… for having understood what Columbia University’s Sudhir Venkatesh was long before the New York Times got wind of it. Her post about Columbia’s adorably rogue sociologist appeared way back in April 2009, and her attack on his book about living in a Chicago housing project tells you a lot about the power of the singular, agile, independent blogger to get out ahead of issues (look how long – with a few exceptions – it took everyone else), and about the power of a true education in the methods and ethics of particular scholarly fields.

Of course TR couldn’t know, when she wrote, that Venkatesh’s financial ethics are apparently as shaky as his scholarly; she couldn’t have read these 2010 accounts of his teaching (missing many classes; making highly-selected, immense-tuition-paying Columbia students watch YouTubes when he was too busy to show up); but no one reading her devastating review of his book can miss the larger picture of this man as another in the lengthening line of Jonah Lehrers, Marc Hausers, and Johan Haris.

All of these men, when cornered, said a version of what Venkatesh has said:

I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up.

In all of these cases, we’re supposed to sympathize with people making up research (Hauser) and quotations (Lehrer, Hari), misusing funds (Venkatesh), and lying to pretty much everyone — because they’re so destructively ambitious that they’ve taken on more than they can handle.

When Tenured Radical went after Sudhir Venkatesh in 2009, several of her readers, in the comment thread, accused her of envy. One of his friends, quoted in the New York Times story, accuses his detractors of envy.

Envy’s a beaut. UD‘s all-time favorite use of it has to be Greg Mankiw’s and Eric Cantor’s, as they labor away against new tax policies. People who aren’t rich envy rich people and want to hurt them — that’s what changes in taxation are about.

Envy’s a real human emotion, to be sure. A biggie. But just because everyone’s susceptible to it, and just because it’s so low, cynical argumentative opponents realize it can be a hell of a good button to push. Instantly it distracts people from the intrinsic legitimacy of your arguments; it makes it all about you, and your grubbiest motivations. It is the quintessence of ad hominem technique.

Bravo to TR, then, not merely for having seen Venkatesh before others saw him, but for standing up to the you’re envious folk.

**************************

A statistics professor at Columbia recalls:

When Sudhir was in charge of Iserp, he told us that they were out of money and would not be able to honor existing commitments. Or, to be more precise, that things that I considered commitments were not actually so because they had only been transmitted orally, and that more generally Iserp was broke and could not support research in the way that we had expected. I was pretty angry about that, but when Sudhir informed me that he was suddenly stepping down as head of Iserp to work on a project with the Justice department, I assumed that he was better suited to be a researcher than an administrator and I offered him statistical help with his DOJ project if he ever needed it. I figured he was back on the research track and that this was better for all concerned. I don’t think I’d be a very good administrator myself, so I just figured Sudhir had been over his head. I’ve only seen him once since, it was a year or so ago at a sociology seminar, but we were sitting in different areas of the room and I had to leave early, so we did not get a chance to speak.

When I later heard that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing, that put a different spin on the story. I had heard rumors of an investigation but I’d never known that there was an official document, dated Aug 4, 2011 (nearly a year and a half ago!) detailing $240,000 of questionable expenses including $50,000 for fabricated business purposes. If, as Sudhir is quoted as saying in the news article, he’s only paid pack $13,000 of this, I assume more will happen. It’s not clear why the university would pay a salary to someone who still owes them over $200,000.

Although actual students in Stanford’s Education as Self-Fashioning program had no problem with Terry Castle putting down the quality of a student’s paper in a recent campus speech —

“I appreciated the fact that she was honestly critical of something. The reason I appreciated that was since I had stepped foot on this campus six weeks earlier, I had basically not heard a single critical word about anything,” said Erica McDowell ’16.

[Stephen] Goodspeed agreed, and said that sometimes the ESF program is “a little too uplifting and a little too much of an intellectual safe haven.”

— nervous nellies on the ESF faculty went all 1984 and reported bad her to every university authority they could think of.

The incident was reported to Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences; Debra Satz, senior associate dean for the humanities and arts; Harry Elam, vice provost for undergraduate education (VPUE); and Martha Cyert, senior associate for VPUE…

You doo-doo! You’re in big trouble, doo-doo! HAHAHAHA. We told.

… to triple your salary.

******************

UD thanks Roy.

At least one pieces it together as a suicide: A medical school professor, a 53-year-old woman, is found drowned in the Baltimore Harbor six months after her longtime partner – also a Hopkins med school professor, which whom she collaborated on research – dies of a heart attack.

*************************************

From a Baltimore Sun article about her.

Dr. O’Hearn was an overachiever from the start, according to her sister. They grew up with four brothers in Wilton, Conn., where O’Hearn was president of her 1977 class, homecoming queen and co-captain of the field hockey team at Wilton High School.

She went on to Yale University, where she sang with “perfect pitch” for the Yale Slavic Chorus and earned dual degrees in biology and Russian and Eastern European Studies in 1981. Her sister said she also studied philosophy at the university. She went on to the Johns Hopkins medical school.

A former Oxford lecturer stole all the money of a design firm which had temporarily employed her. She

plundered the firm’s accounts to spend thousands of pounds at stores including internet couture site “Net a Porter” and Selfridges.

