'[Quotation mark abuse] bothers people mightily ... as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn't receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse. [Two examples are the] restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around "Lunch" and "Dinners." [And] the bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light "On" during business hours. ("On" was also underlined. Twice.)

A communications student who specializes in rhetoric at the University of Georgia in Athens, [the blogger] started her blog in 2005 after her senior year in college in Michigan. (Her boyfriend, also a rhetoric student but in Maryland, is a frequent contributor. And proofreader.)

The blog wasn't noticed much at first. But about six months ago, things started picking up. "You know how it happens - one person links to you, then others do. Also, everyone has camera phones now," [she] said in a phone interview. Earlier this week, she was linked on Yahoo!, which quadrupled her traffic for a couple days to about 2,000 hits - though her record is still about 3,000 in a day.

... Rampant quote abuse is a pet peeve of many writing teachers, of course. One of them, Pat Hoy, feels the larger problem is not the punctuation missteps - that's bad enough - but the reliance on quotes themselves, by writers who should know better.

"I have a thing against overuse of quotations, period," says Hoy, director of the expository writing program at New York University. "Whether in academic or bureaucratic writing, it's giving up responsibility for what you're writing. It's a pushing aside of the responsibility to be the major thinker in the piece."'

'I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, `I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, `As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.'

'Soliciting no reputation for respectability, X people are freely obscene and profane, but tend to deploy vile language with considerable rhetorical effectiveness, differing from proles by using fucking as a modifier only now and then and never dropping the g. They may be rather fonder than most people of designating someone - usually a public servant or idol of the middle class - an asshole. This will suggest that generally they eschew euphemism, as, for example, when they insist that their children use the words penis and vagina. But they don't always call spades spades. Sometimes they will euphemize, but unlike more genteel speakers, Xs like to use euphemisms ironically or parodically, favoring those especially which low newspapers use with a knowing, libel-skirting leer. Thus when an X lifts one eyebrow slightly while referring to someone as a confirmed bachelor, we are to gather that flaming homosexual is meant. Similarly... starlet is the ironic euphemism for whore, constant companion for lover, tired (or overtired) for publicly drunk, and fun-loving for promiscuous. Applied to young women, willowy means near death from anorexia. X people can also use the middle class's euphemisms for sardonic effect if sufficient irony is signaled at the same time. Thus it is possible to speak of some poor soul's kleptomania problem in such a way as to install viciously skeptical quotation marks around the words.'

'Have you had any funny moments while you were teaching?

Well, what we professors find funny, students usually don’t find funny. Occasionally students misspell words that are bizarre to us. One student wrote, “He got a plastic enema,” when the correct answer was aplastic anemia.'

'It’s all quite an accomplishment for the former corporate tax lawyer, who entered the academy just four years ago after practicing in New York and doing a brief six-month stint in Washington. Academics generally toil in obscurity for years, hoping for a big political hit. The now-famous paper was Fleischer’s first published policy recommendation.'

'Industry lobbyists mock his earnest demeanor and bright-red hair. Behind closed doors, some even call him “Bazooka Joe,” after the bubble gum cartoon character.'

'In early May, the Senate Finance Committee invited him to speak at a closed-door briefing for staffers from the Hill, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

...In September, Fleischer testified on a panel before the House Ways and Means Committee.

“There is widespread agreement among tax professors and economists that the status quo is an untenable position as a matter of tax policy,” he told the committee. “The partnership tax rules were designed with small business in mind, not billion-dollar investment funds.”'

'Behind closed doors, they call Fleischer a careerist hack. They criticize his use of the phrase “airplane rich” as a way to describe the investment managers, saying he’s simply targeting the wealthy.'

'...Something’s not adding up when rising tuition rates keep climbing year after year while many universities are flush with ballooning endowments.

At a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing in September, witness testimony revealed college and university endowments have grown enormous fortunes. The top 25 college and university endowments are $11 billion more than the combined assets of the top 25 largest private foundations. Investment returns often exceed 12 percent or more. However, college endowment spending averages a paltry four percent.

Some of those endowments are massive and have gotten so big, in large part, because they benefit from very generous tax breaks. Yale University’s endowment equates to $2.8 million per undergraduate. Tapping endowment returns to help keep college accessible to non-wealthy families seems more than reasonable.

As the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee hammers out details of an education tax package, an endowment pay-out requirement ought to be included in the discussion to reduce tuition and help students afford college...'

'...When players on the Duke lacrosse team were faced with charges of rape, many people demanded to know how it was possible that [Duke's president] did not understand that lacrosse players were seen as notoriously "thuggish" and "entitled." Why had he done nothing?... [Trachtenberg defends Duke's president against charges that he didn't act to bring his players under control before the lacrosse mess. Since the players were found innocent, Trachtenberg reasons, they must not have been an established behavioral problem about which the president could have known. Yet several of the players were exactly that, and Brodhead knew it, just as many other university presidents know -- how can they not? -- that some of their athletic teams have more than a few thuggish people on them.] [There's no way the] head of a university with 30,000 students, 5,000 faculty and staff members, and another few thousand adjuncts and visitors [can] control the behavior of all those people.... [Again, when there's notorious misbehavior on the part of certain campus groups -- some groups of athletes tend in this direction -- there's in fact every reason for a president to take note.]

... We [presidents may be] instructed [by our students] that charging tuition is a sign of vice... [GW students have never argued that charging tuition is vicious; they have argued, and their argument has now been taken up by Trachtenberg's replacement as president, that charging excessive tuition is wrong.]'

'Philosophy majors are notorious for being perpetually stoned, easy-going hippies. [I'd drop notorious for being.] They can be found in yoga class, at a NORML meeting or at a party trying to convince a bored sorority girl that the world is really nothing but the dream of a hamster named Fred. [End of sentence great: hamster named Fred is fun. But can be found is a bit clunky. How about Look for them in... And rather than trying to convince I'd simply write telling. I'd also drop is really nothing but and replace it with the world's the dream of a hamster named Fred. Notice the way my edits are about making things snappier, shorter, stronger, more direct.] However, there exists a lesser-known species of philosophy majors. [There exists is okay, because she's trying here for a certain pretentious intellectual formulation.] This minority consists of chain-smoking, coffee-consuming, Friedrich Nietzsche-worshipping emo kids. [Excellent.]

If you have ever been shaken out of your Sudoku-induced trance [I'd drop induced.] by the kid wearing black in the back of the class answering a professor’s question in an inappropriately deep fashion [Drop inappropriately.], you have probably encountered this lesser-known type of philosophy student. No question is too mundane. It could be an innocent rhetorical question such as, “How is everyone doing today?” Instead of joining the chorus of droning “Gooood,” from the class [The two of's are awkward; the joining and droning are too ingy. The sentence is wordy.], they volunteer the answer: “Considering the limitations of the human sense of perception, we can never know anything for sure. I do not even know for certain I exist. So how am I supposed to know how I’m doing? Why would you ask that? Whhhhy?” [Drop the final Whhhy. Too cute.]

For these lovers of knowledge, philosophy is a way of life. Spurning physical activity and rowdy social gatherings, emo philosophers can instead [Drop instead.] be found outside of coffee shops drinking coffee (black) and smoking cigarettes. [Unfiltered in parenthesis after cigarettes would be fun, and would give the sentence balance.] They will inevitably [Drop inevitably.] be reading an obscure philosophical text, or if with a partner, discussing the dark existential truths of life. [Simply dark existential truths would be better. Truths is a stronger word to end on.] Also, due to an affinity for rain and gloominess in general, they are often seen taking melancholy walks in the rain… without an umbrella. [Drop in general.]

They do occasionally detach themselves from their current book and engage in the pointless, shallow social activities that the rest of the world uses only [Drop only.] to distract [Awkward use of distract here. How about to elude etc.?] from the grim reality of life.
[Again, as in earlier sentence, simply write from grim reality.] When this happens, a large amount of alcohol can confer the emo philosopher with [ can confer upon the emo philosopher traits etc. would be better.] traits of their close relation, the stoner philosopher. Articulating nothing more intellectual than “Whoa!” repeatedly while staring up at the stars, or alternately giving long speeches about the futility of hope - both distinct possibilities. Drunkenness, however, is only an occasional respite from the weight of being serious all the time. [Note the unnecessary words gumming up this great material: repeatedly, alternately, long, occasional.]

The most recent on-screen emo philosopher is Dwayne from last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine.” He took an oath of silence in honor of his hero, none other than existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche. His over-the-top rebellious antics are common. [are common is a blah way to end the sentence.] When faced with the depressing conclusions dictated by their chosen philosophical gurus, some philosophy students have no choice but resorting to periods of long silences and listening to Elliott Smith. [Drop depressing; drop chosen. And rewrite latter part of the sentence something like this: resort to periods of silence or the music of Elliot Smith.]

If you have not been able to discern it already from my glowing portrayal [Drop glowing.], yours truly is a member of this philosophical following. My pride in my membership of this minority group [membership in.] stems from an incident that occurred [Drop that occurred.] last year at a party. When I answered a typical inquiry to my major [about my major] with “philosophy,” the response from the questioner [Drop from the questioner.] was: “Oh, did you just try to pick the easiest major possible?”

I was outraged, hot fire burned in my black heart. I knew that Socrates was flipping a shit somewhere in his Greek grave. [Flipping a shit's fun.] I proceeded to explain - while internally cursing
[Drop internally.] myself for participating in this idle distraction from life [Yet again: Drop from life.]- that actually, philosophy is one of the oldest and most interesting disciplines in the world.

Sadly, this one incident [Drop one.] is not the only time the seriousness of my major has been doubted. When faced with these naysayers, I need only relate the horror of the loathed branch of philosophy called “logic.” [Describe might be better than relate. And I'd drop the horror of.]

My teaching assistant actually told us on the first day that this class had a tendency to make students cry, give up hope and get a bad grade. Although filling me with dread, I suppose his warning was helpful. Now I can tell everyone who says philosophy majors aren’t serious students to eat shit and try to solve a biconditional derivation or read 100 pages on the word “the.” [This is good. Feisty.]

Despite their differences, emo kids and stoner philosophy students can unite in agreement [Unite in agreement is somewhat redundant and clunky. How about agree on one thing?] over one thing: Stop fucking confusing us with psychology majors!' [Excellent final line. An earned exclamation mark.]

Labels: SOS

'... The fire struck the house ... sometime before 7 a.m. and burned completely through the first and second floors, leaving only part of the home's frame standing. The waterfront home was built on stilts, forcing firefighters to climb a ladder onto the house's deck to reach the first living floor. The house was a total loss...

"We ran down the street to get away," said Nick Cain, a student at the University of North Carolina who was staying at a house about 100 feet away. "The ash and the smoke were coming down on us. We were just trying to get away."

Cain was one of the dozens of college students who filled at least four houses within a block of the burned home. Neighbor Jeff Newsome said the students were going back and forth between the houses all weekend long.

... Winds blowing flames over the water, and not toward any of the other residences on the tightly packed row of vacation homes, kept the fire from spreading. The intense heat kept [one neighbor] from attempting a rescue, although he said he had to fight to keep several of those who escaped from trying. When he approached the front door, he said, it was too hot to open.

"When I was going up to the entryway, you could hear the windows above me explode," [he] said. "When I knew the flames had taken over, I don't think I've ever felt as helpless in my life."

Authorities erected a blue tarp to block the view of the fire scene, but neighbor Bob Alexander said he saw investigators removing bodies from the gutted remnants of the home early Sunday afternoon. Family members of some victims who gathered in a chapel across the street from the town hall declined to speak with reporters.

"It's terrible to see somebody's children come out of that house this way," Alexander said.'

HLJ

'[Walter] McNeil said he could not remember any courses he took at St. John's or the names of any professors or how much tuition he paid. He also was not sure whether he wrote a master's thesis. "I think I did," he said.'

'McNeil is "putting himself on the same standard as other people with legitimate master's (degrees). It's not morally acceptable," said Allen Ezell, a former FBI agent who has written books on the issue and now investigates corporate fraud as a Wachovia vice president in Tampa. "He's a cop. He's a law enforcement officer. He's supposed to lead by example."'

'"It's basically a guy in some church," said Alan Contreras, who heads Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization, which closely tracks schools with questionable accreditation.'

I've been haunted about the issue concerning plagiarism in connection with President Poshard since I first heard about it. [Haunted is certainly seasonally appropriate...]

My first reflections went back to a recent issue about Dr. Walter Wendler being replaced because of plagiarism. [Wendler is one of three high-ranking SIU administrators who plagiarized.]

I've researched the dictionary and found the meaning of the word to be "To take (ideas, writings, etc.) from (another) and pass them off as one's own." I am persuaded by this definition.

Dr. Wendler didn't plagiarize anyone, because he was using his own plan for a project on the SIU campus. [He recycled a plan he'd prepared for a whole other university and, largely word for word, just stuck it onto SIU. This was stupid and lazy. He also more straightforwardly plagiarized in a speech he gave at SIU.] Dr. Wendler comes across to me as a fine gentleman and an asset to any organization. I've met him on campus a couple of times, and he is very well dressed, presents himself well and speaks to me although he doesn't know me. I'm honored. [See, this is the non-'thesdanian thing. In UD's world, defending a guy from plagiarism charges on the basis of the cut of his suit isn't considered a good move.]

He is a Christian man [Dresses well and isn't Jewish or anything.] and objects to some of the trends on campus, and I, for one, agree with him in what he attempted to do and his attitude about the whole affair. [What whole affair? This is mysterious. Haunting.]

