… but this is one of those stories… those Sorceror’s Apprentice stories… those Strega Nona stories… those shaggy dog stories… in which more and more things pile up and it gets crazier and crazier until you have to laugh. UD has to laugh, anyway.
So all day on and off she’s been following the story of Marcello DelCarlo, a biochem professor at Rush University in Chicago (his faculty webpage was up earlier today; let’s see if it’s still there) whose morning began with a domestic battery charge. His girlfriend says he shook her violently.
That’s bad, certainly, but not bad enough, professor-behaviorwise, to get you mentioned on University Diaries. (Yes! It’s still there!)
Then, when police looked through his apartment, they found
… more than a dozen cardboard tubes filled with an explosive substance and capped with plaster … One of the devices ignited as police bomb and arson investigators tried removing it, causing a small fire that was quickly extinguished by the unit’s fire sprinkler system, according to prosecutors and witnesses. The block-long building was evacuated, and the remaining devices were taken from the home and destroyed.
Although the professor scoffed that they were merely little firecrackers he’d fashioned for July fourth, the police added to his domestic battery misdemeanor “felony possession of an explosive or incendiary device.”
And then when the police talked some more with the girlfriend, she told them “he made the explosives and traded them for meth.”
Oh. And:
On Monday a Cook County judge set DelCarlo’s bail at $225,000. He is currently serving a sentence of six months of court supervision — a form of probation — for a January conviction for misdemeanor possession of ammunition without a valid firearm owner’s identification card and possession of an unregistered handgun.
From a profile in the Sacramento Bee of Tom Campbell, Republican Senate candidate :
… Campbell grew up in Chicago, the son of William J. Campbell, a federal judge. He obtained three economics degrees, culminating in a doctorate, all from the University of Chicago. His experience in the free-market Chicago economics graduate program helped to distance Campbell from his Democratic upbringing.
… Campbell also obtained a law degree at Harvard in 1976, satisfying his parents’ desire for him to secure a professional credential. He served two prestigious clerkships, first on the federal appellate court in Washington, D.C., and then with Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
During that time, Campbell met his wife, Susanne. She taught him how to ride a bicycle at age 25, amusing White, a former football star.
“Justice White was just amazed there was an adult male who couldn’t ride a bicycle,” recalled S. Elizabeth Gibson, a University of North Carolina law professor who clerked with Campbell. “If it had been me, I would not have announced it, but Tom announced he had learned how to ride as a great accomplishment.”…
From a review of Professor Untat, a new book by Uwe Kamenz and Martin Werle:
…. [P]rofessors [in Germany] have an extreme form of tenure, so that for them, unemployment simply does not exist. There are also no real controls within the system, so they are left very much to their own devices.
The result, the authors argue, is that only a third of the large body of German professors work hard and with integrity, while about a fifth abuse the system to the limit.
[They get] their doctoral students to do a large proportion of their teaching and administration, and most or even all of their research, while still passing themselves off as the authors.
… These beleaguered doctoral students work incredibly long hours on all manner of activities and projects. They often have little time during the week to work on their own doctorates, and receive little in the way of supervision.
All of this is possible because professors in German academia are in a position of total power over their doctoral students – and because the latter desperately want to earn their degrees.
Some of the activities described in Professor Untat take some beating. On the teaching front, professors block their courses so that they need to be on campus only two or three days a week – during semesters, that is.
Furthermore, “lectures” often comprise little more than PowerPoint presentations prepared by doctoral students. In such cases, the latter inevitably are more in command of the material than the academics who present it.
In the worst cases, sabbaticals are used either for extended holidays or to engage in lucrative consultancy work…
… and finds himself in the hangar.
A British law professor is slamming Air Canada after the airline left him asleep on a plane for 90 minutes after it landed — and he woke up in a hangar at Vancouver International Airport.
… “It’s absolute craziness,” said [Kris Lines]… who is head of sports law at Staffordshire University.
“The last thing I remember was taking off from Calgary. I knew I was safely on board and there was no further destinations and it was all good,” Mr. Lines added.
“Somebody would wake me up at the end.”
What he didn’t expect was to be roused by a mechanic after the Air Canada Jazz plane was towed into a hangar at YVR…
UD, a nervous flier, finds this story amazing. Short of being blotto (which UD never is), she cannot imagine attaining the buddhistic calm that would allow you to miss your plane’s arrival at an airport…
… there’s Evergreen State College in Washington, which seems to have let one of its professors run an abroad program pretty much all by himself. Which meant that he just collected money from students and put it in his personal bank account. Link (Can’t figure out how to do links properly here at the hotel):
http://www.theolympian.com/2010/03/26/1185197/ethics-probe-begun-for-ex-prof.html#ixzz0kEro8YqL
The college auditor reported in February 2009 that [Jorge] Gilbert had not accounted for at least $50,000 in student payments that he collected between 2003 and 2008 for an international program in Chile. The audit also found that he misrepresented the college by signing contracts with a Chilean company partly owned by his family.
