What's depressing here is that this is precisely the argument heard at parent-teacher meetings across the land. When is the boss ever going to ask my Johnny about the Peloponnesian War?

President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, [b]especially in middle and high school[/b], to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.
...
The other parts of the campaign include a two-year focus on science on "Sesame Street," the venerable public television children's show

The plan will enlist companies and nonprofits, including "Sesame Street," to spend money and time to encourage students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

Why should the literature requirement be fulfilled only by "a comprehensive literary survey" and not by single-author courses (aren't Shakespeare and Milton "comprehensive" enough), or by a course in the theater or the graphic novel or the lyrics of Bob Dylan (all rejected in the report)?
...
This holds too for the insistence that only the study of American history "in both chronological and thematic breadth" can fulfill the history requirement. Here the politics is explicit: such courses, we are told, are "indispensable for the formation of citizens and for the preservation of our free institutions."
...
I see no obvious reason why a course on the Civil War or the American revolution or the French revolution (or both of them together) would not do the job as well as a survey stretching from the landing at Plymouth Rock to the war in Iraq. (At any rate, the issue is one for academic professionals to decide.)

5. Faculty governance is essential for tenure and curriculum decisions. But faculty governance for setting university priorities is a big mistake.
...
8. Current administrators are using stimulus funds to buy off the old interest groups, under the view that these are temporary bad times. Relative to what will come, these are "good times," and much of that surplus ought to be put in reserve funds. That is not happening.

9. Many mid-level schools underinvest in making incremental improvements to their strong, core departments, because nobody gets much credit for that.

um, so did you see the review? He's either stupid, incompetent, a hot head, or just in over his head---which couldn't be the case considering he's so good he could handle his job and Murano's......the guy is making a mockery of himself.

I remember having a more professional review when I worked at McDonald's as teenager.

If reviews like that are worth chancellor money, I'm sure my five-year-old niece has a nice paycheck coming her way.

I'm giving a talk to such a group tomorrow and I am curious to hear what you think I should be telling them. This isn't a talk about public policy per se, it's a talk about the economics of universities.

The prof's version of the dream of having to take an exam in a class you didn't know you were in is to have to give a talk on a subject you haven't prepped for. Imagining the nightmare scenario where I (a non-economist) would have to step in for you and give your talk, I'd try to discuss:

• the merits of the common statement that a university should be run like a business. Is this valid? Do academics dismiss it to easily? If a business, what kind, what are the products, who are the consumers, and how do we measure productivity?
• what are the currencies in the intra-university economy? What are the modes of trade/barter within the campus? I'm wondering about how universities fit with some of what I've read from Yochai Benkler on "social production", i.e. I may serve on a committee or cover a class with an expectation of reciprocation, and I'm happy if you bring coffee and cookies, but I'd be insulted if you offered to pay me in cash to do those things. But I expect an honorarium if I speak at a different university. Why?
• public choice theory in the context of the intra-university economy. Has any administrative function, from a deans office to a faculty committee, ever voluntarily reduced its size?
• whether university prestige is correlated with the accessibility to either a) good coffee or b) good local ethnic restaurants.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network.

...the divine is the arising and passing that does not itself arise and pass away. This process is actualized in an infinite web of relations that is an emergent self-organizing network of networks...

In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

Taylor plunks the description down there as if it were supposed to be obvious that a dissertation on Duns Scotus's use of citations were trivial. But is it that there is something inherently trivial about this student's dissertation, or is it that Taylor himself is in the wrong gig? When a professor of religion cannot imagine why a dissertation on Duns Scotus might be important or useful, and when a scholar thinks that citations are necessarily trivial, then there's trouble. I'm not a specialist in medieval theology, but offhand, and as someone who studies modernism, I know that citation practices involve questions of authority and deference, intertextuality, bibliographic/genetic information about the author's sources, and philosophical positions on presence/absence that are probably fairly relevant to theology. I don't know enough about the project to evaluate it, but there's nothing about that description that should give anyone license to dismiss the project out of hand, unless that person is already hostile to the idea of specialized knowledge per se.

Taylor pretends to be sympathetic to grad students, but to ridicule someone's dissertation in the pages of the New York Times is nothing but hostile. And, if he is talking about a real colleague's real student's real dissertation, unethical.

The jurors found that Mr. Churchill's political views had been a "substantial or motivating" factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway.

The verdict by the panel of four women and two men — none of whom wished to be interviewed by reporters, court officials said — seemed unlikely to resolve the larger debate surrounding Mr. Churchill that was engendered by the case. Is Mr. Churchill, as his supporters contend, a torchbearer for the right to hold unpopular political views? Or is he unpatriotic or — as his harshest critics contend — an outright collaborator with the nation's enemies at a time of war?

It is true that student satisfaction is lower in economics than in most other departments at the university and that student-faculty ratios are higher. I have been told, however, that if you do a regression of a department's student satisfaction on its student-faculty ratio, the economics department is right on the regression line. This fact suggests that our student satisfaction is low precisely because the student-faculty ratio is high.

The Crimson editorial implores the econ department to take action to prevent the elimination of the junior seminar program. But that will prove hard to do with existing resources. If the student-faculty ratio is the ultimate problem leading to low satisfaction with the econ major, and I believe that it is, there are two ways to improve the situation: Increase the number of economics faculty or decrease the number of economics students.

Students are given tests six months after they've taken the course to see whether they understand basic economic concepts, and students who've taken the course don't score any better on those tests than students who didn't take the course at all.

Ben Bernanke, my co-author on a Principles text and I decided that the real problem in the course was that people were trying to do way too much in it, so that you had these big encyclopedic texts with thousands of topics on the syllabus thrown at students. When you're trying to throw that much information at a student, much of it in the form of equations and graphs, it all goes by in a blur and they walk away with nothing in the end.

Travis Lively, a detective at the University Police Department who investigated the case, said a co-worker at the Health Science Center discovered the files while scanning the iTunes libraries of his fellow workers.

iTunes, a music program, allows its users to view media files on the computers of other users on its network.

"This person clicked on Dr. Dohrman's iTunes folder and found file names that were suggestive of child pornography," Lively said. "He reported it, and eventually the report made it to the Police Department."

AUSTIN - State Board of Education members tentatively approved new science curriculum standards Friday that scrap a longtime requirement that students be taught the "weaknesses" in the theory of evolution.

The action came after board members aligned with social conservatives were unable to muster enough support on the 15-member board to retain the rule in a preliminary vote Thursday. The decision was a major setback for the seven Republican board members, who argued vigorously for keeping the "weaknesses" requirement.

However, evolution critics scored a minor victory when a majority of board members agreed to an amendment that calls for students to discuss the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of Charles Darwin's tenet that humans and other living things have common ancestors.

Tired of struggling to find enough teachers to staff its classrooms on the Friday before the annual Georgia-Florida football game, the Clarke County (Ga.) School District -- which includes Athens, home of the University of Georgia -- decided to cancel school altogether.

Brian May, the guitarist and founding member of the legendary rock band Queen, earned his PhD in astronomy last year from Imperial College London. His PhD thesis A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud has just been co-published by Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd.

Tenure decisions were a flashpoint. Lilley denied 12 of 30 tenure applications this spring after they had been approved by faculty tenure committees, Toben said. Ten cases were appealed, and seven were granted.
"When people's careers are on the line, with their families and their livelihood, these things count, and they count big," he said.

Batson said the board would not ask a new president to reconsider the tenure decisions.

Faculty members felt Lilley valued research over teaching, Toben said. "Scholarship is critically important, but ... teaching and students have to come first."

Baylor is different from public universities, he said, a difference underscored by Baylor 2012, which calls for the the world's largest Baptist university to marry biblical principles with cutting-edge research.

James Twitchell, a widely published UF professor who writes about consumerism and pop culture, has lifted words verbatim from multiple authors in at least three books published between 2002 and 2007, a Sun investigation found.

Twitchell initially denied a pattern of plagiarism, but the 64-year-old professor was contrite and ashamed when recently confronted with a larger body of evidence.

It's unfortunate that newspaper accounts of such scandals rely so much on "objective" parallel passages rather than getting at the true disservice to the reader. When James Twitchell fails to cite sources for his statistics, leading readers to assume he is the source, he deprives those readers of further information on the subject, including when the stats were gathered and how. He also slights readers when he offers an unsourced summary of another scholar's idea without telling readers where to find the original, and far more thorough, development of that idea. Then there's changing facts to make them inaccurate...

As an offense against other scholars and writers, plagiarism is a sign of bad character. But, more important for the public sphere, it's a sign that you don't care about your readers.

Who knows, it may work out. The financial situation may improve, and the academic enterprise may flourish if Benson really does keep hands off. But a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that.

Like Benson, Michael Garrison has no advanced degrees in an academic subject (although he does at least have a law degree), and his appointment, in April of last year, was opposed by the Faculty Senate.

Again like Benson, Garrison has a long-term interest in higher education - he was chairman of the state's Higher Education Policy Committee - but his main career work has been first as a chief of staff to a former governor and subsequently as a lobbyist. In recent months he has become involved in a rather murky controversy. A daughter of the present governor (a Democrat and a political ally) had claimed a degree on her resume that apparently was never awarded. When apprised of this fact, a university spokesperson said that a clerical error had been made and that the degree had indeed been earned.

But in the academy there is no product except knowledge, and that may take decades to develop, if it develops at all. The concept of market share is inapposite; efficiency is not a goal; and there is no inventory to put on the shelves. Instead the norms are endless deliberations, explorations that may go nowhere, problems that only five people in the world even understand, lifetime employment that is not taken away even when nothing is achieved, expensively labor-intensive practices and no bottom line. What is an outsider to make of that?