I wonder if these issues [??] stimulated the anonymous letters that inspired the original accusations. I've been guilty of quoting the Bible at times without giving credit and have gotten away with it. President Poshard has been exonerated. Let's correct the issue with Dr. Wendler. [He'll be exonerating the third SIU plagiarist next.]

Labels: SOS

... cited in the report, $3,357 in charges at a New Brunswick restaurant -- including more than $1,000 in alcoholic beverages that included a $125 bottle of wine -- were billed to a state-funded [Rutgers University] account called Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture".

'[An] absorbing and suspenseful production ... "Redshirts" chronicles the crisis that erupts at a university when four football players are accused of plagiarizing an English paper.

...[It examines] the calculus of power and powerlessness on the Tennessee Southern campus. Dante [a player] and his teammates are at the mercy of [English professor] Dr. Bigelow and other authority figures from the university establishment.

But the athletes have a larger vulnerability, as their encounters with English literature suggest: They've missed out on valuable cultural grounding enjoyed by society's elite. "'Moor' and 'prayer?' That's a rhyme now?" Curtis complains in frustration while studying Emily Dickinson. "Man, they just keep makin' this [stuff] up!" Language is a kind of power, but it's one that largely eludes these students...'

'As high school seniors narrow their choices for college and parents gingerly peek at the price tags, they're asking themselves: How is it possible that colleges charge so much?

Colleges blame big tuition hikes on rising bills for fuel, health care benefits and salaries--and on the cost of keeping up with College X and its new rock-climbing wall and wired dorm. Businesses, though, face the same escalating costs and the same pressure to upgrade their products, but they don't raise their prices at anything like the same pace.

Since 1983 the cost of keeping colleges running has outpaced the Consumer Price Index by 48%, according to the Commonfund Institute, a nonprofit that compiles a higher-education price index. And the prices that colleges charge have climbed even faster. At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the tuition for students who don't qualify for a discount is up 270% in real terms in the past 25 years....'

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner. In our terminology, such an individual will be said to be acting like an AH. ... Following classical genetic theory, I postulate the existence of four alleles ...which I henceforth refer to as rectalleles ... Each pair of rectalleles constitutes a genotype; with four alleles there are 10 possible genotypes (disregarding allele order). An individual carrying the AH genotype will be referred to as a "complete AH"...

'I was appointed to raise the research profile of the school and, with the RAE submission now almost completed, I feel that we have achieved that objective. I am convinced that the school's RAE return will be an excellent one.

"I feel privileged to have led this school over the past few years. We now have excellent students, outstanding staff and a friendly and supportive working environment.'

'The full extent to which a leading business school head lifted material from papers published by his peers has emerged.

Tony Antoniou quit his post as dean of Durham Business School at the beginning of September for what were described as "personal reasons", amid unspecified allegations of plagiarism. He remains a professor of finance at the university.

An investigation by The Times Higher reveals that large quantities of material in Professor Antoniou's 1986 DPhil thesis, and a later journal article, are copied from a number of other sources.


The Times Higher has established that substantial parts of the professor's York University DPhil thesis, Futures Markets: Theory and Tests, take material from at least three other sources.

The introduction to Professor Antoniou's thesis begins identically to that of a paper by American academic Gary Koppenhaver "Risk Aversion and Futures Market Behaviour".

Both papers start with the same quote, attributed to an anonymous futures market analyst, and both are identical until the sixth line of the first paragraph.

Large sections of two chapters in the DPhil are also taken from Mr Koppenhaver's paper.



The DPhil also uses material from two other theses: Stephen Taylor's Time Series Properties and Models of Commodity Prices, Lancaster University, 1978, and Dosung Chung's Individual Optimisation and Market Equilibrium in Futures, Washington University, 1982.



Substantial duplication of other work is also apparent in a paper Professor Antoniou wrote in 1988 for the Journal of Business and Society.

Professor Antoniou's paper, "Futures Market Efficiency and the Time Content of the Information Set", borrows heavily from a paper, "Futures Market Efficiency and the Time Content of the Information Sets" written in 1983 by US student David Goldfarb and two Israeli academics, David Bigman and Edna Schechtman, for The Journal of Futures Markets.


... Professor Taylor said: "I am personally satisfied that Professor Antoniou's 1986 DPhil thesis contains several sentences and paragraphs that are identical to material in my 1978 PhD thesis."

"As Antoniou does not include any of my research output in his list of references, it is easy to see why people may believe that plagiarism has occurred."'

'...Germany's Federal Court has overturned the arrest of a sociologist accused of being a member of an extreme left group.... Holm, a sociologist at Berlin's Humbolt University, was released on bail at the end of August after three weeks in prison.... In its warrant, the prosecutor's office had said Holm had twice met with a suspected member of mg and that the researcher used "keywords and phrases" in his academic texts that had appeared in documents written by mg, such as the term "gentrification," according to news reports.

It also said that "as an employee of a research institute, [Holm] had access to libraries where he could inconspicuously do the research required for the founding of a militant group."... The Federal court, however, said this evidence did not meet the requirements of showing it was a "strong possibility" that Holm himself was a mg member. ... In August, more than 100 academics from Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries called on German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms to release the sociologist.

..."We strictly oppose the use of violence as endorsed and practiced by the 'militant group,'" one of the letters reads. "At the same time, however, we strongly object to the notion of intellectual complicity adopted by the federal prosecutor's office in its investigation. …Such arguments allow any piece of academic writing to be potentially incriminating," the letter said.'

'Thirteen years after New Jersey dismantled higher education oversight, the entire system has shown itself to be vulnerable to waste of taxpayer and tuition dollars and abuse of positions by officials, a state commission reported Thursday.

The New Jersey Commission of Investigation said it found instances of officials taking gifts from contractors, accounting systems that were virtually indecipherable, patronage appointments to boards, out-of-control borrowing and little oversight of hiring practices and discretionary spending.

In the case of the alleged gift-taking, at the scandal-plagued University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the commission's findings were serious enough to be specifically forwarded to state prosecutors for further review, according to the report.

... For example, Rutgers University, the state's largest higher education institution, had an accounting system that was so poorly integrated, with record-keeping so decentralized, that commission investigators had to hire a private forensic accounting firm to gain an understanding of it, according to the report.

A study of a random sample of Rutgers University expense reports submitted by faculty members found that nearly two-thirds - 37 of 58 - had compliance problems. A university professor, for example, received about $5,500 to take six people, plus family members, to a workshop in Lake Placid, N.Y., but submitted no documentation to support the expenditure...

... State Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-Union, said the commission's report backs up his proposed legislation to increase state oversight of higher education.'

'A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is accusing aides of John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, of demanding that he remove from YouTube a student report critical of Mr. Edwards’s Democratic presidential campaign — and of threatening to block the university’s access to Mr. Edwards and the campaign headquarters near campus.

Mr. Edwards’s campaign officials said they did not level any such threat during what were clearly heated discussions with the professor and the student over her approach and over the central question in her report: Why has a campaign focused on poverty based its headquarters in an affluent part of Chapel Hill?

The student, Carla Babb, posted the report on YouTube as an entry to a video contest sponsored by MTV, giving the report the potential for national viewing. Ms. Babb had initially approached the Edwards campaign to interview a student working as an intern at its headquarters, but the piece changed focus after the initial request, taking a closer look at the location of Mr. Edwards’s campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, in light of its poverty message, which had been a subject of a column in the university newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.

The video includes an interview with the columnist, James Edward Dillard, saying, “To pick that place as your campaign center, when you’re going to be the man who advocates on behalf of the poor, I just think, why not turn the media’s attention to somewhere where there are huge, huge problems.”

Ms. Babb’s professor, C. A. Tuggle, said in an interview that after the report first appeared on YouTube on Tuesday night he received calls of complaint from a deputy in Mr. Edwards’s national press office, and, then, his communications director.

Mr. Tuggle said the aides told him they felt “blind-sided by the way the reporter presented the piece in the pitch,” adding unapologetically, “The focus of stories change[s] all of the time.”

“We told them we were not interested in taking it down or holding it from broadcast on our show on Monday,” Mr. Tuggle said, adding that the campaign responded by telling him that, “campus media would have real trouble getting any sort of access to the Edwards campaign, and so might other parts of the university.”'

'Jessica Seinfeld did not write the new cookbook Deceptively Delicious. A team of experts large enough to form a soccer team—a writer, chef, nutritionist, art director, photographer, agent, editor, project manager, and then some — did. [But despite claims by some, it's not plagiarized.] Plagiarism [is]... about dishonesty. It's about pretending someone else's ideas and work are your own, even if those ideas are paraphrased. [Seinfeld's book and the other book in question] are based on the same unremarkable, unoriginal idea. [This makes both books empty. But they're different enough in their particulars that one hasn't plagiarized from the other.]... Plagiarism is a serious accusation. It can get students expelled; it can ruin writers' careers. And if it's occurred, it should. But the news media should take plagiarism seriously enough to not use the word unless it truly applies. Many things can be said of Seinfeld's book and its runaway success. A sad commentary on the state of parenting? I think so. A triumph of celebrity over substance? You bet. Further evidence of the decline of the West? Definitely. But an act of plagiarism? No way.'

'...copied his 1986 doctoral thesis (University of York) from three other sources: a paper by Professor Koppenhaver, "Risk Aversion and Futures Market Behaviour", a thesis by Professor Stephen Taylor (Lancaster, 1978) and a thesis by Dosung Chung (Washington University, 1982). Furthermore an article he wrote in 1988 for the "Journal of Business and Society" is largely based on another article from the "The Journal of Futures Markets" of 1983.'

"The probability that two authors use the same sources six years apart to write exactly the same thing including quotes is nil...

The role of a senior administrator, especially in the highly competitive environment of business education, is to maintain and improve the institution's reputation. Reputations are built on the trust between scholars, students and business partners – the trust that is required for an environment of scholarship. While plagiarism is always abhorrent to scholars, plagiarism by a senior administrator not only destroys the reputation of the individual but also the very environment for scholarship. Pity the students, both past and present, for the price they pay for such a selfish act."

'The controversy surrounding the president of Southern Illinois University has begun to bother me. [Recall SOS's many, many cautions against beginning a letter of this sort with how upset, hot, bothered, wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again, you are. Feelings expressed in this way do nothing for an argument except make it feel minutely, dully, personal.] While I have met Dr. Poshard on several occasions professionally, I have no vested interest in the affair. However, as it is playing out I have several observations and questions. [Dead ringer for Mr. Collins, Pride and Prejudice.]

My first deals with the continuous calls for "open and honest" revelation on the part of Dr. Poshard. If that is the case, why is that not also required of the person(s) who brought to light the issue in the first place? [The author of this letter will prove quite the fan of the quotation mark. Read on.]

Next, I struggle with a concept of law known as the statute of limitations. [Writer thinks you're stupid. "...a concept of the law known as..." ] I believe that in law there are very few actions that do not have to follow that rule. One of those exceptions is for murder.

If an academic panel found the text of Dr. Poshard's work acceptable over 20 years ago, why is it an issue now? Please tell me we are not making this "issue" as grave a matter as that of taking a life? [Quotation marks around issue mean to say I don't think it's an issue! It's a non-issue! I speet on your "issue"...] I am also troubled by the faculty vote at SIUE and rational of the person who proposed it. [He means rationale. I think. Bit murky in here.] Quoting a former U.S. President: "What is 'is'?" [Meta-quotation marks. Not murky. Send a search party.]

In philosophy there is a construct known as "cause and effect." [Same thing as with statute of limitations above. Since we've never heard of cause and effect, the writer introduces it to us here. With quotation marks around it.] I wonder what the "real" cause is? [Though a Reverend, author appears to be a radical skeptic. "Does" "reality" "exist"?] Is it academic integrity or perhaps the not so off hand remark to separate the two campuses? Or could it be something else? In short, I find this small rodent-like bump being made into the latest glacial peak. [Off the rails here..] It seems that we are more and more becoming a people caught up in the minutiae while real problems within society remain.

Yes, academic integrity is important, but to the detriment of "real" societal issues; I think not! Perhaps some of those in the academic "ivory towers" and the editorial offices who have been calling for the removal of Dr. Poshard would like to join me in my office where I deal with people who are trying to purchase gasoline for their cars, put food on their tables, pay their rent or keep their utilities connected; "real" issues for "real" people.

Is it not time to return some "common" sense to the issues that seem to drive our media and our lives?

Rev. Gary Gummersheimer

Murphysboro, IL'

Labels: SOS

"The inmost spirit of poetry ...is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. "

"The only calibration that counts [Hughes wrote this toward the end of his life; it's addressed to his son] is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

"Do you remember ... you described a dream – ...A frog was jumping up the path behind you. You entered the building and closed the glass door, shutting out the frog. The frog then jumped against the glass of the door. Do you remember it?

...One series of dreams I had, from my teens on. Occasionally still have. Were versions of your frog. Instead of a frog, mine, in these dreams, is an aeroplane. Sometimes I'm in it. More often, it goes over – in trouble. On fire, or driving out of control. It crashes – usually just out of sight.

...That plane is the frog hitting the glass. Something from the other side of my conscious mind – something mighty important, ie the news from my whole body and its understandings, is trying to get through to me.

...What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life, that had somehow to be managed – internally – by me.

...The best I could do, through all those following years, to deal with that giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me, was write, as if to her, quite privately, simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together.

They were what accumulated, over the years, to this Birthday Letters. ... So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say. And nothing in my way of life contained the real me – I was living on the wrong side of the glass door. ...

It was when I realised that my only chance of getting past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public – like a confession – that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I've called them.

