… Roger Williams…

All of these universities are models of insider dealing, their boards of trustees bursting with local merchants making money off of their position.

Of course, no one does it like Jersey.

I’m a huge admirer of the SIUC newspaper, The Daily Egyptian. It’s not only well-written, it’s gutsy and ethical and knows exactly what SIUC has become.

… Board of Trustees Chairman Roger Tedrick has indirectly benefited from millions of dollars worth of construction contracts SIU has awarded — contracts that he voted to approve. Tedrick helped nearly 40 companies on university contracts find insurance to cover the work they would be doing. Tedrick voted “yes” on 20 of them — each of which weighed in at more than $250,000 — then found insurance for the successful bidder.

Between 2002 and 2006, Tedrick donated $26,000 to the Blagojevich campaign. Tedrick was appointed to the BOT in February of 2004.

… The Southern Illinoisan reported Sunday that SIU President Glenn Poshard’s son Dennis Poshard and Dennis’s company have received contracts from the university and from organizations affiliated with the university for $138,000.

Dennis Poshard’s company received a contract from his friend and neighbor, College of Business Dean Dennis Cradit, to make a promotional video for the college.

… President Poshard serves southern Illinois as a politician who understands the downstate area, but he shouldn’t be running the university like a patronage political machine.

… Now that SIU has Chicago’s attention, the Daily Egyptian appeals to Gov. Pat Quinn to stir up the university’s governing board. SIU is still rife with Blagojevich politics. There’s no telling how deep corruption could run at this university….

That last point’s the most important one. We know who the hacks are and how they think. The corruption almost certainly runs deeper than we know.

There’s a bright side to this. The Egyptian is well-positioned to win some serious journalism prizes. Unlike student journalists at clean schools, they’ve got a lot of dirt to write about.

An op-ed in the New York Times by the chair of religion at Columbia brings together familiar arguments about how American universities should change to avoid obsolescence.

Like Francis Fukuyama, Mark C. Taylor wants to abolish tenure because it has created “institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.”

Although university tenure as an institution still seems to UD pretty secure, she reminds you of the recent upheaval at Mr UD’s University of Maryland over how stringent post-tenure review should be.

UD‘s most intrigued by Taylor’s comment about scholarly publication:

In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

It’s certainly true that tenure has wedged into place senior professors who may value nothing but older models of print publication. These professors review junior professors who look more and more like Taylor’s mixed modern model.

The Modern Language Association came out a number of years ago against the tyranny of the book manuscript and for the new formats Taylor mentions, but he’s correct that virtually nothing has changed.

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Update: It’s useful, in this connection, to look at the latest recipient of the Clark Medal in economics, second in importance to the Nobel. Professor of Economics at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez has never published a book, and he has never occupied a narrow subject band. He publishes articles, mainly online. His work sometimes appears as book chapters.

In an earlier post on this subject, UD quoted Lindsay Waters: “To make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.” UD continued:

Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him “why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge.” The economist, Waters concludes, is right: “Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays… .?”

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(Paul Krugman titles his blog entry on the prize SAEZ DOES MATTER.)

(“Mr. Saez, an easygoing Frenchman who loves surfing, has resisted overtures from the powerhouse economics departments at MIT and Harvard University.” The model here, of course, is Colin McGinn.)

… translating physics is charming, smart, wonderful.

He was one of the three people killed near the University of Georgia yesterday.

UD thanks David for the link.

… who wrote poetry, one hesitates. But here’s a page of Zinkhan’s stuff.

Read it while you can. I imagine the American Marketing Association might want to to take it down.

Here’s a perfectly competent poem of his, capturing the bureaucratic surreal:

“after hours”

Late at night after he thought
that everyone had gone home
the senior accounting partner loosened
his tie and
walked around the offices
splay foot
bare

“You’ll catch your death of cold”
pronounced the newly hired secretary
when she caught him one evening
unaware

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Bare. Unaware. Good rhyme, well-placed. And unaware has a nice duality to it — caught him unaware; i.e., he didn’t know she was still in the building. But she too is unaware — unaware of the deeper weirdness in this place, in this man — she’s a new secretary, after all.

