An official in an Australian legal society has resigned after plagiarizing much of an article that appeared in the society’s journal, Proctor.

The organization, the Queensland Law Society, has been profoundly uncooperative with the Australian, the newspaper that uncovered the copying, refusing to comment at all even as its director of “people and organisational performance” leaves the organization in disgrace.

Why did it take a newspaper to catch flagrant plagiarism on the part of one of its officials? Why, faced with obvious malfeasance, did the organization react with tight-lipped annoyance to a newspaper’s questions about it?

At the very least, the QLS ought to have released a statement about how the journal’s editors will do a better job of reviewing its manuscripts.

Its pompous denials, and then its clipped, reluctant admissions, make clear that while the QLS considers plagiarism perfectly okay, it finds its disclosure a disgrace.

It’s 3:58 on a dreary afternoon. UD, fighting a cold, is in bed drinking tea and eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Next to her, La Kid, visiting the old folks for the weekend, is asleep with her glasses still on and her right hand still holding Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol open to page forty.

The bad news is that La Kid loves Dan Brown. The good news is that she’s taking The Lost Symbol out of UD‘s house forever.

In the living room, Mr UD lies asleep on the couch, a legal pad resting on his chest. At his feet sleeps the dog.

Ecoute. It doesn’t get any better than this.

A lawyer writes an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

… Congress should prevent federal research grants or subsidies from being awarded to any educational institution that pays greater compensation on average to its football or basketball coaches than it does on average to its tenured faculty members.

Any school that pays more to those who coach big time sports than to those who teach students academic subjects shows its true colors. No taxpayer should pay money to such a school…

Every now and then UD stumbles on pieces like these. They’re the product of a disbelief that turns to rage when people serious about universities start to examine what’s going on.

Some people decide the thing to do is go after the university’s tax exempt status. Others say spin already-professional university sports programs off and make them an independent affiliate of the university, with the players paid athletes rather than unpaid pretend students. This writer would make schools that pay their coaches six million dollars a year while their classrooms sink into ruin ineligible for federal research funds.

It’s unlikely any of these ideas will go anywhere. For one thing, contemporary America is much more about entertainment than seriousness, and our universities, many of them, reflect that priority. In going up against crass campus sports programs, you’re going up against an entire culture.

And you’re going up against deep-lying needs. The people of Alabama don’t see Nick Saban as a coach. He’s a savior. A god. He will make their sad lives happy, their shame pride. Variants of this fervency prevail at all big sports schools, where no amount of criminality, greed, and contempt for the values of universities on the part of teams and coaches diminishes their on-field aura.

A third problem is that people never really look directly at universities. We sentimentalize the places. You’d think, for instance, that people would be able to look directly at the University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area and conclude the obvious: The University of Georgia isn’t a university; it’s a tailgaters’ trash dump. And indeed until it finds a way to stop being a dump and start being a university, it probably shouldn’t get federal funds.

But it’s like the most photographed barn in America in White Noise. No one, says a character in the novel, sees the barn.

No one sees the dump.

… from the president of the University of California system in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The interviewer asks serious questions about his compensation, and he tries to turn them into jokes. Not a very clever move when your system’s in financial crisis.

[Q]:: What do you think of the idea that no administrator at a state university needs to earn more than the president of the United States, $400,000?

[A]:: Will you throw in Air Force One and the White House?

An excellent question. A serious question. Why do presidents at state — or for that matter private — universities earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the country’s president? Clearly university presidents do far less, have far less onerous responsibilities, etc.

The answer is that boards of trustees, usually composed of corporate players with millions of dollars in annual compensation, consider half a million dollars in salary peanuts. They think of their university’s president as shockingly impoverished. That’s what you get when your trustees no longer have anything to do with public service, with education as such, and everything to do with the acquisition of personal wealth.

California’s president might have mused on this transformation of the university into a money-making machine for coaches and presidents, but he decided to do a borscht-belt shtick instead.

Some people feel you could close the U.C. budget gap by cutting administrative salaries, including your own.

The stories of my compensation are greatly exaggerated.

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

When you began your job last year, your annual compensation was reportedly $828,000.

It actually was $600,000 until I cut my pay by $60,000. So my salary is $540,000, but it gets amplified because people say, “You have a pension plan.”

