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.

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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.

… 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…