Madonna Constantine (here are all my Constantine posts; scroll down) has lost her wrongful dismissal suit against Columbia University.
Undaunted, she’ll press on with whatever else she can think of that’ll divert time and money from Columbia’s efforts to educate people. Specifically, she’ll see if she can’t make some money from one of these two remaining sources:
1.) A $200 million defamation suit.
2.) A federal discrimination case.
… Above the Law, is UD‘s kind of guy. They don’t agree on everything (Mystal thinks laptopped classrooms are great), but I like his style, and I certainly agree with him on this one: Professors at law schools with poor placement rates shouldn’t pontificate about for-profit universities with poor placement rates.
Mystal first describes Seattle School of Law:
[It’s] ranked 77th by U.S. News, but the school charges $35K – plus for tuition. The cost per year exceeds $50,000 when you include books, board and other living expenses. But the school only sports a 67.9% “employed upon graduation” statistic.
Then, writing about this New York Times piece about for-profits, which basically rewrites the Business Week piece UD blogged about here, Mystal mocks a professor at Seattle interviewed for the NYT article who says this:
“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”
Mystal remarks:
How can you fix your mouth to criticize “trade schools” for setting up their students for financial ruin when you teach at Seattle School of Law? … I wonder why Professor Pardo exempts Seattle from the list of schools who graduate more and more students who “can’t find meaningful employment.” …
A Bridgewater State College student describes a recent class.
… On the first day of class, my professor informed us that it was mandatory that we use a credit card to sign up for an online program that we would use throughout the semester. The program was equivalent to the price of an expensive textbook, but if it was going to help me, I was all for it. The program would have actually been quite helpful if it was used as a tool in the classroom. Unfortunately for me, the program was the class.
The professor actually informed [us] that everything we needed was in that program-that we need not ask him questions because they can be answered online. This was not a program that the professor created; it was just a generic one he was letting teach the class.
During class time, the professor would read the PowerPoint notes that came with the program. When asked if he could show students some examples, he refused. He claimed that there were plenty of examples they could view online and that it would be a waste of time to go over examples in class.
Ironically, what was a waste of time was this professor’s class. What is Bridgewater State College paying this professor to do – read off the internet? This professor never created a lesson plan and never put any effort in teaching the class. He simply used technology to teach the class for him.
It is truly unfortunate that Bridgewater State is wasting their money paying this professor, but what is most unfortunate is that hundreds of students each year suffer in cases similar to this, where they can only learn so much from technology without the help of their professor.
… a con coquotte… a fraud frotteur… This blog’s HOAX category is on fire with scammed credentials, faked memoirs, and plagiarized everything.
And UD always loves to put another log on the fire.
Conwise, though, it’s been a pretty cold winter. There’s been no really big bilking — the sort of thing that involves not merely made up shit in a book, but an author’s fake self-presentation, etc.
So UD‘s pleased that the Hiroshima thing has happened.
The Hiroshima thing departs in one way from one of UD‘s oft-stated rules about hoaxes:
In the matter of the hoax, Europe is holocausts, America addictions.
In other words, Europeans make up shit about how when they were seven the Nazis chased them around Bulgaria, while Americans make up shit about how cocaine put holes in their nose.
Yet this latest thing, this Hiroshima thing, is American.
The author of the now-pulped Last Train from Hiroshima, about the bomb’s immediate aftermath in Japan, lied about his Ph.D.
Henry Holt & Company, which stopped printing and selling “Last Train” earlier this week because of questions about the accuracy of several sections as well as concerns that some of the people quoted or portrayed in the book did not exist, had also questioned whether Mr. Pellegrino actually held a doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Yes, what about kindly old Father MacQuitty, and kindly old Father Mattias, who presided over the funeral of MacQuitty? Like James Frey‘s heroin-hags, these men of the cloth were too good for this world.
… did everything he could to warn us.
It’s much, much, much worse now.
And scads of people are warning us.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Leading French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy has been caught red-faced for praising the work of a philosopher who, it turns out, was invented as a joke by a journalist from a satirical daily.
In his latest book “De la guerre en philosophie” (Making war in philosophy), Levy quoted Jean-Baptiste Botul, an expert on German philosopher Immanuel Kant created by journalist Frederic Pages.
Levy acknowledged late Monday that he had often quoted Botul’s work “The sex life of Immanuel Kant” during many public appearances and in the pages of his latest book…
Didn’t look twice at a book titled Sex Life of Kant?
Charles Bremner, in the Times, elaborates:
In his latest book, published this week amid the traditional adulation in the media, Lévy, 61, attacks Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher. He calls him “raving mad” and cites as his authority Jean-Baptiste Botul, a 20th century philosopher.
The trouble is that Botul never existed. He was invented as an elaborate joke in 1999 by Frédéric Pagès, a literary journalist, who wrote works in his name. One was titled “The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.” His school, known as Botulism, subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” [The metaphysics of the limp].
