… killed in a car crash in Uganda.

He was much more than a professor, as his charming webpage shows.

Luke Cole, a leading theorist and practitioner of environmental justice law, who battled toxic waste facilities, mega-dairies, mining companies and other pollution threats in poor and minority communities in California and Alaska, died Saturday in a car crash in Uganda. He was 46.

Cole was traveling with his wife on a rural road in western Uganda when a truck hit their vehicle head-on. He died at a clinic a short time later, according to his father, Herbert Cole. His wife, Nancy Shelby, was flown to a hospital in Amsterdam, where she is recovering from her injuries.

… An avid birder, connoisseur of root beer and collector of bobbleheads and miniature spy cameras, Cole had taken off in early March on what was to be a four-month sabbatical. He traveled to South America, Antarctica, Madagascar and South Africa. Uganda, where his brother lives, was one of his last stops…

… The circumstances surrounding the death of Alain Monnier, professor of religion and anthropology in Geneva remain unclear for now, with police saying only that a knife was found in a nearby river and that he died of a stab wound to the heart.

Monnier was a professor for 21 years at the University of Geneva and he was last seen Thursday 4 June when he left his home in the Jura, near the Doubs river area, to go for a walk. His body was found Saturday. Police are not excluding all [should be ‘any’] possibilities, from suicide to accident to murder.

Most of the articles about this are in French, but this one, from Geneva Lunch, conveys the basic elements. Unless police find signs of a struggle, I’d say suicide. Hard to know how you accidentally end up with a knife in your heart.

This article describes a vivid, original personality of enormous warmth and inspiring intellect. He lived a rich life.

Here’s his home page at the university. He did religious ethnography.

There’s the Harvard coffee guy (see below), and there’s the Johns Hopkins spy guy. The guy who boasted to the undercover FBI agent who caught him that he had “lots of medals” from Cuba. That’s because he’d been spying for them for thirty years.

One of his students reminisces about My Professor, the Spy. A writer for Politico wonders why, given the broad hints the spy dropped over the years, it took so long to catch him.

Lee Fleming,
a Harvard business school
professor, got angry when
some guy’s car partially
blocked his driveway. He
threw hot coffee on the guy.

Fleming was arrested.

He’s charged with
assault and battery.

A glimpse of an Arizona State University professor, from his obituary.

Born in Bogota, N.J., in 1923, [George] Paulsen served as a U.S. naval officer in the Pacific theater in World War II. Following the war, he pursued advanced degrees in history, receiving an undergraduate degree in 1949 from Hobart College and a doctorate in 1959 from Ohio State University, where he was a student of Foster Rhea Dulles.

At ASU, Paulsen was known among basketball players in the department for his unorthodox hook shot. He also regaled his colleagues with accounts of the early years of the ASU History Department when its graduate program was small and its library resources limited.

According to history colleague Stephen Batalden, Paulsen was an ardent Democrat and longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who lived modestly, rarely driving his 1965 Plymouth Barracuda out of its place in the garage.

Two years ago Paulsen sustained serious head and neck injuries in a bicycle accident in Tempe, never fully regaining his health, though he continued to read widely until the last weeks of his life, according to Batalden, director of ASU’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

… economic forecasting, has died.

… Granger realised that not all long-term associations between non-stationary time series are nonsense. Suppose, as the American academic Kevin D Hoover explained, that the randomly-walking drunk has a faithful (and sober) friend who follows him down the street from a safe distance to make sure he does not injure himself.

“Because he is following the drunk, the friend, viewed in isolation, also appears to follow a random walk, yet his path is not aimless; it is largely predictable, conditional on knowing where the drunk is,” Hoover noted. Granger and Engle coined the term “co-integration” to describe the genuine relationship between two non-stationary time series. Time series are “co-integrated” when the difference between them is itself stationary – the friend never gets too far away from the drunk, but, on average, stays a constant distance behind.

Granger’s discovery had an enormous impact, leading, as one of his students put it, to “chaos for a few years”. In order to forecast non-stationary variables, new techniques had to be developed to replace the ones Granger had debunked. …

Granger once wrote: “A teacher told my mother that ‘I would never become successful’, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.”

… who was a veteran kayaker, dies in an accident.

An Eastern Washington University professor is believed to be the man killed in a kayaking accident on the St. Joe River on Friday.

