idea that the football team wants to have a college of which it can be proud once was meant to be something said as a joke.

These days, there are times when it's difficult to see the humor.

Compromises are made. Athletes who are forced to be students are pushed through classes and leave their colleges ill-prepared for the real world.

Graduation rates don't change that.

What needs to be changed is the idea that every player in a college uniform is a true student-athlete. The NCAA needs to understand that it's OK to admit this.

No one in the stands for the Auburn-Alabama or Texas-Oklahoma game or even the Virginia Tech-Virginia game is going to watch a player score a touchdown and then say, "I'd be much happier if his American literature grade was higher."

Universities should pay these athletes or provide them with a vocational education or permit them to work somewhere on campus. They still would be part of the university community and still could represent the school on the athletic fields.

'He currently gripes that no institute of higher education would hire him, despite his qualifications. "I discovered I could not gain a professorship even after applying many times," he writes in The Savage Nation. "My crime? I was a white male."'

"Dr. Richardson says the university is not waiting until the [internal] investigation is complete to take action. He says, 'I want to ensure that every course at Auburn is taught with the academic rigor that students should expect and they deserve.'"

The boarding school where I taught during the 2004-05 school year was accredited--but this was hardly a guarantee of quality, or even of responsibility on the part of the school. This school cost more than $32,000 a year, which is the going rate for boarding schools in New England and elsewhere around the country. That's a price tag that creates some entirely reasonable expectations; one imagines, if one is mortaging one's future to send one's child to such an institution, that for $32,000, one's child will have access to one hell of an education, one that far surpasses, in quality and variety, what's available at the free public school just down the road. But in schools as in other commodities, price tags are really only price tags, and all they tell you is what the market rate is for the commodity at hand. That's one of the many things I learned during my year teaching at a very expensive, but very academically weak school.

I won't name the school, since it's not my goal to cause problems for the school itself, and since it is my goal here to use my experience at the school to point to larger issues with the private school system. But I will give some particulars, just to explain what I mean when I say the school was academically inadequate. I say that the school was academically inadequate because it employed teachers to teach subjects that they were not able to teach. There were some excellent teachers there--but they were outweighed by the bad ones. There was a biology teacher who also taught introductory Spanish--but who did not speak Spanish, could not read or write Spanish with any real skill, and had no idea how to teach a foreign language; her worksheets and quizzes were riddled with errors because her own grasp of the language was so weak. There was an English teacher who also taught algebra one and two--but who could not actually explain the principles behind the math, and who, by the end of the year, also could not solve the homework problems assigned in the textbook. Because the school failed to employ a competent algebra teacher, large numbers of students lacked the skills to go on to pre-calculus. There was a U.S. history teacher who taught current events and leftist ideology rather than history proper. Because there was no set English curriculum and no real training in writing (one teacher actually devoted substantial time to having students write and illustrate comic books), the school graduated functional illiterates with depressing regularity. The SAT scores for students at this school were ludicrously low. They did not reflect students' intelligence, but they did reflect the poverty of their educational experience.

For $32,000 a year, parents were paying for a school that probably did more to harm their children's chances of going on to a good college than not. Worse, the parents did not seem to have the faintest idea that this was the case. The students at the school were, by and large, quite happy there (though many of them would tell you, with a frankness peculiar to teenagers, that they knew it wasn't a real school they were attending). There was much that was wonderful about the school apart from its abysmal academics--and parents, seeing their children happier than they had been at their previous school, and admiring the excellent arts program, the work program, the good cooking, and the school's pastoral setting, assumed that all was well. Teenagers don't tend to talk much to their parents about the daily details of their lives if they can avoid it; they especially don't tend to talk much about what they are learning in class; and the parents of boarding school students are exceptionally cut off from those kinds of details. The happiness of the kid and the price tag stand in as proxies for quality of education. It was scary to see how willing this school was to flush students' opportunities; scary, too, to see how trusting parents were, and how misplaced their trust was.

The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message.

...It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find.

For me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000?

Anyone interested in actual improvement of the presence of good nonwhite faculty in our universities needs to take certain steps at their schools. Do not allow the hiring of more bureaucrats to gasp in predictable horror at the way things are. No more Assistant Vice-hand-holders in the bower of ethnic unhappiness. Forget all the false storefronts and unseemly fawnings that are the usual pewter trade beads of minority recruiting.

Start the laborious process of dragging recruitment out of the clinging vines of the H.R. people and back into the hands of departments. Accept the possibility that an imperfect process can lead to a perfect result. College leaders need the ability to go outside the standard hiring process to support and attract the best faculty, including minority faculty. They should also have the flexibility to flag potential scholars early in life and use university resources to assist them in their long-term goal of joining the professoriate.