I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let your mother's Academic armies of support demolish me... – I can't care any more, I can't lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.

So I did it, and now I'm getting the surprise of my life. What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn't want to read it.

And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It's as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I never could think. I have a freedom of imagination I've not felt since 1962. Just to have got rid of all that.

Well, let's hope it wasn't all just a bit too late.

...You were given the means – if you use them, everything about you will be changed, by what follows the frog through the door. Slowly. Like a leakage. Bit by bit."

'Meet the top boss in Fort Bend County: County Judge Bob Hebert, who says he has a doctorate in management.

Hebert: “You want to know about my throw down degree.”

11 News: “The Ph.D.”

Hebert: “Oh, that’s my throw down degree.”

It’s from California Coast University, which is ... on the Texas illegal list.

But the judge claims, “I didn't get the degree to impress you or an employer or a voter. I got it to impress me.”

And he said, “I don't use that degree professionally. I don't sign any documents pertaining to the county as Bob Hebert, Ph.D.”

But 11 News showed him his own Web site.

“It says Ph.D. county judge,” Hebert said.

And the county’s official Web site had it too.

11 News: “You're claiming to be a Ph.D. as the county judge.”

Hebert: “That is an error.”

'11 News: “Do you claim you're a Ph.D. sir?”

Lin: “Oh yeah, yeah. I got a Ph.D. from Kennedy Western.”

He did say his Ph.D. was from Kennedy Western – something also mentioned on the Texas Southern’s own Web site.

11 News: “The State of Texas says it’s illegal for you to claim you are a doctor inside the state of Texas. Why would you continue to do that?”

Lin: “No I didn't claim that one myself. That's from the department.”

11 News: “Are you going to continue to claim you're a doctor?”

Lin: “Oh yes, yes. I have my Ph.D. degree. Yes.”'

'Thousands of Americans will travel to colleges and universities this fall for "parents' weekend." [Drop the effing quotation marks! ... Who told me that there's a whole blog now devoted to unnecessary quotation marks?] They'll wander leaf-strewn lawns and quadrangles with their sons and daughters, asking earnest questions about courses, sports and friends.

Later, when they retire to the local Hilton, Sheraton or Holiday Inn, they might notice something funny: It looks a lot like their children's dormitory. [This actually is funny, and a good comic writer could do great things with it... The idea that the parents' hotel room might indeed be less glamorous than their kid's dorm is a winner. But this writer will not be able to capitalize on the comic potential.]

Dorms are changing - to resemble hotels. Student centers have gotten makeovers, too. They look like museums or corporate office buildings. [These sentences, which gesture in the direction of description, but don't really describe, would be better if they featured actual physical details.]

At elite private universities and even at some public ones, students have nicer facilities and services than their parents could have imagined. That raises big questions about what we're teaching this generation and why.

Consider George Washington University in Washington [This is the Snapshots from Home bit in this post.], where incoming students receive engraved chocolates under their pillows during freshmen orientation. [Nothing's too good for UD's charges.] Or Ball State University in Ohio, which just opened a $36 million residence hall featuring mobile furniture, a digital music lab, and a dining hall that takes online take-out orders. [Isn't all furniture -- except for my new baby grand -- mobile?]

Plasma TVs? Got 'em. Refrigerators and microwaves? Check. Fitness center? Of course. Weekly housecleaning service? For an extra fee, it's yours. [The question and answer plus slangy language thing here is sort of lame.]

That's hardly the kind of luxury that Princeton president Woodrow Wilson envisioned a century ago, when he commissioned residential buildings. Wilson worried that too many students had moved off campus into "eating clubs," which separated them according to interests, tastes and wealth. Better that they live together in monasterylike brick or stone dormitories, sealed off from the world.

"A university was conceived as a place where the community life and spirit were supreme," wrote one Princeton architect in 1909, three years before Wilson entered the White House. "It was a walled city against materialism and all of its works." [Not sure of the wisdom of choosing America's most status-conscious, Social Registered university for your example of higher university values.]

After World War I, Harvard erected seven new dormitories along two sides of its famous yard. Featuring elaborate outside details but humble interiors, the dorms created a literal and symbolic divide between students and the surrounding city.

At new women's colleges, meanwhile, educators feared that off-campus boarding houses would lead innocent young women astray. So they took special care to construct solid but simple dormitories that would place all students under college supervision - and on equal economic footing. [He's muddying things here. Why bring in this now-unattractive paternalism? Does the writer want to go back to that, as well as to anti-materialism?]

"We have a chance to see what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess," the dean of Smith College wrote in 1919, praising a new set of dormitories.

The big boom in dorm construction occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, sparked by massive state and federal spending. In 1958, the University of California's nine campuses could house only 2,900 students; by 1970, they had residential space for nearly 20,000. Despite some new architectural styles, most of these dormitories were built in concrete or cinder block - functional, not fancy.

Fast-forward to the latest $22 million dormitory at Tufts University, offering suites with two large singles off a sunlit living room. Each has a dining room with a glass table and a kitchen with a dishwasher. "This is like going from Amerisuites to the Ritz-Carlton," a Tufts senior told the Boston Globe last month.

The dorm is a hotel, but it just got way nicer. That's bad news for anyone who cares about the future of the university. [Note the abruptness with which the writer now returns to the argument he introduced at the beginning of the essay. This is of course about the space constraint he's under. But it comes across as too sudden -- unprepared, unsupported.]

By providing really nice things for our kids, we're teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we're forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism.

Only a segment of students can afford the new luxuries, of course, which makes matters worse. More colleges now price dorms at different rates, depending on how many bells and whistles are included. So rich kids get the fancier residence halls and poorer students the older ones, which yields the economic divide Wilson and his generation wanted to avoid. [Again, it's not as if Princeton ever housed an economic divide.]

How did we get here? As government aid has declined, colleges chase the students with the most dollars, and the best way to do that is to offer really cool amenities. University presidents may not like catering to the whims of already-privileged 18-year-olds, but competing schools are doing it, so what choice is there?

During the Cold War, that kind of thinking was called "mutually assured destruction." At universities today, the era could be called "mutually assured consumption." And we're all impoverished by it. [Ask yourself: Is this a strong piece? I think the answer's no. And why is it not strong? Because it's sketchy. It's not able to gather its complicated and multifaceted subject matter into a concise little polemic. And the main reason for that failure, IMHO, lies in the writer's lack of an individual sensibility. The one crucial ingredient missing in this piece is an interesting consciousness. The writer might have, for instance, started in the first-person rather than the third, drawing on his own years of university life to give his argument a sense of emotional immediacy to go with its intellectual substance. Instead, his voice is that of a vague, disembodied, complainer.]'

Labels: SOS

The first signal Division I’s dashboard indicators project [Cute name, and UD's just able to make out that it has something to do with cars.] has revealed is that the “check engine” light is on. Athletics spending is progressing at a rate three times that of overall university spending — a pace presidents and chancellors know is not sustainable in the long run. [The piece is about to announce a new service for member universities -- the NCAA will provide schools with comparative sports spending numbers from the other schools. Note that the piece does begin with a seeming acknowledgment of problems in bigtime university spending on athletics. But, typical of bath salt writing, it will do this only in order to calm readers' fears as the piece progresses.]

While the blinking beacon may be alarming to some, others are reassured [The calming process begins.] that the NCAA’s collaboration with the National Association of College and University Business Officers to produce a uniform data-reporting system and provide dashboard indicators that allow for peer comparison will serve as a financial GPS for big-time intercollegiate athletics. [Note the hokey playing out of the dashboard metaphor.]

The dashboards, which are expected to be finalized in spring 2008, are to fiscal responsibility as the APR is to academic reform. [This sentence exemplifies the to be verb problem in writing, about which SOS has written in greater detail here. In one sentence, the writer has given us four instances of is: are, to be, are, is. It makes for a dull and wordy sentence. Rewrite it something like this: The dashboards, due in spring 2008, are a kind of APR of fiscal responsibility. Your reader knows what APR means.] They are benchmarks developed on a by-campus basis that provide presidents, athletics directors and university CFOs the most comprehensive, accurate and comparable data to date that inform decisions about athletics spending.

That means Kent State can compare itself to its Mid-American Conference peers in its reliance upon university-allocated funds as a percentage of the total athletics budget. Texas Tech can see where it ranks among Big 12 schools in football revenues. Duke can run a comparison with other private institutions on athletics giving. Oregon can determine its percentile in revenues via ticket sales. Illinois can stack up against other traditional basketball powers in facility investment. A Football Championship Subdivision institution can see the investment it takes to reclassify to the Football Bowl Subdivision. [This is a good paragraph, with varied prose and rich examples. It mentions one of UD's favorites, Texas Tech, where four of every ten annual debt service dollars repays loans for athletics facilities. Texas Tech's program just emptied its reserve fund because of a multi-million dollar deficit.]

In other words, the dashboards can be all things to all schools. Simply put, it is the best customized financial data Division I has ever had, and the system is being applauded by those who will use it. [We're living in the best of all possible worlds. It's not as if many of the schools mentioned in this article are, like Texas Tech, ancient hulking sports factories with almost no interest in academics, schools who'll be made so anxious about this new data about what their rivals are spending that they'll add a few more catastrophic athletic expenditures to the ones they've already made. No -- things are great, and they'll be made greater by the dashboard indicators.]

“We do a lot of benchmarking at the institutional level,” said Michigan State University’s Kathy Lindahl, the school’s vice president for financial administration. “The dashboard project for athletics has tremendous potential in that it gives you instant validation as to whether you are ahead of the curve, behind it or in the ballpark. The data bring athletics to a level of sophistication that universities are accustomed to in other areas of the campus.” [Machine-generated prose, with an eerie manufactured enthusiasm thrown in... Oh, and here's another example of this sort of prose...]

... “Presidents are deeply engaged in benchmarking in every other aspect of our work — why not in athletics?” University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher said. “We are creating a system for accountability for the value added of a college degree, a system about what students are learning from their general studies program and a system about the degree to which students are satisfied with their college experience. We are using national instrumentation to probe those areas, so the idea of a common data set for gauging the return on our investment in athletics is just as important.” [Gauging what's going on -- financially, legally, morally, academically -- in most of bigtime university athletics isn't about dashboards. It's about sledgehammers. Texas Tech doesn't need sophisticated instrumentation to know it's got its head up its ass.]


...“The kind of change we’re talking about will be more incremental than revolutionary,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chancellor James Moeser, who as a Task Force member helped draft the white paper on the dashboard project. “But we are giving leaders the tools to make more informed decisions. It’s up to every president and chancellor to use them in their own situations.” [This overlooks the fact that presidents and chancellors, at many of these schools, have little to no power over athletics.]

...“There will be a lot more conversation between the athletics department and our vice chancellor for financial administration than there has been in the past, for example,” Moeser said. “And there will be more regular presentations by athletics to the budget committee.” [Uh-huh.]

... Task Force members acknowledge the possibility that the additional data may in fact fuel the perceived arms race in athletics [Note the word "perceived." It's not perceived. It's actual.] rather than douse the flame, but most of them downplay the concern [Bath salt prose. No cause for alarm! Keep doing what you've been doing!], saying that more accurate data beats little or unreliable information.

... Others, though, think the dashboards will prompt institutions in the upper echelon to hit cruise control and some in the lower half to step on the gas.

“Large governing bodies are guilty of that kind of behavior, and you can’t help it,” said Katie Hill, a senior associate athletics director at Clemson University. “You presume that everyone’s decision-making is based on the global good. It’s not. Does our government scale back spending because the national budget is out of hand? No. Does our national debt keep us from borrowing from China? No. We’ve heard the expression that all politics are local — well, all athletics decisions are local, too. It’s about what our universities, our athletics departments, and our fans and supporters expect from us.” [Writer sticks the truth of the situation at the end of the piece -- things like dashboard indicators hasten the trend in which schools like the University of Texas maintain obscenely over-funded sports programs, and smaller schools destroy themselves trying to keep up. The writer gives us another paragraph insisting this worry is groundless, and then he concludes the piece.]

Labels: SOS

'[Health and Human Services Secretary Mike] Leavitt and Michael Chertoff at Homeland Security are the first two members of President Bush's Cabinet who are blogging.

..."I've decided to wade in a little deeper into blogdom by writing one for the next month or so," Leavitt wrote in his first entry. "I'm going to see how I feel after that time period. I may continue; I may not."

Leavitt says he writes every blog entry himself, often late at night in hotel rooms when he is traveling. He is concerned that his entries are too long; on Aug. 20, he wrote 2,444 words about his trip to an orphanage in South Africa.

... Leavitt said his blogging experience has so far been positive. The blog has picked up almost 100 links, he pointed out. "I have no idea if that's any good," he wrote. "Maybe some of you more experienced bloggers can give me some perspective."'

'City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier - SUX - and instead have made it the centrepiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned website - www.flysux.com.

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives - GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY - but airport trustees turned them down.

Airport board member Dave Bernstein proposed embracing the identifier.

"Let's make the best of it," Bernstein said. "I think we have the opportunity to turn it into a positive."

He noted that many airports, including some of the busiest, have forgettable three-letter codes.

"I've got buddies that I went to college with in different cities that can't even remember their own birthdays, but they all know the Sioux City designator - SUX," he said.

Mayor Craig Berenstein, who in 2002 described SUX as an "embarrassment" to the city, said he views the new slogan as a "cute little way" to make light of the situation.'

'University President Steven Knapp said he plans to lower GW's tuition, saying it negatively impacts the University's image and leaves students piled in loans, in his first address to the Board of Trustees Friday.