Well, yes, that’s what people say because he does, and it’s part of his compensation package. As is free housing, transportation, and lots of other stuff that make the half million plus in salary unjustifiable, especially while terrible cutbacks go on all over campus.

UD‘s chronicled a thousand clowns like Mark Yudof at the heads of American universities. Their bouncy personalities play well among potential donors, but they fall down badly when it’s time to get serious.

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

Update:

Tweets.

… resigns.

Brandeis posts at University Diaries here.

A student writes in the Brown University newspaper:

Perhaps the greatest problem [involving Brown’s two-week class “shopping” period] exists for Monday and Tuesday seminars. These classes have just two meetings for the entirety of shopping period, one of which is devoted to [an] abbreviated introduction. Thus, the only truly substantive class exists during the third week of classes… My friend and I shopped a seminar at the beginning of the second week, where the professor simply passed out syllabi, lectured for five minutes and let the class out after a mere half-hour (cutting professor’s own total class time by two full hours). When we were walking back to our respective dorms, I asked if he was going to take the class. “I have no idea what this professor is all about,” he said, “and I don’t really have the time to find out.” Needless to say, he isn’t showing up to class this week.

… which includes my remarks on the News Hour last night.

They used my best bit — the bit about serious literature and the mystery of life.

If I am, it’ll be in the second half of the hour.

The segment is a report about Dan Brown’s blockbuster, The Lost Symbol. It mainly involves showing viewers various locations around Washington that figure in the book. But — assuming I’m not left on the cutting room floor — every now and then things will switch to this female English professor wearing a blue scarf and holding forth on what it means that this thing sold two million copies in its first week.

This was UD‘s first outside interview — Jeffrey Brown and I stood in front of the News Hour‘s building in Virginia on a hot windy afternoon and chatted. I don’t think I was very good… Something about being outside, maybe? I don’t teach very well outside, either. Nothing sounds right to me. There are many distractions. Anyway, I wasn’t at my best.

But, you know, another media thing, and UD loves media things.

… at 12:30 today UD meets George Gollin, diploma mill expert and physicist, at Kinkead’s for lunch.

At 1:45 a Red Top cab shows up at the front of the restaurant to take UD to the News Hour studio, where she’ll be interviewed about Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

More later today.

UD‘s currently holed up in an undisclosed location reading THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown. She’s preparing for a phone interview this morning with a Lehrer News Hour producer, who may want to interview her on this evening’s show about it.

Later.

… bit of writing in the Times Higher Education from a group of professors about “the seven deadly sins of the academy.” UD‘s sister sent it her way, and she’s grateful. It’s already getting wide distribution because one of the professors, Terence Kealey, a vice- chancellor (emphasis on vice) at the University of Buckingham, in writing about the sin of lust, has done a Kinsley Gaffe and offended scads of people.

The whole thing’s worth reading – especially the stuff on snobbery and arrogance – but let’s look at Kealey’s Gaffe, with UD‘s responses in blue ink.

Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the faculty and football for the alumni.  [Funny!]  But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students’ bedrooms?

The great academic novel of the 19th century was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The great academic novel of the 20th century was Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. Both books chronicle lust between male scholars and female acolytes, and I expect that the great academic novel of the 21st century will describe more of the same. So, why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse?  [Pullulate.  Wonderful.  Anyone with a sense of humor knows the man means to be funny.  But so few people… Oh well…]

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he is famously said to have replied, “because that’s where the money is”. Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are. Separate the acolytes from the scholars by prohibiting intimacy between staff and students (thus confirming that sex between them is indeed transgressive – the best sex being transgressive, as any married person will soulfully confirm) and the consequences are inevitable.  [A convoluted way of putting it, but absolutely true.  There’s a natural erotic pull of some professors toward some students, and some students toward some professors — UD speaks from experience, having had some affairs with professors when she was young.  Enact rules prohibiting affairs and you tend to make them, as Kealey suggests, that much more tempting.]

The fault lies with the females. [Again, the sort of flat overstatement that should tell you he’s trying to be funny.  A lot of readers don’t see it that way.]  The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades. I know of two girls who, in 1982, got firsts in biochemistry from a south-coast university in exchange for favours to a professor, but I know of no later scandals.  [Over the top humor, but nothing wrong with it.  And – to make a more serious point about power – only sometimes is the power concentrated in the male professor and not the female student.  These relationships are complicated and diverse.  UD was the aggressor in her heyday.]

