Talkin’ bout my revolution.
Talkin’ bout my revolution.
After former marketing professor George Zinkhan shot and killed three people on April 25, the marketing department had to scramble to cover his classes.
Red and Black, University of Georgia newspaper.
… in the country has no required ethics course.
(UD thanks Brad for the link.)
From a comment on a UNM Daily Lobo story about a sadomasochistic sex worker in the creative writing department:
I propose a no-holds-barred celebrity duel between Mike “Suckerpunch” Locksley and Lisa “Mistress Jade” Chavez to be held in Smith Plaza next Friday at high noon – 15 rounds or until one of our UNM celebrities can fight no longer – tickets will be sold to the public and all proceeds will go to settle lawsuits against UNM resulting from the earlier escapades of “Suckerpunch” and “Mistress Jade” – Come one, come all – see the show of a lifetime – and shake hands with the man who brought you the whole thing, Ringmaster David Schmidly!!!
The State University of New York system, as we know, is dealing at the same time with a big sports scandal and a big money scandal. Details here.
There’s a similar sort of two-front war raging at the University of Florida, where they’ve got both a big sex scandal and a big money scandal.
Money scandal first. UD covered the story back in May when accusations that the Director of the university’s Propulsion Institute created a fake research unit to steal from the government first arose. She was shocked back then to discover that Samim Anghaie’s university website still functioned; imagine her amazement to discover, post-indictment, that he’s still up there, representing the University of Florida.
As to the sex scandal: The only thing UD finds scandalous in this story is the sort of course the professor teaches. Scathing Online Schoolmarm thought she’d seen it all.
… Local online auctioneer Ggi Auction said yesterday that Asia University, located in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang, was put up for sale on its site last Wednesday.
It marks the first time a college has been listed in an auction in Korea.
The appraised price of the school – which includes a 120,000-square-meter (1.3 million square feet) plot of land and 12,577 square meters of buildings and other facilities – was 11.064 billion won ($9.36 million).
But perhaps that was a bit too high for the online auction crowd: No one offered up a bid for the college at Wednesday’s auction, Ggi Auction said. The company plans to put the college up for sale again, this time during a live auction on Nov. 20 at Daegu District Court. Bidding will start at 7.745 billion won – 30 percent less than it was listed on Wednesday.
The college, founded in 2003, was battered by a series of corruption scandals involving the executives of its foundation, which eventually led to its closure. In 2005, its president and vice president were arrested together for receiving a combined 3.9 billion won in bribes in return for the promise of professorship. In another case, an executive was caught obtaining a loan from a bank under the name of a part-time lecturer. The amount of cumulative liabilities at the school is over 5.1 billion won, Ggi Auction said…
From the long comment thread to a NYT blog post about the ineffectiveness of efforts to control binge drinking at party schools.
My youngest (of five) kids – all fine people – is graduating from college this year. After paying college tuitions for 20 years now (the kids were spread out in age) I have started to question the necessity of spending all that money for what is, in many respects, a four-year party.
They all went to good private schools, but was the huge expense and all the worry really worth it? What would have been so terrible if they’d gone to the local state college, lived at home and worked to pay tuition? Add the number of actual weeks in the college year and you’ll be shocked to see how many vacation weeks there are.
I wish colleges were the challenging bedrocks of scholarship and intellectual pursuit they were hundreds of years ago. As things stand now, why should anyone pay $55,000/year for a huge four-year party?
— Jane Landers
I wonder whether a better remedy for college binge drinking would be stricter academics. My friends and I drank reasonably in college because our college was hard. If we’d been hungover we couldn’t have kept up with the work and we would have flunked out.
–Charlotte K
If so, that school must be doing a Yeshiva. Doing a Yeshiva is slang for anxiously airbrushing a Merkin or a Madoff from the webpage listing your trustees or your executive committee or whatever when the Merkin or the Madoff gets in trouble with the law.
Big trouble.
Samberg of Pequot Capital is being investigated for trades in Microsoft shares in 2001, around the time he hired an employee from Microsoft. That employee didn’t stay long at the fund, but eventually got a $2 million payment from Pequot, which was disclosed in a recent divorce action. The payment rekindled the SEC’s interest in the on-again, off-again case.
When it got a big gift from him, Columbia Business School praised Samberg’s “commitment to cultivating ideas that will help business schools shape society.”
Insider trading. It’s an idea. An idea that shapes society.
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Update: They’ve got his name on a teaching excellence institute.
Nortin Hadler, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, adds another item to our list of university-sponsored bullshit.