"I am personally not happy with seeing this institution at the top of the list of price," Knapp said at the meeting of the University's highest governing body.

Without taking GW's fixed tuition policy into account, GW is the most expensive private institution in the country. Knapp spoke about the impact of negative media attention that linked GW's decreasing U.S. News and World report ranking with the University's increasing cost.

... "(The price) leads to the dangerous perception that we're costing more than we're worth," Knapp said.'

---gw hatchet---

'FDA WARNS VIAGRA USERS
MAY SUFFER HEARING LOSS


Users of impotence drugs, such as Viagra, may suffer sudden hearing loss, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

It's not clear that the drugs truly trigger hearing loss, but the Food and Drug Administration decided Thursday the drugs would bear a warning about the possible risk after counting 29 reports of the problem since 1996 among users of this family of medicines.

The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will bear the warnings. So will Revatio, a drug for pulmonary hypertension, which contains the same ingredient as Viagra.

Viagra's label already mentioned hearing loss as a possibility, because a few cases were reported during initial testing of that drug. But given that hearing loss is a risk of advancing age and certain conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, that can lead to impotence, it wasn't clear if the link was real.

... The reports involve hearing loss in one ear, which in a third of cases was temporary.

FDA urged patients who experience any hearing problems — loss or ringing in the ears — to promptly call their doctors and stop taking the impotence drugs.'

GUESTS: Tom Lantos Mark Parris Jimmy Carter
Ban Ki-Moon Margaret Soltan.

'...[N]ow they tell me -- they being the SIU seven member faculty investigating committee -- that Poshard's padding his paper with multiple paragraphs copied verbatim from other sources, without quotes or footnotes, was "consistent with the style used at the time by other graduate students." Apparently, I was too naïve to know I could have saved hours and headaches [on my dissertation] by simply copying thousands of words from already published sources to submit as my own.

The seven committee members, who work for SIU President Poshard, assigned no penalty, told him he may keep his job and to correct his dissertation. They justified their October 12th decision on the basis that SIU had no "definition" or "code of conduct" regarding plagiarism in the olden days of 1984.

... Are my ears not working right, or is this not the number one educator at a state university, echoing the same tired claims of countless students caught cheating in school over the years?

What is even more embarrassing to everyone else in higher education is the rationalizing of the SIU investigating committee.


...In Glenn Poshard's doctoral thesis about programs in education for the gifted, the committee found 14 passages copied from other sources without citations (presenting others' findings as his own), and 16 other passages copied and cited, but not placed in quotations (presenting others' words as his own).

Thousands of students in American schools have received F's for considerably less.

Glenn Poshard can keep his job, if SIU still wants him.

But his degree is another matter. Degrees and diplomas are supposed to be guarantees, and his does not guarantee the scholarship and integrity it's supposed to...'

---mercury news---

'No wonder the Liberal Democrats are all over the place: one of the contenders for the party leadership once declared that opium could be “safely experimented with” and that LSD “holds no surprises”.

This weekend Chris Huhne is discovering, just as David Cameron before him, that his undergraduate days at Oxford can come back to haunt him. Last night Huhne, 53, was doing his best to disown an article he appears to have written in an Oxford student magazine about the benefits of illegal hard drugs.

The piece, which bears his name as an 18-year-old student at Oxford University in the 1970s, states that drugs such as opium, LSD, and amphetamines should be an “accepted facet of our society”.



Most notable is the author’s apparent familiarity with class A substances and their effect when taken. “Opium is available in Oxford and, in its natural form can be safely experimented with,” the article states. Opium and the class A drug heroin are both opiates. “Colours, movements and shapes are serenely beautiful, as beautiful as a dream and as realistic as George’s [a cafe frequented by students] at 7.30 on a Monday morning.

“Acid [LSD] is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper . . . The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people . . . if one is able to live with oneself . . . then acid holds no surprises.”

The article was published in the university’s Isis magazine in February 1973 clearly bearing his byline. But this weekend the MP for Eastleigh was struggling, possibly through the passage of time, to remember it. He said that he could not recall writing it and suggested he might only have been compiling the thoughts of other contributors.




“To be honest I don’t have any memory of it,” said Huhne. He insisted that it was his private business whether or not he had taken opium or any other drug, but said “the views that were [expressed in the article] are certainly not my views as they are at the moment”.

... Huhne went to Magdalen College and won a first class degree in politics, philosophy and economics. He began writing for Isis soon after starting university and became its joint editor for a period.

The exposition on the benefits of hard drugs was published as part of a longer article on how to “escape” the trials of being a student at Oxford.

“There are a number of people who are open-minded about experimenting with drugs,” recorded the piece, which was accompanied by a drawing of a hand holding a syringe.

“This tolerance is welcome, and it is only with the aid of this tolerance that drugs can be put in their correct unsensationalist place as a social phenomenon with great and respectable antecedents.”



When asked about the article Huhne said: “I was basically putting together large hunks of that, so God knows who wrote it and did anything and I wouldn’t attribute it to me if I were you.”

When told that his byline was attached, he added: “I may have edited the piece but as I say I was just bringing together whole loads of stuff.” ...'

Summarized.

'Timothy L. Jacobs, charged Thursday with illegal possession of three assault weapons after police removed 350 guns from a house and barn on Highland Avenue last week, is an associate professor of sociology at Naugatuck Valley Community College.

He shares the property with his estranged ex-girlfriend and their 5-year-old son. The child's mother, Anne Marie Kelly Jacobs, has full custody of the boy. The couple's relationship broke down a year ago, and Jacobs had been living in the barn, where most of the weapons were found. The mother first called police Oct. 5 after finding six loaded handguns in a dresser drawer inside the house.

A spokeswoman for the state community college system did not immediately return a phone call Thursday afternoon seeking comment about Jacobs' job status. He has taught at Naugatuck Valley at least since 1994 and earns about $70,000 annually.




The 59-year-old Jacobs, a thin, slightly stooped man with collar-length, scraggly gray hair, was arraigned in Superior Court Thursday on three felony counts of possessing an assault weapon. It was illegal for Jacobs, formerly of the Moodus section of East Haddam, to have the weapons because he failed to obtain the required certificate of possession from state police and to register the guns, prosecutors said.

He was ordered jailed, with bail set at $75,000, and he faces a maximum of 15 years in prison.

His attorney, John Maxwell, argued for a lower bail, saying his client has had serious psychological problems for years, but was not a flight risk.

"He seems like an otherwise peaceful man," Maxell said after the court hearing. "Certainly, he has some issues. He apparently collected the guns."



In court, Assistant State's Attorney Craig Nowak said that the charges were serious and that possession of the illegal guns was highly troubling. Superior Court Judge Barbara Jongbloed refused to lower the bond, and she barred Jacobs from having any contact with the child or the child's mother if he were to make bail.

Maxell noted that the guns were safely stowed in the Middletown police property room, but that was of no solace to Kelly Jacobs' attorney, Heidi Alexander.

"I wouldn't trust this guy with chemicals for the lawn," Alexander said in court.

Nowak told the judge that federal authorities are also considering whether to seek an indictment against Jacobs for possession of a fourth illegal weapon - a "streetsweeper" shotgun with a revolving ammunition drum for quick loading. That firearm is illegal in the United States, Nowak said later.

After finding the six loaded, unsecured handguns in a dresser drawer, Kelly Jacobs told police she was concerned for the safety of her son, according to court records. That call led to the seizure by police of 350 weapons over a period of a week. Kelly Jacobs also obtained a restraining order against Jacobs.

The weapons cache included 200 pistols, 100 shotguns, 50 rifles, 18,000 rounds of ammunition, 75 sharp-edged martial-arts weapons, more than a dozen manuals on the making of explosives, two grenade launchers, and four bulletproof vests, city police said.

Nowak said after the hearing that Middletown police and federal agents were studying three additional assault weapons to see whether they were manufactured after a national assault-weapon ban was passed. If they were, it would be illegal for Jacobs to have possessed them.

Sgt. Scott Aresco, a Middletown police spokesman, said in a press release that "additional charges have not been ruled out."'

'...The Ducks have blatantly said that the big-bucks donor has become more important to the athletic department than the athletic director, and it's naïve to think otherwise.

Even if you wanted to, you can't -- the Ducks hired a prominent donor to replace [former coach Bill] Moos. Pat Kilkenny is second to [Phil] Knight in money given to Oregon, and now he's running the asylum.

It's amazing, really. No, astonishing. A wildly successful businessman, Kilkenny, 55, is ex-CEO of Arrowhead General Insurance Agency in San Diego. He has donated nearly $6 million to Oregon athletics, which more than compensates for having no AD experience or a college degree. He also is said to have paid a large chunk of Moos' buyout, but this was before he was a candidate for the job.

According to a story in the university's student newspaper, the Daily Emerald, 92 faculty members signed a letter that ran in the Eugene Register-Guard complaining about the hiring and the imbalance of academics and athletics.

Professor Tom Givon was quoted as saying: "The business of letting a major fundraiser become the force of the athletic department is just the last straw. It's just a money bag. Excuse me, but I'm sick of seeing money bags creating this place into an athletic empire."...

The strippers wouldn’t take no for an answer. While the boys drank Perrier and played chess while listening to The Very Best of Chopin, the dancers climbed through an open window into the bathroom. The boys, hearing a commotion in the lavatory, barricaded the strippers into the bathroom.

'A massage may have led to the killing of a popular community college professor, sources said.

Richard Urdiales, 53, was found beaten to death on Sunday outside a house on North 55th Street.

Urdiales was an English professor at Blue River Metropolitan Community College in Independence, Mo., but he also made extra money as a masseur.

Students told KCTV5's Liana Joyce that Urdiales had a unique teaching style they could relate to. "He was really loud sometimes. And I liked it, because I'm really loud, too," said Lindsay Walker, a student at the school. She added, "He was one of my favorite teachers."'

'Universities may change the way they manage their e-mail systems in the near future, as companies like Google and Microsoft seek to tap the college market.

Google recently convinced Arizona State University's 65,000 students to switch to Google e-mail services. And a number of other universities, including Vanderbilt, might make the switch as well...'

'...Mailboxes often fill to quota with little effort and need to be cleared out several times a semester. Both the Web-based version and the recommended e-mail client Mulberry look like they may have been designed in the late ‘90s. And the program offers no additional services — such as a chat mechanism or a way to view which of your contacts are currently online. Even a task as simple as creating a mailing list seems insurmountable with Webmail. [UD would add that her university's system seems eager to time you out when you're writing a slightly longer than usual email.]


In essence, ITS spends an inordinate amount of time and resources maintaining a system that offers less than what students can get elsewhere for free. With more students switching to Gmail each year, it will eventually make very little sense for the university to sustain its own e-mail program.


Arizona State University has already made the switch for their 65,000 students; surely the transition would be even easier at a place with a significantly smaller student body....'

'...Here in Columbus, the OSU athletic department is a gold-plated island in a region getting roiled by harsh economic forces. The lavish program is the most vivid example of how college sports have turned into a humongous business and created a parallel universe of high-living in the world of academia. OSU's athletic budget, which has grown 46% in five years, has expanded despite a prolonged downturn in the Ohio economy and several rounds of public-funding cuts to higher education.

...Last year, the issue of swelling athletic-department budgets was taken up in Washington by the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. In a strongly worded letter to NCAA President Myles Brand, former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas criticized "highly paid coaches with no academic duties," and wrote that Division I football and men's basketball "more closely resemble professional sports than amateur sports..."'

'A student at Rider University's Westminster Choir College has been charged over a fellow student's death, prosecutors said Thursday.

According to the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office, 19-year-old Kieran Hunt of Piscataway sold heroin to freshman Justin Warfield and shot it up with him in the Princeton music school's parking lot on Tuesday evening.

Prosecutors said Warfield, an 18-year-old from Columbia, Md., had to be taken by ambulance early Wednesday to University Hospital in Princeton, where he was pronounced dead.

Hunt was arrested and charged Wednesday with being liable for Warfield's drug death, as well as selling him the heroin, prosecutors said. He is free on $100,000 bail.

Mercer County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman Casey DeBlasio didn't immediately respond to an Associated Press e-mail sent to him Thursday; no phone listing was found for Hunt in Piscataway.

Warfield's death comes seven months after another Rider freshman, Gary DeVercelly Jr., died after drinking at a fraternity party on the school's main campus in Lawrenceville.

The case got widespread attention, partly because of the legal maneuvering that followed.

Three students were charged with aggravated hazing, as were two university officials. The charges against the administrators were dropped; two of the students were accepted into a program that could allow them to avoid prison time; charges against the third student are still pending.

The case prompted the university to establish strict new rules governing on-campus alcohol use.

People who knew Warfield back in Maryland told The Star-Ledger of Newark that he graduated in June from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, which is located between Baltimore and Washington. A drummer, he was a member of "The Getaways," a band that performed at venues in that area.

Steve Holmes, director of the Maryland State Boychoir that Warfield was part of, remembered a talented young man.

"He was very charismatic. Justin had a shimmering beautiful voice..."'

We are writing in response to the "Our Word" editorial (including the cartoons) in Friday's DE, and Monday's "The P Word" editorial (including the cartoon), both which have occasioned a good deal of negative response on campus and in the wider community. We hope that you will explain what's puzzling about those editorials, as an initial contribution toward developing a reasoned and positive educational experience from what now is a sadly contentious episode in our university's life. [Beyond the vapid positive educational experience cliche, note that these two initial sentences are, well, puzzling. Does the word "puzzling," for instance, mean puzzling to the writers, or puzzling in the editorials? And already the tone feels condescending, irritated, defensive.]

