UD‘s always hearing about how low standards are in the humanities classroom, because the field is so vague… So it’s refreshing to see truly low standards in math, of all places.

The University of Manitoba just gave some person a math PhD even though said person, claiming a diagnosis of extreme exam anxiety, not only failed his comp exam (twice), but did not complete “the required graduate courses.”

This outcome so pissed off one of the math professors at Manitoba that he went after “a court injunction in September against the awarding of the PhD.”

This outcome so pissed off the university that they have suspended the math professor for the rest of the year, without pay.

Manitoba says it’s upset about his having compromised the student’s privacy. You and I know the school’s upset because the professor made their degradation of their own degree public, and thereby deeply embarrassed the University of Manitoba.

… some of America’s best schools of medicine in the last few years involves the painstaking, expensive training of doctors who almost immediately stop practicing and instead go for megabucks as investment managers. Why make half a million a year using the knowledge you’ve learned at Yale medical school to heal people, when you can make five million dollars a year doing trades and not get your hands dirty?

I mean, so what if you took a hotly contested seat in a Yale classroom — a seat hundreds of people actually dedicated to medicine tried to get and failed?

For instance: Chip Skowron, Yale MD and PhD, used a lot of taxpayer money to get himself all educated as a clinician/researcher and then said Fuck it. I’d rather be a hedgie.

Skowron put quite the spin on his decision in this 2003 Bloomberg article on doctors abandoning medicine for hedge funds:

Skowron said that during his residency, senior doctors complained about administrative burdens, declining pay and the strain of paying insurance premiums. “My current job allows me to look at the newest developments in oncology and to translate that into investment opportunities,” said Skowron, who manages health-care investments at Greenwich, Conn.-based FrontPoint Partners LLC, another hedge fund.

I guess I was little dim! Spent years and years in med school and grad school and it never occurred to me to discover the nature of the vocation for which I was training. Finally, in my residency, the horror of medical practice became apparent – the soullessness of paperwork, the growing impoverishment of physicians… I’ve gone from the meaninglessness, the shabbiness, of clinical medicine, to offering the world investment opportunities…

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But you know what they say: No opportunities without risks. Medicine may have its drawbacks, but so does trading.

When FrontPoint Partners came to light on Tuesday as the unnamed hedge fund that federal authorities said had traded on inside information from a French doctor, so did the name of another doctor: Chip Skowron.

FrontPoint said late Tuesday that it had placed Dr. Skowron on leave indefinitely. The firm’s announcement follows the arrest of Yves Benhamou, the French doctor accused of tipping off an unnamed fund manager about setbacks in a clinical drug trial by Human Genome Sciences.

FrontPoint, which is being spun off by Morgan Stanley, would not elaborate beyond its statement. But the firm’s announcement of Dr. Skowron’s suspension provided an obvious No. 1 guess for anyone trying to figure out the identity of that mystery portfolio manager.

In the Washington Post, Annie Lowrey takes a look at the law school scandal.

[L]aw schools … keep growing. Law schools awarded 43,588 J.D.s last year, up 11.5 percent since 2000. And the American Bar Association’s list of approved law schools now numbers 200, an increase of 9 percent in the past decade. Those newer law schools have a much shakier track record of helping new lawyers get work, but they don’t necessarily cost less than their older, more established counterparts.

… The marquee law schools will be fine. But some of the newer, lower-ranked law schools will shut down.

UD ain’t sure where Lowrey gets her confidence that bad schools will shut down. A law school shut down? UD doesn’t think so. Starting new law schools, as Lowrey points out, is a growth industry.

“If I see a laptop opened, [that student is] considered absent for the day,” said William Cohen, a [Temple University] professor of community and regional planning who requests no laptops be used in his class.

From The Temple News.

She will usher in 2011 with this fellow, in Vermont.

Regular readers know that Les UDs have spent many December/Januaries in chilly Vermont farmhouses with Peter.

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Update: Galbraith wins. Top vote-getter.

… newspaper.

[W]hen a professor simply stands in front of the room, reads the PowerPoint word-for-word and tells us what we already learned from nightly readings, students will mentally check out.

… Students will go to class if professors consistently teach material that students did not already learn while reading the textbook.

… If professors give us something valuable during lecture, we’ll be there to take it.

The opinion piece is in response to a new national trend: mandatory attendance. How did mandatory attendance come about?

Professors who teach nothing teach no one. Students don’t attend their classes.

Empty classrooms (No one’s here to watch me read my slides!) make professors look bad, so these professors eventually make attendance mandatory.

It’s a variation on the old communist-era saying, We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Here it’s I pretend to teach and you pretend to learn.

But while professors seem to have a high threshold for futility, students have a low one. After all, students are paying to play pretend; professors get paid.

If students won’t play along, if they won’t be good sports, some of these professors will suddenly drop the whole it’s all a game thing and force them into the room. Students will respond by playing on their laptops.