Zinkhan, in this poem and others, is highly attuned to the Kafka-nature of The Office (a nature played for laughs in the television shows by that name), the weird disjunction between a buttoned-up rational senior accountant and the same man a bare-footed creature at night roaming the halls. Werewolf story. The naked animal beneath the suit. Catch your death in these cold climes.

——————–

Update: As I anticipated, the poetry has now been removed from the website.

Good article in the Spokesman Review about the majorly unprofitable football program at Eastern Washington University.

A veteran EWU professor comments:

“There are far more opportunities for students to represent their universities in sports at Central and Western than at Eastern, because they’re competing at a different level.”

Corkill backs his argument by noting his school has axed sports such as baseball, wrestling, swimming, men’s soccer and men’s golf during his tenure, basically for the sake of reducing expenditures.

“And they’ve done it in order to protect football and basketball and the Big Sky Conference,” he said. “I feel, in a way, that football distorts the intercollegiate athletics program at Eastern, and given the huge budget cuts we’re facing, I just think that maybe it’s time to rethink whether we should be in the Big Sky – or if we even need football.”

Via Wendy, a reader.

Three people have been shot and killed in Athens, Georgia, and police are looking for a professor at the University of Georgia, George Zinkhan, in connection with the killings.

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Update:  Seems to have killed his wife and two bystanders.

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Another Update:  An earlier UD post on the subject of professors who murder.  All of the cases she’s encountered since starting this blog involve men murdering their wives — estranged, ex-, current.  (The man featured in the post, Rafael Robb of the University of Pennsylvania, eventually confessed.)

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Witnesses.

… [A]n argument between the suspect, who was well known to the theatre group, and an unidentified man immediately preceded the shootings.

According to [police], witnesses told police that Zinkhan left the event and returned a few minutes later with two handguns. He fired both guns… and afterward walked away, got in a car and drove off.

…“At high level of threat for anyone who comes into contact with him,” said [an investigator].

Adams said after the shootings, Zinkhan apparently took both [of his] children to another neighbor’s home.

“He said he had an emergency,” Adams said Saturday evening. Police questioned neighbors on the street.

The two children are now in police custody…

The two wounded people did not suffer life-threatening injuries… Both were injured by ricochet — one victim in a leg and the other in a foot… Both were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens.

A man outside the shooting scene said his son was a witness to the slayings.

John Hardy of Conyers said his son, Matt Hardy, was standing next to one of the victims. John Hardy says his son told him that the victim, Tanner, was shot twice — once in the front and the back.

John Hardy said Matt Hardy, who lives in Athens, was a friend of Tanner’s. His son was being questioned by Athens police and released. He declined to comment on what he told investigators.

“At 22 you’re not supposed to watch people die,” said John Hardy.

According to Tanner’s Facebook profile, he has acted in 50 productions, including “Sherlock Holmes – The Final Adventure,” the current play being produced at the theater.

Gary Moon of Athens had just left classes at nearby Piedmont College when he heard gunshots.

“It was like pow, pow, pow. At first I thought it was just somebody fooling around with a cap gun or something,” Moon said. “Then I saw a lady who was walking her dog. She took off running and screaming down the street.”

Moon called 911 and reported the shooting, then drove up to the scene. Trained in CPR he sought to help. “I was too late. There wasn’t anything I could do.”…

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

A couple of random thoughts:

1.) I think it likely that Zinkhan will be found dead by his own hand.

2.) I would guess that Zinkhan and his wife were estranged, and that the man with whom he had an argument before leaving and returning with guns was protecting her from Zinkhan.

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

This report calls Marie Bruce Zinkhan’s ex-wife.

***********************
Ex-wife, but apparently they still lived together in the same house with their two children.

Was she going to move out? Had she fallen in love with one of the men Zinkhan apparently argued with and then returned to shoot? If she’d told Zinkhan she was leaving him to move in with a lover, that could have set him off. Custody issues, too, would have played a part in his rage, as they did in the case of Thomas Murray and Raphael Robb, two other professors who killed their wives.

The profile here, whether it turns out to match Zinkhan or not, is that of a control freak who thinks he’s a genius to whom no rules apply. And who’s not going to let some woman get away with messing up the carefully crafted pattern of his life.

… in a few weeks, we get up to date on things Scottish.