What needs explaining is this: In Friday's paper, under the headline of [Drop of.]"Exactly what the doctor ordered," you say: "The committee has failed us. The Board of Trustees has failed us. Our university is a joke. And the Daily Egyptian is at a loss for words."

The initial question we ask is: What committee has failed you, and how? The first editorial appeared on the day that the review committee, charged last month by Chancellor Fernando Treviño, delivered its report to the chancellor, who in turn delivered it to the Board of Trustees. Yet the cartoons that follow those four sentences show a caricature labeled "blue ribbon committee" - an entity formed by SIU President Glenn Poshard, more than a year ago, which delivered its report last month. Both editorials confuse these very different committees.

These are different committees, chosen in radically different ways, and with completely different charges. We cannot speak for the "blue ribbon committee," and we certainly do not speak for the Board (any more than the Board speaks for us). Nor can we speak for President Poshard - or he, for us. However, we can speak as members of the review committee to what we have determined.

We ask that you, and all concerned persons [all concerned persons is police-speak] in our community, listen to the press conference and hear, for yourselves, that the chair of the Board of Trustees, in response to a specific question, said that "the Board does not feel that he committed plagiarism."

The chair of the review committee, however, responded to the same question by saying that the review committee concluded that "inadvertent or unintentional plagiarism" was the result of student Poshard's citation practices. (The Southern Illinoisan provides the audio: See their Web site under "Archives," Oct. 11.)

The report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published the first editorial does not consider plagiarism to be a joke. [Since it has treated it like one, it certainly does consider it a joke.] And the report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published that editorial does determine that plagiarism, understood within a particular definition of the many that exist [There aren't many definitions of plagiarism. These writers are obfuscating in an effort to get Poshard off the hook.], is present in the dissertation that student Poshard's committee approved. One item in the review committee's charge was to determine the "severity" of instances of incorrect citation. [It's clear that Poshard's dissertation represents severe plagiarism. Long verbatim passages from other places appear in it.]

Just as there is a spectrum of severity in a messy room, a case of poison ivy, a broken bone, or a misleading newspaper article, there is a spectrum of severity in plagiarism. Correlatively [Ooh, aren't we fancy. Correlatively. Throughout this piece, these two, who can't write, are talking down to students who can.], the law recognizes shades of severity in both civil and criminal cases - from negligence to intentional wrong doing; from manslaughter to first degree murder. People commonly accept that there are differences in the character of acts that make for differences in what decision is warranted. We determined that the category of "inadvertent plagiarism" was the most warranted in this case. [But why? In his remarks about the case immediately after the paper's discovery of it, Poshard himself seems to acknowledge that he was aware of what he was doing.]

Lastly, although we regret that the Board feels otherwise, that difference should suggest, at the very least, that we have acted independently in investigating the allegations and reaching our conclusions and recommendations. [What? Because you attached a bogus designation to your exoneration of him while the Board didn't bother to do this? That only makes the Board more honest than you.] Our report, listed as "Faculty Review Committee Report," along with the Board's statement and other statements and reports, is available for all to read at http://news.siu.edu.

The DE editorial board, as well as various commentators and letter writers, feel that because the review committee was composed of SIU faculty, it could not have remained objective because we were evaluating our boss. We believe that you should reconsider this presumption.

First, President Poshard is not our boss. We do not report to him directly or indirectly. We are all tenured faculty. [So? He determines your budgets, and is certainly, in a variety of other ways, in a position to make your lives unpleasant.]

Second, had the chancellor or we decided to convene an outside panel to review the allegations, this panel could not have been blind to the subject of the review (as is usually required in external, peer review). [I don't understand this sentence.]

Third, had that committee come to the same conclusion that we did, we're sure that the DE editorial board would have found many ways to discredit them, such as accusing us or the chancellor of cherry-picking panel members. To avoid any appearance of cherry-picking, the chancellor named this committee on the basis of our already being in elected positions of leadership in the Faculty Association, Faculty Senate and Graduate Council. [This is a sweet one. Choose institutional insiders to make sure the committee isn't made up of insiders.]

Fourth, we knew from the beginning that our findings would be highly scrutinized by both President Poshard's distracters [The student editors missed this one. Or did they -- as UD hopes -- non-inadvertently retain it, in order to display the semi-literacy of professors who feel comfortable condescending to students about their writing?], and his supporters. Moreover, we have our academic colleagues around the world looking over our shoulders. These concerns kept us in check, and kept us honest in our attempts to reach a fair conclusion.

Finally, as teachers and researchers, we suggest that reading our report and listening to the press conference might alleviate your sense of being at a loss for words. In the light of reading and listening to the relevant evidence, we, as members of the review committee, ask that you reconsider the belief that you have been failed, in light of reading and listening to the relevant sources of information and considering the following: [Dizzyingly circular sentence full of light.]

Had the review committee not followed due process, as set out in established university policies (specifically, in the Student Conduct Code) for investigating allegations of academic misconduct, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not applied thought, deliberation, and analysis, and instead relied solely on plagiarism software technology to reach our conclusion, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not gone further in our analysis than is indicated in recent media reports - which, in some cases, are misleading or inaccurate - we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not fully investigated the context and circumstances in which the alleged plagiarized text was prepared, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not concluded that the attribution style and other errors resulted in inadvertent plagiarism, we would have failed you. [Dayenu.]

Would you want any current, former or future SIU student accused of academic dishonesty to not be treated with due process, as we have treated this former student?

Labels: SOS

'[...C]ontemporary business schools increasingly see themselves as business organizations, not educational institutions. Over the past decade, the apparent dominance of market logic in how business educators think about their enterprise has become evident in their discourse. Business schools make a “value proposition” to students, who are now commonly described as “customers.”

A 2002 ... report titled “Management Education at Risk,” heavily laced with business jargon, described the increased “segmentation of consumer markets” for business education and explored its implications for “strategies to deliver educational and research services” on the part of business schools. Nowhere in this report, authored by a committee consisting mostly of business educators, was there any discussion of education as a mission, management as a profession, or the risk to the integrity of university business schools from an uncritical adoption of a commercial self-conception. This view has become part of the institutional character of business schools and indeed, as many have recently argued, of the American university itself.

While administrators at the elite business schools undoubtedly cringe at the notion that diplomas are merely market products, signals for employers, and induct students into elite networks, a cursory examination of business school Web sites and marketing material will highlight that the same administrators have nevertheless continued to promote their schools as a means of access to benefits clearly ancillary to education, in particular a valuable credential associated with a high “return on investment” and access to elite networks.

One reason that business school deans and administrators may have been reluctant to face up to the reality of the changes unfolding before their eyes is that these changes, examined closely, can be seen to carry implications that severely undermine the intellectual and social foundations of the university-based business school itself, calling its very reason for continued existence into question.

The ideas of shareholder primacy and managers as the agents of shareholders, which now is the staple of most M.B.A. curriculums, stripped the occupation of management of any last vestiges of professional identity, self-respect, or responsibility that had been attached to it through the efforts of business school founders, leaders, and faculty going back over a century to the birth of the university business school itself.

This raised the question, among others, of whether business schools were actually “professional schools” if business management itself was indeed not actually a profession. And if they were not — if, instead, business schools were highly sophisticated trade schools that existed to prepare students, by and large, for careers dedicated to the sole purpose of creating private wealth, for themselves as “agents” as well as for shareholders as “principals” — another question that arose was whether business schools remained aligned with the mission of the university to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge to advance the public good.'

'Sport is not considered art. Instead, it is invariably dismissed as something lesser — even something rather more vulgar — than the more traditional performance activities. [Not considering something art is not the same as diminishing it. Most people don't diminish sports relative to the arts. They put the two things in different categories. And some sports are violent -- their very nature is violence -- which is not the same as vulgar. I don't say football, for instance, is vulgar. I say it's primarily violent, and that it appeals not to the aesthetic but to the violent sensibilities of its audience. If military strategy and battlefield skill with weaponry is an art, football is also an art. Singers and dancers aren't trying to move a ball down a field by injuring the person in their way.]

Now Gary Walters, the athletic director at Princeton, has spoken out that sport should be granted equal educational prestige with the likes of drama and art and music. [Getting a little foggy already. What does "art" mean in that list? Painting? Painting's not a performance art.]


"Is it time," he asks, "for the educational-athletic experience on our playing fields [to] be accorded the same ... academic respect as the arts?" [Here the significant distinction is between simple daily life, which incorporates into it all sorts of experiences we can call educational, and the forms of education which are specific to universities. The sort of education you get playing a game has nothing to do with the sort of education universities provide. This is one reason we call sports extra-curricular.]

Walters validates his advocacy with unique credentials beyond the Ivy League. He went to the Final Four as playmaker on Bill Bradley's last team. He was chairman of the national Division I basketball committee this year, the maestro of March Madness. This is all to say that he brings the broadest perspective to college sports, and it mightily irritates Walters that sport is only considered a "distant cousin" to the arts. [Nothing in this paragraph is relevant to the argument Walters and Deford are trying to make. What is Walters' educational background? Does he have a degree in art theory?]

Well, apart from simply being so sweaty, I think that sport has suffered in comparison with the arts — or should I say: the other arts — because it is founded on trying to win. Artists are not supposed to be competitive. [Not true. Artists are both supposed to be competitive,and are competitive. Architects compete for commissions. Writers compete for subsidies. Singers and instrumentalists are always competing for prizes.] They are expected to be above that. We always hear "art for art's sake." Nobody ever says "sport for sport's sake." [We never hear art for art's sake. That went out a century ago.]

I also believe that sport has suffered because until recently, athletic performance could not be preserved. What we accepted as great art — whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony — is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

Now, however, that we can study the grace of the athlete on film, a double play can be viewed as pretty as any pas de deux. Or, please: Is not what we saw Michael Jordan do every bit as artistic as what we saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do? [An instant replay of a move an athlete's coach told him to make in one particular moment in order to gain two points is not the equivalent of a dancer interpreting a ballet.]

Of course, in the academic world, precisely that place where art is defined and certified [It's not in academia that art is defined and certified. Art pre-exists academia, and has evolved its own traditions, forms, and meanings. Academia elaborates on these, certainly, and chooses among artworks -- finding some more valuable than others -- but transforming football into an art is not a matter of finding a bunch of professors who'll agree to say that it is.], sport is its own worst enemy. Its corruption in college diminishes it so and makes it all seem so grubby. But just because so many ersatz students are shoe-horned into colleges as athletes and then kept eligible academically through various deceits, the intrinsic essence of the athlete playing his game should not be affected. [Why not? We respond to the artistic expressions that we have. Those that seem corrupt and inauthentic, those undermined by their intrinsic falseness, are rightly rejected in favor of those modes of art that seem to us authentic. Just because we can imagine an ideal Division One football game unshadowed by squalor doesn't mean we should enshrine that ideal as an art. Admiring our inexistent ideal football team is not art appreciation. It's mental masturbation.]

As Walters argues, "Athletic competition nourishes our collective souls and contributes to the holistic education of the total person in the same manner as the arts." [This vacuous language tells you all you need to know about Walters' ability to argue his case. Holistic, total, and totally holistic. Oprah Winfrey Show here we come.]

Certainly, there remains a huge double standard in college. Why can a young musician major in music, a young actor major in drama, but a young football player can't major in football? That not only strikes me as unfair, but it encourages the hypocrisy that contributes to the situation where those hidebound defenders of the artistic faith can take delight in looking down their noses at sport. [We don't look down our noses, and we're not hidebound. We are awed by a billion dollar industry exclusively devoted to entertainment which has installed itself on our university campuses.]

So, yes, Walters' argument makes for fair game: Is sport one of the arts? Or, just because you can bet on something, does that disqualify it as a thing of beauty? [Does sport intend to be beautiful? Artistic activity is aesthetic activity. It intends beauty. Does football?]'

'It was unclear Monday what, if any, discipline Baylor University officials will hand down to an assistant football coach cited early Sunday for allegedly urinating on the bar at a watering hole frequented by Baylor students.

Eric Schnupp, Baylor’s offensive line/tight ends coach, was issued a citation at 2:20 a.m. for disorderly conduct-reckless exposure at Scruffy Murphy’s, 1226 Speight Ave., said Waco police spokesman Steve Anderson.

The citation was a Class C misdemeanor, carrying a $258 fine, according to a Waco Municipal Court spokeswoman.

The alleged incident happened around closing time, as employees were getting patrons out of the bar, said bartender Danny Severe, who was working at the time.

Severe said an employee witnessed Schnupp urinating on the bar, and a manager told police, who were already at the bar for an unrelated matter.



“While we were kicking everybody out, he apparently thought that nobody was looking and whipped it out and (urinated) on the bar,” Severe said. “He tried to deny it, but there was definitely a puddle and there was no one else around him.”

Severe said Schnupp had taken several shots of hard liquor, most bought for him by other people. Severe said bartenders had not directly served any liquor to Schnupp between 1 and 2 a.m.

Baylor associate athletics director Nick Joos said Monday morning that a call from the Tribune-Herald was the first time Baylor officials had heard about Schnupp’s citation.

After discussions with athletics director Ian McCaw and head football coach Guy Morriss, Joos said, “We are aware of the situation involving Coach Schnupp and discipline will be handled internally. Since this is a university personnel issue, neither Coach Morriss nor Baylor Athletics will comment further on this situation.”

Joos wouldn’t say what disciplinary measures are being considered, but said “I can tell you that Coach Morriss is taking this issue very seriously.”

Schnupp [from the German, "to breathe heavily"], in his first year as a Baylor coach, played football for the University of Miami from 1995-2000 and previously coached at West Texas A&M University.

