… and already a winner.

A pointless new law school has, within minutes, lost its new president.

[A] University audit revealed $2,235 in [personal] expenses which should have been reimbursed.

The whole point of a new public law school, you recall, was that “the school won’t fall back on taxpayers.” Whose money did the president just spend on family travel? How much will buying out his contract cost? Hiring headhunters to find a replacement?

The absolutely pointless University of Massachusetts law school: Already a class act.

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UD thanks Andre.

Or should I say Très SEC… Brown University’s bouquet has been very Securities and Exchange Commission lately, with the distinctive aroma of federal investigation wafting in particular from the school’s board of trustees. Steven Rattner (after his, er, troubles he seems to have left the board), Steven A. Cohen (a current trustee)… And of course from the school’s president, a loyal Goldman Sachs trustee during the wonder years.

Cohen, a perennial SEC object of interest, has yet again been informed that his firm is under investigation for insider trading… Leaving Brown University with a venerable intellectual dilemma: Hold onto him because some day he’ll give us a slice of his fortune? Drop him before he dries up and goes the route of Rajaratnam?

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UD thanks Roy.

Almost 60 years ago, the Bell Telephone Company launched a program to address rising concerns about the education of its managers. W.D. Gillen, president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, felt that many of these managers would eventually rise to positions in which they’d need a broader point-of-view…

To that end, Gillen established the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, a 10-month immersion program that amounted to a complete liberal arts education. The program required more reading than the average graduate student had to complete in a similar time frame. They also visited museums and art galleries, attended orchestral concerts, and listened to guest lecturers. The program’s capstone came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to Ulysses.

Sadly, the program didn’t last past 1960. Multiple assessments found the executives to be more confident and intellectually engaged, but also less interested in putting the company’s performance ahead of their family and community commitments.

Irony-ridden because Hauser, who left Harvard having been found guilty of research misconduct, and who has now been accused of plagiarizing the ideas of another scholar, specializes in morality.

A philosopher at Princeton argues that in one of his books Hauser used many of the ideas in an unpublished manuscript by a younger scholar – ideas which Hauser sometimes presented as his own. Not only should Hauser “have waited [for the younger scholar] to publish his book before going ahead,” but the more senior scholar should have acknowledged his indebtedness to the younger much more generously and clearly in his book.

The University of South Florida Polytechnic has been good to the Goodman family…

23 percent of women aged 40 to 59 take antidepressants…

(From The New Yorker. Adam, a reader,
sent it to UD.

It can be found online here.)

… the Runango Running Forum. Take a look around.

Its rejection rate has soared.

This bizarre story from non-bizarre eastern Ohio would appeal to Franz Kafka.

The owner of an animal farm has been found dead (we are not told how he died, and so are free to imagine his own animals attacked him), and many of his animals have escaped. Armed police are driving around in pickup trucks and shooting at “bears, lions, tigers … cheetahs… wolves, giraffes, and camels.”

On Tuesday, commuters reported spotting bears and wolves along I-70.

A surreal tale for Halloween.

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UPDATE: This gets more Kafkaesque by the moment.

The guy opened all the cages and then killed himself.

… the eruption of unregulated capitalism into the university — billion-dollar tv contracts that make already filthy university athletics unspeakably filthier; massive, Goldman Sachs-run online for-profit tax siphons; university presidents who presided over obscene corporate bonuses; professors with outrageous corporate conflicts of interest, and so on.

Peter Beinart, in a post about Occupy Wall Street, considers the larger culture of destructive greed in America, and the growing outrage over “financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown [who have] have almost entirely escaped justice.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement … represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.

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UPDATE: Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes that if the American government has become so oligarchic as to violate the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, citizens – like the Occupy Wall Street crowd – have a right – even a responsibility – to protest this violation vociferously.

The Guarantee Clause says that the United States shall guarantee to the states a republican form of government. It says that we are guaranteed a responsive government, a government that cares about the 99 percent, not a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent.