But girls fantasise. This was encapsulated by Beverly in Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, who forces herself on to JoJo, the campus sports star, with the explanation that “all girls want sex with heroes”. On an English campus, academics can be heroes.  [Put it this way, at least for wee undergrad UD.  She lusted after knowledge, after the truth, and certainly she was drawn madly to men who seemed in possession of some of that.]

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?  [Abnormal UD.]

Enjoy her! She’s a perk. She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.  [Here’s the core of the gaffe, I guess.  He speaketh absolute truth.  Like Casaubon, you keep your hands off of her even as you enjoy her absurd intellectual/erotic idealization of you.  The thought that this beautiful woman finds pale bespectacled you sexually hot excites you, of course; and if you take that sense of your perceived erotic power to bed with your wife and it pumps things up a bit, what’s the problem?]

Yup, I’m afraid so. As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch. Be warned by the fates of too many of the protagonists in Middlemarch, The History Man and I Am Charlotte Simmons. And in any case, you should have learnt by now that all cats are grey in the dark.

So, sow your oats while you are young but enjoy the views – and only the views – when you are older.

Anyway. If you want to read all the outrage, it’s here, in the comment thread.

… happen. But it’s rare that universities acknowledge the event right at the top of their home page.

Switzerland’s excellent Federal Institute of Technology [ETH] announces in this forthright way the bogus results of a set of experiments that involved “the properties of reactive hydrocarbon free radicals using a technique called zero kinetic-energy photoelectron spectroscopy.” Results couldn’t be reproduced. A university committee “found identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra reported in the two papers, but it could not find a key lab notebook that should have held the raw data.”

The person overseeing experimental work in that lab has resigned from his position as head of research for the institute, though he remains a professor. He seems not to have been involved in the project at all, though he acknowledges responsibility as head of the lab.

Off they go, like it or not, once they hit 65.  Them’s the rules at British universities.

Terry Eagleton, you may recall, likes it so little that he’s suing the University of Manchester for consigning his 65-year-old ass to the dustbin of history.

Now there’s Jan Åke Gustafsson, a Swedish professor recently awarded the “2009 Fernströms Great Nordic Prize, a one million kronor ($146,000) award, for ground-breaking research in the area of nuclear receptors.” Gustafsson’s mistake was turning 67, which is when you get canned if you’re Swedish.

“I can’t believe it,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

“It feels as though I still have much more to give.”

Since January of this year, Gustafsson has devoted much of his time to establishing a new, $30 million research centre in the United States at the University of Houston in Texas.

And he doesn’t expect his advancing age to be an issue for his colleagues in the United States.

“During the whole decision making process in Houston, not a single person has asked how old I am,” he told SvD.

“It’s irrelevant there. The only thing that counts is competence.”

Reason #7,641 why European universities – with one or two exceptions – will never begin to approach American.

The past recaptured.

A severed human hand has been unearthed from the garden of a Maryland home…

… The son of a previous owner of the house told police the hand was a souvenir he took home as a student at the University of Maryland’s medical school more than 50 years ago.

For years, [Charlie] Leitch has made it his morning duty to leave piles of unsalted Hoody’s peanuts at the bottom of the trees outside Corbin Hall [at the University of Montana] to feed the 12 to 16 squirrels that inhabit them. But starting last week, most of the peanuts have gone uneaten.

On Thursday morning, he only saw about four squirrels, but they weren’t regulars. They acted like they barely knew him.

“Normally I show up in the morning and, literally, there will be eight squirrels at my feet wanting peanuts,” Leitch said. “They started disappearing about the time school started, and … I showed up on Tuesday and I put out peanuts and they just didn’t come.”

Leitch has worked on campus for nearly 23 years and, while his job as an accountant for the Rural Institute has made him adept at keeping track of hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant money and following paper trails, he is at a loss to find the majority of his long-tailed charges.

“I don’t know [what happened to the squirrels], but it’s got me worried to see that many disappear, because normally at this time … not only would they be swarming on that side of the building, they would be swarming on this side of the building, too, and there aren’t any,” he said. …