Singaporean Li-ann Thio, appointed visiting professor at NYU law school for the fall, has canceled.
Her record of fervent and often vulgar statements against gay rights generated enormous controversy on campus, and she finally declared herself so offended by what people were saying about her that she decided to stay home.
Inside Higher Education has both a well-presented summary of the situation and a terrific comment thread.
In an extraordinarily forthcoming and thoughtful comment, the dean of NYU’s law school asks the crucial question:
Should an academic opposed to the recognition of certain important human rights be allowed to teach a human rights course?
UD thinks the answer must be, in some circumstances, yes.
Partly this is because reasonable people can argue about what a human right is, and, once we’ve decided that, what an important human right is, and what its implications are (does important mean basic? universal? important to the majority of people asked to vote or comment on a certain right? Gun rights advocates – a majority of Americans – will argue that guns provide a basic right to self-defense, etc.). Recall that Peter Singer’s notion of human rights is pretty eccentric, and offensive to many, and he’s teaching at Princeton.
I answer yes to the question because I can imagine a brilliant, non-vulgar mind (Singer might be an example) with non-standard views on human rights — views that, while offensive to a lot of people, might be defended in usefully provocative ways.
Thio defends her views with brio, but without intellectual respectability. She’s simply prejudiced, and it shows.
Kristin Luker, a law professor at Berkeley, is a prose stylist who understands that the best way to castrate a man is with a smile on your face.
Let’s see how she does it! (Note that I’ve revised this post to quote less of the original article.)
It’s an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times:
UC Berkeley law professors Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin are such … economists! And they’re such men. (They are also brilliant and friends of mine, but that’s not the point here.)
[A bit scattered for an opening paragraph, but she’s got a couple of dissonant things going on here. One, she wants to do a shout-out to a couple of beloved colleagues. Two, she wants to castrate them.]
In their July 16 Op-Ed article, “UC system: layoffs, not pay cuts,” Cooter and Edlin suggest that the way to solve the University of California system’s budget crisis is to lay people off, not to cut salaries across the board. “With employees paid up to 20% below what peer institutions pay … the best people will leave,” they note plaintively.
[Ooh, but plaintively already begins to give up the game, don’t it? Ja, plaints from rich law professors at a first-rate, gorgeously-located university — the envy of the world, really … I think we’ve got some prenez vos mouchoirs problems coming up.]
[Cooter and Edlin] argue for “staff” layoffs, but when looked at closely, what they really mean is layoffs for anyone but professors. Tenured professors, as Cooter and Edlin admit, are almost impossible to fire unless the university takes the almost unprecedented step of eliminating entire departments. [Sure, we tenured law professors have absolutely secure jobs when everyone else we know is in peril. But on the other hand, instead of $250,000 salaries — this table shows ’04-’05 salaries, so figure it’s higher — we’ve had to make do with $200,000.]
… So what “staff” does that leave? Well, it leaves almost everybody who’s not a professor — the clerical workers, the lecturers, the administrative people, the janitors, the research staff, the cooks and the groundskeepers.
… [T]he staff I am most familiar with already work overtime and routinely do things not in their official job descriptions. One employee I know informally runs her department’s computer operations, mentors graduate students, plots strategy and tactics to get what the department needs from the administration, and does fiscal planning and budgeting to keep things moving for her professorial colleagues, many of whom are blissfully unaware of how much she really does.
… Yes, let’s do follow Cooter’s and Edlin’s advice and think critically and carefully about how the university goes about its business. But let’s take it a step further and have an outside agency do the analysis, rather than the tired “self-study” we usually engage in. My hunch is that a “comparable worth” analysis of how hard and how effectively people work on the Berkeley campus — and in the UC system generally — will lead to some eye-opening results. [Ouch. Well, this is another issue. If you look at the comment thread for the article, you see the problem. Not only do these guys make immense academic salaries, they don’t work very hard. Let’s figure their course loads range from one to two courses a semester.]
If I’m right, and if the measure is how much an individual contributes to the institution’s core mission, many professors will find themselves just a little bit humbler, and many staff will find themselves with much healthier paychecks.
They certainly won’t find themselves humbler. They’ll find themselves at the University of Texas law school, making $300,000.
… under extremely strange circumstances.