Not much, because he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don't learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don't have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all.

Benson is not embedded in the practices of the academy, and no crash course will yield the tacit knowledge that would make him a knowledgeable and informed steward of the university's fortunes. Of course, this liability might be finessed if he leaves the academic side of things to the chancellors of the system's campuses, as he has suggested he will, but it seems somewhat odd to hire a CEO and then hope that he will stay away from the store.

The 1994 Handbook identified the grounds for termination and provided, in the event of a RIF, nontenured faculty would be laid off first. 1994 Handbook XI.A.3.a.

The 2003 Handbook did not afford tenured faculty a similar priority over nontenured faculty. Instead, it listed factors the President must consider in making layoff decisions, including tenure, status, years of service, program needs, academic expertise, performance, and teaching record. 2003 Handbook XI.B. 1. It further provided that "[t]he primary consideration shall be the maintenance of a sound and balanced educational program."2003 Handbook XI.B.1.

In addition, the 1994 Handbook stated that, in the event tenured faculty were laid off, "every reasonable effort would be made to relocate individuals in the institution."1994 Handbook XI.A.3.e. The 2003 Handbook did not require Metro State to make any efforts to relocate dismissed faculty within the institution. 2003 Handbook X.C.

Last March, the Northern Star editorial board wrote an open letter to Gov. Blagojevich elaborating on the condition of the Stevens Building and illustrating how badly money was needed to make proper renovations and repairs.

Upon receiving the board's letter, Gov. Blagojevich triumphantly announced in planning for fiscal year 2008 that he had included $19 million for Stevens Building work. It was exciting to feel like our governor was indeed listening to us and taking initiative in supporting our education as college students.

The problem: Our $19 million for the Stevens Building never made it to NIU. Like so much else having to do with funding in Illinois, it seems to have disappeared somewhere in Springfield.

Barsema Hall, NIU's newest academic building, cost just over $20 million to build, and if you've ever been inside, you know how just how nice it is. So is $40 million really an appropriate amount to suggest to NIU and to the state legislature?

... when Virginia Tech happened I let my family know that could have been us. The response so far has been professional and by the book.

Late Thursday, sources confirmed that they have tentatively identified the shooter as a 27-year-old graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Our university requires us students to write anonymous evaluations of our professors.

On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor's sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, but if anonymity was promised, is this investigation ethical? — S.C., GEORGIA

Mr. Ivanov told investigators he intended to use the bombs for fishing; but, given his admission that he painted swastikas on synagogues, investigators became concerned he was planning violence.

An audit was conducted in 2005 after an anonymous letter blamed Kessler for the declining finances.

"When David Kessler came to UCSF he inherited more than $90 million in Dean's Office reserves," the letter said, according to a copy Kessler gave The Washington Post. "In a mere 18 months Dean Kessler has spent or formally committed all of the reserves of the Dean's Office and has also incurred substantial long-term debt in the form of lavish salary increases and exponential growth in new, highly compensated faculty."

Elsa Murano has been named the sole finalist for the vacant presidency at Texas A&M University.

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents named Murano at their meeting Friday.

Murano currently holds the positions of Vice Chancellor and Dean for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Director, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.

She was appointed to that post in January 2005.

Dear Faculty and Staff of Texas A&M Agriculture:

As you may have heard, the Board of Regents of The Texas A&M University System today announced my name as the sole finalist for the office of President of Texas A&M University.

When I was first contacted about this position, I was reluctant to participate as a candidate. The reason was simple: I love what I do as Vice Chancellor, and as Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences! Since assuming my current position in 2005, we have made tremendous progress. We have secured opportunities for our faculty, and staff through the legislative appropriations process in terms of salary increases, infrastructure support, and funds to support special research and extension initiatives. We have also focused our programmatic priorities through our science, extension, and teaching roadmaps, and have elevated the recognition of the value that those programs bring to the citizens of this great state with our stakeholders. We have reversed the downward trend in our undergraduate student enrollment, and have begun to take exciting new steps in recruitment for our college through novel marketing initiatives and other efforts. As I have heard so many of our constituents say, in these three years we, and that means all of us, have managed to put the "A" back in Texas A&M!

It is undeniable that former Texas A&M President Robert Gates left us with a great legacy and a strong foundation on which to build. This foundation has been very aptly maintained by Interim President Ed Davis over the last year. If appointed, I pledge to build on their efforts, moving forward towards establishing Texas A&M as one of the top public academic institutions in the world. And, as we march aggressively towards academic pre-eminence, the values and traditions that Aggies hold so dear will be marching with us.

Many will say that today is a historic event in the life of Texas A&M, a day in which a Hispanic female is named as the sole finalist for the presidency of this great University. As for me, it is a day to reflect and to be grateful. As I write this, I am reflecting on the heartbreak that my parents went through when they left their native Cuba so many years ago, with a couple of young children in tow, never again to return. And I am grateful, because as a result of their bold decision, I now live in a country that has given me so much, including the great honor to potentially serve as president of Texas A&M University.

It has been a distinct pleasure working alongside each of you since 1995, first as a faculty member in the Department of Animal Science, then as Director of the Center for Food Safety, and most recently asVice Chancellor for the A&M System, and Dean of this great college. If I'm appointed, I promise to continue to support your efforts, as well as those of the rest of the university community, as President of this unique American institution.

Thank you, and Gig 'Em,

(signed)

Dr. Elsa A. Murano
Vice Chancellor and Dean
Agriculture and Life Sciences

Ewing -- a distinguished math professor who received accolades as both a researcher and an administrator -- died late Wednesday, after apparently suffering a heart attack while driving home from work.

The 61-year-old had worked for Texas A&M University or within an A&M System agency since 1992. Most recently, he had returned to the math department to continue his research and his work with A&M's Institute for Scientific Computation, which he founded.

Previously, he served as vice president for research but left that post in August following a federal investigation into A&M's select agent research.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered the university to temporarily halt part of its homeland security research after learning that four Aggie researchers accidentally had been exposed the previous year to bioweapons -- brucella and Q fever -- being studied on campus. Federal law required such exposures to be reported within one week.

Ewing had served as vice president since 2000. In August, he said he felt it was his duty to resign and attributed the problems to human error.

Though math was his first passion, the struggles that resulted for both him and Texas A&M as a result of the CDC investigation weighed on him immensely, family and friends said.

"How unfair the world is that he waited until he was no longer suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous administrative fortune to die," College of Science Dean Joe Newton said, adding that he was infused with rage upon learning of Ewing's death. "Hamlet would have said something like that."

for this we pay $44K per year?)

these guys are probably not the Rhodes scholars

[Joe David] Jones, the founder and CEO of Skyonic, has come up with an industrial process called SkyMine that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide coming out of smoke stacks and mixes it with sodium hydroxide to make sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. The energy required for the reaction to turn the chemicals into baking soda comes from the waste heat from the factory.

"It is cleaner than food-grade (baking soda)," he said.

The system also removes 97 percent of the heavy metals, as well as most of the sulfur and nitrogen compounds, Jones said.

Luminant, a utility formerly known as TXU, installed a pilot version of the system at its Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas, last year. Skyonic, meanwhile, hopes to install a system that will consume the greenhouse gas output of a large--500 megawatts or so--power plant around 2009. Skyonic is currently designing one of these large systems.

The Discovery Channel had a show about traveling to Mars, and experts offered up their ideas for getting rid of carbon dioxide. Jones told his sons that the experts had it wrong. Creating sodium bicarbonate would probably be the best solution.

He then went to his PC and began to research the subject on Google. He didn't find a lot of answers, but one posting referred to a 1973 textbook Jones remembered. He'd bought it for a class at the University of Texas. In fact, it was on the shelf right behind him.

He opened it up to the relevant page and there was the passage he wanted, underlined years earlier by Jones himself.

Dr. McKinney, a family physician, came to the A&M System from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, where he had served as senior executive vice president and chief operating officer since September 2003. He had served in leadership positions at the UT System since 2002, including vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System administrative offices in Austin and acting dean of the UT Medical School in Houston.

During 2001 and 2002, Dr. McKinney served as chief of staff to Governor Rick Perry. From 1995 to 1998, during former Governor George W. Bush's first term, he was Texas commissioner of health and human services. In this role, he oversaw 11 state agencies, a staff of 64,000 and a budget of $24 billion. From 1984 to 1991, he represented Leon, Madison, Grimes, Houston and Montgomery Counties in the Texas House of Representatives. He was speaker pro-tempore of the House from 1989 to 1990.

We know you have the statutory power to arbitrarily appoint a President. We're just saying there's a difference between having power and using it wisely

e wary of confusing Sherman's hiring with other NFL retread coaches, as well. He has the following upsides over the recent rash of middling to piddling NFL exiles finding solace in the breezy 70 hour work weeks of the college world:

1. Has college coaching experience at the school, so will respect the deep fabric of tradition at Texas A&M.

2. Not a bitter cyborg whiling away his time on earth until his robot masters come back from the future to rescue him. (Hello, Bill Callahan.)

3. Actually won quite a bit as a head coach and looked positively ept while doing so, unlike some mustachioed Pitt coaches.

4. Will likely not settle in at a stasis of 7-5 and rely on playbook consisting of 5 plays while going 0-fer life against major rival. (Hello, Chan Gailey.)

• He stressed the importance of teaching as well as recruiting
• He asked to have his salary be less than what Fran was making in order to use the difference on assistants. Not that $1.8M/year for 7 years is a vow of poverty.

