A law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul has been charged with tax evasion between the years 2004 and 2007.

… Between 1991 and 2003, she filed only one tax return, in 1997, within the required time. Magee, who has been employed by Hamline for 17 years, told an investigator “she teaches classes on race and religion and is not familiar with tax law,” the complaint states…

One of many simple and eloquent comments in memory of a just-retired University of Wisconsin zoology professor who died in a bicycle accident. Article and comments evoke an exceptionally kind and committed scholar.

Really, a genuine and encouraging man.

“The Stanley I Dodson Rocky Mountain High” was what we called in his honor climbing a mountain and doing a headstand at the top. I’m comforted by the fact he’d find it fitting he died this way, doing what he liked in the place where he grew up and loved.

He was the real deal. Always one of those professors who had time for his students.

He didn’t make a big deal of himself. He preferred the essential things and he loved the outdoors and being with family and friends.

I remember one assignment where he had us calculate the proportion of passers-by wearing Earth Shoes (to teach us population sampling techniques).

Stanley was our neighbor. He loved his cat. He made his yard into a garden paradise with a stone wall and many native plants. He was always a kind soul.

He loved the out of doors and the simple pleasures of working around his house and yard, biking and living in harmony with nature.

I too studied Ecology with Dr. Dodson at the UW [Summer of 1985]. What an exciting class! A great professor. Assigned readings included Aldo Leopold’s magnificent “Sand County Almanac”. Additionally, each student chose a site collecting phenological data for periodic reports. I loved the guy!

A 50-year-old female professor at Ewha Womans University, who forced students to do chores at her home and extorted money from them, has lost a suit she filed against the school to nullify sanctions on her, a Seoul court said Thursday.

Among the chores were house cleaning, watering plants, trash disposal and changing the filters in her vacuum cleaner.

The students also had to take care of her around the clock when she was hospitalized and perform tax-related tasks, according to a ruling statement.

The professor, identified only as Park, well known in the field of textile arts, even extorted part of one student’s scholarship, worth 2.76 million won ($2,200), saying the student did not fulfill her duties, the court said.

In 2007, Park faced a one-month salary reduction after a student filed a complaint with the school authorities. Park denied the charges.

As the school refused to withdraw the punishment, the professor filed a suit with the Seoul Administrative Court. But the court also went against her wishes.

Presiding judge Lee Nae-joo said, “The punishment against her was appropriate.”

The feet of an impassioned, bizarre, and brilliant professor were worth sitting at. They (the professors, not the feet) challenged my perception of what reasoning was, what it meant to have an independent mind. (See Nabokov’s lectures on literature.) Would they get past search committees today?

The New Yorker

… for my other blog, over at Inside Higher Education.

Title: RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Link to the post: HERE.

One of the high points of UD‘s writing life was being published, about twenty years ago, in Richard Poirier’s journal, Raritan. She had long admired Poirier’s essays on literature — his independent spirit, his beautiful writing style — and was thrilled when he put her in Raritan.

Poirier has died, age 83, from a fall.

This charming tribute to him — “”He was a wonderful man. He was fantastic, rambunctious, beefy with energy.” — comes from the poet Frederick Seidel, Poirier’s longtime friend. (Have I posted on Seidel on this blog? I think I have. I’ll check.) (I have. But this reminds me that I’ve meant to write about his poetry. I’ll do that. Maybe today.)

I was surprised to read that his father was a fisherman. I’d have guessed diplomat, lawyer.

“Call it weed, Mother. Or call it pot.”

Okay, weed. Pot. I don’t smoke it.

Nor do I light cigarettes.

Or farts.

Since I never cook, I do not light my oven.

I used to light candles, but now I’m afraid.

When it’s cold out and I’m in the mood, I light a fire in my hearth.

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Far as UD can tell, from her admittedly limited ‘thesdan perspective, she and Mr UD are about the only people of any age anywhere in the region who do not sometimes take a hit. UD hasn’t gone out and interviewed people, but that’s kind of how it looks.

