In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.

[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.

Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.

“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”

… One of the most painful parts of his illness is its timing. [UCLA Professor of Japanese Michael] Marra is 54, and said he has just begun to give meaningful lectures – when he was in his 20s and 30s, he was still piecing together puzzles in his research.

… He will stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., answering e-mails from students who are studying in Japan. And last week, he started a new project: organizing a book for the 20th anniversary of the Center for Japanese Studies.

Though he hopes to finish out the quarter, Marra told his students at the first class meeting that this might not be possible. He said they were free to drop the course and left the classroom for several minutes. When he came back, everyone was still in their seats.

… is now up at Inside Higher Ed.

Title: LASCHED.

A Hamline University law professor was convicted this morning of failing to file state tax returns for the years 2004 through 2007.

… [Robin] Magee, of St. Paul, had claimed to investigators that she didn’t have her papers organized and that she didn’t understand tax law, according to the criminal complaint.

But Magee, 47, practiced tax law and criminal law before joining the faculty at Hamline…

She hasn’t taught for two years, but remains a tenured professor there… Drawing a paycheck and all…

Which is an even better gig than the never paying taxes thing, since you can eventually be run aground for failing to pay taxes, but at Hamline they seem to want to hold on to her.

Maybe they can’t find anyone else to teach her very specialized niche.

… West of the Moon.

From Leon Knopoff’s obituary in the LA Times:

He also gained a certain amount of fame from a 1983 report in the journal Nature with astronomer Steven Kilston that tentatively linked earthquakes to an alignment of the sun and moon on opposite sides of the Earth that tugged the opposite sides of faults in opposing directions. That article predicted a quake in November 1987 in California’s Imperial Valley and, in fact, two occurred.

Researchers still do not know what to make of that potential link.

[Princeton music professor Milton] Babbitt, whose father and brother were mathematicians, also taught in the mathematics department at Princeton during World War II. While his mathematical approach was a signature of his own compositions, as a teacher he embraced a wide range of subject matter, focusing on areas such as jazz and popular music, in addition to abstract modern compositions.

The composer Milton Babbitt has died, at 94. Princeton’s long review of his life describes a man of immense intellectual and artistic range.

Philomel.

… with Daniel Bell.

Bell has died, at 91. I’ll have more to say later.

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The Times obit quotes Bell on the distinction between scholar and intellectual:

The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his ‘self.’

The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.

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Arguing the World is a film about Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol.

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From a 2004 interview:

[We’ve seen in the last two centuries] a triumph of the secular ideologies as against religion. [But this triumph] failed too. It failed with the end of communism, it failed with the collapse of Marxism, at least in its Russian and communist form. So that was really the end of ideology. … But I also said in 1960 that this was not the end of all ideology because you’ll always have credal warfare of new kinds, particularly with newly emerging states.

On the end of sociology as a discipline:

… I don’t think society is a system in which you have a single set of variables which control all the relationships of mankind. So if you can’t have a general theory and you can’t have sociology as a system, sociology has to go back to historical grounding. Now it can do very good empirical work and you can try to formalize it with mathematics, fair enough, if you think you can do it. In fact there’s a lot to be said for empirical sociology. But the notion that you can build out of this a general theory seems to me false, so [in that sense] that’s the end of sociology, not as an effort to look at different aspects of society, but to find a general theory.

Modernity, modernism, modernization.

I tried for my part to distinguish three things – modernity, modernism, and modernization. Modernity is an attitude to the world. You can find it in Diogenes, you can find it in the Elizabethan period. It’s an openness to the world, it’s a scepticism, rather than being fixed in certain positional modes. So modernity is not necessarily one element of time or a period but a more general element of human behaviour, or human aspiration… [M]odernism [is] a specific historical movement going back against romanticism … [and] traditionalism. Basically modernism is a certain kind of formalism. We think of the Bauhaus elements of modernism… Modernization is an effort to rationalize the administrative economic systems of the world.

And he was chair. Of Temple University’s opthalmology department.

An alleged alcoholic; and an alleged fraudster.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a 144-count indictment against Kubacki for

falsely claiming between 2002 and 2007 to have provided more than $1.5 million in services to patients at a clinic run by the ophthalmology department. The indictment says Kubacki… made notations in the charts of patients, seen by other doctors, indicating that he also had seen and evaluated those patients – when he hadn’t. In some cases, he wasn’t even in town when the patients were seen.

His false statements, the government said, allowed Temple to bill Medicare and other insurance companies for more than $1.5 million.

For Temple, there are questions of repayment as well as questions of responsibility. How long did it maintain a department chair apparently scorned by students because he was drunk? (Patients, of course, didn’t have the option of avoiding him.) Why did it take five years for Temple to notice the Medicare fraud? And why isn’t there a statement somewhere on Temple’s website about all of this? There should be.

Swarthmore’s George Moskos.

… has died.

… grateful students. Colby College excerpts some emails he received from them in his last days. Here’s one:

I remember making a passing comment about [job] worries to you after class one day. Little did I know that, later that day, my dorm room phone would ring and you would be on the other end.

“Kwedor? Bassett here.” (As if that voice could belong to anyone else!) We had been reading The Old Man and the Sea, and … you told me that the message that I should take from that book was simple: do what you want to do, do what makes you happy. Don’t be like Manolin, doing only what makes others happy; he only regretted that decision later.

That was the first time anyone had so bluntly told me that I could control my own fate, that even if my first job after Colby wasn’t glamorous or prestigious, if I was happy then it was a good decision.

… at the University of Miami buys a replacement saxophone for a street musician with mental problems.

“He’s an educated man, who at some point did well,” Mowerman said. “He’s had a lot of difficult points. There are so many people out there struggling the same way.”

A recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley law school (Boalt) responds – in a comment thread – to his dean’s leadership of that group.

I’m an ’07 alum. I still have significant debt. Yet I work in BigLaw and I dedicate a significant portion of my salary to charitable contributions–which up to now included Boalt.

I usually ignore the letters and pleas and do all my donations in a big chunk at the end of the year, so this news couldn’t have come at a better time for me to be able to avoid giving to Boalt this year. I’ve been hearing for six years from [Dean Edley] how CA is in dire financial straits, the UC can’t afford anything, the law school needs private donations just to operate, let alone to be able to award scholarships, pay for tech improvements, embark on building campaigns, etc etc etc. I dutifully–and happily–contributed. Boalt did a lot for me and I wanted to give back.

But I’m done until DE leaves or provides me a convincing explanation for why he deserves an even fatter pension when he knows damn well UC and the state can’t afford it. Yes, he could make more in the private sector–sort of. For anyone who can show me a private sector job with the same sort of salary and guaranteed retirement benefits, I can show you 100 where the salary is the same (or even lower) and most compensation comes from stock and options.

Well, let’s be fair. Blame also attaches to Stafford’s colleagues at Stanford, and to professors at other American universities, who get paid by drug companies to hawk therapeutically unsubstantiated, physically destructive, and enormously expensive atypical anti-psychotics to prescribers. Now these over-prescribed pills are a national blight.

… shows his students how one person can make a difference. As the leader of the U Cal 36, he is making legislative history in California.