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…

… Inside Higher Education.

Title: PROFESSORMATRONIC

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.

The unionized faculty has placed an ad in the student newspaper advising students to begin looking at other universities for their summer courses.

“The UNH Faculty Union will boycott the 2010 summer session if a contract settlement with the UNH Administration is not reached prior to the final scheduling of courses,” reads an AAUP advertisement run in today’s edition of The New Hampshire. “We strongly recommend that students investigate summer course offerings at other institutions well in advance.”

… “I need to take summer classes in order to have enough credits to graduate by next May,” said junior Arielle Romano. “This is a university. We’re paying astronomically high tuition prices. I understand professors have to make a living, but they are here to teach us; it’s an honorable profession. It seems selfish of them to strike a semester of classes for an extra 0.2 percent increase in salary.”…

Students are indeed very angry, and, as this editorial makes clear, their anger is directed against the faculty union.

There’s a good deal of language, in comment threads to various campus articles about the crisis, about lazy professors.

UD‘s only comment at this point? Universities with unionized faculties have a responsibility to inform incoming students about the union. UNH students would not be angry if, when they accepted UNH’s offer of admission, they knew that the school operates on the collective bargaining / strike model. This isn’t the sort of information students and their parents should be expected to pick up in some casual way. UNH needs to be very, very clear about the ways in which this arrangement makes campus life precarious.

… who is now an engineering professor there, has been arrested at Heathrow Airport for war crimes.

The provisional extradition warrant relates to an attack on Yugoslav forces in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Serbia claims more than 40 soldiers were killed in the so-called Dobrovoljacka Street attack, after Bosnia had declared independence from the Serb-led former Yugoslavia.

The soldiers were allegedly withdrawing from Sarajevo in a convoy at the time.

Ejup Ganic’s university has a close working relationship with Buckingham University.

… wrote UD‘s colleague, Lee Sigelman, to her in an email in January 2008. Lee, who died last December, was an eminent political scientist. With various colleagues, he had his own blog, The Monkey Cage.

From The Monkey Cage, some memories of Lee.

i had professor sigelman for one class, intro to US politics. you rarely find heads of poli sci departments teaching intro classes to masses of freshmen but i think he enjoyed teaching it (i cant come up with any other reason why he would).

he started the class by asking everyone to fill out notecards with our contact info and one interesting thing about us. I put that my [only] real skill was the ability to draw homer simpson, and then i drew him. this made it onto the projector at the start of the next class.

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

He was a wonderful mentor. And, if he’s out there reading this in the great beyond, I promise I’ll never use the word impact as a verb again!

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

Lee was a remarkable person—funny, witty, engaging, and, despite all the heights he reached, exceedingly modest. It was humbling and inspirational to see how he lived his life and comported himself in the face of enormous adversity over the past two plus years.

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

[One evening, at a fancy restaurant, Lee and I] were greeted with much enthusiasm and escorted to a semi-private room where a waiter and several assistants helped us into our chairs, grabbed the neatly folded napkins off the plates, and snapped them onto our laps.

Our waiter, a young, officious and somewhat pretentious fellow, introduced his staff, told us at length about the wonderful specials available to us, and, at the end of what had been a five minute peroration asked if Lee had any questions. Without skipping a beat, Lee replied, “What’s the capital of Albania?”

The waiter looked stunned, but managed to stutter out, “I don’t know, but we’ll find out before you leave.”

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

Lee and I were friends and riding buddies who came from completely different professional backgrounds. He was the academician and I spent a career in business. The common ground we shared was our love of riding our bicycles.

One summer afternoon, a group of us had ridden out MacArthur Boulevard from the District into Maryland where we rode River Road. Lee particularly liked riding River Road; it was hilly and he loved to climb. He was a great climber and no matter how hard I tried I could never catch him on the long climbs.

We had finished our ride and the group was heading back down MacArthur into the District. Normally I jump off and take the Chain Bridge home, but [I] decided to stay with the group and venture home over the Key Bridge. Riding MacArthur into the District is relaxing, especially after a tough workout, because it’s flat and when it’s not, it’s downhill. We rode to where MacArthur meets Canal Road and the road narrows. From that point, past Georgetown University, to M Street at the start of Georgetown, the road becomes very bicycle unfriendly. Over the next quarter mile, cars, buses and trucks all jockey to either take M Street, the Key Bridge or the Whitehurst Freeway. Bicyclists and motorized vehicles always have an uneasy truce, and the truce is often stretched to its limits on this very short roadway where there are no shoulders.

Unusual as it was, I happened to be at the front of the group and Lee was behind me when a small passenger bus pulled up alongside us at the red light at the beginning of the run to M Street. The door opened next to where Lee was patiently sitting waiting for the light to change and I heard the driver say: “Why don’t you take the bike path?” Without missing a beat, Lee answered: “Why don’t you take 495 (The Capital Beltway).”

From a nicely written profile of Mitchell Harris, a young English professor at Augustana College. It’s in the Augustana newspaper.

With the build of a linebacker and a hairless head perfectly formed to fit under any helmet, he appears out of place as he strolls down the English department hallway at Augustana.

His green sweater bears the Green Bay Packers logo, and with his arm bent across his large chest, at a quick glance he looks like he’s ready to burst through a defensive line with the football tucked safely away.

… Harris smiles when recalling the events surrounding his Augustana interview.

“Foolish thing I did,” Harris says. “I looked for dates of convenience and decided to interview on Friday so I could drive down Thursday.”

At the time Harris was filling a visiting position at his alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn., and he figured Friday would be the best day to work with his schedule. But he had forgotten the NFL had added Thursday night games that season, and this particular Thursday was the much-anticipated Dallas Cowboys versus Green Bay Packers game.

“I was kicking myself all the way to the interview,” Harris says. “I wanted to watch the game that night, but also prepare for the interview.”

Harris decided to go to a Buffalo Wild Wings to catch part of the game before heading back to his hotel to prepare for the next day’s important meeting. But when he got to the restaurant, the place was packed, so he asked a table of guys if he could join them. The three men obliged, and Harris soon discovered that they were Augustana football players.

The next day at his interview, Harris mentioned that he had met a few of the college’s football players at Buffalo Wild Wings the previous night, and [Jeffrey Miller, department chair] was impressed at how Harris was already able to bond with Augustana’s students, especially ones that didn’t frequent the Humanities building often. [Drop often. Redundant.]

… “Well, he’s motivated me to start doing more push ups to make myself not seem so insignificant when I stand next to his aura of testosterone,” English major Rob Green jokes.

“He makes Uncle Sam look like a communist. What a man.”

Fellow senior male English major Per Nestingen agrees. “Mitch Harris could walk onto any NFL team’s practice and instantly be given a starting job as an o-lineman, tight end, quarterback, or heck, even wide receiver,” he said.

… Already Miller and professor Patrick Hicks, the only other male English professor at Augustana, note Harris’ uniqueness.

“Mitch is definitely different,” Miller says. “Hicks and I like to sit around and drink tea.”

Students also echo Miller’s sentiments.

“From a male and female perspective, his presence is reassuring,” Nestingen says. “He provides a way for us to see how a bear trapped in a man’s body interprets the different gods of English. Who knows, maybe his allure and hip male perspective will help even out the ratio of men to women.” …

… to “true humanism” and a “compassionate, insatiable mind.”

It’s just gossip. But it features one of the most important professors in the world, plus amazing quotations, like the one in my title. So why not.

Niall Ferguson, whose comments about Scotland have appeared on this blog, has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali human rights campaigner, currently under a fatwa.