A leading historian was under pressure to apologise yesterday after he described Scotland as a “feeble little nation”.

David Starkey also hit out at Robert Burns, describing him as a “boring provincial poet”, and dismissed bagpipes as “awful” on BBC’s Question Time.

… Jim Mullen from Haddenham asked if Dr Starkey could be reported for racist comments.

The Scots spend a good deal of their time expressing umbrage over this sort of thing. In 2005, Niall Ferguson went much farther than Starkey. History News Network summarizes:

An expatriate Scottish historian provoked fury yesterday by calling for the land of his birth to be put into “liquidation” because it had become “the Belarus of the West”. Professor Niall Ferguson said Scotland’s glory days were long over, leaving it a “small, sparsely-populated appendage of England”.

The Glasgow-born academic, who is now based at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Scotland’s assets should be broken up, with the Scottish Parliament closed and the Scottish Football Association taken over by its English counterpart.

However, a leading fellow historian condemned his views as “tripe”, while the Scottish National Party said they would be “unrecognisable and unsupported by the vast majority of Scots”.

Prof Ferguson said the “ridiculous” Holyrood parliament building – which he described as a “risible and over-priced folly” – should be turned into a multiplex cinema or shopping mall, while Rangers and Celtic should “go where they belong”: to “pretty near the bottom of the [English] Premiership”.

The Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, who moved to the US from Oxford University in 2002, has long been an arch-critic of Scotland, but his latest tirade in a Sunday newspaper marks a new level of hostility towards the country.

Writing from South Africa – to escape his “Caledonian heritage” of Auld Lang Syne, kilts and whiskey – Prof Ferguson said Scotland must “face up to some harsh realities”.

He said the country’s weather is “impossibly wet”, most of the land north of Loch Lomond is “barren rock”, and said that educational standards have mostly collapsed.

He added: “When it comes to sport – and I do not count the one decent tennis player – Scotland is the Belarus of the West. In fact, when it comes to just about everything, it is the Belarus of the West.”

Prof Ferguson said Scotland had been cursed by a misplaced “superiority complex” that it did things better than south of the Border.

He said that rather than a “Scottish cringe”, there was a “Scottish swagger”, which he admitted he had been guilty of in the past.

However, the academic said it was time to cut Scotland down to size. He said: “Those who called it ‘North Britain’ in the 18th century had it right.”

Prof Ferguson said the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament after 300 years had created a “glorified county council” rather than restoring the country’s political independence.

He said: “The idea that Scotland might one day ‘be a nation again’ should simply be dropped.

A cooling wind and a still bright sun in a flawless sky at seven. What can I tell you. Key West.

I was part of a large crowd lined up at the main pier, all of us gazing at the water and the sky for signs of impending battle. Sometimes we glanced at bland gated Sunset Key island across the water from us, full of empty houses and nothing else.

Despite the full sun, tall lamps burned along the waterfront. Reggae, an inescapable component of island life, pursued us.

Pelicans sat on pilings looking bored. Yet another reenactment of the epic battle with the Coast Guard by which Key West attained its independence and became the Conch Republic. Yawn.

But we were excited. Many around UD wore hats in the shape of conches. They waved Conch Republic flags, miniature counterparts to the enormous CR flags flapping madly in the wind from atop various ships preparing for battle.

One combatant vessel floated by with a banner on it. A QUEST FOR CLOTHING OPTIONAL BEACHES. On the boat, a pirate flourished his sword. Practicing.

A teeny plane puttered by. “Battle’s ongoing,” said an informed observer near UD to no one in particular. “Air power hasn’t yet showed up in force. See that boat with the big Conch Republic flag on it? That’s us. Enemy’s anything without the flag.” He and many other men sucked cigars. Through the smoke, UD saw the circling craft begin spraying water from their decks in large powerful arcs. Again, preparing…

“Airforce!” shouted the man as six planes in ragged formation approached from the south. They rained streamers on the CR boats, and people on the CR boats shook their fists at them.

“Coast Guard!” As the crowd booed its arrival, protracted mutual spraying commenced.

More planes! And then big guns that made red smoke! The streamers streamed down as the air and sea battle ground on. Helicopters buzzed the CR boats, trying to intimidate them, but once more the CR boat people shook their fists. Ashore, young women with flowers in their hair and old men dancing along to the steel band also shook their fists.

