That’s Rep. Lois Kolkhorst of Texas, where the first consideration in choosing a university is the football team.

Texas has a new law that will put online a school’s attendance costs, plus published work, syllabi, cvs, and salaries of all professors at public universities in the state. It had bipartisan support.

The AAUP isn’t happy.

… The Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors requested a repeal of the law in its June newsletter. The group said the law is an unfunded mandate that would have a chilling effect on classroom discussion of controversial subjects.

If professors are required to post detailed descriptions of class material online, those opposed to the discussion topics would be able to target specific classes and professors, the association said.

“As far as any of us can tell, this is an attempt by cultural conservatives to identify course content they might view as undesirable, and is thus clearly an attack upon academic freedom,” a previous newsletter said.

Murray Leaf, speaker of the Faculty Senate at the University of Texas at Dallas, said that despite the bill’s portrayal as a measure promoting transparency, it displays “an insulting mistrust of higher education faculty.”

“Faculty in the United States decide the curriculum,” Leaf said. “We are largely autonomous. The people behind this bill are opposed to that and are trying to undermine it.”

A law requiring professors to post their résumés online suggests that they’re not qualified to teach their classes. And the higher education system depends on peer review by other educators, which is a better method for judging professors’ qualifications than review by the general public, Leaf said.

“The law really isn’t primarily about giving students better information, but about giving people who want to attack higher education better information,” he said. “We’re not against transparency. We’re against being attacked by our enemies.”…

This isn’t a very good argument. Professors should be fine with giving attackers better information, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t that make the attack better informed, and therefore perhaps fairer? Putting this in terms of “our enemies” makes professors sound like Richard Nixon.

… Dr. [George H.] Udvarhelyi felt that the well-rounded medical student needed to include art, music and literature in his educational repertoire.

His efforts resulted in the establishment at the Hopkins medical school of the Office of Cultural Affairs in 1977 — the first at a U.S. medical school — which brought prominent actors, musicians, artists and authors to the East Baltimore medical campus.

For years, Dr. Udvarhelyi had argued that after bringing the finest academically qualified students to the medical school, “we kill them,” he said in [a] 1995 article.

“Four years as a medical student, six years as a resident — 10 years they have no time to look at a book again, no time to listen to music,” he said in the 1995 article. “If you don’t give them a little free time to think, to enjoy these things, that is bad.”

As a result, he was able to bring such noted artists as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Aaron Copland, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Richard Leakey, Leo Steinberg and Phyllis Diller to Turner Auditorium…

Phyllis Diller?

Anyway, read the obituary. He had one of those long, bizarre, multilingual, lives …

PETER ERLINDER ESCAPES RWANDAN JAIL
ONLY TO BE MUGGED IN ST PAUL

The William Mitchell law professor, freshly released from a Rwandan prison after being charged with minimizing the country’s genocide, has only been back in Minnesota for less than a week. But his luck doesn’t seem to have changed.

According to St. Paul police spokesman Paul Schnell, Erlinder was standing in front of his home Thursday night when one of a group of teenagers across the street came over, flashed a handgun, and demanded money. Erlinder threw some cash on the ground, and the robber grabbed it and ran away…

A Boston University professor of music is about to retire.

From BU Today:

… [Joel Sheveloff] reflects on nearly half a century as not just a teacher, but a thorn in the side of the administration and a beloved but incorrigible nudge. With his gravelly, Mailer-esque voice and old-fashioned suspenders, Sheveloff has a way of wresting control of a room and holding forth on just about anything. He may grouse about everything from his department’s curriculum to the traffic on the BU Bridge, but if he criticizes his students at all, it is with affectionate bemusement. He likes them.

They like him back: “I was in Dr. Sheveloff’s class in 1973, and I remember him to this day as one of those rare people who inspire your life on all levels,” writes an alum on Ratemyprofessors.com. “Of course his knowledge is awesome,” writes a student, “but what makes Dr. Shev one of the best is his insight. He understands the paradoxes of the human condition and how music expresses the full range of this experience.” And from another student: “Professor Sheveloff is hilarious. He makes each lecture immensely enjoyable by joking, dancing around, and just creating a pleasant class atmosphere.”

