Last year it was Caltech. This year, Cornell University is experiencing a string of student suicides. The number is in dispute — between three and five in the last few months. Security people have been stationed at the bridges over the famous campus gorges. Most of the suicides jumped into the gorges.

Suicide is frighteningly contagious. Suicidal students are obviously watching one another for ideas as to method. In 2005, William and Mary had the same one-and-right-away-another-in-exactly-the-same-fashion pattern that Cornell is seeing. At Caltech, two of the students used the same method: helium inhalation. In the last few years, three students at NYU have jumped from the top of the library’s atrium.

… is now publishing her latest IHE post.

Title: Pathology of the Laptop.

A Bridgewater State College student describes a recent class.

… On the first day of class, my professor informed us that it was mandatory that we use a credit card to sign up for an online program that we would use throughout the semester. The program was equivalent to the price of an expensive textbook, but if it was going to help me, I was all for it. The program would have actually been quite helpful if it was used as a tool in the classroom. Unfortunately for me, the program was the class.

The professor actually informed [us] that everything we needed was in that program-that we need not ask him questions because they can be answered online. This was not a program that the professor created; it was just a generic one he was letting teach the class.

During class time, the professor would read the PowerPoint notes that came with the program. When asked if he could show students some examples, he refused. He claimed that there were plenty of examples they could view online and that it would be a waste of time to go over examples in class.

Ironically, what was a waste of time was this professor’s class. What is Bridgewater State College paying this professor to do – read off the internet? This professor never created a lesson plan and never put any effort in teaching the class. He simply used technology to teach the class for him.

It is truly unfortunate that Bridgewater State is wasting their money paying this professor, but what is most unfortunate is that hundreds of students each year suffer in cases similar to this, where they can only learn so much from technology without the help of their professor.

UD likes Chris Van Hollen, who represents her and all ‘thesdan peoples; but now that Murray Hill’s in the race, she’s conflicted.

The Washington Post reports:

Murray Hill might be the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation’s capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it’s safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical.

That’s because this little upstart is, in fact, a start-up. Murray Hill is actually Murray Hill Inc., a small, five-year-old Silver Spring public relations company that is seeking office to prove a point (and perhaps get a little attention).

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.

“Until now, corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington,” the candidate, who was unavailable for an interview, said in a statement. “But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” …

They’ve already got a pretty compelling ad out.

Here’s an interview with their Designated Human.

And here’s their website.

… has gotten so bad that newspapers are beginning to report just the tiniest, slightest bit of complaint from UO’s fan base.

Nothing to worry about, of course — there’s no such thing as too low for university football fans — but…

… [F]ans and [the] university community [are] exasperated by a head-spinning series of transgressions from the football team they usually pack Autzen Stadium to cheer on.

“I want to apologize to the fans of the University of Oregon,” [coach Chip] Kelly said. “I want to apologize to the faculty of the University of Oregon. This is not what our football program is all about. We feel that we’ve taken the steps necessary to make sure that this doesn’t happen with these young men again.”…

Sure it’s what it’s about! You recruited these guys!

There’s so much you can do with two million dollars in government grant money! This post’s headline is a partial list of some of the ideas Daniel Kwok, a Canadian engineering professor at the University of Calgary, and recipient of many grants from that country’s main technology funder, came up with.

It’s a long list because Canada is very, very slow. Very, very slowly that country gears up to … uh… what? Somebody reports something to someone… stuff is passed along to the police whose investigation … uh…

The documents point to major problems with oversight of Canada’s multibillion-dollar research system — holes so glaring that one leading ethics expert says he hopes the case will jolt federal politicians into giving “marching orders” to Canada’s research councils and universities to get their acts together.

“There is a public accountability here that is just missing,” says Michael McDonald, founding director of the centre for applied ethics at the University of British Columbia.

… [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] officials, four years after the investigations into Kwok’s conduct began, took the most drastic sanction at their disposal. In September 2009 they cut off all Kwok’s grants indefinitely, accusing him of plagiarism and misuse of funds in 2005 or before.

McDonald says it’s hard to fathom why it took NSERC so long to act.

“Four years is way too long for something of this kind,” he says. Buying stereos, TVs and car parts with science grants seems such an “egregious” breach of the rules that someone with a fifth-grade education can understand it, he says: “It’s obvious, a no-brainer.”