The wired classroom student: Casper The Unfriendly Ghost.

… as University of Washington president. Like Emmert – now running the NCAA – she’s a jocksniffer. She has also, like Emmert, never seen a corporate board seat she didn’t like.

One of Wise’s first acts as president is to fuck up all sorts of classes on campus because of a football game.

But it’s worth it because a huge national audience will see how important academics are to UW.

Yes. That’s her argument. UW will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.

The game is expected to snarl traffic through Montlake, disrupt afternoon and evening classes at the university, close clinics at the University of Washington Medical Center and play havoc with the workday schedules of thousands of fans.

… [Wise and other] university officials say the game is an opportunity to showcase the school’s athletics and academics to a national audience.

It’s much more than that. It’s also an opportunity to showcase UW’s commitment to keeping its clinics’ doors open, and its commitment to the quality of life in the larger metropolitan region.

… Peter Benjamin, talks up their town.

A national historic district, a nuclear-free zone, an arboretum (yes, the whole town!), a true small community with its own town government.

… to inaugurate my new leather writing book: The roof of the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel. It’s a warm windy afternoon, just after the Pet Parade.

I left the hot tub up here to go down to the boardwalk and watch the parade (Elvis sheepdogs with black wigs and silver capes; dachshunds as frankfurters). Now I’m back on the roof, sitting with my sister as we rock ourselves into a stupor on white chairs.

British and American flags flap away on either side of us, and, on the ocean’s horizon, white container ships float. There are gulls, contrails, and white clouds in a pale blue sky.

All of which makes me nostalgic for my sabbatical year (six months, really; the rest was Key West when I couldn’t take the cold anymore) next door to this hotel, in Edgewater House.

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Strange combination of influences, this Halloween at the beach. The constantly lulling effect of the water, wind, and sun is the main thing. You feel as though you’re hovering well above the business of being mortal, skipping over the hard parts… At night there’s the infinity of the sky over the waves, and you feel part of that too… So in the hot tub I found myself singing Time Passes Slowly Up Here in the Mountains, its long calm lines covering the same all the time in the world territory.

But these are the Days of the Dead, and, like something out of Fellini, skeletons and grim reapers cavort on the beach. Halloween Week on our room’s tv features Beetle Juice (UD had never seen it!) and episode after episode of House, which takes you deeply into our decrepitude, and, in the character of its hero, asks in each segment whether life is worth living.

… part of the wallpaper.

Ania Soltan, Ireland, October 2010.

Dune grass, wooden fencing, horses.

… in a dry season.”

A real estate agency in England has had its agents take a poetry writing course, to buff up descriptive copy about sale houses.

After the course, one Regency £495,000 two-bedroom seafront flat, originally described prosaically as “spacious, high quality, and within short walking distance of local shops”, inspired the following ode from a staff member…

“The first thing you see is the sea meeting the sky; like old comrades they share a warm embrace. Coats of armour; the cornice lines up. Without feeling lonely, the room has an echo. Ornate surroundings, the fire begs a match.”

[Professor] F. Schauer [to his students]: ‘One of you can look that up [on your laptops]. Whatever you’re currently bidding on can wait.’

… our stupidest state (just as she has long called the University of Georgia the worst university in America). But Florida has always been a major stupidest state contender, and now their incoming Senate president has, I think, tipped things over so that, yes, Florida is the stupidest state.

University of Florida professor Mike Haridopolos (here’s his appropriately shady-looking faculty page) is an absolutely stunning idiot. His idiocy is as stunning as the sun right in your eyes at the tip of Key West at noon.

The faculty didn’t want him appointed, but it’s an old Southern tradition to put politicians – and their wives – in universities so they can pocket money and throw their weight around.

[Haridopolos was hired at the] University of Florida as a guest lecturer in their Department of Political Science at a starting salary of $75,000, nearly double the $40,000 average for the position. UF faculty and the Democratic Party of Florida cited his lack of academic credentials or input by faculty prior to his hiring, as well as perceived conflict between his obligations as a state senator and an employee of the university.

And now a course wouldn’t ya know it! The ol’ boy “failed to disclose on required state forms that he was paid thousands of dollars by the marketing arm of one of the state’s largest appliance retailers for two years.”

Haridopolos told state ethics investigators he didn’t read the directions for filling out a financial disclosure form in 2004, then repeated his mistakes year after year — assuming he was doing it correctly.

“And I feel pretty silly,” he said, according to files released Wednesday. “I mean, I’m a college professor and I didn’t do it right.”

HYUK! And Isa professor and everything!

“I think what I did is I didn’t read the directions that well to start, and I just kept doing the same things year in-year out,” Haridolopos told the investigator, adding he spent no more than an hour filling out the forms.

He also said that he hadn’t read the separate instruction sheet and overlooked the notice that a specific description of assets over $1,000 was required, along with the name and address of his creditors.