Charleston County Sheriff’s deputies arrest[ed] 3 women and [a Medical University of South Carolina] psychiatrist during an undercover prostitution sting at a strip club.

[Alberto] Santos, 50, was charged with theft and unlawful possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of and intent to distribute prescription medication. Deputies say he was using his patients’ pills as payment for sexual favors at the Silk Stockings by Amber gentlemen’s club.

… Tasman et al. have produced an outstanding book in this third edition of Psychiatry. At a list price of $340 (less on discount websites), Psychiatry is not cheap, but in two volumes weighing about 7 kg, you get a lot for your money. Perhaps you would get even more with less if it were on a CD, thus making it more portable and searchable. Still, this is a fine textbook that will serve educators, at all levels, as a curriculum guide and teaching tool. For practitioners, it is a comprehensive reference that will find great use in any library.

Psychiatry takes its place in the University Diaries Textbook Hall of Fame next to The Ultimate Rule of Law (189 pages of text, $136.00), and Marxism Beyond Marxism ($140.00).

The ex-president of Zambia, on trial for massive financial corruption, complains about his successor, who pushed for the trial.

“The presidency in Africa is not cheap,” Mr. Chiluba said, according to a transcript [of off-the-record remarks]. “People die to secure the presidency. But here was Mr. Mwanawasa, who received it on a silver platter from my hands. He stabbed me in the back badly. I still bleed.”

A recent Columbia University grad is confused:

… In [Columbia University] student housing, where I lived for four years, the water in the showers was either scorching or glacial but rarely tolerable. Infestations might be part of New York’s charm, but our cockroach and mice roommates were amazingly abundant. I sometimes awoke at 4 a.m. to find my roommate chasing mice. He was more successful than our traps at catching the little guys.

At the library, I might wait 20 minutes to print something out. During finals time, it might be an hour to get a nook at a desk in which to study.

I’m not sure where the money is going…

Hint: Check out your president’s salary.

The university is on pace to lose millions of dollars in revenue after enrollment projections fell drastically short last semester, a report shows.

The university’s fiscal year 2009 third quarter budget report revealed a spring semester enrollment figure of 19,099 — 399 students shy of the expected 19,498. The shortfall could account for nearly $3 million worth of lost revenue, Vice President for Financial and Administrative Affairs Corey Bradford said….

At least they’ve got a plagiarist president and a politically compromised board of trustees to deal with the problem.

Not very Darwinian of the great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin to have resigned, under pressure (she turns out to have written emails reminding people that her rival, Derek Walcott, had an accusation of sexual misconduct against him), from the Oxford University poetry chair she just won. 

Having done what she needed to do to triumph in the struggle for dominance, Ruth Padel caved to pressure from the pack.

Background here.

Mary Easley has been told that she should resign from her $170,000-per-year position at N.C. State University because it is in the best interest of the university.

UNC system President Erskine Bowles said today that Easley has been given that message. He said he could not elaborate on her response. N.C. State University Chancellor James Oblinger earlier today also said it was in the best interest of NCSU that Easley step aside.

New disclosures over the past week about the position already have led to resignations of the provost who hired her and the N.C. State trustee — and friend of the Easleys — who also played a role in the job.

NCSU spokesman Keith Nichols said today that Oblinger would only say that Easley’s resignation now is “in the best interest of the university.” Oblinger will not discuss whether he has delivered that message to Easley, saying he cannot talk about personnel matters.

Bowles said he also believes it is in the best interest of N.C. State that Easley give up her position…

Sure sounds as though Easley won’t go easily. They’re ganging up on her, but she ain’t moving. Hm.

… with each other, or with themselves, it ain’t pretty. It can even become, as at North Carolina State University, a bloodbath.

So far the hacks and cronies who gave the wife of the scandal-ridden ex-governor a cushy job at a North Carolina campus and, soon after hiring her, upped her salary eighty-eight percent, have suffered two losses: The provost has had to go, and the chair of the university’s board of trustees is on the verge of going.

The president of the University of North Carolina system has asked McQueen Campbell, chairman of the N.C. State University board, to resign immediately after learning this week that Campbell played a role in hiring former first lady Mary Easley.

