Long Island University‘s provost is a master of understatement.

As a parting gesture, the just-fired director of the campus art museum stole nine Egyptian antiquities from the place, erased them from the collection’s computer database, and then sold them to Christie’s as part of “the collection of Barry Stern.”

The court wants to know why he robbed the museum. I’m sure Barry had cause: They didn’t appreciate him, he needed the money, and shit, no one would have noticed the pieces were missing if Christie’s hadn’t sent a purchase order to his old address at the museum (That last thing happened because Barry fucked up. But … you’re gonna lock up a man for making a mistake?).

It sounds terrific.

Title: Leaves of Grass.

Plot, via Roger Ebert:

… It is certainly the most intelligent, philosophical and poetic film I can imagine that involves five murders in the marijuana-dealing community of Oklahoma and includes John Prine singing “Illegal Smile.”

… Sometimes you cannot believe your luck as a movie unfolds. There is a mind behind it, joyful invention, obvious ambition. As is often the case, I had studiously avoiding reading anything at all about “Leaves of Grass” before going to see the movie, although I rather doubted it would be about Walt Whitman.

… The film opens with [Edward] Norton as a philosopher named Bill Kincaid giving a lecture on Socrates to a packed classroom of star-struck students at Brown. It’s a measure of Nelson’s writing and Norton’s acting that this lecture isn’t a sound bite but is allowed to continue until the professor develops his point, and it’s an interesting one. Only as I think back do I realize what an audacious way that is to open a movie about the drug culture of rural Oklahoma.

Spoilers in this paragraph. Kinkaid is on the fast track. He’s published books, is a crossover intellectual superstar, is offered a chance to open his own department at Harvard. Then he gets a telephone call telling him his twin brother Brady is dead. He has long since severed his old family ties, but flies home for the funeral to Little Dixie, Oklahoma, and is met at the airport by his twin’s best friend. As it turns out, Brady is not dead, and the story was a lie designed to lure him back home for two purposes. One is to force him to see his mother, a 1960s pothead played by Susan Sarandon. The other is to act as his double to establish an alibi while Brady goes up to Tulsa for a meeting with the region’s dominant marijuana dealer Tug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss).

… [T]he film makes the twins equally brilliant; Brady has designed and built a hydroponic farm that is producing its seventh generation of top-quality weed. He is also something of a philosopher himself. In writing his dialogue, [the director] doesn’t condescend. He is a Tulsa native who dismisses the widespread notion that a man’s “hick” accent (the movie’s word) provides a measure of his intelligence. Brady sounds like a semi-literate redneck, but he’s very smart.

… Janet (Keri Russell) [is] a local English teacher and poet, who quotes Whitman to Billy and entrances him in a way he has never before allowed…

The Sarandon character is right out of Michel Houellebecq.

America’s worst university is also its filthiest: As per tradition, thousands of drunken tailgaters have dumped … let’s see.. seventy tons of trash on campus after a recent football game.

“[P]olice estimate we have 15,000 to 25,000 people who come here to tailgate and spend the day with no intention of attending the ballgame,” says the university’s sports-mad president, Michael Adams, who deserves everything he gets, since his asshole-friendly policies created the problem.

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The headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states the school’s quandary:

IS THE TRASHING OF UGA DUE TO TAILGATING OR DRINKING?

Hm, yes, take your pick. The regular transformation of an American university campus into a puke and piss dump is maybe because of its y’all come on down tailgating policies, or maybe because y’all doesn’t even know there’s a football game going on … doesn’t even know it’s on a campus…

So you don’t gotta choose, really. It’s tailgating and it’s drinking.

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Got my headline for this post from a remark someone made on the article’s comment thread.

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Here’s another comment: “It was just shocking to see the aftermath,” said Andy Carter, 37, who works at the UGA Library and only recently moved to Athens.

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What are these people seeing? Let’s not be coy:

Whole tailgate tents left half-standing. Abandoned portable grills. Urination in campus doorways. Defecation. Trash strewn everywhere.

Oh and they got all sorts of folk comin’ up with all sorts a jackshit excuses — Blamin’ it on the media ’cause they want UGA to have night games and you know how somehow I dunno but somehow folks just do that much more shittin’ in classroom doorways when it’s dark out…

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No one’s saying that the university campus has to be a meticulous little monastery. Have your games. Expect noise and mess. But America’s worst university holds that title in part because it’s lost all sense of decorum, all sense that it’s supposed to be a serious place, where people like librarians can go about their business without stepping in Bubba’s shit.