Canada’s slow, but Kwok is fast:

… Documents released by NSERC show that by 2005 the university had launched investigations into allegations of “financial misconduct” and “scientific misconduct” involving “plagiarism.”

Kwok did not wait around for the results of the investigations. In the spring of 2005, he … stunned his colleague[s] with the news that he was moving to the University of Calgary, leaving the Edmonton engineering department scrambling to pick up his teaching load and graduate students.

… More than half the money was awarded after his conduct in Edmonton had come under scrutiny and he had moved to Calgary.

The university kept it quiet. The NSERC passed the buck. The scientist pulled in more government money for his subwoofer.

[The University of Alberta] made a deal with the researcher: in the “event of timely repayment” of the money spent on car parts, phones, electronic gadgets and entertainment systems, the university would not pursue restitution for other questionable purchases made with research grants.

The researcher gave $24,676.33 to the University of Alberta’s lawyers in the fall of 2006, “subject to reaching agreement on suitable terms of a release and a confidentiality agreement.”

The University of Alberta returned $21,485.67 to NSERC and another $3,000 to other agencies that had financed the research.

In keeping with the federal policy for dealing with possible fraud, NSERC then turned the case over to the [police] in 2006 to investigate “the misuse of the $24,000 grant funds and also the possibility that more than this amount was misused.”

The documents show that NSERC officials initially decided no sanctions should be taken against the scientist or red flags put on his file until the [police] completed [their] investigation — a position that some found infuriating.

“This person is still receiving NSERC money, in spite of highly unethical behaviour,” one scientist wrote…

The long article is an hilarious compendium of no comments and it’ll take years for us even to begin investigating — all of this from universities, the police, the government… Meanwhile, Kwok remains at Calgary in good standing.

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

While his university thinks he’s great, this man’s students seem to disagree. Kwok’s too busy with his subwoofer to teach…

But hey – the question of whether this guy can teach lies at the bottom of a very large stack of other questions. I’m sure Calgary will get to it eventually.

Can there be a university stupider than Texas Tech? It gives millions of dollars to that master of BDSM, Mike Leach, and then when his psycho coaching style becomes a national scandal and TTU fires him, Leach sues TTU – a lawsuit that will end up costing them millions and millions more.

And all for what?

So that Texas Tech can show the world what really goes on at this university.

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UD thanks Brad.

A Danish scientist with a grant from the CDC stole two million dollars from it.

Aarhus University said the Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation (DASTI) has gotten grants from the U.S. National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities since 2001. Thorsen directed the administration of the grants, the university said.

After discovering that money was missing, DASTI and Aarhus “became aware of two alleged CDC funding documents as well as a letter regarding funding commitments allegedly written by Randolph B. Williams of the CDC’s procurement grants office. . . .”

“Upon investigation by CDC, a suspicion arose that those documents are forgeries.”

The university’s statement goes on to say that in March 2009, Thorsen resigned from its faculty.

From a letter signed by eighteen faculty:

Lois B. DeFleur’s two-decades-long tenure as president of Binghamton University has ended in real harm to the university’s reputation and pride… Withdrawal from membership in Division I is in the interest of this university that aspires to be a ‘premier’ public research institution… It will send a strong message to Chancellor Zimpher, our students and alumni that we intend to end the spirit of cover-up that was encouraged from the top, raise our academic standards, and restore BU’s reputation.

For the last ten years, Dennis Lasser, a finance professor, has been faculty representative to the NCAA. So he’s done a terrific job of monitoring things at his institution… I guess that’s why the New York Times reporter thinks it’s worth his while to interview Lasser about a situation he did a good deal to help bring about.

Lasser’s comment is contemptible.

The basketball program is a disaster, but if you look at the regular sports and look at the performance before this change in regime, we were doing things the right way… The only reason I would say leave Division I is if we didn’t learn our lesson. If we self-assess properly, I think we can get back on the right track.

Martin Stone, professor of philosophy, is one of the most brazen plagiarists UD‘s covered on this blog.

But this is his only distinction. Otherwise, his plagiarism is much like the other cases of academic plagiarism UD has written about: Because a professor rather than a student did it, his university issued no punishment, but on the contrary allowed him to leave the institution quietly by lying about having fallen ill; and the particular plagiarized material was only one of many acts of plagiarism on his part.

I suppose another small distinction in the Stone case involves his having been a philosopher of religion who pontificated about morality.