Students who took part in Gilbert’s Chile program in 2008 reported that they deposited the approximately $3,000 for their trip into an account at West Coast Bank, for which Gilbert was the sole signer. The money did not include quarterly tuition.
The college began its investigation of the Chile program after some of the students on the 2008 trip did not get the airline tickets that they thought they had purchased. Gilbert had arranged for the students’ tickets through a travel agency that went bankrupt.
University Diaries has covered, over the years, a number of stories involving medical school professors – especially anesthesiologists – who abuse or become addicted to the pills they handle. Pharmacy professors and students have similar levels of access, and similar problems.
Charles Butler, an eminent British pharmacologist who until recently was a visiting professor at Reading University, has been hoarding and illegally dispensing a zillion drugs. But he has his reasons.
Prof Butler, who was awarded an MBE in 2005 for services to the NHS, pretended he had to hire a locum to cover his absences at a pharmacy practice while he was working as an advisor to a health watchdog.
But police discovered that Prof Butler, an advisor to the Department of Health, had sold his practice years earlier.
During a raid on a flat he owns in Whitechapel, east London, officers also found drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, “crystal meth” and the date-rape drug GHB, which police believe were used during sex parties hosted by the 64-year-old.
… [Butler] claimed almost £175,000 in expenses from the Health Services Commission to pay for a locum at his practice while he was away.
… During the raid on Butler’s second home in London, police found cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, marijuana resin and the “date rape” drugs gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and rohypnol, which are powerful relaxants.
Sedatives including temazapam, diazepam, ketamine and midazolam were also discovered…
Vancouver Sun:
A group of professors in Saskatchewan are criticizing a scholarship that’s being offered to the children of fallen Canadian soldiers, calling it a “glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan.”
Sixteen University of Regina professors have drafted an open letter to school president Vianne Timmons, stating their concerns.
“It’s about associating heroism with the military intervention of Afghanistan,” said Jeffrey Webber, a political-science professor at the school…
The open letter, endorsed by Webber and his colleagues, asked for three things: the immediate withdrawal from Project Hero; public pressure on government to provide funding for universal access to post-secondary education; and a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian “imperialism” to be held before the end of semester exams…
Before the end of semester exams! WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.
Norman Schureman, a professor at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, has been shot and killed. He got into some sort of argument at a party, after which the person he argued with left and returned with a gun.
Eleanor Salotto disappeared over a month ago. It looks as though her body has been found (by a group of men out fishing) in the James River.
Sweet Briar’s president, who has a blog, has been writing about her. There’s also been a Facebook page.
She was chair of the English department.
… is a most Nabokovian name. But rather than coming to us from Ada, or Ardor, this name comes to us from the Yale School of Management, where it belongs to a professor of management. Vroom’s name is preceded by his title: BearingPoint Professor of Management & Professor of Psychology.
Now for a spot of awkwardness.
The court-appointed official in charge of winding down BearingPoint Inc. is suing Yale University to recover $6 million the consulting firm paid to endow a chair in management and name facilities at the university.
The donations were part of a $30 million, seven-year deal between BearingPoint and Yale’s School of Management.
The consulting firm made three payments of $2 million each to the school in the two years before the firm sought bankruptcy-court protection in February 2009.
… [The official] is also seeking the return of $2.1 million BearingPoint paid to Yale three months before its Chapter 11 filing in a deal that allowed the firm’s employees to attend leadership classes and education programs at the school.
… Mr. [Victor H.] Vroom holds a chair endowed by BearingPoint under its deal with the university, which was stuck by the firm’s then chief executive, Harry L. You, a Yale graduate…
It looks as though Vroom will have to stop holding that chair.
There’s so much you can do with two million dollars in government grant money! This post’s headline is a partial list of some of the ideas Daniel Kwok, a Canadian engineering professor at the University of Calgary, and recipient of many grants from that country’s main technology funder, came up with.
It’s a long list because Canada is very, very slow. Very, very slowly that country gears up to … uh… what? Somebody reports something to someone… stuff is passed along to the police whose investigation … uh…
The documents point to major problems with oversight of Canada’s multibillion-dollar research system — holes so glaring that one leading ethics expert says he hopes the case will jolt federal politicians into giving “marching orders” to Canada’s research councils and universities to get their acts together.