From The Morning Sun, a Central Michigan newspaper:

The Genealogical Society of Isabella County is presenting a Victorian Funeral Tea and Cemetery Walk at 1 p.m. at Centennial Hall in Mt. Pleasant. Tickets may be purchased in advance. Cost is $20. Contact Sherry at 772-0155. Kim Parr of Crocker House Museum will be the speaker. Sponsored by Helms Funeral Home, Berry Funeral Home and Clark Funeral Chapel. This is one of the county’s sesquicentennial events.

They’re just beginning to haunt Australia.

At least one article submitted to Australia’s leading medical journal in recent years was ”ghost written” by a writer employed by a drug or medical device company, its editor says.

Martin van der Weyden, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, has called for a government-funded investigation into the influence that industry has on research papers.

However, he believes the problem in Australia is not nearly as bad as in North America, where there is a scandal over the extent of ghost writing in leading medical journals.

… Mr van der Weyden said pharmaceutical companies had a far smaller influence on research in Australia, but he had to stay on alert for telltale signs of their influence on submitted articles…

… never thought seriously for a moment, about ending University Diaries. But the cruel university events I’ve been compelled to follow lately, so early in the new school year, have certainly brought me back to this Philip Larkin poem.

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Forget What Did

Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

l wanted them over,
Hurried to burial
And looked back on

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.

Raymond Clark is now under arrest for murder in the strangulation of Annie Le.

Yale’s president, in his email to the Yale community, writes

This incident could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace. It says more about the dark side of the human soul than it does about the extent of security measures.

Given the panicked stupidity of his response to what he had done, and the resulting reams of physical evidence Clark left, UD wonders… If the crime was – as appears – unpremeditated, might that change in any way the severity of the charge or punishment against him?

A letter to the editor of the University of Minnesota newspaper.

Your recent story on [football coach] Tim Brewster’s helicopter rides was a shocking read. In the midst of a recession and a University hiring freeze, Tim Brewster’s waste of money on an entirely unnecessary helicopter ride to Irondale in New Brighton, a 15 minute drive from campus, should be a scandal. Yet we have come to accept that even when institutions from our state government down to the corner store are tightening their belts, the University athletics department will never be questioned for its ridiculous spending choices. Dan Berezowitz’s comment that Brewster was not “showboating” is an obvious lie.

He knows it, Brewster knows it, we all know it. Worse was the insulting comment from Joel Maturi suggesting that those opposing Brewster’s spending habits “think we shouldn’t spend one dollar [recruiting].” Maturi knows those opposed to expenses like this helicopter jaunt don’t believe in a $0 recruiting budget. His defensiveness and desire to aggressively delegitimize any opposition to the wasteful spending habits of the athletics department are very telling.

Patrick Timmons

Starts like this.

When it comes to using technology to foster education, the prevailing wisdom has been that more is better. Over the past decade, universities around the globe have invested heavily in the wired classroom, adding everything from external laptop connections to Blu-ray DVD players. But there is little evidence that these gadgets enhance learning–and, critics argue, they might actually hinder it, making both students and teachers passive. What if classrooms were restored to the pre-Internet days of wooden tables and chalk?

Then there’s this bit about José Bowen, Mr Teach Naked.

Then it concludes.

Technology has a place in education, but it should be used independently by students outside the classroom. That gives them more time to absorb lectures via podcast or video, and frees teachers to spend class time coaching students in how to apply the material rather than simply absorb it.

Duh.

… between Raymond Clark, a lab technician, and material in the Annie Le murder.

At this point, if the reports are correct, investigators have an immense amount of evidence against Clark, including this:

Swipe cards Le and Clark used to move through different areas of college buildings showed they were in the same room shortly after 10 a.m. on Sept. 8, The Hartford Courant reported.

Le, 24, wasn’t seen alive after that, and her card wasn’t used again. But Clark swiped into the area where she was found strangled five days later in a crawlspace, a law enforcement source told the paper.

