Why is Brandeis so inept? UD has followed several Brandeis stories over the years (the Rose Art Museum fiasco, the Donald Hindley fiasco… the president who threatened to sue a magazine because of an article he didn’t like) and they tend to be about administrative ineptitude. Here’s another one.

Because its journalism department had to make “an emergency hire” (Huh? If you can’t find a replacement at the last minute, you cancel the course rather than picking someone up off the sidewalk.), it picked up this chick – an alcoholic with a serious rap sheet. A friend of a friend of someone in the journalism department recommended her.

Scot Bemis up there in the headline explains it all very clearly for us. It’s illegal to ask applicants about their criminal backgrounds. However, if you ask applicants about their criminal convictions, they have to tell you about them…

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, no one asked this woman anything. But you could Google her, the way a Brandeis student journalist did.

Ross’ criminal background, according to her blog as well as multiple newspapers, includes numerous convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence, conspiracy to aid an escape from jail and conspiracy in attempting an escape from jail. On Feb. 28, the day after she was placed in protective custody in Waltham, she was arrested for operating under the influence and operating a vehicle after her license was revoked for drunk driving, according to the Barnstable Police Department.

The Barnstable Police Department confirmed that Ross has been convicted of OUI more than four times; under Massachusetts law, that many convictions requires a lifetime suspension of the involved individual’s driver’s license.

… Despite the fact that information about Ross’ arrests is publicly available through her blog, Google searches and public records, nobody at the University knew about her criminal history before hiring her, according to multiple University officials.

All this info got stirred up when Pippin Ross was found “intoxicated and unresponsive” in her car on campus. She’s been fired.

… can be eloquent; it can have a pathos, as when Yeshiva University, on that auspicious Madoff/Merkin eve, page-not-founded its two – until that story-breaking moment – esteemed trustees, together tasked with making the financial health of the institution flourish… Page Not Found, in these circumstances, says NOTHING TO SEE HERE PLEASE DISPERSE, and only those determined enough to discover the cached page will fail to obey.

Medical schools page-not-founds are reserved for professors selling painkillers on the side, making up their research results, and – like Mount Sinai Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Tatyana Gabinskaya – arrested as part of massive insurance fraud rings.

The suit says she had submitted hundreds of charges for expensive MRI tests for car accident victims, despite the fact that — as a pediatrician — she had no training to actually read an MRI. In one year she billed for $2 million.

Trevor Hodge, professor of ancient technology, seems to have had a good life.

[S]he had a trait that I see in the very best trial lawyers, the very best teachers, and the very best parents. She was a wonderful listener. She would lower her head a little bit, lean against a counter, and do nothing else but take in what you were saying. She was comfortable with being quiet as she listened, which is a rare and wonderful trait. If she wanted to clarify something, or ask a question, her hand would come up, palm out, to signal that, the gentlest of signs.

Then she would nod. If she nodded hard, her hair would bounce, and sometimes she did nod hard. She understood, and she really did — her intelligence could be sharp and fierce or soft-spoken, but it underlaid everything. She was, as we say in law, a “quick read,” a talent that takes equal measures of intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking.

It was those traits — intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking — that would frame her response. One did not go to Katherine Darmer if you wanted a simple “yes” or affirmation; she was too smart and honest for that.

I cannot ask her about the piece I am pondering [writing], because she is gone. We miss those who have died when we stumble on the hole that they leave, and for Katherine that will be different for different people; she left many very large holes.

For me, the rest of my life, there will be a repetition of the same moment… I am thinking about writing something, or doing something, and it is her counsel I need. That is when I will stumble into that hole and remember her as she was — a woman who worked most hard for people who were not like her, who turned her mind and energy to justice, and who so often used her prodigious gifts in the ways that were best for God’s creation, this world.

Mark W. Osler remembers Katherine Darmer, law professor and advocate for justice. She committed suicide.

[Brian Tamanaha] also takes aim at the claim of law professors that their high salaries and low teaching loads (relative to other academics) are justified by the revenue they forgo when they enter the academy. No, he replies. Not only is “our pay far better than that of other professors,” not only do we have lifetime security and hours of work that are “whatever we want them to be,” but “our quality of life is far better than that of lawyers and we make more money than most lawyers.”

Who wins? Nice plot twist: The professor!

A life so amazing you just have to laugh.

They shoot professors, don’t they?

A very cool idea from a couple of Yale law professors: Along with being totally candid with applicants about LSAT scores, grades, passing the bar, getting a job in a terrible legal market, and of course your school’s prestige or lack of same, and the effect of this on employment prospects, all law schools should “offer to pay off part of their first-years’ loans should these students realize that their prospects of successful legal careers are slim.”

Disapproving Yale professors fret about how the school would afford this idea. Yale’s endowment sputters along at around twenty billion – a big fat nothing compared to Harvard’s almost forty billion. They also think it would encourage students to drop out. They also fear it would lower their salaries.

None of the other professors says this last thing, of course. About salaries. But people who are still pulling down $300,000 or so in the worst market for their students in years have got to be keeping an anxious eye on the bottom line.

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…”