WBNS, Columbus:

For [Ohio State University athletic director Gene] Smith, the [free courtesy] Cadillac is part of his deal. He earns $800,000 a year and his contract requires a free car for him and his wife. [OSU director of NCAA compliance Doug] Archie, who is directly responsible for making sure players don’t go wrong with car dealers, makes $117,000 a year. He does not have a contract that guarantees a free car.

Archie’s [free] car comes … from Miracle Motor Mart, located at 2380 Morse Crossing. Former 1980s-era Ohio State player Mike D’Andrea, who owns the lot, said he sometimes employs student athletes during the summer.

In exchange for the cars, D’Andrea said he received a pair of season tickets to Ohio State football games.

… finally gets its own Adzillatron. [Scroll down for UD‘s earlier Adzillatron posts.]

… will get you.

Dean Baker has resigned.

Students were, at first, impressed by the inspirational speech about a doctor’s never ending quest for knowledge. But some knew something was amiss when Dr. Baker referenced the “velluvial matrix,” a term the original author invented and included in his convocation address to students at Stanford University in California last year.

Background here.

The latest Teutonic text-trafficker understands that the best defense is a good offense.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, forced out of high-profile political jobs by the discovery that she plagiarized her Heidelberg University dissertation, has blamed the university. “The dissertation commission granted me the title in 2000 being fully aware of the considerable weaknesses of my work,” she complained.

Heidelberg is at fault in the matter, in other words, because it enabled Koch-Mehrin’s unfortunate tendency to produce crap. Her hands were tied.

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(UD thanks Chris.)

Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith said Thursday he is considering hiring private investigators to strengthen the monitoring of Buckeye student-athletes.

Hard to imagine a finer intellectual setting than this: Your students trailed all day by the school’s private investigators.

And what an excellent use of university funds.

The prez of Barnard College joins the board of Goldman Sachs.

“I find Goldman to be a particularly interesting company …”

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Women of Barnard: Congrats!

A University of New Mexico football player is in jail for suspicion of “trespassing, battery and resisting arrest,” after refusing to pull his pants up.

An airline employee spotted [Deshon] Marman before he boarded Flight 488, bound for Albuquerque, and complained that Marman’s pants “were below his buttocks but above the knees, and that much of his boxer shorts were exposed,” [Sgt. Michael] Rodriguez said.

The employee asked Marman to pull up his pants before he boarded the plane, but he refused, Rodriguez said. Marman allegedly repeated his refusal after taking his seat on the plane.

“At that point he was asked to leave the plane,” Rodriguez said. “It took 15 to 20 minutes of talking to get him to leave the plane, and he was arrested for trespassing.” Marman allegedly resisted officers as he was being led away.

… has inspired some good writing —

One Canuck-clad hooligan made several attempts to throw a five-gallon water bottle through the remaining unbroken windows of the Budget office. His eyes were glazed over in pointless rage and he was easily exploited by the crowds to do their destructive bidding… These weren’t hardened criminals raised on poverty, but rather booze-fueled suburban youth who gulp their courage from a bottle.

— and reminded UD of all the post-game university football and basketball riots she’s covered on this blog over the years.

UD, who usually takes part in Washington’s Bloomsday reading, is this year at Rehoboth Beach.

The Irish beach Stephen Dedalus walks:

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porter-bottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

Sentences and phrases from this chapter that UD loves:

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.

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Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field…. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

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… on ghost-written professors:

Why do academics serve as authors on scientific articles they did not write, using research they did not perform? Because they are rewarded, both by their universities and by their colleagues for how much they publish and for its prominence.

… this article, welcomes readers from Inside Higher Education.

In his zeal to prove cultural bias in empirical research, Stephen Jay Gould may have been guilty of bias himself.

The Righthaven company, typically referred to as a copyright troll, has over the last year or so come at many bloggers with copyright violation lawsuits.

Now a judge has ruled that Righthaven never had legal standing to sue, and will probably be sanctioned for dishonesty.

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UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation comments:

“This kind of copyright trolling from Righthaven and Stephens Media has undermined free and open discussion on the Internet, scaring people out of sharing information and discussing the news of the day,” said [an EFF attorney]. “We hope this is the beginning of the end of this shameful litigation campaign.”

“To Righthaven and Stephens Media, the Court has issued a stinging rebuke,” added [another]. “For those desiring to resist the bullying of claims brought by pseudo-claimants of copyright interests, the ruling today represents a dramatic and far reaching victory.”

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Steve Green, the Las Vegas reporter who has owned the Righthaven story, concludes:

[F]ederal judges don’t appreciate their courtrooms being used as ATM machines by Righthaven.

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UPDATE: Eric Johnson, a specialist in copyright law, draws some moral conclusions:

Righthaven lawyers constructed a sham transaction, and then made multiple misrepresentations to courts and third parties in order to hide the sham nature of the transaction. This was done in a bid to get a number of unsophisticated, unrepresented defendants to fork over substantial settlement payments, largely out of fear or because of their financial inability to mount a defense.

The potential to pervert our civil justice system in this way is one of the most important reasons attorneys are required to demonstrate a high moral character as a prerequisite to receiving a license to practice law. Righthaven’s behavior, in my opinion, is incompatible with that standard.

He anticipates the disbarment of Righthaven attorneys.

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If you want to read some of the best prose UD has ever seen, read this. When the history of Righthaven is written, paragraphs and paragraphs from this letter will be front and center.

… I wouldn’t be too interested in hiring someone who went to school at the mall…. or online for that matter. You’re much more likely to get a well paying job and have a more successful future if you go to a real face-to-face school with a campus not located next to Old Navy.

A commenter makes the obvious point about cheesy for-profit schools, one of which is now the object of a class action suit from some of its students, who claim it took their money and taught them nothing.

The owner of the school, “[n]oting that she is African-American, …said she finds the lawsuit offensive.”

I hope her lawyer can come up with something better than that.