A former Western Kentucky University professor pleads “guilty” to federal program fraud.

The U.S. Attorney’s office says Katrina Phelps entered into a “plea agreement” today, where she admits intentionally misapplying $27,087.20 from Western Kentucky University.

[“Guilty”? “plea agreement”? Why the quotation marks? Did she not really plead guilty? Is it not really a plea agreement? Am I living in Upper Volta where we don’t use terms like guilty and plea agreement, so you have to put them in quotation marks to introduce them to me?]

Phelps admits from March 2005 to December 2007, she took the proceeds from 16 checks from a justice department grant, and misapplied the funds.

As part of her plea agreement, Phelps agrees to pay full restitution to WKU, prior to her sentencing.

The maximum potential penalties for Phelps’ offense, include ten years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and supervised release for up to 3 years.

Adds piquancy that these were from the justice department… “Background” “here.”

… [O]nline education doesn’t translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in [a] faculty survey. More than 10,000 faculty members at 67 public campuses responded to the survey.

While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior…

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Surfing the Web may soon disappear entirely from Georgetown [University] classrooms, as a growing number of professors enact policies either banning or discouraging laptop use during lectures and discussion sections.

For David Goldfrank, a professor in the department of history, the turning point came at the beginning of a World History II discussion section in 2007.

“I started with a directed question, and the student replied, ‘Wait a minute, please. I need to turn on my computer where I have my notes,’” Goldfrank said. “[ … As a professor,] I don’t want to know what is in your computer; I want to know what is in your head.”

… [Professor David] Cole claims that students who use their computers to take notes become stenographers rather than actually processing the information, and those who are surfing the Internet are simply not engaged.

… “I don’t have much self-control,” Cristina Cardenal (COL ’11) said. “When there’s a lull in conversation and I have my laptop … I want to go on the Internet.”

… “The few advantages, such as a student’s targeted looking up a disputed or unfamiliar fact during a lecture, could not come close to balancing the negatives,” Goldfrank said…

This university’s highly paid president maintained the financial criminal of the century and his victim supplier in positions of enormous campus power and influence. The school lost tens of millions of endowment funds to these men.

The president continues to oversee a board of trustees bursting with conflicts of interest. UD expects at least one more member of that board to be dragged into the Madoff debacle. Yet despite calls from outraged alumni to dissolve the board, the president has done nothing.

Now, finally, faced with the loss of its financial base and any integrity it might have had after being run into the ground by its beloved Madoff and Merkin, Yeshiva’s president acts. He fires sixty innocent people.

The guilty parties – the president and his board of trustees – remain in place.

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

UD thanks Tzvee for the link.

From a Philadelphia Inquirer profile of Senator Charles Grassley:

Jerome Kassirer, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and an expert on conflicts of interest, applauds Grassley’s efforts [to go after academic physicians guilty of conflict of interest], but wants changes that would abolish speaking fees, trips, and other payments to doctors that help drug companies promote their point of view.

“Transparency is only a partial solution to conflict of interest,” Kassirer said.

Grassley has told him he’s just getting started.

… “It is self-evidently absurd to look to a company for information about a product it makes,” Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said in a telephone interview.

“Why can’t doctors, who are among the most privileged members of society, pay for their own continuing medical education?” Angell said. “Why have they abdicated that responsibility to the companies who make drugs?”

Reuters updates us on the continuing scandal of Continuing Medical Education.

… let us consider one of her poems.

She was born 8 February 1911. Died in 1979.

She lived in and wrote about Key West, so that’s another reason for UD, who will soon move there, to write about her.

But the real reason to write about her is that she’s a spectacularly good poet. Very much in the way of UD‘s adored Philip Larkin. Compare this Larkin poem with the Bishop we’re about to consider.

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

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

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

If home existed. Bishop says almost the exact same thing in her poem Questions of Travel:

… “Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

We travel, she writes in Arrival at Santos, because of our “immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both.”

