… very expensive, very board-motivated, Victor Dzau, from Cardiobrief.

Cardiobrief notes that Dzau is shy about his board membership at PepsiCo, which he doesn’t list on his faculty bio page (he lists his Genzyme board membership only).

Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo …strikes me as the most troubling of all [of his four corporate board memberships]. As a prominent and influential health care leader, how could Dzau treat a tax on soda, or a ban on vending machines in schools, or any of a multitude of other health policy issues relating to the obesity and diabetes epidemic? In addition, might Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo (and the other companies) produce a chilling effect on the free speech and activities of Duke faculty and affiliated doctors?

Roy Poses, at Health Care Renewal, looks more deeply at the

very

very

VERY

VERY

(one very for each of his four corporate boards) busy, very overcompensated, chancellor of the Duke University Health System.

Victor Dzau’s take-home pay has inspired a Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke to stage campus protests against his latest bonuses.

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Duke’s misstep in this matter is clear.  It hired a Professor of Christian Ethics who actually believes that stuff.

Compassion is always good. The professor in question is adored.

But when an alcoholic on the faculty — multiple DUIs, operating without a license, public intoxication, felonious assault on a police officer, violation of pre-trial release, failure to appear in court —melts down in front of her students, in class …

… “She wasn’t finishing her sentences,” [one] student said. “It was like she couldn’t find the right words. We asked what was wrong but she just said she wasn’t feeling very well.”

For a few minutes after watching Evans, another student said they believed she was having a stroke.

“Someone went to call 911, and everyone else just sat there really upset,” the student said. “She’s easily everyone’s favorite teacher.”

… While the class waited for the ambulance to arrive, students tried to talk to Evans.

According to the student, when asked what was wrong, Evans told students that the university had taken away her job because she had been charged with a DUI. When police came into the class, they told students to leave.

This woman – driving drunk on a suspended license, assaulting police officers – is dangerous. She should not have been in a James Madison University classroom.

A strange professor there has died.

Tom Trusky had obsessions — among them, the work of outsider artist James Charles Castle, about whom he wrote a biography. Here’s an announcement of a recent Castle retrospective. His work has become extremely pricey.

Boise State assumed Trusky – a man of exceedingly modest ways – left nothing of value. It was very wrong. He left the university a gift.

[T]he contents of his U.S. Bank safe-deposit box …left Trusky associates reeling. Named as his personal representative in his will, [his friend Cort] Conley was staggered to open the box and find a dozen books by acclaimed artist-bookmaker James Castle.

“I knew he had some of Castle’s work, but when I went through it, I was blown away by how many drawings he had,” [another friend] said. “I don’t think you can buy a Castle drawing today for less than $5,000.”

Greg Kucera, who sells Castle’s work at his Seattle gallery, says individual drawings have sold there for $5,000 to $20,000. The books in Trusky’s safe deposit box collectively contain hundreds of drawings…

His will stipulates that their recipient can never sell the books, which BSU almost lost to the Portland Art Museum by waiting until the final day to meet a legal deadline for accepting them.

Two of his students speak in the article’s comment thread.

Professor Trusky’s most valuable legacy to the university lives in the hearts and minds of his students. No one demanded more–or excited us more–in exposing us to the written word, with all its beauty and power.

My enduring image of him: seeing him careening through a turn at 10th and Grove on his bike, hands crossed behind his back.

University Diaries has been covering executive bonuses at Duke University. Earlier posts are here, here, and here.

From a comment thread about the Duke bonuses in the Duke newspaper:

Dr [Victor] Dzau is a director of four major corporations (sample Pepsi) earning more than $1 million in fees each year in addition to his Duke salary and his bonus. When you consider the boards meet regularly (usually 10 or 12 times a year) in distant cities, … this [is] an undue diversion of his attention.

The experts agree. From a recent New York Times article about university presidents and chancellors sitting on corporate boards:

Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent research firm focusing on corporate governance, [says], “it is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” [when you sit on many boards]. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.

Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards… “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”

… [There is now] a movement to limit the number of boards each president serves. In the University of California system, for example, the Board of Regents voted in January to restrict board membership for its chancellors to three.

Raymond D. Cotton, a partner at the Washington law firm Mintz Levin who specializes in presidential contracts and has represented about 250 institutions, says he recommends to universities that they write into contracts that the president can serve on a maximum of two boards.

Duke is rewarding Dzau for not being on campus.

Here’s some important background on the Duke Bonuses.

Kudos to Professor Amy Laura Hall, spearheading the effort to make sure these men get every penny coming to them. And then some.

… these two YouTubes from Duke should help motivate you to dig into your pockets.

Please see this post for background. And remember: Nothing you can give could ever be enough; but whatever you can give will help.

The former head of Duke University’s bariatric surgery program has been charged with embezzling $267,000 from the school.

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The cover of his book.

… rape?

No comment.

… 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.

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

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.