In the aftermath of Stephen Gey’s death – he was a law professor at Florida State – one of his students pays homage to the strength of his character as well as to his intellect.

This article, a few years back, captures Gey’s passion, and his students’ reciprocal feelings.

This is the best – the very best – of the university, that free and ordered space, as Bartlett Giamatti called it – a space as removed from the tawdry cyberspace of distance ed as possible – where human beings and their passions meet human beings and their passions.

[Ben] Gibson and about 40 other students gathered for Gey’s First Amendment class Monday. They couldn’t see Gey, who was calling from his house of hard, steep angles. They could only hear his voice over three speakers. But they could picture him in those ironed jeans, sitting ramrod straight.

He called to say goodbye.

He said he could no longer teach, even by phone. He said he had wanted more than anything to finish the term, but was too sick. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said.

The class fell silent.

“This is Ben,” Gibson called out. “I want to thank you for the semester. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done.”

The class was again silent. So were the phone speakers.

Finally, they heard Gey sign off. “Thank you,” they heard him say. His voice was choked.

“Thank you for allowing me to fulfill my life’s passion.”

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

The man in action.

This is potentially a very big story. I want to read more about it before I comment, but it’s important enough for me to put a couple of links up already. Here, and here.

Original report here.

What am I talking about? The BBC explains:

A report from the US-based thinktank The Oakland Institute claims that the scramble for arable land in Africa by foreign investors is forcing millions of small farmers off their ancestral land.

As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, wealthy countries and investment funds are seeing an opportunity in Africa and acquiring huge tracts of fertile land to produce crops like wheat, rice, corn and biofuels for consumption back home. The report says that an area the size of France has already been sold or leased to foreign investors.

Because of poor land ownership laws in many African countries and a lack of transparency about deals, it is claimed, these land deals are delivering almost none of the benefits promised to African citizens.

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

WTF?

In the west African country of Mali, one investment group was able to secure 100,000 hectares of fertile land for a 50-year term for free, according to the Institute’s report.

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University on acquisitive, amoral universities.

Among his complaints:

… [M]edical researchers lend their names to articles written by drug companies to boost sales. Ghost writing has benefited researchers by giving them additional publications to add to their resumes..

The problem, which has alarmed medical editors in the US, arises when ”publications are the coin of the realm in university scientific careers…”

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

He says a university should produce people “who understand the world and their place in it, who can speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.”

Why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it.

“It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!”

Miami Herald

Students at China’s Tsinghua University are upset that a campus building has been named after a commercial donor, Jeanswest.

At least they’re not the University of Louisville.

Take back your cash
Take back your slots
What made you think
That I’m so easily bought?
Take back the books
The Ayns and the Rands
I may be poor
But I’m not one of your brands.

Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.

A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.

Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.

In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”

You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?

Shakes you up.

… Georgetown.

[UD thanks Jonathan.]

… comes to Vanderbilt.

Indiana Tech, an undistinguished, mainly online thing, boasting a ten percent four-year graduation rate, is going to open a law school.

The ABA, which would accredit Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s tool, will certainly accredit the Indiana Tech Law School.

… known as the Research Foundation, has long been an object of investigation for misuse of funds and general disorganization. And now one particular thing the Foundation recently did with its money has become a big local story: It gave bunches of it to the daughter of an important state politician, but it didn’t ask to her do anything to earn it.

The state’s ethics commission on Friday charged the president of the research foundation of the State University of New York, John J. O’Connor, with giving a no-show job to the daughter of the former Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno.

Bruno’s since been found guilty of federal fraud (not for this; for all sorts of other things); and his daughter has quit her sinecure. But it’s good to remind ourselves that using universities as dumping grounds for politicians and their beloveds is not merely a folkway of America’s deep south.

We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.

Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.

All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.

But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.

From Cornell…

… to Kentucky.

You can read the university president’s crap [see post below]; or you can get the real deal. Here.