The panel is considering "four or five" candidates, including at least one -- and possibly two -- of the three names originally submitted by the presidential search committee, Jones and A&M System Chancellor Mike McKinney said. All were under consideration by the presidential committee at some point, they said

It is extraordinary that prior to the election of Alumni Trustees Todd Zywicki and Steven Smith, both tenured law professors, Dartmouth's Board had no members at all with experience as a full-time faculty member or as a senior educational administrator. This posture makes as little sense as a corporate Board of Directors that has no business executives on it.

At Harvard, two of the six non-ex-officio members of the governing Corporation are faculty members at other schools, as are 10 of the 30 members of its Board of Overseers.

At Yale, three members of the 18-person governing Corporation are faculty members or senior administrators at other institutions, and at Princeton, seven of the 38 member of the Board are full-time educators.

Unlike the other programs on our list, Notre Dame's athletic department operates under the umbrella of the university and is not run as its own distinct entity. As a result, a much higher share of profits are retained by university for academic use. The football team's contribution to academics totaled $21.1 million for the 2006-2007 season--that's as much as the next five most valuable teams contributed to their respective schools combined.

The University of Texas Longhorns, worth $92 million, was football's most profitable team last season, earning $46.2 million, of which $4.7 million went to academics.

Some Democrats have outright called for re-regulation, and even some Republicans are making vague threats about the state stepping in if tuition costs don't level off soon. Many say they want more detail on why universities say they need to raise more money.

A generation ago, Texas had the least expensive public higher education in the country, thanks to heavy subsidies from state oil and gas reserves. In addition, college-going rates were relatively low.
...
Calculated on a per-student basis, which accounts for growth, state support for public universities dropped from $5,872 in 2002-03 to $5,577 in 2005-06, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The figures are for all students, not just undergraduates, and are in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Rep. Fred Brown, R-College Station, said, for example, that flagship universities, like UT and Texas A&M, leave lots of classroom space unused. Why, he and others have asked, do colleges keep adding new buildings when they don't offer more classes at night, on weekends or online?

The contributions of the search committee were taken into consideration, he said - and highly appreciated, which he emphasized - but, ultimately, the final choice probably will not come from their recommendations.

Once the board makes that choice, he said, he does not understand how the faculty's morale could be marred, and the University, as a community, should be behind the selection.

"I don't see where the problem is," Stallings said. "Why should their morale be low because we didn't take their suggestion?"

The faculty members spoke publicly about the issue for the first time Wednesday, three months after the presidential search committee concluded its work, presented its findings to A&M System Chancellor Mike McKinney and then was disbanded. The 15-member committee was formed to find candidates to replace Robert Gates, a former CIA director who left his post in December to become the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

We are concerned that, without the validation that comes from being identified as a leading and acceptable candidate by the Search Advisory Committee, the next President will be weakened by the controversy surrounding the selection process.

...to the extent any decision we make as a Board unintentionally creates negative impact on faculty morale, we will accept those unfortunate consequences.
...
I further trust that there will be no further thoughts or threats of controversy surrounding the process.

11) There's no way to assure the quality of private schools Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Seriously? The problem with private schools is that they can't match the same level of quality we've come to expect from our urban public school system? And what else have you learned in your visit to our planet?

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.

Robert L. Birmingham, known for challenging his students by posing provocative questions, would not have lasted 36 years at the University of Connecticut School of Law if he weren't also an effective educator.

Unfortunately for those who might benefit from his wisdom, he crossed the line between academic freedom and irresponsible behavior recently when, in two separate classes, he showed students a film clip of a woman in a thong dancing suggestively.

The pimping subculture in Atlanta operated under a set of rules, presented in the video called Really Really Pimpin' in Da South. This videotape was made in Atlanta by Pipkins and Carlos Glover, a business associate. Really Really Pimpin' in Da South featured prominent Atlanta pimps, including Pipkins, explaining the rules of the game. This video, along with its companion piece, Pimps Up Hoes Down, outlined the pimp code of conduct, and was repeatedly shown to new pimps and prostitutes alike to concisely explain what was expected of a prostitute.

The professor, Robert L. Birmingham, agreed to take a leave of absence for the rest of the semester and apologized to students after he showed a clip from an R-rated version of a film called "Really, Really Pimpin' in Da South."

But why do faculty, particularly at the undergraduate level where the task is mastery of a basic body of knowlege, set exams where the majority of the students can't answer a majority of the questions?

Jarret A. Zafran '09 said he was asked to leave the Coop after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial he hopes to take.
...
[Coop President Jerry P.] Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop's intellectual property.

• Eat right. Bonking in an exam is not good
• Lack of sleep makes you stupid. Pulling all-nighters is nothing to brag about.
• You can cram, but cramming only loads short-term memory. This has been shown to be evolutionarily conserved back to fruit flies, and is a feature, not a bug. Associative learning is only useful if the associations are reproducible.

...a lot of Americans really are angry or dismissive towards academic institutions and towards academic professionals. Some are that way all the time, some are only that way in response to particular incidents. Some are passionately angry, others are ironically bemused by what they see in academia.

If what you get out of that exercise is, "I really enjoy the study of history, particularly reading old documents" or even, "I'm fascinated by American history, particularly the Civil War", do yourself a favor and give up any ambitions to do a doctorate in history. Not because there is anything wrong with either of those statements, but because you don't have a sufficiently specific sense of what it is presently like to be a professional academic historian. That's one of the major points of my "Should You Go to Graduate School": grad school is not an exploratory kind of education. That's bad, in my view, but that's the way it is. Period.

"I plan to study early modern Mediterranean history, with an emphasis on northern Italy. I'm primarily interested in cultural history and urban history."

"I plan to study American diplomatic history, with an emphasis on the antebellum period. I'm especially interested in how the United States integrated itself into the evolving interstate institutions of the early 19th Century, both before and after the Napoleonic wars."

"I'm interested in the comparative study of imperial frontiers in early modern world history".

"I'm interested in modern China with a strong emphasis on economic history. I'm particularly interested in the internal economics of China before and after Communist rule."

"I'm interested in precolonial African history, especially West Africa in the era of the slave trade. I'm open to a range of methodological approaches."

"I'm primarily interested in radical approaches to global labor history and global capitalism in the 20th Century."

"I'm interested in the history of the book and publishing. I'm fairly open to period and location, but I find 19th and 20th Century approaches to copyright especially intriguing".

"I'm interested in the history of indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, particularly after 1600."

"I'm interested in the theory and philosophy of history, particularly in the consequences of the "linguistic turn'. I would like to think about how to move beyond certain kinds of relativism and return to more grounded conceptions of historical truth."

These kinds of commitments aren't a contract signed in blood. You can start graduate work and find that there's another methodological style you like far more. (In fact, I think that's what ought to happen in most cases, as your own practices evolve and become your own.) You may find a topic you didn't know about, that no one really knows about.

I've always been fascinated by history, and as history major at Big State U, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Bigshot on my undergraduate thesis on cultural and urban history of Northern Italy. I was able to find (insert short, specific description of findings here) This experience gave me a sense of what is involved in being an academic historian, but I know that I've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

I am applying to the graduate program in History at Eastern Snob Univ. because of its exceptional strength in X, Y, and Z, which are all areas that I find particularly interesting, but, as you know, are not well represented in the program at Big State U.

• Moonbats at Stanford don't want her to come back
• There are people in the Middle East who don't like her
• There are lots of books being written about her
• Max Boot thinks she isnt doing enough about human rights

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel tops Forbes magazine's list of the world's 100 most powerful women for the second year in a row, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice slipped to fourth from second last year.

"As a scholar, she'll be fine," said Stanford's president, John L. Hennessy, who succeeded Ms. Rice as provost in 1999. But, he added: "Clearly, there are people who are unhappy about what she's done as secretary of state. Some would say she should not be allowed back. But that is not a legitimate position."

Students and postdocs carry out the day-to-day work in laboratories serving as cheap, well trained labour.

• They aren't cheap
• If they're well-trained, they probably spent a fair amount of time on somebody's grants getting that training.
• They were never indentured, at least not to the PI

The survey finds that over two decades the number of academically employed life scientists in tenured or tenure-track positions has remained stuck at about 30,000, while the number of doctoral degrees awarded in the life sciences has doubled. Thus the proportion of postdocs actually reaching tenured or tenure-track positions has dropped from nearly 45% in the early 1980s, to just below 30%.

The data also reveal a hard-to-reach career getting farther out of reach...

I can sum the whole presentation up in a sentence: academic life science is a hard place to make a living, and getting harder every year.

This week's Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you're a graduate student, don't read any further.

For those that stay in academia, they are in for a rough ride...

Assuming (incorrectly) that our primary purpose in graduate education is to train our replacements and assuming (incorrectly) that all graduates want an academic position, we should still graduate more candidates than there are positions because we will want to choose the best candidates for a position and this means that there has to be a larger supply than the demand.

...the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%.

the average age of first-time R01 grantees has been going up for the past thirty-seven years.

7,000 students per year casting a covetous eye on a total of 20,000 positions? You're all waiting for me to die, aren't you?

LONDON, May 30 — The main union representing 120,000 British college teachers voted Wednesday to endorse a Palestinian trades' union call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The boycott resolution, approved at the inaugural congress of the University and College Union, called on British college lecturers to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions."

In theory, a boycott could sever academic contacts and exchanges of personnel between British and Israeli academic institutions.
...
The resolution condemned what it called "the complicity of Israeli academia" in the occupation of Palestinian lands and said "passivity or neutrality is unacceptable, and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-Semitic."

We are academics, scholars, researchers and professionals of differing religious and political perspectives. We all agree that singling out Israelis for an academic boycott is wrong. To show our solidarity with our Israeli academics in this matter, we, the undersigned, hereby declare ourselves to be Israeli academics for purposes of any academic boycott. We will regard ourselves as Israeli academics and decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded.

