… to direct your attention to this Google News page rather than summarize the contents of these articles, make snide remarks about how badly some of them are written, and compare in detail the president of Jacksonville State to the president of Southern Illinois University, who also plagiarized his education degree.

Our entire budget has been directed to sports stories.

UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.

The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.

Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.

If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.

UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.

Bowling Green had the blow job picture to deal with. Now Shasta College also has to figure out what to do when Mr Stiffy pays a visit.

… The painting, titled “See It Go” and styled on the mid-20th century-era “Dick and Jane” books, depicts two children playing outdoors and making motions to greet a grown man wearing a blue bathrobe. The robe hangs open and the man, in a state of arousal, is fully exposed.

… In response to complaints, officials duct-taped white poster board over the painting, which hangs in the college’s Art Gallery, and attached a note that reads, “Advisory: Provocative Content.” Near the bottom is an arrow with the directions, “Lift to view.”

Wesleyan’s president’s tears.

Roth … cried when he recalled Justin-Jinich’s last paper, on the dignity of man.

A BBC reporter in Paris describes the paralyzed French university system.

… The French leader wants to give individual universities more autonomy to run their faculties along the lines of successful commercial businesses and to make them more competitive.

Students and lecturers, however, have interpreted his proposal as an ultra-capitalist attempt to privatise the education system which will simply force up fees.

“Competition is just a right-wing ideology – in the case of humanities, competitiveness doesn’t even make any sense,” says Sorbonne English Professor Barbara le Lan.

“French universities are the least demanding universities as far as results go.”

Everyone in France who passes the Baccalaureat or “Bac” has the right to take up a state university place.

The result is that the France’s public universities are overcrowded, under-funded, have high drop-out rates and fail to make any international league tables. So would a little competition really hurt?

… One of President Sarkozy’s demands is that lecturers at the state universities, who are paid to research as well as teach, should be monitored a little more closely to make sure that they are indeed researching and are not simply doing nothing or spending their spare time giving private lessons.

He wants to set targets for the number of academic papers they publish. Professors like Ms Le Lan are simply horrified at the idea that academics should be subjected to quotas.

The government is determined to shake up the terms of employment for lecturers.

France is the only European country, and in fact one of the last countries in the entire developed world, where teachers are civil servants.

Those that support the government’s reforms feel that the current higher education system is geared very much towards the teachers’ needs and very little to the students’.

Last year, I attended a psychology class at Montpellier University, where students were crammed into a grubby lecture hall and where the acoustics were so bad that the pupils on the back three rows had given up trying to catch the wise mumblings from the distant podium and had either nodded off altogether under a copy of Liberation or were simply listening to their iPods…

Chuck Grassley is sticking around as the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, one of the centers of power in the health reform debate.

… Grassley and Max Baucus, who chairs the committee, had lunch at the White House today with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They spent most of the meal talking about health reform, the Des Moines Register reports.

… The prospect [that Grassley might leave Finance] apparently had some pharma lobbyists pretty excited, given Grassley’s scrutiny of the industry.

But it didn’t work out that way…

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

LAMENT OF THE MED SCHOOL FACULTY

We thought with the end of Chuck Grassley
We could go back to acting all crassly.
But our passion for pharma’s
Run into bad karma:
The man is alive, and it’s ghastly.

Academics at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library – because of health and safety fears.

The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.

Students travel to libraries as far away as London to view other copies.

… Books on the top shelves include tomes about art history and poetry.

… Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: “The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location – where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the health and safety office.”

It involves drug company payments to Karen Wagner, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas. Big payments, over many years, for her touting the benefits of various dangerous concoctions for the most vulnerable among us — children.

The Commission’s very hush-hush. Wagner never reported any of this money to her university. Well, once she reported she’d gotten six hundred dollars. That left multiple hundreds of thousands that she concealed.

The university thought it’d be a great idea to put Wagner on a committee reviewing other professors’ conflict of interest forms.

Wagner knows how to keep a secret:

In March 2006, Dr. Wagner was being deposed in a case on Paxil. During that deposition, Dr. Wagner was asked how much money she had taken from drug companies over the previous five years.

Her response? She said, and I quote, “I don’t know.” In fact, she testified that she couldn’t even estimate how much money she received from the drug companies.

The latest on the Wagner Commission:

An influential U.S. senator has reported a University of Texas researcher’s financial relationship with a drug company to the top investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the University of Texas System in September raising concerns that child pharmacology researcher Karen Wagner had not properly disclosed her financial connections with drug companies. He reported her in a letter to the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.

An extended search of the Japanese island Kuchino-erabu for traces of Craig Arnold had offered up hope the poet might be injured, but still alive, among one of the island’s many crevices.

That hope died Friday afternoon once a search team announced that a trail discovered the previous day showed signs that Arnold, 41, suffered a leg injury, then fell from a steep cliff to his death soon afterward.

Authorities say a body has been discovered in an area near where a University of Georgia professor’s Jeep was found.

The professor, George Zinkhan, is accused of killing his wife and two others outside a community theater last month.

The Athens-Clarke County Police Department said in a news release Saturday that the body is being taken to a state crime lab for positive identification.

—————————

Update: Cadaver dogs
found the body. Did you
know about cadaver dogs?

UD didn’t. Here’s
cadaverdog.com.
They offer a course called
Advanced Cadaver.

