As with the students of Mark Hauser, so with Suchitra Holgersson’s students: You can’t train them in empirical methods and then expect them to look the other way when you fudge things.

… Holgersson, who joined the [Sahgrenska] Academy [in Sweden] two years ago, [has been found] guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data … and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert [review] panel itself during the investigation.

Professor Holgersson’s own PhD students blew the whistle on her.

Holgersson studies transplantation and immunity.

The provost of Texas Tech

suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.

More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…

Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.

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Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?

… (title: On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures), has died.

… Although [Julian] Besag was a leading figure in a notoriously complex field, he was himself highly averse to all forms of pomposity…

… Besag was a passionate man who was demanding of both colleagues and himself. He was a keen hockey player, devoted to Northop Hall hockey club, and once trialled for the Welsh national team. After moving to Seattle he loved to sail, voyaging single-handed through Puget Sound and beyond, even after kidney failure required him to undertake a punishing regime of self-dialysis…

… from a New York City high-rise.

Background on Janet Hamburg here.

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Update, Kansan.com: “A detective with the New York City Police Department said Hamburg jumped from the 19th floor of a building on East 57th St.“

… just caught my eye in the New York Times. I’ll link you to it now. Then I’ll read it and see if I’ve got anything to say…

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Hokay.

Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Absolutely. It’s okay for a few courses at extremely expensive colleges to be taught by carefully selected adjuncts and grad students. But more than a few? Scandalous.

[If] colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic ­facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.

Uh-huh.

But I dunno. If you read the whole thing, it’s confused. It takes on all sorts of big issues – presidents’ salaries, tenure, athletics, inequality – but doesn’t have the space or the organization to make much sense of them.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychology professor who took leave after University investigators said he was responsible for scientific misconduct, will teach two courses at the Harvard Extension School this academic year even though he is facing a federal inquiry.

Way bad call. This is a swiftly moving story, its latest charge fabrication of evidence. Things could get worse still. Having Hauser on your active teaching faculty communicates cluelessness as to the seriousness of the case against him.

… and more characterize the Marc Hauser misconduct story. The journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science attempts to clarify things.

Mr UD loves it — as do many of their friends — and since he does the food shopping, we eat a lot of Joe’s food.

A longish article in Fortune tries to explain the market’s appeal.

Who’s a fan of Trader Joe’s? Young Hollywood types like Jessica Alba are regularly photographed brandishing Trader Joe’s shopping bags — but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly is a fan too. “What’s not to like?” says Costco (COST, Fortune 500) co-founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. “They’re very good retailers, and we admire them a lot.” Visit a Trader Joe’s early in the day, and there are senior citizens on fixed incomes shopping for bargains; on weekends and evenings a well-heeled crowd takes over. Kevin Kelley, whose consulting firm Shook Kelley has researched Trader Joe’s for its competitors, jokes that the typical shopper is the “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.”

But Mr UD hates Volvos.

Whenever UD worries that the currency of the title “Professor” has been devalued, she reads articles like this one in USA Today, about the styling of the latest Mercedes-Benz model, and heaves a sigh of relief.

“The new CLS points the way forward for the future perceptible design idiom of Mercedes-Benz”, explains Professor Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes-Benz. “At the same time it takes its inspiration from the great tradition of stylish, refined sportiness which has always been a feature of Mercedes coupés.”

If Mercedes-Benz thinks it’s a plus to put “Professor” in front of the names of its designers (this guy’s predecessor was also Professor), I guess we’re still prestigious.

… remarkable candor.

Joan Gussow, locavore, is interviewed in the New York Times about reconstructing her garden along the Hudson River after floods.

The NYT writer quotes from one of Gussow’s memoirs, in which

[Ms. Gussow writes] that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband [after he died], or even grieve for him.

“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes.

… the literary critic, has died.

The New York Times.

… [H]e almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”

For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.

Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” …

From the New York Times obituary for Bernard Knox:

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”

He continued, “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”

Or no, wait. Leadership.

… there was an

… insurrection among [Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s] staff… “[When] Marc was in Australia, [said an informed source], the university came in and seized his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’ They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence [of research fraud].”

Background here.

Not a peep out of Harvard all this time. They seem to have retracted one of his papers… or gotten him to retract it or something… But otherwise, three years after strong evidence of fraud on the part of one of its highest-profile faculty members, Harvard’s doing and saying nothing. Only because someone at Harvard leaked a letter about it to the press do we know anything.

The cover-up is beginning to look as bad as the scandal.

Ellen Schrecker, in Forbes, describes the process whereby tenured professors become contingent instructors who in turn become internet traffic directors.

She begins with a story.

… California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

One instructor, 700 students. Online. What could go wrong?