… to succeed.”

Well, that’s Italy I guess.

A professor at Long Island University was wounded in an “accidental shooting” on campus early this morning. No students were present.

The faculty member was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

What the hey?

First theory: Suicide attempt.

A Rutgers professor for whom intellectual achievement always came easily copes with a terrible stroke.

[Peter] Goldie’s philosophising arose from his own experience and out of novels he loved, especially by Joseph Conrad and Robert Musil. He was determined to make sense of topics – grief, jealousy, the nature of emotion in general, artistic response – which, as he said, philosophers tend to “over-intellectualise”, and thus distort. Without ever abandoning philosophical rigour, he excelled at revealing the richness of human life from the inside.

Dig: The chair of GW’s physician assistant program

did not teach two out of three semesters of a course on evidence-based medicine during the 2009-2010 school year. In … letters, obtained by The Associated Press, the students claim they were never told why the classes weren’t taught and that they were all given “A” grades.

LOL! What was this chick thinking? Can this story be accurate?? Let’s see if Rate My Professors has anything on just-resigned Venetia Orcutt… No. But here’s her webpage at her last job and it’s got two teaching awards listed!

Think about her teaching method. It’s so simple, so ingeniously, brilliantly simple. A simple transaction. Goes like this.

You pay GW tuition.

I give you an A.

You keep your trap shut about it because you’ve never been offered a better deal than full credit and a guaranteed A for NOTHING. NADA. See me wave you away from my office with an imperial flick of my wrist. Off with you! Go and sin no more and I shall put an A on your grade sheet…

No but maybe not so brilliant. Recall the expression there’s one in every crowd. In every crowd there’s some spoiler, some petit morceau de merde who absolutely must follow the rules blah blah. Or maybe even worse there’s some freak who wants to learn something about being a physician assistant before beginning a physician assistant job search. Clearly these sorts of people are going to rat on you.

… professor’s craw.

Sweet, sweet, story.

… Steve Roberts is trashing books he hasn’t read, he probably shouldn’t do that. Not a good message to send to his students.

… is science advisor to a new non-profit – Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care – which is trying to do something about the over-prescription of anti-depressants in the United States. Psychosprawl, as it’s known.

David Pollack was medical director of Oregon’s mental health program when he learned just how far psychiatric drugs had spread. About 250 kids between ages 1 and 6 whom the Oregon Health Plan tracked were prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, despite no proof of early-age safety for them.

… by one of his students.

[W]hen information technology was introduced at [the University of East Anglia], he refused to have a PC installed in his office. Sebald never wrote an email and if, to his dismay, he received one, it was printed out and delivered to him by “some clown from the Registry”, as he told me.

… [Sebald] predicted further continuing deterioration of academic culture in UK higher education as a result of increased bureaucracy, the imposition of profit-driven, short-term policies that aimed to turn universities into business operations, the introduction of benchmarks, the redefinition of students as customers, time-consuming quality assurance mechanisms and superfluous staff development training.

… Throughout his life, one has to conclude, it was Sebald’s desire to protect his waywardness and individual freedom from those who aimed to curtail it, be they university administrators or literary critics.

… the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the absolutely immense text packed with every imaginable psychological permutation.

Allen Frances, editor of an earlier DSMV, cautions against what some are calling psychosprawl:

The greatest problem in the past 15 years of psychiatry has been diagnostic inflation and the over-treatment of people who really don’t need it. This misallocates scarce resources away from those who do most desperately need and can most use our help. I fear DSM-5 because it threatens to further medicalize normality and spread psychiatry too thin.

… Rate My Professors is a good source of information about university teaching.

Why does ratemyprofessors work as well as it does? Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire answered that question by surveying students about their use of ratemyprofessors. They found that people who post on ratemyprofessors are basically typical students — although men were more likely to post than women, and students in the arts and humanities posted less than those in other disciplines. The motivations for posting are varied, but the two most important are “warning others about an instructor” and “communicating that an instructor was excellent.”

As in – you know – the famous final lines of that Stevie Smith poem, Not Waving But Drowning:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Two recent books about American university professors span the waving/drowning thing in their very titles: One’s called The Faculty Lounges, and attacks tenured American university professors as larking about and waving at suckers with real jobs; the other, The Fall of the Faculty (reviewed here by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott), has us drowning in administrative “blight.”

I’ll have comments about both of these books later on today.

[The University of North Carolina’s] problem can no longer be cast as a terrible farce in which big-money college sports runs sneak plays behind the backs of the bespectacled and bewildered professoriate.

Did professors get in the game, participating in the corruption of both the university and the students they are supposed to shape?

… says the sheriff. He doesn’t expect a professor to be a fugitive from justice because of his just-discovered big-time meth distribution business. Professors don’t have weapons caches, body armor, and huge wads of cash in their houses. Professors aren’t presidents of bikers clubs.

Pshaw. Do you read this blog? Over its lifetime UD has covered stories of professors who had live bombs in their houses; professors who on the first day of class told students to write down their Social Security numbers and hand them forward. So that the professors could rob them.

As for drug use: University Diaries has covered stories of professors so disabled by cocaine or alcohol while lecturing that students had to escort them to the emergency room.

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Yes, universities tend to produce more white than blue collar criminals — The insider trader on the board of trustees is fast becoming a paradigmatic postmodern American university figure … There’s Friend-of-Donna, Nevin Shapiro. Yeshiva University couldn’t honor Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff enough until that dark night when it had to go through all its web pages and erase their names and pretend they never existed…

You can certainly expect more faculty members to steal from their grants than to distribute drugs. But the drug distributors are out there.

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One point about this particular guy. Starting last year, if Cal State had bothered to look, it would have discovered he routinely came to class late and rambled and was beginning to piss off students.