Erskine Bowles told The News & Observer on Thursday that Campbell phoned him earlier this week and “went through a whole mea culpa,” then recounted telling Chancellor James Oblinger that Easley was looking to change jobs before N.C. State hired her in 2005.

“He said, ‘I did tell Jim Oblinger in passing that Mary Easley was going to change jobs and he may not even remember that.'” Bowles said. “And I said, ‘What?’ That was about the end of the conversation. I was surprised.”

Campbell was prominently featured in a two-part series last weekend in The N&O, which recounted his friendship and influence with Mike and Mary Easley. Campbell flew the governor often in his planes, sometimes for free, and bragged of his influence in getting key development permits. The governor twice appointed him to the N.C. State Board of Trustees, where he rose to chairman.

Campbell had insisted that he played no role in Mary Easley’s job at N.C. State. He denied having even a single conversation with university officials or Mary Easley before she got a three-year contract at $80,000 a year in 2005, or when she received a five-year, $850,000 contract that touched off controversy.

That story changed with his call to Bowles. Bowles then phoned Oblinger, who said in an interview Thursday that he did not recall being told by Campbell that Mary Easley would be available. Oblinger said he does not deny it might have happened…

The article goes on to cite the idiot head of trustees bragging about how his political connections allow him to break rules and skirt laws. Plus he’s on record lying to a reporter about his involvement in the Easley case. Just the sort of person you want at the helm of a university.

So far the bloodbath has bypassed the governor’s wife, understandably eager to retain her amazingly lucrative position. But the president of the North Carolina system now says, rather darkly, that she “will be reviewed in the appropriate manner especially as we look at where we’re going to place our budget going forward.”

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

Update:  McQueen Campbell (great name) obliges.

Harvard gets a Grassley letter.

A Spanish judge best known for indicting Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden denies any wrongdoing after being paid $200,000 for work at a U.S. university while drawing his salary in Madrid, a court official said Wednesday.

Judge Baltasar Garzon insists he acted in good faith, hid nothing and reported both sources of income to tax authorities in both countries, said the official at the National Court, where Garzon is based.

A judicial oversight board is investigating Garzon for allegedly failing to warn his superiors he would be getting paid for teaching and lecturing at New York University during a sabbatical in 2005 and 2006.

Judicial officials say Garzon received …more than $200,000 in salary, travel expenses and school tuition for his daughter during that stay

… Spanish judges must tell the judicial oversight board if they will receive an outside salary during leaves of absence, the board said Tuesday in announcing the probe.

Council investigators have a month to decide whether to drop the case or recommend that Garzon be penalized. Punishment could range from a fine or suspension to outright expulsion from the court.

This human type can be played for tragedy (Lear) or comedy (Homer Simpson). It’s either horrific or hilarious to watch him destroy himself and others through stupidity and arrogance.

Lloyd Jacobs, president of the University of Toledo, is one of these, very much in the comic mode with his Babbitty emails about the revolutionary for-profit approach he’s bringing to the school.

Along with Babbitt, the fictional prototype for Jacobs is Charles Bovary, Emma’s dullard husband, who, convinced he’s found a new way to fix a club foot, ends up crippling a patient for life.

Faculty and students have mobilized quite impressively against Lloyd, and have so far managed to keep him from realizing his dreams. Here’s their latest blocking action.

Still. The man is president. “I will do such things…”

On Feb. 16, [Carnegie Mellon’s investment manager] visited the offices of the Westridge fund in Greenwich and Jersey City, New Jersey, to try to locate the school’s money. In Greenwich, he was met by attorney Maxine Sleeper, who told Kennedy that her firm, Cooley Godward Kronish LLP represented the firm, though not Greenwood or Walsh [directors of the firm, arrested for misappropriation], according to the complaint.

When [the investment manager] asked Ms. Sleeper who was in charge, she said the answer was “tricky.”

An article in this morning’s New York Times picks up the ever more gruesome tale of American university students and debt.

Even as the economy tanks, tanked students stagger over to the bright tent at university football games and open a credit card account in exchange for a gift. How innocent they are…

[One] bank has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets. Under certain circumstances, Michigan State even stands to receive more money if students carry a balance on these cards.

Their university and the banks have created the perfect sucker storm… Flush with drink and a sense of invincibility as her team wins 27 – 0, the student excitedly accepts her free blanket and her third credit card…