From a comment on a UNM Daily Lobo story about a sadomasochistic sex worker in the creative writing department:

I propose a no-holds-barred celebrity duel between Mike “Suckerpunch” Locksley and Lisa “Mistress Jade” Chavez to be held in Smith Plaza next Friday at high noon – 15 rounds or until one of our UNM celebrities can fight no longer – tickets will be sold to the public and all proceeds will go to settle lawsuits against UNM resulting from the earlier escapades of “Suckerpunch” and “Mistress Jade” – Come one, come all – see the show of a lifetime – and shake hands with the man who brought you the whole thing, Ringmaster David Schmidly!!!

A reporter from the George Washington University student newspaper came by today and asked me questions about my no laptops thing. To prepare for the interview (UD prepares) I read Georgetown Law professor David Cole on the subject. He bans laptops for two reasons:

1. They turn students into stenographers rather than note-takers.

2. They distract the student with the laptop, who spends a good deal of time using it for non-class purposes; they also distract students who aren’t using laptops but can’t help looking at the screens around the room, which might be showing basketball games, porn films, etc.

The GW Hatchet article about this should come out on Monday; if I’m quoted, I’ll link to it.

Meanwhile, here’s some weird shit.

… Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman isn’t bothered by what his students do in class. If students want to play poker or watch porn during class, so be it, he says, though he knows his opinion is out of the mainstream.

“I have students who don’t come to class. I have students who are paying attention and say dumb things. But so be it,” Berman says.

Berman’s only concern is when one student’s behavior distracts another’s learning experience. It is a lesson he learned all too well when sitting in on a colleague’s evidence lecture during the March NCAA basketball tournament.

“I noticed a student’s laptop with the basketball scores on the screen,” he says. “I got distracted looking at the scores.”

He doesn’t think a student watching porn distracts other students? And… I dunno… the whole I don’t care what they do rhetoric makes me wonder… The way he says it – it sounds like a boast. So take the porn — what’s that going to turn into? Say you’ve got five guys in the back of the lecture hall clustering around a naughty movie, plus a bunch of others scattered about pleasuring themselves on private screens… What’s that gonna be like? Heavy breathing, orgasmic groans. But so be it.

… the Central Michigan University math professors not guilty of plagiarizing a grant they took part in have begun to identify themselves.

One of the seven mathematics faculty members listed on the original National Science Foundation proposal that was found to be plagiarized confirmed she did not participate in writing the proposal.

Mathematics associate professor Lisa DeMeyer was one of the seven faculty members on the investigative staff for the grant proposal and was a senior staff member on the project.

She said in a letter e-mailed to Central Michigan Life she did not participate in writing the grant proposal.

“I assisted the co-principal investigators developing course materials, that was going to be my job but the project was stopped before the work was complete,“ DeMeyer said…

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Update: The plagiarists have been revealed: Manouchehri — now sharing her gifts with another university, Ohio State — and Lapp.

Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

You bet.

From the AP:

…Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday passed a resolution calling for an end to subsidies for the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics.

[Athletics consistently produces] deficits of millions of dollars. Critics say that’s a particular problem right now with budget cuts forcing class cutbacks and student fee hikes.

The resolution is nonbinding. But Chancellor Robert Birgeneau says officials will try to work out a plan to reduce the cost of the department.

A psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin knows that less is more. In a short opinion piece about medical school professors hawking new drugs and devices, he simply reviews the numbers. The corruption of academic medicine is so grotesque that this is all he needs to do.

… Because of pharmaceutical promotions, doctors have written billions of dollars in unnecessary or ineffective prescriptions. In the past five years, seven pharmaceutical companies have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice for their marketing practices and fined a collective total of more than $5.8 billion. Device manufacturers also have been prosecuted and, as part of their settlement, now must publish online their payments to surgeons.

Industry provides many important health care innovations. Medicine must do a better job of redefining its relationship with industry to maintain trust with our patients.

Spot of nice writing from a British columnist, who reflects on the special respect in France for intellectuals like Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Yes, Britain has scholars and pundits. But on the intellectual spectrum they enjoy a status somewhere between being and nothingness. France’s “intellos” serve as the moral conscience of their age, speaking freely on the political and social mood. Intellectuals lift the national debate. They fertilise political thought. A country too embarrassed to embrace them is, well, too stupid by half.

This story offends on so many levels UD doesn’t know where to start.

Oh, sure she does. She’ll start by linking you to this article, detailing the gangrenous corruption of Jack Bonner, a DC lobbyist whose firm sends fake letters to Congress on behalf of pharma and other clients. The letters – full of pretend mistakes to make them look authentic – appear to have come from just plain American folks, and argue on behalf of issues dear to Bonner’s corporate clients’ hearts. They are of course written by Bonner’s firm.

After decades of this practice, Bonner for some reason got caught at it, or offended someone high up or something, because Bonner recently got, as TPM writes, “hauled before Congress,” where he swore up and down he’d be a good boy from now on.

