An engineering professor at the University of Regina has been accused of plagiarizing a student’s work and trying to publish it in an academic journal in a case the university is declining to talk about.

Former student Shahryar Ali Khan, now a petroleum engineer in Calgary, laid a complaint with the university but says officials haven’t told him what, if anything, they’re going to do about it.

Khan said he learned something was wrong in the summer of 2008, when he submitted a paper for publication in the Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology.

It was based on the research he did for his Master’s thesis at the University of Regina, a document titled “A Simulation Study of Water-Coning Using Downhole Water Sink Technology.”

Khan got a surprising response — the journal staff said his submission closely resembled another paper received six months earlier, one that bore the same title.

The earlier paper, which was never published, listed his academic supervisor — associate professor Ezeddin Shirif — and three other people as authors. …

… at the University of Alaska.

UD knows Stuart Umpleby, a colleague of hers at George Washington University, very slightly. A business professor, he teaches Management 201, one of whose recent students (Fall 2007) appears to have been the Qatari diplomat who dealt with being caught smoking on a plane the other day by quipping that he was trying to light his shoe.

Here, via a link provided by Mike, a reader, is a scholarly paper with 144 authors. UD‘s used to seeing thirty or forty med school professors listed at the tops of papers, but these are astronomers, and — as Carl Sagan used to say — there are billions and billions of them.

A writer at the Times Higher Education Supplement points out that there are 36.3 words per author in this piece, so assuming authorship is truly shared among the 144, each one wrote about two sentences.

From a review of Professor Untat, a new book by Uwe Kamenz and Martin Werle:

…. [P]rofessors [in Germany] have an extreme form of tenure, so that for them, unemployment simply does not exist. There are also no real controls within the system, so they are left very much to their own devices.

The result, the authors argue, is that only a third of the large body of German professors work hard and with integrity, while about a fifth abuse the system to the limit.

[They get] their doctoral students to do a large proportion of their teaching and administration, and most or even all of their research, while still passing themselves off as the authors.

… These beleaguered doctoral students work incredibly long hours on all manner of activities and projects. They often have little time during the week to work on their own doctorates, and receive little in the way of supervision.

All of this is possible because professors in German academia are in a position of total power over their doctoral students – and because the latter desperately want to earn their degrees.

Some of the activities described in Professor Untat take some beating. On the teaching front, professors block their courses so that they need to be on campus only two or three days a week – during semesters, that is.

Furthermore, “lectures” often comprise little more than PowerPoint presentations prepared by doctoral students. In such cases, the latter inevitably are more in command of the material than the academics who present it.

In the worst cases, sabbaticals are used either for extended holidays or to engage in lucrative consultancy work…

… things can be pretty swanky.

… and finds himself in the hangar.

A British law professor is slamming Air Canada after the airline left him asleep on a plane for 90 minutes after it landed — and he woke up in a hangar at Vancouver International Airport.

… “It’s absolute craziness,” said [Kris Lines]… who is head of sports law at Staffordshire University.

“The last thing I remember was taking off from Calgary. I knew I was safely on board and there was no further destinations and it was all good,” Mr. Lines added.

“Somebody would wake me up at the end.”

What he didn’t expect was to be roused by a mechanic after the Air Canada Jazz plane was towed into a hangar at YVR…

UD, a nervous flier, finds this story amazing. Short of being blotto (which UD never is), she cannot imagine attaining the buddhistic calm that would allow you to miss your plane’s arrival at an airport…

… at ten o’clock last night:

ALL PASSENGERS LEAVING THIS AREA
MUST CONTINUE TO EXIST

… English Masterpieces series of books
that came out in the ‘sixties.
She used them when was she was an
undergraduate at Northwestern;
and her sister-in-law, Joanna, used
them as an undergraduate at Boston
University. UD found
on the shelves in Shady Hill Square
(she’s just back from Cambridge for
Easter) this volume:

It includes a great poem by Archibald
MacLeish that she’d never seen before.

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

Eleven

And summer mornings the mute child, rebellious,
Stupid, hating the words, the meanings, hating
The Think now, Think, the Oh but Think! would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. And sit there quiet, breathing
The harsh dry smell of withered bulbs, the faint
Odor of dung, the silence. And outside
Beyond the half-shut door the blind leaves
And the corn moving. And at noon would come,
Up from the garden, his hard crooked hands
Gentle with earth, his knees still earth-stained, smelling
Of sun, of summer, the old gardener, like
A priest, like an interpreter, and bend
Over his baskets.

And they would not speak:
They would say nothing. And the child would sit there
Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing—

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

And is a great poetic word. And death shall have no dominion, etc., etc. You first meet it maybe in the Bible. And God spoke… and… and… See how every sentence in this poem starts with and? And why?

Why? Because the poet wants to convey the spontaneous, stream of consciousness, sudden memory trace feel of the mental and emotional moment the poem captures. It’s how we narrate, isn’t it? I remember I’d run from the porch and my books and my schoolwork and I’d run across the part of the yard that only had trees in it and I’d flee all that emptiness and abstraction for the bracing reality of the objects in the shed and I loved the way they slowly emerged from the darkness of the shed, and the way my summer-saturated eyes had to adjust to the darkness… And the way they rose from the dark world and took on a kind of super-existence… I remember that…

These were the wise tools, earth-friendly; not like my effortful cerebral exercises, my noisy verbal efforts to make the world mean something. They just were, sustaining silently on their surfaces the old truths of life. The gardener, adept in the soil and the soil’s tools, was the priest of the real world, interpreting its meanings with his gestures. I felt the real world inside myself as I sat there silently with him, felt my own plantlike stirrings and vibrancies. My sheer life – needing no name, and, like the leaves, happily blind to the convolutions of the human realm – began to twine upward into the real sunlight in that shed.

