… Professor in Events and Cultural Policy.
… Professor in Events and Cultural Policy.
Watch the video. Before the professor explodes, note the conditions under which Ivy League students are learning. Lights low, an enormous lecture class, the professor – his back to the room – straining his neck to read off of a huge, ceiling-high PowerPoint slide about kilobytes.
When American students in classes like these finally realize how thoroughly they’re being ripped off, we’ll start to see massive, coordinated yawns. One hopes.
… Erin O. Patton, 40, and [a Southern Methodist University] adjunct professor of public relations in sport, [last month] attempted to flee arrest from officers…
After crashing into three cars, Patton was stopped by police, who then found a crack pipe in Patton’s 2010 Mitsubishi Gallant. According to Kim Cobb in SMU’s Department of News and Communications, Patton was “suspended from his teaching duties Oct. 1.”
However, Patton’s students received a different message on Sept. 26. In an email to his students, Patton said that he was taking a “personal leave of absence” due to “family health reasons.”
He further explained that he would be traveling between Dallas and the East Coast, which would impact his “class schedule and preparation time.” …
… among other things, a closed enterprise that protects its own. See the university act as a guild.
A student in [University of Central Florida] Professor Richard Quinn’s business class posted a new video on YouTube. The video is from the first week of class, when Professor Quinn told students he writes his own mid-term and final exams.
But it seems Professor Quinn never wrote the mid-term exam his students cheated on. It was written by the publisher of the textbook for his business class. One student found a copy on the internet, and passed it on to others. [Quinn’s statement to the class is excellent pedagogical technique, no? Keep the students off the scent by telling them that you write your own exam. Don’t check the book! I write my own! You’d be wasting your time checking the book! … Yet one of his enterprising charges looked anyway! Shouldn’t Quinn give that person extra credit for business acumen? Never trust what other people say! Trust your instincts!]
… UCF spokesperson Grant Heston told WFTV “it’s not uncommon for higher education professors to use these pre-made exams produced by the publisher.” [Ah, Heston. Guildmaster speaks. Not uncommon, so that means, uh, perfectly fine so shut your face. It’s a guild thing; you wouldn’t understand.]
… Eyewitness News asked if [Quinn] would be punished for using a test that’s so easily accessible online.
“It’s irrelevant. The focus shouldn’t be on the professor, but on the students who used the test inappropriately,” said Heston. [Get the effing focus off my man! This is how professors behave and did I already say shut your face?]
Background here.
And a new editorial in the local paper.
Not all the details are in yet, but it looks as though a good and dedicated teacher there may have allowed students traveling with him on a field trip to drink on the chartered bus taking them back to Lubbock. One of the students got outrageously drunk, and, once back in her own car, plowed into another vehicle and killed one of its passengers.
[The student] was arrested October 22nd and charged with intoxicated manslaughter, intoxicated assault, and aggravated assault. According to the police report, [she] states that a professor allowed the students to drink on the field trip. She says in the report that she had five beers and a shot of alcohol.
Here we are. Flashlights on!
Point them at the front of the room.
There’s the prince of darkness, ruler of this domain. He strides from side to side, declaiming many things in front of six hundred followers.
Point your flashlight at the followers.
Note that instead of six hundred, there are two hundred in attendance. The entire course is taught out of a textbook; the prince merely copies, from the same textbook’s test bank, the test on which class grades are based.
He is after all a prince — not the sort to write his own tests.
Since there is no point in attending lectures, many students do not. This angers the prince.
What angers him even more is that a third of the students cheated on this semester’s midterm. Even though the New York Times recently featured his university’s expensive, pervasive, student surveillance cameras as a model for the nation, his business class still cheated.
Humiliated and enraged, he storms. The video of his storming is – like the test he takes out of the textbook – online for anyone to see.
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Here’s what seems to have happened.
[S]tudents [found] a version of the test and the grade key on line. Where is the security system for test banks, and how was it so easily obtained? Locally, they are saying that no security breaches happened and the answer key was simply found on line. Shame on the professor and the university. [Scroll down to comments at the link.]
Oy oy oy. Security systems again! First you gotta buy zillions of cameras and train them on the students while they take their exams so the classroom looks like a Vegas casino. THEN you gotta lock security into the exams your princes pick out of textbooks. It’s incredibly expensive, and you’re a public university in Florida, where expenditures for universities are in the cellar.
What to do?
The vast University of Central Florida is essentially an online university. It should drop its physical campus pretense.
Yes, a large percentage of online students cheat. But no one finds out.
… enters the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.
“I get credit for inventing the McRib fairly often,” [Roger] Mandigo conceded in an interview earlier this week… “We played an important role in the technology to bind pieces of meat to each other. I didn’t invent the McRib sandwich,” he said. “McDonald’s did that.”
… our stupidest state (just as she has long called the University of Georgia the worst university in America). But Florida has always been a major stupidest state contender, and now their incoming Senate president has, I think, tipped things over so that, yes, Florida is the stupidest state.
