You gotta admit that stealing from students is the cherry-on-top of university corruption, the real apex of depravity. A high-ranking professor/administrator at Morgan State University did that, plus lots of other stuff that will send him to prison for a decade or so.

“Thinking seriously endangers those who do it… They may, unexpectedly, learn something truly important, and they will be compelled to live with it. Liberal education does not make for comfort; it does not promote success in public life; it may not even make one happy.”

Allan Spitz, University of Alabama Huntsville, who died last January at 83.

… by which university professors could exploit their students for personal gain.

All of the strategies she mentions are… strategies, whereas Georgia Tech’s Joachem Teizer runs rings around all of those strategists simply by using the most direct approach imaginable: He tells his students to hand over their money to him. Teizer basically holds up his students.

The one complexity in Teizer’s approach comes at the very beginning: He only targets students who don’t speak English very well.

Allegations against Teizer came from about 10 Asian graduate [engineering] students he supervised. [An investigator] learned the students are not fully fluent in English.

The first allegation, made in October 2013, notes that one student told school officials he paid more than $10,000 in cash to the professor in 2011.

Auditors estimate the total payments are double that sum.

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In a detail that I know you will like as much I do, Jochem Teizer specializes in “resource detection.”

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UPDATE: And Georgia Tech not long ago got rid of Bonnie and Clyde!

What is it about Georgia Tech?

… to the sexual harassment charges against him. (Background here.)

The general idea is that the student was the sexual aggressor throughout.

Some of it’s a bit shaky.

Ludlow further denied that he knew the student was underage, believing she was 22 at the time.

“Because of this, he believed her to be older than a traditional freshman would be,” the document states.

Admittedly this is a newspaper quoting from a document, but huh? Because he believed she was 22, he believed she was 22? On what was he basing that belief?

Ludlow says that when NU’s investigation began

he even offered to obtain and provide security video from his building’s elevator and receipts from the restaurant and bar showing how many drinks had been ordered.

I’m not sure what any toing and froing on camera would tell us, unless the camera captured the student hurling herself on Ludlow and Ludlow sternly escorting her to a cab. Similarly, the number of drinks wouldn’t tell us much, since Ludlow and the student are likely to have had drinks earlier in the evening as well.

At Case Western Reserve, a law school dean facing charges of harassment, and facing a retaliatory behavior lawsuit filed by one of his colleagues, has stepped down. He remains on the faculty.

At Northwestern (where UD was an undergraduate), Peter Ludlow, a high-profile philosophy professor who certainly seems to have harassed a student (a freshman!), and whose punishment for that harassment seems to many there insufficiently severe, cancelled a class today because a sit-in was planned in his classroom.

Ludlow is in even more extensive legal difficulty than the Case Western guy… Let’s see — he’s suing various media outlets for having used the word “rape” in their coverage of the case, when in fact no rape occurred. He might have to sue Rutgers University to get back the job they just offered him (this was to be his escape from NU) if they decide – now that the harassment mess is all over the papers – that they don’t want him after all. He’s being sued by the complaining student, and for all I know he may countersue her (he claims she was the sexual aggressor). Petitions and protests against his continued presence at NU are making it difficult – maybe impossible? – for him to hold class.

The president of SUNY Broome has handled the heroin and alcohol overdose death of the chair of the school’s criminal justice program (also “a former police officer and New York State certified criminal investigator”) extremely well. Shortly after the death – as soon as reports of its circumstances started to come in – he acknowledged it, expressed shock, expressed sympathy, and used it as an occasion to prompt people who might know someone else in trouble:

“If you a have a loved one you think might be involved in drugs, please intervene,” Drumm said in a statement. “We so wish that we had any inkling of issues with our beloved colleague so that we might have done so.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the use of three so‘s in that second sentence … But really, as someone who has chronicled official university responses to very bad events for years, UD (to channel the second of your blogger’s multiple personalities) admires Kevin Drumm’s rapid, straightforward, humane response here, especially since this story unavoidably embarrasses the school. The person in charge of a significant component of SUNY Broome’s education in the law was himself lawless, etc.

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One detail of this story worth noting in terms of trying to get a grip on the nature of the drug epidemic: Wesley Warren seems to have been a heavy user of alcohol as well as (at the same time as) heroin.

… of the chair of SUNY Broome’s criminal justice program having apparently died of a heroin overdose.

… says Buck Mulligan of troubled, brilliant Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.

Robert Trivers, who describes himself as “one of the greatest social theorists in evolutionary biology alive, period,” seems a pretty impossible person, and his restless, aggressive ways with the world seem to be getting worse as he gets older. To the point where his employer, Rutgers University, has now suspended him (with pay, but they might be on their way to suspending him without pay). His department asked him to teach a course he did not want to teach, and he complained about this – to his class – so unpleasantly that he was removed.