… All of Sheveloff’s complaints are major, from whether BU’s orchestra and choir directors should be full-time (they are now, he says, thanks to him) to an increase in course credits from three to four (“they make the candy bar smaller and charge you more for it”) to what he believes is the pandemic misinterpretation of Bach’s Musical Offering.

… His passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Rogers and Hart songbooks are part of what fueled his friendship with John Daverio (CFA’75,’76, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at the age of 48. The loss devastated Sheveloff, who spoke in a eulogy for Daverio of how “for more than a quarter of a century, John and I discussed issues, shared intimacies, and otherwise interacted by employing strategically placed song lines in our dialogue. We both enjoyed finding relevant lines — this game belonged to the two of us.”

… When it comes to J. S. Bach, Sheveloff serves up a feast of superlatives. Bach, he asserts, is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music.”

As he expounds on a quirky meter in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, an assistant pops her head in the room to tell Sheveloff he has a phone call from his wife, whom he refers to as “She who must be obeyed.” He’s been married 48 years. “Feels like 75,” he says.

… Where they once scrawled in spiral notebooks, students now sit in class tapping away at laptops. “Students think they can get anything they need from Google,” he says, an arm swiping the air in the universal sign for oy vey. “My colleagues are concerned about kids sitting in class e-mailing and looking at Facebook. In my class I say, go ahead — I’m not your mother.” …

I leave this afternoon to join Mr UD in Utah for a few days. We’ll stay in the mountains, and of course blogging will continue as always.

My graduate school mentor, Wayne Booth, grew up in American Fork, Utah. I’ll make a little pilgrimage there in memory of him, and I’ll write about it here.

Want to know what Booth was like? Read this letter (scroll down to Remembering Wayne Booth). Just the thing for the day after Bloomsday.

Usually students miss more lectures than their professors, but in week five of the spring 2010 term, Eric Hudson, popular instructor of 8.02: Electricity & Magnetism, would have given chronic class-skippers competition.

“I think I’ve been gone five of the last seven weeks or something,” he said with a light chuckle, seeming awed at that fraction himself. “It’s really been terrible,” he said.

Hudson found out this past December that he did not receive tenure. In those weeks away from MIT, he had been in England, Sweden, and the country of Georgia interviewing for a new post as professor…

A student’s tribute to a professor who really got around.

At a time when professors still routinely suffer the casual disdain conveyed by headlines like this one, about the last Japanese prime minister —

PM WHO NEVER LOST AIR OF BEFUDDLED PROFESSOR

Dubbed “The Alien” for his big, staring eyes and penchant for head-scratching philosophical rambling, Yukio Hatoyama was always an unusual choice of leader.

The offspring of a political and business dynasty, Mr Hatoyama built a solid academic career before following his grandfather, father and brother into politics. But he never quite lost the air of a slightly befuddled professor.

— it is rather stirring to have produced, from among our ranks, a professor who storms around town on his BMW motorcycle, stopping only to reveal his genitals to women.

This University of New Hampshire professor (UD thanks a reader for the tip.) (Scroll down to Edward Larkin.) has been convicted of indecent exposure while astride a crotch rocket:

… This is a fellow who approached a mother and her teenaged daughter in a Milford supermarket parking lot with his genitals exposed. He was caught miles away, with his zipper still down.

Yet, as of last week, Professor of German Edward Larkin, 60, was still employed by the University of New Hampshire. He has been on paid administrative leave since his arrest a year ago. That pay continued despite his Nov. 3, 2009, conviction and it continued despite his decision this past March not to appeal.

“The University of New Hampshire has concluded its inquiry into Professor Ed Larkin’s conviction on misdemeanor charges,” said a UNH spokesman, “and has advised Professor Larkin of the consequences of that conviction on his employment with the university.”…

Hey! Rock out with your cock out and get a fully-paid year-long vacation! But only if you’re tenured.

Avner Magen, a computer science professor, and Andrew Herzenberg, a biologist, were climbing a glacier in Alaska.

