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.

You can say that again.

This will likely be a pretty big story – an eminent literature professor is arrested for prostitution, with mug shots provided of him in drag and out of drag.

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Max Reinhart is 65 years old. UD predicts that he will retire.

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Keep in mind that the University of Georgia is a public university, in a state with a very conservative legislature.

… has sprouted a diagnosis.

UD‘s amazed it’s taken so long. The eminent University of North Carolina physicist has been in prison for weeks for drug smuggling and yet only now does the sluttily obliging medical establishment put out for him. UD has no doubt that within minutes of her being arrested for, say, jaywalking she could find a doctor to diagnose her with … let’s see, what’d they give this guy… schizoid personality disorder.

Frampton’s friends aren’t really helping him.

“He doesn’t even drink, except perhaps wine with dinner, and he’s concerned about his health and goes to a gym,” [a colleague] said. “He is completely dedicated to his research and his students, and for the moment, since his divorce, to chasing girls.”

A divorced gym-membership-holder with his dick hanging out. How could anyone believe such a person capable of criminal conduct?

It’s that time of year.

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UD thanks Wendy.

The work to which Paul Campos referred in the last sentence of this April 2011 New Republic piece involved honest analysis of (wretched) job placements for law school graduates.

And now, with the latest numbers on applications to America’s law schools – not surprisingly, given the lack of jobs, they’re way, way down, especially among America’s smartest students – the work also involves an honest look at tuition, law professors’ salaries, and the outrageous rate at which new law schools (most notoriously, the one at Irvine, and the one at U Mass) are opening.

On the salary issue: As Campos noted in a comment on this blog:

A range of $140K to 300Kish is accurate for top law schools… Mid-tier schools are more likely to have a range from the low $100s to the mid $200s. Lower tier schools pay less, perhaps $80K to high $100s.

At Above the Law, a writer asks, “could the decline in law school applicants mean tuition cuts [and therefore lower salaries] are on the way?,” and answers no: “[I]nstead of listening to reason, law school tuition is still on the rise.”

It’s really a kind of let them eat cake madness.

… may have died – in New York City last week – of an accidental overdose.

… has been found dead in a midtown Manhattan hotel under odd circumstances — maybe suicide, maybe an assignation gone wrong… or maybe natural causes:

Detectives were treating Richard Descoings’ death as suspicious after finding his cellphone on a third-floor landing as if “it had been flung out the window,” a police source said.

Descoings, director of the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris, was found dead about 1 p.m. in his seventh-floor room at the Michelangelo Hotel.

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Update: The clues (if they’re reliable; it’s still early in the story) point to suicide. Friends have apparently told police Descoings was depressed; empty liquor bottles and anti-depressant pills were found in the room. No marks of trauma were on the body. Someone had hurled his laptop and cell phone out of the room, onto an exterior landing.

One possible sequence of events: Suicidal, but not wishing to kill himself at home, in France, he determined to wait until he was in a hotel room (it’s not uncommon for suicidal people to choose hotels – hotels are anonymous, and you spare the people who live with you the trauma of discovering your body). He drank a lot of liquor (alcohol for that matter may have been a factor in his depression), maybe took a bunch of pills… In a kind of rage, or in despair, he threw, as it were, his life away – the laptop, the phone – and then lay down.

This would explain his condition when hotel security came to check on him on the morning he was supposed to appear at a conference. Colleagues, concerned that he hadn’t shown up, contacted the hotel. Hotel personnel said they heard him snoring.

Some time later, they checked again, and found him dead.

Pure speculation, of course – but, again, if the clues are correct, it’s a possibility.

There are also reports that he had visitors to his room that night. So something very different might have happened.

“…[F]or 25 years, I lived and breathed business, and the economy, and jobs. I had successes, and failures. But each step of the way, I learned a little bit more about what makes our American system so powerful. You can’t learn that teaching constitutional law [at] the University of Chicago, all right?”

We’ll see if the perennially popular professor-as-pussy strategy works for Mitt Romney.

Police have reportedly arrested at least 16 judges in an operation centered on the Italian city of Naples, the BBC reports.

Those arrested are thought to be linked to the Fabroccino Camorra clan, one of Italy’s most notorious criminal organizations.

Corriere.it describes those arrested as “at least sixteen tax magistrates, eight tax tribunal officers, a prominent lawyer who also teaches at university, and an accountant”.

Imagine his Rate My Professor page:

Brings an immediate, real-world understanding of the workings of the Italian tax system. Insider’s knowledge. Dresses extremely well, drives an amazing car. Avoid arguing with him about your grade.