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.

There’s an old-fashioned seemliness, a southern comfort of sorts, about this story out of Virginny, where a powerful member of an appropriations committee in that state’s General Assembly “helped obtain a $500,000 budget amendment for [Old Dominion University], knowing that the university planned to hire him for the job the budget amendment was to pay for.”

Yes, buy your job! Appropriate the money and become a real live professor with it! Hell, write an email instructing an administrator at the university on how much you expect to be paid:

“Currently my part-time salary with the Newport News Public School system is around $37,000. I need at least that amount from the ODU Foundation to have a part-time salary of $75,000 per year. Of course, more than that is always appreciated.”

Standards for new professors at the University of Texas El Paso are pretty low: As this student of Fernando Parra’s says, as long as Parra doesn’t try to get the student involved in his mail fraud, bribe, obscene material transportation, and other activities, it’s fine by the student.

This one’s rather mysterious. A beloved math professor at the University of North Florida behaves so weirdly and belligerently on a plane that he’s arrested for “disorderly conduct and interfering with the operation of an aircraft.” Apparently he refused to take his seat, refused to stop talking on his cell phone, and in general frightened his fellow passengers.

How does a man whose students fall over themselves to praise his kindness get into this sort of trouble?

There are a couple of possible explanations. Alcohol’s always the first place to look, of course. Drinks too much, becomes a belligerent drunk… Is already maybe afraid of flying, and totally loses it when authorities start asking him questions.

Another possibility is that he has mild mental problems — say, Asperger’s — which he can manage, but which, under conditions of stress, come roaring out.

If this doesn’t rally the troops, nothing will.

Background.

… dot org.

… the dean of the recently opened, totally unnecessary, school of law at the University of California Irvine.

In response to the terrible crisis in that state’s public system, Erwin Chemerinsky warns darkly against

freezing or decreasing executive and faculty salaries. If the University of California is going to retain and attract high-level faculty, it must pay the same as comparable schools across the country. Over the last few weeks, I have negotiated salaries with superb professors we are attempting to recruit who are currently teaching at Harvard, Northwestern and Yale. The University of California must match their current salaries or they will not come. As much as I love living in Southern California, I could not have afforded to leave Duke University if it meant taking a substantial pay cut.

Well, let’s get to it. How much do you make? How much do your law school colleagues make? How much do they teach? How many of your graduates get jobs as lawyers (the Irvine school opened despite the fact that California has a glut of lawyers, and large numbers of unemployed law school grads)? And, uh, didn’t you tell me, when justifying your unjustifiable new school, that your faculty would be all about turning out public interest lawyers? So… hard-nosed, hyper-capitalist, private sector salaries for our faculty, but of course! And crappy non-profit positions for our idealistic students.

I mean, I ask how much you make because you say you couldn’t afford to live in California unless you earned what you earn. What do you earn?

Let’s say at Duke you earned $300,000. Are you saying that you couldn’t afford to live on less than that?

Remember the University of Chicago’s Todd Henderson. And he teaches at a private school…

Vous savez… UD‘s father, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, made a lower salary than he would have in the private sector; but he didn’t seem to mind, because he thought public service was a high calling. What happened to that whole thing?

Listen to Kristin Luker, Chemerinsky. She’s a colleague of yours at Berkeley.

*******************************

UPDATE: From the comments at TaxProf blog:

Going from US News rankings, at the top [of California’s universities] are Stanford and CalTech– both are private and so from the state’s point of view are cheap/free (never mind federal research dollars for a second). Then we get to the state university system: UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara.

Then, after all these schools, you finally get to UC Irvine. I can see the rationale for their flagship schools (and even having more than one flagship given the size of California). I can see the argument for a strong set of second-tier institutions, too.

Can anyone explain why Irvine, ranked ninth in the whole wide state, is recruiting from Harvard, Northwestern and Yale? Just what is Chemerinsky saying here? By his own argument, being world-class is expensive, and so from a return-on-taxpayer-investment perspective, Irvine shouldn’t be frozen, they should be gutted to keep the top California universities on top.

Chemerinsky is arguing against freezing or cutting the law school. What he should be defending is the law school’s existence in the first place.

… has died. Denis Dutton, a philosopher, taught for many years at Canterbury University.