The Leuven University student newspaper is not happy about this man, his plagiarism, and the university’s response:

… [The] Institute and the K.U.Leuven together intentionally kept silent relevant information on the functioning of a highly-esteemed member of the academic staff. Though protecting the professor and the reputation of the Institute can be seen as an act of nobility, it is unfair towards the students – as they have the right to know what is going on. Apart from that, it becomes clear once more that the university uses different standards when it comes down to deciding on cases of sentencing plagiarism committed by either students or professors. Also ex-students who were supervised by professor Stone and especially the ones who earned their PhD under his guidance may have been treated unjustly by covering up info of this matter and size.

The member of the Finnish parliament whose work Stone stole found that “tens of pages were identical or nearly identical [to my thesis], although my name was not mentioned at all.”

That was just one of Stone’s publications plagiarized from the work of this man. Stone mined the parliamentarian’s work very extensively. “[N]ot only one, but four articles published by Stone were [in] large part …plain copies of my dissertation.”

“Stone has plagiarized several other researchers, too.”

The medical school at Tufts has a little of everything.

It has the heroic Dr Jerome Kassirer, who writes, and testifies in front of Congress, about the “thinly disguised bribes” that pill and device marketers offer to physicians.

It has the appallingly inept Dr. Kajoko Kifuji, who does little these days other than testify in multiple courtrooms about her malpractice.

And it has, most recently, a whole bunch of cardiologists who seem to be involved, along with the device manufacturer Medtronic, in a false claims investigation.

… responds to a student who complained in the campus newspaper about his banning laptops from his discussion sections.

… The embarrassing sight of members of Congress texting their way through the State of the Union address shows us that not even the rich, powerful and old are immune to [the always-online] compulsion. At the same time, the phenomenon of texting while driving offers clear proof that people will stay online even when doing so endangers their very lives.

These extreme examples demonstrate why a ban on laptops in the classroom is sometimes necessary. For whatever reason, we – not just college students, but all of us – are unable to resist the lure of constant online access. Yet certain activities require the sustained attention that the Internet impedes. Driving a car is one such activity. Discussing complex ideas is another. Everyone knows that students with laptops in class frequently use them for non-class activities such as Facebook and e-mail. At this time, the only answer I can see is to remove the temptation.

… [My student writes that] “it is a student’s individual choice to pay attention – or not – in class.” She is right to point out that students ought to be responsible for their own learning, but wrong to suggest that this responsibility is merely individual. Quality education results from the collaborative interaction of engaged thinkers, not from professors imparting content to passive individuals. Distracted students hurt not only themselves, but the rest of the class as well.

… [W]e must try to reap the benefits of the online world without subordinating every aspect of learning, and life, to its subtle coercions.

Most uncivil behavior from a founder of “one of Singapore’s most established civil-society groups.”

Vivienne Wee has been found guilty of stealing her grant. She got almost a million dollars to work on a website, but secretly transferred the money from the original contractor to a bogus outfit run by her family.

The ICAC, Hong Kong’s anti-graft body, accused the pair of conspiring to hide from City U, and that she had a conflict of interest with the company that was the actual service provider of the IT contract.

The IT contract was for a website and intranet project headed by Wee. It was won by the company Sparkland. But the job was actually done by Locus Interactive, run by Wee’s sister-in-law, Ng Ngar-Sheung.

Both the owner of Sparkland and Ng were also found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. The owner of Sparkland had transferred the university’s payment to Locus, and received a cut of the fees.

The British start covering the American university laptop ban story.

As the controversy grows, University Diaries will of course follow it.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to push the off button on the trend of text messaging during meetings of the Board of Supervisors and various city commissions.

The tech-savvy mayor, himself an avid texter on his beloved iPhone, has asked the city attorney’s office to draft legislation curbing electronic communication during public meetings for fear of city officials being unfairly influenced by lobbyists’ texts.

… Ideas being discussed include banning text messages from lobbyists during meetings, though it would be virtually impossible to enforce; prohibiting the use of all cell phones during meetings, while acknowledging receiving messages from family members and staff may be crucial; and even banning the use of laptops, which allow for instant messaging and e-mails during meetings.

… Several states’ legislatures have restrictions on electronic communication during meetings, ranging from self-policed no-texting rules to making inoperable any device used to transmit data, including cell phones and computers…

All trends start in California.