Yes, it’s “notoriously disgraceful,” as his dean put it, that a professor at the Merchant Marine Academy made a tasteless joke about the Aurora shooter to his students – especially since he’d been sent an email informing him that one of the students in that class was the son of a man who’d been killed in the incident. The school plans to fire the guy, though this seems to me to be going a bit far.

Also disgraceful, by the way, is what the guy was doing as he made the comment. See how the article starts? See what the professors you and I pay for do in their classrooms?

After turning down the lights in his classroom at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan began showing a documentary and prepared to step out for a moment.

But first, according to an internal personnel document, he paused to make a parting joke: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room,” he is said to have remarked to his students, “run for the exit.”

That’s right, kiddies. They’re showing movies. We’re paying for them to turn off the lights, turn on a machine, and leave.

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Outside the classroom, Sullivan writes about Japan.

It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls this writing style Translation from the German.

Something to shoot for.

… of a professor at the University of Chicago medical school.

… Zlatko Tesanovic, a Johns Hopkins physics professor who has died, age 55, of a heart attack suffered at Reagan National Airport (he was rushed to the hospital across the street from UD‘s office), sounds as though he was a lot of fun. He lectured in shorts and Hawaiian shirts. His students compiled his sayings.

From his Rate My Professors page:

What makes great people great is not that they’re always great, it’s that they’re sometimes great. Some people are never great. That’s just how it works.

From a student’s webpage:

We use now a piece of trickery…

The problem with liquids is that they are not a gas.

It will be like a light to you in dark rooms in the middle of the night, when you are despairing and everything else has failed you… and you will realize, the Method of Steepest Descents is your only true friend.

There’s not much information yet, but it sounds as though UCLA has a problem on its hands. I’m going to search for more on this story, but I’ll link you to this much now.

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Details of the allegations.

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The guy being sued (along with UCLA) directs the university’s anxiety disorders program. Here’s its home page.

Nobody asked me, but if anybody had asked me, I’d say that an image that takes you down a path to a deep ocean probably isn’t ideal for a psychiatric disorders page.

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Seven minutes ago, ABC picked up on the story. More details.

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Experts said the case would be divided into two issues — the standard of care provided and ethical considerations involved in soliciting donations from a patient [Alexander Bystritsky is accused of having come after the family for research money while at the same time treating Harvey].

If true, “It would be a horrible indictment of the fund raising efforts of UCLA,” said Donna Darling, a former New York assistant district attorney who now represents plaintiffs in medical malpractice suits. “They should have known she was a patient.”

… India.

… in the wake of the cinema massacre. Of the three kinds of mass murderers (“psychopaths, the delusionally insane, and the suicidally depressed”) Dave Cullen writes about here, Professor Rainer K. Reinscheid of the University of California Irvine med school sounds to UD like the suicidally depressed. His fourteen-year-old son killed himself after being disciplined by his high school, and since then Reinscheid’s been homicidally vengeful, committing arson and making death threats. As Cullen writes:

Most vengeful depressives blame their girlfriend, boss, or schoolmates. Some just aim to kill those targets. But the eventual mass murderer sees it differently: it wasn’t one or two mean people who drove him down, it was all of us. Society was brutal, the whole teeming world is mean. We all need to understand what we did to him; we all need to pay.

In Reinscheid’s case:

Detectives on Friday discover[ed] e-mails on Reinscheid’s cell phone from April, when he allegedly discussed with his wife plans to burn down Uni High School, commit sexual assaults, purchase firearms and murder school officials and students before killing himself.

“Most mass murderers intend to die in the act,” writes Cullen, and although Reinscheid – who’s in custody – now seems unlikely to be able to carry out any killings, he’s obviously a profound suicide risk.

Whether it’s Joe Paterno at Penn State or Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar at University of California Davis, you really want to keep an eye on your overpaid and overlaureled personnel. Eventually the money and adulation will do to them what it does to pretty much everyone. It will make them believe their own publicity, and it will make them consider themselves free to do what they like, immune from consequences.

