… poll? What’s its secret?
Well, it’s a matter of priorities. Look at its public university system.
[I]t’s hard to find $900 million for a 60,000-seat domed college football stadium for a program that has had a winning record once in the last 13 years and resorted to giving away tickets for free to get people to go to its last home opener.
Sure it’s hard. Sure! No one ever said life was easy. But the state of Nevada knows what matters, and UD is sure it will devote millions of dollars to this initiative.
And anyway you can’t say Nevada students don’t care about basketball! The other night, UNLV’s student body president got so excited he got thrown out of a game!!
“I was the leader of our group,” said [Mark] Ciavola, a 39-year-old political science major and the campaign manager for Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas.
“If you feel you have to escort someone out, you escort the leader, but multiple people on both sides were yelling and gesturing,” he said. “None of the [University of Nevada, Reno] fans were ejected for throwing things at us, but perhaps no one saw that.”
More detail from Ciavola:
… Ciavola had tried to lead a group of about 50 UNLV fans around the perimeter of the court to chant “Rebels,” something he had done at last year’s game between the two teams.
He said they were stopped by a security guard or police officer who told them to return to the bleachers or they all would be thrown out of the game.
‘We went back to our seats, but as UNR starting tying up the game things really got heated and the entire stadium started chanting “F— the Rebels,’” Ciavola said. “The section in front of us was flipping us off and throwing things at us – a water bottle and crushed up paper — and finally we gestured back at them.”
… to better out of state universities.
The president of the University of Nevada Las Vegas says he’s losing faculty like mad because “They are frustrated with the perception that higher education isn’t valued here.”
UNLV can’t do much about faculty flight; but both UNLV and the University of Nevada Reno have “built programs that guarantee [their strongest applicants] what [UNR’s president] calls “tons of online classes taught by part-timers.”
No, no. Let’s try that again. “[O]ne-on-one … relationships with a distinguished faculty.”
Ouch. Students at University Nevada Reno are embarrassed. The DEAN of their engineering school “has routinely used the pay-to-publish journal he owns as an outlet for subpar and even nonsensical papers, with the effect of drastically inflating his apparent productivity.” They want the … entrepreneur (more details here) to resign, which he certainly won’t do, and which the school won’t pressure him to do — mainly because it’s just a terrible school, and it’s unlikely to know or care what research misconduct is.
University of Nevada Reno president Marc Johnson skillfully handles a challenge from the press on the matter of the athletic department’s $1.5 million deficit.
RGJ: You mention that success leads to higher attendance. But the football team finished in the top 15 last year and was in the Top 25 almost the entire season and still only drew 19,000 per game and even had 11,000 for one game…
MJ: When you have more competitive games, that helps. When you’re winning games 50-7, I think that hurts attendance. Not as much as not winning, but when you’re winning 50-7 that kinds of gets boring by the second half so people don’t come out.
UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.
No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.
Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).
Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.
*************
You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!
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UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …
Gets better and better.
A sweet disorder in the prose
Kindles in me oohs and ohs:—
A plagiarism has me thrown
Into a fine distractión,—
An erring line, which here and there
Enthrals the happy reader fair —
A quote neglectful, and thereby
Prose that flows confusedly,—
A shocking theft, deserving note,
From something that was ‘fore that wrote —
A careless word-string, in whose sense
I see fantastic fraudulence,—
Do more bewitch me, than when prose
Is too precise in every pose.
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Can UD be the only person who thrills to tales like these?
An elected member of the Nevada Board of Regents is amending his 1995 University of Nevada, Reno dissertation following the discovery that more than four pages of it were copied from an uncited California report.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in late August that Regent Jason Geddes, who has defended the Nevada System of Higher Education against allegations it plagiarized a think tank’s report, had copied material in his own academic work.
Geddes has a doctorate in environmental sciences and health and has been a member of the Board of Regents since 2006.
Geddes’ adviser Glenn Miller was adamant Geddes did not plagiarize — despite pages of paragraphs being copied exactly, with the exception of an occasional word change and conversions to the metric system. Miller said it wasn’t plagiarism because dissertations aren’t widely read, the copied work was accurate and the copied language wasn’t creative …
Breathes there the soul which aren’t widely read fails to quicken? The copied work was accurately copied! The copied work was not creative! Please tell UD she’s not the only person bewitched not merely by plagiarism, but by (recalling this classic) excuses for it!
Yet for all the delight one takes in the defenders, there is nothing like the audacious copyists themselves. Recall, merely among professors, the selfsame University of Nevada’s Mustapha Marrouchi, who had apparently been plagiarizing (from hundreds of sources) for decades. Think, more recently, of Arizona State’s Matthew Whitaker, whose “resignation” will cost that university hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But if you ask UD, hundreds of thousands of dollars is a bargain. These guys and their shenanigans (note what Whitaker’s got going on with the City of Phoenix) might be fun for UD to follow, but when you get down to it, they’re really embarrassing.
… weary unto death if you ask me, produces one farcical story after another.
Insistent on an organic rather than psychiatric basis for their syndrome, some British CFS people make it a point to harass university researchers who fail to find said organic basis.
Professor [Myra] McClure [,tormented for having eliminated one viral candidate, the XMRV retrovirus,] says she will not be doing any further research in this area, and that may be the single most important consequence of this campaign of abuse and intimidation.
CFS is equally farcical on the other side, among scientists. The chick who claimed the now-discredited XMRV viral basis – she was associated with a lab at the University of Nevada – is now under arrest for “possession of stolen property and unlawfully taking computer data and equipment.”
Because… let’s see here… ach, my muscles ache from trying to piece this Keystone Kops plot together… Okay so like after she published her thing about yes there’s this viral basis the paper was retracted because no one can replicate the thing and people in her lab said the result might have just been “contamination” or maybe outright data manipulation or omg whatever.
So the university institute fired her and she apparently tried to steal all her data so she could take the NIH-sponsored work someplace else. Only NIH doesn’t let you do that, you know … just up and decamp with your shit… Plus bigger problem is that you’re not supposed to steal things.
On 22 November, [Judy] Mikovits posted $100,000 bail after spending four nights in jail in Ventura, California, as a “fugitive”, according to a county-court docket. She is accused of possessing stolen lab notebooks, a computer and other material belonging to the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI), a private research centre in Reno, Nevada, where she was research director. Mikovits faces extradition to Nevada, while the WPI is seeking the materials’ return in a separate civil suit.