Someone fired a banana at the Coast Guard ship, and this was the final straw. As the sun quickly set, government forces just as quickly retreated, and it was over.

… is a benign dictator, in the way of football coaches.  A well-meaning, emotional man of limited worldly understanding, he keeps his kingdom content with athletic spectacles and brooks no dissent.  His players are worshipped by all.

On the fringes of Leipold’s domain lies a university, and though his players may not use the athletic equipment of this university without one of their fitness coaches present, three of the athletes did so anyway, refusing to show their student identification and behaving with the sense of entitlement that you would expect of the king’s pets.

A reporter from the university newspaper was present, took offense, and wrote a column about “spoiled athletes.”

Neither their demeanor, nor their language was respectful, but that’s OK, because they’re athletes. They’re allowed to play the system. Next time I’m in the Williams Center, I’ll keep my ID, wear my headphones on the bottom floor and bench press naked because I feel like it. …

The guilty party usually isn’t the typical student-athlete. It’s really not even the few who misbehave or accept preferential treatment. The villains are the “adults” – the coaches and administrators – who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.

The writer concluded by noting one common endpoint of athlete-coddling:

[S]ometimes exceptional talent still isn’t enough to bail out someone who thinks he’s above the rules. Ask [Maurice] Clarett. You can reach him at the Toledo Correctional Institution.

When he read this, King Leipold flushed crimson and flew into a rage.

“This is fucking bullshit,” he thundered, and banned the newspaper from access to the football program. “The door is shut. Go cover soccer…. I’m sure that will be fun.”

So certain was Leipold of the right of kings that he wrote an email to the university’s chancellor boasting of having shut down the press: “If this is the type of journalism our paper is going to have. They can cover someone else — we will get along just fine,” Leipold wrote.

Imagine Leipold’s amazement when reprimands and sanctions rained down upon him from the chancellor! When he was made to apologize in public to this student and to the newspaper!

Moral of the story: Just as the concept of assault has now become clearer to Mississippi’s coach, so the concept of a free press is surely beginning to work its way into the brain of King Leipold.

From the Daily Northwestern:

Despite the millions of dollars companies spend on diversity training each year, these programs are ineffective, said Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin in a lecture Wednesday evening. Dobbin spoke to an audience of about 100 in the McCormick Tribune Center as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Center on the Science of Diversity.

In his lecture “You Can’t Make Me: Why Diversity Training Backfires,” Dobbin argued that diversity training simply does not make individuals and institutions more open to diversity.

“Companies with diversity training programs are not more diverse,” he said. “What’s frustrating is, it’s the most popular and most expensive type of program that firms spend time, money and energy on.”

Dobbin identified external sanctions as a key factor in the negative impact of diversity training. For example, if a company does not comply with diversity rules, it can be sued for violating civil rights, he said. This kind of pressure can cause psychological resistance.

“If you tell Billy that he will be punished for taking a certain toy from a pile,” Dobbin said, “Then that is the first toy he will reach for when he is left alone in the room.”

The problem is that firms make it mandatory for their employees to attend diversity training, Dobbin said.

… Sociology professor emeritus Arthur Stinchcombe [He’s a friend of Mr UD’s.] said he has known Dobbin for years and has researched many of the same subjects.

“Since he does very good work, I thought I would learn something, and I did,” he said. “(I learned that) if somebody orders you to have a given sentiment, then you probably won’t have it.”…

The pathos of that statement lightly hammered onto a bicycle sculpture in front of a house on Olivia Street.

A sign by the entrance of a house on Southard: Hippies Use Side Door.

The music drifting out of a house off Duval: Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I leave Key West in a few days, and as I walk it now, I see it — to paraphrase Humbert Humbert — through the mist of my utter acceptance of it.

I love the man who smokes and drinks while riding his bicycle. If he could swim and smoke and drink, he’d do that. The body culture here is softened by self-indulgence, by a loose-limbed exuberance that will crowd three more palms in front of the porch and take in two more cats and lean for hours into a hammock, just looking around.

And why not look around at white houses thronged with green plants, and at the peculiar markings of each specifically loved outpost along the hot breezeways of Key West.