Though often based on assertions of fundamental principle, boycotts are not in themselves matters of principle but tactical weapons in political struggles.

Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas branch in Brownsville, saw a slight problem in the route of a border fence that federal officials displayed at a community meeting earlier this month.

"Part of our university," Dr. Zavaleta said, "would be on the Mexican side of the fence."

What about traffic between classes, he wondered. "Would the students need to show a passport?"

Fame-wise, Antioch has always punched out of its weight class. When my parents were in college, it was a centre of beatnik and hippie revolt. When I was in college, it achieved considerable fame as the author of an infamous sexual speech code, which required men to ask permission roughly every minute during a sexual encounter. And a shocking number of the professional organisers one met in those days were recent graduates of Antioch. In the back of my mind, where I store information I don't actually use for anything, it was filed under "Institutions, American, Venerable." So I was kind of shocked to hear that the school is shutting down because it has run out of money and, um, students

Sue the rascals, one urged. Another said, Secede.

In its glory days, it attracted students who wanted to change the world, through war protests or work in communities. But Steven Lawry, Antioch's president, said in an interview that more recently, the college became a magnet for students who felt marginalized, and so bred a political narrowness and culture of resentment. By way of example, he cited students getting "called out" for wearing Nikes, seen as an emblem of globalization.

"It became less about intellectual rigor, than a political and social experience," he said. "The boot camp of the revolution became the model."

"We were offering," he added, "a political re-education" instead of a liberal education.

THE sticky note on my door was wiggling. It was a gift from a student.

Glued to the middle of it was a cockroach.

When I complained about Rick to the dean of students, I was told there was nothing to be done — after all, "students have rights, too." Only after appealing to that dean's boss and calling a raft of fellow professors who had also come to fear Rick's strange behavior was I able to convince the administration to take grudging action; they restricted his ability to loiter in certain areas and began nudging him toward the classes he needed to graduate.

Dr. A. Ian Scott, the pioneering Texas A&M University chemist who discovered how bacteria produce vitamin B12 and other insights that helped revolutionize organic and natural product chemistry, died Wednesday (April 18) of an apparent heart attack at the age of 79. Funeral arrangements are pending for the eminent chemist, who came to Texas A&M in 1977 and was named a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry in 1981. As holder of the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry and the D.H.R. Barton Professor of Chemistry, he achieved worldwide renown for his work with vitamin B12, the essential life pigments chlorophyll and heme, and the cancer drug taxol and other antibiotics.

Children who got quality child care before entering kindergarten had better vocabulary scores in the fifth grade than did youngsters who received lower-quality care.

Also, the more time that children spent in child care, the more likely their sixth-grade teachers were to report problem behavior.

This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material of any kind that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous.

There has been criticism, however, that Cotton is quick to publish work that may be considered trivial and of dubious value to the scientific community, particularly if it were submitted by a more junior scientist. This is particularly true in the area of crystal structures. Cotton has countered this criticism in published interviews, indicating that he feels compelled to publish all of the results he generates using taxpayer funding.

From: security curmudgeon (jericho@attrition.org)
To: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 17:30:44 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Question for you or other Attrition members

: Wow, I feel dumb now. I honestly cannot rember if there were pigeons on
: campus or not. A lot of crazy squirrels, but I can't remember pigeons.
: Just for my own edification, why do you need to know that? I'll find out
: for you.

Hey, squirrels work fine. First, let's be clear. You are soliciting me to
break the law and hack into a computer across state lines. That is a
federal offense and multiple felonies. Obviously I can't trust anyone and
everyone that mails such a request, you might be an FBI agent, right?

So, I need three things to make this happen:

1. A picture of a squirrel or pigeon on your campus. One close-up, one
with background that shows buildings, a sign, or something to indicate you
are standing on the campus.

2. The information I mentioned so I can find the records once I get into
the database.

3. Some idea of what I get for all my trouble.

U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg's communications director, Todd Shriber, was fired Thursday after verifying the accuracy of online reports that he tried to hire hackers to change his grade point average in the records of his alma mater, Texas Christian University, according to Rehberg chief of staff Erik Iverson.

Shriber did send Lyger a note in September asking that the e-mails be removed from the site

• First, it often leads universities to admit students that are probably inferior to those they would have chosen otherwise.... This is dealt with in my previous posts
• Second, and probably much worse, the article notes that the formula creates perverse incentives for students to try to game the system by transferring to weaker schools or taking easier classes...
• Third, the tradeoffs inherent in the ten percent plan are less transparent to both students and the general public than those involved in racial quotas...
• Finally, the ten percent plan also has the effect of disadvantaging high-achieving minority students who go to strong schools and - in part for that reason - fall short of the top ten percent in their class...

When I lived in Texas in 2001-2002, I met quite a few people with high school-age children who had switched to weaker schools in order to take advantage of the plan, or were considering doing so.

Third, the tradeoffs inherent in the ten percent plan are less transparent to both students and the general public than those involved in racial quotas. As a result, it is more likely that harmful effects will remain unmonitored and undetected. If public universities are going to strive for racial diversity, the costs and benefits of doing so should be as transparent as possible.

But if it is morally wrong to aim for a given racial balance in a state university student body by using explicit racial preferences, why is it not equally wrong to intentionally try to achieve the same effect through indirect, facially "neutral" means? In the days of Jim Crow, southern states often used facially neutral policies such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and peonage laws to disadvantage blacks. Few today would argue that these policies were somehow morally superior to those Jim Crow laws that discriminated against blacks through explicit racial classifications. If, as critics of affirmative action claim, explicit affirmative action preferences are morally wrong for the same reason that Jim Crow laws were wrong, then "facially neutral" affirmative action systems such as the Texas ten percent are wrong for the same reasons that the facially neutral means of propping up Jim Crow were.

Like painters composing a canvas, admissions officers like to have a rich palette of students to draw from...

Critics contend the Top 10 Percent Law requires admission of some students who have lower standardized test scores than those who are rejected. This does occur. However, top 10 percent high school students make much higher grades in college than non-top 10 percent students. In fact, top 10 percent students at every level of the SAT earn grade point averages that exceed those of non-top 10 percent students having SAT scores that are 200 to 300 points higher. Strong academic performance in high school is an even better predictor of success in college than standardized test scores.

Here in Texas, the 10 percent solution has worked reasonably well in achieving diversity without running into Supreme Court restrictions on affirmative action. Of the freshmen at the flagship campus here, 18.7 percent are Hispanic and 5.2 percent are black, roughly the same proportions as before the 1996 court ruling in Hopwood v. Texas.

But the formula has also had unintended consequences that the Texas Legislature is now wrestling with; it has become the tail that wagged the dog, university officials suggest. Seventy-one percent of the 6,864 Texans in the freshman class are top 10 percenters, compared with 41 percent in the first year the formula was used. That steady growth has frustrated college officials who have seen their flexibility to admit high school class presidents, high SAT scorers, science fair winners, immigrant strivers, artists and the like narrow.

Mr. Walker, the admissions director, is confident that he can achieve diversity, in part because a 2003 Supreme Court ruling in two University of Michigan cases allows race as a criterion in selecting a class as long as there is not an ironclad racial point system.

If we want to ensure that some set percentage of university admissions slots go to particular minority groups, far better to do so through traditional affirmative action, than by means of the Texas ten percent plan.

• Diversity
• Quality
• Fairness

THE sledgehammer bluntness of the 10 percent formula, signed into law by George W. Bush when he was governor, is based on an assumption that Texas high schools are roughly equal.

"We want to compete in the big leagues," said William Powers Jr., Austin's dapper, cigar-chewing president. "We want to be the best public university in the country, and that means getting the best students."

Authors Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman explain in the "Professors' Guide to Getting Good Grades in College" why it is not bad to be a grade-grubber:

"We hear the terms all the time: dweeb, nerd, geek. Or worse: . . . brown-noser, grade-grubber, teacher's pet. All of these names, of course, are used to put down students who are just trying too hard to get good grades -- students who are ill-adjusted and undersocialized, and will go to practically any length to get an A. That's why many college students are ashamed to admit they care about grades at all. And why we see such students coming to office hours with their tails between their legs, sheepish about displaying even the slightest interest in grades.

Thousands gathered at the steps on the north side of Rudder Tower, the home of Gates' on-campus office, sang the school's alma mater, The Spirit of Aggieland, and cheered for their leader one last time. It was a student-planned event that organizers said was meant as an opportunity for students to say good-bye to the school's most popular president in recent memory.

Word spread about the ceremony through e-mails and online messages. It was originally intended to be a surprise for Gates; students would line the walk from Rudder Tower to the Koldus parking garage where the golf cart he used to travel around campus was parked. But word spread quickly, and the amount of interest it created forced it to be moved to the north side of the building, organizers said.

"A little less than a month ago, I was worried about beating the hell out of Nebraska," Gates said.

"Now, I am worried about beating the hell out of al-Qaida," he said - leading to thousands of whoops from the students.

You know what? I've checked the coaching hotline -- Stanford is still considered a pretty good destination, without insane pressure or big dollars but with a chance to prove your coaching chops in a big media market under the purview of Bill Walsh.

• A place that fires a second-year coach after the team goes 1-11 with injuries, infectious diseases, and a brutal schedule is a school that is dicarding any pretense of not having insane pressure.
• What exactly is the benefit of being under the purview of Bill Walsh?
• The media market?! The size of a media market is usually discussed in terms of how revenue from the broadcast rights for the team allow them to have an expensive roster of free agents, as in the Yankees. Versus the Oakland A's, who are the exemplar of success in a low revenue market. And this is college, idiot. Maybe we should pay and bid for NCAA athletes openly. But you'd think a sportswriter in that big media market would know that we don't.
• Stanford doesn't pay it's coaches that well. When Harris was hired, the Stanfor Daily wrote of Harris:
  

  His salary at Pitt was $600,000, and his pay on the Farm is believed to be comparable.

