Andrew Sharp, at SB Nation, considers the latest Jim Tressel revelations:

… [J]ust what does a coach have to do to get fired? If Tressel’s still at Ohio State next fall, how can anyone associated with Ohio State keep a straight face? The moral high ground doesn’t really exist in college football, but you gotta admit, Jim Tressel sets about as horrible a precedent as anybody in the country.

As with many college football articles, this one is written with what you might call rhetoric-desperation. How much more intensity, the writer seems to ask, can I lend my language? How can my prose ever hope to measure up to the sheer unmitigated shittiness of big time university sports?

The governor couldn’t be prouder
To reappoint Robert E. Lowder.
A trustee supreme
For a school that’s a dream!
(Though of course there are one or two doubters.)

Glenn Poshard got away with it.

But Yoo Kwang-chan, head of Korea’s Jeonju National University of Education, has gotten caught plagiarizing almost all of a textbook that appeared under his name. The newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reviewed the text and found, for instance, that the entire first chapter, word for word, was taken from another book.

Yoo, by the way, makes his students buy the book.

Paul Campos, in The New Republic, shaves so many points off of official law school job placement figures that by the end of his essay he’s whittled the business of legal employment to practically nothing.

After revising the bogus reassuring numbers down and down and then down again, Campos concludes with a cui bono.

Yet even this does not exhaust the dire news for those about to enter the legal profession. Some schools have adopted the practice of placing their graduates in temporary positions, which, whatever the rationale, has the benefit of helping to inflate their employment numbers…

Nor have we considered how the “lucky” winners in the big law lottery often accept jobs that make them miserable, featuring insane hours and unfulfilling work, but which these graduates conclude they must take in order to pay their often astronomical educational debt (adjusted for inflation, public law school tuition has quintupled, and private law school tuition has nearly tripled, since the mid-1980s). If you’re a law professor and you want to get depressed, try to figure out how many of your recent graduates have real legal jobs that pay enough to justify the tuition that funds your salary, and also involve doing the kind of work they wanted to do when they went to law school.

All of this suggests the extent to which prospective law students need more and better information. Of course, such information will make law school look like a far worse investment than it does at present. Still, if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.

Humanities professors might not graduate many gainfully employed humanities professors, but few humanities professors receive between $150,000 and $300,000 in compensation each year.

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Update: Two of my readers (see comment thread) have pointed out that my original attempt to come up with a reasonably plausible figure for law school professor compensation seemed inflated. In response to their comments, I’ve done some more poking around in the statistics. I now offer (see above) what seems to me a reasonable compensation range.

We’ve already encountered male-bashing, self-pitying Caitlin Flanagan on this blog.

Now she’s calling for the closure of all fraternities. So terrified by them was she when she began to attend the University of Virginia that she… left.

My fourth night at school, I went with some friends to Rugby Road, where the fraternity houses are located. They are built of the same Jeffersonian architecture as the rest of the campus. At once august and moldering, they seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned. I remember standing there thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. It wasn’t worth it, I decided. The next day I withdrew from the university.

Good God, woman.

The student newspaper responds to one notorious defense of lax conflict of interest rules at universities.

Concerns have been raised that stricter policy stipulations and implementations would make Columbia less appealing to high profile faculty — but what sort of professor would reject an offer from Columbia due to high ethical standards? Any professor or researcher who finds strong disclosure policies a shortcoming is not an individual we want at our University.

UD would only add that Columbia should have an open door policy when it comes to inviting low ethical standards money people to the university after they’ve been put in prison. Already there’s a bustling trade in financial criminals giving cautionary lectures at business schools all over America.

A commenter at the Duke University student newspaper calls for beefed up campus security services.

The incident that prompted the comment is recounted here.

Last night, and then this morning, I heard extended high-pitched shrieks coming from the back of my woodland acre.

Theories:

1.) Rabbits being seized, killed.

2.) Fox kits? I think they’re being born about now. We have gray and orange foxes.

3.) Coyotes?

With everything in bloom, and with birds everywhere, I take lots of walks every day around my woods and garden.

On a hidden path lined with vinca I stopped a moment ago to study an eastern box turtle, quite motionless, head extended.

The white flowers on our azalea bushes are popping out; they’re a calm counterpoint to the harlequin madness across the street, where our neighbors exhibit massive mixed azaleas in a ring around their house and in a path to their door. UD‘s friend Al Teich took a picture a few seasons ago.

Our white flowering dogwood got absolutely hammered in the big snowstorms this year – we had to pull down dead branches. Yet it’s glamorous again already.