In “De la Guerre en Philosophie” [On war in philosophy], his new book, Lévy writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the second world war, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance.” …
The Neo-Kantians of Paraguay? Isn’t that an emo band?
… is a classic disorder among degree fraudsters.
UD‘s been saying for years that if you want to get by with a diploma mill degree or just a degree you made up out of your head, you need to keep your sheepskin stats low.
UD understands it’s tempting, as long as you’re manufacturing your own awards, to give yourself three or four or five. But the danger is that if anyone investigates you, all those PhDs will look odd.
Currently a lad of 31, Jason Walker “taught three undergraduate courses, as well as one graduate course” in some medical subject or other at the University of Victoria. This was in 2006, so he was what? 27? But already at 27 he had ” two or three doctorates in forensic and behavioural sciences and medical epidemiology.” These and earlier degrees were from a variety of schools:
Among the academic institutions Walker has claimed to have studied at are the University of Victoria, the University of Calgary, McMaster University, the University of Toronto, Yale University and Smith College.
Smith College is an all-women liberal arts institution in Massachusetts.
I guess he liked the anonymity of the name Smith.
Anyway, Walker recently gave expert advice in some child custody thing in Canada, and someone in some office checked up on him, and now he’s in deep Vancouverian doodoo.
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Update:
… [P]olice became suspicious about his academic background when someone looked closely at a University of Toronto degree on his office wall, spokeswoman Sgt. Julie Fast said.
“It says it’s a Ph.D. in ‘philiosthy.’ That is how it’s spelled,” she said…
UD says philiosthy is a variant of philioque, itself a variant of filioque. This was a theology degree.
Two cases this year, both stunners.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham has asked that nine research papers by former UAB scientist H.M. Krishna Murthy be retracted because his experimental findings appear to be false or fabricated.
One has already been retracted by the prestigious Journal of Biological Chemistry.
… UAB launched a probe of Murthy’s research in January 2007 after the international scientific community began questioning the validity of molecular structures he had published in respected scientific journals such as Nature and the Journal of Molecular Biology. A committee of experts who had no conflicts of interest examined all the data and did a re-analysis of each molecular structure that was alleged to have been fabricated.
UAB found a preponderance of evidence that 11 protein structures “were more likely than not falsified and/or fabricated…
… This is the second case of research misconduct at UAB reported this year. In July, two UAB scientists, Dr. Juan R. Contreras and Judith M. Thomas were barred by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity from receiving grants and contracts after falsifying animal study results. They no longer work at UAB.
… Murthy’s JBC work involved discovery of the molecular structure of a serine protease enzyme for the virus that causes the Dengue and Dengue hemorrhagic fevers. The work was important — Dengue fever strikes about 100 million people each year and kills thousands…
… than accounts of mandatory online ethics exams at universities. I’ve covered these exams on this blog for years, and their description is always a riot.
Take a look at this, from Western Illinois University. Read all the way through to the end, because the last line’s the best.
It’s that time of year again. If you happen to work for Western Illinois University in any way, shape or form, you must complete an ethics course online by Nov. 16.
In six years I’ve taken many different versions of this dreaded test, ranging in length anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. The “course” was always a technicality, providing very shallow imaginary situations from which we must draw conclusions.
Yet every other time I took this course, it was followed by a test. Not this year! After procrastinating as much as possible I completed this obligation yesterday, and much to my surprise, it was not followed by a test of any kind.
Just to clarify, I sat through 74 pages of hypothetical scenarios, entering my most random haphazard guess, and grazed through every answer, expecting a test at the end. Needless to say I answered quite a few of them incorrectly, with no penalty.
Without a test at the close of this year’s ethics training, I am concerned. In my mind, the test was the only portion of the “course” that forced employees to retain this information. Perhaps the training writers are banking on the fact that you expect a test.
I hate to throw this out there, but I know someone has already figured it out: this training procedure allows for students and employees to pick any random answer and click the next page arrow without reading.
Yet again we’re concentrating on standardization and completion above learning. I have half a mind to report to my local ethics officer that this test is unethical…
I’m concerned about any institution that deems this a “course” of ethics. This is no course at all, no one’s learning, and certainly no one will retain the information. You’d think we’d tighten up this policy, since we had to remove our ethics officer this year for engaging in unethical activities.
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The author is Sara Gregory.
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Unsurprisingly, Illinois — arguably our most corrupt state — has also for decades been the most mandatory-online-ethics-quiz enthusiastic. Rod Blagojevich, for instance, insisted on them.
Clifford Orwin on the actuality of ethics courses and oaths.
… I’m not suggesting that business students are bad people, or that those who would teach them to be good are any less competent than the rest of us. It’s just that the whole notion of teaching ethical behaviour rests on a fundamental misconception – namely, that ethical behaviour can be taught.
Now I’m a pretty good teacher, or so people say. Yet, give me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.
This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.
Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.
By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.
