China today:

Academic corruption is on the rise, while the quality of papers is declining. Paying for papers to be published has become common practice. A great many professors and students are not ashamed of plagiarism on the excuse that [it is] the norm. How absurd that a medical paper has been plagiarized six times by 25 people!

University of Oregon athletics doesn’t like to do contracts.

As all criminal syndicates know, if you write down what you’re doing, other people can figure out… what you’re doing.

Do you remember any scenes of Al Pacino signing contracts in The Godfather?

So when the school’s athletic director left the other day to take a tv job, and the school just, you know, gave him $2.3 million dollars even though he wasn’t fired – he quit – and even though it was all done via secret handshakes, the state Justice Department decided to investigate.

The UO says it had no signed agreement with Bellotti on the terms of his employment or departure when he took over the job of athletic director last summer, yet the university said it will pay the former football coach the $2.3 million to fulfill unspecified “commitments” that were never put on paper.

Bellotti negotiated the terms of his employment orally with UO President Richard Lariviere in July, when both of them were beginning their new jobs, a UO spokeswoman said last week. The UO is not making those terms public. Less than nine months later, the two settled on the details of a deal allowing Bellotti to leave for the television job with the multimillion-dollar payout.

Nobody at the university has any comment to make to reporters.

Reporters want to know how a once-respectable university became such a cheesy outfit.

Via Eric, a reader, SOS relishes the retro

pleasures of a wonderfully written

– handwritten – letter.

It’s by a Chicago blogger whose gym’s

cancellation policy insists that you send

them a letter you penned yourself.

(Click on the image to enlarge it.)

From the student newspaper, University of Maine:

… [T]he athletic department is losing millions of dollars annually. Other financial documents indicate the university is spending less of its budget on educational instruction now than it was in previous decades.

In the current fiscal year — which runs July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 — athletics is projected to cost the university $7.3 million more than the revenue it brings in.

Athletic Director Blake James said the athletic department is subsidized by the university, but that the projected loss of $7 million sounded high. James said he thought the actual loss would be closer to $5 million.

… The budget for fiscal 2010 projected the athletics department would generate about $4.5 million in revenue, falling far short of its expected $12.2 million in expenditures. This discrepancy would be covered by revenue in the general university budget, the vast majority of which comes from tuition and state appropriations.

… The bulk of sports teams’ operating costs comes from coaches’ salaries and benefits.

… There appears to be a historical trend in the financial documents from decennial accreditation reports indicating student education has been slipping on the university’s priority list…

Well, where would you put student education on a university’s priority list? Tenth? Twelfth?

… newspaper, talks about some of the professors he’s had.

His writing is a bit awkward, but UD admires his stress on real encounters between human beings in university classrooms.

[Some] professors … are impersonal. Perhaps this is best seen in the voice of reason. If the professor poses some voice of cool logic, then they are probably ignoring your question for the sake of convenience. These are the types to stay close to their scripts, reading their power points as if power points were the last say on knowledge. Generally speaking, the bigger the class size, the more impersonal it gets.

What a rush of joy it is for these people not to have to answer real problems, real questions, real intelligence.

… Real relationships, real exchange of teaching and learning are hard to come by. The problem is facilitated by the sleeping student, the texting student and the student on Facebook during class. No one can know the authority is corrupt when they know nothing about the authority…

Los Angeles Times:

[Republican Senate candidate Tom Campbell’s] brains and demeanor could collide with the prevailing political winds this year as no other. A consummate and genteel academic who holds degrees from two of the nation’s top universities, he is seeking election [from California] at a time when white-hot anger and verbal flame-throwing is more likely to arouse the GOP primary voters who will decide his fate in June.

University Diaries has covered, over the years, a number of stories involving medical school professors – especially anesthesiologists – who abuse or become addicted to the pills they handle. Pharmacy professors and students have similar levels of access, and similar problems.

Charles Butler, an eminent British pharmacologist who until recently was a visiting professor at Reading University, has been hoarding and illegally dispensing a zillion drugs. But he has his reasons.

Prof Butler, who was awarded an MBE in 2005 for services to the NHS, pretended he had to hire a locum to cover his absences at a pharmacy practice while he was working as an advisor to a health watchdog.

But police discovered that Prof Butler, an advisor to the Department of Health, had sold his practice years earlier.

During a raid on a flat he owns in Whitechapel, east London, officers also found drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, “crystal meth” and the date-rape drug GHB, which police believe were used during sex parties hosted by the 64-year-old.

… [Butler] claimed almost £175,000 in expenses from the Health Services Commission to pay for a locum at his practice while he was away.

… During the raid on Butler’s second home in London, police found cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, marijuana resin and the “date rape” drugs gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and rohypnol, which are powerful relaxants.

Sedatives including temazapam, diazepam, ketamine and midazolam were also discovered…

… going viral.

The winners of this year’s Pritzker
Award for architecture are a Japanese
team, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

Their recently completed learning center
at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne
is a sad flat cratered slice of moon

inside of which the lunar abstraction
proceeds unhindered by any object
of interest, or, indeed, any differentiation
into rooms where one might privately
study or daydream or make out.

No dreaming allowed in this bright white
airport where your every step has been
engineered for maximum visual access,
so that you can become another plastic
white chair.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Sylvia Plath captured the mood.

The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky——
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.

… strong on detail.

… the diploma mill.

… makes a direct appeal to her fellow students. Final paragraph of her opinion piece:

… As a student who does well in her classes without the use of a laptop, I implore you to try spending a few classes without your laptop. Take notes by hand and underline important parts of readings as you discuss them in class, rather than just scrolling through an on-screen PDF. I think you’ll find it much easier to focus on the material at hand and you’ll learn a lot more…

This Boston Globe opinion piece tells you the reason.

From the moment she clapped eyes on him at a Knight Commission gathering a few years ago, UD knew Michael Adams, president of the University of Georgia, would be the NCAA’s next president. Unlike Myles Brand, who entered the job with a sense of morality as well as a sense of what universities are (he started his career as a philosophy professor), UGA’s man is a backroom politician all the way down.

His departure from UGA will be good news for that university. Otherwise, it’s barf bag city.

Lucas Holzhaeuer, University of Calgary newspaper:

I realize how handy the internet can be as a simple way to answer the prof’s question or to follow their PowerPoint, but let’s face it, going online will likely lead to distractions. Open a browser and odds are you’ll check your email, make sure nothing changed on Facebook and accidentally start playing “Fancy Pants Adventures” (highly recommended). This leads to a larger issue of you not just zoning out of class, but also distracting all those immediately behind you. All in all, surfing the internet does not help in note taking, but rather, hinders the process immensely.

At the Café Maure de la Mosquée.

With friends. She’s the one with
blond hair and glasses.