The current House of Lords turns out to be a bevy of Bracknells.
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April Fool’s. I guess.
A strange place, Seton Hall University.
It’s Catholic, so it features things like The Heart of the University Retreat Series:
The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for quiet reflection guided by four members of the University’s priest community.
… “Deep in the heart of every university are the hearts of its teachers, and as we explore the university’s identity, we naturally need to explore ourselves. Ultimately, whatever our discipline, we teach who we are – `professing’ our worldview, our ethics, our values, as well as our hopes and dreams.”
Just the sort of gentle quiet reflection on values you’d expect at a Catholic school. The heart of Seton Hall is its teachers, and they are teaching values, etc., etc.
… Or maybe that’s not the heart of Seton Hall. Maybe its heart is its basketball program, a program so dirty, with a coach so violent, that it’s featured in today’s New York Times. The photo accompanying the article shows the coach shrieking like the very devil.
Or yet again maybe the heart of Seton Hall is its generous alumni?
… Business Week magazine dubbed [the university the] “Seton Hall of Shame” in 2002 for having not one but three major buildings bearing the names of disgraced corporate executives.
The trio included Kozlowski Hall, Walsh Library (named after former Tyco board member Frank Walsh, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to concealing a $20 million bonus) and Brennan Recreation Center (named after convicted First Jersey Securities founder Robert Brennan, who is serving time for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering).
Seems to be a disconnect between the priest community and the rest of the place.
In UD‘s recent squirrels-at-universities post,
she forgot to mention squirrel fishing.
The sport originated, according to a number of
sources, at Harvard, where students attached
nuts to fishing poles and, as squirrels grabbed
onto the food, lifted the squirrels off the ground.
(See this primer and film.)
UD‘s very attracted to the idea of squirrel
fishing. There’s a sweetness and an
inventiveness here. You need very little
equipment. Squirrels are plentiful everywhere.
No one gets hurt. Competition is keen,
and there’s lots of room for strategy (type
of nut, placement, timing once the squirrel
locks on, etc.). Squirrels disrupt our lives
in countless ways, and this feels like an
innocuous form of revenge.
Wherever it originated, it seems most
prominent at the moment at Berkeley.
From Times Online:
A book dealer from Co Durham has denied theft of a Shakespeare First Folio stolen from Durham University in 1998. Raymond Scott, 53, claims that he found the 1623 book — worth up to £15 million and one of only 228 copies known — in a nightclub in Havana, Cuba.
Mr Scott, of Manor Grange, Wingate, County Durham, claimed he came across the book while visiting his fiancée Heidy Rios, a 21-year-old dancer at Havana’s Tropicana Club.
He was arrested after taking the book to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC to have it “verified”, and staff became concerned that it was the same First Folio stolen from Durham University Library in 1998.
The book, which is believed to be worth up to £15 million, has been described as one of the most important printed works in the English language…
Way to go, Folger….
I’d love to have been there to see the whole thing unfold…
Imagine the incredulous face of the librarian as it slowly dawns on her… The way she glances up at Scott and then gingerly walks out of the room with the thing, her fingers trembling. Mr Scott would you mind waiting here a moment…
Then, with her whole body shaking, alerting her colleagues who confirm its authenticity… Then rapid whispering: Whadda we do?… Whadda we do?… Call the FBI, dammit… Then giving the guy tea (Folger has a high tea) and chatting him up while the FBI gets there…
Ignore the twee family website. Tasha Tudor (a successful book illustrator, she died a few years ago) is the object of a squalid dispute among her children. They are fighting over her assets like animals in an Aesop’s fable.
Moral: Only lawyers will get anything.
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A detail from her will:
Tudor’s 2001 will asked that she be buried with her predeceased dogs and the ashes of her pet rooster Chickahominy, should he die before her.
Pay attention because this one’s a little confusing.
From the Associated Press:
A former University at Buffalo addictions researcher hired professional actors to testify on his behalf during an investigation into whether he fabricated data in federally funded studies, state prosecutors said Tuesday.
[Okay, so we start with two levels of fabrication: Fabrication of research, and fabrication of testimony.]
William Fals-Stewart paid three actors to speak by phone during a university misconduct hearing in 2007 – and then sued the state for $4 million when their false testimony helped exonerate him, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office said.
[Right. So the actors did a good job and convinced the university he was innocent of the charges. He then turned around and sued New York state for four million dollars. That was dumb. He should have taken his exoneration and run. But to the two layers of fabrication we must add greed.]
The office charged Fals-Stewart with grand larceny, perjury, identity theft, offering a false instrument and falsifying business records.
[Again, there’s a lesson here. STOP WITH THE HIRED ACTORS. DON’T GO FOR THE MONEY.]
… Fals-Stewart, 48, appeared in Buffalo City Court on Tuesday, where bail was set at $2,500.
[Pretty damn paltry bail for such a bad boy.]
His attorney did not immediately return a call for comment… [Who’s his attorney? Richard Gere?]
… The actors, using scripts written by Fals-Stewart, testified as three people who had worked on his projects at the university’s Research Institute on Addictions or who had access to records, prosecutors said in court documents.
… Fals-Stewart, claiming the allegations had tarnished his reputation, then demanded $4 million from the state to settle a federal lawsuit, Cuomo’s office said.
The attorney general’s office uncovered the fraud when, as the state’s lawyer, it was called on to defend the university and the state against the court action, Cuomo’s office said…
Yeah well. I just liked the word.
