… 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.

Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.

UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.

The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.

UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.

For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.

Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.

Long Island University‘s provost is a master of understatement.

As a parting gesture, the just-fired director of the campus art museum stole nine Egyptian antiquities from the place, erased them from the collection’s computer database, and then sold them to Christie’s as part of “the collection of Barry Stern.”

The court wants to know why he robbed the museum. I’m sure Barry had cause: They didn’t appreciate him, he needed the money, and shit, no one would have noticed the pieces were missing if Christie’s hadn’t sent a purchase order to his old address at the museum (That last thing happened because Barry fucked up. But … you’re gonna lock up a man for making a mistake?).

America’s worst university is also its filthiest: As per tradition, thousands of drunken tailgaters have dumped … let’s see.. seventy tons of trash on campus after a recent football game.

“[P]olice estimate we have 15,000 to 25,000 people who come here to tailgate and spend the day with no intention of attending the ballgame,” says the university’s sports-mad president, Michael Adams, who deserves everything he gets, since his asshole-friendly policies created the problem.

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The headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states the school’s quandary:

IS THE TRASHING OF UGA DUE TO TAILGATING OR DRINKING?

Hm, yes, take your pick. The regular transformation of an American university campus into a puke and piss dump is maybe because of its y’all come on down tailgating policies, or maybe because y’all doesn’t even know there’s a football game going on … doesn’t even know it’s on a campus…

So you don’t gotta choose, really. It’s tailgating and it’s drinking.

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Got my headline for this post from a remark someone made on the article’s comment thread.

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Here’s another comment: “It was just shocking to see the aftermath,” said Andy Carter, 37, who works at the UGA Library and only recently moved to Athens.

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What are these people seeing? Let’s not be coy:

Whole tailgate tents left half-standing. Abandoned portable grills. Urination in campus doorways. Defecation. Trash strewn everywhere.

Oh and they got all sorts of folk comin’ up with all sorts a jackshit excuses — Blamin’ it on the media ’cause they want UGA to have night games and you know how somehow I dunno but somehow folks just do that much more shittin’ in classroom doorways when it’s dark out…

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No one’s saying that the university campus has to be a meticulous little monastery. Have your games. Expect noise and mess. But America’s worst university holds that title in part because it’s lost all sense of decorum, all sense that it’s supposed to be a serious place, where people like librarians can go about their business without stepping in Bubba’s shit.

SOS doffs her hat to the editorial staff of the University of Virginia newspaper. Their response to GQ having ranked the school 25th Douchiest is lovely.

And the comments! Even lovelier.

(The school University Diaries has dubbed the worst university in America, the University of Georgia, comes in 13th.)

You recall UD’s post about this Louisiana University’s effort to update its mascot.

It came up with this image —

— which generated a lot of controversy.

Here’s a nicely written letter to the editor about it:

As [a] native of Louisiana and former resident of Thibodaux, I have observed the controversy regarding the newly unveiled Nicholls mascot with great interest.

I must admit that when I viewed the new Colonel Tillou mascot for the first time my own thoughts were of a Bolshevik cavalryman from the Russian Civil War. The politically correct forces claim they began a campaign to replace the old mascot in an effort to improve the university’s image. Unfortunately, the new mascot conjures up an image of a murderous Red Army dragoon slashing his way through a Ukrainian village. This is definitely not an improvement on the university’s image. Instead, it tarnishes the school and everyone associated with it. This whole experience should finally demonstrate the folly of political correctness and its various progeny.

What makes this matter even more distasteful is the knowledge that an out-of-state design firm and focus groups participated in this travesty. In the end, the entire endeavor that created “Colonel Bolshevik” has been a waste of money, time and university resources. The university should bring back the old mascot and issue an apology. Once it does that, it can return to more-fruitful endeavors, such as educating the young adults of Louisiana.

… why she committed fraud with her university-issued credit card:

Sheila Renda Springs, a senior fiscal assistant with the chemistry department, reportedly bought 22 personal items costing nearly $3,400 over two years. Springs, who was employed at UF since 1999, bought mainly electronics and camera equipment.

She told university police that she wanted the items for her family but couldn’t afford them, according to the report.

… Or not.

From the New York Times:

Washington Monthly has recently released its new college ranking. It’s based on several factors, one of which is a comparison between a college’s graduation rate and the makeup of its student body.

… Toward the bottom of the ranking, the University of Louisville has an expected graduation rate of 59 percent and an actual rate of 44 percent.

Unhappy presidents are pretty much all alike.

(To mess with Tolstoy’s famous opening lines from Anna Karenina.)

UD means that in her blogging experience (she’s been following universities for years) successful college and university presidents are successful in all sorts of ways — they’re amiable and upright and quietly persistent in their policies; they’re wild and crazy and adorable and no one can say no to them because the president loves the school so much, works so hard, and has such charm; they’re a bit robotic and businesslike, but no one can argue with their results;  they’re absurd and corrupt and care only about the sports teams, but in these things they mirror their constituency, so they get on like gangbusters, etc, etc.

Unhappy presidents, like the just-booted president of Montgomery College here in ‘thesda, tend to share the following characteristics:

1. Personal greed. They abuse their university-issued credit card.  They use university funds for their dog’s amazing living quarters, for massive limos to take them from their just-redecorated offices to their compulsive shopping sprees, for first-class airline tickets or, hell, private jets, etc.

