A New York Times article notes the alarmingly high rate of retractions for articles in scientific journals.

… [The] scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent

… that a whole bunch of people were standing on the roof of The Avenue, an apartment building I can see from my classroom’s windows.

Forgot about it until, returning to my office and chatting with a colleague, she asked if I’d been able to see the Shuttle fly by.

For years, in these pages, UD has followed the corruptions and absurdities of the Italian university system, nicely summarized at the end of the article from which I’ve drawn this post’s title:

Nepotism and closed-shop recruitment of staff have largely been blamed.

There are departments in some Italian universities where much of the faculty shares the same last name. They’re one big extended family. The department was founded, as it were, by Nonno Rossi, and he’s made sure since then that it provides income for all the Rossis.

Anyway, here’s an Italian university – the Politecnico in Milan – that has decided to switch the language of all of its courses to English. The rector explains that this will

“contribute to the growth of the country”. He said the strategy would attract brain power and yield the high-quality personnel that would “respond to the needs of businesses”.

From a New York Times roundup of Tribeca Film Festival offerings:

Andrew Semans’s “Nancy, Please” conveys a similar turbulence lurking just under the civilized surface of everyday life. In the story, which traffics in the ghastly-funny misanthropy that is the specialty of Neil LaBute, a doctoral candidate and his angry former roommate engage in an escalating battle of wills when she refuses to return his copy of “Little Dorrit,” which contains the notes for his thesis. Observing this conflict, which begins to destroy his sanity, is like watching a slow-motion car accident. As much as you may loathe the characters, you can’t avert your eyes.

… (background here), but he’ll lose. Colorado State University’s on-campus stadium will be built. It won’t matter that Dave’s got all the statistics on his side, that the cost of the thing will drive student fees way up, that it won’t attract more student applications, that desperation to win (gotta fill the stadium) will drive CSU toward troubled players (of course the school is already dealing with that) and shady coaches.

No, because decisions about things like football aren’t about reason. They’re about rich guys with harebrained schemes. These we will always have with us.

… on poetry today, a discussion of Paul Valéry’s The Graveyard by the Sea. Feel free to register for the whole series.

… to get UD‘s attention, and these three Saudis, two of them residents at the University of Ottawa’s med school, and the other lately tossed from said med school, are doing that. Background here.

And here’s an update:

A Saudi doctor who is suing the University of Ottawa for more than $55 million has lost his bid to overturn his dismissal from the Faculty of Medicine’s neurosurgery residency program.

In a decision earlier this month, a panel of Ontario Division Court judges rejected Dr. Waleed AlGaithy’s argument that the university’s Senate appeals committee violated procedural fairness and acted unreasonably when it upheld his dismissal from the residency program …

Plus, since they decided to sue for all those buckaroos, they can’t even do the Human Rights Tribunal thing!

In three decisions dated March 29, 2012, the Human Rights Tribunal dismissed the complaints from AlGaithy, Aba-Alkhail and Alsaigh, saying it was barred from proceeding because the three had commenced civil suits based on the same facts and allegations and were seeking similar remedies.

That violates provisions of Ontario’s Human Rights Code that prohibit the tribunal from hearing complaints that are the subject of civil proceedings, the decisions said.

South Korea, a “plagiarizer’s paradise,” adheres to the very highest standards of plagiarism.

Like Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino, who used state funds to construct quite the fiefdom for himself, Wheeling Jesuit University’s Davitt McAteer has built an empire – though McAteer used federal, rather than state, funds.

An expert in mine safety, McAteer attracted tens of government millions to Wheeling, but seems to have had a different take on the money from that of the government, which started accumulating evidence of his mining of the federal purse a couple of years ago. As with all such stories, he had plenty of help from various campus personnel – allegedly, in this case, the university’s trustees.

UD‘s friend Dave Ridpath dreams the impossible dream by going to Colorado State University (site of some recent national sports news) and pointing out that building a new on-campus stadium when they already have an off-campus one is stupid.

Ridpath tonight is set to speak at a forum organized by opponents of an on-campus stadium. Skeptics argue CSU already has a perfectly decent facility in the 32,500-seat Hughes Stadium west of the city.

Ridpath said he was “dum[b]founded” when he heard CSU was considering building a new stadium. He said athletic success and student engagement aren’t linked directly to facilities, and he predicted that even if a new stadium is privately financed, costs for students will inevitably rise.

They’ll build it, of course; but Dave is in there trying.

IT’S FRIGHTFUL, HOME?

*****************
Thanks, Dave.

“I live near Wall Street. The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification,” [Jeffrey] Sachs said. “They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30 billion a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards. ‘What do those kids have against us?’ I don’t think they were kidding except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”

The work to which Paul Campos referred in the last sentence of this April 2011 New Republic piece involved honest analysis of (wretched) job placements for law school graduates.

And now, with the latest numbers on applications to America’s law schools – not surprisingly, given the lack of jobs, they’re way, way down, especially among America’s smartest students – the work also involves an honest look at tuition, law professors’ salaries, and the outrageous rate at which new law schools (most notoriously, the one at Irvine, and the one at U Mass) are opening.

On the salary issue: As Campos noted in a comment on this blog:

A range of $140K to 300Kish is accurate for top law schools… Mid-tier schools are more likely to have a range from the low $100s to the mid $200s. Lower tier schools pay less, perhaps $80K to high $100s.

At Above the Law, a writer asks, “could the decline in law school applicants mean tuition cuts [and therefore lower salaries] are on the way?,” and answers no: “[I]nstead of listening to reason, law school tuition is still on the rise.”

It’s really a kind of let them eat cake madness.

Ira Boudway, in Bloomberg Business Week:

Ad Age reported this week that the NCAA has sent out a request for proposals for a new agency to help spread the good word about college sports. The request includes a sideways acknowledgement of the bad press that has dogged the NCAA over the past two years: “Market research and media analytics show that misperceptions persist and opportunities exist to inform public opinion, increase confidence in the association, and boost awareness and advocacy for the positive values of intercollegiate athletics.”

To quote George Orwell, “such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

He goes on to list some of the zillions of events and people in big-time university sports whose pictures you don’t want your phraseology evoking.

And not that a basement-dweller like the NCAA can get any lower, but note the insult of using university money for burnishing the NCAA.

University Diaries will cover the ad campaign. Should be a hoot.

… have been killed in what looks like an attempted carjacking near campus.