He traveled with the team to Lawrence, Kan., where they were defeated by the Kansas Jayhawks, 58-10, Saturday afternoon...'

'Nebraska athletic director Steve Pederson was fired Monday, two days after the school's once-mighty football team was rocked with its worst home loss in nearly a half-century.

... [It will] cost at least $2.2 million to buy Pederson out of his contract.

At the end of July, Pederson's contract was renewed for five years...'

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

'Plain speaking about sex conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time.'

---tulsa world---

CAMBRIDGE - Drew Gilpin Faust, who will be officially installed as Harvard's first female president today, should use her new bully pulpit to push for a more diverse faculty and administration and to unify a school often split by competing fiefdoms, professors and students say.

"I want her to both celebrate and promote Harvard's diversity," said Charles Ogletree, a law professor since 1985. "She is symbolic of the fact that it is a new day at Harvard." [A-fucking-mazing. Reporter starts article with self-righteous statement from Harvard's Number One faculty plagiarist.]

...[Professor Orlando] Patterson said that most of all he wanted Faust to emphasize the importance of teaching and to improve the student-to-teacher ratio.

"This is the richest university in the world," Patterson said, "and we really ought to be able to say that the ratio of students to teacher should be no more than 12, and every effort should be made for professors to be able to meet with students in a meaningful way."[That should read richest university in the universe.]

'Past generations of Arizona's football and men's basketball teams wrote the headlines, but when essay assignments arrived, your high-profile athletes took a hit in the loss column. [The reporter for the University of Arizona newspaper is a freshman who writes pretty well. Naturally, though, SOS has some suggestions...] [...For instance, generations would be better than past generations. Past is implicit when you refer to generations. And while SOS is about to notice and more or less admire the flamboyant language throughout the piece, she will also issue a caution about overuse...]


Both teams held the worst graduation rates in the Pacific 10 Conference from 1997-2000, according to the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate report released Oct. 3. For the third year in a row, Arizona football occupied the Pac-10 cellar with a 41 percent graduation rate of players earning a degree within six years of enrollment.

This year, the men's basketball team joined the basement party with a backboard-shattering 25 percent graduation rate - less than half of the national average of 61 percent. [Basement party's nice, and backboard-shattering's great, but when you put them together you get a mixed metaphor.]

The McKale male ballers may have grabbed plenty of rebounds in March, but when it came down to snagging a diploma on the hardwood, three of four players shot the air ball in May. [Peppy, peppy. But a little over the top with all the sports metaphors.] Wonder if 25 percent from the free-throw line would be an acceptable performance on the court? [Very good. But I'd tighten it a bit: Would 25 percent from the free throw line look good to you? Something like that.]

Then again, look who's laughing now, sitting pretty with multi-million dollar bankrolls. [Look who's laughing now is a walloping cliche... But SOS has pointed out before on this blog that sports writing is cliche writing, so there may be no way out of this...]

"For the elite-level kid, basketball is everything," said Josh Pastner, a UA men's basketball assistant coach. "Why do you think Mike Bibby came here? He came here to get ready for his chosen profession."

Pastner believes the NCAA data is skewed, since the numbers penalize student-athletes who leave school to turn professional. [Um, in what way is this skewed? It's exactly what the numbers mean to reveal.] The percentage also fails to credit former players like Mile Simon, who left Arizona in 1998 but returned to finish his degree outside of the designated six-year period.

Can you blame current NBA superstars Bibby, Gilbert Arenas and Jason Terry for walking away from Tucson to cash contracts combining for hundreds of millions?

"Make Gilbert Arenas stay four years - I want to hear how they're going to do that," said Jim Rosborough, UA special assistant to the athletic director.

In his 18 years as an assistant coach for Olson's Arizona men's basketball program, Rosborough ensured his players attended class. But since the new mindset in athletics drastically evolved into dollar signs, academic priorities evidently fell down the ladder. [Rewrite this sentence, getting rid of drastically and evidently, and choosing between dollar signs and ladders for your images.]

Through the eyes of an elite athlete, turning professional is a continuous fixture [Continuous is redundant. And I'm not sure fixture is the best image. How about saying fixation?] from youth basketball up through high school. Rosborough said those attitudes develop from parents' pressures to become great.

And as Pastner said, "In the NBA, they don't require you to have a degree."

The debate boils down to one simple argument: stay for an education or leave for financial freedom. [That's two simple arguments.] Eat at Which Wich, or own a Which Wich franchise? [Nice example.] In senior cornerback Antoine Cason's case, his education remains priceless.

Despite opportunities to enter last year's NFL draft and prognosticators pegging him as a first-round pick, Cason believes his tough decision to stay was a "gut check," showing dedication to finish out something he started. [Writer did well to highlight "gut check." It's a good phrase.]

"You can't duplicate your college experience," Cason said. "Graduation is one of my goals, and that's what I want to do."

Rocky LaRose [Great name!], a UA associate athletic director, believes being last place in the Pac-10 is irrelevant, due to the diversity of public and private schools in the conference. [Huh?] She compares athletic graduation rates to the entire UA rate, which she said has exceeded the school percentage in the past. [Confused sentence. Problem starts with the word which. Rewrite for clarity.] The recent decrease, however, dips athletes below the university percentage.

LaRose, who forecasted such a downfall, seeks an optimistic future after the football program went through four head coaches in five years between 2000-2004, leading to multiple player transfers. [Futures can't be optimistic. Only people can be optimistic. Find a better word.]

The academic unit now reports to the university side, rather than the athletics department.

More changes include a revamping of the C.A.T.S. program that Pastner describes as "the best in America" and the MVP of McKale Center. From life skills to academic help, C.A.T.S. provides athletes with the proper resources to succeed in the classroom.

Pastner stresses the significance of the term "student-athlete" over the common mindset of an athlete-student.

Hopefully Wildcats today and beyond bear down and take that to heart. [Hopefully always comes across as a bit awkward - and a bit rhetorically weak - when used in this way. It's particularly limp in the context of what's just been written. Most of the staff has just told him they don't give a shit whether athletes graduate. So the hopefulness seems exclusive to the reporter.]'

---the wildcat online---

Labels: SOS

Mysteries of
Ivy League
Admissions
Committees

'Glenn Poshard should correct citations he missed in two academic papers he wrote more than 20 years ago, but he will remain president of Southern Illinois University with the full support of the board of trustees.

That's the verdict from an announcement university officials made Thursday afternoon, following the board's review of plagiarism allegations lodged against a 1984 doctoral dissertation and a 1976 master's thesis Poshard wrote as a student at SIU Carbondale. The crux of the assertions came from the fact Poshard failed to use quotation marks around material cited from other sources in his paper. Poshard contends the way he wrote the paper was appropriate according to the professors who graded it and has said any uncited passages in his work was purely a mistake, not intentional.

SIU board of trustees chairman Roger Tedrick said the board wants Poshard to continue as president, despite recent calls for his resignation over the allegations.

"Dr. Poshard will remain our president with full board support. His integrity is unquestioned and his energy, passion and commitment to this university unsurpassed," Tedrick said. "He continues to be the right man to lead the SIU system."



SIUC Chancellor Fernando Treviño requested a seven-person faculty review committee investigate the anonymous plagiarism allegations against Poshard in September. Engineering professor and SIUC Faculty Senate President Ramanarayanan Viswanathan led the panel.

"This review must be understood in its historical context," Viswanathan said. "Our examination of some theses and dissertations completed in Dr. Poshard's department in the same general time period found that the citation style he used appears to have been commonly accepted by different committees in his college."

However, the style used then is not recommended today, Viswanathan added. The committee is recommending Poshard publicly recognize "incomplete citation errors" and correct them using currently acceptable practices.

Poshard said he would honor the committee's wishes.

"The members of this committee are individuals of integrity and credibility, and I appreciate their service to the university," Poshard said. "I have read the committee's report and I accept its recommendations. I take full responsibility for the inadvertent errors that I made 23 years ago."'

'...Doris Lessing is direct, womanly, very charming. She wears her long, graying black hair drawn into a bun at the back of her head; her face is slender and attractive, exactly the face of the photographs, the "Doris Lessing" I had been reading and admiring for so long. Meeting her at last I felt almost faint—certainly unreal—turning transparent myself in the presence of this totally defined, self-confident, gracious woman.

...[S]he met Kurt Vonnegut, "a bloke I got on with very well," whose writing she admires immensely. This struck me as rather surprising, since to me Doris Lessing's writing is of a much more substantial, "literary" nature than Vonnegut's; but their similar concerns for the madness of society, its self-destructive tendencies, would account for her enthusiasm. She spoke of having heard that Vonnegut did not plan to write any more—which I hadn't heard, myself— [Nor did it turn out to be true.] and that this distressed her; she thought he was very good, indeed. She mentioned Slaughterhouse Five as an especially impressive book of his.

Less surprisingly, she felt a kinship with Norman Mailer, and believed that the critical treatment he received for Barbary Shore and The Deer Park was quite unjustified; "They're good books," she said. I mentioned that the exciting thing about Mailer—sometimes incidental to the aesthetic quality of his work—was his complete identification with the era in which he lives, his desire to affect radically the consciousness of the times, to dramatize himself as a spiritual representative of the times and its contradictions, and that this sense of a mission was evident in her writing as well.

... I asked her if she might [want] to teach full-time, but she said she would hesitate to take on a position of such responsibility (she had been offered a handsome job at City College, which she declined with regret), partly because she considered her own academic background somewhat meager. "I ended my formal education at the age of fourteen, and before that I really learned very little," she said.

It struck me as amazing: a woman whose books constitute a staggering accomplishment, who is, herself, undisputably a major figure in English literature of the twentieth century—should hesitate to teach in a university. It is rather as if a resurrected Kafka, shy, unobstrusive, humble, should insist that his works be taught by anyone else, any ordinary academic with ordinary academic qualifications, sensing himself somehow not equal to what he represents. Perhaps there is some truth to it. But I was forced to realize how thoroughly oppressive the world of professional "education" really is; how it locks out either overtly or in effect the natural genius whose background appears not to have been sufficient.

...Never superficially experimental, Mrs. Lessing's writing is profoundly experimental—exploratory—in its effort to alter our expectations about life and about the range of our own consciousness.

Her books, especially the Martha Quest series, The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, have traced an evolutionary progress of the soul, which to some extent transforms the reader as he reads. I think it is true of our greatest writers that their effect on us is delayed, that it may take years for us to understand what they have done to us. Doris Lessing possesses a unique sensitivity, writing out of her own intense experience, her own subjectivity, but at the same time writing out of the spirit of the times.'

'...[S]he is an old-fashioned moralist. This means that she is inclined to take very seriously the quotidian. The deep—as opposed to strip—mining of the truly moral relationship seems to me to be her territory.... At best, Lessing's prose is solid and slow and a bit flat-footed. She is an entirely "traditional" prose writer.

...Shikasta is the work of a formidable imagination. Lessing can make up things that appear to be real, which is what storytelling is all about. ..

...Although Lessing deals with opposites, she tends to unitarianism. She is filled with the spirit of the Sufis, and if there is one thing that makes me more nervous than a Jungian it is a Sufi... Lessing [in this novel] rather lacks negative capability. Where Milton's Lucifer is a joy to contemplate, Lessing's [devil] is a drag whose planetary agents sound like a cross between Tolkien's monster and Sir Lew Grade.

...Lessing's affinity for the Old Testament combined with the woolliness of latter-day Sufism has got her into something of a philosophical muddle.Without the idea of free will, the human race is of no interest at all; certainly, without the idea of free will there can be no literature. To watch Milton's Lucifer serenely overthrow the controlling intelligence of his writerly creator is an awesome thing. But nothing like this happens in Lessing's work. From the moment of creation, Lessing's Shikastans are programmed by outside forces—sometimes benign, sometimes malign. They themselves are entirely passive. There is no Prometheus; there is not even an Eve.

...Obviously, there is a case to be made for predetermination or predestination or let-us-now-praise B. F. Skinner. Lessing herself might well argue that the seemingly inexorable DNA code is a form of genetic programming that could well be equated with Canopus's intervention and that, in either case, our puny lives are so many interchangeable tropisms, responding to outside stimuli. But I think that the human case is more interesting than that. The fact that no religion has been able to give a satisfactory reason for the existence of evil has certainly kept human beings on their toes during the brief respites that we are allowed between those ages of faith which can always be counted upon to create that we-state which seems so much to intrigue Lessing and her woollies, a condition best described by the most sinister of all Latin tags, e pluribus unum.'

'...The NCAA Enforcement Staff alleges that [Florida International University] lacked institutional control by placing inadequate systems and resources related to advising, monitoring the eligibility of student-athletes, and applying for NCAA financial aid and legislation. [Well. That covers just about everything.]

Vice President of Enforcement David Price sent a "notice of allegations" to University President Modest A. Maidique Oct. 1 detailing that the institution violated several bylaws allowing 40 ineligible student-athletes to compete during the 2002-2003 through 2006-2007 academic years. [Not ten, not twenty, not thirty, but forty.]

The University investigated and self-reported the transgressions to the NCAA.

"The problem is that FIU lacked the resources, manpower and adequate personnel," said Athletic Director Pete Garcia. [Then why do you have an athletic program? If you can't run one?]

The University has hired three more compliance officers along with the Student-Athlete Academic Center doubling the number of tutors from seven to 14 along with purchasing new computers this year. Also more opportunities exist for student-athletes to take summer courses. FIU has invested about $250,000 towards improving the SAAC and its resources.