So she figures this guy is probably telling the truth when he says his step-father — a law professor at Suffolk University — smokes pot with him. This guy deals the drug, and he has brought to his anxious upscale neighborhood some of the gun play disagreements among dealers can sometimes prompt. So he’s in court, and he has been talking about his family life. Of course, he could be lying. But his account has the homely feel of the truth.

Jonathon Cook, 20, said his stepfather, Suffolk University law professor Timothy Wilton, helped him build a place to grow marijuana in exchange for some of the profits and also smoked it in the house, according to a police report.

He said that his mother, Kathy Jo Cook — the former president of the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts — also knew about the drug activity and frequently complained that her husband’s smoking left the house smelling like marijuana, authorities said. … Authorities said they found a small smoking pipe in a dresser drawer in the parents’ bedroom, a scale and several baggies in the bedroom and another pipe in a closet in an office only they use… After his arrest, Cook told police his parents knew that he was selling drugs out of their home, and that his stepfather built a “grow closet” for marijuana plants. They agreed to split the proceeds of sales from the plants, Cook said.

Cook also said his stepfather bought marijuana from him, occasionally stole it from him and “constantly smoked marijuana,” according to the police report.

“He said that Mr. Wilton walks around the house smoking marijuana and his mother gets upset at him because the house smells like marijuana,” police wrote in the report…

If it’s true, it’s no one’s business. On the other hand, you shouldn’t tell lies.

Is Arnold Klein — Michael Jackson BFF, probably father of two of his kids, supplier of calming agents to Jackson, and soon to be arrested — is Arnold Klein a professor at UCLA?

He’s not listed on the medical faculty page, and yet as recently as last June the UCLA Newsroom cited a magazine article that quotes him, and the school identified him as a “UCLA clinical professor of dermatology.”

Indeed, he shows up on a directory page.

Most surprisingly, given how much in the headlines he’s been lately, Klein’s mentioned not at all on the dermatology department’s professors-in-the-news page, which contents itself with cellulite and athlete’s foot updates.

… who asked Why are Swedes So Stupid?

A retired Norwegian linguistics professor has described Swedes as “stupid” for not being able to understand Norwegian. Norwegians have no problem with Swedish, the professor points out.

Finn-Erik Vinje has caused an escalation in what is promising to become an all out language war, by publishing a post on his blog last week asking, “Why are Swedes so stupid?”.

… The basis of Vinje’s assertion is that Swedish viewers of Himmelbå, a Norwegian television series based on the British production “Two Thousand Acres of Sky”, have complained that the language is too difficult to understand and would prefer to see a series in Swedish, with Swedish actors, in a Swedish setting.

Vinje reacts to a review of the series in the Expressen newspaper in which Norwegian is described as an “incomprehensible and ugly language”.

“Line Verndal in the female lead can look as much like (the Swedish actress) Lena Endre as she likes. But she is still speaking that strange double Dutch,” Expressen’s Nils Schwarts writes.

Vinje [claims] it is… unnecessary for Swedish to be subtitled on Norwegian television although adds that perhaps it may be useful to do so for some of the Norwegian dialects…

… from students and classmates of Charles Gwathmey, the architect. He died on Monday.

From a New York Times comment thread:

… Professor Gwathmey’s most important lesson [as an architecture professor at UCLA in the ‘seventies] was surprisingly personal, and not technical or aesthetic. He taught us all that that it is ultimately the individual architect who must synthesize all of the many factors & forces which impact any final building design, and thus architects must nurture the courage to establish that balanced design which best reflects a comprehensive solution, shorn of any single preconceived design ideology.

He also taught us that whenever as architects we are asked why we made any given design decision, the always-correct answer should be: “Because, after careful consideration, that is the way that I thought best as to how it should be, all things considered in good balance.”