More glamorous. The thinning made it delicate, Japanese.

Major infestation of rabbits, natch, and they’re eating my hostas. One of them hops across my front yard as I write this. Fuck the Easter Bunny.

… reviews the still pretty pathetic pharma-dependency issues at American medical schools.

Among the several Facebook groups dedicated to the mad squirrels of the University of Florida is one titled UF SQUIRRELS ARE PLOTTING MY DEMISE.

Laptops. The view from Boston.

… [MIT] professors complain about students trading stocks online, shopping for Hermès scarves, showing one another video clips on YouTube — leading some faculty to call for the unwiring of all lecture halls.

“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’

… Jonathan Zittrain, a [Harvard] professor and Internet law specialist who cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has banned laptops and all mobile devices from his first year torts class since 2004.

“If you sit in the back of the room and see what’s going on, it’s so demoralizing,’’ Zittrain said. “It’s not just poker or Minesweeper, they’re shopping for shoes as you’re talking about some fascinating Supreme Court case.’’

… I always wonder, ‘Why are they in class?’, because it’s clear they are not paying attention,’’ Jones said…

UD‘s buddy Bill Gleason has a honey of a post up about homeopathy and the University of Minnesota.

Love calls us to the things of this world, say Augustine and Wilbur.

Pablo Neruda says the same thing. Perhaps we would rather escape the earth or transcend it or ignore it. But (MacNeice this time) the earth compels.

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Still Another Day: I

Pablo Neruda

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

[trans. William O’Daly]

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Neruda wrote only in green ink – color of earth’s plants – so we’ll do that too… Here you have a hard-hearted person, dead to the light of the world, estranged from his own memories, living under a dull pelting rain.  Let’s say he’s the poet himself, impervious to what used to be the sources of his aesthetic energy.

Confusingly and compellingly, however, the earth’s outburst on this day amounts to a kind of visitation: the bell-like rain now echoes with the remembered rain of the poet’s childhood, and this sets going a welcome, tentative, awakening in him.  As opposed to the old morning/noon/night story the sun begins each day to tell,  there’s a particular “slant” here, an edginess that’s the poet’s own.  Now can he live and write?

Not quite.  Kissed awake by the kiss of mud the rain kicks up, the poet concludes with a love song to the earth, mysterious origin of his physical and spiritual life.  But how to love this dark lady?  The sun’s old clarity might be a bore; but this deeper, truer, carbon-coated body, this muffled vehicle of song, frustrates and exhausts the muse.

So the muse simply has to keep at it.  The earth compels.  “I must still uncloud my earthly duties.”

… [In] South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley, a Tea Party favorite, tossed out Darla Moore, a longtime member of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees who had given money to one of the Democratic candidates for governor. Haley said she wanted “a fresh set of eyes.” This would not be all that big a deal except that Moore is the biggest donor in the university’s history. She has given at least $70 million to the school, which would seem to be worth one heck of a lot of sets of eyes.

Moore is being replaced by Thomas “Tommy” Cofield, a lawyer and Haley supporter …

In recent years, York University in Toronto and Florida State University have had to fight off efforts to establish chiropractic programs in their medical schools. (Here’s an excellent review of these failed efforts, especially the Jeb Bush-approved effort at FSU.)

At Mr UD‘s university, the University of Maryland, no such campaign has occurred, but something more insidious is happening, about which Steven Salzburg, a computer science professor there, has written in Forbes. Salzburg’s attacks on creeping anti-intellectualism at UMD are indispensable elements of the permanent watch professors everywhere must keep over the university’s integrity. You can’t count on presidents and trustees to keep watch. These particular proposed programs, for example, always come with huge gifts from in-search-of-legitimacy chiropractors, and administrators tend not to be able to see past the money. Only professors have the combination of empiricism and disinterestedness – and tenure – that can hold back the pseuds.

So Salzburg’s going after his reputable university’s housing of disreputable ideas and methods in its Integrative Medicine center, which features, among other absurdities, homeopathic approaches:

[H]omeopathic treatments are just water. Or rather, water dropped onto a sugar pill, and sold at stores such as Whole Foods, which has a section devoted to homeopathic remedies.

(A spectacular new Whole Foods just opened up down the street from UD‘s house, and she and Mr UD have joined the appreciative ‘thesdan crowds there. UD always avoids what she calls the Medieval Aisle. Too depressing.)

Salzburg concludes:

By providing a respectable home for these pseudoscientific practices, UM Medicine is undermining its own scientific and educational missions. But when the money is coming in, the administration seems quite happy to support it.