Firing him is the easy move for athletic director Bob Bowlsby. Finding a good replacement will be more difficult. Since Tyrone Willingham left, the university has tightened admissions standards for athletes. Unless the university administration goes back to the earlier standards, taking the Stanford job would be committing professional suicide. Remember that Harris took Pitt to four bowl games in his six seasons there. He didn't suddenly turn dumb when he came to Stanford.

Let me sum up that case, though I think you know the highlights:

• 1-11 and a horrendous offense the whole season, except Saturday.
• All those empty seats at the new Stanford Stadium.
• The Harris Charm Factor? Not exactly one of his strong points.
• Bowlsby didn't hire him.
• It's becoming clear that a large segment of the Cardinal roster is cool to Harris' sour, drill-sergeant persona.

Perhaps the powers that be at the Capstone finally realize what the rest of the college football community understood about three or four Tide head coaches ago. The Alabama name doesn't carry the weight that it once did. Ask recruits, teenagers too young to remember when Alabama ruled the SEC West.

Without higher pay and better perks, the University of Illinois will continue to lose talented faculty to other institutions, officials say.

Some questioned whether professors living in the relatively affordable Champaign-Urbana community should be paid the same as professors at expensive private schools or in bigger cities like Chicago or New York.

"We would oppose any such idea to increase their salaries that much,'' said Jeff Trigg, executive director of the Illinois Taxpayer Education Foundation. "It's a poor excuse to say we need $110,000 salaries because other people have it. We need to be living within our means.''

First, there's the little problem of a compensating differential. Sure, Urbana probably has cheaper housing than Palo Alto or Greater Boston, but faculty members have neither the view of Lake Mendota or the cachet of a Stanford or MIT affiliation. Second, there's the incentive Mr Trigg's attitude sets up (which is depressingly common among college administrators as well.) If faculty members have to demonstrate their marketability in order to elicit better offers, they're halfway out the door already. Not only that, department chairmen, deans, and provosts have to spend time working out counter-offers and setting up searches they might otherwise avoid having to carry out had the university's policy been to treat productive people decently. Third, there's a difference between refusing to pay $150 for a pair of sneakers just because other people have them, and refusing to pay the going rate for a resource that has opportunity costs. I'd like to see Mr Trigg negotiating with a gas station. "I don't want to pay $2.25 for gasoline just because everybody else does." OK, you don't pay it and I won't sell it.

Tenure-track faculty at the flagship campus earn an average of $92,900 a year, making them the best-paid public university professors in the state and near the top in the Big Ten.

The moment when Gates signaled his intentions was the graduation ceremony in December 2002. The traditional seating arrangement was for attending faculty members to be seated almost out of sight, on the arena floor, with the vice presidents onstage, in the front row, and the deans seated behind them. One of Gates' stated goals for A&M was to "elevate the faculty," but no one knew he meant it physically as well as conceptually. Early arrivals at the ceremony were startled to see that new construction had expanded the stage, allowing the faculty to sit on the same level as the rest of the A&M leadership. The front row was now occupied by the deans, with the vice presidents seated behind them. Coming from a former Sovietologist, who had made a career of noticing who was standing next to whom at Kremlin events, the message was unmistakable: The new arrangements represented a revolutionary transfer of power, from administrators to the faculty and deans. When I went to A&M in 2004 to write about the university's growing pains as it wrestled with change, many of the people I interviewed brought up the ceremony as the signature moment of Gates's presidency.

Small wonder, then, that even college students who ardently supported the invasion of Iraq and just as ardently favor "staying the course" in Iraq argue smugly that, instead of serving their country in uniform, they can serve it so much better in law school or by trading bonds for Goldman Sachs. I personally have heard this argument many times from hawkish undergraduates at Princeton University who would never dream of fighting in uniform for the nation they profess to love.

The station already offer all candidates an opportunity to express their thoughts
If any candidate is given additional opportunities, the station has to make time available for all other candidates...

November 5, 2003 | A federal lawsuit filed last week in Texas may very well turn into the Lone Star State's own version of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" -- the famous 1925 court battle in which two of America's most famous attorneys debated whether evolution should be taught in the public schools. Then, the underlying issue was whether Christianity should trump science; today, it is the scientific status of mainstream environmentalism. In the current case, the author of a widely used environmental textbook is suing five present and former members of the Texas State Board of Education, who two years ago rejected his book because of alleged factual errors and pervasive bias. Claiming that the author's free speech and equal protection rights were violated by an act of censorship, the lawsuit asserts that the real reason the book was rejected was the author's environmentalist views, which clash with those of right-wing school-board members.

W. EUGENE DAVIS, Circuit Judge:
Appellants Chiras, a textbook author, and Rodriguez, a high school student, challenge the district court's Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal of their action alleging that the Texas State Board of Education violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment when it refused to approve Chiras' environmental science textbook for state funding. Because we find that the Appellants do not state a violation of the First Amendment, we affirm the district court's dismissal of their suit.

If, however, a school district selects a textbook not on either of the lists adopted by the Board, the Board pays only 70% of the cost of the textbooks,²² and the local school district is responsible for the remainder.²³

...in Lovato's magical educational approach, the mesmerizing world of author J.K. Rowling works like a Hermione Granger charm. With a minimum of materials and money, he and four assistants keep 120 after-school kids levitated between homework and fantasy. Fifty-three more kids on campus are on the waiting list.

After the homework hour one day last week, Lovato opened the door to a second-floor classroom where Jessica Wu, a 20-year-old team leader, was teaching ``Care for Exotic Creatures'' to the youngsters assembled as students of Gryffindor House.

Wu flashed drawings and photos of lions and their prey through an overhead projector as she explained the wildlife of Africa. In Harry Potter's world, the lion is the official mascot of Gryffindor House.

The kids think they're studying Potter, Lovato said, ``but this is really zoology.''

Wu switches to pictures of a unicorn and phoenix, cleverly bringing the kids back from serious study of African wildlife to Hogwarts' magic before losing their attention.

In other classes, the Slytherins will study ``Potions,'' but it's really basic chemistry.

`Our teachers have been forced to focus on spending all their time on improving those infamous test scores and they have little room for anything else,'' said Virginia Benavidez, who has two children in Lovato's program. There she says, ``My kids have learned leadership skills, teamwork, discipline, how to manage their time wisely and self-confidence, just to name a few.''

``I'm the kind of guy who likes to do things my way,'' he said. ``Not to criticize any school or district, but they have their teachers not necessarily offering an education. They're teaching these kids to pass a test.''

The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else's words.

But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school's action will tar students at one of Fairfax County's academic powerhouses.

"It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."

Dan Kent, a Loudoun County social studies teacher, called Turnitin necessary in a "cut-and-paste world." When Kent became department chair at Ashburn's Broad Run High School in 1999, he said, many teachers were reluctant to assign complex research papers because of the difficulty they encountered in checking for plagiarism.

I can only emphasize once again that the Provost presented a moving target for Stryker--whatever she did, it would never have been good enough. The university has made a policy now of writing negative C2 review letters to virtually everyone (that's the letter you get during the review two years before the tenure review). That way, administrators have "proof" that any person they want to pick off wasn't good enough, and they'd been warned about it. Apparently one top administrator was crowing about how successful this policy was in helping to getting rid of Stryker. I've seen some of these C2 letters, and they're really painful--even some of the male faculty are left in tears. A person who has received one of our top research awards, for example, and is also a top teacher, was told in her letter something along the lines of "your job is to teach, not to be students' friend." What's funny is that the same verbiage was used in the other professors who were reviewed for C2 that year. It wasn't that they were picking on her especially--they treated everyone shabbily, no matter how much they'd accomplished or how hard they worked.

Everybody in Biology knows that the Provost hasn't gotten any funding to speak of for years. So where *does* the funding come from to operate his very expensive lab?

The Provost urged Barkur Shastry--one of the Biology Department's faculty members--to vote against Stryker. Shastry was deeply offended by the attempt at vote coercion, and told Professors Sheldon Gordon, Thad Grudzien, Fay Hansen, and George Gamboa about the Provost's (apparently illegal) activities. Shastry stated words to the effect that he was so horrified at the attempted vote manipulation that he would happily testify about it if anyone ever asked. Then, suddenly, Shastry clammed up, changed his story, and said he hadn't even seen the Provost for 1.5 years. It is believed that the Provost applied some sort of scare tactic to Shastry to frighten him into silence.
(One obvious motive for Shastry's sudden silence--he is still only an Associate Professor and probably would like to make full.) The Provost is also believed to have talked to Professors Satish Walia and Rasul Chaudhry in an attempt to ensure their votes were negative.

...this information was not provided to the arbitrator. The union was aware of the information, but was leery of going forward without Shastry himself testifying. And if Shastry testified, his tune had suddenly changed so as to be an EXACT echo of the Provost's opinion of Stryker's research. (This directly contradicted Shastry's previous written opinion as the person in charge of the research section of Stryker's tenure dossier--but so be it.) The other four people mentioned as having discussed the issue with Shastry were also interviewed by the union, and confirmed that Shastry had indeed told a contradictory story earlier.
Incidentally, the Provost point blank denied on the stand that he had any preconceived notions in mind when he looked at Stryker's record. This is despite the fact that the Department Chair of the time, Dr. Cowlishaw, had written notes he had taken from four months prior to the beginning of Stryker's review, stating how Dean Downing had told him that the Provost was "gunning for" Stryker.