****************
He was arrested in his house. The police said he was disorderly when they interviewed him about a (nearby?) break-in.
This is a rambling old luxurious house, just around the block from our house on Shady Hill Square, and inches from the house our friend Peter owns (his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, bought it).
I’m trying to open the police report and read it now. Hold on.
*****************
Well, okay, here’s the police report.
And here’s how things look — in a VERY preliminary way — to old UD.
There had been a previous break-in at the Gates house, and the front door wasn’t working right. A woman walking by saw two black men with backpacks pushing up against the door as if to break it in. She called the cops.
But it seems likely that they pushed the door in that way because that was the only way to open it since the break-in. Or I guess attempted break-in.
Okay. So a policeman responds to her call and begins to talk to Gates, who is most decidedly unpleasant to him. Did the policeman provoke the unpleasantness? Maybe, maybe not. Is Gates so angry being racially profiled in various ways that he took his rage out on the policeman? Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, it seems clear that Gates lost it and shouted and made a big scene.
It is not at all clear that the policeman should have arrested him. So Gates is screaming and out of control. So what. He’s still in his house. He’s not going anywhere. The thing to do at this point, it seems to UD, is leave. It seems to UD that this was not so much a racial as a class encounter between a high-handed Harvard professor (“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” said Gates, obnoxiously.) and a cop insulted by Harvard obnoxiousness.
But if you work the Harvard beat, you need to be able to take it. You need to be able to walk away when high-handed people who think they’re better than you are mouth off. I’m guessing the policeman lost his cool.
But this is WAY preliminary…
********************
Update, New York Times. Still a bit murky.
What is it with Harvard business school professors? There’s the Bionic Man (currently in trouble for a spot of public aggression); and now there’s Mr Nipples (watch the film).
Lauren’s a kind of nerd Superman:
He was cocaptain of the Waverly High School football team, changing uniforms at halftime to play tuba in the band.
At the gym:
During a workout on a recent Friday afternoon at Total Performance Sports, his T-shirt and shorts were stained with sweat and the white chalk he uses to help him grip weights. Blood trickled from old leg wounds reopened by deadlifting a heavy bar across the space between his ankles and knees.
That which does not kill me!
His wife:
He weighs about 200 pounds, but overall his physique is not particularly imposing – especially for someone who can flip an 800-pound truck tire end over end for 100 feet. In fact, his wife said that when she first met him, she thought he was merely “fat.’’
Judging from my dog’s excitement, plus the general population of rabbits, I think we’ve got a nest of rabbits under the deck out back.
I’m okay with rabbits, as I’m okay with deer. Sure, these guys eat plenty of garden. The deer behead the lilies, the rabbits shred the hosta. But UD, despite her ‘thesdan locale, isn’t your basic suburban neatnik with groomed grass and worries about upkeep. Walk by her house and you’ll see a pretty well-tended garden with a natural lawn. But avoid the back. Broadly speaking, it looks okay, because it’s lush and green and forested; but UD does little with it, and the animals in the adjacent woods are having a field day.
The most amazing thing she’s seen
back there was a mink.
She has also seen coyotes.
She saw plenty of lizards in Key West (UD‘s just back from living there for three months), but of course you don’t see them in colder climates — unless they’re an escaped pet.
Betty Moran said she stepped onto the rear patio of her Libertyville [Illinois] home Friday, hoping to spend a quiet afternoon reading a summertime novel when she first saw the unwanted visitor.
Staring back at her was a two-and-a-half foot-long lizard, its long, blue forked tongue fully extended.
“I jumped up on the picnic table,” said Moran, 66, her face hinting at a fear that lingers days later. “I ran inside, slammed the door and called my neighbor.”
Although the leafy expanses lining St. Mary’s Road are not where one expects to find an exotic reptile, the Morans say their coldblooded guest has found a home beneath their front deck.
“We thought that it might be an iguana, but then I saw it eat a mouse in a single gulp,” she said. “Then on Saturday it was sunning itself on our deck, looking into the house and scratching on the window.”
Sam Sweet, professor of Zoology at the University of California Berkeley, identified the animal as an African savannah monitor lizard through photos taken by the Morans.
“It appears to be someone’s pet that escaped after being well cared for several years,” Sweet said Monday. “My guess is that the publicity will reunite it with its owner. Savannah monitors are really harmless – just pick it up.”
