Without Division I athletics, Northern Iowa’s not on the cover of the Sports Illustrated. Without Division I athletics, the Panthers aren’t whisked to Los Angeles and handed an ESPY award.

… where UD was born (her father was a Hopkins post-doc at the time) has always sat in a dangerous neighborhood.

In a breaking story, a doctor there has been shot, with the shooter still in the hospital.

No word yet on the condition of the doctor.

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More details. Doctor is in critical condition, and the gunman is holed up in a locked room on the eighth floor. He apparently has a hostage who may be a relative of his.

A nurse who said she was on the floor at the time of the shooting said that the shooter was upset about the medical treatment of his mother. He was threatening to jump out of a window, she said.

“I started running,” she said. “When you hear gunshots you run.”

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My friend Courtney, the rock climber and competitive frisbee player, works at Hopkins, and Gchats me the following:

they’ve caught the guy

looks like that won’t be happening

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UD is grateful to Courtney.

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Update: Earlier reports about the shooter were wrong. He hasn’t been caught. Courtney writes:

police scanner is discussing “ongoing unresolved tactical situation”

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Another update: I’m told (this is unconfirmed) that the doctor is out of surgery and in stable condition.

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Police have shot and killed the gunman.

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Correction: The gunman killed his mother and then himself.

… New York’s St. John’s University is certainly giving the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the University of Miami, a run for their money.

First there was this sadsack, who came to his court hearing in a bright red sweatshirt with ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY emblazoned on it in huge letters, in case anyone was wondering what university molded him into an embezzler. He got the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award in 2008.

Now there’s a former dean, on trial for embezzling (am I the only person who loves the word embezzle?) a million dollars via expense account chicanery (chicanery’s good too — sounds like the name of a spice).

The final paragraph of the New York Times article about her could only have been written in America.

… Ms. Chang’s home … has seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a gym, a sauna and a Jacuzzi tub. Ken Winslow, 74, a next-door neighbor, said that other than the Mercedes-Benz Ms. Chang drove, she did not appear to live ostentatiously.

Way serious drug business going on at the University of Alabama. Guns, wads of cash, impressive array of substances.

One of these lads is only 21. Wow.

The Grade Change form UD uses at George Washington University is a small white piece of paper on which you’re given one line to explain why you’ve changed a student’s grade (I know not what others may do, but as for me, these forms are almost always about changing an Incomplete to a grade after a late paper or something has been submitted).

NYU’s business school must have had to use teeny weeny writing to fit in its reason for changing Rosenthal’s grade in his Professional Responsibility course to an F:

In February 2007, three months after completing his course work at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Ayal Rosenthal pleaded guilty to charges that he leaked to his brother secret tips that he learned at his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Rosenthal never told the school about the investigation of him or his guilty plea, even while serving as a teaching assistant in a professional responsibility course…

NYU didn’t merely change Rosenthal’s grade; it rescinded his MBA degree. Rosenthal sued to get the degree back and the judge laughed him out of court.

… are beginning to ban laptops.

Reasons?

“… [M]isuse and lack of courtesy. But the biggest reason is that it’s a liability for professors to allow students to use these electronic devices in the classroom.”

…“Laptops have become barriers that interrupt dialogue between the students and the teacher … and education is a dialogue.”

… how medical school professors become corrupted.

Universities could easily clean up the [conflict of interest] problem, simply by banning or capping industry payments to faculty members, but that is unlikely to happen. Not just because academic physicians would object, but also because many high-level university administrators have lucrative corporate relationships of their own. (For instance, the president of the University of Michigan sits on the Board of Directors of Johnson & Johnson, while the president of Brown University sat on the boards of Pfizer and Goldman Sachs.) As universities have come to look more like businesses, competing for funding and prestige in a consumer marketplace, industry relationships have become a lucrative perk of many university jobs.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.

Several questions garnered loud applause, including that of senior political science major Avrell Stokes, who said that it is his understanding that athletics received the cut it did ($137,000), because a deeper cut would have meant athletics being lowered a division.

“What I would like to know is who made the decision to cut education rather than to go down a division in athletics and why?” asked Stokes, as his fellow students clapped.

University of Southern Mississippi students confront hapless administrators at an open meeting. They got the same bullshit answer to this question that administrators always give: Big-time sports make universities ever so much better!

Oh, and about the plane the university leases:

Saunders explained that the reason for the plane is to maximize administrative time.

Administrators for USM are simply jetting about all over the country all the time! They have to! And a limo to a distant private airport, flying for a hundred miles, putting down in another nowheresville airport, getting limo’ed from there to somewhere… You’d be amazed how much time this saves.

This University of North Carolina professor is certainly correct about her school; it cares far more for lower-ranked coaches than it does for philosophy professors… Yet she adds:

“It is what it is. It gives you an idea of where society places its value.”