She also hired holiday homes in Portugal, spent £10,000 flying a friend to London from Italy and made out cheques for thousands of pounds.

When she realised the police were on her tail, [Maria] Di Natale tried to have two incriminating computers stolen from the company offices.

She

covered her tracks by ensuring the company financial system was “almost wholly destroyed.”

Then, when the previous financial controller was asked to return to the company, Di Natale suggested selling the company to avert bankruptcy – to a firm she owned.

An investigation by an accountancy firm found she had spent £13,286 on Portuguese holidays, £17,000 on renting a flat for her and her husband and £2,840 on a chaise longue.

She had also hired a jet to fly in an associate to London for a charity football match.

She should not go to jail, her lawyer argued, because she is

suffering from bipolar disorder.

She will go to jail. For five years.

… is in some sort of trouble for some sort of inappropriate something.

Rather, I ask you to notice what one of his students says about his class, a psych course at Northeastern University:

“Sometimes during class, his wife will call and he’ll talk to her.”

The student also admits he’s been known to make “racially inappropriate” comments, and told students on their first day to not even bother buying the textbook listed on the class syllabus.

“We haven’t learned anything,” she says, claiming she has yet to receive a grade. Because she has no grades to her name, however, she’s nervous she won’t be granted credit for the class — a class she’s already paid for.

This is only one student; but these are observations reasonably easy to confirm or deny by talking to other students.

Let’s say she’s describing things correctly. Put aside the claim about racial insensitivity, which presumably is related to the trouble he’s now in. (He’s been removed from the class, but Northeastern is refusing to say why.) This is a professor who talks on his cell phone during class. He assigns a textbook and then tells students not to buy it. He hasn’t given out a grade yet, and they’re probably past the midway point of their semester. “We haven’t learned anything.”

Why do students put up with it? Over the course of writing this blog, UD has encountered other stories like this — classes where a scandalous lack of anything is going on, about which not one student seems to complain.

George Washington University students celebrating in front of the White House late last night.

More pictures.

***********************************

LOL.

Heard loud and clear over chants of “U.S.A.” and “Obama” was an unnamed George Washington University undergraduate screaming to her friends: “I legitimately have a paper due tomorrow!”

***********************************

Last night was a nail-biter.

Yeah, we’ve got that.

*********************************

A Win for Professors.

If you can understand the Five Stages of Grief, thank a professor.

And a professor shall lead them.

Professor Bashing as Clever Strategy on the Eve of a National Election.

*****************************

The Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse:

Empiricism

Humaneness

Proper Speech

… to ask…

… at Vanderbilt pursues a political career.

… is one of this guy’s specializations, but he seems to have flubbed it.

A faculty member at a public university in California, he sent out an email to hundreds of students on campus telling them to vote for

… Proposition 30 [a Jerry Brown tax initiative] and push others to vote for it, while warning of dire consequences if it fails. It also noted that students would receive a $498 tuition reimbursement if the initiative passes.

“The fate of Proposition 30 on the upcoming November ballot will directly affect our university (and our jobs),” said the email from Stromberg, a professor in CSUMB’s Division of Humanities and Communication.

Now there’s a lawsuit against the school, since what this guy did violates California law. You can’t “use … public resources for mass political mailings.”

… of a University of Texas Arlington psychology professor points in the direction of suicide. His car was found at a park about fifty miles from campus.

Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.

But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.

As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:

“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”

And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.

… the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The interesting thing is, nowadays my career would have been impossible in the sense that I did classics, ancient Greek and Latin, all my school time and then had to switch to science. My poor parents had to pay an extra year of private tuition to get into science. In those days they were actually short of students in Oxford, and so I received a curious letter from the admissions tutor in Oxford that said they would accept me on two conditions. One was that I came into residence immediately, in a week’s time, and the second was that I did not study the subject in which I had been examined. This is unimaginable!

So, you were being ordered not to become a classicist!

Absolutely. They said I’m not suitable for that. I later met the person socially. He was the man, [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who later became Lord Dacre, very involved in the last days of Hitler, and he told me privately that his mind was on greater things and he’d realized he hadn’t filled the places in the college, and so he looked down the list of unsuitable people.

An investigative reporter badgers a University of Houston professor about how much he charges the university and his research sponsors for work-related expenses.

He’s in the UH physics department but he works for big oil and sees no reason why he shouldn’t live like his real employers — or at least a little like them. For oil executives, renting Land Rovers and flying first class ain’t worth a bucket of spit (they use chauffeurs and private jets); but for physics professors it’s way cool.

University stories rarely offer international intrigue, but the Jorge Gilbert saga at Evergreen State College has potential.

Jorge, a charming Chilean, ran back to the mother country with tens of thousands of dollars he stole from students in the Evergreen study abroad program he used to administer. He even managed to sell his pricey Olympia condo before the hapless state could grab it.

Jorge’s not in hiding; he’s living an elegant life in a fancy apartment in Santiago and is attached to some university there. So Washington’s trying to hire a collection company to corner and fry his ass.

… Chilean collection agencies typically keep as payment about ¼ of the total debt collected- meaning any collection agency interested in tracking Gilbert … and wringing him of the money he owes Washington stands to make a cool $30,000.

I see Gilbert scaling the Gran Torre Costanera and shouting Nunca me llevan vivo.