• Hanna, DM., Gross, BA., Kandlikar, SS., Lempicki, E., Oakley, BA., Stryker, GA. 2005. Detection of Vesicular Stomatitis Virus using a Capacitive Immunosensor. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, Accepted
• Oakley, BA., Hanna, DM., Kandlikar, SS., Gross, BA., Stryker, GA. 2005. Cell Lysis in SWLA-2 Hybridomas due to 1 kHz AC Electric Fields. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, Accepted
• Clark, AK., Kovtunovych, G., Kandlikar, SS., Lal, SK. and Stryker, GA. Cloning and expression analysis of two novel paraflagellar rod domain genes found in Trypanosoma cruzi. Parasitology Research 2005 Jul;96(5):312-320.
• Kandlikar, SS., Oakley, BA., Hanna, DM., and Stryker, GA. 2004. "An Examination of the Effect of Decaying Exponential Pulse Electric Fields on Cell Mortality in Murine Spleenocytes, Hybridomas, and Human Natural Killer Cells," Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE 26:2643-2646.
• Gross, BA., Kandlikar, SS., Oakley, BA., Hanna, DM., Rusek, A., Stryker, GA. 2004. "An Examination of the Effect of an AC Pulsed Electric Field on Cell Mortality in SWLA-2 Hybridomas," Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE 26:2635-2638.
• Spagnuolo, AM., Hanna, DA., Lindsey, W., and Stryker, GA. 2004. "Modeling HIV-1 Dynamics and the Effects of Decreasing Activated Infected T-cell Count by Filtration," Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE 26:722-725.
• Hanna, DM., Oakley, BA., and Stryker GA. 2003. Using a System-on-a-Chip Implantable Device to Filter Circulating Infected Cells in Blood or Lymph. IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience 2(1): 6 -13.item

I did a great deal of research with Dr. Stryker, and I can assure you that she more than pulled her own weight, and she is an excellent researcher. Interestingly, when I spoke up for Dr. Stryker at her arbitration hearing, the Provost passed his lawyer a note, subsequent to which I was asked whether Dr. Stryker's and my joint conference papers were published by the conference only because I was a Vice President of the Society (the society in question is the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society--the largest bioengineering society in the world). The lawyer then insinuated that I had somehow pulled rank and gotten my papers accepted because I'd reviewed them myself. This is a shocking charge to level at any academic. In reality, all papers are anonymously reviewed for the EMBS conferences, and the system is set up so that no person can ever review themselves--*and* an author has no choice of reviewers for their own papers. What's worse is--I myself had gone up for tenure the year before, being judged on many of the same joint papers, and the Provost did not ask *any* of these questions or make any such bizarre insinuation--my tenure was simply approved. The fact that I was a Vice President of the EMB Society was commented on favorably. All of these factors contribute to why I feel very certain that Dr. Stryker was singled out for very different treatment than other professors going up for tenure.

You all might also be interested to know that this past year, a professor came up for tenure with no publications whatsoever, no grant monies, and a unanimous vote against by the department.
The Provost gave this professor tenure.

Young, Brilliant,
Unanimously Approved
By Three Faculty Committees
For Tenure, Professor Gabrielle Stryker...
...has been canned (sixth story down). The provost at Oakland University doesn't like her. He overruled everybody. Won't say why.

Dr. Stryker has been told by the Dean of Arts and Sciences that the decision was based on her lack of independence as a researcher.

Oakland University administrators and faculty were able to reach a tentative agreement around 10 p.m. Tuesday to avoid a strike that would have impeded the official start of the 2006-2007 school year today [Aug 30].

15-0 (1 abstention) tenured members of the Department of Biological Sciences (the provost does not get a vote in the department, although I was personally told by one of the department review committee members that the Provost had tried to encourage him to vote negatively).

6-0 at the College of Arts and Science

11-0 at the University's Faculty Retention & Promotion Committee

While the standards for tenure differ at each institution, all of my peers felt I had met the standards at Oakland. There was no dissension until the provost, who had been my Chair and had clashed with me on issues within the department. He had hired me, I had not been properly deferential to him.

She may have made the mistake of crossing the wrong person (her department chairman became provost) but the paper trail suggests procedural irregularities that will keep the common-room lawyers, as well as the real ones, occupied for some time. For starters, the department is obligated to note in a probationary faculty member's third-year and fifth-year review whether her research record offers sufficient evidence of her own talents as a scholar. (Continued publication with one's thesis advisor, or participation in grants at one's degree-granting institution, to the exclusion of any single-authored publications, collaboration with colleagues, or mentoring of Ph.D. students invites trouble. But the department or the college has failed to exercise due diligence in not suggesting a change of research emphasis.)

This fragmented and mostly unplanned learning system is a messy mix of government programs and private business. In some ways it compares favorably to other countries' more controlled governmental systems. Of course, that isn't an excuse for not trying to improve our schools. We would certainly be better off if more students performed better. Nor should it inspire complacency. "Other countries are picking up these models of community colleges and online learning," says Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a research group.

handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.

The strategy of pursuing short-term tuition revenues by lax standards comes undone when those graduates write a "See Spot run" cover letter on a resume (or, worse, send "can u give me a job?" as a cover letter.) When the employers quit showing up at the job fairs or sending recruiters, the self-esteem game is over.

Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.

I've heard math faculty say that every year, somebody raises a hand and asks 'why are you doing math with letters?'

Look to your left, and now look to your right. By the end of the year, one of you will join a class action lawsuit.

as of 15:30 GMT last Thursday (August 17th), after enduring what was surely the longest transfer viva in the history of man (two and a half hours--hell, they should have gone ahead and given me my degree right then and there), I am now an official Oxford D.Phil. student. (The D.Phil. is Oxford's archaic equivalent of the Ph.D.) That means I can look forward to another 2+ years of hardcore science here in the Department of Biochemistry. Yes!

WASHINGTON, July 14 — The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.

Surprise, surprise, surprise private schools aren't better than public schools, and private schools run by conservative Christian organizations are the worst.

The average private school mean reading score was 18.1 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .58.

The average private school mean mathematics score was 12.3 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .38.

Including selected student characteristics in the model, however, resulted in a substantial reduction in the difference in all four analyses. The reduction varied from 11 to 15 score points. For grade 4 reading and grade 8 mathematics, the average difference in adjusted school mean scores was no longer significant. For grade 4 mathematics, the difference was significant, and the adjusted school mean was higher for public schools. Only for grade 8 reading was the difference still significant with a higher school mean for private schools.

gender, race/ethnicity, whether students had a disability or were English language learners, computer in the home, eligibility for free/reduced-price school lunch, participation in the Title I program, number of books in the home, and number of absences.

Public schools do as good as private ones

• Shoot the messenger
• Everybody else does it

Vanderbilt, SEC football's welfare queen, annually collecting millions from schools that can actually earn bowl bids, but contributing not a dime of its own in more than a generation.

University officials had earlier refused to disclose her health ailments, but friends say Denton had a history of thyroid problems stemming from removal of a cancerous thyroid in her 20s [emph added].

Often shy and awkward in social settings...

When we spoke, Denton was feisty, funny and passionate about recruiting more gifted women and minorities into the sciences, for which she had a stellar reputation. This was before she found herself in the middle of her own campus controversy.

She misread the campus culture at UCSC horribly -- instead of the happy hippie thing I think most of us figured was going on, it turns out that, as Tim and others note, some of the students there are real persistent and real nasty in a very in your face way, and that in general (again if Oso's got it right) the place is somewhat toxic at the moment.

Quotes from UCSC screening committee

• Ken Doctor, UCSC alumnus:
  
  ‘What stands out immediately is a level of energy and accomplishment, which is unusual is academic circles. Alums value UCSC its commitment to undergrads. It's a difficult balance for a research university, but she has won a bunch of awards for her teaching and mentoring.'


• Don Rothman, lecturer in writing, 32 years at UCSC:
  ‘I have such mixed feelings. Marty Chemers brought something unique to the position, even in the brief time he's been acting chancellor, but I'm open to discovering who the new person is ... . The school of engineering has attracted a first-rate faculty. How the rest of the campus can benefit from that success remains to be seen.'


• Max Waxman, student representative on long-range development plan committee:
  ‘I was hoping it would be Martin Chemers, but it will be interesting to have a new perspective. I hope the new chancellor will explore the forest as a new student does and learn the perspectives that are here. The new chancellor has to dovetail her work with the work Martin Chemers started with the community and with the students.'


• Becky Klein, financial assistant at UCSC's engineering school; president of Coalition of Union Employees:
  
  ‘This woman's got a lot of work ahead of her. Morale is at an all-time low. We've had layoffs and they're eliminating positions. CUE, AFSCME and most of UPTE don't have a contract. It will be interesting to see how she deals with all these challenges.'

Criticism of the chancellor escalated to the point that Denton worried about her personal safety.

"People were coming to her house and banging on the door wanting to talk about issues," Regan said.

Denton took the job in the midst of a multi-year process to update the university's long-range growth plan, which could bring 6,000 more students to the campus. She repeatedly defended the plan when it was challenged by city leaders, residents, faculty and staff.

In April, she received dozens of threatening phone calls and e-mails from people upset that student anti-war protesters forced military recruiters off campus, a campus spokeswoman said. And earlier this month, Denton was followed across the campus by chanting protesters against "institutional racism" at the university. They blocked her from leaving until she agreed to watch them perform a skit. She left before the performers finished.

"No one could say quite why - it was just a bad fit," he said. "She might have been unused to dealing with people outside of science and engineering, because she never had to deal with them before."

We should start to learn soon what the proportions of [Denton's] despondency were: how much was due to professional frustration and how much to Gretchen Kalonji [her partner. It‘s rumored that Kalonji had just broken up with Denton].

