Sadder but wiser: Online stinks and everyone knows it.

Online and cheating. They go together like a wink and a smile.

Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.

A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.

Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.

In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”

You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?

Shakes you up.

… that UD spends her Augusts in Upstate New York, where Les UDs have a little house up on a hill in a town called Summit. Down the hill is Lutheranville, “once called Tar Hollow due to a tarring and feathering incident.”

If you followed my series on guns at Inside Higher Education, you may recall that UD shot off her first rifle just down the hill from her house, courtesy of a neighbor who likes guns.

Every year, in preparation for rural life, UD checks out regional news articles.

Here are a couple.

The Korean university has already had a lot of untimely deaths this year, and now a visiting professor, Christopher Surridge, has died. Only 46 years old, he collapsed at a train station in Korea. Some of his colleagues made a memorial YouTube. Here’s another YouTube – a talk he gave about PLoS-ONE.

… after all.

… went missing in Liverpool a few days ago. His body has now been found. Police don’t yet know how he died.

… Georgetown.

[UD thanks Jonathan.]

From a review of Big-Time Sports in American Universities, by Charles T. Clotfelter.

[Clotfelter investigates] the ways in which universities use their sports programs to court potential donors. He filed public-records requests with eight universities, asking for the names of invited guests who sat in the president’s box during home football games.

The University of Washington, to its credit, complied with this request. The University of Oregon, to its shame, demanded payment of $791.87. And the response from the University of California, Berkeley, was laugh-out-loud funny — a snooty version of: We’re not giving you the names, because we don’t want to.

UD has already examined the lucrative business of gathering corporate and government employees for a few days of leadership bullshit. It’s such an obvious scam that Senator Grassley, last year, asked a number of leadership bullshit institutes to explain why Margaret Soltan’s taxes pay for their bullshit.

More recently, a New Zealand politician has addressed himself to the very same scam: Government-sponsored, vastly expensive, leadership bullshit seminars. He wanted to know why this guy, who boasts an online PhD from California Coast University — a notorious diploma mill — is the DIRECTOR of this clever enterprise. Do the taxpayers of New Zealand have no self-respect?

[Keith Locke said] given the institute’s six-day leadership programme at Queenstown’s Millbrook Resort cost $18,285, plus $2558 in accommodation, it was time to review the course.

“There needs to be a check on public sector people using the institute, to see if there is value for money,” Locke said. “These courses are expensive. How can it be justified when three-year leadership programmes offered by the government itself through its Leadership Development Centre cost about $11,000.”

And when the Leader di Tutti Leaders has a fake degree.

To put your disappointment over the lack of the end of the world into perspective: Nothing.

By the Fugs.

… the end of the world. (Scroll up to page 131; read through page 133.)

… prison.

… from UD‘s parents’ favorite album.

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Answers to frequently asked questions.

A Guardian writer updates us on the new, improved pharmaceutical ghostwriting industry.

… Alastair Matheson is a British medical writer who has worked extensively for medical communication agencies. He dismisses the planners’ claims to having reformed as “bullshit”.

“The new guidelines work very nicely to permit the current system to continue as it has been”, he said. “The whole thing is a big lie. They are promoting a product.”

Matheson expects an article he wrote about a new cancer treatment to appear in print later this year, with an oncologist considered a “key opinion leader” (KOL) by planners listed as the author in his stead. “You’d do the same thing if you were selling cornflakes,” Matheson told me. “It’s no different.”