I’m thinking about a couple possible motives:

•  Unrequited passion.  He had perhaps long lusted after her and been rejected.  He knows she’s about to get married, and he decides to make one last try.  Things go very badly.  Enraged, he kills her.

•  He thinks she disrespects him.  He’s a man; she’s a woman.  He’s a big muscular guy; she’s a scrap of a thing.  She should be subordinate to him.  It drives him nuts that he’s a janitor, she a researcher, higher than he on the professional scale.  He has accumulated, over a number of months, an intense sense of grievance against her.  He’ll show that bitch.

… she thought “Five men tie up a woman and rape her in a dormitory bathroom while a party’s going on not far away and no one hears anything? No one comes in?”

Suspicious, she decided not to write about it on her blog, even though, if true, it was a very big university story.

Another reason UD felt uncertain about this case: A number of fake rape stories are happening at universities lately. Women report being raped and then, a day or two later, admit to having lied about it.

The Hofstra student has indeed admitted lying; the sex, she says, was consensual. The men she accused are quite unhappy at having been arrested and jailed, and having their mug shots appear all over the nation’s newspapers, because of a crime they did not commit.

SOS doffs her hat to the editorial staff of the University of Virginia newspaper. Their response to GQ having ranked the school 25th Douchiest is lovely.

And the comments! Even lovelier.

(The school University Diaries has dubbed the worst university in America, the University of Georgia, comes in 13th.)

The former head of the National Institutes of Health explains it nicely and concisely.

His comment appears in a long article (subscription) about UD‘s acquaintance, Paul Thacker, described as Charles Grassley’s “bulldog” in the fight against the dangerous corruption of academic science.

“Paul’s good,” said the senator, sitting across from Thacker. “If you’re going to be successful in these investigations, you gotta have people like Paul.”

The article notes that scientists grown accustomed, as Zerhouni says, to lying about the money they stand to make from their own research results don’t like Paul Thacker one bit. Too bad.

You recall UD’s post about this Louisiana University’s effort to update its mascot.

It came up with this image —

— which generated a lot of controversy.

Here’s a nicely written letter to the editor about it:

As [a] native of Louisiana and former resident of Thibodaux, I have observed the controversy regarding the newly unveiled Nicholls mascot with great interest.

I must admit that when I viewed the new Colonel Tillou mascot for the first time my own thoughts were of a Bolshevik cavalryman from the Russian Civil War. The politically correct forces claim they began a campaign to replace the old mascot in an effort to improve the university’s image. Unfortunately, the new mascot conjures up an image of a murderous Red Army dragoon slashing his way through a Ukrainian village. This is definitely not an improvement on the university’s image. Instead, it tarnishes the school and everyone associated with it. This whole experience should finally demonstrate the folly of political correctness and its various progeny.

What makes this matter even more distasteful is the knowledge that an out-of-state design firm and focus groups participated in this travesty. In the end, the entire endeavor that created “Colonel Bolshevik” has been a waste of money, time and university resources. The university should bring back the old mascot and issue an apology. Once it does that, it can return to more-fruitful endeavors, such as educating the young adults of Louisiana.

Annie Le’s murderer may have been a young lab technician (he apparently failed two lie detector tests and has defensive wounds to his chest) whose refusal to give the investigators a DNA sample meant that police raided his apartment last night in order to get one. They led him away in handcuffs.

If reports that Le was asphyxiated, and that she was found fully clothed, are true, the crime seems less about erotic obsession than about rage. Did the guy feel Le had dissed him in some way?

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Piling on to the sadness at Yale is the death of another student — a recent graduate — while riding her bicycle in the city:

Sylvia Bingham ’09, a Yale graduate who was passionate about social justice and the environment, died Tuesday morning. She was 22.

Bingham was en route to her job in Cleveland shortly before 9 a.m. when a truck collided with her bicycle. She passed away at St. Vincent Charity Hospital soon after. The truck driver did not stop, but police located him that afternoon using information provided by witnesses.

… Professor Hannah Brueckner, the director of undergraduate studies for sociology who got to know Bingham during her senior year, described her as a “fearless intellectual, a skilled field worker, and a committed activist.”

… “She showed up on my birthday with a box of dainty little madeleines that she had baked for me,” [a Yale friend] said. “I think that cookie and that act represent her persona perfectly: she was bursting with creativity and was a teeny, quirky fashionista.” …