—————————

Another Update:

Fugitive murder suspect George Martin Zinkhan III dug his own grave and covered himself with debris before firing a single bullet into his head, investigators said Saturday.

“A person not accustomed to the woods would not have found it,” Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Jack Lumpkin said. “The body was beneath the earth… The body was purposely concealed in a manner not to be discovered.”

Searchers found two handguns in the grave.

Zinkhan’s well-hidden body was discovered Saturday by cadaver dogs — an Australian shepherd and a German shepherd — at 9:50 a.m. Saturday. The civilian Alpha Search and Rescue Team was working woods beyond the initial search area. Zinkhan’s temporary grave was in thick woods about 1,000 yards from an elementary school and about a mile from where his red Jeep Liberty was recovered more than a week ago. Zinkhan’s home in Bogart in Clarke County is not far away.

The police chief said this was the second time in his 35 years in law enforcement that he had encountered a suicide victim who buried himself first…

… from Key West, UD‘s been spring cleaning.

Yesterday, Les UD‘s bought sphagnum moss
for their topiary bulls. (The bulls honor
Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
who lived in UD‘s house.)

This morning, while pressing the moss
into the topiary’s frames, UD prepared
various clever sallies to use when passersby
remarked, as she knew they would, on her
activity. She practiced the lines in her head
— timing, tone, facial expression, etc.

Right away, two women walking two black
labs stopped just outside UD‘s wooden fence.

“So… Look what you’re doing…”

You could tell this woman wanted to say
something clever but couldn’t.

Okay. Here goes.

“Don’t you two stuff your bulls every morning?”

UD chose this riposte because it sounded obscene.

The women, unfazed, came right back.

“No,” said one of them. “I stuff myself full of bull every morning.”

Although this riposte was as meaningless as UD‘s sally, UD liked it. She found it, speed-of-ripostewise, impressive.

… Johanna Justin-Jinich.

… who lived in the house behind mine (and across from Nils Lofgren’s) in Garrett Park. Don’t recall how old I was — maybe thirteen? Dino’s father (here’s his obituary) owned a hair salon, House of Alexis, which Dino now manages.

I’d picked a book at random from a shelf in the Alexis living room, and it turned out to be softcore porn — not that I had that category in my head at the time. Harold Robbins kind of thing. The scene I opened to had a woman expressing her enjoyment of some mildly sadistic nipple play. “Aiee!!” she said. “Aiee!!”

This was a formative moment for little Scathing Online Schoolmarm, because it was her first encounter with the double exclamation mark. From that day forward, she gave a good deal of thought to when and how one should employ the exclamation.

Stuart Jeffries has a charming and thoughtful piece on the subject in the latest Guardian.

In general, SOS sides with those who counsel sparing use of this heavy breather; she believes that in almost all cases your prose, not funny little marks at the end of various sentences, should convey your sentiments, including exclamatory feelings like excitement, delight, surprise, rage, and love. Writing is a discipline; it’s about control. Excess exclamation marks suggest lack of control, as Jeffries notes in quoting some authors about them:

Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters, insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” … Fowler’s Modern English Usage [says]: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Jeffries goes on to note that in the age of email the exclamation mark is much-used. People say email’s a particularly cold and unemotional medium, and that the exclamation allows them to add warmth. Great to see you! Instead of Great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you! Rather than Looking forward to seeing you. We’re anxious for people to know we care, and the exclamation mark does the trick.

SOS notices that she only uses the exclamation mark in two ways in her emails. When a student she hasn’t heard from in a while writes to her — with simple greetings, or asking for advice, or asking for a recommendation — she in fact often opens her reply with an exclamation mark at the end of her first sentence: It’s wonderful to hear from you! She knows that students worry they’re bothering professors, or that professors don’t remember them, or whatever, so she wants to underline her happiness at having heard from them.

She also uses the mark ironically. Or sarcastically. Jeffries takes note of this use as well:

There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

… who now lives in Virginia, told me about Liberty University‘s plans for a snow-free ski hill some time ago.

It’s become a reality. Ski Channel reports:

And on the seventh day, God Skied.

Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian university in the world, will soon be home to the first Snowflex, snow-free ski hill in the U.S. Snowflex was a quantum leap forward for carpet skiing. The technology was invented in the U.K. in 1993 and has since been installed in a handful of facilities in Europe. The first Snowflex tiles, plastic mats that closely simulate the sensation of snow, were installed above Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on May 1st. The 110 vertical-foot slope should be open by the summer.

Jerry Falwell, one week before his death, talked about why he wanted to remake the bald hill above the university into an all-year-round ski hill. “There are no beer bashes at Liberty, and no coed dorms, but it doesn’t have to be a monastery. We’re breaking the stereotype that Christian education is synonymous with boredom.”

Surely there will be new tricks and their corresponding trick names whose genesis will be traced back to the dry hills (pun intended) of Liberty University. How about a Jesus Air, Nicodemus Flat Spin, Switch Judas 180, or a Mute Lazarus?

House Speaker Michael Madigan’s plan to rid state government of people hired and appointed by former Govs. Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan would include university boards of trustees.

Madigan’s office released a list of about 90 or so boards affected Thursday, and the state’s public universities were among them.

If the Chicago Democrat’s legislation is eventually approved, Gov. Pat Quinn would have 60 days to decide whether or not to keep universities’ current trustees on board or not.

The news came mostly as a surprise to university officials.

… The legislation, House Bill 4450, hasn’t yet been debated by lawmakers.