Both of which are curious things to say. It is what it is — meaning nothing to be done… I wonder if she takes the same approach to her work in economics… unemployment rates, gross wealth disparities… they are what they are…

And then… way to blame it on society! As you may know, UD asks her students to avoid, in their papers, any generalizations about ‘society,’ because they almost always sound dumb…

In this case, for instance, society does not pay assistant university coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does. Many universities do not pay their coaches in the way UNC pays its coaches. As Balaban points out in her initial comment, UNC could give a shit about the life of the mind. Its resources go to athletics, and, with this latest scandal, to athletics-related public relations and litigation.

“I would not think there is not a single professor at Harvard who is not ambitious, in the sense of intellectually ambitious,” [says Harvard] Psychology Department Chair Susan Carey.

UD just whispered these words to Mr UD as he fell asleep.

Mr UD insists that UD vote, even in the primaries, so after she taught her classes he picked her up at Grosvenor Metro and they drove to Holy Cross Elementary School (they usually vote at UD‘s elementary school, Garrett Park, but the main building’s being demolished and a new building’s going up).

As they walked from the car to the polling place, UD read, loudly, in the voice of Major “King” Kong, instructions on how to vote.

The instructions were in the booklet Mr UD had just handed her. He’d written UD‘s Polish name –Madzia – on the top of the first page of the booklet.

Inside the booklet were mock ballots on which he’d carefully marked every person UD was to vote for. Aside from Barbara Mikulski and Chris Van Hollen, UD recognized no name in the booklet. (Check out picture # 5 on Van Hollen’s website. That’s my neighbor, John Wilpers; his daughter Terry is just about my oldest friend. I wrote about John here.) As is always the case when Mr UD forces her to vote in primaries, she simply does what she is told.

There were very few people in the polling place, most of them fellow Garrett Parkers. UD was handed a computer card and escorted to a little booth, where she quickly touch-screened all the names Mr UD told her to enter. The whole thing took twenty seconds.

Mr UD took forever. “I was rereading my ballot,” he said, “to make sure everything was right.”

On the way back to the car, UD railed – again loudly – about the travesty of making Americans vote at a religious school.

LAST TIME I LOOKED THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ANYBODY HERE HEARD OF SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE? ANYBODY? ON OUR WAY INTO THE BUILDING WE WALKED DIRECTLY UNDER AN ENORMOUS CROSS. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT HAS NO EFFECT ON PEOPLE? LAST TIME I LOOKED…

The Major Kong thing, the loud railing church and state thing — These are the ways UD makes unpalatable events palatable.

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Update:

LOOOOOK!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Phil.

It’s a remarkable new model whose time has come. Have physicians pay for their own education.

After all, homeless people have to pay back the government loans they take out in order to attend for-profit universities. Now some people are saying it’s time for doctors to pay for their Continuing Medical Education courses.

The way it goes now is like this: The doctor gets an invitation from a drug company to have dinner, paid for by the company, at the Palm Restaurant. At the Palm, the doctor joins a table of happy people who drink wine and eat steak and listen to a salesperson from the drug company talk about an expensive new pill. At the end of the meal, deeply satisfied with the dinner and very grateful to the drug company, the doctor decides he’ll start prescribing the new pill tomorrow.

His night at the Palm has earned him four CME credits.

“[D]octors often pay little or nothing for the instruction because many of the companies that offer it are partly funded by makers of drugs and medical devices,” explains the Boston Globe in an article about a Harvard professor who’s starting a CME company without big pharma money.

Critics say the reliance on industry funding allows drug and device companies to influence what is taught, potentially misleading physicians about the best treatments for patients and pushing up spending on prescription drugs. They note that many other professionals pay for their own continuing education.

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Don DeLillo’s Players.

From the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

… its interest in luxury suites at University of Louisville football and basketball games onaccounta people were really pissed when they realized Dismas is a tax-funded non-profit charity sort of thing.

At first its CEO — who makes a humongous, totally corporate salary, so what’s the big deal with the luxury suites? — refused to give up his babies and said he had nothing to apologize for. Then I don’t know. Something happened. The IRS noticed the news stories about it maybe. I don’t know. Suddenly Dismas is all weepy and apologetic.

The UL athletic director agreed to release Dismas from its luxury suite contracts, but said this is “somewhat of a hardship” for the school.

You said it. They’ve got quite a few unrented luxury suites for both basketball and football and I don’t know how that has happened. Sports is a religion down there, etc., and watching the games from a luxury suite must be like worshipping at St Peter’s Basilica. You’d think they’d be clawing each other for the privilege. Anyway, I’m sure the university is making up the shortfall by destroying educational opportunities for its students.

It’s worth remembering that the University of North Carolina was not founded to field a football team; it was created to educate the sons – and much later the daughters – of the people of North Carolina…