The chancellor of North Dakota’s university system could definitely express himself less windbaggedly; but that’s a small embarrassment. He has two big embarrassments to deal with, so forget the way he talks.

First big embarrassment: Turns out that if you so much as use a bathroom at ND’s Dickinson State University you’ll be enrolled as a full-time student and given all A’s.

Enrollment-technique-wise, the simplicity of physical capture is an improvement over the for-profits’ convoluted psych-ops. Just – comme disent les bouddhistes – Be Here Now.

Second big embarrassment: The president of Dickinson State is doing a Bootsie Mandel. He refuses to leave, even though the chancellor has fired him.

First up and then out of the Anglican Church, Jonathan Kirkpatrick turned to one of New Zealand’s universities, where, as head of this outfit, he got away with $666,000 until he got caught.

Court documents showed the large scale of the fraud, which stretched back to 2002 soon after Kirkpatrick got the job…

He resigned from his role as chief executive of AUT’s business innovation centre after large sums of money were discovered missing from research and development funds last week.

… Kirkpatrick was a Reverend and Priest in Charge at St Alban’s Church in Balmoral, in central Auckland, where his assistant priest was Reverend Philip Sallis, who is also the Pro Vice Chancellor of AUT.

… Hawksbill Greenway in Luray, Virginia this afternoon, we saw a green heron skimming along the creek, and then a black-crowned night heron, sitting on a stone (just like this), watching for fish.

That was our second walk of the day. Earlier, we followed the Shenandoah River around White House Farm — and this was one of the most beautiful rural walks I’ve ever taken. It’s got everything – blue mountains, a rolling river, a quiet winding road with just-shorn sheep and old white houses whose porches overlook the Shenandoah. There are acres of apple trees, long green fields of corn … and White House Farm itself, which dominates the view and is (if you’ve looked at its picture) a pastoral symphony.

When’s the last time you found a NOTHING FOUND page this lovely? It’s the farm building behind the main house, photographed in the early evening, the sun settling deep on the hills…

But don’t institutions expect their faculty … members to publish ethically and in the best interest of patients?

Apparently not.

… (as regular readers know, UD is fond of saying of UMDNJ that it has rolling prison admissions) scores another winner.

(Here’s a new book for UMDNJ to display in its visitors’ center. Sample sentence: The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is a microcosm for corruption in the rest of the Garden State.)

This place knows how to maintain a reputation: Keep ’em coming.

Maintain? Hell – enhance! The University of Medicine and Dentistry’s criminal class has traditionally been made up of local petty thieves who ended up on the board of trustees or whatever… This guy’s a med school professor! The crime is tax evasion on a most impressive scale, in fancy countries like Switzerland! Forget the whole Jersey backwater thing! We are moving up in the world!

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Why is this man smiling? Now we know.

I mean, we know why he was smiling. Five years in prison await.

Revenge of the Nerd.

… that boosters of in-class technology are going to have to bury.

… in the country’s recent banning of the burqa, says Time magazine.

Not strange at all. Same thing has happened in other European countries who’ve banned it, and will, UD predicts, continue to happen. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you’re likely to recognize the lack of basic human rights when you see it.

… with it.”

The legal system may have other ideas.

Yesterday afternoon, a small black bear loped across Skyline Drive in front of Les UDs, who put on their brakes and watched him.

The bear watched Les UDs. Then the bear loped away.

We proceeded to park at Big Meadows Lodge and hike a bit and call La Kid back in DC to report the bear.

Mr UD insisted they eat at the dining room in the Lodge. Totally not UD‘s aesthetic (the open woody look is fine, but note the stiff-backed regimented chairs… and the curtains.. ), and she knew the food would be bland, but marriage is about compromise.

UD has fallen behind on a number of university stories, but she will now pull herself together and do a little blogging.

… and more recent memories of the shooter in Norway, people are finding events at Virginia Tech – a gunman was spotted on campus this morning – particularly unnerving.

Christa, our innkeeper, has hung mucho hummingbird feeders along our deck. As I stood out there a moment ago, one of the birds – weird, thrumming, gold-green – buzzed my head, wondering if it contained sugar water. I shooed it away before it could put a beak in my ear.

Below the deck Christa has planted blowsy stands of pink hibiscus… I’m seeing hydrangea in there too… Down the hill a butterfly garden with plenty of purple buddleja vibrates.

The sun is hot, but there’s a breeze outside. And inside. In our room, where we’re resting up after breakfast, a quiet ceiling fan rotates.

Very peaceful, in other words. Even the black bears, according to Christa, keep to themselves.

The view? Wave after wave of bluegreen mountains.

Adam, a 22-year-old junior with a double major in psychology and sociology at George Washington University, said he’s not sorry he left school in March to join the [Libyan anti-Gaddafi fighters]. He told his Libyan parents, who also live in Washington, about his plans only after he’d bought the plane ticket.

“You value things more and get a better perspective on life,” said Adam, sporting thick black-rimmed glasses, military fatigues and a bandana in camouflage colors. If he survives the war, he plans to go back to school to finish his degree and then settle in a free Libya.

… has died. Both immunologists, they worked together at the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s (UD‘s father spent his whole career at NIH).

I can’t find papers they co-authored, but they cited each other a lot. Benacerraf’s name, for instance, shows up as the last reference in this paper (UD‘s father is Herbert J. Rapp), “Heterogeneity of Rabbit IgM Antibody as Detected by C′1a Fixation.”

UD‘s been having rather trying summers lately.

True, she doesn’t teach during the summer, which means that her reading and writing time is her own. This fact alone makes her summers enviable from the point of view of most people, who have to go to workplaces.

On the other hand, last summer, as she prepared to go to her houselet in the hills of upstate NY, Righthaven came calling. No traditional birthday dinner for UD at Woodstock’s Bear Cafe. She had to stay home and deal with that.

This summer, which was going to involve a variation on the Bear Cafe birthday — an event at Peter Galbraith’s house in Vermont was planned — is also messed up, because she’s having surgery mid-August. Nothing scary, but she’ll need a few weeks recovery, etc.

Mr UD came up with the idea of their taking a little trip the week before the surgery, so today they drive to a bed and breakfast in Luray Virginia, where they will explore caves (this will impress you). UD will of course blog throughout the week.

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Longtime readers know that Les UDs – for reasons of Soltan family history – own a fifty-acre snail farm in Latgale, Latvia, not far from the town of Rezekne. (“It’s not a snail farm,” Mr UD just said, and indeed no snail farming goes on there; but someone imported snails to the property a long time ago, and they’re crawling all over the place, and someday maybe we’ll farm them, so I call it our Latvian snail farm.)

Time and priorities being what they are, UD has never spent a summer, or any other season, on the snail farm, but there’s a story in today’s news that reminds her she should visit the region.

Vilnius, Lithuania is a couple of hours away from the snails, and its mayor the other day took an armored vehicle and crushed a car illegally parked in a bicycles only lane.