… I was 13 when I came to hate the Taliban and knew that someday I would have to fight them. A woman who lived on our street was walking home, with her baby in one arm and her shopping in the other. Her little daughter was close behind, holding on to her mother’s covering. My neighbor was having difficulty walking because of the mud and lifted her burqa for just a moment so she could see better how to cross the road. Taliban members ran up from behind and began to beat her head and back with a long length of thick, metal cable. I watched as she dropped her own baby in the ditch and screamed from the pain…

Khoshal Sadat, New York Times

From a comment thread after an article about the latest University of Florida player arrest:

[Commenter #1] Please point out one program that has [like UF] had 28 players arrested in the past five years. Thanks.

[Commenter #2] [D]id you forget the fact that Georgia had 30 arrests over the 4 year period that UF had 24?

PETER ERLINDER ESCAPES RWANDAN JAIL
ONLY TO BE MUGGED IN ST PAUL

The William Mitchell law professor, freshly released from a Rwandan prison after being charged with minimizing the country’s genocide, has only been back in Minnesota for less than a week. But his luck doesn’t seem to have changed.

According to St. Paul police spokesman Paul Schnell, Erlinder was standing in front of his home Thursday night when one of a group of teenagers across the street came over, flashed a handgun, and demanded money. Erlinder threw some cash on the ground, and the robber grabbed it and ran away…

Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.

On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.

It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”

The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.

KCBD reports:

… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.

… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.

As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…

So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…

But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…

A bioethicist at Boston University explains the latest case of disease mongering.

One of the interesting things about this disorder is the diagnostic criteria — one is “deficiency of sexual fantasies.”

Does this mean an insufficient number, or low quality? Or both?

Los Angeles Times.

… The fare dodgers who jump the turnstiles or sneak in through exit barriers on the Paris Métro are as much a fixture of the city as the subway itself.

Those caught without a proper ticket, though, face fines of up to $60. What’s a poor freeloader to do?

The answer, in the land that gave the world the motto “All for one, one for all,” is typically French: Freeloaders banded together to set up what essentially are scofflaw insurance funds, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary fervor.

For about $8.50 a month, those who join one of these raffish-sounding mutuelles des fraudeurs can rest easy knowing that, if they are busted for refusing to pay to use public transit, the fund will cough up the money for the fine.

… At least six or seven such funds now exist throughout Paris, some based at universities, others organized by arrondissement, or district…

The president of a teachers’ union in Canada announces that because Nipissing is going to give an honorary degree to a conservative politician, his organization will exact revenge by ruining the teaching careers of that university’s graduates.

I’m with Douthat.

Here’s Fish.

The Lexington Herald-Leader notes that Wendell Berry has

express[ed] his displeasure when his university, the one where he both studied and taught, crawls in bed with an industry that blasts mountains apart, fills adjacent valleys with rubble and destroys or pollutes waterways in the pursuit of profit.

UK — indeed, the whole state of Kentucky — endured a few days as the butt of a national joke after the school’s trustees agreed to paste “Wildcat Coal Lodge” on an unnecessary new basketball dormitory in exchange for donation of the $7 million construction cost.

Now, we’re seeing a more serious consequence of the decision to sell the university’s soul — a severing of ties between one of Kentucky’s most esteemed men of letters and the state’s flagship institution of higher education…

He’s taken his brain and gone home. Or in search of a university.

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

“A heartbreaking thing for me.” — Berry talks about his repudiation of UK.

I think this new series in the Atlantic
on tea is going to be a bit twee for UD.

But she is a serious tea drinker, and
some of her readers are too, so let’s
give the guy a chance.

… before we look at what the University of Michigan medical school has just done, let us remind ourselves of the basic truths about Continuing Medical Education. I quote from Marcia Angell:

… In most states doctors are required to take accredited education courses, called continuing medical education (CME), and drug companies contribute roughly half the support for this education, often indirectly through private investor-owned medical-education companies whose only clients are drug companies. CME is supposed to be free of drug-company influence, but incredibly these private educators have been accredited to provide CME by the American Medical Association’s Accreditation Committee for Continuing Medical Education—a case of the fox not only guarding the chicken coop, but living inside it.

… If drug companies and medical educators were really providing education, doctors and academic institutions would pay them for their services. When you take piano lessons, you pay the teacher, not the other way around. But in this case, industry pays the academic institutions and faculty, and even the doctors who take the courses. The companies are simply buying access to medical school faculty and to doctors in training and practice.

… [T]he pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate role in graduate or post-graduate medical education. That should be the responsibility of the profession. In fact, responsibility for its own education is an essential part of the definition of a learned profession.

Simple enough? Fox, chicken coop; lessons wrong way around…

Hokay. Let’s proceed with the announcement from the University of Michigan, reported by the New York Times.

In the latest effort to break up the often cozy relationship between doctors and the medical industry, the University of Michigan Medical School has become the first to decide that it will no longer take any money from drug and device makers to pay for coursework doctors need to renew their medical licenses.

University officials voted to eliminate commercial financing, beginning next January, for postgraduate medical education, a practice that has come under increasing scrutiny from academics, medical associations, ethicists and lawmakers because of the potential to promote products over patient interests.

… [One] leading medical ethicist asserted that the prohibition did not go far enough. Dr. Bernard Lo, lead author of a 2008 Institute of Medicine report on conflicts of interest, said private doctors and academic physicians who are paid to speak for drug companies should be barred from presenting educational material at accredited conferences. “Mouthpieces for their products,” he called them.

… “Industry wouldn’t be paying billions of dollars to do this stuff if it didn’t benefit them,” [another physician said]…

So Michigan boldly leads the way. As other schools attempt to join UM, expect to hear a lot of chickens squawking.

Soon I won’t have anything burqa-related to complain about.

… our Park City Utah deck are

black-billed magpies.

It’s about the writer Wendell Berry, who has withdrawn, in protest, his papers from the University of Kentucky.

Read all about it.

A writer for Tablet magazine gives human dimension to the recent decision of Israel’s Supreme Court to allow equal access to higher education.