The short answer: Get a president who doesn’t preside.

From an interview with the latest one on his way out the door.

On UK’s scandalous athletics culture:

I wish the country as a whole wasn’t as crazy as it is about athletics. It’s out of whack. But it’s a reality that you have to deal with in this position.

On the Wildcat Coal debacle:

Todd and the Board of Trustees received a lot of criticism for accepting $8 million from coal operators to build a new dormitory for the basketball team in return for naming it Wildcat Coal Lodge. Author Wendell Berry pulled his papers from UK, and others complained that the university is too beholden to an industry that denies climate change and resists calls to become more environmentally responsible.

If he had it to do over, would Todd handle Wildcat Coal Lodge differently?

“I tried to handle it differently,” he said. “We had some other suggested names. You have donors who … want to name it what they want to name it. They are good donors for us across the whole university and they are capable of giving more. We discussed other names, but when it came down to it, it was a decision to take the donation.

“I would be glad to build a Wildcat Green Lodge,” he added, if donors would give UK the money to pay for it.

Common thread? You can’t expect me to do anything! I’m only the president.

“At the UW… Greenberg gave an annual lecture to students titled Ethical Issues in Forensic Psychology.”

A sickening tale of intellectual and institutional credulity, or laziness, or just plain corruption. No telling how many lives were ruined.

A hero at the University of South Florida.

Well, them boys at Ohio State was supposed to circle the wagons and all, but seems one of ’em didn’t hear the cow bell! One of the trustees dropped the ball! Here’s what he said about all them NCAA violations!

“The cracks here weren’t really cracks of rules, procedures, and policies, they were cracks in a value system,” Jurgensen said. “I think we have a lot to learn on sort of the manual aspects of this, but I think we also have a lot to look at it in sort of the soul searching of what is most important in the game of life.”

Hah? Fuck that! President Gee and all the other boys on the board jumped on this guy so fast he’s still spittin’ up dust! The name Ohio State and the word Value are, like, one and the same! Nothing wrong here! Nothing to see here! We’re a model for the nation!

It’s a story made for the New York Post, so UD will defer to their writers throughout her coverage of the Flory/Garcia story.

In Tuesday’s Notice of Allegations from the NCAA, containing nine major alleged violations by the football program, former university tutor Jennifer Wiley was identified as paying $1,789 worth of parking tickets for one of the eight players named on Friday.

Yes, at the University of North Carolina they go the extra mile for their student-athletes, who “racked up 395 campus parking tickets totaling $13,125 in fines over a three-and-a-half year span.”

That’s the title of a new Inside Higher Education post at UD‘s second campus.

University of Nevada Reno president Marc Johnson skillfully handles a challenge from the press on the matter of the athletic department’s $1.5 million deficit.

So you just know some schlub has been sneaking up there for years because it’s the only place on campus he can smoke his cigs … And he missed all the Green Campus memos … And soon he’ll be lying in GW Hospital fighting for his life …

Hospitals are also notorious sources of oxycodone. This blog has written about hospital personnel – medical students, nurses, doctors, other employees – who steal the stuff. The latest story involves a Staten Island oxycodone ring.

One of the suspects, Angelique Sestito … works as a nurse at Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, though it’s not clear if she used her position to obtain drugs, the sources said.

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UPDATE.

And the most entertaining form of plagiarism is plagiarism committed by men of the cloth.

Here’s an especially good example.

Tennessee Temple University’s president stole an entire chapter of his book, Jesus is Awesome, from another preacher because, as the guy he plagiarized explains:

“He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”

Hell, I thought you was dead.

Plus no way that chapter’d be in print anymore – nobody’d recognize it ‘cept you and, hyuk, you’re dead…

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PLUS, as the plagiarist himself explains:

“I didn’t know copyright laws at the time.”

— or make that a Flory of emails, from friends and readers, about some fallout from David Flory’s prostitution arrest.

Apparently a former president of the University of New Mexico was a partner in Flory’s online business, and has also been arrested. Details when I get a chance to catch my breath.

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More, from local tv news.

Garcia was also vice-president of the American Political Science Association.

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This is kind of a ho-hum scandal for UNM, though. Remember Mistress Jade?

More here.

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No one human being can keep up with all the sex and sports scandals at UNM. But UD has tried. See these pages.

… Charles Dickens’ endless murky description of existence as a sad and murky predicament, figures in John Roberts’ opinion against Anna Nicole Smith’s heirs today.

[Roberts] began with a quote from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House detailing long-running litigation in which the original parties have “died out of it.” Smith died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2007. Her husband’s son, E. Pierce Marshall, died from an infection in 2006. Dickens wrote of a “long procession” of judges and a suit that “drags its weary length before the court.”

“Those words were not written about this case,” Roberts wrote, “but they could have been.”

The spectacular opening chapter of Bleak House, with its evocation of a fogged-in, hopeless, and sinister world, is here.

You can read the novel in the way Roberts does, as what a University of Maryland professor calls the “ultimate indictment of law, lawyers, and the legal system in the English language.”

The novel’s institutional world indeed paints us as “litigation-fever” dupes, pinning our greedy and grandiose hopes on the outcome of this or that legal case. Equally greedy lawyers, however, systematically draw those very cases out to infinity, so that we die – our pockets emptied by legal fees — long before the cases are decided.

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There’s something Kafkaesque in this portrayal of life as a matter of almost comic futility, and plenty of critics read Dickens’ novel as an anticipation of modernist absurdity and nihilism.

More intimately, the pathos of Smith’s, and her son’s, bleak prescription pain pill lives makes these abstractions real. In the opera based on their lives, the character of Smith’s son says nothing at all, Anthony Tommasini notes, until after he dies:

The only lines that Mr. Rowntree has come after Daniel has died, when, his head peering from a body bag, he sings a litany of drug names.

This is the punishing reality – surreality – of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, the starkest imaginable presentation of our credulity, our vulnerability, our predicament.

Hear them sing it? Ten years in the courts…

… about a high-profile University of Melbourne professor of psychiatry accused of … well, you know the list from our homegrown … troubled professors of psychiatry:

… over-medication of drugs, consultations of 30 seconds and a conflict of interest involving pharmaceutical companies…

Curious, too, because you just know, from looking at his cv, that this guy is the real thing. Start with his acronyms:

AO, KCSJ, BSc, MB, ChB, DPM, MD, FRANZCP, FRCPsych, MRACMA, Dip.M.Htlh.Sc (Clinical Hypnosis), FAChAM.

Do you have that many acronyms? UD has… let’s see… BA, MA, PhD, CIA (can’t talk about that), NSA (ditto) NS (Navy Seals, can’t talk about that), MY (Mother of the Year)… That’s seven after-the-name acronyms. Graham here has… I’m counting twelve, but I’m thinking we could break down Dip.M.Htlh.C into two probably… So make it thirteen.

Then (stand back): There’s this:

He has published more than 650 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author or editor of more than 95 books, including the Handbook of Anxiety Disorders and the Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry and has contributed chapters to approximately 190 other scientific books. He serves on the editorial boards of 30 international and Australian journals.

Consultations of 30 seconds! His patients should be honored to get five seconds! Do they have any idea who they’re dealing with??

Trudo Lemmens talks to Paul Thacker about med school professors who put their names on ghostwritten, industry-sponsored scientific articles.