… a lawsuit over excessive compensation.

Next up: Mark Emmert!

… When companies seek to work with university faculty, …it is generally on the basis of the faculty’s expertise in particular areas of research relevant to the company’s activities. It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology….

The American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Washington wonders what, besides greed and cynicism, puts their provost on Nike’s board.

I couldn’t do it.

Or… maybe I could do it, if I got one pomegranate martini per reading.

It’s taken awhile – 13 years to be exact – but the “Finnegans Wake’’ Reading Group has finally finished James Joyce’s famously long and difficult novel. Formed by serious fans of the Irish writer, the group has been meeting weekly to read a page or so of the convoluted work of comic fiction. The uncommon exercise, which began at the Thirsty Scholar in Cambridge, concluded this week at the Corrib in Brighton. Published in 1939, “Finnegans Wake’’ begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. To mark the end of the marathon reading, the group’s members raised their glasses and ritually chanted the entire completed sentence.

Here are the initial and final phrases united:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Philip Larkin at the Hull Festival

The ghost of the poet from Hull
Found his festival terribly dull.
“Exhibits, a play…
What is there to say?
Nix naught nonexistent and null.”

… the Finance and Investment Advisory committees is bankrupt.

… Faylene Owen and her husband Larry Owen filed for bankruptcy protection in December. Some colleagues say Trustee Owen should step back from some of her leadership roles. Court documents show her million dollar East Lansing home is in foreclosure, and she and her husband owe more than $100,000 in taxes…

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Update: A couple of reactions to the story from locals. The first one, from a comment on an article in the Lansing State Journal, is mainly of interest to Scathing Online Schoolmarm:

Perhaps those that live in glass houses should not be heaving stones. … Those that publicly attempt to drag her through the proverbial “mud” only resurrect the historical predisposition of the MSU family to provide fodder to its detractors.

Only two sentences, but they manage to do so much — insanely mixed metaphors, absolutely pointless quotation marks, and, overall, a spectacular combination of pomposity and idiocy.

Here’s another response, from an MSU student:

Both the State News editorial board and Larry Owen attempt to group the Owens in with the thousands of working Michigan families who are facing bankruptcy and other financial troubles. How ridiculous! As Michigan workers lose their jobs, face layoffs and have their salaries slashed, the Owens reported their monthly expenditures are more than $7,000. The Owens are a classic example of greed and corruption gone awry and are not to be confused with the real victims of Michigan’s current financial recession.

Ah. That’s better. Unlike the first writer – probably a member of MSU’s board of trustees – this college junior can think and write.

Egypt’s biggest public university has banned female students who wear the niqab from replacing the full-face veil with surgical masks in examination halls, the local media reported on Tuesday.

Officials at Cairo University said that replacing the niqab with facemasks violates a recent ruling by the Administrative Court, which upheld a ban on the full veil in examination halls.

The controversy over the niqab in this predominantly Muslim country erupted last October when Mohammad Tantawi, the Grand Shaikh of Al Azhar, the leading Sunni seat of learning, banned the niqab in female-only classes and dormitories.

The top cleric said that the costume is not an Islamic duty. A few days later, Minister of Higher Education Hani Hilal followed suit, citing security reasons.

He explained that several men were caught donning the niqab to enter university hostels.

Later, Hilal barred niqab-dressed students from taking their exams. He also ordered that niqab-dressed female lecturers should not be allowed in classes…

What’ll they wear next?

Background here.

FORT WORTH — A Wedgwood Middle School coach was fired after displaying a knife and threatening to castrate a student, according to documents released by the Fort Worth school district.

Eugene R. Jennings, a social studies teacher and coach who worked in the district for 20 years, has insisted that he was joking, according to the report by the district’s Office of Professional Standards.

According to the report, Jennings entered another teacher’s classroom in September and noticed a student misbehaving. At that point, he pulled a student aside and threatened to castrate him, according to a witness’s statement in the report….

UD thanks Bill for the link.

… OrthoGynol.

… [Arguing before the Supreme Court,] University of Michigan law professor Richard D. Friedman [said in answer to] a question from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, … that [something] was “entirely orthogonal” to the argument he was making…

… Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stopped him.

