… there’s so much drinking in the state of Wisconsin. But the most important thing to know, if you’re thinking of attending college there, is that the combination Wisconsin/campus/nearby bars/nearby rivers makes going to school there remarkably dangerous.

The first means to show off; the second to show contempt for.

Pharma Giants Flaunt Rules writes an AARP blogger. Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks she means flout.

Why is Brandeis so inept? UD has followed several Brandeis stories over the years (the Rose Art Museum fiasco, the Donald Hindley fiasco… the president who threatened to sue a magazine because of an article he didn’t like) and they tend to be about administrative ineptitude. Here’s another one.

Because its journalism department had to make “an emergency hire” (Huh? If you can’t find a replacement at the last minute, you cancel the course rather than picking someone up off the sidewalk.), it picked up this chick – an alcoholic with a serious rap sheet. A friend of a friend of someone in the journalism department recommended her.

Scot Bemis up there in the headline explains it all very clearly for us. It’s illegal to ask applicants about their criminal backgrounds. However, if you ask applicants about their criminal convictions, they have to tell you about them…

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, no one asked this woman anything. But you could Google her, the way a Brandeis student journalist did.

Ross’ criminal background, according to her blog as well as multiple newspapers, includes numerous convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence, conspiracy to aid an escape from jail and conspiracy in attempting an escape from jail. On Feb. 28, the day after she was placed in protective custody in Waltham, she was arrested for operating under the influence and operating a vehicle after her license was revoked for drunk driving, according to the Barnstable Police Department.

The Barnstable Police Department confirmed that Ross has been convicted of OUI more than four times; under Massachusetts law, that many convictions requires a lifetime suspension of the involved individual’s driver’s license.

… Despite the fact that information about Ross’ arrests is publicly available through her blog, Google searches and public records, nobody at the University knew about her criminal history before hiring her, according to multiple University officials.

All this info got stirred up when Pippin Ross was found “intoxicated and unresponsive” in her car on campus. She’s been fired.

The front porch of the university.

That football players, at least in uniform and often out of it, are crazy, psycho, too-strong and too-fast machines of physical vengeance, and would shoot their mother to win a football game, regardless of new rules vainly trying to rein in the aggressiveness they learned in the womb.

That coaches are paid to win, and motivating players is part of that equation, and if offering bounties to knock players out of the game by injuring them is an added motivation, then that’s what coaches will do.

Is it barbaric? Yes. Is it terrifying? Yes. Is it sick? Yes.

So what?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again:

That is why we watch football. Because it is barbaric and terrifying and sick. Because we love good hits and kamikaze safety blitzes and a quarterback sitting on the field after a sack with visions of Tweety Bird dancing in his brain.

I’m lovin’ it.

While laptops and smartphones can help enhance the educational experience, far more of them are being used inappropriately during class.

Walk into any classroom where teachers permit the use of laptops and you’ll find a sea of different screenshots not pertaining to the classwork. Students often take advantage of this technological triumph by browsing websites like Facebook, YouTube and even play full-fledged games like Minecraft.

Some students who bother to take notes with their laptop only does so when the slide changes or the professor writes something on the chalkboard. Even then, they often return to whatever distraction was previously holding their attention.

Texting is especially rampant during college classes, which shows a clear disrespect for both the professor and the material the professor is trying to teach them, as well as students around them who are there to learn without unnecessary distractions.

The last week has been quite the treat around UD‘s forested acre. Walking along one of her paths a few days ago, she stopped to admire a dead vole. Near the vole lay three well-licked plastic containers carelessly discarded by the deer after their last picnic. The deer have begun sleeping out in the open about midway up UD‘s back hill. People walking along Rokeby Avenue gawk at this sight while UD wonders if she could make money charging admission.

A huge grackle visitation yesterday afternoon turned the area around her house into a shriekfest. Grackles are glossy blackbirds with fixed angry eyes. UD‘s permanent residents – the calm and elegant mourning doves, the genial robins and cardinals – made themselves scarce.

UD‘s been gazing with love and concern (will it be okay if there’s a late frost?) at her spice viburnum, in full bloom and scent. A gift from her mother, who wisely told UD to plant it by her front door, this bush is insanely beautiful and fragrant.

UD‘s master plan has always been to tolerate the deer all over her backyard, but to keep them from the front. She yells at them when she sees them trespass toward Rokeby, etc. The master plan is a joke.

… advertising on the Rush Limbaugh Show!