The ideals (and the fears) of the framers are still relevant today; the wisdom of the Guarantee Clause still applies. If government no longer pays attention to the vast majority of its citizens; if the government has been hijacked by the most wealthy and powerful in the country to perpetuate and expand their wealth and power; if the agencies of government have been derailed from their constitutional obligation to “promote the General Welfare,” then we no longer live under a republican form of government, and the government we have is no longer consistent with the United States Constitution.

A broken government, unresponsive to the public, is more than a misfortune. It is a violation of our basic charter– our Constitution.

[T]echnology use [by students] in class has become a norm, something that I feel not only distracts and prevents us from understanding and learning class material, but also disrespects professors and other speakers in the academic setting of the University… If you do not think you can get through class without falling to this temptation, it may be in your best interest to try another method of note-taking such as returning to the olden days of pen and paper. You might still get distracted by daydreaming, but it is much easier to snap out of a daydream than it is to pull yourself away from the Internet.

This University of Virginia student responds to one of the most idiotic claims tech-pushers make: There’s no difference between surfing and daydreaming, between clicking through one visual world after another and doodling.

… the Garrett Park Bugle, UD‘s hometown newspaper, and her coverage of the latest Town Council meeting.

It has already affected it. Some people, says Rachel Azaria, consider Jerusalem already “a lost city,” ruled by segregationist ultra-orthodox. They’ve succeeded in creating sex-segregated streets for an upcoming holiday; and of course many public buses make women sit in the back, just like Rosa Parks.

To tell women that they have to sit at the back of the bus, or that they have to stand in certain lines in the supermarket, or that the supermarket will be closed to women during certain hours goes against our beliefs … we will not stand for it.

All of this segregation, mind you, is illegal. Go to the Israeli courts, and they’ll obligingly rule again and again that you can’t do any of this in a democracy. But it doesn’t matter, because the haredim ignore the laws, and the police don’t enforce them.

Israel even has a national curriculum, because you don’t want a large, unemployable population. Opting out isn’t a legal option.

Only it is. The haredim opt out.

The larger picture here.

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An update; and an excellent idea:

Perhaps Haredi goggles should be developed. With picture recognition software these goggles would identify human females in the field of vision and replace them with convex pink patches (color could be selected by the user). Think about night vision goggles that show infrared as “false color”. This would allow pious men to walk anywhere, read illustrated newspapers (without female images cut out) without being disturbed, and without disturbing females. I would assume that in cases when women can fail to be recognized by the software they should look sufficiently un-exciting. With a “cautious” setting, all human figures with bare elbows and bare heads could be covered. With “most cautious” setting, the only visible humans would be properly dressed Haredi males.

St. John’s, Mon Amour.

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The bench which UD gave St. John’s
in memory of her mother.

(Click on the photo for a larger image.)

As brave as Dimitrov, as wise as Stalin.

You’re a Gaelic poet and a Stalinist. You remain a Stalinist way past the degenerate stage (invasion of Hungary). While a Stalinist you write and publish a poem with the above line. (A Bulgarian communist, Dimitrov was head of the Comintern from ’34 to ’43. Although all traces of him have been removed from Bulgaria, “A massive painted statue of Dimitrov survives in the centre of Place Bulgarie in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, two decades after the country abandoned Marxism-Leninism and the colossal statue of Vladimir Lenin was removed from Place Lenine. Few Beninois are aware of the history of the statue or its subject.”) You edit the lines out of the poem much later – for a 1989 collection – but now – on the centenary of your birth – a big collection of your work comes out which restores the original passage. You died in 1996, and so have nothing to say about the restoration.

The editors explain that “it is perhaps time to remind people that there is more to [Sorley] MacLean’s work than what he presented himself back in 1989.” Another Gaelic poet comments, “MacLean’s self-shaped ‘biographical legend’ might not stand up to scrutiny in the way he intended, but his status as a major European poet is never in doubt.”

It’s an intriguing moral question. To what extent should editors honor only the poet’s approved versions of much-redacted poems? Especially when the poet has arguably airbrushed his own political history?