A Hamline University law professor was convicted this morning of failing to file state tax returns for the years 2004 through 2007.
… [Robin] Magee, of St. Paul, had claimed to investigators that she didn’t have her papers organized and that she didn’t understand tax law, according to the criminal complaint.
But Magee, 47, practiced tax law and criminal law before joining the faculty at Hamline…
She hasn’t taught for two years, but remains a tenured professor there… Drawing a paycheck and all…
Which is an even better gig than the never paying taxes thing, since you can eventually be run aground for failing to pay taxes, but at Hamline they seem to want to hold on to her.
Maybe they can’t find anyone else to teach her very specialized niche.
… what looks to me like a stealth effort on the part of high-ranking administrators there to turn ASU into their own personal for-profit online domain. Here’s the background on the quite astounding story of ASU’s former president – now a professor there as well as (until recently) the president and chairman of an online for-profit educational outfit – who, along with ASU’s interim chancellor, apparently tried to power through a takeover of the faculty for the business.
The faculty have been a bit slow to catch on, but have now passed a “resolution calling for a moratorium on any further involvement with Academic Partnerships until the partnership [can] be investigated…”
You can understand the ex-president’s eagerness, though. Online for-profit is SOOO much better than face-to-face non-profit, he just couldn’t wait to offer its blessings to the youngfolk.
An interview in the Wall Street Journal with the dean of the Wharton business school.
WSJ: You’re increasing soft skills training — presentations and writing skills. Who pushed for that?
Mr. Robertson: Certainly faculty, and probably most importantly, our business community and our recruiters are saying that [they] want students who can read and write… Maybe Powerpoint and writing in bullet style has led to deterioration of the ability to write reports.
Mike Shields, a retired Marine Corps colonel and human resources director for U.S. field operations at Schindler Elevator Corp., rejects about 50 military candidates each year for the company’s management development program because their graduate degrees come from online for-profits, he said in an interview. Schindler Elevator is the North American operating entity of Schindler Holding AG in Hergiswil, Switzerland, the world’s second-largest elevator maker. “We don’t even consider them,” Shields said.
This sort of outcome makes paying your loans back difficult.
What’s up with Villanova, a Catholic institution? What’s up with its law school?
One of its recent grads is right out in front on the big insider trading scandal. Its last dean resigned for “medical reasons” (prostitutes). And now it turns out school administrators have been lying about entering GPA and LSAT scores for years.
‘Course, everybody lies.
UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.
(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)
***************************************
LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE
As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.
The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.
“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”
Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.
A recent controversy at Colorado State University arose when a rejection of eight athletes on the basis of academic disqualification led to their admissions denial being overruled by President Tony Frank.
Someone’s gotta do it.
UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.
Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.
One student is dead; eleven other people are wounded. Apparently a fight broke out at a party.
**************************
Correction: Not a fraternity house. A private house on the edge of the YSU campus, at which members of a fraternity had gathered for a party.
… to this book, Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, an essay by Karol Edward Sołtan appears (UD‘s too lazy to slash the l).
But put that aside. This post is about Heller. (Mr UD remembers walking Heller back to her hotel from the Promises of ’68 conference.)
It’s about Heller and four of her colleagues in philosophy departments in Hungary. From an article in Science Insider:
It began last summer with what authorities describe as an anonymous tip to police that taxpayer-funded grants for philosophy research were being misspent. A police investigation began, but nothing was heard about it until last month. On 8 January, the office of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced to the press that it was launching its own investigation into the use of grant money awarded to five Hungarian philosophers. The scholars have received grants totaling 440 million forints—about $2 million—to support dozens of research projects, postdocs, and students. The commissioner in charge of the investigation, Budai Gyula, did not name specific charges but implied that there was evidence of wrongdoing.
Outside Hungary, some journalists have called the move a government attack on dissidents. But the right-leaning Hungarian media took a different tack, according to critics. “The press has depicted these philosophers as a criminal gang,” says István Bodnár, a philosopher at the Central European University in Budapest. One of the accused philosophers, Agnes Heller, has appeared on YouTube (in English) to make the case that they are being persecuted.
Here’s Heller’s YouTube.
Here’s an open letter from members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the president of that organization. There’s an online petition.
This latest attack aligns nicely with the Hungarian government’s new law repressing free speech.
Okay… But this makes it look as though New Mexico State still uses Security Concepts to protect its campus.
Either way, you gotta wonder why they hired Security Concepts. The owner was “arrested in 1999 on racketeering and other charges in an investigation of crime in public housing that turned up allegations of illegality at [a] downtown Las Cruces bar.” Charges were dropped because they couldn’t find enough witnesses.
More recently (last month), the same owner was “charged with driving drunk with two loaded firearms in his vehicle.”
… [Michael] Gonzales refused to provide a breath sample … During a search of the Jeep, the deputies found an unloaded Phoenix Arms long rifle under the passenger seat, a loaded Charter Arms .38 Special and a Kel-Tec 9 mm Luger, which was not only loaded but had a round in the chamber …
… to better out of state universities.
The president of the University of Nevada Las Vegas says he’s losing faculty like mad because “They are frustrated with the perception that higher education isn’t valued here.”
UNLV can’t do much about faculty flight; but both UNLV and the University of Nevada Reno have “built programs that guarantee [their strongest applicants] what [UNR’s president] calls “tons of online classes taught by part-timers.”
No, no. Let’s try that again. “[O]ne-on-one … relationships with a distinguished faculty.”
Randall Stross, in the New York Times, talks online university education:
Candace Thille, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s [Online Learning Initiative], put it this way: “There is something motivating about the student’s relationship with the instructor — and with the student’s relationship with other students in the class — that would be absent if each took the course in a software-only environment.”
Those relationships — with humans in the flesh — help students to persevere. Online courses are notorious for high dropout rates.
And people are racing to put high school educations online! With their greater maturity, high school students will certainly do even better than university students at online education.
Stross points out that if your choice is a humongous statistics lecture course or an online statistics course (whose air traffic controller almost certainly will be handling more students than the in-class lecturer), you might as well go online (likely to be a trash course either way).
But in [the] case [of statistics], the subject matter is distillable into a handful of concepts, and the exams use questions with only a single correct answer. That’s not an option for just about all of the humanities and vast swaths of the social sciences.
Stross concludes by quoting Berkeley’s Wendy Brown:
“What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”
If your answer is that most Americans don’t care about this sort of education, and just want to get a job, then go to it. Clean up Kaplan and the other shady operators and give America respectable online vocational institutions.
True, some of our universities are already purely vocational – or they’re well on their way toward being purely vocational. They should (UD has predicted that many eventually will) shut down their physical campuses and join the vocational onlines. But some universities are real universities of the sort Brown describes. Leave them alone.