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.

Isn’t bald-faced theft enough to trigger dismissal? And the guy’s an assistant professor! In every case UD‘s covered of a physics or engineering professor creating a fake company to steal university/state/federal funds (she’s covered tons of them), the thief is like in his sixties. This guy has his scheme up and running in his twenties!

… Yi in the summer of 2011 pushed the purchase of a high performance illumination simulation tool that he said he needed for renewable energy research at CSI.

That fall, he submitted a memo to the City University of New York and the state Dormitory Authority stating that only one company, 3G Institute of Renewable Energy Inc., could supply the software.

But the Joint Commission on Public Ethics said Yi failed to mention that he was president of 3G…

The guy just has to pay a fine?

…by offering them amazing loans not only for fantastic Manhattan apartments and vacation houses (as described in this article) but also for third homes in European capitals?

To be sure, NYU hasn’t yet extended its two-subsidized-luxury-residences policy to a third subsidized overseas residence; but UD is confident this will be its next move. You can’t expect to draw the best, most committed professors to your unattractive school in Greenwich Village without offering to subsidize a primary residence, a vacation residence, and a place in a foreign capital of the professor’s choosing.

I mean, let’s do what the real estate people call comps; let’s look at how important people in Manhattan tend to live. Take the Murdochs. They own six residences, one on the Upper East Side, and the others in “Beverly Hills, London, Beijing, Cavan in South Australia and Carmel in California.” So say you’re recruiting a new NYU law professor. The legal job market has collapsed, so few of the professor’s students will get good legal jobs, but put that aside. She must be given what the very best professors demand if they are to be successfully recruited: One course per year. Armies of teaching assistants. A huge salary. Time off like crazy. Summer travel and research money. Plenty of freedom (and, once again, time) to pursue all conceivable forms of outside compensation.

You simply cannot expect such a person to buy a house with her own salary. You will need to give her spectacular deals on Murdoch-worthy residences in New York City, in surrounding states, and in a foreign capital.

Charles Grassley, that sour old scold who seems to see his job as superintending the American tax dollar, gets all high and mighty about what NYU is doing:

“Universities are tax-exempt to educate students, not help their executives purchase vacation homes,” he said in a statement on Monday. “It’s hard to see how the student with a lifetime of debt benefits from his university leaders’ weekend homes in the Hamptons.”

Ha! Loser! As Greg Mankiw and Eric Cantor have noted, Grassley’s just envious because he has a shitty little Senator salary, and these people are so much richer.

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UD thanks David.

How degrading is it to be a professor at West Virginia University?

Well two of the school’s, er, troubled coaches (the predecessor of one of them was Rick Rodriguez of sainted memory) are getting enormous raises on top of their enormous salaries, while because of “a $13 million cut in state funding to the school … tuition [will] be raised and no pay raises [will] be forthcoming for university employees.”

This writer suggests that these wildly overcompensated coaches (neither has won many games lately) “could donate [their raises] for pay raises to university employees,” but you know how that goes. Greed has no limit in the lovely world of big-time university athletics. Reread the Wikipedia page on Rodriguez if you’re in any doubt.

The writer concludes:

The point is, that we have reached a point in time where some independent outside panel should look into the finances of the school and the athletic department, a thorough and comprehensive study that includes all financial areas, including [AD Oliver] Luck’s travel and the dealings over the athletic department’s Tier 3 negotiations, the reseating within the Coliseum and the raise in the required donations for football seats, all of which has stirred up what had been a loyal public.

This entire mess has grown to such proportions and entangles both the university’s finances and the athletic department’s finances, creating a situation where a soccer coach finds a way to get a new locker room built, where a football coach gets a new weight room to go with a raise and a $300,000 retention bonus next year but a math professor can’t get a three percent raise that someone has to come in and work it out.

Well, but you have to keep in mind the nature of the institution. You’re talking about America’s number one party school. Number one! So who’s that someone gonna come in and work it out? A public university doesn’t get to the top of that list without a concerted, statewide effort.

No, as that ridiculous thing, a professor at West Virginia University, you’re in a hopeless situation. UD‘s advice: Seek respectable employment.

… which seems to be (background here) working its way toward becoming America’s first faculty-free sports factory. A couple of faculty members – astonished by the university’s sudden “sweeping” of all departmental accounts – asked to see the school’s budgets for some recent years.

They were told that collecting, preparing and copying their requested documents — estimated by the university to total some 300,000 pages — would cost them more than $54,000 each.

Well, that’s one way to try to increase your revenue – extort money from people trying to determine how inept your budgeting is.

More great PR for professors coming up.