To that end, he hired an old friend, American University professor James Thurber, as his ethics adviser, to produce an ad cleaning up Bonner’s rep, presenting him to the world as a scholar and a gentleman. And how else to do this but through the university?

Here’s the ad.

Having done some guest lectures and workshops for AU, Bonner turns out to be a regular philosophe.

Classy to use the respectability of the university to clean this guy up… Classy to drag students into it — We love you, Jack! — as well as AU… Although AU’s been so scandal-ridden for so long that a make-the-lobbyist-look-pretty ad doesn’t add much …

But here’s the grangrene on the cake: As TPM notes, even now Bonner’s giving a workshop at AU on how to do his thing!

Grassroots Lobbying
The Art and Craft of Lobbying
Instructor: Jack Bonner
October 24 & October 31

This weekend workshop is designed to teach the craft of grassroots lobbying as practiced in Washington, D.C. Emphasis is on the detailed strategies and applications of grassroots lobbying. Students are exposed to the latest developments in the field with practicing lobbyists and gain practical grassroots skills.

As TPM comments, “[W]ho better to teach those ‘latest developments’ than a guy whose firm just got caught sending forged letters urging wavering members of Congress to vote against climate change legislation, on behalf of a coal-industry client but purporting to come from local community groups?”

From TPM‘s latest post on the situation:

“The university is aware of the ad and is looking into the facts of the situation,” [an American University] spokeswoman told TPMmuckraker. “The university does not endorse individuals or organizations.”

The ad was placed — and, according to the AU spokeswoman, paid for — by the school’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, which is run by long-time professor and political expert James Thurber.

So now Thurber’s in trouble and he’ll have to turn around and hire Bonner’s firm to place ads calling Thurber a scholar and a gentleman…

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Update: Thurber has apologized.

From the University of Pittsburgh student newspaper:

University officials say Pitt students won’t be affected by a [twenty percent] drop in endowment funds and [a] $35 million loss in investments, at least not this year.

From Nature.com:

Economist Achilleas Mitsos, one of Europe’s leading research policy-makers, has been tasked with a root and branch reform of the research system in his homeland, Greece.

Director general of the European Union’s research commission from 2000 to 2006, Mitsos has now been appointed general secretary for research in Greece’s new socialist government. He spoke to Nature about his ambitious plans to overhaul the research system of a country where money for science is scarce and cronyism is rife…

[Mitsos:] There is too little competition, too little evaluation of performance, and there is a lot of dead wood. Even scientists who do very little work continue to get a share of what little money there is for research. And most scientists are civil servants, so they are guaranteed employment until retirement.

… A large part of the academic community has always resisted the idea of quality control and evaluation, and in the past politicians have never insisted on it. Last year, the former [centre-right New Democracy] government did actually introduce a law that tried to address some of the problems, but it was overcomplicated and unworkable. [That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in response to its introduction a zillion Greeks ran into the streets of Athens and started burning it down.]

… Greece is a small country, and we can’t expect to find evaluators and peer reviewers for all scientific areas within Greece who are both experts and free of conflict of interests. So we will have to involve foreign scientists. That means that all grant applications and research programmes will have to be written in English — I don’t see a problem with that. [Others certainly will.] …

Independent Study.

It’s one of those phrases. It’s like the word non-profit. They both sound so damn good until you look closely at what they might actually mean.

Harvard University and the NCAA, for instance, are non-profits.

And independent study at universities with major sports teams is often code for Players do jackshit and get one A after another.

It’s independent, see. It’s between professor and student and it’s none of your business what anybody does or doesn’t do to get credits.

UD has followed one independent study scandal after another (Auburn’s the biggie) since she birthed University Diaries.

Now there’s one at Marshall University — not sports-related, but, as is the West Virginia custom, political corruption-related.

The Marshall University student newspaper reports:

West Virginia State Treasurer John Perdue’s daughter, Emily Perdue … received two incompletes [in independent study courses] from [Marshall University College of Education and Human Services professor] Laura Wyant.

The incompletes were changed to letter grades [both A] by Rosalyn Templeton, dean of the college of education, after a meeting with the student and her father. Templeton was not listed as an Instructor of Record when she changed the incompletes, which is a violation of university policy.

Wyant’s really pissed.

Professor Laura Wyant presented a petition with 42 faculty signatures to the executive committee Monday asking them to investigate.

The grades in question are for Emily Perdue in two independent study courses last spring.

Wyant says Education Dean Rosalyn Templeton improperly removed her as Perdue’s instructor and took over the grading herself. Wyant said Perdue and his wife both met with faculty and administration officials before the change was made.

Wyant gave an interview a couple of weeks ago:

… Wyant said Emily Perdue never showed up for any class meetings and never turned in any work during the semester.

“It was a concern to me when my students don’t come to class or show progress in the course, and I usually call them in and talk to them,” Wyant said.

She says nothing happened until the end of the semester in May when Emily and her father met with several school officials, including herself and Dr. Rosalyn Templeton, the dean of the College of Education and Human Services.