… What can ethics education accomplish, then, beyond informing of professional standards? It can serve as an exercise in self-celebration. Look at us students, how earnest we are in avowing how earnest we are. Look at our institution, how bent we are on making our students better people.
The relation of such palaver to actual conduct is doubtful, to say the least. Take Stanford University, where the student body avows itself as green as Kermit the Frog. Buttressed by a stack of PowerPoint graphs, a friend likes to demonstrate to his students that, as they have grown ever more Gaia-friendly over the years, their consumption of energy in the Stanford dorms has grown ever more mind-boggling. It’s those shiny gadgets of theirs. My friend does this for the sheer delicious malice of it, not because he expects a single student to unplug anything. He knows that, among any student body, ethics is primarily a fashionable pose.
Are there genuinely ethical businessmen, doctors, lawyers, police officers, plumbers? Sure. But not because of anything that I or any other professor taught them. Modesty, colleagues, modesty.
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Stanley Fish says something similar, less amiably.
Margaret Soltan says something similar.
UD began to sense the dimensions of the contact hours controversy in the UK when La Kid came back from visiting a friend in school in Scotland. “She never sees a professor! She doesn’t have classes!”
This had to be an exaggeration; but it wasn’t that far off.
Students studying subjects such as languages, history and philosophy have access to less than nine hours a week “contact time” with lecturers or tutors, research reveals today.
The study by the National Union of Students and HSBC shows huge differences in the student experience. Those doing medicine and dentistry have an average of 22.6 contact hours a week, compared with 14.8 for biological sciences, 12.2 for law and 8.7 for languages, the study found.
Those at the most prestigious universities receive significantly more time with academics through lectures, individual tutorials and drop-in sessions than those at other institutions, despite the vast majority of universities charging students up to the maximum fee level of £3,225 per year – whatever their subject.
The issue of contact hours has becoming increasingly contentious since fees were raised in 2006 and will be further scrutinised tomorrow when the government announces the details of a review. Some university vice-chancellors want to see the cap raised to £7,000 a year.
“Given that there has been no demonstrable improvement in the number of contact hours since fees went up in 2006, I don’t believe there can be any justification for an increase now,” said Aaron Porter, vice-president of the NUS…
UD‘s reminded of University of Toledo President Lloyd Jacobs, whose revolutionary, cost-cutting approach to higher education has the same unbeatable feature we see in the UK — gather income from students, but avoid expenditure on actually educating them in classrooms with teachers. Computers and podcasts cost far less than faculty.
The downloadable university degree takes its cue from generations of diploma mills that got there before.
In the UK, though, I don’t think they’ve even got the technology with which to fob off students. I think they’re still making due with lies.
From Czech Press Survey:
One … infamous student suspected of gaining the title of doctor of law fraudulently is Marek Benda, a deputy for the [Czech Republic’s] Civic Democratic Party (ODS)…
In his capacity as head of the lower house’s constitutional and legal committee, Benda is supposed to supervise the strict observance of law. Caught cheating, Benda said he would not resign from his parliamentary post. He said he would not use the title of doctor of law…
Here you’ve got an article in the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University, and it’s all about how their school of education is so fantastic that …
The College of Education and Human Services is not part of the national call to significantly change teacher training, university officials say.
According to the New York Times, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a speech Thursday at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York that all universities needed a revolutionary change in the way they prepare teachers. Duncan said many, if not most, colleges and universities are doing a “mediocre job” of preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom.
Jan Waggoner, director of teacher education, said she believes SIUC’s program is not one that needs changes. Waggoner said the college was cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs and works to ensure the students are as prepared as possible for the classrooms.
“I don’t know that we would fall into the mediocre category that (Duncan) is naming or needing for the revolutionary change…”
UD looked at the US News rankings, about which Waggoner’s school indeed boasts in its publicity material, and she finds that Southern Illinois is not ranked at all. It’s listed along with all the other schools surveyed, but given no ranking.
To see a ranked school, look at the University of Illinois – Urbana. They’re ranked 24. See?
The thing SIUC’s education school’s best known for — giving SIUC’s current president a PhD in education even though he plagiarized much of the document — probably didn’t help much in this whole process.
But anyway. Kind of cute to see the campus paper playing along.
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UPDATE: This page, on the SIUC school of education website, deepens the pathos.
The director of teacher education tells the school newspaper reporter that the school was “cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs.” It wasn’t. Why not?
Last year our Education programs together were ranked in the Top 100. Unfortunately, the data we provide for this year’s ranking was in advertently incomplete and so we could not be included. We have no doubt, however, that if we had been appropriately considered, we would have achieved that lofty (Top 100) ranking again.
So they’re a Top 100 school… in principle… but they can’t appropriately fill out a questionnaire from US News and World Report. Would you want to go there?
The Korean guy who inspired this awful stamp
has been convicted of scientific fraud.
[A] senior colleague at his laboratory in Seoul,
South Korea claimed Dr Hwang had admitted
to fabricating key parts of a study that purported
to show the creation of the first human master
cells tailor-made to match individual patients…