…[W]e are … bombarded by announcements and pronouncements from medical centers… Many tout the opening of a new building, or the offering of a new procedure, or claim world class expertise that outshines all others. These announcements and pronouncements are the work product of a formal department in the institution that often bears the moniker “Public Affairs” or even the “Public Affairs and Marketing Office” as is the case for my own [University of North Carolina] Hospitals. The departmental budget is often liberal and always part of the “overhead” of health care in our country. We all pay for these activities as part of our health care premiums.
Staffing these departments are people highly skilled in communicating to the public with backgrounds in marketing, public relations or, increasingly, health journalism. Working in institutional “health communications” is all too often the soft landing for unemployed health journalists. Hence, the pronouncements and announcements are often put forth in the glossiest of multimedia formats as well as the more standard press announcements.
A recent analysis of the press releases by academic medical centers casts all this activity in an unflattering light (Annals of Internal Medicine 2009;150:613-8). This analysis was a demanding exercise undertaken by investigators funded by the National Cancer Institute. Academic medical centers issue an average of nearly 50 press releases annually. Nearly half pertain to research in animals, which are almost always cast as relevant to human health.
Of the releases about primary human research, very few were describing studies that would pass muster as high quality; far more described findings that were preliminary at best. Most neglected to emphasize cautions regarding interpreting such studies. Clearly, academic medical centers are wont to promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health.
… At the very least, media must state whether the reportage is based on primary sources that take personal responsibility for the validity of the pronouncement. Better yet, independent sources should be queried as to the validity, reproducibility and relevance of the claims…
If the pronouncement is simply lifted from a marketing Web site, that should be disclosed….
He acted heroically during the mass shooting last year at Northern Illinois University, but NIU’s police chief has always been a bit unhinged, and students, with whom he has been abusive, want him out:
… [A]n editor of the campus newspaper [has] accused [Donald] Grady of threatening and shouting at him during an interview that became a three-hour tirade.
“It’s time to put an end to this mess. It’s time for a change,” the Northern Star student paper wrote in a blistering editorial calling for Grady’s removal. It accused him of employing intimidation to get his way.
School officials put the 56-year-old Grady on paid leave for 30 days starting last week while a panel reviews the allegations …
DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott is among the officials who have publicly backed the paper’s call for Grady’s ouster or resignation.
“NIU has isolated itself under his leadership,” Scott said.
… Controversy has dogged Grady, who also is from Beloit, Wis., during his career. After becoming Wisconsin’s first black police chief in the mostly white town of Bloomer in 1989, he created a stir by issuing nearly 300 tickets, including to himself, for violations of a snow-shoveling ordinance.
When he became Santa Fe, N.M., chief in 1994, he ordered officers to stop accepting free cups of coffee on the job and banned bolo ties.
Police responded with a 103-to-5 no-confidence vote in their boss. After digging in his heels for two years, Grady resigned, saying his reforms had encountered too much resistance.
And at NIU, well before the shooting, staff of the student newspaper had already complained that he often withheld standard crime reports, requiring the paper to file Freedom of Information Act requests…
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A UCLA professor who taught the student accused of slashing a female classmate’s throat last week said Saturday that he told a university administrator 10 months ago that he had concerns about the student’s mental health, but strict federal privacy laws prevent UCLA officials from disclosing how they handled the issue.
Stephen Frank, an associate professor in the university’s history department, met the suspect, undergraduate student Damon Thompson, when he enrolled in the instructor’s Western civilization class late last year, Frank said in an interview.
Frank said he grew concerned about Thompson in mid-December 2008, after the student sent several e-mails complaining that classmates sitting around him had been disruptive and made offensive comments to him while he was taking a written exam.
In one of the e-mails that Frank provided to The Times, Thompson, 20, also accused Frank of taunting him.
“I believe I heard you, Professor Frank, say that I was ‘troubled’ and ‘crazy’ among other things,” Thompson wrote in the e-mail. “My outrage at this situation coupled with the pressure of the very weighted examination dulled my concentration and detracted from my performance.”
There were other such complaints from the student about a range of campus people. He seems, from the article’s descriptions, to be a severe paranoid.
An official told Frank that they could only suggest to Thompson that he seek treatment, but they could not require him to seek psychological services.
“My concern was in the context of other violent incidents on campuses around the country,” Frank said…
It can’t be true that merely suggesting help was UCLA’s only option. Surely it can suspend students who seem threateningly unstable.
[A spokeswoman] noted that campus police have said they have no record of any formal complaints being made about Thompson prior to his arrest.