The Libertyville Police Department loaned the Morans a cage to trap the lizard. Hamburger and apples lay on a plate, untouched.
Jim Moran, 68, performed a ‘tap-dance’ on the deck in an attempt to flush out the lizard, but to no avail.
“When he saw me over the weekend, he didn’t seem overly concerned,” he said.
Monitor lizards are intelligent and adaptable reptiles known for their venomous bites and quick-whipping tails. They are native to Africa, Australia and Southeast Asia, where they can grow up to seven feet in length. Despite their strengths, monitors are tropical lizards and a few chilly nights can quickly push them to the brink of death.
Sweet said people should contact organizations like the Chicago HERP Society when they encounter strange reptiles not native to the area.
“What happens all too often is that people hit the panic button and call the police who decide it is a problem and shoot the animal,” he said. “People should instead contact these organizations and somebody will try to find a good home for it.”
So while the Morans are pleased to know the monitor is probably domesticated and therefore harmless, don’t expect them to welcome it with open arms.
“I’d rather face a lion than this lizard; reptiles are not my thing,” said Betty Moran. “In my dreams, I’ve been hoping that the coyotes can have a feast.”
A few days later…
Libertyville’s most-wanted lizard was finally captured Wednesday afternoon.
College of Lake County Professor of Biology Mike Corn was called to the residence of Jim and Betty Moran after the African savannah monitor lizard was discovered sunning itself on the rear patio.
After a brief search of the property, Corn reached into a bush and came out holding the two-and-a-half-foot-long lizard.
“This lizard is very tame and was undoubtedly someone’s pet,” Corn said. “It is a growing young adult with healthy fat reserves.”
Everything from hamburger and hard-boiled eggs to sardines [has] been placed in steel cages around the home for weeks, but the trap-savvy lizard had eluded capture and likely remained burrowed in soil beneath the deck.
Wednesday’s muggy weather and a strong appetite for mice and chipmunks ultimately drew the wayward reptile to the surface.
“He gulped down a mouse the first day I saw him and I’ve only seen one chipmunk around here in the past two weeks,” Betty Moran said.
The well-fed lizard seemed at ease stretched out on Corn’s left arm and allowed careful hands to stroke its scaly skin.
For now it has been transported to the College of Lake County, where it will be cared for and displayed for biology classes.
“These lizards are active hunters – this one has been surviving on mice and small chipmunks,” Corn said. “We are fortunate because tropical lizards like this would have a real tough time surviving in this area’s autumn climate.”
The Morans were glad that the lizard had found a better home, although they appreciated the rodent control the coldblooded carnivore provided their property.
“Now all the neighbors will want monitor lizards to take care of their mice problems,” Jim Moran joked. “It’s a beautiful and fascinating little animal and I was truly amazed by how tame it was.”
Betty Moran said she’ll return to what was an ordinary summer until the lizard showed up June 26.
“Now I can go outside without worrying about what I’ll see in my peripheral vision,” she said. “I just hope I don’t find any of its eggs.”
Thomas Edwards, a good writer, was the reporter on both stories.
*****************
Update: Are you kidding?
… an influential Stanford university computer sciences professor, was found dead in his swimming pool last month.
Toxicology results show “a blood-alcohol level of three times the legal limit at the time of his death.”
Motwani was credited by Google co-founder Sergey Brin as his unofficial academic adviser. He called Motwani’s contributions to computer-science “brilliant.”
If this report, from a student journalist at the University of Oregon interested in greater representation of conservative views on campus is correct, it’s scandalous.
He’s in the office of a professor who disagrees with the student’s point of view on the matter. They’re talking away.
He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.
“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”
From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.
The screamer (again, if the account is accurate) plays directly into the hands of people who attack professors as monolithic and arrogant.
The behavior is way out of bounds, and the student deserves an apology.
Arnold Klein, a professor in UCLA’s medical school. Where is he?
I’m getting this when I search for him on the university’s faculty site:
Klaustermeyer, William B
* Medicine
Kleck, Jeffrey H
* Radiation Oncology
* Radiation Oncology
Kleerup, Eric M.D.
* Geronet
* Medicine
* Asthma and Cough Center
Klein, Marc G. Ph.D.