Knowledge of the world before you leave it, and a perfectly clear understanding that you’ll gain very little knowledge before you leave it — it’s odd to UD that this shared pathos created in Bishop a restless traveler and in Larkin a stay-at-home. But then both of them seem to suggest that there isn’t any home anyway, that the world’s a bizarre mystery wherever you happen to plant your ass, so you don’t really need to travel. You’re always writing letters of exile. Poems are letters of exile.

In fact travel might backfire; it might rouse expectations destined to be disappointed. These expectations might involve the possibility of greater comprehension; they might also be about the possibility that you can make a new life — that having botched this one, you can make a good, new one by placing yourself in a different world. That’s the theme of this little Larkin ditty:

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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

The ongoing struggle of our lives is the same struggle anywhere; to chuck it all is to pretend otherwise, to pretend that having, say, mucked up one life, you can do the next one right.

But anyway. What strikes UD most about these two poets is their almost Kafkaesque sense of how fundamentally strange life is, and their related disengagement from the human realm. Their world is the world of the Royal Station Hotel abandoned by human beings, though recently and incompletely colonized by them… I mean, Larkin and Bishop notice again and again traces of our efforts to inhabit and understand the world. They notice the way the obdurate world responds to these efforts with a maddening inhuman self-sufficiency. The world goes on living its worldly life and gives away almost nothing. This conundrum of ours produces – if you’re a literary genius – extremely eerie sets of lines, evoking not emptiness, but an absence weighted with the failed effort to be present.

Cape Breton

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.
On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.
The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–
and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.
(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying
from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

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

This is a shag, by the way.

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

So let me take a voyage around this poem. Here it is again:

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,

[As with Larkin and the objects in the hotel, so with Bishop and the animal objects she’s considering, there’s a weird intentionality that the poet casts upon them; they’re almost human, seeming to mean and feel certain things — The birds are solemn; they’ve turned their backs to the mainland in some meaningful gesture of withdrawal or rejection… ]

while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,

[The water weaves silk as a weaver weaves. It doesn’t merely move; it disappears. It means to disappear in the same mysterious way the birds seem to mean their rejection of the mainland.]

lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

[Incorporates. The great poet finds the word. Takes into its body somewhere. The world has a mind and the world has a body, and these things are powerful and have their reasons. We have little to no access to them, though we can mark some of their operations.

We can’t see the boat because of the mist — the mist that will stand throughout the poem for the haunted and undisclosed Kafka-world in which we move.]

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

[Toto, I don’t think we’re in Romanticism anymore… Rotting, sucked away, dead, stereoscopic… Here, consciousness takes in the natural world as a rigid neurotic oddball with morbid tendencies. Which has nothing to do with us.]

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.

[Unlike the trees, the road is animate; but wildly, in a way that has nothing to do with us.]

On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.

[As with the Royal Hotel poem, it’s the world weighted with our failure to be present that compels Bishop. For her, every day is Sunday, because we never really enter into and interact with the world.

And yes – If you find yourself drifting glacially toward Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning – he also lived in Key West – that’s dandy.]

The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.

[Brilliant simile.]

The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock

[She’s getting into it now. Notice how great poems don’t assert much of anything; they calmly and expansively describe a world, and then, naturally as it were, generate implications.]

and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–

[Hey! UD gets all excited when she reads these lines. Faithful readers know why.]

and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.

[Notice how by now, having evoked an obscure and powerful natural/spiritual world, Bishop’s introduction of people makes them and their things — buses, bulldozers, churches — seem like toys, absurd powerless things dropped in, crawling about, barely existent.]

(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying

[Again, just like the Royal Hotel, the setting is that of a place usually inhabited but now not inhabited.]

from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

[Notice too how the poet’s perspective moves in the poem from distant to closer and closer, from a long view of the islands to, by now, a specific view of a specific human being. Like a scientist, she is trying to understand, bringing the objects of her interest more and more to view.

And of course his house is invisible, holding back its meaning as much as any other thing on the island or the mainland holds back its meaning.]