“There is a public accountability here that is just missing,” says Michael McDonald, founding director of the centre for applied ethics at the University of British Columbia.
… [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] officials, four years after the investigations into Kwok’s conduct began, took the most drastic sanction at their disposal. In September 2009 they cut off all Kwok’s grants indefinitely, accusing him of plagiarism and misuse of funds in 2005 or before.
McDonald says it’s hard to fathom why it took NSERC so long to act.
“Four years is way too long for something of this kind,” he says. Buying stereos, TVs and car parts with science grants seems such an “egregious” breach of the rules that someone with a fifth-grade education can understand it, he says: “It’s obvious, a no-brainer.”
Canada’s slow, but Kwok is fast:
… Documents released by NSERC show that by 2005 the university had launched investigations into allegations of “financial misconduct” and “scientific misconduct” involving “plagiarism.”
Kwok did not wait around for the results of the investigations. In the spring of 2005, he … stunned his colleague[s] with the news that he was moving to the University of Calgary, leaving the Edmonton engineering department scrambling to pick up his teaching load and graduate students.
… More than half the money was awarded after his conduct in Edmonton had come under scrutiny and he had moved to Calgary.
The university kept it quiet. The NSERC passed the buck. The scientist pulled in more government money for his subwoofer.
[The University of Alberta] made a deal with the researcher: in the “event of timely repayment” of the money spent on car parts, phones, electronic gadgets and entertainment systems, the university would not pursue restitution for other questionable purchases made with research grants.
The researcher gave $24,676.33 to the University of Alberta’s lawyers in the fall of 2006, “subject to reaching agreement on suitable terms of a release and a confidentiality agreement.”
The University of Alberta returned $21,485.67 to NSERC and another $3,000 to other agencies that had financed the research.
In keeping with the federal policy for dealing with possible fraud, NSERC then turned the case over to the [police] in 2006 to investigate “the misuse of the $24,000 grant funds and also the possibility that more than this amount was misused.”
The documents show that NSERC officials initially decided no sanctions should be taken against the scientist or red flags put on his file until the [police] completed [their] investigation — a position that some found infuriating.
“This person is still receiving NSERC money, in spite of highly unethical behaviour,” one scientist wrote…
The long article is an hilarious compendium of no comments and it’ll take years for us even to begin investigating — all of this from universities, the police, the government… Meanwhile, Kwok remains at Calgary in good standing.
*********************
While his university thinks he’s great, this man’s students seem to disagree. Kwok’s too busy with his subwoofer to teach…
But hey – the question of whether this guy can teach lies at the bottom of a very large stack of other questions. I’m sure Calgary will get to it eventually.
A Danish scientist with a grant from the CDC stole two million dollars from it.
Aarhus University said the Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation (DASTI) has gotten grants from the U.S. National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities since 2001. Thorsen directed the administration of the grants, the university said.
After discovering that money was missing, DASTI and Aarhus “became aware of two alleged CDC funding documents as well as a letter regarding funding commitments allegedly written by Randolph B. Williams of the CDC’s procurement grants office. . . .”
“Upon investigation by CDC, a suspicion arose that those documents are forgeries.”
The university’s statement goes on to say that in March 2009, Thorsen resigned from its faculty.
…has been murdered.
The campus paper doesn’t name him, but his students know who he was, and they talk about him to the reporter. He was apparently killed, along with his girlfriend, by his girlfriend’s ex-lover.
… Student Felicia Lopez, in the professor’s Chicano Studies class, said her teacher did not show up for his 10 a.m. Monday class.
“He would tell us before if he was going to miss class,” she said. “He was always excited and passionate to show up to teach.”
… Student Oscar Ortega said the professor canceled class three times in the past two weeks because he had to testify in court as a witness to a domestic dispute case.
“He talked about how concerned he was about the domestic dispute case,” he said. “He was constantly talking about it.”
Students in the professor’s class plan to honor him by wearing black wristbands on their right arms, Ortega said…
From LEX18.com
Lexington police say that a University of Kentucky professor arrested Tuesday was involved in sex crimes.
According to court documents obtained by LEX 18 overnight, Dr. Robert Tannenbaum, 68, engaged in sexual acts with an adoptive relative four to five times a week between August 1998 and June 1999.
The relative was in eighth grade at the time.
Tannenbaum faces four counts of incest.
Tannenbaum is an important professor and administrator at UK.