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

Charlie taught a visiting critic’s design studio at UT Austin in the early 90s. i remember seeing him in the architecture building courtyard doing yoga, way before anyone cool did yoga…

… university professor.

(Scroll down for the trailer.)

… a scholar of Russia whose glorious prose style and deep aesthetic, social, and historical understandings created essays like this one — it introduces his edition of the Edmund Wilson / Vladimir Nabokov letters — has died.

A couple of excerpts:

While some in the West could mourn for Nicholas and Alexandra and romanticize all Russian émigrés as genteel aristocrats who had lost their fortunes, and others could acclaim Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as “the first truly human culture” and a triumph of true Marxist socialism, there was simply no place in the Western view of Russia and Russians for a liberal faction that was opposed both to tsarist regime before the Revolution (and had, in fact, brought about its downfall), and to the theocratic police state founded by Lenin.

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

Wilson’s assertion in his reply to Nakobov’s critique of his portrait of Lenin that he had steered clear of official biographies and had based his view on “family memoirs, Trotsky’s writings, Lenin’s own works, and the memoirs of people like Gorky and Clara Zetkin,” who were all “trying to tell the truth,” makes one think of a historian of Christianity who is sure that his account is factual because all his information comes straight from the Vatican.

The Newton resident — who maintains an office at the school and is present on campus at least four days a week, according to school officials — teaches no regular classes, conducts no formal medical research, does not fill out a timecard and is not up for post-tenure review for at least two more years.

Medical school officials were unable to provide any syllabus or course listing with Dr. Lazare’s name as an instructor, guest lecturer or participant.

He’s a psychiatry professor — specializing in shame and humiliation — at the University of Massachusetts medical school, and his salary is $366,000 a year.

Definitely beginning to sound like Borat.

And thank goodness a professor’s gotten involved. UD gets to cover the story!

The alleged crimes of the Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys were first reported by an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who learned of the man’s suspected involvement through her research.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes – whose contacts in Israel define her as the world’s leading authority on organ trading – says she heard reports that the suspect, 58-year-old Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, held donors at gunpoint after they changed their minds about the operation.

Such reports that she received from her sources compelled her to go to the authorities. She met with an FBI agent at a Manhattan hotel and gave him information about Rosenbaum, but she says that the Bureau acted only much later. The Berkeley scholar is said to have identified Rosenbaum to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.

The anthropologist says that the man who led her to Rosenbaum says that he initially believed Rosenbaum was a man who saved the lives of people in need. According to Scheper-Hughes, that man told her he had changed his mind after meeting some of Rosenbaum’s donors – confused and impoverished people from Eastern Europe…

One out of every five adult males in some of Moldova’s poorest villages has had his kidney removed, according to Scheper-Hughes …

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

I boarded a broken-down jitney
To check out a show at the Whitney.
And jumpin’ jehovah
The Salle de Moldova
Was featuring recycled kidney.

… would have to include this post from ’04, a typology of bearded professors.

Some of its descriptions jibe pretty well with this latest professor-typology, written by college students and not bad at all.

If you skim Rate My Professors, as UD occasionally does, you’ll find students all over America encountering and describing The 7 Professors You’ll Have in College.

Highlights:

At first, you might think it’s funny that Prof. Leung pronounces the number seven “ceiling” or that Dr. Kolodjzieg wrote “Operation for to having a midterm” on the syllabus …

He pronounces “Darfur” with an “African” accent and is repulsed by the current lack of student activism. You’re repulsed by the fact that he is bald on top, but still insists on harnessing his last few strands of hair into a ponytail…

[T]he fake laugh [is] the major tool that [will] get you through his lectures. Each class session brings you another lesson in faking laughter …

[S]he wants you to know that she is most definitely the best source of knowledge in her particular field and many adjacent fields … [Enjoy her] hilarious anecdote about going to a dinner party at Gore Vidal’s house …

UD thanks Dave for the link.