W. Anthony “Tony” Oertling was an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The 55-year-old had been at EWU since 1992 and was in his first year as chair of the department, “where he was performing in his usual effective and enthusiastic manner,” according to an e-mail Judd Case, dean of the College of Science, Health and Engineering, sent to colleagues Monday morning…

The Sheriff’s Office described the victim as a veteran kayaker who had 20 years of experience…

Kansas State’s president, much in the news of late, puts his son (UD assumes it’s his son) on the faculty (scroll down to the last name).

UD thanks a reader for pointing this out to her.

He was snobby. “I gave the department secretary the syllabus for this course to type up,” he told us, his Northwestern University undergraduates in a course called Joyce/Nabokov. “She said Oh, I’ve heard of Joyce Nabokov.” Imitating her uneducated speech.

A few students laughed. Most of us were taken aback.

Alfred Appel, who has died, was very kind to me. Had me over to his house and showed me his inscribed Nabokov novels, in some of which the writer had drawn butterflies. He was funny. His Annotated Lolita (which Gore Vidal thought a creation of Nabokov… Vidal thought Alfred Appel was a creation of Nabokov…) is hilarious.

UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.

The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.

Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.

If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.

UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.

One of your high-profile, highly-compensated professors is under investigation by The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for having stolen large sums of money from NASA. His M.O. is the same as George Washington University’s Professor Bedewi: You create a private business run by your wife and kids and all, and you send your grant money there. You then use that money to buy — they all buy the same shit — massive SUVs, massive houses, etc.

It’s awkward because, although he’s on administrative leave, you’ve still got this guy’s university web page up, welcoming everyone to the Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, which he directs, and where he shows the sort of innovative entrepreneurial approach to directing an academic institute that lands you and your university in the middle of a big fat Senate hearing.

Seems to UD that the solution is something like the following: Take down the guy’s page and replace it with a generic Welcome to the Institute page, on which you note that the current director is on administrative leave.

… Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.

I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”

She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”

This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.

The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.

“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”

Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”…

From the Daily Northwestern:

Despite the millions of dollars companies spend on diversity training each year, these programs are ineffective, said Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin in a lecture Wednesday evening. Dobbin spoke to an audience of about 100 in the McCormick Tribune Center as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Center on the Science of Diversity.

In his lecture “You Can’t Make Me: Why Diversity Training Backfires,” Dobbin argued that diversity training simply does not make individuals and institutions more open to diversity.

“Companies with diversity training programs are not more diverse,” he said. “What’s frustrating is, it’s the most popular and most expensive type of program that firms spend time, money and energy on.”

Dobbin identified external sanctions as a key factor in the negative impact of diversity training. For example, if a company does not comply with diversity rules, it can be sued for violating civil rights, he said. This kind of pressure can cause psychological resistance.

“If you tell Billy that he will be punished for taking a certain toy from a pile,” Dobbin said, “Then that is the first toy he will reach for when he is left alone in the room.”

The problem is that firms make it mandatory for their employees to attend diversity training, Dobbin said.

… Sociology professor emeritus Arthur Stinchcombe [He’s a friend of Mr UD’s.] said he has known Dobbin for years and has researched many of the same subjects.

“Since he does very good work, I thought I would learn something, and I did,” he said. “(I learned that) if somebody orders you to have a given sentiment, then you probably won’t have it.”…

… and a credit to his breed.

In a provocative speech in the heart of coal country, a noted Appalachian scholar called for an end to surface mining for the good of the state’s economy.

University of Kentucky professor Ron Eller, a Pulitzer-nominated author and former head of the university’s Appalachian Center, said the state must recognize declining coal reserves, political opposition to coal-fired energy, and rising regulations on carbon dioxide emissions.

“We must begin, I think, by abolishing surface mining,” and especially mountaintop removal, Eller said to about 250 people in the keynote speech at the East Kentucky Leadership Conference in Hazard.

Reaction was not entirely warm…

Note the many thoughtful comments from local readers.

More detail here.

UD doesn’t know where on Professor McDonald’s list of priorities sitting on the board of a notorious spamming firm appears, but I guess it’s important to him, or he wouldn’t be on the board.

On the other hand, he doesn’t list the board membership on his otherwise fulsome bio at Stanford. Maybe he doesn’t want to be publicly identified with a business that uses aliases.

While the Better Business Bureau has registered only two complaints for QuinStreet under advertising and sales practices (and several more in other categories), other complaints have been filed under QuinStreet’s aliases — such as VendorSeek.

It’s not spam anyway. QuinStreet/VendorSeek is performing the public service of keeping us informed — every day, every minute — about new products.