Although actual students in Stanford’s Education as Self-Fashioning program had no problem with Terry Castle putting down the quality of a student’s paper in a recent campus speech —

“I appreciated the fact that she was honestly critical of something. The reason I appreciated that was since I had stepped foot on this campus six weeks earlier, I had basically not heard a single critical word about anything,” said Erica McDowell ’16.

[Stephen] Goodspeed agreed, and said that sometimes the ESF program is “a little too uplifting and a little too much of an intellectual safe haven.”

— nervous nellies on the ESF faculty went all 1984 and reported bad her to every university authority they could think of.

The incident was reported to Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences; Debra Satz, senior associate dean for the humanities and arts; Harry Elam, vice provost for undergraduate education (VPUE); and Martha Cyert, senior associate for VPUE…

You doo-doo! You’re in big trouble, doo-doo! HAHAHAHA. We told.

This blog covers Alabama State University because it has to – ASU is a university story of significance.

It is incredible to her that this criminally inept institution is accredited. It should be shut down.

… someone resigns and it’s not because of a scandal.

This just in — In NON-scandal related news….

… (close to 900 million dollars in fines of one sort or another; placed under a monitor’s oversight; executives indicted for securities violations, various lawsuits, etc., etc.), so we know Laurie Glimcher really works for the hundreds of thousands in compensation she gets from the corporation. Keeps a good eye on its extensive anti-competitive practices.

Or, you know, I mean, I’m being ironic. Glimcher seems to know how to be a good soldier, and which of us wouldn’t be a good soldier, collecting that sort of compensation for doing very little? Indeed for apparently inquiring very little into the actual operations you’re supposed to be directing?

Now that she’s dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell defends her directorship against suggestions of conflict of interest by insisting on the importance of such university/corporate partnerships.

But what is the nature of the partnership here? Under her watch, Bristol-Myers Squibb was for years was one of the most law-breaking anti-competitive corporations around. Under her watch, one executive after another quit in disgrace.

… kvells:   My daughter will be performing with (wait for it) …

… PSY.

Yeah, Gangnam Style Psy.   THE Gangnam Style Psy.  THAT guy, sexy ladies.   (Best parody here.)

For reasons known only to the federal government, it has been decided that the annual Christmas is Washington event will feature Gangnam Style.

La Kid sings in the chorus of this event every year, and will therefore share a stage with the dude.

Perimortem

Dying beside your folding kayak
After four good hours on the bay
You finally felt your thoughts collect
Then pump frantically away.

Your blood pooled inside your mind
A mind so fine all ideas violated it
A mind for the last time
Immersed in thought.

Thought about the water, the dock, the history
Of your wanting to live near a bay,
Your wanting islands in a bay.
A settlement off the coast of Washington.

You always kicked things to the next level.
Thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.
A kind of cerebral prinking, it seemed to me.

Now you can barely take in the gray plank
By your head. The shaking hand
Of your companion, cupping your neck.

Uri Simonsohn fails to get the postmodern simulacrum memo.

I hope they have good security. We’ll see whether Tunisia’s government will even let them hold this conference.

… you might upset the delicate balance that’s made the University of Tennessee one of America’s most pathetic sports factories.

… when a University of Southern Mississippi professor working on a lesson plan learned real quick that living near football players meant fights and gun play in the neighborhood.

That was 2009. Since, then USM’s budget has collapsed (here’s the school in 2010, defending continued use of a private jet and continued stoking of the football program at the expense of academics) (here – also 2010 – it’s defending cutting faculty while giving the coach a big raise) (and here’s a 2012 piece about how their totally losing team will not even hold games on campus – USM makes a bit more money having them take place hundreds of miles away in different venues, and, as the faculty senate president says, “We need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base.”).

Now, as the team finishes its winless season and fires the coach, those students and faculty who have been missing fights and guns can take heart that that USM sports tradition is alive and kicking: Its freshman quarterback has been charged with aggravated assault, and another student, brandishing a handgun at the scene, has also been arrested, after a fight on campus involving at least four people.

This article says two guns were recovered at the scene.

UD feels sure her beloved August Kleinzahler was mistranscribed here; but on the other hand there’s something head-scratchingly poetic about it.

… is currently flashing red, as trustee Steven Cohen’s firm gets official deep-shit notification from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cruddy feds. UD proposes that unlike Texas, which can’t afford it, SAC secede. SAC has 13.3 billion or so in capital. It can be another Liechtenstein.

Just some amusing stuff in here.

When does a university start tipping over into Auburn territory? When does it accumulate so many scandals of so many kinds – athletic, research, financial – that it begins to get that University of Kentucky smell?

When you add the current insider trading scandal in the University of Michigan’s medical school to the psychology department scandal … when you throw in long-established questions about the university president’s extensive, lucrative, and possibly conflictual corporate board activity… and when you add years of high-profile athletic scandals, including the president’s recent very own Rich Rodriguez debacle… Well, UM’s heading into the red zone.

The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ’em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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

By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”