"This is a huge setback for the whole University," Garcia said. "The only good thing is that we've put in the right systems to move forward." [Fantastic use of a passive formulation. Not "We've done something horrible. We did it before." (See below.) "We've done it again. We're ashamed."]

The NCAA reported that FIU violated bylaws concerning full-time enrollment, the five-year rule and progress-toward-degree requirements.

Thirty-seven student-athletes, who enrolled prior to Aug. 1, 2003, competed while ineligible by not completing enough credit hours to fulfill the progression-toward-degree requirements.

Fourteen of those 37 student-athletes from various sports did not complete an average of 12 semester hours in their Fall and Spring semesters or a total of 24 hours since the previous fall term.

During the 2004 football season, a student-athlete competed for a sixth year of eligibility exceeding the five-year rule.

In addition, FIU incorrectly applied NCAA financial aid legislations from the academic years of 2004-2005 through 2006-2007 resulting in men's soccer, women's soccer and women's golf exceeding NCAA financial aid limits. Thus, FIU violated NCAA bylaws that stipulated that each specific sport has a financial aid award limit.



An infraction report from Aug. 25, 2005 showed that FIU broke NCAA rules. Therefore, the recent allegations are the second record of FIU violating NCAA bylaws and [it] is now subject to penalties under repeat violators, which may include the prohibition of some or all outside competition in the sport involved for one or two sports seasons. [They just keep doing it.]

"We are resilient and confident that we can overcome this," Garcia said. "President Maidique has been in constant communication with NCAA President Miles Brand." [Again, note the surreal language. As if their own repeated indifference to the rules is a disability they're resiliently going to overcome.]

FIU is required to send a written response with the necessary records to confirm or disprove the validity of the allegations by Dec. 4.

The NCAA also requests all information on other possible violations discovered by the institution as result of its findings. Some of the records include enrollment dates of student-athletes at FIU and any other two or four-year institution and the reasons behind the NCAA violations.

FIU must provide a detailed description of any corrective or disciplinary actions against current and former athletics department staff members.

The NCAA Committee on Infractions may decide to terminate the employment of all staff members who knowingly engaged in or condoned a major violation.

"It was nobody's intent to violate the rules of compliance," Garcia said. [The Official Orwellian Statement.]

The NCAA Committee on Infractions is set to review the response through an in-person hearing Feb. 15, 2008 and Feb. 16, 2008.

The NCAA will notify Maidique of the official hearing date where he is required to attend.

Select University representatives including Garcia, Faculty Athletics Representative Stephen Fain and Sun Belt Conference Associate Commissioner Rick Mello who served as athletic director from June 2000 through October 2006 are also mandated to attend the hearing.

The bulk of the violations occurred while Mello served as athletic director. He declined to comment on the matter. [Totally understandable.]

Presently, the allegations are major violations but the University may send evidence within the written response to reduce the allegations to secondary violations.

Self-disclosure is considered when determining the penalties issued. Every sport except tennis and softball was involved in at least one allegation.'

I Poshard plagiarized but did not mean to.

II Poshard is a fine gentleman.

III All is forgiven.

'...[A] Staunton [Virginia] man ... filed court papers last month in general district court demanding the city supply him with a list of words that trigger City Hall's filter software, a system that blocks e-mails containing words deemed offensive.

The "war of words" [No need for quotation marks.] began in August when Adrian Riskin, a mathematics professor at Mary Baldwin College, sent an e-mail to a friend working for the city. The e-mail contained the "F" word, was rejected and sent back to Riskin.

"This intrigued me," Riskin said Tuesday morning during a telephone interview. [Sign of a professor. We don't, as a rule, get angry. We don't get much of anything emotional. We get intrigued.]

The city has refused to supply Riskin with the list of forbidden words. After numerous e-mails from Riskin, where he tested various words that would trigger the city's software filter, City Hall finally blocked his e-mail address.

"I was just playing around," said Riskin, who said he was genuinely curious as to what words would slip through. [Again, no anger, no fighting city hall shit. He's curious.]

In the Sept. 27 court filing, Riskin said the city's rejection of his request for the list of offensive words is a denial of his Freedom of Information Act rights.

The city's filtering system is performed by the software program MailMarshal. The city claims the software is proprietary and excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. In his court filing, Riskin argued that the software can be edited and said if the city has altered the list it is no longer proprietary. Riskin further argued that if the city left the software as is, "it cannot possibly be proprietary since the software vendor provides it for a free download from their Web site."

In one of his e-mails, Riskin told the city that he is forming the organization of "Fathers for Uncensored Communicational Knowledge." The e-mail was blocked. [UD is falling in love.]

"Essentially, I'm just hounding them because they have no sense of humor," Riskin said.

City spokesman Doug Cochran, named in the court filing along with City Hall, said the MailMarshal software is in place to protect city employees from harassing e-mails and to control spam. Asked why the city wouldn't release the list in question, Cochran said licensing rights prevent the city from doing so.

Cochran also said the list of words that prompt the software to block e-mails was not altered by city officials.

"The list has not been edited," Cochran said.

A hearing in Staunton General District Court is scheduled Oct. 25.'

'The University of Oregon will not spend a dime of Phil Knight's $100 million donation on a basketball arena.

Instead, it will borrow the $200 million cost of the arena using state bonds and pay back the money with arena revenues and annual donations from fans, Oregon officials say.

The plan means that rather than private donors financing the bulk of construction, as was planned a few years ago, taxpayers will bear the arena project's financial risk.

...[S]ome UO faculty members already are worried about the university borrowing such a huge sum and skeptical about the latest projections for the arena's revenue.

"I will say that we're concerned," UO senate president Gordon Sayre said. "And we're trying to get all the information in its latest form from the athletic department so that we can look at it with a critical eye."

...Although revenue projections still are being finalized through donor surveys and other studies, [the athletic director] said recently that he was "comfortable" in saying a new arena could generate $16 million annually -- about what the University of Arizona's basketball program makes. That sum would more than cover the $11.2 million [he] estimated Oregon would pay each year on 40-year bonds.

But Oregon's latest arena revenue forecast is higher than a projection done a few years ago by an outside firm it hired to research the arena project.

In 2003, sports-facilities consulting firm CSL International projected that a 13,000- to 15,000-seat Oregon arena would generate $6 million per year in a "moderate" scenario and $8.6 million in an "aggressive" scenario, before any bond payments were made.

...Sayre called the arena financing plan "possibly risky," given that new, more expensive priority seating for basketball will compete for many of the same donors already paying for priority seating at Autzen Stadium.

"Lots of people come from all around the state on Saturday to watch football, right? So they get season tickets," Sayre said. "But are people really going to come on a foggy night in December from Portland and Medford for a basketball game?

"Can we rely on a large pool of season-ticket holders who will pay higher prices? Those are some of the questions we need to answer."

...The Oregon arena, if it uses $200 million in bonds, would be the largest single bonding project in the history of the Oregon University System, said Bob Simonton, OUS capital construction director. It also would more than double the University of Oregon's debt load for the type of bonds used for revenue-generating projects such as parking structures and dormitories.

Oregon's current load of XI-F(1) bonds is $178 million, with 3.3 percent of the university's total annual operating budget being used to pay back those bonds. State guidelines recommend a cap of 7 percent, which Oregon would nearly reach if the current arena financing plan went forward.

That's before the university launches a planned overhaul of its dormitories, which could require as much as $450 million in debt, Sayre said...'

...School officials say it applies only to students who are drunk -- not those who are actually sick.'

'A University of Cincinnati professor is under investigation for an incident at a Tri-State park.

University police reported that Michael Sanders and some students were detained by Hamilton County park rangers at an unnamed park.

Sources told News 5 that the incident involved filming a nude woman dancing near a fire.

While police would not confirm those details, Sanders is a professor of electronic media at U.C’s Blue Ash campus.

School officials said Sanders has not cooperated with the investigation.

No charges have been filed.'

'The good news just keeps flowing like sewage to the treatment plant. Apparently there was a fight on campus ...last Saturday night. [Another website] is reporting several football players were involved .... I can't wait for the details from this to come out.

Can someone please take control of this team? Where are the captains? Where is the leadership? I wish I could say the coaches need to buckle down on them, but how can you expect the players to act like gentlemen when the head coach is supposedly running innocent people off the road in his vehicle because they are driving too slow? [It's still in the rumor stage, but the rumor is that sainted coach Paterno lost it the other night... after running people off the road, he reportedly shrieked at them: "Do you know who I am?"...] This entire season is a complete disaster. ...[T]here is absolutely nothing I like about this team. They had all the promise in the world and they are throwing it away with their drinking and fighting on Saturday nights.

Pack it in for 2007 folks. This program needs to be purged. Any player or coach that causes another disturbance needs to be booted from the team. That includes the guy at the top. We cannot stand for this. I would rather lose with dignity than win with this. I am calling on the University and coaches to weed out the bad apples right now. I don't care if we only have 60 guys on scholarship next year. We cannot have this type of team if we hope to achieve the goals we all set for this program.'

'...At the very least, a sizable number of football players seem to be out of control at times. While it ain't Oklahoma under that rollicking, gun-toting Barry Switzer, "lack of institutional control" is a phrase that comes to mind. And I don't mean NCAA violations, just that the football team seems to have a collective mind and will of its own, and sometimes it seems to me that the coaches are asleep at the wheel.

I realize that "boys will be boys," but at what point do they grow up? How many brawls will it take? How many police blotters will have to be filled? Coaches can't hold their hands 24/7. Is it the babying these players get from their first steps? Is it the enabling behavior they receive from being treated like gods because they have a talent for a GAME?...'

'Police are investigating a sexual assault on the Penn State, University Park campus. Police said a Penn State football player is the prime suspect. His name has not been released.

The woman who filed the report said she was raped in a Nittany Dorm Complex room early Friday morning. Penn State police confirmed that they have a suspect and that alcohol was a factor. Police have released few other details.

Police said the woman knew the man and reported the rape immediately Friday morning.'

'Even though duck season hasn't opened yet, The Bee fired off both barrels at the faculty members of the University of California who objected to having former Harvard President Lawrence Summers address the UC Board of Regents. Hundreds of faculty members objected to the invitation that had been extended to Summers, and then Chair Richard Blum retracted it [Meaning Blum caved to numbers? What happened to principle?]. The Bee suggested that Summers had been "censored" in a manner that infringed on academic freedom.

This controversy has nothing to do with academic freedom. [Borrowing language here from another free speech-challenged U Cal person, Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, who tried to fire the new dean he'd just hired when he decided the new dean would be too free in his speech... Drake too came out with these blanket statements denying the censoring had anything to do with censoring.] Blum invited Summers to address the regents at a private dinner in Sacramento -- away from an academic campus -- where there would have been no opportunity for any meaningful public scrutiny or debate. Blum invited Summers without consulting the university community, and secrecy was maintained when Summers was not listed on the agenda or any other public document. [So the faculty gets to vet all invited guests? UD'd be interested in hearing more about this rule.]

In short, Summers' appearance before the Regents was stacked in such a way that no debate or discussion was possible, violating a bedrock principle of academic freedom. Summers was to be given privileged access to the governing body of one of the world's premier public educational institutions without any public accountability. [So no private meetings between the trustees and guests may take place? All meetings have to be open to the entire university community?] When Blum learned that many faculty members objected to this arrangement, he retracted the invitation, as he had every right to do. [Faculty expressed no objection to the arrangement. They expressed, in terms strong and direct, an objection to Lawrence Summers.]

If Summers had been part of a public forum on campus, rather than speaking at a private dinner in Sacramento, his views would have been put on sale in the "marketplace of ideas." Despite the insulting and uninformed opinions he expressed about women scientists in a 2005 speech in Boston, we doubt that there would have been objection to a public discussion featuring Summers. [Are you following the logic of this? Why object to a private rather than a public appearance of this man? What sort of a cabal do these people think he and the trustees represent?]

Blum has indicated that at the private dinner Summers would have addressed "the ability of UC to compete with private universities such as Harvard and Stanford." Given the contentious nature of Summers' tenure as president of Harvard, and his early exit from the presidency, the entire UC community has a vital stake in any advice he is providing to the regents. [Again, there are vast leaps of logic here that I just don't get. Most presidents have contentious tenures. Summers was extremely popular with Harvard students, among other constituencies. But however you characterize his tenure, why does this have anything to do with how many people get to watch him talk about competitiveness? Note again: The "entire UC community" has to be there whenever Summers speaks.]

The UC faculty did not in any way depart from the principles of academic freedom. [Pure Orwellianism.] Summers remains entirely free to present his views to university audiences and to the public at large [But he's not allowed to give private talks.], and we will defend his right to a public discourse, at the University of California and elsewhere.'

'...[T]he Yellow Jackets ranked last in the ACC. I’ve heard and read all the arguments about graduation rates, that Tech doesn’t have an easy major in which to hide athletes, that Tech is a difficult school for all students, that Player X went on to make a lot of money in the pros so who cares if he graduated? Frankly, none of those arguments hold water.

If Tech doesn’t have an easy major in which to hide athletes, it still has the responsibility to recruit athletes who can compete in the classroom. If that leads to more of a competitive disadvantage on the field, so what? Are you willing to buy victories at the price of your academic mission?

Sure, Tech is a difficult school for students at large, not just athletes. But if Darryl Richard can graduate in three years, is it asking too much that Tech find other athletes who can graduate in six? And it’s a myth that athletes are doing poorly but doing a lot like other students.

