A reader sends UD a 1975 Time magazine article which describes the diploma mill the University of Massachusetts education school was in those years.

This is the school from which, during that decade, Bambi Cardenas (background here) earned her Ph.D. The School of Education, noted Time, had “earned a reputation as a diploma mill. In the past three years it granted more than 387 doctoral degrees. Some doctorates were awarded to students who had no undergraduate degrees. The writing in many doctoral theses was barely at high school level.”

No wonder Bambi – president of the University of Texas at Pan American – is now being investigated for having plagiarized her U Mass dissertation in educational leadership.

And… I dunno… Sad, isn’t it? That so many ed schools remain, as the New York Times recently wrote, “little more than diploma mills.”

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

The other hoax? The journal Quadrant. Australia.

Keith Windschuttle, its editor, published a science piece that agreed with his global warming skepticism, but he did no checking on its author or its sometimes absurd claims.

… Windschuttle admitted the article was unsolicited and from an unknown author, and that he had failed to even Google the author’s name or check easily validated facts, such as the claim that the paper was first presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics in Brisbane last year.

A check of the program on the internet by The Australian yesterday revealed there was no such paper or author listed.

Windschuttle said his practices were the same as any editor of a publication and that checking every fact and quotation in an article was impractical.

“I guess I could have done more to investigate the author but the content was something I did investigate because I was interested in some of the sources,” he said.

The latest entry on the hoax blog says: “So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn’t even check the putative author’s credentials”.

“Nor it seems did they get the piece peer-reviewed. Nor did they check the facts; nor the footnotes. Nor were they alerted by the clues. I’m almost embarrassed for you, Windschuttle. Just look at you above, a pea in a pod alongside those other culture warriors.”

The hoaxer wanted to expose the absurdity of the journal’s views on the environment by writing patently extreme nonsense and watching him print it. A hoax very much like the Sokal hoax.

The last one was way successful, so here UD goes again.

Please read the following article from Ontario’s Daily Commercial News:

With a nod to [Waterloo’s] industrial past, and an eye to a green future, designers unveiled plans on January 7, 2009 for an uptown school that aims to attract sharp minds from around the world.

To be built on land where whisky barrels used to roll, the Balsillie School of International Affairs will transform an empty Seagram’s distillery site into a tree-lined campus with understated brick buildings, living roofs, a public auditorium and central courtyard.

“This is an institution that will go head to head with the rest of the world,” declared Shirley Blumberg, principal architect for the project.

Speaking at a packed open house at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Blumberg said the school was designed to be “functional but not fancy,” as per the wishes of its namesake and chief bankroller, Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

Balsillie is giving $33 million to the new school, while University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University will add $25 million over 10 years.

The site connects to the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The project will be built in phases, with ground preparation beginning by the end of this year.

City council will be asked to approve the site’s master plan on Feb. 23.

Although the economic downturn will affect the timing of later construction, the section housing the Balsillie school will be the first to be finished.

It’s designed to hold about 25 faculty, plus 70 to 100 students.

Future plans call for another academic wing to hold other university programs, plus a proposed 12-storey building that would serve as housing for faculty and students and an underground parking garage.

Okay, so here you have a new university rising from the ashes of a whisky distillery. A … frothy atmosphere for puns… In fact, ol’ Shirley up there already did it… The place will go head to head…

So — Readers are invited to come up with a university motto, presidential inaugural remarks, copy for promotional brochures… stuff like that.

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

As with the last contest, the prize is an inscribed copy of Teaching Beauty.

Her nickname’s Bambi.

An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.

Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.

In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…

Background here.

… it’s also at the heart of protecting yourself from Ponzi schemes.

SOS talks about it all the time.

What is it?

The control of your emotions.

One person who worked with Markopolos on a risk-management committee in the early part of this decade said he was not surprised that he remained focused on Madoff for so long.

“His background is one of risk management and mathematics,” said Mark Williams, professor of finance and economics at Boston University. “It’s about when you see an error, correcting it. … Madoff was breaking the normal equation…. From a pure academic standpoint, Harry was trying to break that and prove that something is wrong here.”

Markopolos. You know.

Many people were fooled, but not Harry Markopolos, the 52-year-old former financial executive who [has] been onto Madoff since 1996.

…UD will attempt to update her list of links. She tends to be lazy about adding new sites and deleting inactive ones, etc. Apologies.

Here’s a wonderful new site: Ars Psychiatrica. Beautifully written, and thoughtful in a thousand directions: medicine, spirituality, ethics, beauty…

UD thanks Barney for telling her about it.

… Even though [Rutgers athletic director Robert] Mulcahy was dismissed, the university will continue to pay his generous salary — and his over-the-top perks — for the next 18 months while getting nothing in return. If he deserved to be fired, he deserved to be prevented from continuing to feed at the public trough.

But Mulcahy will be fed, and fed well. A university spokesman told the Bergen Record this week the university is obliged to honor the remainder of Mulcahy’s contract. His salary alone will cost them another $511,875. He will continue to receive a car or annual automobile stipend of $12,000 and health benefits and insurance for the next 18 months.

