The president of University of Texas Pan American announced Tuesday she will retire at the end of the month, citing “pressures” that taxed her health and distracted her from leading the university. [Background here.]

Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas will step down after 4 1/2 sometimes turbulent years at the university. Last October, anonymous allegations mailed to the University of Texas System and media outlets around the state suggested Cardenas had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. The senders claimed to be UTPA faculty.

The UT System said in late October it would investigate. But David Prior, the system’s executive vice president for academic affairs, said the inquiry was halted before concluding.

“Once we understood Dr. Cardenas’ intention to resign we abandoned it,” Prior said. Asked if Cardenas was pressured to step down, Prior said, “not to my knowledge.” In a letter to the campus, Cardenas said she informed UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine of her decision in late December.

Under Cardenas, the university in Edinburg increased the number of students receiving degrees by 58 percent, to more than 3,200 annually. It also raised the number of graduate degrees offered, the number of nursing graduates, the amount of available financial aid and the freshman and sophomore retention rates, according to Cardenas’ letter.

But in 2007, Cardenas had to pay back more than $7,000 to the university she used to pay for landscaping service and install an air conditioning unit, sprinkler system and alarm in her home. She had also been billing the university for mileage for her commute to work…

This story is about faculty persistence. They kept at her, writing anonymously about her, um, unorthodox billing practices, her plagiarism… And she finally decided it would be better for her if the plagiarism investigation didn’t happen. Good call.

Her nickname’s Bambi.

An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.

Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.

In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…

Background here.

You knew we’d check in on Western Kentucky University again, right? We’ve been following the fortunes of that school ever since Professor Robert Dietel, way back in 2006, excited intense ridicule and hatred from the school’s trustees for warning that going Division I would destroy the school’s finances.

Now ruined, and a laughingstock, WKU does what they all do: It hires a new deer-in-the-headlights president, a guy who looks the part cuz he wears bowties, and they send him out to shut down what’s left of the school’s academic side. Enjoy his picture. Note the deer-in-the-headlights look. And the This is a Real University; I’m a Real President bowtie. The copyright holder on the bowtie thing is sports-whore supreme Gordon Gee.

The trustees insisted that Dietel was an asshole and that classy coaches like Bobby Petrino and an incredibly expensively recruited (but less carefully vetted) football team would make enrollments skyrocket…

That rocket went flaccid and now Bowtie Bambi meets the glare of national news cameras head-on…

Thanks to a Scottish kid named Jake, she has been able to identify these bones. (Read more Jake here.)

UD was just now clearing the winding paths she’s created through her woods, and from her first glance at the bones she thought deer (given that vast herds of them live atop her back hill), but she also ghoulishly played with the idea of human child for a moment.

This is exactly what the lower bone looks like. And who knew you needed it for – uh – boning your boots?

So where’s the rest of it? Jake always seems to score the whole skeleton. UD poked around, but has found nothing. She thinks maybe these bones washed forward in the recent very big rains.

A reader sends UD a 1975 Time magazine article which describes the diploma mill the University of Massachusetts education school was in those years.

This is the school from which, during that decade, Bambi Cardenas (background here) earned her Ph.D. The School of Education, noted Time, had “earned a reputation as a diploma mill. In the past three years it granted more than 387 doctoral degrees. Some doctorates were awarded to students who had no undergraduate degrees. The writing in many doctoral theses was barely at high school level.”

No wonder Bambi – president of the University of Texas at Pan American – is now being investigated for having plagiarized her U Mass dissertation in educational leadership.

And… I dunno… Sad, isn’t it? That so many ed schools remain, as the New York Times recently wrote, “little more than diploma mills.”

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The other hoax? The journal Quadrant. Australia.

Keith Windschuttle, its editor, published a science piece that agreed with his global warming skepticism, but he did no checking on its author or its sometimes absurd claims.

… Windschuttle admitted the article was unsolicited and from an unknown author, and that he had failed to even Google the author’s name or check easily validated facts, such as the claim that the paper was first presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics in Brisbane last year.

A check of the program on the internet by The Australian yesterday revealed there was no such paper or author listed.

Windschuttle said his practices were the same as any editor of a publication and that checking every fact and quotation in an article was impractical.

“I guess I could have done more to investigate the author but the content was something I did investigate because I was interested in some of the sources,” he said.

The latest entry on the hoax blog says: “So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn’t even check the putative author’s credentials”.

“Nor it seems did they get the piece peer-reviewed. Nor did they check the facts; nor the footnotes. Nor were they alerted by the clues. I’m almost embarrassed for you, Windschuttle. Just look at you above, a pea in a pod alongside those other culture warriors.”

The hoaxer wanted to expose the absurdity of the journal’s views on the environment by writing patently extreme nonsense and watching him print it. A hoax very much like the Sokal hoax.