… there’s Evergreen State College in Washington, which seems to have let one of its professors run an abroad program pretty much all by himself. Which meant that he just collected money from students and put it in his personal bank account. Link (Can’t figure out how to do links properly here at the hotel):

http://www.theolympian.com/2010/03/26/1185197/ethics-probe-begun-for-ex-prof.html#ixzz0kEro8YqL

The college auditor reported in February 2009 that [Jorge] Gilbert had not accounted for at least $50,000 in student payments that he collected between 2003 and 2008 for an international program in Chile. The audit also found that he misrepresented the college by signing contracts with a Chilean company partly owned by his family.

Students who took part in Gilbert’s Chile program in 2008 reported that they deposited the approximately $3,000 for their trip into an account at West Coast Bank, for which Gilbert was the sole signer. The money did not include quarterly tuition.

The college began its investigation of the Chile program after some of the students on the 2008 trip did not get the airline tickets that they thought they had purchased. Gilbert had arranged for the students’ tickets through a travel agency that went bankrupt.

University students are young, inexperienced. And they’re not going to be at your university for long. You can take advantage of them.

You can take advantage of them because they’re unlikely to have the time or inclination to understand the workings of your school’s complex organization.

Take student fees. They’re kind of an abstraction, aren’t they? Students pay tuition, and then on top of that of course they have these fees…

But what are they for, exactly? How many universities really break down the numbers?

UD‘s grateful to Elizabeth, a reader, for alerting her to this article

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-student-funds4-2010apr04,0,2506603.story?track=rss

in the LA Times about various abuses of student fees at some public universities in California. Here’s one of three examples:

At UCLA, student fees are being used to save a plan to renovate Pauley Pavilion, home of the school’s legendary basketball team.

In 2006, administrators launched a campaign to raise $100 million from private contributors to pay for the $185-million upgrade, which includes cushier seats, a high-definition scoreboard and expanded locker rooms. But when the fundraising effort fell victim to the recession, administrators changed the finance plan to include $25 million from student fees.

“Students really weren’t involved in the process, beyond maybe some rubber-stamp committee,” said UCLA Student Regent Jesse Bernal. “I don’t think they know enough about it.”

Most of the student money, $15 million, will come from fees approved by a student referendum in 2000 to maintain two older campus buildings that house gyms and student centers. The remaining $10 million had been set aside for seismic repair of student facilities.

Using that money to renovate the arena “seems like a strange priority,” said long-time UCLA fundraiser Richard Bergman, who originally chaired the Pauley Pavilion campaign. He said he was summarily dismissed last year after complaining about several aspects of the project, including the dip into student pockets.

… Bergman said that when money got tight, administrators should have scaled back their ambitions.

Steve Olsen, UCLA’s chief operating officer, acknowledged that the referendum approving the fee included nothing about Pauley Pavilion.

… Few students will be able to afford a good view at the renovated Pauley, where seats between the baskets are expected to cost more than Lakers tickets, Berman said. Season tickets will require a one-time fee in the tens of thousands of dollars….

UD accompanied Mr UD to church in Cambridge this morning. UD is not Catholic, but she’s intrigued enough by Catholic ritual to want to see churches in action occasionally, and Easter’s the big blowout.

It was odd. As they waited in a line that snaked around St. Paul Church, protesters holding signs that said YOU’RE DOOMED TO HELL shouted at them. Then, inside the church, as the priest sermonized about Adam and Eve, a big piece of masonry suddenly crashed down from the ceiling.

It didn’t hit anybody. The priest made a joke about the building fund and everyone laughed.

Bizarre summer weather yesterday brought lightly dressed crowds to the cafés of Cambridge. As UD walked to the florist near Harvard Square, she wondered at the sunlit clarity of this usually gray city, and at the smiling milling crowds all around her, also full of wondering people.

The flower shop burst onto the street with a confusion of bulbs; no one knew what to buy. More milling. UD finally chose five huge dusty hydrangea blossoms that kept falling out of the paper the woman at the counter stapled around them. UD also bought lilacs.

“Excuse me.” A man and a woman approached UD as she crossed back into Harvard Yard. “Where’s the forest?”

“Er, the forest? You mean you’re looking for the woods? Here? … Or do you mean a shop or a restaurant called The Forest?”

“No, no. The florist.”

UD glanced at the flowers in her arms and giggled. And gave directions.

… from a Stanford student:

A real teacher engages [her] students and challenges [them] to engage with course material. A real teacher pulls from students strands of potential and forces students to use their abilities in order to grow intellectually. And at Stanford? Eh, many Stanford professors don’t teach as much as they speak at you, read off of Powerpoint slides, or boast about their various accolades. Come to Stanford and you may get a few memorable intellectual experiences. But know that they are rare and that the fast-paced quarter system makes them easy to avoid.

… for women in Belgium’s universities. For women all over the country. For the country.

Support for the ban in Belgium transcended party lines, ranging from the Greens to the far right, and also resulted in a rare show of unity between the linguistically divided halves of the country.