... The anecdotal arguments that say grad rates aren’t important because some pro players make a lot of money without earning a degree has two serious flaws. First, a very small percentage of Tech’s non-graduates go on to pro careers. Second, and I know some of you will disagree with me on this, college isn’t about helping people make money, it’s about helping people get educated. Tech isn’t supposed to be like those guys on TV telling me how I can make millions in real estate buying houses with no money down. It’s supposed to have a higher purpose than that.'

Labels: SOS

'... Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts [Toward the end of her tv-watching life, UD found herself mesmerized by televangelicals -- the bumptious Bakkers, the robotic Robert Schuller, and the blow-dried, condescending Richard Roberts.] says God is speaking again, telling him to deny lurid allegations in a lawsuit that threatens to engulf this 44-year-old Bible Belt college in scandal [Why is God telling Richard Roberts to lie?].

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay. [An ounce of creative energy relative to the loot's disposition in these sorts of cases would be great. Never happens.]

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males." [It does get more interesting than usual here. She controlled scholarships? And the underage male thing has potential.]

At a chapel service this week on the 5,300-student campus known for its 60-foot-tall bronze sculpture of praying hands [What would this sort of sculpture look like at Alexander Portnoy University?], Roberts said God told him: "We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit ... is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion." [The Deity graduated law school.]

San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, a member of the ORU board of regents, said the university's executive board "is conducting a full and thorough investigation."

Colleagues fear for the reputation of the university and the future of the Roberts' ministry, which grew from Southern tent revivals to one of the most successful evangelical empires in the country, hauling in tens of millions of dollars in contributions a year. The university reported nearly $76 million in revenue in 2005, according to the IRS.

Oral Roberts is 89 and lives in California. He holds the title of chancellor, but the university describes him as semi-retired, and his son presides over day-to-day operations on the campus, which had a modern, space-age design when it was built in the early 1960s but now looks dated, like Disney's Tomorrowland.

Cornell Cross II, a senior from Burlington, Vt., said he is looking to transfer to another school because the scandal has "severely devalued and hurt the reputation of my degree."

"We have asked and asked and asked to see the finances of our school and what they're doing with our money, and we've been told no," said, Cross who is majoring in government. "Now we know why. As a student, I'm not going to stand for it any longer."

The allegations are contained in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by three former professors. They sued ORU and Roberts, alleging they were wrongfully dismissed after reporting the school's involvement in a local political race.

Richard Roberts, according to the suit, asked a professor in 2005 to use his students and university resources to aid a county commissioner's bid for Tulsa mayor. Such involvement would violate state and federal law because of the university's nonprofit status. Up to 50 students are alleged to have worked on the campaign.

The professors also said their dismissals came after they turned over to the board of regents a copy of a report documenting moral and ethical [UD's never clear on the difference between these two words.] lapses on the part of Roberts and his family. The internal document was prepared by Stephanie Cantese, Richard Roberts' sister-in-law, according to the lawsuit. [Is Stephanie a satanist? What motivated her?]

An ORU student repairing Cantese's laptop discovered the document and later provided a copy to one of the professors. [Sounds as though Stephanie set things up to play out this way... ]



It details dozens of alleged instances of misconduct. Among them:

_ A longtime maintenance employee was fired so that an underage male friend of Mrs. Roberts could have his position.

_ Mrs. Roberts — who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU's "first lady" on the university's Web site — frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to "underage males who had been provided phones at university expense." [Are we talking desperate late-night phone sex?]

_ The university jet was used to take one daughter and several friends on a senior trip to Orlando, Fla., and the Bahamas. The $29,411 trip was billed to the ministry as an "evangelistic function of the president."

_ Mrs. Roberts spent more than $39,000 at one Chico's clothing store alone in less than a year, and had other accounts in Texas and California. She also repeatedly said, "As long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off." The document cites inconsistencies in clothing purchases and actual usage on TV.

_ Mrs. Roberts was given a white Lexus SUV and a red Mercedes convertible by ministry donors.

_ University and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts' home to do the daughters' homework.

_ The university and ministry maintain a stable of horses for exclusive use by the Roberts' children.

_ The Roberts' home has been remodeled 11 times in the past 14 years....'

So I know

He put moisturizer on the morning he shot
thirty-three people. That stands out. The desire
to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR
that's what I want, to be soft, or the guy
from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says
we should chat. Such a casual word, chat.
I'm chatting to myself now: you did not
do enough about the kid who took your class
a few buildings from where he killed.
With soft hands in Norris Hall killed.
This is my confession. And legs I think
the roommate said, moisturizer in the shower,
I don't know what I could have done
something. Something more than talk to someone
who talked to someone, a food chain of language
leading to this language of "no words" we have now.
Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies
they are unworded. Maybe I should have shot the kid
and then myself given the math. 2 < 33.
I was good at math. Numbers are polite, carefree
if you ask the random number generators.
Mom, I don't mean the killing above.
It's something I write like "I put my arms
around the moon." Maybe sorry's the only sound
to offer pointlessly and at random
to each other forever, not because of what it means
but because it means we're trying to mean,
I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.
If I don't do this I have no face and if I do this
I have an apple for a face or something vital
almost going forward is the direction I am headed.
Come with me from being over here to being over there,
from this second to that second. What countries
they are, the seconds, what rooms of people
being alive in them and then dead in them.
The clocks of flowers rise, it's April
and yellow and these seconds are an autopsy
of this word,
suddenly.

Labels: SOS

'It is a small and often neglected word. But the word 'the' has just won Australia's Glenda Browne international recognition in the form of an Ig Nobel prize.

The Ig Nobels, parodies of the real Nobel Prizes, are awarded annually to applaud achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think.

Browne, a professional indexer who once worked in the field of biotechnology, is this year's winner in the literature category.

Her award honours a scholarly article addressing a tricky question. Where should names starting with 'the' appear in indexes?

While contemplating this issue, she looked through indexes filled with names like The American Journal of Psychiatry, and The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics on one hand, but British Journal of Pharmacology and Journal of Microscopy on the other.

Browne's work involves creating alphabetical lists of key terms that appear in books, so readers can find the material they want. So the 'the' question is crucial to indexers like her.

But throughout her 18-year career she grew increasingly aware that the humble 'the' was a problem.

"I don't know why I started thinking about it," she says from her home in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

"In indexing, we follow rules but sometimes the rules don't make sense and that bothered me."

The conundrum with 'the' is deciding how to index names or titles that include it, she explains. Should 'The Who' be indexed as 'Who, The', or 'The Who'?

The key question is finding a method that would make the index easiest to use, Browne says.

Her deceptively simple solution was published in 2001 in the journal The Indexer.

Index entries for names with 'the' in them should be indexed both with and without the 'the', so to speak, she says.

"I decided, look, people think in different ways, so let's put it in the index in two places."

It was a win-win solution, and a logical conclusion.

"Similar arguments apply to 'a' and 'an', but these are beyond the scope of this article," she notes in her paper.

Browne says the indexing skills she needs to resolve issues such as the 'the' dilemma are similar to those needed for scientific endeavour.

"I think they both have a mix of the analytical and the creative," she says.

"You need to focus very carefully, but you also need to be able to take a broad point of view."'

'... The NCAA, the top body in collegiate sports, has long worried about gambling's pernicious influence. Between 2000 and 2004, the NCAA publicly supported Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in a failed bid to ban betting on all college sports. That left relations with Las Vegas strained, says Rachel Newman Baker, the association's director of agents, gambling and amateurism since 2005.

In 2003, the NCAA issued a report suggesting that gambling was widespread among college athletes and that more needed to be done to stop it. The association convened a task force to study how to counter the negative effects of gambling on college sports.


...[O]ne gambler, who identified himself to them as living in the Midwest, cast repeated wagers against Toledo ahead of its Sept. 17, 2005, meeting with Temple University. One bet was for about $20,000, more than four times the size of a typical big wager on a Mid-American matchup. MGM Mirage says the gambler correctly bet that Toledo would fail to beat the point spread.

Toledo's next game, on Sept. 27, attracted a wave of money as well. MGM Mirage eventually removed the team's events from its boards.

...According to federal documents, ... Toledo football and basketball players [were offered] cash and goods to influence game scores. [Match fixers]... attempted to influence the score of the GMAC Bowl, between Toledo and the University of Texas at El Paso, the affidavit says, and allegedly offered one player up to $10,000 to sit out particular games. In all, the scheme ran from fall 2003 to winter 2006, according to the documents. Federal officials say the investigation continues...'

'“It gets confusing when the New York Times starts launching a ton of blogs, and the Huffington Post starts offering news,” said Jonah Perretti, a 26-year-old MIT graduate who is the [Huffington Post's] resident tech whizz [Make that whiz.]. “Things start to blur.”

... Like a standard newspaper, Ms Huffington insists that her contributors maintain accuracy. All errors must be corrected within 24 hours, lest bloggers have their posting privileges withdrawn. Yet she argues that one of the blog’s strengths is an attitude and immediacy that distinguishes it from the mainstream media’s sometimes-tortured attempts at objectivity. “None of this ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’," she says. “You have to believe that there is a truth to be ferreted out.”'

'...As the business of intercollegiate athletics has ballooned, the IRS repeatedly has identified some sports revenue as unrelated to education and thus subject to income tax. But universities employ a battery of attorneys, lobbyists and tax specialists to convince the government otherwise.

They have been overwhelmingly successful. "Everything's pretty much gone the universities' way," said James Musselman, a professor specializing in tax law at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. "There are some pretty serious benefits, and (the schools) have pretty much gone unrestrained."

Thirty years ago, when athletics departments started earning big money from the televising of their football and basketball games, the IRS argued that the income wasn't linked to the universities' educational mission and should be taxed. But after resistance from colleges arguing that the money was essential to athletics — and athletics was a part of education — the government backed down.UT athletics earns about $5.2 million per year from TV rights.

In 1991, the IRS proposed taxing the millions of dollars that athletics departments were receiving for the sale of naming rights to football stadiums. The agency again reversed course after a storm of protest, and in 1997, Congress passed a law exempting from income tax the money that colleges receive from corporations for naming rights — about $275 million a year, according to the NCAA.

University Federal Credit Union is paying UT $13 million to place its name on the Longhorns' baseball field. Texas Tech University has deals totaling $30 million from AT&T and United Supermarkets for football stadium and basketball arena naming rights.

Most recently, the IRS tried to tax the growing income that big schools were receiving from shoe and apparel firms but dropped the idea. Adidas pays Texas A&M University $1.4 million annually in cash and gear. UT gets about $2.6 million a year in apparel and cash from Nike....'

'[At] FAU, where trustees have given provisional approval for a 30,000-seat football stadium, more money for academic programs [is what's needed]...

FAU's stadium largely is driven by the university's ill-advised jump to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top division, I-A. Yet nearly half of I-A schools lose an average of $2.5 million a year on football, reports the News & Observer of Raleigh. No Division II school makes a profit on athletics, evidenced in the $745,000 average deficit for football.

Rather than making money, college football is costing money - including higher student fees, often with students' approval. The schools' motivations range from enhancing the college experience by providing more social activity and sense of community, as at traditionally commuter FAU, to attracting more and better students. Those dividends are hard to measure.

...[A]dd the budget cuts pending in a legislative special session, and the determination to move ahead with a stadium on the Boca Raton campus seems all the more inadvisable.

...Officials say the university "is proceeding cautiously and prudently to develop an appropriate, conservative, feasible plan." FAU's feasibility study, however, assumes not only operating revenue and $700,000 from naming rights, but $750,000 in corporate and community fund-raising annually for at least 10 years. Before signing off on any athletic deal, in an academic environment in which students are not always the priority, FAU trustees must ensure that it all will be done for, not paid for by, students.'

'...[I] have a radical suggestion for FAU and every other university ... [W]here to allocate limited resources? Where should they spend [large sums of money]? I propose they... set up a large scholarship fund that would give significant scholarships to students majoring in math and science. America is not producing enough math and science majors. America is producing enough football and basketball players.

With this money plus the scholarship money now going to football and basketball players, the school could provide a $10,000 annual scholarship to between 300 and 600 students annually, depending on the earning of the endowment fund.

Florida and Palm Beach County are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to attract high-level science jobs to the area. Maybe FAU could work in that same direction ...'

'...FAU President Frank Brogan is selling a men's football stadium under the guise of an "Innovation Village," a hub of sports, student housing and retail to create a "traditional American college experience." Don't buy it. The true modern college experience should be in the classrooms on the other side of campus. ...'

UD thanks Mike for telling her about it.

'...The Board of Trustees has [suggested] that it has known about these plagiarism accusations for some time. Not only were they not forthcoming, they took it upon themselves to determine whether the allegations were true.

Their method? Plugging the dissertation into Turnitin.com, a popular database educators have used in recent years to see if content within a paper matches up with published works.

Now, we may just be a bunch of gangly, fledgling student journalists, but common sense tells us, "Duh, you're not going to find anything because the books Poshard used in his dissertation are way older than a database born in the 90s."

The DAILY EGYPTIAN even put the dissertation through Turnitin.com's sister database, iParadigm, and had the same results. The sites' owner said the disputed works might not exist in his database.

Yet the BOT accepted its findings as fact and swept it under the rug.

...The committee Poshard charged with developing a working definition of plagiarism submitted its review Sept. 21. Its report stated that plagiarism can be unintentional, and a sloppy regard for citation style could be one way such an allegation could occur.

Poshard has said such a mistake may be the correct way to categorize what he did.

Yet the DAILY EGYPTIAN ... found such "mistakes" at least 30 times during its investigation. In many cases, there were no citations or quotations.

We don't know about you, but we're thinking that's a lot of mistakes for someone who was deemed a doctor of his field.'