UD has covered similar professor meltdowns, but usually they’re about alcohol or drug use. This one, a math professor at Michigan State who paced his classroom, slammed his head into the window, shouted obscenities at his students, shouted about there being no God, and then stripped naked – looks to have been a pretty classic psychotic break.

Students madly dialed 911; they claim police took too long (fifteen minutes) to arrive, but there seems to be some controversy about that. What’s not controversial is that these students were badly traumatized (some feared the professor might have a weapon).

It’s hellishly difficult to identify mad or dangerous or badly addicted people on campus. I’ve only had one student, in years of teaching, who was immediately identifiable as mentally ill by her class behavior and comments (I told someone in administration about it; the student later withdrew to get treatment). Privacy rights; a tolerance for oddness; denial; fear — lots of factors play into our tendency to avoid doing anything about unsettling behavior. And things are often mixed: Amy Bishop’s students report that she taught quite normally only hours before the faculty meeting during which she murdered three of her colleagues.

Given this difficulty, response time is key.

Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, gives great interview. He’s talking here about his new e-book, Don’t Go to Law School.

In order for things to change, “legal academia has to get its collective head out of the sand and stop being so piggish (I am mixing my metaphors).” He compares wildly overcompensated law school professors to French aristocrats: “[L]egal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn’t care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.” He quotes Upton Sinclair (“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”). He does all he can to make absolutely clear that people shouldn’t make $250,000 a year for graduating hundreds of unemployable people with $200,000 of debt.

But he also recognizes that law school professors themselves will do nothing about their culture of entitlement. They will have to be tossed and replaced by reasonable people if the schools are to survive.

The most straightforward short term solution is to return to the faculty student ratios and faculty compensation structures of three decades ago. This can be done through not replacing people who leave and buying out others. The alternative for universities is to simply close schools altogether…

Among the schools Campos considers to be in existential trouble: American University, down the street from UD‘s GW.

… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.

Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.

The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.

[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.

He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.

“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.

He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.

“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.

You don’t want to overuse technology. You don’t want students staring at tv shows on their laptops, or texting their friends. If there’s noise in the hall, you should shut the door. If you have to breastfeed your baby, you should do it somewhere else.

American University, down the street from UD’s GW, has responded correctly to a professor there who took her breastfeeding baby (who was sick that day) to class.

“The faculty manual requires professional conduct in the classroom at all times, including a focus on high standards for teaching and respect for students,” said the administration’s statement, which a spokeswoman said was based on a range of policies already in place at the university. “For the sake of the child and the public health of the campus community, when faced with the challenge of caring for a sick child in the case where backup childcare is not available, a faculty member should take earned leave and arrange for someone else to cover the class, not bring a sick child into the classroom.”

The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…

The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.

The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.

As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:

… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.

One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.

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UD thanks Maurice.

A Newcastle University professor, in a somewhat obscure though highly literate act of protest, has – it is alleged – taken a screwdriver and etched onto 24 fancy cars in his affluent neighborhood words like arbitrary and really wrong.

Stephen Graham (this is where you could have found him before Newcastle unpersoned him) definitely has a strong anti-capitalist orientation (he’s interviewed a few minutes into this YouTube), but dressing all in black and crouching down and scratching his rage into BMWs seems a bit much. A neighbor caught him doing it. He’s been arrested.

Stanford’s Henry H. Jones. A life outrageously well-lived.

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.