Toward the end of Love Lane, I smell incense and omelets. I hear windchimes and falling water and parrots whistling from hidden stoops.

Happiness feels fully elaborated here; you can read, in house and garden, the way this person and that person have worked out their way to live; and it’s all you can do, sometimes, not to walk down their hibiscus path, press open their unlocked door, and live with them and be their love.

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

At seven this evening — thirty minutes from now — they’re reenacting the independence battle that made the Conch Republic a republic. I guess I should go, for your sake. Later.

… and a credit to his breed.

In a provocative speech in the heart of coal country, a noted Appalachian scholar called for an end to surface mining for the good of the state’s economy.

University of Kentucky professor Ron Eller, a Pulitzer-nominated author and former head of the university’s Appalachian Center, said the state must recognize declining coal reserves, political opposition to coal-fired energy, and rising regulations on carbon dioxide emissions.

“We must begin, I think, by abolishing surface mining,” and especially mountaintop removal, Eller said to about 250 people in the keynote speech at the East Kentucky Leadership Conference in Hazard.

Reaction was not entirely warm…

Note the many thoughtful comments from local readers.

More detail here.

UD likes macho men.

She can’t help it. She was socialized into it by a sexist society and now it’s too late. Hope perhaps lies in future generations.

When pertinent, UD likes to point out on this blog instances of her attraction to academic rogues, rascals, rakes and randies, pre-impotence Hemingways swaggering the quad…

Today she likes the Harvard professor featured in this Crimson story, a med school guy going after Grassley and the other “quasi-religious” pharmascolds who worry about conflict of interest.

He argues that “physicians should be free to determine on their own if [an industry] gift is a bribe.”

How exactly would this work?

“This gift is a bribe. Great. I can use the money.”

No, no. And here’s where UD begins to pant a bit. “If people do bad things,” says her man, “shoot them.”

I also like how he describes the current turmoil over the issue: “Now there’s some skin in the game.” Meaning now doctors are getting pissed because the rules are changing and they’re losing money. Life’s a rugby match, baby, and Grassley’s pissing off the other side and he better look out!

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One editorial thing. The Crimson reporter notes that many other medical faculty believe “academic medicine has long suffered from ethical breeches.”

I think this would be trousers made with no leather products.

The Charleston School of Law in South Carolina held a party at which people misbehaved. That much seems clear.

The location was an aquarium. Preliminary reports indicate that a few of the pissed pissed in the otter tank.

Other, more lurid, behaviors are rumored. A spokeperson for the student body sent out to the school the following badly written email about it all:

I am going to take a minute to address the situation that has occurred today. It is regrettable that there is a situation that has occurred where someone decided to tell a news outlet about unsubstantiated rumors of what occurred at our Barrister’s Ball. I can say that these statements were rumors and that no one from the legislative community was assaulted nor was there a physical altercation of any sort between a legislator and a student. I urge anyone who says otherwise to come forward with details of such conduct. Additionally, there were no sexual relations between people at the Barrister’s Ball even though many of us heard something to the contrary. Both of these rumors were dealt with in a meeting with security for the event that occurred the Monday after the event. I can state with one hundred percent certainty that what you have read on the Internet is not true.

I can also tell you that action was taken immediately after the event between the parties involved, the administration and myself. These actions have however not been made public to the students based on the fact that we did not want to post until everything was finalized. An investigation was conducted and punishment has been considered by the administration. The SBA was planning on releasing today as part of the agenda that at our meeting this week we plan to address this situation. I urge each and every one of the students who care about this situation to attend. At the meeting we will be having a public apology by each of the individuals involved, as well as a release of the details concerning punishment…

Huh? Work your way through the thicket of words here to discover that the writer both alleges nothing happened and talks darkly of punishments and apologies. Otter tank pissing, UD gathers, did incontrovertibly take place, but you wouldn’t know it from this Kafkaesque missive, with its four uses of the word occurred and four uses of the word situation. The writer’s paragraphs contain an otter-tank full of problems — passive voice, vagueness, euphemism, redundancy…

UD doesn’t have her heart set either way on, er, sexual relations between people having taken place in aquarium toilet stalls. She merely reminds you that drunkards getting excited and doing each other in the loo is otterly routine.