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

[Frightening. We’re left, for all our mental exertions, with the same inscrutable soundings, and with a world that has a mind of its own — the thin mist propelled by its own dreams. The world is and always has been a cold place, despite our efforts to warm it. Cold and dark, with reminders of our brief battles here.]

From The Southern:

Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been ousted from office, but concerns regarding his appointments to the Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees remain prevalent.

Gov. Pat Quinn, who replaced Blagojevich after the state Senate removed him from office, said Friday his administration would take a serious look at all appointments to state boards made by his predecessor.

“We are going to look at everything,” Quinn said. “We are taking it one day at a time and one issue at a time, but we’re definitely going to take a look at that.”

Members of the Southern Illinois community continue to ask questions about board members and the campaign contributions they made to the legally embattled Blagojevich, as demonstrated by a letter from Laraine Wright of Carbondale on today’s Opinion page.

“These people are chosen to do the best they can do for the public university,” said Wright, who’s attempting to rally residents to Thursday’s board meeting. “That’s a lot of money, a lot of responsibility, and they need to take it seriously.”

An Associated Press article in January linked Frank William Bonan II, the board’s newest and youngest member, to $30,000 in campaign contributions his father and uncle netted for Blagojevich at a fundraiser in November, less than a month after his appointment to the board.

Bonan declined to comment when approached by a reporter for The Southern on Wednesday.

Other board members – including Chairman Roger Tedrick and trustee John Simmons – donated a total of at least $25,000.

None of the contributors are accused of wrongdoing.

An internal review conducted by the university’s general counsel determined all the board appointments were clean and not connected to contributions. SIU President Glenn Poshard said Thursday he understood where concerns would come from but said the university completed its duty in the investigation.

“I recognize the environment we’re in where everybody’s under suspicion if they gave anything,” Poshard said. “We did the due diligence that we could do in talking to our board members and asking the questions.”

Poshard said he and the board members have no say in new appointments and that responsibility rests in the hands of the governor. All the members of the board have professional qualities and excel in their respective industries, which could be a basis for appointment, he added…

Poshard. If due diligence existed at his university, his plagiarism would have disqualified him from SIU’s presidency.

Best friends from way back with Blago, Poshard is just the man to oversee this dumping ground for political hacks.

The latest from Naperville, where the new superintendent of schools graduated from a now-defunct diploma mill. The search firm that charged the taxpayers of the district for their services describes its methods.

… District 203 school board President Suzyn Price directed questions about Mitrovich to Hank Gmitro, an associate with Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, the search firm the district employed to help it find a new superintendent.

Gmitro said the firm was aware of what school Mitrovich attended and learned during a routine check several days ago that it was not accredited. He was unsure of whether the firm learned before or after the board approved hiring the new leader and said it’s typical to focus discussions with candidates more on their experiences….

Unsure whether they knew before or after the board took their recommendation whether he graduated from a pretend school.

The profoundly corrupt University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (read UD‘s many posts about it here) has lost track of some mice.

The frozen remains of two lab mice infected with deadly strains of plague were lost at a bioterror research facility at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark — the same high-security lab where three infected mice went missing four years ago.

The latest incident, which led to an FBI investigation, occurred in December but was never disclosed to the public.

University officials said there was no health threat.

The remains of the dead mice were contained in a red hazardous waste bag being stored in a locked freezer, according to the researchers. But an animal care supervisor could not account for them while preparing to sterilize and incinerate them.

In September 2005, the same lab discovered three live mice infected with plague missing from multiple cages. Officials then said the animals had likely died.

University officials yesterday said they immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and state health officials in December upon learning of the missing remains, but withheld information from the public until The Star-Ledger began asking questions. They subsequently released a report about the matter in a mass e-mailing to the university community, saying they did not want employees, students and professors to read about the incident in the newspaper.

FBI officials confirmed the December incident.

