Clearly using the Italian university system as their model, professors at Kosovo’s Pristina University have discovered that a professorship represents a nice stable income base from which you can launch a political (or other) career.
The real beauty is that you don’t even have to show up at the university. You can just take the money and the prestige and the title and run with them.
An Eastern Kentucky University professor resigned Friday after being arrested on a drug charge.
Dr. Larry Belknap, a tenured professor in EKU’s Department of Recreation and Park Administration, was arrested Thursday for trafficking in marijuana over five pounds.
Professor Jerry Dimitman, who has died at 91, lived a long, beautiful, American story. From the balcony of his parents’ small New York apartment he grew plants, and then, with money his mother’s sister won in a lottery, he moved to California. He worked in orchards and got degrees in botany.
Stationed in the Pacific during the war, “he became fascinated with the culture, and particularly the fruits, of Eastern Asia.”
After his retirement from Cal Poly Pomona, he “spent many years abroad as a consultant in plant pathology and education in Greece, Guatemala, Yemen and other countries, where he became known for his habit of suddenly driving his car off the road to investigate plants that caught his eye.”
But the main thing about this guy is that in 1953 he bought property
after carefully investigating the suitability of its microclimate for growing Asian fruits. In addition to tending the grove with great skill, he often waited decades for slow-growing exotic trees to mature into majestic specimens loaded with fruit. Just as important, he established close connections with members of his area’s Asian American community, who gave him some of his prized varieties, and by whom he was regarded with something close to reverence.
Riots practically broke out when he sold this stuff at the local farmers’ market; he always told reporters to keep the address of his property out of stories to “deter intrusions by overzealous fruit lovers.”
His mother’s name was Rose Moss.
Yes, it says “clinical professor of dermatology” here. Back in ’09. Glory days. Farther back, in ’04, Klein’s friends and admirers sponsored an endowed chair at UCLA with his name on it (UD wonders how much Klein himself contributed – probably a lot), and UCLA described him as “a valued member of the UCLA faculty for 25 years.”
Lemme see if I can find Klein on the UCLA website. Hold on.
Nope. Nothing at UCLA.
Nothing at the UCLA med school.
No references to the Arnold Klein, M.D. Chair in Dermatology either.
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Lesson: Botox talks, bullshit walks.
… for Michael Dummett:
He never lectured twice on exactly the same material, preferring to maintain as much freshness as possible in his delivery. It was impossible to hear him lecture and not to have a profound sense of thought in action. He would pace up and down, cigarette in hand, pausing periodically to formulate in his own mind how best to proceed, referring only occasionally, if at all, to his notes. The upshot would always be a beautifully structured and wonderfully conceived argument in which ideas about the most abstract topics were seamlessly woven together.
In discussing ideas, Mr. Ribstein didn’t sugar-coat things, [a colleague] said.
“It’s never comfortable to be told you’re an idiot, but he didn’t have a malicious bone in his body…”
The more you look at a law school’s ledgers, the more life in the legal academy seems a sweet deal. And it’s been getting sweeter. Course loads have shrunk in the last couple of decades; the pay scale is high and has been rising. Median salaries are in the $120,000-to-$150,000 range, but superstars can earn $300,000 or more and the best of the best get pretty special housing deals. Over the summer, the New York University School of Law spent $5.6 million on two apartments in the West Village. A spokesman for the school said it had yet to determine whether the units would be combined and who would live there.
“It’s a wonderful life,” says Nancy Rapoport, a professor at the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of an article for the Indiana Law Journal, “Eating Our Cake and Having It Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult in Law Schools.”
“You’ve got a lot of happy law professors, who don’t want to change anything,” Ms. Rapoport said. “They may not realize how precarious legal education is, and the legal market is, right now. That’s human nature. Everything is going well. Let’s keep it the way it is.”
More here.
Merry Christmas from your one-course-a-semester, $200,000 a year law school professor!
Too bad there aren’t any legal jobs for the students she — now and then — teaches.
Harvard’s Marc Hauser (background here – scroll down) didn’t like people monkeying around in his lab.
In an important essay on Hauser, and on research fraud in general, Charles Gross concludes the obvious:
[I]rreversible damage has been done to the field of animal cognition, [and] to Harvard University…
Robert Zelnick likes to go fast.
Amid her concern about this law professor’s condition, UD had to laugh when she got to this detail about the guy who stabbed him.
Both men were sitting in the waiting room of an Illinois train station when Scaggs – meth-maker, burglar, racist – said something about this being his country and slit the other guy’s throat.
So who’s the attorney Scaggs gets? This guy!
Last July, UD noted the presence, on Harvard’s summer school faculty, of an economist with scandalously bigoted views. Dangerously bigoted views.
[Subramanian Swamy] received significant criticism for an op-ed he wrote last summer in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis, in which he called for the destruction of mosques, the disenfrachisement of non-Hindus in India who do not acknowledge Hindu ancestry, and a ban on conversion from Hinduism.
Harvard’s faculty has now voted to cancel Swamy’s summer economics courses.
You always want to tread carefully when speech is at issue; and after all these were views irrelevant to Swamy’s teaching. Yet universities need to protect their reputations; they need to watch out for their intellectual integrity. Truly hateful, truly illiberal speech expressed by people who enjoy the prestige and legitimacy of a university affiliation is particularly damaging to universities. Universities are above all places devoted to reasoned discourse; and while we can argue about what ‘reasoned discourse’ might include, it certainly doesn’t include advocating the destruction of mosques.
All naughty creative writing professors are naughty in their own way.
B-School Boys, as you know from reading my Beware the B-School Boys category, are all about extortion of very large sums of money. In their world, it’s just straight down the line fraud.
Creative writing professors deal in smaller currencies, and tend to get involved in lame, convoluted, one-man get-rich-quick schemes. (Clubby B-School Boys always have partners in crime.)
Poète maudit Ravi Shankar, currently placed on administrative leave, has been rather on the loose wig lately. We know from his RMP page (He missed 5 out of 15 classes (yet if you miss 3 you fail) & had us buy 100 dollars worth of books which were barely used (money down the drain)… Great class, when he shows up. Had to meet online a few times, poetry is not the kind of class where online classes are really helpful…) that Shankar is copacetic but kind of out of it. His two recent arrests – one of which found him hiding from the cops in the woods – also speak to some problems.
[Shankar was] arrested …in November after allegedly crashing into a vehicle on Route 40 in North Haven [Connecticut] and fleeing the scene, state police said. State police say Shankar was driving east in the shoulder when he rear-ended a parked vehicle and then drove away. A police dog helped troopers find Shankar in a wooded area.
Shankar was charged with driving under the influence, evading responsibility, failure to drive in the proper lane and operating a vehicle without insurance.
That was his second arrest. His first was much more complicated. You can read the details at the article, but the main point is
[Shankar ordered] more than $22,000 worth of tickets to a soccer game in New Jersey in the hopes that he could sell them to make a profit and pay off his more than $70,000 credit card debt.
Things went terribly wrong.
… have an inside track on how government economic policy is made.
Excellent, excellent.
But she should be more frugal with A’s.
Les UDs own a Cambridge house a few streets away from Somerville, where, inside her apartment there, a Boston University math professor has allegedly been cooking up meth.
Boston University Professor Irina Kristy is expected to face charges for abetting her son in running a drug lab in their apartment, according to an article published Monday by the Somerville Journal.
Kristy, a professor of math and statistics at BU, and her son Grigory Genkin are suspected of cooking methamphetamine from their apartment in Somerville, the article said.
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UD thanks Annie.