… Maureen McLaughlin of Denali National Park and Preserve, said avalanches are “not uncommon this time of the year in the area where they were climbing. The temperature gets warm and snow gets heavier . . . and we see avalanches.”

The park is best known among climbers for Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America.

A cat looks at a queen.

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

UPDATE: We’ve seen Mina Dulcan on University Diaries before. The earlier post quotes University World News citing a statement Dulcan made to the BBC:

Mina Dulcan, editor of the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry which published a study on paroxetine and children, told the BBC investigative show Panorama two years ago that she was not bothered by the fact the published article was at odds with the data and appeared to have been ghostwritten.

“I don’t have any regrets about publishing at all. It generated all sorts of useful discussion which is the purpose of a scholarly journal,” Dulcan said.

Way queenly!

This is a breaking story, and I can’t even get a confirmed name for the guy, much less which university is lucky enough to have him on its botany faculty, but what we have so far is that an Egyptian-American professor sailed through security at JFK with “six metal boxes containing two 9mm pistols, 250 bullets, two swords, and 11 daggers,” only to be stopped by security at Cairo.

His name is Mohamed Ibrahim Khalf, or Mohammed Ibrahim Marei, or something.

I’m sure I’ll be updating this.

… Southern Connecticut State University’s journalism department, and indeed, when interviewed recently by the police, Jerry Dunklee said he was “under the impression that whatever he did in the privacy of his own home was his business.”

But there’s freedom, and there’s the law. The indecency law.

A Southern Connecticut State University journalism professor has been arrested for public indecency after neighbors say he was masturbating in his window.

Jerry Dunklee has also been charged with breach of peace.

Police in New Haven were called to Front Street last week. Dunklee’s neighbor told police that she had been dealing with his “odd behavior” for four years. The neighbor says whenever she walks her dog, Dunklee would run to his window, undress and begin masturbating.

Another neighbor told police that he would often see Dunklee dancing around his house naked.

When the neighbor was walking with officers around her yard, police noticed Dunklee standing naked in the window and when he saw the police, he quickly sat down.

… at his university office. He’s in critical condition. He was active in Iran’s Green Revolution.

… what Paul Krugman said today.

Duflo:

What the crisis has made bluntly apparent is that all this intelligence is not employed in a particularly productive way. Admittedly, a financial sector is necessary to act as the intermediary between entrepreneurs and investors. But the sector seems to have taken a quasi-autonomous existence without close connection with the financing requirements of the real economy. Thomas Philippon calculates that the financial sector, which accounts for 8% of GDP in 2006, is probably at least 2% above the size required by this intermediation.3 Worse, the sub-prime crisis is almost certainly in part linked to the fact the needs of the financial markets (the insatiable demand from banks for the famous “mortgage backed securities”) led to excessive borrowing and a housing bubble.

Duflo got the Clark Award today.

She’s a Cambridge University law professor, and that’s the title of one of her articles up there: Private Libel and Public Accountability.

Scholarship, Karl Marx tells us, repeats itself first as something or other and second as farce. (That’s not the exact quotation.) And as Palmer’s private trashing of historians whose work touches on the same subjects as her husband’s work becomes public, she and her husband (Orlando Figes) definitively enter the farce era.

A prominent British historian has found a new way to get in trouble: Orlando Figes, a historian of Stalin’s Russia at Birkbeck College, London, and a contributor to the New York Review, has admitted that his wife has been publishing hostile comments about rival historians at Amazon.co.uk under a pseudonym.

… According to The Guardian, Figes’s attorney conceded that Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, a lawyer and lecturer at Cambridge University, had posted reviews at Amazon describing Rachel Polonsky’s book “Molotov’s Magic Lantern” as “dense,” “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Robert Service’s book about Trotsky was called a “dull read,” and his history of communism was dismissed as “rubbish” and “an awful book.”

Figes’s book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” on the other hand, was described by the same reviewer – posting under the psuedonym “Historian” — as a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history, the work of a writer with “superb storytelling skills.” The reviewer concluded, “I hope he writes forever.” …

The wife of the writer Orlando
Adores him as if he were Brando.
If only Ms Palmer
Had been a bit calmer
She might have avoided a scando.