Rutgers also must pay Mulcahy’s annual membership fees at the exclusive Baltusrol golf club, believed to be about $8,000. That’s outrageous. Why should taxpayers and struggling college students have to foot the bill for any already highly paid public employee — a fired employee, no less — to sharpen his golf game?…

The girl can’t help it. She doesn’t understand what conflict of interest is.

Rep. Marti Coley, R-Dist. 7, has no plans to give up her $60,000 job at Chipola College, unlike fellow state legislator and Speaker of the House Ray Sansom, who resigned his post at another college amid criticism about his dual role.

The legislator said she sees no conflict in her two jobs and she’s puzzled by the air of criticism surrounding legislators who also work at Florida colleges.

Coley had worked as an adjunct professor at Chipola for two decades before taking the job she now holds there — special assistant of business and community affairs. Her pay started at $45,000 when she took the postion, but she got a 33 percent raise in July of this year, bringing her salary to $60,000.

Her job entails, among other things, fund-raising activities for the Chipola honors program and the school at large.

… As for speculation that her double service puts Chipola at special advantage come budget time in the legislature, Coley said that’s just not so.

She readily admits to advocating for the school she works for — she sees it as part of her job as a representative of the district where Chipola is located — but said her work on the school’s behalf is above-board and really begins after funding requests have made their way through a certain process.

As a legislator, she said, it would be her duty to advocate for the college, whether she was employed by Chipola or not.

“I represent nine counties, and any entity in that community is going to get 100 percent effort from me in the legislature. Even with budget cuts, we have a very large budget and that money is going somewhere,” she said. …

J. Ezra Merkin, the New York financier tied to Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, is hearing from collectors interested in buying his dozen $150 million Mark Rothko paintings, the world’s largest private grouping, according to his art adviser.

Though the paintings aren’t for sale now, “everything has a price,” said Ben Heller, 83, who helped Merkin buy the abstract expressionist paintings during the past five years. …

… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.

The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.

“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.

Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.

In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.

The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.

The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.

There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.

But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.

Background here.

UD‘s about to see Legally Blonde – The Musical, at the Kennedy Center, with her kid.

UD‘s been calling for the dismantling of the pilfering, conflicted board of trustees at Yeshiva University since the Madoff thing broke. Nobody listens to her because she’s just a girl. Just a blogger. Everybody listened to Stephen Trachtenberg, who’s a guy, plus a paid Yeshiva consultant, and not only did Trachtenberg think everyone should leave the board alone, he dismissed all criticism of the Yeshiva boys as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

So, you know. Fine. UD‘s used to this sort of thing. On to the next subject. You don’t change intimate homosocial subcultures just like that…

But maybe there’s hope.

Normally, activist hedge fund managers try to shake up boards of companies they’ve invested in. But one fund manager is seeking to oust the directors of his alma mater over the Bernard L. Madoff scandal.

Andrew Sole of Esopus Creek Advisers called for the removal of Yeshiva University’s board, after the school’s endowment lost millions of dollars because of its investments in Mr. Madoff’s firm, The New York Post reported, citing correspondence between the hedge fund manager and the school.

Yeshiva’s endowment, which has fallen to $1.2 billion from as high as $1.8 billion, suffered because the school had invested with J. Ezra Merkin, a fund manager who has emerged as one of the main feeders into Mr. Madoff’s investment firm. Both Mr. Merkin and Mr. Madoff were Yeshiva directors, but have since resigned their positions.

Mr. Sole is demanding the replacement of the rest of the board, according to a letter obtained by The Post. But when the school’s president responded to Mr. Sole by saying Yeshiva’s counsel was looking into the matter, the hedge funder responded that the university was resorting to an “ostrich defense.”

Actually, the original article about this in the NY Post quotes a far stronger response on Sole’s part. Yeshiva’s letter to him is, Sole wrote, “scripted” and “beyond offensive.”

And the letter’s not from Yeshiva’s president. He’s far too busy to respond to so trivial a concern. He gave the job to an assistant.

Leadeth me beside
the submerged school desk.

… One of the ads for the Kaplan, Inc. division (and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.) is a 60-second commercial depicting a professor at a lectern before his students. The professor apologizes, saying “The system has failed you; I have failed you” because higher education, “is steeped in tradition and old ideas.” As he argues that it is time to use technology to “rewrite the rules of education,” the camera cuts to different people in different locations watching his speech from laptops and mobile digital players.

A second commercial shows a series of video shots of school desks arrayed in odd locations, like a beach, submerged in a river, in subway cars, and in supermarket aisles. A college-guy voiceover says “Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education, that classes only take place in a classroom?” …

UW RANKED 16th BEST
UNIVERSITY ON EARTH

The Daily, University of Washington

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations with God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him.

… Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim,… previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “the morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”

… In a telephone interview, Mr. Walsch, 65, who said he regularly gives 10 or 20 speeches a year, said he had been retelling the anecdote in public as his own for years. “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me,” he said.

… In a statement, Beliefnet said that Mr. Walsch had withdrawn from the Web site’s blogging roster. “As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust,” the statement read….

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has been mum, but sources tell the Post’s Lena Sun that Bruce Springsteen will perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration week welcome event Jan. 18 on the National Mall. The event will be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and open to the public for free.

La Kid will be part of the chorus for the event.