University of Florida professor Mike Haridopolos (here’s his appropriately shady-looking faculty page) is an absolutely stunning idiot. His idiocy is as stunning as the sun right in your eyes at the tip of Key West at noon.
The faculty didn’t want him appointed, but it’s an old Southern tradition to put politicians – and their wives – in universities so they can pocket money and throw their weight around.
[Haridopolos was hired at the] University of Florida as a guest lecturer in their Department of Political Science at a starting salary of $75,000, nearly double the $40,000 average for the position. UF faculty and the Democratic Party of Florida cited his lack of academic credentials or input by faculty prior to his hiring, as well as perceived conflict between his obligations as a state senator and an employee of the university.
And now a course wouldn’t ya know it! The ol’ boy “failed to disclose on required state forms that he was paid thousands of dollars by the marketing arm of one of the state’s largest appliance retailers for two years.”
Haridopolos told state ethics investigators he didn’t read the directions for filling out a financial disclosure form in 2004, then repeated his mistakes year after year — assuming he was doing it correctly.
“And I feel pretty silly,” he said, according to files released Wednesday. “I mean, I’m a college professor and I didn’t do it right.”
HYUK! And Isa professor and everything!
“I think what I did is I didn’t read the directions that well to start, and I just kept doing the same things year in-year out,” Haridolopos told the investigator, adding he spent no more than an hour filling out the forms.
He also said that he hadn’t read the separate instruction sheet and overlooked the notice that a specific description of assets over $1,000 was required, along with the name and address of his creditors.
Sue Marcum, an accounting professor at American University here in DC, has been found dead in her Bethesda house; police are calling it a probable homicide.
The comment about her in my headline – taken from Rate My Professors – is typical. She was apparently able to make a pretty dull subject interesting. Almost everyone agrees that she was a great teacher.
The few details about her death that have been released suggest a robbery that turned deadly — a shocking event for her safe, affluent neighborhood.
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The AU newspaper describes her students, some of them in tears, leaving her empty classroom this afternoon.
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Update: A break in the case.
… as Nina Martyris nicely calls it, in an article about censorship at an Indian university, always identifies intellectuality as the enemy. Reflective people who value unemotional deliberation and an openness to the complexity of human life and thought are intellectual snobs – as Michael Gerson calls President Obama in a recent opinion piece – unable to appreciate the higher wisdom of plain-spoken people. Gerson joins Sarah Palin here, who in her speeches relentlessly uses the word professor to condemn Obama.
In his response to the scandal of the University of Mumbai having dropped a novel from its syllabus in response to political pressure, the author of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay reminds us that “it’s one thing to be scandalous but quite another to be scandalously stupid.” Stupid is influential people in the world’s largest democracy choosing repressive parochialism over free thought.
In response to Sarah Palin and Michael Gerson and others, who insist that a president who openly values ambiguity, intellectual depth, and the free play of the mind — a president who voices his belief that there are stronger and weaker uses of reason in thinking about civic life — threatens the country, Michael Kinsley writes:
If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?
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UD thanks Jack, a reader in Ontario.
Excerpts from a 2008 interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals — rough mathematical shapes “whose uneven contours … mimic the irregularities found in nature” — who died today at 85.
I can stand loneliness. In fact, I’m rarely comfortable in a big crowd, because big crowds automatically are very specifically organized by dates, by tradition, by training. And I don’t sound like a mathematician. I don’t sound like a physicist either. Nor do I sound like an art critic. There’s very great strength in being a stranger, if one brings something new.
… Perhaps my early rootlessness gave me an awareness that one can live without being so completely specified.
… [A] large number of truths that I discovered did not result from purely mathematical deduction but from skilled examination of mathematical pictures.
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I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes…
… and smarts” suddenly dies.
Richard Nagareda, professor of law at Vanderbilt, has died at the age of 47.
Not long ago, Vanderbilt featured him in a slide show series called A Day in the Life of…
By all accounts, he was a great teacher, a wit, and a sweet man. His work on mass torts – “allegations of tortious misconduct affecting large numbers of broadly dispersed persons” – was enormously influential.
Robert Klose on the eccentric professor.
Rupert Vallentine, an Australian professor of engineering, dies.
At war he discovered teaching – ad hoc talks to troops and chess to Japanese POWs… At home, he listened to music, smoked from a stubby white cigarette holder and developed from first principles a way of cleaning the pool by swimming with one leg straight which drew leaves into the centre by centrifugal force. He sang his children to sleep with a mouth organ and when they were asked at school to nominate a religion he suggested: “Theodolite”. It worked.
In blocking Diamond’s nomination, Shelby said:
“I do not believe he’s ready to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board,” Shelby said in August. “I do not believe that the current environment of uncertainty would benefit from monetary policy decisions made by board members who are learning on the job.”
Not many days later, Diamond gets the Nobel Prize for economics. (Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides also won.)
Talk about a fast learner! I guess Shelby’s diss really made Diamond hit the books.
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UD hears Shelby’s working with consultants from the Chinese government to figure out how to respond to Diamond’s award.