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.

[Joseph] Biederman, along with Charles Nemeroff, who was then at Emory University, and Alan Schatzberg of Stanford (the 116th President of the American Psychiatric Association) are in many ways poster boys for [pharma corruption]. Ironically, it was Schatzberg, during his presidency in 2009, who responded vehemently to Allen Frances’s criticisms of the DSM 5 task force by pointing to the $10,000 in royalties Frances was still receiving from DSM IV. Apparently, the $4.8 million in stock options Schatzberg had in a drug development company, or the fat fees he received from such companies as Pfizer, had no similar distorting effect on his judgment — just as the $960,000 Charles Nemeroff received from GlaxoSmithKline (while reporting only $35,000 to his university) had no influence on him. And just as the millions of dollars that Biederman and his associates at Harvard received for creating a new diagnosis and a massive new market for antidepressants and second-generation antipsychotics among young children (drugs associated with massive weight gain, metabolic disorders, diabetes, and premature death) had nothing to do with their behavior!

Nemeroff is now at the University of Miami, but that’s not a scandal because Miami isn’t a respectable university. The scandal lies at respectable places like Stanford and Harvard, which will “turn a blind eye to ethical failings if the money on offer is sufficiently tempting.”

… a dead ringer for Leonard Bernstein, is the subject of a forthcoming film about his campaign against the DSM.

A curious conference at Bard
Has left its professors quite scarred.
When asked about Summa
They say Man what a bumma.
Disregard! Disregard! Disregard!

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UD thanks Josh.

… honors a scientist at the university who was murdered, two years ago, allegedly by her husband. His trial has just begun.

UD has followed, on this blog, quite a number of university-related murders, many of them the murders of estranged wives by enraged husbands.

So enraged that the murderers made it pretty easy to discover and convict them.

Two cases out of several in the last few years come to mind – George Zinkhan, a University of Georgia professor who wasn’t tried and convicted because he decided – with the police closing in – to dig his own grave and kill himself; and Rafael Robb, a University of Pennsylvania professor about to be freed after serving five years for the murder of his wife.

Five years seems about right. Except for having bludgeoned a defenseless woman to death in one of the bloodiest crimes the state of Pennsylvania has ever seen, he’s been a really good boy.

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Update: Ah. They revoked the parole.

… and never was a speaker better chosen. Wong, not long ago head of UCLA’s Plasma Physics Lab, has devoted his life to thinking about how to amass mucho green from the government and from UCLA. A venerable 75 years old, he has pled guilty to stealing millions upon millions of greenbacks from these generous sources by…

You know the deal. You’ve read this blog long enough to know how the phony invoice thing works.

Wong created fictitious invoices at [one of his businesses] that claimed [it] had manufactured and sold to [another of his businesses] certain nanotechnology components. Fraudulent invoices totaling $160,000 were then submitted to the Defense Department for payment. Wong also caused [his businesses] to submit false vouchers to the Department of Interior for improvements on his privately owned land, as well as equipment and labor costs unrelated to the government Department contract.

He could go to prison for five years.

UCLA might give some thought to taking this page down. And… he keeps being described as emeritus. With all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto?

This hurts my feelings?

This hurts my feelings?

This is a woman (an English professor at Barnard College, whose class is notorious for massive cheating) whose children have ballsy Daniel Ellsberg’s DNA coursing through their veins (she’s married to Ellsberg’s son). And she’s pathetically announcing to her large audience that it has hurt her feelings??

I’m not saying she should handle the problem this way, and produce a viral YouTube revealing to the world that she is an ass (the professor in the YouTube got his exam questions out of a book – too lazy to write his own – and thereby made it supersimple for students to get the questions in advance). I’m saying that having shown yourself a sap by your grading method (Ellsberg asked students to grade themselves), you don’t double down on the sap by making it clear that your emotional frailty will guarantee that you’ll just move from one way of being manipulated by your class to another.

In the Barnard case as in the ranting biz school professor’s case, the instructors were too lazy or too fragile or whatever to run cheating-aversive courses (I don’t say cheating-free, since it’s always possible that even in the best-run course some students will cheat). Instead of doing obvious things – writing questions students won’t be able with little effort to find in a book; not asking students to grade themselves; not allowing smartphones in class – these professors virtually welcomed their students into the world of naughty.

Even worse is the way such people tend to respond to the revelation of cheating. Of course both must have known it had been going on for years; neither one is stupid. They just let it continue until it got so bad they got pissed off (the guy) or until some poor honest soul in the class told them about it and forced some form of response (Ellsberg).

What they tend to do is get all police state about it. Ellsberg went from hippie to Kim Jong-un in no seconds flat, installing her students in device-free isolation chambers overseen by high-ranking administrators and administering there a big ol’ scary exam on which most of her students’ grade depended.

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Here’s UD‘s take: If you are a cheating-enabler sort of professor — if you give take-home exams and shit like that, shit that guarantees cheating — own it. Be that thing. Get defensive when people call you on it and say it’s no one’s fucking business how you run your classes. Don’t get all schizodemento and hurl yourself from one extreme to another and hypocritically protest to the class how shocked and hurt you are. That’s what Sartre called being in bad faith. Not a good place to be.

It is better (as Bismarck said of laws) not to see them being made.

Certainly universities do all they can to conceal the details that go into the making of people like Richard Herman; but a zealous Chicago Tribune reporter has stridden (look it up) into the sausage factory. We, who would never dare, are in her debt. Hold it cheap / May who ne’er hung there!