“I’m sorry,” Roberts said. “Entirely what?”

“Orthogonal,” Friedman repeated, and then defined the word: “Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.”

“Oh,” Roberts replied.

Friedman again tried to continue, but he had caught the interest of Justice Antonin Scalia, who considers himself the court’s wordsmith. Scalia recently criticized a lawyer for using “choate” to mean the opposite of “inchoate,” a word that has created a debate in the dictionary world.

“What was that adjective?” Scalia asked Monday. “I liked that.”

“Orthogonal,” Friedman said.

“Orthogonal,” Roberts said.

“Orthogonal,” Scalia said. “Ooh.”…

Headline in Artdaily.org:

DEPAUL EXHIBITION EXPLORES PROCESS
OF PAIRING DOWN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

… in Central Michigan Life newspaper:

PROFESSOR DAVID CURRENT’S DEATH
WILL NOT CHANGE CLASS SCHEDULES

Former Texas Tech University football coach Mike Leach sued the college on Friday, claiming it defamed him, and suspended and fired him without cause. Leach has denied the school’s accusation that he abused an injured played by locking him in a shed because he suspected the student was faking a concussion.

In his complaint in Lubbock County Court, Leach claims the school’s statements were intended to injure his reputation and hurt him financially.

… He seeks damages for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, defamation, deprivation of due process and seeks waiver of the school’s sovereign immunity…

What’ll they think of next?

Harvard University is one of 40 colleges that will be audited this year as part of the Internal Revenue Service’s review of the tax-exempt status of some nonprofit organizations, the school said in bond offering documents.

… Harvard is the world’s richest college with an endowment of $26 billion as of June 30, down from a peak of $36.9 billion in 2008. An alumni group criticized pay at the school’s endowment, known as Harvard Management Co., in 2003 after the top six in- house managers earned a combined $107.5 million the prior year.

… Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has been examining finances at universities, including how much funding rich schools give to student financial aid, and drug company payments to university researchers. Grassley called the IRS probe “long overdue” when it began in 2008.

This is a new one on me. Along with the worldwide celebration of Bloomsday on June 16 every year, there’s a Dead Dinner.

On the January night James Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place, Joyceans in New York and Washington dress up in period clothes and reenact the big Christmas dinner and the singing at the center of the tale.

… [Stella] O’Leary recalls starting her Dead dinners the year John Huston’s film came out. It takes [guest] Ambassador Michael Collins just a few seconds to find the year of Huston’s film on his iPhone. O’Leary gasps and crosses herself, saying “‘87, 97 . . . so it’s 22 years”. Guests sing the lyrics of Thomas Moore’s Endearing Young Charms from their iPhone screens.

As [a guest] reads Gabriel Conroy’s closing speech, a website news photo on a phone of snowy Ireland is passed around the table.

… In New York, consul general Niall Burgess and his wife Marie also hold an annual Dead dinner.

… O’Leary’s guests were from the business and diplomatic community. New York is the capital of culture, though, and Burgess’s friends include the novelist Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award in November, the Tony award-winning actor Jim Norton and Gabriel Byrne.

… “Just as the English have A Christmas Carol and the Welsh have A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Dead is our Christmas story,” [says] Burgess…

A few years ago UD wrote about the final paragraph of “The Dead.”

My New Year’s Inside Higher Ed column is about bondage, discipline, and the American university. In fact, it’s titled BDSM and the American University.

It’ll be up later tonight. As always, click on the title when it appears under the Latest UD Blogs at IHE column to your right.

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Here it is.

A student writes in the University of Saskatchewan newspaper:

… Think about what you’re paying for each class. In Term 2 there are approximately 24 lectures per course. With the course costing approximately $600 and the text at, oh say $100, that’s nearly $30 per class. For about an hour long lecture, is it really worth the money? For 30 bucks you could go see two movies … and even get snacks for each! Even if one of the movies sucks, you’re still getting more entertainment value than a prof reading some PowerPoint slides.

Oh, sure, sure, but school isn’t about entertainment. It’s about learning and education. Let’s not lie to ourselves; there’s not much of that going on. So if we aren’t learning we should at least be entertained. And as fun as it is watching documentaries when the prof is too lazy to give a lecture; it’s just not worth the moolah…