What are we calling a formal complaint? A faculty member had sent the university plenty of evidence that the student was seriously unbalanced.
Another thing. UD‘s followed enough of these stories to know that getting anything useful out of the student’s family is unlikely. For whatever reason (denial?), in a number of cases, when family members comment to the press, they express amazement that an obviously troubled brother or son or cousin had anything wrong with him. If even Susan Klebold can claim she hadn’t a clue…
Which leads UD to suggest that universities looking to avoid trouble should pay serious attention to what professors and teaching assistants tell them.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has defended a professor’s $219 purchase of the complete set of the 1960s series “Get Smart” as appropriate.
The Legislative Audit Bureau discovered the purchase of the 25-DVD set by a business professor during a review of credit card spending.
Auditors also wanted explanations for the professor’s purchase of seasons of “The Love Boat” and “Family Ties.” The professor, whose name was redacted from records, spent more so all three could be shipped overnight.
In an internal e-mail, the professor said clips from the shows would be used “to illustrate aspects of business and management” in his class.
UW-Madison called the purchases a “best judgment” and said the DVDs would be used for years, so purchasing instead of renting them made sense.
… bit of writing in the Times Higher Education from a group of professors about “the seven deadly sins of the academy.” UD‘s sister sent it her way, and she’s grateful. It’s already getting wide distribution because one of the professors, Terence Kealey, a vice- chancellor (emphasis on vice) at the University of Buckingham, in writing about the sin of lust, has done a Kinsley Gaffe and offended scads of people.
The whole thing’s worth reading – especially the stuff on snobbery and arrogance – but let’s look at Kealey’s Gaffe, with UD‘s responses in blue ink.
Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the faculty and football for the alumni. [Funny!] But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students’ bedrooms?
The great academic novel of the 19th century was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The great academic novel of the 20th century was Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. Both books chronicle lust between male scholars and female acolytes, and I expect that the great academic novel of the 21st century will describe more of the same. So, why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse? [Pullulate. Wonderful. Anyone with a sense of humor knows the man means to be funny. But so few people… Oh well…]
When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he is famously said to have replied, “because that’s where the money is”. Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are. Separate the acolytes from the scholars by prohibiting intimacy between staff and students (thus confirming that sex between them is indeed transgressive – the best sex being transgressive, as any married person will soulfully confirm) and the consequences are inevitable. [A convoluted way of putting it, but absolutely true. There’s a natural erotic pull of some professors toward some students, and some students toward some professors — UD speaks from experience, having had some affairs with professors when she was young. Enact rules prohibiting affairs and you tend to make them, as Kealey suggests, that much more tempting.]
The fault lies with the females. [Again, the sort of flat overstatement that should tell you he’s trying to be funny. A lot of readers don’t see it that way.] The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades. I know of two girls who, in 1982, got firsts in biochemistry from a south-coast university in exchange for favours to a professor, but I know of no later scandals. [Over the top humor, but nothing wrong with it. And – to make a more serious point about power – only sometimes is the power concentrated in the male professor and not the female student. These relationships are complicated and diverse. UD was the aggressor in her heyday.]
But girls fantasise. This was encapsulated by Beverly in Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, who forces herself on to JoJo, the campus sports star, with the explanation that “all girls want sex with heroes”. On an English campus, academics can be heroes. [Put it this way, at least for wee undergrad UD. She lusted after knowledge, after the truth, and certainly she was drawn madly to men who seemed in possession of some of that.]
Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? [Abnormal UD.]
Enjoy her! She’s a perk. She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife. [Here’s the core of the gaffe, I guess. He speaketh absolute truth. Like Casaubon, you keep your hands off of her even as you enjoy her absurd intellectual/erotic idealization of you. The thought that this beautiful woman finds pale bespectacled you sexually hot excites you, of course; and if you take that sense of your perceived erotic power to bed with your wife and it pumps things up a bit, what’s the problem?]
Yup, I’m afraid so. As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch. Be warned by the fates of too many of the protagonists in Middlemarch, The History Man and I Am Charlotte Simmons. And in any case, you should have learnt by now that all cats are grey in the dark.
So, sow your oats while you are young but enjoy the views – and only the views – when you are older.
Anyway. If you want to read all the outrage, it’s here, in the comment thread.
The past recaptured.
A severed human hand has been unearthed from the garden of a Maryland home…
… The son of a previous owner of the house told police the hand was a souvenir he took home as a student at the University of Maryland’s medical school more than 50 years ago.