A resident physician at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital apologized to faculty members over the weekend for posting a photograph of a former classmate giving two thumbs up next to a cadaver as state health officials said they would be looking into the matter.
In three separate e-mails, Erica Katz, who works in the emergency medicine unit at Stony Brook University Medical Center, told faculty members that posting the photo on her Facebook page was a mistake.
… Dean Richard Fine on Monday met with faculty members, who referred the matter to the committee on academic standards. That panel will make recommendations to Fine on what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Katz.
… The photo, which features [the classmate] wearing purple gloves and smiling over a cadaver with both of [the classmate’s] thumbs up, was taken during an anatomy class.
… Dr. Todd R. Olson, professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists… [asked:] “Don’t you think … one has every reasonable expectation that you’re not going to show up with somebody holding two thumbs up over Uncle Dick on Facebook?” …
UD discovers two higher education chicken stories:
1.) Some sort of fowl eludes captors at Glendale Community College.
2.) A Reed College student cancels a class he’d planned to offer in how to slaughter a chicken.
University Diaries has already written about the outrageously mismanaged Chicago State University, with its thieving presidents and desperate faculty and students.
Really desperate faculty. They recently begged the governor to fire the school’s entire board of trustees, in order to stop the trustees from appointing another putrid president. The governor ignored them.
But whatever else might be wrong with the new guy, he did do some auditing.
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He found out that a local politician has run off with one of CSU’s statues.
Officials from Chicago State University stopped just short of accusing State Representative Monique Davis of statue theft.
Davis, who recently made headlines because she allegedly owes $500,000 in back rent to the Chicago Board of Education, has in her possession a $25,000 statue of an African slave that belongs to Chicago State University.
And she’s refusing to give back the artwork, the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed reports.
Chicago State University Police Chief Ronnie Watson tried to collect the 400-pound bronze entitled “Defiance,” but, perhaps poetically, Davis refused to relinquish the rendering of a slave girl in shackles with whip marks on her back.
… CSU originally purchased the statue to adorn its financial aid center. They used state funds that were set aside for the school.
But that doesn’t explain how Davis ended up with the bronze. She can’t explain it either, or, rather, she declined to explain it to Sneed.
… Newly installed president Wayne Watson, who is trying to revamp the school’s management procedures, uncovered the missing statue during a financial audit.
As far as UD can make out from reading a variety of accounts of this matter, Davis simply loves the statue. She loves it madly. She loves to look at it in her office. She has bonded with it and feels it belongs to her.
… the Finance and Investment Advisory committees is bankrupt.
… Faylene Owen and her husband Larry Owen filed for bankruptcy protection in December. Some colleagues say Trustee Owen should step back from some of her leadership roles. Court documents show her million dollar East Lansing home is in foreclosure, and she and her husband owe more than $100,000 in taxes…
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Update: A couple of reactions to the story from locals. The first one, from a comment on an article in the Lansing State Journal, is mainly of interest to Scathing Online Schoolmarm:
Perhaps those that live in glass houses should not be heaving stones. … Those that publicly attempt to drag her through the proverbial “mud” only resurrect the historical predisposition of the MSU family to provide fodder to its detractors.
Only two sentences, but they manage to do so much — insanely mixed metaphors, absolutely pointless quotation marks, and, overall, a spectacular combination of pomposity and idiocy.
Here’s another response, from an MSU student:
Both the State News editorial board and Larry Owen attempt to group the Owens in with the thousands of working Michigan families who are facing bankruptcy and other financial troubles. How ridiculous! As Michigan workers lose their jobs, face layoffs and have their salaries slashed, the Owens reported their monthly expenditures are more than $7,000. The Owens are a classic example of greed and corruption gone awry and are not to be confused with the real victims of Michigan’s current financial recession.
Ah. That’s better. Unlike the first writer – probably a member of MSU’s board of trustees – this college junior can think and write.
Egypt’s biggest public university has banned female students who wear the niqab from replacing the full-face veil with surgical masks in examination halls, the local media reported on Tuesday.
Officials at Cairo University said that replacing the niqab with facemasks violates a recent ruling by the Administrative Court, which upheld a ban on the full veil in examination halls.
The controversy over the niqab in this predominantly Muslim country erupted last October when Mohammad Tantawi, the Grand Shaikh of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni seat of learning, banned the niqab in female-only classes and dormitories.
The top cleric said that the costume is not an Islamic duty. A few days later, Minister of Higher Education Hani Hilal followed suit, citing security reasons.
He explained that several men were caught donning the niqab to enter university hostels.
Later, Hilal barred niqab-dressed students from taking their exams. He also ordered that niqab-dressed female lecturers should not be allowed in classes…
What’ll they wear next?
Background here.
… proprietor of the blog You
Made Me Theorize, sends her
news of the latest edition
of a Joseph Conrad classic.
The University of Oregon newspaper interviews Stephen Stolp, executive director of support services for student-athletes at the school, about the new student-athlete learning center building, which features, writes the reporter, “many reminders of students who balanced athletics and academics and came out on top in both: names are engraved and painted on the walls, the floors and even the mirrors.”
“There’s a lot of umbrage to the past,” Stolp said.
Right after you figure out homage was intended, you get this:
Eugene Sandoval, a design partner at the Portland-based architecture firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, headed the design team for the center. Before he and his partners began designing, he traveled to universities all over the country to draw inspiration. He found that “the more astute the university, as far as academic prowess and achievement, the more their buildings are a representation of our culture.”
UD read Sandoval’s comment to Mr UD. Mr UD looked thoughtful. He said: “That probably meant something.”