* Physiology
Klein, Robert M.D.
* Medicine
Klein, Stanley R M.D.
* Surgery
* Surgical Oncology
* GENERAL SURGERY
Kleinman, Leonard E …
No Arnold.
Yet the man’s all over the news, as is his academic affiliation. He’s the guy who did all kind of shit with/for Michael Jackson… … drugs… babies… stuff. Is he not on the UCLA faculty?
He’s a psychologist; his wife isn’t, but she plays one for the purposes of grand larceny.
He teaches Psychology of Personality at the Rochester Institute of Technology, but his main source of income is “allowing unqualified staff, including Esta Miran [she has an education degree], to perform therapy sessions, charging for longer sessions than were actually performed and billing for group therapy sessions when records show individual therapy sessions were occurring at that time.”
Along with grand larceny, they’re facing “scheme to defraud in the first degree, falsifying business records in the first degree, offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree and unauthorized practice.” They seem to have ripped Medicaid and Medicare off for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This should be a fun one to watch. The State Attorney General knows how to pick them. “Two married doctors are in jail Tuesday,” begins one local report, “accused of stealing close to $250,000 dollars. Neither of them would stop talking in court.” The roguish Mirons seem to have decided that the best way to evade their fate (about a decade in jail for both of them) is to pretend to be very old and very stupid. They nattered on during their arraignment, claiming to be confused about where they were and what was going on. Unfit for trial!
And yet so agile were these doctors that they sometimes needed only sixty seconds to provide therapy.
One of the charges accuses the Mirans of booking four to five intensive psychotherapy sessions in the same hour and conducting psychotherapy sessions from just one to 12 minutes at a time.
He led a life of intense activism and intense meditation.
Throughout, he worried about humanity’s desire and capacity for freedom. Here’s a good interview with him.
When Mr UD was working for the United Nations in East Timor, he got to know, a bit, Dahrendorf’s daughter Nicola, who was also working there.
From this interview: “[A]s Director of the London School of Economics, [I] have always regarded it as my job to protect academics from the obsession with realities, even the obsession with funds. That is to say, if you do administer, if you are in charge of an academic institution, you really have to see to it that those who are there as academics can do their job. So you have to relieve them of some of the burden of living in the real world.”
From the obituary in the Tallahassee Democrat:
A devoted Marxist, Hodges was an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man. At FSU, he inspired a cadre of students who formed FSU’s controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter in the late 1960s.
Many were students in a short-lived interdepartmental program Hodges created called social philosophy, which taught “anarchism, Maoism, Trotskyism, anything except capitalism,” said former FSU activist, … Jack Lieberman.
“He was keenly aware what he was doing would not meet the approval of the administration,” said Lieberman, now a Miami businessman. “But it was some of the best studies of my life and I learned a lot.”
Hodges was infamously cantankerous. Before his 2003 retirement, he lived more than 20 years in the Miccosukee Land Co-Op, where “He was not much involved in the community because he was not interested in anyone telling him what to do,” said Mitchell.
Hodges never learned to use a computer, imposing constantly on the philosophy department secretaries. He spent six years as chair of the philosophy department, until colleagues voted him out for spending the department’s entire travel budget on one of his research trips.
… “He could be a pain in the butt, no question about that,” said longtime FSU philosophy professor Russell Dancy.
… takes all the fun out of Angels and Demons:
In this followup movie to The Da Vinci Code, Hanks hears a dire warning that the half-gram of stolen antimatter will cause “a cataclysmic event” if it comes into contact with matter. “They take this in a special canister off to Rome with the intent of blowing up Vatican city,” [Roger] Moore said.
“To put it a little bit into perspective, if we took all the antimatter that we make in one hour at CERN and we dumped it into this cup of tea here, the result would be an increase of about 1 C. So we don’t even make enough antimatter to make a good cup of tea, so you really shouldn’t be worried about anybody blowing anything up with this.”
The movie’s premise makes for exciting science fiction, but fiction it certainly is, Moore said. Scientists are nowhere near capable of making that much antimatter. “It would take us about 10 million years to make half a gram of antimatter, so unless you are planning to live this long, you don’t have to worry just yet,” he said. “The other problem is, even if you could … grab all this antimatter that we’re making, we can’t store it.”