“As a matter of protocol in this type of matter, the FBI was called in to investigate and we determined there was no nexus to terrorism or risk to public health,” said Bryan Travers, a spokesman for the FBI office in Newark.

The state Department of Health and Senior Services said it had also been notified of the situation, “and we are very confident that the appropriate authorities are investigating,” said spokeswoman Donna Leusner.

University officials defended their decision to keep the matter confidential.

… … Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who has been a critic of the government’s rapid expansion of bioterrorism labs, said while the likelihood is that someone made an accounting error, it was a potentially embarrassing situation for UMDNJ.

The University of New Mexico’s corrupt and greedy president, having been tossed out of two prior university president jobs, will soon, UD anticipates, be tossed out of this one.

Look at his Google News page! Nepotist, jocksniffer, anti-intellectual — David Schmidly’s the compleat anti-president.

And yet. After getting ejected from one institution after another, he always seems to dust himself off and find a new one.

… jumps to US News and World Report.

Two other [Canadian Madoff investors] were more puzzling – Herb and Ruth Gamberg, a pair of modest, left-leaning professors who came to Halifax in the 1960s and taught at Dalhousie University before they retired.

Mr. Gamberg, 75, is regarded as one of the world’s leading Marxist scholars, according to a documentary about his life under development by Halifax director Walter Forsyth. He grew up in Worcester, Mass., and on his trips home from Brandeis University he would play pickup basketball with his younger friend, Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist who comprised part of the Chicago Seven. After coming to Canada, he helped establish the Foundation Year Program at King’s College, and became one of the early members of Dalhousie’s sociology department, writing on everything from prison reform to socialism to the history of Nova Scotia’s political left.

Although they are retired, the Gambergs remain politically energized. They added their names to a petition nominating folk singer Pete Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize, and were among a group of signatories protesting Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama mining project in Chile.

The Gambergs could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Ruth’s work contributes to The Truth About the Cultural Revolution (see footnote 6).

Ohio State University has Alex Boone.

New one on me. Am wondering if it’s a hoax. Think not.

The Princeton Buildering Society (PBS) breaks the rules every time its members meet. Buildering — the act of climbing on structures like buildings, poles and statues — has occurred on Princeton’s campus for decades. Every brick scaled and every tower reached, though, marks a violation of the University’s Environmental Health & Safety guidelines, which state that “the use of University structures for ‘climbing’ is prohibited.”

The practice, however, survives.

Despite the controversy that erupted in 2006 when Public Safety discovered photos of students climbing buildings on the PBS facebook.com group, PBS members continue to attain the highest levels of achievement on campus.

Public Safety reprimanded the members with a warning, PBS member Lisa ’09 said, adding that “they were making sure that we had good protection and were being safe.” All members’ names have been changed to protect them from disciplinary action.

The incident with Public Safety did not deter Princeton builderers, though they now climb primarily at night.

“I think people have done it and will always do it as a measure of excitement,” builderer Greg ’09 said.

Buildering offers students a unique perspective on Princeton’s campus that often goes unperceived, Lisa noted.

“Seeing campus from above can be both exhilarating and clarifying and also fun,” she said. “People don’t tend to look up.”

… “Every building is possible to climb, and it’s definitely more interesting to climb buildings that have cool gargoyles and architecture,” Lisa said. She added that the buildering society was a direct result of the combination of Princeton’s “beautiful Gregorian architecture … and curious, vertically minded people.”

… Buildering experienced a rise in popularity in the United States in the ’70s. Some members of PBS said that the society has been around for much longer than that, perhaps even “since the turn of the century,” Adam said.

Lisa said she did not know when the group was formed, but that she thought “part of the mystique of the group itself” stems from its uncertain origins. “The society is a secret that is kept among students,” she added.

This secrecy might make it difficult for interested students to join PBS, but Lisa said she was confident this obstacle was not insurmountable.

“If people were interested, they would start exploring on campus,” she said. “The society has a way of finding people. At least, that’s what happened to me.”

Daily Princetonian