… says the sheriff. He doesn’t expect a professor to be a fugitive from justice because of his just-discovered big-time meth distribution business. Professors don’t have weapons caches, body armor, and huge wads of cash in their houses. Professors aren’t presidents of bikers clubs.
Pshaw. Do you read this blog? Over its lifetime UD has covered stories of professors who had live bombs in their houses; professors who on the first day of class told students to write down their Social Security numbers and hand them forward. So that the professors could rob them.
As for drug use: University Diaries has covered stories of professors so disabled by cocaine or alcohol while lecturing that students had to escort them to the emergency room.
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Yes, universities tend to produce more white than blue collar criminals — The insider trader on the board of trustees is fast becoming a paradigmatic postmodern American university figure … There’s Friend-of-Donna, Nevin Shapiro. Yeshiva University couldn’t honor Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff enough until that dark night when it had to go through all its web pages and erase their names and pretend they never existed…
You can certainly expect more faculty members to steal from their grants than to distribute drugs. But the drug distributors are out there.
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One point about this particular guy. Starting last year, if Cal State had bothered to look, it would have discovered he routinely came to class late and rambled and was beginning to piss off students.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:08AM
At least Brandeis U has a web page – news flash to Sally Rockey at NIH for posting conflicts of interest.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:58AM
You might also need to call out the schoolmarm on this.
The article repeatedly refers to the Devil’s “Diciples.” (There’s no “sic” after that spelling.) Is that the way it’s spelled or have we come so far that even working journalists and/or their editors don’t know how to spell? Also the article describes it as a gang at one place and a club in other places. The two aren’t the same things.
September 2nd, 2011 at 10:09AM
Wait. No, it can’t be that you are saying that university agents should lurk on ratemyprofessors.com to uncover dirt–or even truth–on instructors. Can it?
September 2nd, 2011 at 10:32AM
Lovell: Lurk and dirt and agents sounds very exciting, Lovell; and UD does work down the street from the Spy Museum. But I’m afraid she only means that just as lots of people on campus look at in-house professor ratings, so lots of people should be aware of RMP. I’ve always considered it a good – though far from perfect – source of information on the way professors teach.
Sometimes there aren’t enough responses on RMP to mean anything; but when you get quite a few, and when students repeat things that are easily confirmed — a professor who announces, for instance, that it’s okay not to attend the course at all; or a professor more than one student reports is chronically late and out of it — universities should pay attention.
September 2nd, 2011 at 10:35AM
AYY: Another article reports that the Diciples are quite insistent on the incorrect spelling – it appears on their groovy t-shirts, etc.
September 2nd, 2011 at 3:22PM
Well, with enough methamphetamine, I guess you might read too fast for silent letters.
September 2nd, 2011 at 3:37PM
Michael: LOL.
September 2nd, 2011 at 3:45PM
Once again: I must be doing it wrong. I cannot imagine having the time to run drugs/run with a motorcycle gang AND be a professor.
Though perhaps on meth, you don’t need sleep, so you get more done. I guess.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:26PM
I see your point, UD–and I truly believe you do great work for our profession. For what it’s worth, one of my reviewers on RMP said I was hot! I got a chili pepper!
I’d rather have more money….
September 4th, 2011 at 9:28AM
My favorite part of the article:
“investigators seized more than a pound of methamphetamine, rifles, handguns, body armor, leather biker vests…”
One of these things is not like the others. Though it may be a fashion crime to wear a leather biker vest, esp. without a shirt.