David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote this last month about the “moral naturalists,” a group of evolutionary psychologists who argue that we’ve evolved an innate moral grammar, rather like Chomsky’s innate linguistic grammar.

He features the work of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:

… Hauser … began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense.

Yet now, with a heavy-handed irony that seems more the realm of fiction than real life, Hauser’s own morality is in serious question. He has taken leave from Harvard as a major investigation into his possible research fraud continues.

As far back as fifteen years ago, Hauser’s methods and results were being seriously challenged. He routinely seems to make claims about primate behavior unsupported by evidence, and has already retracted one influential paper.

“If scientists can’t trust published papers,” comments a fellow researcher, “the whole process breaks down.’’

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The subtitle of Hauser’s forthcoming book deepens the irony: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

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UPDATE: Interesting to see that, back in ’06, Richard Rorty sensed some bullshit at work here.

The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”

… [Harry] Whittington’s work was brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

[F]ew would dispute Gould’s observation that, in his description of the Burgess Shales, Whittington had undertaken some of the most elegant technical work ever accomplished in palaeontology. Gould added that if there was a Nobel Prize in the subject, Whittington and his research team should be the first recipients.

… [Whittington’s removal as chair of a department during an administrative shakeup] probably came as something of a relief to [him], who was in any case too modest a man to care much about status.

His official retirement from the [Cambridge] Woodwardian professorship in 1983 made no difference to Whittington’s routine and he continued to put in a steady morning’s work at the Department of Earth Sciences every day until shortly before his death.

Of some 200 published papers, around 50 were published after his retirement, the last in 2009 shortly before his 93rd birthday…

Doug Fields said this last May when he resigned as president of the University of New Mexico faculty senate. He, like many other UNM professors, was protesting the wretched management of the university by its president, David Schmidly (long history here).

And he meant that thing about leaving. This article describes graduate students taking over much of the teaching, especially in math and physics, which have recently lost 25 professors “to higher salaries at other universities,” says the deputy provost. He doesn’t mention the no-confidence vote against Schmidly, the many sports scandals over which he has presided, his effort to give his son a high-paying job at UNM, etc., etc.

Several classes are being canceled as well.

Although it’s hard to confirm this from where UD‘s sitting, it does look as though an exodus of UNM faculty is underway. They’ve still got Mike Locksley, though.

Bioluminescence work on the side of 1200 U-Hauls.

… and mathematics.

Links here.

Since UD‘s very interested in – and about to teach a course in – beauty, she’ll have more to say about this film later today. She has to think about it. And of course she’s not going to be able to see it in the near future…

A new fatwa has overcome the prohibition of gender mixing in unsupervised areas among unrelated people: Women may now breastfeed men with whom they come into contact, thus creating a ‘family’ bond which makes the man and woman related and the contact permissible.

Although too old to teach under these circumstances, UD looks forward to reading Rate My Expressers.

Hard initially to get hold of her nipple; once locked on, very good.

Slow. Too much class time spent pumping, sucking. Female students look bored.

Plays favorites. Feedings should be fairer.

Talks endlessly about how much better she lactated when she taught at a more selective school.

Milk production fine, but men sleepy after, and professor seems unable to wake them. What are they teaching in ed school these days??

A Duke researcher’s questionable experimental methods seem to have inspired someone to look closely at his cv. On it, he claims a Rhodes scholarship he didn’t earn.

The Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials.

The lead researcher, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while it investigates allegations that Dr. Potti falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar.

The article goes on to suggest that Potti has a habit of padding his cv.

… was found dead this morning, in his lab.

College of Engeering professor and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chairman Francesco Cerrina was found dead in a laboratory on the fifth floor of the Photonics Center Monday morning, Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said.

… The Boston Police Department arrived at the scene, but after investigation have declined to take the case on themselves.

BPD Sergeant William Ridge said that BPD would only take on the case if there were a chance that it was homicide.

“They don’t think there is any foul play,” Ridge said, adding police were not sure about the cause of death.

“[This] leaves it up to accident or suicide,” Ridge said.

Or natural causes.

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More information here.

Don’t mess with the big boys.

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UD thanks Frank for the link.

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…