Plan ahead a generation. Work ahead a generation. Figure out who of color in your local schools has the potential to be a good professor. Get rid of your highly paid and symbolic chief diversity officers. We all know that they accomplish little. This is not their fault; their jobs are inherently impossible. Respect can’t be legislated, it must be earned. Use that money to hire a brace of heat-seeking twenty-somethings to systematically find the most academically promising minority 10-year-olds in likely and unlikely places, and track and support them for a decade or more, as your university’s scholars-in-waiting. Consider advance long-term contracts with the best doctoral students. Be bold.

Let the word diversity lie fallow until something meaningful can grow from its good soil. Let the words affirmative action not be spoken until they mean action that is affirmative again.

[T]he story was greeted with great disdain in Auburn and with considerable laughter in other SEC locales like Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Knoxville, Tenn. But if you looked deeper, you would find that even those rivals who got a kick out of seeing the Tigers embarrassed were a bit nervous themselves.

Why?

Because they are all afraid their team is going to be next.

One of the most peculiar things about college athletics — and sports in general — is that even the most diehard fans watch the games with the nagging suspicion that everyone — even their team of choice — is cheating. Whether it's happening or not, many of them accept this as a necessary evil, even if they would prefer to ignore it and hope no one else notices.

Let's say you're an alumnus and supporter of University X. And let's say you take a trip back to the town of your alma mater and see the kid your school just signed to play quarterback driving past campus in a new Escalade.

Are you simply excited to see a young superstar in person? Or is your first reaction to think, "Gee, I hope no one tries to find out how he paid for that?"

These are answers that everyone deserves but nobody really wants. This is the reason most people aren't interested in the Auburn story, just like they aren't particularly riveted by the Barry Bonds controversy.

After all, if those pesky reporters can nail the single-season home run king, then they might be able to nail my guy too, right?

This is why many people always will hate sportswriters more than political scribes. After all, the charm of politics is the corruption, the lying, the infighting. Sports are supposed to be the respite from all that madness, and the journalists who bring the ugly stuff to the forefront are ruining the fun.

Three Duke football players were dismissed from the program yesterday by Coach Ted Roof and a fourth, starting quarterback Zack Asack, was suspended and will miss the 2006 season because of a serious academic infraction.

The players dismissed were Andreas Platt, Deon Adams and Joe Suder. Platt, a 6-2, 200-pound strong safety, is from Greensboro and played at Jamestown's Ragsdale High School, and Adams, a 6-1, 195-pound receiver, is also from Greensboro, where he played at Smith High School.

Platt would have been a third-year sophomore after being redshirted in 2004 as a freshman. Adams would have been a senior. Suder is a 6-6, 340-pound defensive tackle from Reno, Nev., who redshirted last season as a freshman.

Duke athletics officials said that the three players were dismissed for violating team regulations. Platt, reached at home last night, wouldn't say what led to his dismissal. A DWI charge at least contributed to the situation.

Platt was found guilty of the charge in January in Orange County District Court for a July 16, 2005, minor traffic accident in Chapel Hill.

"I ain't got nothing to say," Platt said. "I ain't worried about nothing. It was just a mutual agreement that it was time for a change. I'm going to another school."

Platt said that he plans to continue his education and football career at Western Carolina.

Platt played in 11 games at Duke and had 15 tackles. Adams played in 27 games and caught 12 passes for 125 yards.

Asack was suspended for plagiarism and will not be able to attended classes in the coming academic year. School officials said that he will be eligible to return to school and to the football program in the summer of 2007.

"I made a mistake and am remorseful," Asack said in a prepared statement released by Duke. "I take full responsibility for my actions. I wish the team well and look forward to returning next summer. I love it here at Duke."

Asack would have been a sophomore this season. He started six of the Blue Devils' final seven games last season and finished the season with 966 passing yards. He completed 50 percent of his passes and had five touchdown passes. He was intercepted eight times.

Asack's absence will likely thrust rising sophomore Marcus Jones into the starting quarterback role. The only other recruited quarterback in the Duke program next season is incoming freshman Thaddeus Lewis.

Roof said that the Blue Devils will move forward and try to offset Asack's absence in the coming season.

"Sometimes great young men make poor decisions and that is the case in this situation," Roof said in a prepared statement.

"While I certainly don't condone his actions, I have been impressed with the manner in which Zack has handled this issue.

"I fully support Zack and am confident that he will grow in many areas as a result of this situation.

"When you are part of a family and make an uncharacteristic mistake, you are not kicked out of the family. Zack will remain part of the Duke football family and will be supported by everyone in our program."

The chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville has been accused of plagiarizing parts of a speech from, among other sources, remarks by President Bush.

In a written statement issued on Wednesday, the chancellor, Vaughn Vandegrift, said he "relies heavily on his staff" to write his speeches. "I approved the speech, and I take full responsibility for its content," the statement said. "If mistakes were made, we will take steps so that it doesn't happen in the future."

The chancellor delivered the speech in February at a luncheon celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. In the speech, Mr. Vandegrift said the following: "For generations, African-Americans have strengthened our nation by urging reforms, overcoming obstacles, breaking down barriers, rising above injustice, and enriching our society."

That language is nearly identical to a passage in a 2003 speech by President Bush: "For generations, African-Americans have strengthened our nation by urging reforms, overcoming obstacles, and breaking down barriers. We see the greatness of America in those who have risen above injustice and enriched our society."

Another 19-word passage in Mr. Vandegrift's talk appears to have come almost verbatim from the Web site of the King Center, in Atlanta.

The similarities were found by a sister of Chris Dussold, a former professor at Southern Illinois at Edwardsville who was fired for plagiarizing his teaching statement. Mr. Dussold believes he was unfairly dismissed, and he and his supporters have worked to uncover other examples of plagiarism at the university. "All of my friends and family, time permitting, start searching for plagiarism," Mr. Dussold said on Wednesday.

And they have found a number of examples, from both professors and administrators. In many of the cases, like the chancellor's, the copying has been only a few sentences. But Mr. Dussold argues that if he was fired for copying a teaching statement used only as part of his tenure review, then others should also be dismissed for similar borrowings.

"If mistakes were made, I think their policy is they fire the person immediately," said Mr. Dussold, who is now an assistant professor of accounting, economics, and finance at nearby McKendree College. "If you're going to consider what I did to be plagiarism, I want equal treatment."

Mr. Dussold has also pointed out that Mr. Vandegrift's 150-word online welcome statement -- titled "From the Chancellor" -- is identical to that of the previous chancellor. A spokesman for the university, Greg Conroy, said he had written the statement and that there was nothing wrong with reusing it because it is "university property."

Mr. Dussold also brought to light passages that had been plagiarized in a 2005 speech by Walter V. Wendler, chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Like Mr. Vandegrift, Mr. Wendler said those passages had been included by a member of his staff.

Mr. Dussold, who was dismissed in 2004, is suing the university and plans to cite such examples as proof of unfair treatment.

S. Philip Morgan, a professor of sociology at Duke University, says that institutions would be wise not to encourage independent study courses, because he believes that professors — especially those who care deeply about the success of their institution’s teams — can easily manipulate grades for such courses. “There is very little oversight in those kinds of situations,” he says.

"[U]nless we attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical."

'The sad episode has one happy consequence. It has enriched the English language with a new verb. To quote an innovative blogger, "to frisch" means to write "something on the internet so creepy and offensive that you are forced to quit your job before getting canned."'

The blogger used it in a sentence: "Deb really frisched herself…"

Much of his teaching was aimed at cultivating the civilizing virtues as opposed to one's curriculum vitae. I learned about this side of him the hard way.

Acutely aware of the fact that I would soon be looking for a job — this was in 1978 — Professor Rieff began prodding me to start submitting articles for publication. One day I paraded into his office puffed up like a peacock because I had just garnered my first article acceptance. "Congratulations," he said, kindly adding, "There will be many more." But then he said, "Gordon, I have to tell you that from the first day that I met you, you reeked of ambition." I dropped my head, for the truth is I probably am one of those injured birds who constantly needs his feathers stroked. He went on, "And you had better understand that the profession that you are going into is all about teaching. I know many professors who went into this business because they loved writing books and articles and developing a little coterie of admirers. But when they got into their 50s and could feel the limits of their talents, they fell into very serious despair, because it was clear that they were never going to become the Kierkegaard that they imagined they were, and they dreaded teaching."

Rieff was on a roll: "Most academics are too narcissistic to be the parental figures that they need to be. They will slam their door on a student just so they can write their next forgettable article or book." Professor Rieff was not finished with his brass knuckles. He knew that I had a brilliant neuroscientist of a wife who helped me with typing and photocopying and, well, just about everything, so he hit me between the eyes: "These self-involved characters will also turn their wives into secretaries and sacrifice their children to feckless books."

'Days after announcing a crackdown on researchers who do not disclose drug company ties, the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association said she was misled again, this time by the authors of a study linking severe migraines to heart attacks in women.

All six authors of the study have done consulting work or received research financing from makers of treatments for migraines or heart-related problems. Their research appears in Wednesday’s journal.