Despite (because of?) my having recently called an excerpt from his book “tepid,” Andrew Delbanco has directed Princeton University Press to send me a copy (it’s here on my desk, sixth floor, Academic Center, George Washington University, Foggy Bottom, Washington DC) of said not-yet-released book, College, What it Was, Is, and Should Be (tepid title).

UD is pleased to have gotten the book, which she will now read and blog about.

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Ok, UD, so what’s your idea of a hotter title for a book of thoughts about college?

Lots of them. Here’s one:

College: Ooooooooh why is it I spend the day, wake up and end the day, thinking of yoooooooooo…..

Righthaven, which sued your blogger (search RIGHTHAVEN on this blog), has been dying by inches for more than a year. Now a judge has killed it off entirely, having taken away all of its copyrights (Righthaven was a copyright troll) in an effort to collect on some of the outfit’s many debts.

The only question left to old UD, as this post’s headline suggests, is whether she wants to try recovering damages.

The defendants may go after the Review-Journal, the Denver Post and Righthaven’s investors — [attorney Steve] Gibson and the owner of the Review-Journal — since Righthaven itself doesn’t seem to have any assets they can go after.

UD has been following the effort of legitimate scientists in Australia to keep pseudo-science out of university classrooms there.

I mean, it’s already in. There’s lots of reflexology and aromatherapy and shit in Australian university curricula. The Friends of Science in Medicine are trying get some of that out, and to prevent new stuff from entering.

The real leader in these legitimizing efforts is England, which has not only been making it more difficult for doctors there to throw antidepressants around like candy (for many people, they seem to be expensive, side-effect-ridden, placebos), but has also made it “no longer … possible to receive degrees in alternative medicine from publicly funded universities.”

UD‘s US of A has also been good at keeping out the pseuds (see Florida State’s successful battle to break the back of the chiropractors), but backwaters like Australia will take longer to grasp the concept of empiricism. We must be patient with them.

In time, Australia will do what we’ve done here – establish a system of diploma mills that hand out Decompression Therapy degrees.

Some of the arguments the cornered pseuds make are quite something. One popular line is that you want pseuds in college rather than out, because they may as well get some training – it’s less dangerous to the general population that way. As the head of an Aussie pseud group pompously puts it: “In order to safeguard the public, practitioners of these modalities need to be part of the same rigorous training and education as other health professionals.” Yeah and there’s mucho, mucho modalities out there, aren’t there… So… you want to safeguard the population by putting all the modalities in the university. Millions of people organize their lives around what astrologers tell them, and yet we have no way of being sure those astrologers are properly trained, so we need to offer PhDs in astrology.

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UD thanks Dirk.

I’ve now filmed my first lecture on poetry for Udemy (Udemy was featured in yesterday’s New York Times); it hasn’t yet been made publicly available on the Faculty Project page, but it will be up pretty soon.

UD is excited to see among her cohort of Udemy lecturers Thomas Pogge, whose work she has long admired.

I haven’t yet figured out how to add images and film clips to my course, but I’ll learn.

Cripes. It’s gotten that bad in the online for-profit racket.

Can they be any more desperate? What’s next? A focus on the education of students?

Although UD loves this headline, it made her laugh, it’s fun fun fun, she can already see its inclusion in Occupy Wall Street’s Statement of Principles — she feels bound to remind herself, and you, her reader, of what psychological studies are worth these days.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny.

… In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychologists scheduled to be published this year, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and two colleagues found that 70 percent had acknowledged, anonymously, to cutting some corners in reporting data. About a third said they had reported an unexpected finding as predicted from the start, and about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data.

I’m just telling you this so that when in fact only one out of every thirty Wall Street employees turns out to be a psychopath you won’t be disappointed.

… can be eloquent; it can have a pathos, as when Yeshiva University, on that auspicious Madoff/Merkin eve, page-not-founded its two – until that story-breaking moment – esteemed trustees, together tasked with making the financial health of the institution flourish… Page Not Found, in these circumstances, says NOTHING TO SEE HERE PLEASE DISPERSE, and only those determined enough to discover the cached page will fail to obey.

Medical schools page-not-founds are reserved for professors selling painkillers on the side, making up their research results, and – like Mount Sinai Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Tatyana Gabinskaya – arrested as part of massive insurance fraud rings.

The suit says she had submitted hundreds of charges for expensive MRI tests for car accident victims, despite the fact that — as a pediatrician — she had no training to actually read an MRI. In one year she billed for $2 million.

Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.

Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:

… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.

… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.

… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.

… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”

… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.

… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.