Well, Russia is the ultimate demoralized, degraded post-Soviet mess, and its higher education system is but a tiny part of all that.

Here at University Diaries, however, we’re particularly interested in that part. And we do well to remind ourselves that there are entire countries where university education is a bogus nepotistic cold hard cash joke. One Moscow college has apparently become “a fake thesis factory.”

As a columnist puts it in Novaya Gazeta:

“It is stupid to accuse kids of cheating on the [national standardized] EGE [test] in a nation where officials cheat on their doctoral theses.”

Having worked hard to accumulate tens of millions of dollars as head of the McGill University Health Centre, Arthur Porter understandably has done all he can to resist arrest and extradition back to Canada for having stolen it via kickbacks.

First Porter said he was deathly ill, but this apparently was a lie.

Then he said he was a plenipotentiary ambassador from Sierra Leone. Plenipotentiary is the highest rank available – head of mission, full authority to represent a government – but this also is a lie.

The two claims are impressive when you put them together – on oxygen, about to die of late-stage lung cancer, and at the same time representing Sierra Leone at the highest levels. The man deserves a medal from Sierra Leone, or from the United Nations. But again, unfortunately, he is making it up.

Having exhausted those two efforts to free himself from arrest and extradition, Porter will be interesting to watch at his trial. What lies will he take up there, by way of his defense?

UD will predict that he will move from lies about his physical health to lies about his mental health. He will claim temporary insanity. Oh, and three other men have been arrested for the same scheme. Porter will certainly blame all of them, and say they duped him into involvement. I don’t think Canada televises trials, but if it did, this would be, as I say, one to watch.

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Adding insult to injury, McGill University has announced it is

cancelling plans to pave an “Arthur T. Porter Way” onto the hospital property.

Always good, here at University Diaries, to look in on foreign fraternities and their way-cool activities. Here in the States, fraternities shuttle between good deeds at the local hospital and parties where they drink themselves to death. In Germany, it’s more retro, more teutonic, more… er… let’s not go any farther forward in time…

Our boys dress down; their boys love a man in cadet slacks. Our boys carry Bud cans; theirs carry rapiers. Ours stagger en masse down State U Boulevard; theirs stage torch-light parades.

Er, yes. And this is why: Say your president really doesn’t like homosexuals. Really doesn’t want to appoint them professors. Your university puts a gay man up for an appointment and the president says fuck that. And if the guy doesn’t like what I’ve done, he can take me to court.

This is not very becoming. You should probably be able to do something about it, so that your country, the Czech Republic, does not become a laughingstock. Much as we all respect the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it’s probably time to review your laws dating back to it.

… asks UD‘s blogpal Ophelia Benson about a cleric who encourages the murder of gay people and positively insists that by eight years of age girls must be hidden behind the burqa.

Well, it’s an old story, British universities sponsoring the ideas of men who think like this – seems every time UD turns around a school is tussling with on-campus prayers that call for the death of apostates, etc., etc.

Now, in both of these cases there has ultimately been a sensible response: Mr Kill the Filthy Dogs has been cancelled; and the other university has asked that the content of prayers be submitted in advance. But the thing just keeps happening – British universities sponsor events that segregate women and prohibit them from asking questions, sponsor speakers who want to murder adulterous people… I mean adulterous women… I mean women accused of adultery…

Anyway. Maybe these most recent responses suggest that the British are getting some backbone.

Luigi Frati, the Rector of La Sapienza University in Rome, has become one of the most notorious figures in [a] scandal which local media have dubbed “Parentopoli” – or “Relative-gate”.

A doctor by training, Professor Frati has, both as rector and formerly as head of the university’s medical faculty, overseen the promotion of his wife from being a local high school history teacher, to becoming Professor of Medical History.

His daughter also gained a post as Professor of Legal Medicine – without any specific medical education. And his son was made an associate professor in cardiology aged just 31, one of the youngest Italians to gain such an appointment.

He has denied claims of nepotism, insisting that all his loved-ones just happen to be the best qualified.

“The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through.”

There are many illuminating statements in this interview with a German ghostwriter of dissertations.

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Markets work in funny ways.

Instead of creating a backlash against ghostwriters, however, cases like Guttenberg’s have actually had the opposite effect. His case was actually how many people first learned about the existence of doctoral ghostwriters at all. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, the number of ghostwriters … has risen and prices have fallen for the service.

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The interviewed ghostwriter shares the self-justifying bullshit that gets him through the night.

“Everything is for sale: sex, people, doctorates. I am only a cog in the wheels of capitalism.”

You keep telling yourself that, honey.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …

Does anyone actually think that the people assigned to review bribe-taking in exchange for directing European Union research money to cronies are anything other than corrupt themselves?

Early [last Monday] morning, some 15 people occupied the [University of Athens] computer center, holding hostage the email accounts of faculty members, students and administrative personnel, including those of the University of Athens hospitals. With a few exceptions, nobody has condemned what has happened, and no university officials have dared appeal to the authorities, for fear of retaliation. Physical violence and bullying is so common in Greek universities and across Greece that almost nobody dares react anymore.

This blog has covered – as much as it can bear to – the fate of universities in Greece [scroll down]. Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, explains the typically vicious response to the prospect of an electronic vote on university reform.

Tourism is dwindling. Who wants to vacation among bands of bearded savages raiding embassies, staking their black pirate flag over universities or burning trucks carrying beer?

… because his University of Puebla economics degree is a fake.

They’re keeping med schools open, but that’s pretty much it. The entire sector is state-funded (the state wants to open things up to privatization, but the unions say no), so I guess the state can go ahead and kill it. Behind this astonishing event lie months of strikes by professors and students, and behind those strikes of course lie years of complex civil unrest.

Sri Lanka had better be careful. Enough of this and its people will begin to resemble the citizenry of Nevada.

Abidi is the head of a university in Tunisia. UD knows it’s ethnocentric of her, but she finds the idea of murderers running universities quite scandalous.

… at a university in Jordan. Daily brawls, with buildings on fire and serious weapons in play. Depending on which report you read, it’s tribal violence, or Saudi students pissed that campus women aren’t in burqas, or a combination of these things, or who the hell knows.