Jodi Cohen has come back with a tale so exhaustively, precisely instructive as to the manufacture of moneyed academic malingerers that it is worth our while to attend.

Start with the fact that as then-chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Herman personally presided over arguably the largest scandal in the history of the University of Illinois – the now-notorious special admissions scandal.

Herman was “the ultimate decision-maker” for the applicants who were connected to trustees, lawmakers and other powerful people. Herman at times overruled admissions officials to enable the students to get into the school.

So this would seem to be a man who helped bring national disgrace to his institution. What to do with him?

Well, Herman is a math professor. He can teach math. A lot of students need help in math. So he goes back to the math department and teaches math, yes?

NO, because now that he’s dragged an entire university system into the mud he’s too eminent.

“I don’t think you should expect him to teach a freshman calculus section with a ton of students.” Quote unquote. From an emeritus professor there. And the university agrees. Not only should this man not have to teach freshmen, he should teach no math courses at all. Apparently the whole field is now beneath him.

But OTOH the university is paying him over two hundred thousand dollars, so he should do something, right?

Weeeeelllll… A man of his stature can’t be expected to live in Urbana-Champaign, which is where he … uh… something for $212,000… He can only be expected to commute in once a week from Chicago. This unfortunate mobility problem radically diminishes his ability to, you know, be there.

Now, after he resigned in disgrace, he did condescend to teach two courses a year at this inconvenient location. In the College of Education, because you wouldn’t want him sullying himself by teaching in his field of expertise. Unsettlingly, however, “His biography on the College of Education’s faculty website is blank.”

Not only is his website blank; so are his class lists. The man has an uncanny ability to get his classes cancelled. It keeps happening. They just effing don’t fill! Who knows why?

Oh wait.

I mean, wait, and wait. Before the second wait. The first: Because the eminent chancellor can’t, curiously enough, get anyone to sign up for his courses, he “has twice switched to teaching online classes to make up for on-campus courses that were canceled for low enrollment.”

OOH LA LA online! Well, online. Yes, online. Talk about a sausage factory… Goes without saying that this solves the mommy don’t make me go down there problem. Plus, well, let’s just say that UD would love to know who’s teaching Herman’s online courses…

So the second wait. Second wait is how does this genius manage to get one course cancelled after another?

“Richard acknowledges that he probably missed a deadline for getting his information submitted in time to get included in the (catalog).”

That’s from a university spokesman, explaining one of the cancellations. The other? It was a grad ed course. But… whoops!

[B]ecause the UIC graduate program doesn’t offer a higher education degree track, there was insufficient student interest and enrollment.

This is the moment to caution you: Don’t try this at home. For all of these elements to come together, for all of this sausage-making to make a sausage, you need high-level strategic skills plus extremely high-level connections.

Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to have inside information which, if released, could ruin the careers of the high-level connections.

Hilarious article in, of all places, a legal journal, by bad boy Brian Tamanaha, who has broken the decorous silence we’re supposed to maintain about the greed and hypocrisy of American law professors. Tamanaha rightly targets progressives – like the Critical Legal Studies (Crits for short) people – who pat themselves on the back for their advocacy on behalf of the world’s oppressed, but who jealously guard their own wealth and status — all the while ignoring the oppressed in their own classrooms.

Tamanaha isn’t the first law professor to go there – that would be Kristin Luker – but he’s way farther out than Luker.

As the cost of legal education rose to astronomical heights, loading more and more debt on the backs of students, erecting an enormous economic barrier to access to the legal profession with major class implications, the Crits said nothing. Like other law professors, they have been playing in the academic sandbox, enjoying the increased income and release from teaching that followed from and was funded by the immense rise in tuition.

“How,” asks Tamanaha, “could developments so contrary to progressive causes occur at a time when most law professors are progressives?”

His answer:

Why we did not resist is straightforward: we benefited personally. Tuition increases meant yearly salary raises, research budgets to buy books and laptops, additional time off from teaching to write (or to do whatever we like), traveling to conferences domestically and abroad, rooms in fine hotels, and dining out with old friends. A sweet ride it has been. After becoming accustomed to such treatment, it seems normal to desire even more pay, and not think twice about traveling to Hawaii or taking the family to the annual Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference, held every summer at a luxury resort.

He concludes with a series of questions, among them:

Can we tell our friends in [progressive legal organizations] that it is unseemly to attend a conference about the future of legal education in Hawaii when so many law students and recent graduates are struggling desperately in the here and now, and can we suggest that they should have fought the rise of tuition as hard as they fought to preserve job security for professors?

Can we ask the liberal law professors at California-Irvine how they can preach to their students that they should engage in public service when they charge $50,000 tuition, loading students with debt, while insisting on getting top dollar for their own professorial services?

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At least conservative professors, like Todd Henderson, tend less toward hypocrisy. Henderson likes money, wants huge amounts of it, and seems to resent/consider himself in competition with people who make more than he does.

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The progressive law professors’ quandary recalls, for UD, the immortal statement of one who has solved it — Fulvia Morgana, the sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World:

Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.

… of János Starker’s cello.

Starker has died, at age 88.

Starker was known for being tough on his students. Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, asked Starker to come speak to his team.

Afterward one of the players came up to Starker and asked if he could tell Starker a joke.

“Mr Starker there was a car accident and three cellists died and they all tried to get to Heaven,” the student said. He then goes on to explain the joke. St. Peter asks the first two with whom they studied. They answer they studied with Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Rosen. St. Peter tells both of them they have to go to Hell.

The third one tells St. Peter he studied with Starker. Then comes the punch line.

“St. Peter says ‘You may come in. You already went through Hell.’”