What was clear from the recent grapevine was that she had alienated almost everyone by now. One leak out of the Council of Chancellors said they were all fed up with her -- anyone who disagreed with her was met with shouting, rage and denunciation for homophobia (her universal response to being thwarted). Another from her office staff said much the same thing -- turnover in what had been thought to be plum jobs was astonishingly high.

Dean-level meetings on campus produced similar reports. Significantly, she fired her number two person within minutes of meeting her and installed in his place perennial yes-man David Klieger [it‘s spelled "Kliger"] --a pathetic character respected by almost nobody. (On becoming Dean of Nat Sciences some years ago Klieger immediately instituted a "Campus Scientist of the Year" award and then gave the first such award to himself.)

Denice Dee Denton, chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz, apparently jumped to her death Saturday morning from the 44th floor of a San Francisco building where she shared an apartment with her partner.

Denton, a well-regarded engineer, had been named this spring in a series of articles examining UC management compensation. She had been criticized for an expensive university-funded renovation on her campus home, and for obtaining a UC administrative job for Kalonji.

Denton had called campus police a few times after protesters camped out on the grounds around her house, said Santa Cruz City Councilman Mike Rotkin, a lecturer at the school. She asked for increased security after someone threw a parking barricade through a picture window at her university home.

"I don't think she was worried or afraid about a particular person,"' he said, "but I think she felt personally threatened by it."

After one recent event in which students surrounded her car and performed a five-minute play in support of workers and students of color, she seemed to grow increasingly fearful, said Josh Sonnenfeld, a student organizer.

"She or the university hired a security guard to be outside her campus home 24/7. She hired a bodyguard-type figure to go around with her everywhere," he said.

Such overbuilding is rampant across the Midwest and Northeast, where the number of new houses -- almost always at the edge of metro areas -- swamped the number of new households by more than 30 percent between 1980 and 2000, according to a study co-written by Thomas Bier, executive in residence at the Center for Housing Research and Policy at Cleveland State University.

"As upper-income Americans are drawn to the new houses, neighborhoods become more homogenous," he said. Echoing the Brookings study, he said: "The zoning is such that it prevents anything other than a certain income range from living there. It is our latest method of discrimination."

there are three findings. You should want your kids to be in a class with (1) high-achieving kids and (2) low variance in achievement. And (3) you should care more if you have a smart kid.

Effect (2) suggests that ability tracking is generally beneficial, because it puts all kids in low-variance environments. However, because tracking raises the average peer for high-ability kids and lowers the average peer for low-ability kids, effect (1) makes high-ability kids achieve more and low-ability kids achieve less. Effect (3) then compounds the increased inequality.

In short, ability tracking appears to be a policy that increases efficiency and decreases equality--another example of the Big Trade-off.

State-controlled, compelled to accept almost everyone who wants to attend for as long as they want to attend, lacking autonomy, perennially underfunded, top-heavy with research universities (which do little significant research) instead of diversified into colleges and universities, poorly governed, lacking many of their smartest students and faculty because these people have left for American academic institutions, profoundly averse to competition, peer review, and excellence, unable to charge tuition, liable to generate violent political opposition if they mount even modest reforms… It all tells "a grim story for Europe."

The Standing Committee did not reach, or seek, consensus with regard to disciplinary actions. Six of the voting members recommended dismissal from the University. Three members recommended suspension without pay; two of these recommended suspension for five years and one recommended suspension for two years.

Given the range of options available, the SCRM considered a number of factors in determining the sanction most appropriate to this case. The analysis of institutional disciplinary policies mentioned above11 describes three factors institutions considered in their choice of discipline: Seriousness of the misconduct, deliberateness of the misconduct, and impact of the misconduct. To this list, the standing committee added a consideration of Professor Churchill's willingness to acknowledge and correct his misconduct, a factor noted by the Investigative Committee in its report.
...
The pattern and the nature of the violations suggest that Professor Churchill's behavior was motivated not simply by a lack of awareness of academic standards, but in willful disregard of those standards.

Many have asked how Professor Churchill received a tenured Associate Professor position, and subsequent promotion to Full Professor, apparently without going through normal review processes. We share that question, but have no answers since it was not directly germane to our investigation. Rather, we note that the University has recently received reports from a task force on tenure-related processes and suggest that the recommendations in that report may be relevant to some of the issues that underlie our investigation.¹⁸ We appreciate the task force's conclusion that the basic procedures for tenure, promotion, and post-tenure review are sound, and we would like to believe that deviations that may have occurred in the case of Professor Churchill would not be repeated with current procedures.

...we would like to believe that deviations that may have occurred in the case of Professor Churchill would not be repeated with current procedures.

Our specific concern is for faculty and staff in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCB who have suffered from the fallout of this investigation. We have taken pains in this report to explain that the findings apply only to Professor Churchill, and should not be casually generalized to others in his department or field of study. We recommend that the Chancellor consider means to ensure that the reputation of other faculty and staff in the Department of Ethnic Studies is restored and maintained appropriately.

Consequently, if any of the sanctions recommended by the investigative committee are implemented by the University, not only will the critics of Professor Churchill feel justified, but also those who have generalized from this single case to the UCB department of ethnic studies and to the field of ethnic studies as a whole. The University has a responsibility, therefore, in whatever decision it might make concerning Professor Churchill, to simultaneously indicate its support concerning the legitimacy of ethnic studies, and to acknowledge the contribution that the UCB department of ethnic studies has made to the teaching and scholarly mission of the University of Colorado.

...review above the level of the primary unit (e.g., by deans or by the Vice Chancellor's Advisory Committee) has a vanishingly small probability of detecting most research misconduct, no matter how well those reviews are done. If there is hope of identifying misconduct sans a complaint, it lies in the unit level review conducted by peers of the individual.

Students are not customers. Teachers are not employees.

By that logic, no spectator at a sporting event or passenger on a money-losing airline is a "customer." For that matter, a personal trainer could use Professor Benton's logic to argue that a trainee is not a "customer." And apparently Professor Benton could use a refresher course on compensating differentials.

• There may be more than one set of customers involved in my purveying of teaching services. Are the taxpayers of the state of Texas customers too? Or something else*?
• That the student is a customer doesn't mean that they should get less rigorous education no matter what they're paying for it. "The customer is always right" is not meant to be taken literally (It would make grading a lot easier, however; A+ for everyone!)

It's probably safe to say that more than two-thirds of college teaching is now done by people who are routinely punished for maintaining standards. The professional survival of untenured faculty members depends on processing large numbers of students without making waves.

OVER the span of his college career, Andrew Lipovsky has taken summer courses at Pace and Columbia in New York, spent three semesters at Northeastern here, and then transferred across town to Boston University last year. While he has majored in business, he has incidentally performed a kind of science experiment, in which he has been the control and those four universities the variables.

He earned grade-point averages of 3.2 at Columbia, 3.5 at Northeastern and 3.8 at Pace, a range solidly in the A's and B's. Then, in his two years at Boston University, he compiled only a 2.4, the borderline between B minus and C plus. When he had to repeat some of the same business courses at Boston that he already had taken at Northeastern, part of the transfer process, his marks dropped by as much as two full grade points.

• The courses might not actually be the same. BU may have asked him to repeat the courses because they are different in content. Students often claim equivalency when it's not really there, based on course titles. The advising office may have looked at syllabi and readings and said that these courses didn't satisfy requirements in his major.
• Differences in testing methods. If the Northeastern courses were based primarily on multiple choice but the BU courses had more writing (or vice versa), a previously unseen weakness in Mr. Lipovsky's academic skills might have been revealed
• Overconfidence. Mr. Lipovsky might have thought he'd breeze through the courses since he's had them before. Even if he did have equivalent courses before, many students don't put what they learn into long term memory. If he was overconfident, he might have not studied or taken too heavy a load.
• Other changes in Mr. Lipovsky's behavior. The contributions of sex, drugs ,alcohol, and rock and roll may all have changed.
• Cumulative exams. Maybe BU is better at distinguishing learning from cramming than Northeastern.

"The biggest crime against students is not low grades," one editorial argued, "but having their work judged based on how it fits into a rigid curve rather than its true quality."

"These students are competing for admission to graduate school, for post-docs, for study abroad," said Jeffrey J. Henderson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "And to the extent G.P.A. is important, they say, we come out of B.U. and we have a lower grade point and no one can tell why. That is a legitimate concern."

Is this any way for a university to seek to distinguish itself?

In addition to salaries and overtime, payroll records obtained by The Chronicle show that employees received a total of $871 million in bonuses, administrative stipends, relocation packages and other forms of cash compensation last fiscal year. That was more than enough to cover the 79 percent hike in student fees that UC has imposed over the past few years.

Of the $871 million, $600 million is compensation paid to health sciences faculty for treating patients or conducting research, and to campus faculty for additional teaching and research they do during the summer. While senior managers at the University have been the focus of the Chronicle's stories, these senior managers received only $7 million, or less than 1% of the $871 million figure. Of this $7 million, approximately $900,000 came from State General Funds and $300,000 from student fees - the rest was from other sources of revenue.

Stanley B. Prusiner Professor	UC San Francisco	$54,737	$598,750
John M. Bishop Chancellor	UC San Francisco	$358,900	$358,900

Even renting each regent their own Jaguar X-Type from Hertz and paying $100 in parking for the three days would cost about half of what UC currently spends, the analysis found.

He eventually enters into a Bushian rift: "All people share the desire to be free"; "human rights are above the state and beyond history"; we are "insisting that all people have the right to be free." Someone shouts: "We're graduating, not voting!" Lots of derisive shouts and laughter and applause.

