… And now it’s getting sunny and warm. The weather has been strange.”

La Kid, in a Skype chat today, described the weird world UD‘s about to enter as she flies to Ireland. She’ll be in Bono’s Clarence House for a few days, and then here, in Galway.

While she’s in Ireland, she’d like to revisit a few places: Newport House, with its salmon river; Newgrange; Inishbofin. All of these are locations that have lodged in UD‘s mind for many years. She’d like to see them again.

UD will blog of her adventures.

Four out of five Tamarac [Florida] commissioners from the class of 2006 have been arrested. I haven’t seen an arrest rate that high since the University of Miami football team was winning national championships.

Michael Mayo, Sun Sentinel

Auburn University: The scummiest sports factory in the nation.

And that is saying one hell of a lot.

Most have involved medical faculty. This one’s about a nurse.

UD continues to follow the growing university-as-pill-mill story closely.

… has an eighty percent drop-out rate earn twenty million dollars a year?

In the for-profit sector, of course.

Astoundingly trashy.

… and I’ll have a chance to blog a bit later this evening, I think, after I rest up.

… Dublin, Ireland on Saturday. UD, who likes her quiet life, now launches a noisy spring break. She will of course blog throughout her travels. Ne quittez pas.

Wow. Sounds bad. And when you realize they’re incredibly highly paid and highly touted University of Minnesota professors, it sounds even worse. For Minnesota. The story’s been kicking around for years. UM’s been keeping them close anyway. The school seems to have separation issues.

He specializes in risk and uncertainty; she’s into the “cognitive processes underlying the interaction of people with complex systems.” So you put that together (Sainfort and Jacko are married) and you get two high-rollers who maybe figure they’ll give double dipping in the complex system that is a university a whirl …

Georgia Tech, where they used to teach, is going after them through the courts for the two full-time salaries they got even though they’d already taken jobs at Minnesota (where they also pulled down salaries). Plus it’s after them for fraudulent billing, theft of funds… pretty much everything determined faculty thieves can do.

Hold them close, Minnesota! Keep that half million dollar joint salary aloft! No doubt they are innocent, and will go on to great things.

… for the first time, at Dundee University, on March 19.

Audience members will be asked to recite the final lines of what many consider the world’s worst poem, William Topaz McGonagall’s Tay Bridge Disaster.

Sing it with me:

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

While teaching a course at NYU law school on corruption, New York’s Waterfront Commissioner, Ronald Goldstock, parked his car illegally.

An enterprising reporter waited by the car – it was there for six hours – until Goldstock returned to it, and asked him why he had done this.

It’s not illegal, he said, pointing to the THIS VEHICLE ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard he’d placed in his car’s front window.

UD likes the sound of this. She likes the idea of designating her teaching hours Official Police Business.

From The McGill Daily:

[W]hy are we so keen on defining grief as a disorder?

… The inclusion of pathological grief as a clinical diagnosis would serve to reinforce the perception of grief as a problematic, rather than a natural human reaction to loss and bereavement.

[Leeat] Granek’s concerns over the inclusion of grief in the DSM stretch beyond the realm of negative societal perceptions and attitudes. Grieving has traditionally been done in tight-knit communities made up of family, friends, and close community-members. In recent years, these support networks have shrunk or largely disappeared, which has changed the way individuals are able to grieve. Granek explains what is happening is a “diagnostic creep” which has meant that more and more people are being screened for grief “disorder.” Indeed, as Granek pointed out, anyone who has ever experienced a loss or grief falls into that purview, and can face diagnosis. As grief becomes an increasingly common diagnosis of disorder, human experiences are relegated to the institutionalized sphere: the offices of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. “…

See also Edward Shorter’s recent essay.

… for those new to this blog, is one of UD‘s much-used Categories.

Why?

Because PowerPoint really pisses students off.

Reading directly from a plain, white PowerPoint presentation [is likely] to induce a coma lasting approximately two hours and 40 minutes.

… The other day I sat through another painfully long lecture. I spent the entire class period reading the textbook instead of copying down notes from the PowerPoint, and by the end of class I had enjoyed myself and understood more of the material than I had in the past five weeks. I left the class quietly seething under my breath and shooting my professor plainly dirty looks because there I was, wasting a beautiful afternoon in a class that wasn’t worth more than its $92 textbook.

Jessica Lynch, University of Colorado

Here’s another one, from Amanda Joinson at the University of Massachusetts:

The classes where the professor is standing in the front of a cavernous lecture hall on a podium accompanied by a poorly executed PowerPoint presentation are perhaps the worst. I swear that ten minutes into the class the audience has been lost, and the professor’s voice turns into that “Blah, blah” that echoes in the background of Charlie Brown cartoons.

These classes often come with the monotone professor who mumbles while looking down at the podium the entire time, while reading from notes that probably have not changed for years.

Both writers use the same Charlie Brown blah, blah or (in the case of Lynch, Charlie Brown wah, wah), meme.

… it must be college football.

[The Ohio State University scandal: the] latest offering from a septic tank of a system that’s unlikely to be flushed out in our lifetime.

Sports Illustrated

A professor at Utah Valley University cheated – just a little! jumped ahead of the line! – at the golf course, and when called on it by rule-abiding golfer Timothy Deason, got annoyed:

Deason told police Williams hit him on the back of the head with a golf club, breaking the club and knocking Deason to the ground. While he was down, Black [Williams’ golfing buddy] hit Deason in the back with a golf club and Williams stabbed him in the back of his left thigh with the shaft of the broken golf club, the affidavit states.

But hell. UVU put him on leave while he was in jail and all, but now that he’s paid a fine and gone on probation, it’s time to come home!

At the time of the incident Williams was working as a full-time associate professor of aviation at Utah Valley University. [Here’s his way-sketchy faculty page.] He … has since returned to work.

Cheating, and then beating a man bloody when he challenges your right to cheat! If there’s one place this man belongs, it’s back in a classroom.

Brad DeLong first quotes Benjamin Barber calling plagiarism charges against Saif Gaddafi “garbage.” Then he quotes a bunch of plagiarized passages.