This comment alone suggests that the New Jersey Institute of Technology was probably right to fire one of Wharton’s finest.

… has done so.

… Kofi Awoonor was killed in the terrorist attack in Kenya.

Governor Vaginal Probe, Penn State — more and more people and institutions are eager to see up the old canal… But aside from the fact that initiatives of this sort prompt equity questions, there’s the matter of privacy. Mandated monthly bouncy-wouncy updates didn’t sit well with women on the Penn State faculty, who felt that whether they wanted their partners’ sperm to squiggle eggward unimpeded was their own business.

In response to complaints, Penn State has opted for the withdrawal method and will not after all impose a financial penalty on canal proprietors. But the university points out that it’s got to find some way to deal with exploding health care costs…

Well but listen. If Penn State had just kept an eye on Jerry Sandusky – a man projected to cost the university almost as much as its health care expenses for one year (both come in at around two hundred million) – it wouldn’t be so desperate.

… has died. Here’s a good remembrance.

“[W]hy should a people want to know modern art?” Berman asks in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. “What can it give them? Pamuk doesn’t offer a single ringing answer, but here’s a start: A global horizon and an expansive flow of empathy, a feeling for irony and complexity, a capacity to embrace contradictory ideas and believe and love them both.”

Berman’s one of those rare writers whose style, in almost everything he writes, is as much cheer-leading as arguing. You can always feel his tumbling excitement for the ‘sixties modernism he lived, his unapologetic nostalgia for the wraparound avant-gardism of post-war American cities:

As an ironic result of the flight of capital from American cities after World War II, every city gained grungy low-rent neighborhoods that could incubate bookstores and art studios and modern dance groups, experimental theatres, venues for jazz and folk music and performance, and the sort of shabby clubs and coffee houses and music stores and cabarets that nourished Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan. New York’s Village (first West, then East) is what I knew, but there were neighborhoods like this all over America. Late in the 1950s, they started to fill up with kids from all over metropolitan areas who could read the little magazines and the Grove Press paperbacks in the bookstores, hang out in streets and play their guitars in parks, hear sounds of music that carried from clubs they couldn’t afford to go to, find intense people like themselves to walk and talk with through the night, and maybe to grope and love.

Grungy, shabby, grope: This is the loose-limbed prose that accompanies Berman’s perpetual enthusiasm for the intense, generative, experimental life that modernity’s secularity and freedom, and urbanism’s moment-to-moment dynamism, allow. Few wrote as evocatively, as convincingly, as he did about the importance of cultivating a critical consciousness and a rebellious life (Isaac Rosenfeld could match him, I guess — though Rosenfeld brought much more jaded eyes to the scene; and there’s the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer…).

Like anyone writing with seriousness and commitment in this Blakeian tradition, he was easy to mock. But Berman held aloft a certain comprehensive modernist ideal, and it’s the same ideal that a postmodern writer like Don DeLillo, in a novel like Underworld, with its long Lenny Bruce soliloquies, is exploring. And pursuing.

Not Matthew Rouch’s best week.

… communications can’t even figure out that you don’t communicate like this.

… has been strutting his stuff at Michigan State, saying stupid shit and getting in trouble for it. What Ward, a professor at the University of Colorado, said was far worse (little Eichmanns, etc.), but William Penn’s arrogant rant is just as powerful an insult to his university. To any university.

Excerpts from an obituary in The Telegraph:

… On the afternoon of November 3 1944, as [his unit] assaulted a series of batteries set in the dunes which ring [an island near the port of Antwerp], the leading troop came under sustained heavy fire that killed 15 marines and wounded 21 . With mortar shells bursting all around him, Forfar attended to the wounded. The troop commander, Major JTE Vincent, was not found until Forfar went on another 50 yards under a rain of mortar bombs. It was the first time that Forfar had come under mortar fire, and each time he saw a shell coming he threw himself flat on the sand behind the wooden groynes before rushing forward once more.

He found Vincent lying grievously wounded, and as he was treating him, five Germans appeared over a sand dune and opened fire with a machine gun, killing one of the stretcher party who had crawled forward to join Forfar and wounding another. Forfar coolly continued to treat his patient, who had been shot through the eye and pleaded with Forfar: “Don’t leave me here, sir.” Forfar, who was a small and wiry man, picked the casualty up, put him over his shoulder and carried him to safety.

… It was largely thanks to Forfar’s tireless lobbying — in the teeth of considerable opposition — that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was established in 1998.

Forfar’s commitment to medical education was expressed in the long-running course in Saudi Arabia which was run by him and his some of his colleagues in Scotland. Theirs was the only course in that country which taught male and female students together, and one of Forfar’s first tasks was to dismantle the barrier in the lecture theatre which the security police had set up to separate the genders.

In 1973 Forfar was the driving force behind the production of Forfar and Arneil, a 2,000-page textbook of paediatrics which is used throughout Britain, and recently went into a seventh edition.

… In June 2009 the mayor of Port-en-Bessin-Huppain unveiled a memorial plaque on the Allée Professeur John Forfar, a walk which links the two villages…

UGA PROFESSOR LOSES TENURE
AFTER PUBLIC SEX WITH STUDENT

Background here.

Emeritus professor Gary Conti does magic tricks to give back and (according to his arrest warrant) accounting tricks to take back. Gary seems to have been part of a conspiracy that stole about ten million dollars of our taxes — a particularly contemptible conspiracy, since it involved stealing money meant for children’s mental health programs.

The embezzlement charges include [co-conspirators] sending $475,078 to a business owned by Conti called Learning Associates between 2008 and 2011, using fake invoices to justify the payments.

Conti, in turn, kicked back $231,550 in 44 separate transactions to the Child Family Advocacy Fund’s bank account in Cut Bank, from which Augare and Onstad drew $225,482 for their person use, prosecutors said.

The president of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics has been found guilty of sexual assault. The 53-year-old Lutheran minister and Aberdeen University professor claimed the 26-year-old woman in the airline seat next to him was asking for it.

“First it was accidental – maybe we touched arms, very slight contact with her chest area,” he said.

“She encouraged me to keep looking out [the window]. The physical contact became more perceptible.

“After she closed her eyes I took it as an affirmative indication to stay close and maintain the physical contact.”

As with most murders, there’s not much mystery here – about who did it, and how. It’s mildly unusual that a smart person – a professor at a med school – would be stupid enough to order the murder weapon via his university issued credit card two days before the murder. I mean, this sounds like someone who wants to be caught.

Or someone caught up in the passion of his rage against his wife, who he allegedly thought was having an affair. Someone who just wants the thing done, now, because he’s really pissed and he wants it to be over. He’ll show her.

University Diaries has covered bloodier, more dramatic wife-killing by professors – George Zinkhan, Rafael Robb – and the motives are all along the same lines … He thinks she’s unfaithful, or he wants their kid to himself, or she’s in the process of divorcing him. Or all three. Here the wife – Autumn Marie Klein, a University of Pittsburgh neurologist – was herself a distinguished professor, and her death at the age of forty-one is a loss for science.

[A William and Mary adjunct professor] reportedly flaunted a gun in front of his [twelve year old] son and 10 of his son’s friends. [He apparently] got annoyed with the noise the boys were making, went in the room where the boys were and pulled out a gun.

The most amazing physics instructor in the world: Denis Rancourt.