Immunity is Muizelaar’s medical speciality; he’s a research surgeon who tries to activate patients’ immune systems to fight cancers. Together with another faculty member, he’s been intrigued by the possibility that introducing bacteria into the heads of people with late-stage brain cancer might activate their immune system and in the process attack the disease.

Well and good; but these guys seem not to have felt the need to get institutional approval for this human experimentation. Of course, no problem getting the patients’ approval; they’re desperate. But precisely because people are desperate and therefore susceptible to dangerous and unproven procedures, you’ve got things like institutional review boards and all.

The guys are now banned from human research. Davis risks losing its federal research funding altogether.

A brilliant young physics professor at Rice dies during a mountain climbing trip. He was found dead in his base camp tent.

Oxygen deprivation? Heart attack? Edema? It’s not yet known. He was only thirty.

You’d be surprised. You’d be surprised how many security cameras are already in place around your office. You’d be surprised how quickly and easily police can rig up a security camera if they think you’re doing something weird.

So when Western Michigan University suspected that the chair of occupational therapy (scroll down) was buying aMAzing, er, cameras for himself out of an endowment fund, they pointed a camera at his office door and filmed the fool returning everything the day after said suspicions were communicated to him.

Auditors have also discovered that he has routinely been “reimbursed for mileage he never logged.”

He goes on trial for embezzlement soon.

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you know that UD has covered plenty of stories that involve thieves and hoaxers on campus being caught by security cameras.

Again, nicely put. University of Virginia professors are giving it their all, stylistically, as they skip town. This is Ian Macara, distinguished microbiologist. He’s outta here.

A writer at Above the Law notes the difficulties UD‘s George Washington University is having administering a program designed to tide our unemployed law graduates over for awhile.

The writer points out that rather than dealing with significant numbers of heavily indebted, unemployed students, the law school might – among other things – reduce the size of its classes (GW seems to be doing this, but rather slowly) and take a hard look at its faculty salaries.

Are they lacing it with male hormone? In the last two years, five naughty faculty boys at Kansas University have been censured, two for plagiarism, but the rest for fights and shit. A few more of these and KU can field a faculty hockey team.

Captain would definitely be this guy, until recently chair of pharmacology:

[He] used PowerPoint slides at a faculty meeting that featured images of soldiers with guns pointed outward from a circle indicating that those inside the department must protect each other.

We’ve all heard the tired phrase second-strike capability, with which professors titillate themselves while discussing whether colleagues will be able to publish a second book. This is far more stirring morale-wise, with its graphic representation of the relationship between faculty and administration.

Here she talks about how California’s great public university system got her started:

Fortunately, the semester fees at UCLA at that time were extremely low. I worked in the library, at a dime store, and at the bookstore. I was able to complete my undergraduate degree without going into debt. I took courses across the social sciences and graduated after three years by attending multiple summer sessions and by taking extra courses throughout. In my last year as an undergraduate, I graded Freshmen Economics.

Getting off the ground wasn’t easy:

[I]t was very hard for any department to hire a woman in those days. Fortunately, the [Indiana University] Department of Political Science later needed someone to teach Introduction to American Government on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday mornings at 7:30 a.m. They appointed me as a Visiting Assistant Professor to do that. After a year of teaching freshmen, they asked me if I would be Graduate Advisor and moved me to a regular appointment at that point.

Ostrom contributed to the framing statement of the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, run every year by Peter Levine and Mr UD.

In the most recent sports school scandal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill has asked a professor who offered pretend courses to football players to pay up.

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told trustees Friday that Julius Nyang’oro was asked to repay $12,000 for teaching a 2011 summer course as an independent study rather than a lecture.

Does anyone really think this guy — who was chair of his department, and who will be allowed to retire with full honors at this end of this year despite the fact that he taught tons of bogus courses — is going to pay the university this money?

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Longer article, with many important comments, here.