UD, who usually takes part in Washington’s Bloomsday reading, is this year at Rehoboth Beach.

The Irish beach Stephen Dedalus walks:

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porter-bottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

Sentences and phrases from this chapter that UD loves:

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.

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Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field…. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

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… on ghost-written professors:

Why do academics serve as authors on scientific articles they did not write, using research they did not perform? Because they are rewarded, both by their universities and by their colleagues for how much they publish and for its prominence.

… this article, welcomes readers from Inside Higher Education.

In his zeal to prove cultural bias in empirical research, Stephen Jay Gould may have been guilty of bias himself.

The Righthaven company, typically referred to as a copyright troll, has over the last year or so come at many bloggers with copyright violation lawsuits.

Now a judge has ruled that Righthaven never had legal standing to sue, and will probably be sanctioned for dishonesty.

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UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation comments:

“This kind of copyright trolling from Righthaven and Stephens Media has undermined free and open discussion on the Internet, scaring people out of sharing information and discussing the news of the day,” said [an EFF attorney]. “We hope this is the beginning of the end of this shameful litigation campaign.”

“To Righthaven and Stephens Media, the Court has issued a stinging rebuke,” added [another]. “For those desiring to resist the bullying of claims brought by pseudo-claimants of copyright interests, the ruling today represents a dramatic and far reaching victory.”

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Steve Green, the Las Vegas reporter who has owned the Righthaven story, concludes:

[F]ederal judges don’t appreciate their courtrooms being used as ATM machines by Righthaven.

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UPDATE: Eric Johnson, a specialist in copyright law, draws some moral conclusions:

Righthaven lawyers constructed a sham transaction, and then made multiple misrepresentations to courts and third parties in order to hide the sham nature of the transaction. This was done in a bid to get a number of unsophisticated, unrepresented defendants to fork over substantial settlement payments, largely out of fear or because of their financial inability to mount a defense.

The potential to pervert our civil justice system in this way is one of the most important reasons attorneys are required to demonstrate a high moral character as a prerequisite to receiving a license to practice law. Righthaven’s behavior, in my opinion, is incompatible with that standard.

He anticipates the disbarment of Righthaven attorneys.

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If you want to read some of the best prose UD has ever seen, read this. When the history of Righthaven is written, paragraphs and paragraphs from this letter will be front and center.

… I wouldn’t be too interested in hiring someone who went to school at the mall…. or online for that matter. You’re much more likely to get a well paying job and have a more successful future if you go to a real face-to-face school with a campus not located next to Old Navy.

A commenter makes the obvious point about cheesy for-profit schools, one of which is now the object of a class action suit from some of its students, who claim it took their money and taught them nothing.

The owner of the school, “[n]oting that she is African-American, …said she finds the lawsuit offensive.”

I hope her lawyer can come up with something better than that.

… of Tufts University’s award-winning computer science professor Ben Hescott.

He is writing. His very own writing he is writing on a blackboard! What happened to his bullet points??

Q. Did you experience an “aha’’ teaching moment?

A. My first time teaching, I was using PowerPoint slides. One student kept saying, “I don’t see it.’’ So I turned off the computer, grabbed a piece of chalk, and went through the material slowly on the blackboard, without notes. Afterward, the kid said, “You’re a really good teacher when you’re not using PowerPoint.’’ That changed everything.

Q. And now?

A. I let material tell its own story. It’s like an improv show where the actors know they have a few plot elements to get out, but who cares how the rest gets filled in?

Let us slowly – and, since I’ve said it a hundred times – redundantly review the main ideas.

BULLET POINT NUMBER ONE: When you plop all the answers down on dead screens in front of students, they don’t see it. What does this mean?

BULLET POINT NUMBER TWO: It means that teachers exist to animate thought processes, to improvisationally, humanly, walk students through how you get to certain ideas, hypotheses, answers, argumentative positions, points of view. If students could see it just by looking at a list of points and a final point, you wouldn’t need human teachers. (And of course the growing ranks of lucky all-distance-ed students get to enjoy the lack of human teachers for the rest of their lives.)

BULLET POINT NUMBER THREE: When you teach humanly, loosely, improvisationally, you exhibit an intellectual ethos that has to do with autonomy, flexibility, humor, unexpectedness, and above all the implicit promise that, like their teacher, students have the capacity to assume a creator’s – a shaper’s – attitude toward knowledge. Knowledge in the university – the real university – is a richness with which all fortunate enough to enter the campus generatively, intensely, play. This is why we refer to the play of ideas. Ben Hescott is talking about the play of ideas.

Pity the PowerPointed.

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UD thanks Andre.

… is just the sort of weird convoluted title you’d expect from a literature type with the freedom to blog. I apologize for my inability to resist using it for this story.

I thought of KIDS TODAY, but that one’s too easy.

I also thought of IVY LEAGUE, but I don’t think kudzu is a form of ivy.

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Cross-country runners are tripping and falling over Davidson College’s kudzu. Davidson has tried hacking it away, but it pops back in minutes.

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The goats they’ve brought to campus promise to eat 12-18 pounds of kudzu every day for two months. I guess they eat down to the roots or something.

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Won’t the runners now slide and fall on goat berries?

If you add up all the violations, it doesn’t really amount to much by the standards of big-time American university football.

But it might not be the best strategy.

… entangled in many corruption scandals, has killed himself.

The school’s webpage.

… low.

Way, way, low.

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(Further thoughts from Philip N. Baker, dean of medicine, University of Alberta.)

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UD thanks Ian.

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Update: Alberta lets its hair hang even lower:

Students have now been asked to not comment publicly as the school tries to limit the fallout of what was supposed to be a celebration.

Uh, let me say a couple of things about this growing-by-the-second story:

1. It’s totally scandalous that a cynical medical school dean would palm off someone else’s words on his students. The contempt it expresses for the students is immense.

2. The behavior totally plays into the already ethically-challenged realm of academic writing in medicine, with its guest authors and ghost authors and all the rest. Great message to send to your graduates – Go out there and download other people’s work.

3. Not comment publicly? Exsqueeze me? I mean, they’ve graduated anyway – they can do what they like, having been sent out into the world by Dean Download. And even if they were still students — What sort of university tries to keep its students from speaking?

4. Answer: An embarrassed university. Fine, yes, it’s embarrassing. The response is not to hush it up but to admit that it happened, that you’re embarrassed, and that you’re looking into sanctions. At the very least it seems obvious to UD that a person who can’t write and deliver a short graduation address should not be a dean. Let’s not even talk about the moral sleaze here.

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Calls for his resignation have begun. This seems to me a very good idea.

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All together now:

One attendee said his brother located the speech on The New Yorker website and was following along on his iPhone as Baker was reciting it.

Talk about the gotcha media! Plagiarist Alert: Soon your audience will be reciting your speech along with you in real time, reading it off their phones.

And the university promptly responded to his request: Fork over $40,000 – no – make that $100,000 – and they’re yours.

It’s hard for us to access our records! And since you’ve been so indecorous as to appeal to Hawaii state open records laws in response to our initial outright refusal of your request (“[T]he agency that oversees Hawaii’s open records law issued an advisory opinion saying the invoices must be released.”), it’s only right that we punish you.

Bad boy. Bother us again and we’ll charge you fourteen million and shoot off your kneecaps.

All over the country, professors teach with it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Either you dislike it (most people dislike it) or you really love it.

This is from Josephine Hart, 1942 – 2011.