“The dean and her and her father went into a closed door meeting,” Wyant said. “When the dean returned, she said, ‘I will be assuming the responsibilities for this student,’ and that was the end of the discussion.”

Wyant added, “When Dr. Templeton made it clear that she was going to be handling this student’s academic progress then I said, ‘Well, she needs to be in a class in your name.’ I made several attempts to make that happen and every time they were disregarded.”

[The interviewer asks:] “Yet those grades changed and had you seen any of Emily’s work?”

“No, I had not seen any work, and the grade was changed and that was the concern for me because my legal adviser said if I changed a grade without seeing the work or supervising the work then that could be fraud,” Wyant responded…

After denials up and down from the school’s president and a bunch of other administrators, the school is now investigating.

From the New York Times:

Dr. Manoj V. Waikar [is] among the top five [Eli Lilly drug rep] earners this year, received $74,850 for consulting and speaking at 51 events, according to Lilly’s on-line faculty registry.

… [D]octors [like Waikar are] essentially are giving canned speeches written by the drug companies; after all, … med schools would not allow students to present somebody else’s work. And so Stanford prohibits full faculty members from participating in drug company speakers’ bureaus. But unpaid adjunct instructors, like Dr. Waikar [Stanford lists him as still active, but his website has him teaching for them most recently seven years ago], are allowed to, as long as they are not using their Stanford titles.

… But Dr. Bernard Lo, the director of the medical ethics program at the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco, said that because drug companies controlled the content of such speeches, they should have their own employees give such talks. “Anyone who teaches medical students or residents should be bound by the same regulations,” Dr. Lo said. “Your own work has to be your own work.”

Stanford is reviewing its policy to determine if any clarifications or changes are needed, a spokesman for the medical school wrote in an e-mail message.

Forgive UD for doubting that as Waikar sells himself to Lilly he puts aside the Stanford connection. Names like Stanford represent precisely the aura of neutrality the company’s after.

UD‘s followed, on this blog, many embarrassing stories about adjunct medical school faculty, from Michael Jackson’s sperm depositor at UCLA all the way down to energizer bunnies like Waikar.

UD wonders why universities don’t give a shit about these clowns.

From an article called The Urge to End It All, in the New York Times:

… What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

… [The] tendency toward impulsivity is especially common among young people. … In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes.

… In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. ..[He]… is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall.

… “I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” …

My point is that NYU’s Bobst Library, like the Golden Gate Bridge, has unfortunately become a suicide beacon. Its creepy design, and its critical mass of student jumpers (they find attractive its high atrium overlooking a large lobby), have given it a charisma and renown.

Suicides can happen in clusters, and students sometimes imitate the methods of other students — often with striking exactitude. (Here’s a recent example of this sort of precise copying.)

If the New York Times article is right about the nature of these youthful impulsive suicides, the main thing NYU can try to do is not only make it impossible to jump from the atrium’s heights (they made it difficult, but, as this latest jumper demonstrated, not impossible), but also somehow (who knows how?) decommission the building, if you know what I mean… Do something more to its outside and inside so that it doesn’t look so much like a place you’d go to commit suicide…

Her winning grant proposal to the NSF was plagiarized, as was its research. The school she just left, Central Michigan University, has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the NSF, and, as one faculty member put it:

“We are under budget constraints, and this is a lot of money… I’m concerned that colleagues of mine committed what is a major breach of academic integrity. We tell our students all the time that they shouldn’t plagiarize in their papers, and here we have colleagues who should know better.”

Now at Ohio State she lists on her webpage cv the very grant.

2005-2007, Co-PI (with Douglas Lapp): CONCEPT: CONnecting Content and Pedagogical preparation of Teachers. National Science Foundation.

Here she is. Ohio State’s picked a winner.

… a writer for The Daily Beast reviews some of the larger reasons it’s hard to keep university students from killing themselves.

But there are subtler reasons. When UD finishes today’s teaching, she’ll write about some of them.

Very pretty example of irony from Tom Powers, a Minnesota Pioneer Press sportswriter.

… [A]thletic departments go about the business of molding young men and women. They teach hard lessons. For example, Brandon Spikes, Florida’s star linebacker, has been suspended for 30 minutes because he attempted to gouge out the eyes of an opponent Saturday.

He must sit out the first half of Saturday’s game against Vanderbilt. Spikes was not successful in removing the eyes of Georgia’s Washaun Ealey, probably because he was wearing a glove and couldn’t get a good grip when he shoved his hand inside the helmet. That’s fortunate for Spikes, who might have been suspended for three full quarters had he succeeded.

[The] University of Minnesota probably appears equally culpable from afar. What is going on over there? The Gophers have had more trouble in one week than some schools have had in a decade.

Well, probably not, actually. Most Division I athletic programs have so many skeletons in their closets that there is little room for shirts and shoes. But the Gophers have had their share of messes to clean up recently.

As Forrest Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does,” which means that the sparkling entrance exam scores of certain Golden Gopher student-athletes may be misleading…

Sure, it’s a little heavy-handed. Whaddyaexpect?

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UD thanks Michael for the link.