… tenuring.

… He had a gift for French and his native Spanish and was honored as an outstanding professor in 2005 and the school’s company grade officer of the year for 2006.

Not bad for a kid who had to teach himself English.

“He pushed all of us,” his daughter, Air Force Lt. Emily Short said Thursday. “His word for us was ‘Don’t do it the hard way, the way I did.’”

Born in Caracas, Ambard never lost his admiration for his adopted land. When he leaned English, he sought perfection and spoke without an accent. He told his children to be grateful for the gifts that come with American citizenship.

That also covers my case: no criminal record and a college professor. PLUS I don’t go into jewelry stores and announce to the salesperson that I’m there to rob the place because I think it’s hilarious to say things like that. So: no criminal record, college professor, AND not an idiot.

Alexander Asandei seems to have trouble holding his tongue. You can already detect the problem here, in his woeful Rate My Professors pages.

But Asandei does not merely reserve his wit (he likes to call his students “dumb”) for the classroom. When asked the other day, in a jewelry store, if he’d like some help, he said no, I’m just here to rob the place.

So he got arrested and smiled his way through a mug shot and all.

Asandei complained about jail conditions and said people are way too sensitive these days. He feels everyone overreacted.

Well, he’s too sensitive to jail conditions.

… like bimbo eruptions, happen. Ellen Lewin, a University of Iowa professor, took offense at a mass email she received from a conservative student group.

She sent an email back to them that said FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS.

This is really not the best way to address your students.

His motives, and the university’s treatment of him, are under intense discussion here.

… Poul Thorsen, once an autism researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, is currently under indictment here in the States for theft. We’re trying to extradite him.

While a visiting scientist at the CDC a few years back, Thorsen scored some big CDC grants, for research to be carried out in Denmark. When he got back to Denmark, he “submitted false invoices for research expenses and had Aarhus University, where he held a faculty position, transfer the funds to his personal account at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta, prosecutors said.”

He used the money for cars, a house, and a motorcycle.

Thorsen no longer teaches at Aarhus; if you Google Thorsen and Aarhus, you get a statement about him from the Managing Director of the university which notes that although Poulsen continues to act as if he’s still on the Aarhus faculty, he most certainly is not.

The university also notes in this letter that Poulsen took a full-time position at Emory (Emory! Emory? Wake up! Get this guy’s mug off your website!) while still employed full-time by Aarhus.

Professor Rappaport (UD‘s father was born Herbert Rapoport – could UD be related to this dude?) offers some wild and crazy extra credit.

Kind of a mild version of that Northwestern University professor’s session with the device.

Rappaport’s Rate My Professors page is a trip. You have to go the extra mile to get a 4.3 Easiness rating.

Several business schools have approached him, he adds, and asked him to work on ethics courses. He likes that idea; Harvard and Northwestern are in his sights.

Once you’ve run a charter school into the ground, it’s time to retreat to your campus cubicle.

Coggins has ignored calls and e-mails seeking comment from the Orlando Sentinel. When a reporter visited Coggins at Stetson last week in attempt to discuss his role with Imani, he slammed his office door and said he was calling campus police.

Coggins specializes in cultural competence, and I gotta tell you that this behavior seems at the very least culturally insensitive.

While teaching a course at NYU law school on corruption, New York’s Waterfront Commissioner, Ronald Goldstock, parked his car illegally.

An enterprising reporter waited by the car – it was there for six hours – until Goldstock returned to it, and asked him why he had done this.

It’s not illegal, he said, pointing to the THIS VEHICLE ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard he’d placed in his car’s front window.

UD likes the sound of this. She likes the idea of designating her teaching hours Official Police Business.

A professor at Utah Valley University cheated – just a little! jumped ahead of the line! – at the golf course, and when called on it by rule-abiding golfer Timothy Deason, got annoyed:

Deason told police Williams hit him on the back of the head with a golf club, breaking the club and knocking Deason to the ground. While he was down, Black [Williams’ golfing buddy] hit Deason in the back with a golf club and Williams stabbed him in the back of his left thigh with the shaft of the broken golf club, the affidavit states.

But hell. UVU put him on leave while he was in jail and all, but now that he’s paid a fine and gone on probation, it’s time to come home!

At the time of the incident Williams was working as a full-time associate professor of aviation at Utah Valley University. [Here’s his way-sketchy faculty page.] He … has since returned to work.

Cheating, and then beating a man bloody when he challenges your right to cheat! If there’s one place this man belongs, it’s back in a classroom.

Dan Drezner writes, on the subject of professors and Libya:

For a scholar, engagement with power should not be automatically rejected, particularly if it means altering policies in a fruitful manner. When the exercise morphs into intellectual kabuki theater, however, then disengagement seems like the best course of action.

Those scholars who stopped participating after it was obvious that Qaddafi wasn’t really interested in genuine change don’t deserve much opprobrium. By that count, [Benjamin] Barber really has a lot to answer for, while some of the others seem to have emerged relatively unscathed.

Yes – the calendar matters. When did people withdraw from involvement? And in the case of Libya, was it ever much more than theater?

But money also matters. Getting paid is fine; getting paid strikingly large sums should raise eyebrows, because it threatens to compromise the consultant’s intellectual integrity.

Finally, conflict of commitment matters. Barber writes:

[This] is about whether academics should stay in the ivory tower and do research and write books[.] Or engage in the world on behalf of the principles and theories their research produces? Do you simply shut your mouth and write? Or do you try to engage?

First, note the way he paints it – There’s the tremulous tight-lipped unengaged ivory tower dweller, and there’s the bold intrepid earth-changing Barber. This is a ridiculous either/or — plenty of academics engage politically in plenty of ways short of writing obsequious op/eds about authoritarians.

And second: How much teaching do professors like Barber do? (Barber no longer teaches, but taught recently at the University of Maryland and at Rutgers.) How often are they even on campus? A certain amount of traveling on behalf of democratic change is fine; but when professors become mainly consultants, when they appear maybe one day a week on campus, something’s terribly wrong.

… Roger Cohen.

There’s a video of Dr. Alia Brahimi of the London School of Economics greeting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as “Brother Leader” at the school three months ago, and presenting him with an L.S.E. cap — a tradition, she says, that started when the cap was handed to Nelson Mandela.

It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I can’t think how.

Calvo-Goller said yesterday that she had not yet studied the ruling and thus had not yet decided whether to appeal. But she said the complaint was aimed at forcing reviewers to be “more responsible” …

The court’s ruling is aimed at making people like Karin Calvo-Goller more responsible.

She has been ordered to pay compensation to her victim.

[T]he [modern] scholar, the writer, and the artist may not be parasites dependent on aristocratic patrons, but that does not mean they are truly free. The desire for applause tends to inspire servility in anyone subject to it — and it is a short step from flattering one’s public to flattering monsters who wield influence and power.

Paul Rahe weighs in on Benjamin Barber.