This fascinating 2005 profile in the Guardian recounts Trivers’ long struggle with mental illness; his self-wounding insistence on picking fights with other people in the various fields in which he works; and his Morrissey-like self-regard.

He reminds UD – based on the little she’s read about him – of Larry Kramer. Both seem permanently pissed off moral purists. And although it’s not much fun for anyone – the purist or the purist’s targets – to be around people like this, they sometimes turn out to make enormous contributions to the world by being the way they are.

Trivers is seventy, and Rutgers no doubt decided they could wait him out. Rutgers no doubt figured that by the time Trivers got really problematic, he’d be on the verge of retirement. But – again, like Kramer, who has, against immense odds, made it to 78 – Trivers continues rolling along nicely. His belligerence-flame burns brightly.

Guys like these – guys like Kramer and Trivers – are powerful rebukes to Buddhism. Apparently you can thrive on anger.

As are many sexual harassment lawsuits, complaints, stories… This is one reason UD tends not to report them… They’re often a real mess.

This one at Northwestern now has a suit (against the university) and another suit (against local news outlets), and what actually happened between this student and the professor she claims harassed her? She does not seem to have filed a report with the police.

I cover this latest NU mess because I covered (a little) the Colin McGinn mess, and because there’s another mess in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado right now, and a larger messy discussion being carried on nationally about philosophy as a particularly sexism-ridden academic field.

Because it’s a major American university, and Ludlow’s an important philosopher, and the student’s lawsuit is a real whopper, this story will probably be pretty big. University Diaries will have to take note.

… the University of North Carolina continues – it should be remembered – to feature people like Charles van der Horst on its faculty.

van der Horst was recently arrested.

… He was arrested along with other Moral Monday protesters on May 6 in Raleigh for trespassing, violating building regulations and illegal gathering in the Capitol Building. The day before, he ran a relay race in California and grabbed a red eye flight back to North Carolina.

… Police slipped plastic restraints around van der Horst’s wrists and led the protesters to a bus that took them to Wake County jail where van der Horst was booked and fingerprinted.

“The attached arrest documents shows that I was arrested for my ‘singing,’ something I am sure my family would say was completely justified,” he wrote in his journal…

He marched with his father during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, worked in the Vietnam anti-war movement in high school and appealed to the N.C. General Assembly in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic… Van der Horst’s father was a member of the NAACP in New York, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.

… Van der Horst said the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid pushed him to join the Moral Monday protests. He believed that decision was based on politics, not on what would be best for the state.

… He also protests voter ID laws, anti-abortion legislation and low teacher pay.

“For God’s sake, I think South Carolina pays its teachers more,” he said.

The attempt to make Horthy a worthy meets some resistance.

Corrupted? Corrupted? Corrupted by the big bad hedgie!

Young Sidney who lived at the foot of the hill
Whose fame every virgin with envy doth fill…

How far the delicate lassie has fallen – caught in the clutches of SAC.

… runs a CUNY program which makes its money the Trump way — by renting out its precious New York City space.

Of course, you could say that the space the program’s in is meant for the program.

And you could say that Wilson didn’t have permission to rent out the premises.

I mean, now that it’s figured out what Wilson’s doing, this is what CUNY is saying. Plus it’s really trying to get rid of the guy, since the rental thing is only one way, reportedly, in which he’s been, er, profiting from the center he runs.

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In response to the charges against him, Wilson’s doing far-left high-dudgeon.

“There is a long history of political persecution in the US, (and CUNY/BC) including the government frame-up of Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, W. E. B. DuBois prosecution, the frame-up of countless civil rights and labor leaders, and mass firings of CUNY faculty during the McCarthy era. This attack is part of that detestable history.”

It might work.

I speculated in this earlier post about the mysterious death, in custody, of a young Yale professor. He’d gotten violent with police (they had come to his house because of domestic violence) and had sustained a mild injury in the scuffle. He was then put in jail for the night. During the night he died, and not by suicide.

The wound sounded too small to have done him in. What then?

Samuel See was only 34, but the medical examiner has concluded that he had had a small heart attack a few days before his arrest; See also had meth in him. He died of “acute methamphetamine and amphetamine intoxication with recent myocardial infarct.” Meth is real bad for your heart. I’m going to assume the heart attack was meth-related.

So when I say cascade I mean a bunch of things seem to have conspired to kill him:

1. the heart attack;

2. the mental as well as additional physical trauma from the domestic violence/arrest violence;

3. being incarcerated and therefore not having his health and welfare closely monitored.

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UPDATE from the Yale Daily News: Background on See’s harrowing personal problems.

“Somebody once asked me how many professors work for me, and I said if you can ever find a professor who thinks he or she works for anybody, let me know.”

University of Washington President Michael K. Young.