2. Paranoia. The just-booted Montgomery College president is rumored to have placed listening devices in various rooms, and to have ordered employees not to talk to the trustees.  He dismissed a faculty report detailing his absences from the job, his over-spending, and his mental instability as  a pack of “vicious” lies, the very intemperance of his language confirming the report’s claims about his lack of personal control.

3. Grandiosity. Bad presidents cannot handle their ascension to the pinnacle of university management.  Throw a few hundred thousand at them and give them a big office with a view and they become the Sun King.

4. Substance Abuse. Not all, but remarkably many, failed presidents deal with their emotional unreadiness for ascension by sucking at the tit of Jack Daniels.

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The faculty of Montgomery College did everything right.  They took a deep breath, compiled a report detailing the president’s activities, did a no-confidence vote, talked to the press, and waited for the trustees to do the right thing.

They’re hip, they’re hot, and, after years in the shadows, they’re coming to a university near you.

They’re the new wave in academia, and they’re blowing all the old ways of being a professor out of the water.

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Move over, Guest Lecturer; make room for Ghost Lecturer.

Visiting Professor? Visitant Professor!

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It’s the Prime of Miss Jean Spooky. It’s Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Mr Blips. It’s Goodbye Mr Spock, Hello Mr Spook.

It’s Ghoul School, and it’s just in time for Halloween.

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Ghost professors we’ve always had with us, but they’ve mainly haunted Europe, where the halls of derelict public campuses echo with the spirits of absentee lecturers, and the Middle East, where veiled specters flit from room to room.

It’s only lately, with the rise of medical school ghostwriters, PowerPoint zombies, and the daemons of distance learning, that America has come to know its own faculty phantasms. These are the professors who take advantage of new technologies and corporate simulations of scholarship to enter into a liminal realm where one is at once disembodied and salaried, silent and published, vanished and teaching.

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To be sure, a few naysayers have crawled out of the woodwork.

They even have a rallying cry, something Frederic Chopin once said:

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

From today’s The Tennessean:

A new study just released by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy shows 90% of bank notes from 18 cities have traces of cocaine on them.

DC topped the list of cities where the testing took place with ninety five percent of the sampled bills testing positive. The study indicates a 20% rise in the amount of cocaine on DC’s money over the past two years.

… Chemists at George Washington University confirm the accuracy of the test results, indicating the highest cocaine levels were detected on five, ten and twenty dollar bills.

Doctor Akos Vertes and his assistant Peter Nemes tested bills Monday evening using a technique recently discovered at Purdue University, “We apply high voltage. This high voltage drives the liquid to the tip of the paper… this gives off ions and these ions are characteristic of the chemicals that were on the paper.”

Former Mayor Marion Barry has a theory on why more cocaine is on DC money these days, “From what I can gather from the study, Washington is no different than other large cities but it means a shift in drug use.”

Barry thinks tough times might be driving cocaine use but others say it could be the result of contaminated bills mixing with regular currency inside ATMs.

UD‘s head is spinning. Help her out on this one.

No problem with her colleagues in Chemistry zapping coked up Jacksons. Someone’s gotta do it, and the English department lacks the lab and expertise. Plus it’s always interesting, as on annual Share Your Research Day, to find out what other professors are doing.

But Marion Barry? Has he really gone from the nation’s most notorious crack user to someone who gathers this and gathers that about our drug problem?

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Update: Apparently Barry has. Vertes reproduces the local news segment about his cocaine work.

Canada’s Robert Fulford goes after ghostly Gloria Bachmann.

Professor Bachmann is being very quiet about all the international attention given to her ghost-writing on behalf of Wyeth pharmaceuticals. So is the university that hired her.

No surprise there. It’s the most corrupt medical school in the United States. UMDNJ. The only medical school, as UD has said more than once on this blog, with rolling prison admissions.

More glory for the state of New Jersey.

… at Kent State University.

… In February 1961, Larry Woodell, superintendent of university grounds, along with Davey Tree expert Biff Staples, brought ten cages full of black squirrels back from Ontario, Canada, and released them on campus.

In early March of 1961, the men made another trip to a park in London, Ontario, to get more squirrels. By 1964, about 150 black squirrels were already occupying the area.

Lowell Orr, biological science professor emeritus and vertebrate zoologist at Kent State since 1956, said he remembers when the first black squirrels were brought to Kent. He said he now sees up to seven or eight at any given time in his backyard.

“I enjoy them,” Orr said. “I think they are delightful, excellent animals, and they give our university a little bit of notoriety.”

Orr said he is glad people have come to associate the university with the black squirrels.

“They are very, very successful, and they have spread far from Kent,” Orr said. “From the original few that were introduced, they have spread into the many cities around Kent, and I’m rather proud of that.”

… Geoff Westerfield, research technician for the Ohio Division of Wildlife… [said] “Environmentally, what they eat isn’t really a problem. … Socially, it can become a problem when they come up to people on campus asking for junk food… ”

… Westerfield said while squirrels do get into some trouble, they are not worse than any other rodent. He said most damage tends to be chewed wires, holes in walls, stripping bark off trees and in some cases, causing arcs in transmission lines, which leads to power outages or transformers blowing up….