As McCain continues with a personal story, a student shouts: "It's about my life, not yours." McCain:
"When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest value..." Groans from the students. "It's not about you!" "Sit down!"

He says after the reconciliation, he and his friend "worked together for shared ideals." A shout: "We don't share your ideals!"

David also possessed an animating love of justice. He worked to make our society more just, and he sought justice for those who were not blessed to live in this country.

Two members of the Committee conclude and recommend that Professor Churchill should not be dismissed. They reach this conclusion because they do not think his conduct so serious as to satisfy the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal set forth in section 5.C.1 of the Law of the Regents, because they are troubled by the circumstances under which these allegations have been made, and because they believe that his dismissal would have an adverse effect on the ability of other scholars to conduct their research with due freedom. [emph added]

Had Professor Churchill demonstrated the integrity of an Ely or a Commons there would be no scandal, Colorado's sloppy promotion and tenure procedures notwithstanding.

Today's law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That's a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career - preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the transition from being a student to being a working scientist. After all, when you're still a student, other people are expected to know more about what you're doing than you do yourself; you're supposed to be learning from them.

But that has to change at some point. It's not that you suddenly get as smart or as experienced as the better grad students or post-docs in the group, let alone your PhD advisor. More talented people might be better at your project than you if they devoted all their time to it, but they're not doing that: you are.

...the decision to hire, and especially to confer continuous tenure on, a faculty member is a deeply consequential one for the University, for by making this decision the University commits itself to the defense of the individual's work, so long as he or she lives up to the University's expectations. We believe that the University of Colorado²⁴⁸ may have made the extraordinary decision to hire Professor Churchill, a charismatic public intellectual with no doctorate and no history of regular faculty membership at a university, to a tenured position without any probationary period in part because at that moment in the institution's history, it desired the favorable attention his notoriety and following were expected to bring.²⁴⁹ This notoriety was achieved to some extent by the publication of some of the very essays that have now come under scrutiny because of their scholarly shortcomings. The hiring was, in short, largely the consequence of Professor Churchill's effectiveness as a polemicist.

In light of the explicit requirements of the Regents' Laws requiring the university to resist outside interference and pressures, it is at least ironic that the Interim Chancellor of the University has now become the formal complainant in this much-publicized proceeding. The University has perhaps gotten more than it bargained for when it made its high-risk decisions about Professor Churchill in the early 1990s, but there is very little about the present situation that is not foreshadowed by developments across the last fifteen years. For us, the indignation now exhibited by some University actors about Professor Churchill's work appears disingenuous, as they and their predecessors are the ones who decided to hire him.

The committee's 125-page report said Churchill falsified, fabricated and plagiarized some of his research, did not always comply with standards for listing other authors' names and failed to follow accepted practice for reporting results.

The decision on his future at the university will be made by school officials later this year. Churchill has said if he is fired, he will sue.

Churchill is found guilty of passing off others' work as his own (plagiarism), but also of passing off his own work as others'. The latter is faulted as a general departure from "established standards regarding author names on publications" (p. 89); but it's also more specifically, and more seriously, faulted because Churchill then used the work published under another's name "as apparently independent authority for claims that he makes in his own later scholarship" (p. 89). This "permits the author to create the false appearance that his claims are supported by other scholars when, in fact, he is the only source for such claims" (p. 90).

But perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of ethnic studies is the affiliation of its scholars to their native communities. The most salient feature of this relationship is the desire on the scholar's part to produce more knowledge and teaching with respect to his community's historical, social, and artistic life and to integrate such teaching and knowledge within the broad spectrum that is American society. Beyond this fundamental commitment, ethnic studies scholars often take an active advocacy role within their communities when they judge those communities are being treated unjustly.

Yet none of these features, especially the latter, should affect scholarly standards in research and teaching. Scholars in ethnic studies can and often do offer revisionary reappraisals of conventionally accepted social events and interpretations, but not by violating accepted norms of veracity. For example, the Second World War against Japan was initiated with an attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Although there can be reasonable scholarly debate as to whether the United States subsequently carried out a war in the Pacific based on a racist agenda, that debate cannot permit a statement to the effect that the attack on Pearl Harbor never occurred. The interdisciplinary work and social commitment of ethnic studies scholars may require an even stronger fealty to standards of veracity and evidence. The particular, distinctive, and welcome features of ethnic studies that entered the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s were never intended to sanction misuse of the evidence, fabrication, plagiarism, or false attribution of academic work. Ethnic studies has now produced a large and distinguished body of scholarship and a parallel fine record of teaching to revise and correct an often distorted understanding of United States society and culture. That record should not be sullied by poor scholarly practices.

Thousands of U.S. students such as Del Monte are increasingly relying on overseas tutors to boost their grades and SAT scores. The tutors, who communicate with students over the Internet, are inexpensive and available around the clock, making education the newest industry to be outsourced to other countries.

Tutoring companies figure: If low-paid workers in China and India can sew your clothes, process your medical bills and answer your computer questions, why can't they teach your children, too?

Apparently, there is something extremely valuable, which I can't quite put my finger on, about live face-to-face interaction between teacher and student, even in large courses. The high value of face-to-face interaction suggests that outsourcing education, while workable in some situations, is likely to be limited.

But maybe I am wrong and will soon need to find another line of work.

We already have distance learning in most university science courses; it's called the lecture.

If MBA students simply turned up and got recruited on day 1, then those institutions, in my view, would have done their[typo corrected] job. Indeed, I recall once an entrepreneur remark that the people he sent off to do an MBA came back in worse condition than he before, since they were indoctrinated with a pile of silly MBA-speak.

Mike helped me unscramble everything in my mind," the 20-year-old said

When Don Herzog, a law professor at the University of Michigan, asked his students questions last year, he was greeted with five seconds of silence and blank stares.

He knew something was wrong and suspected he knew why. So he went to observe his colleagues' classes — and was shocked at what he found.

"At any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90% of the students were online," Professor Herzog says. "And what were they doing online? They were reading The New York Times; they were shopping for clothes at Eddie Bauer; they were looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco when their new job started.... And I was just stunned."

Herzog first went on the offensive in his own law classes, banning laptops for a day as an experiment. The result, he says, was a "dream" discussion with students that led him to advocate more sweeping changes.

• Are the classes at Michigan so unengaging that 85-90% of the students felt that they were better off surfing the web?
• Was there really the causal relationship being claimed? An alternative hypothesis is that in this uncontrolled experiment, banning laptops signalled the students, who are presumably not dummies if they got into Michigan Law, that the prof was serious about wanting more engagement from the class. Other methods of signalling may have worked just as well...and simply banning laptops without that signal might just shift inattentive behavior to other forms.
• Does Prof. Herzog ever call on students by name?
• Even if a ban on laptops is a good thing for Prof. Herzog, why would this lead to the idea that a Law School-wide ban is a better solution than individual instructors setting their own laptop policies?

"Any serious analysis of accreditation as it is currently practiced results in the unmistakable conclusion that institutional purposes, rather than public purposes, predominate," it says. "A system that is created, maintained, paid for and governed by institutions is necessarily more likely to look out for institutional interests."

The single most important influence on your graduate career will be who your advisor is.

It might be a slight overstatement to say that the choice of advisor is the single most important factor in your grad school experience, but only a slight overstatement. The right choice of advisor can make your life much more pleasant, and set you up well for your future career, while the wrong choice can lead to extreme amounts of pain and misery.

• More options if you haven't really narrowed down who you want to work with, and
• More options if you can't get into that person's group

Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing - in some cases tripling - the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.[emph. added]

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

I don't usually go in for conspiracy theories, but the claim that the real purpose of "No Child Left Behind" is to break public education so badly that everybody will agree to discard it looks more plausible with every new story about its effects.

• A historian and an education expert bemoaning the loss of time for other subjects:
  

  "Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."
  ...
  The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading."

• People in the trenches saying that they need the extra remediation, and that the extra emphasis actually helps:
  

  But officials in Cuero, Tex., have adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them meet the federal requirements.
  ...
  "We're using that as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."
  
  At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running.
  ...
  Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills were solidifying. Rubén said math has become his favorite subject.
  ...
  Donna Simmons, his mother, said Mr. Lara seemed to be working hard to help Paris understand math.

  "The school cares," Ms. Simmons said. "The faculty cares. I want him to keep trying."

Wieman said he will close his atomic physics laboratory to concentrate full-time on education. He said he couldn't find a way to pursue his educational mission while maintaining a top-flight lab.

While on sabbatical last year, he sought state and federal support, along with private funding and grants, to pursue his vision for improved teaching techniques.

All 34 of his funding requests were rejected, he said Monday.

The scientists, from Washington University in St Louis, found that students understood and retained information more readily when subjected to frequent tests and quizzes while studying than students who simply read material over and over again.

Soon upon arrival in San Francisco from the helm of Washington, D.C.'s public schools in the summer of 2000, Ackerman began unearthing widespread corruption in the district's facilities department from previous superintendent Bill Rojas' reign. She joked later she had arrived in the "wild, wild West."

Ackerman called in the city attorney's office and the FBI, which resulted in settlements last year against companies involved in the fraud and a recouping of more than $50 million for the district.

The improved financial picture in the district helped convince city voters to approve a $295 million facilities bond for the district in 2003 and a mandated annual contribution of city money for the district in 2004.

Ackerman has also seen test scores improve for all groups of students each year for the past five years, making San Francisco's scores the best of any urban district in the state for the past two years. The district is a finalist for the Broad Prize in Education, a national contest for urban districts with an award of $500,000 in scholarship money.

Outgoing San Francisco schools chief Arlene Ackerman racked up $45,625 in credit card charges in 2005 -- mostly in meals, airplane tickets and hotels -- which have been reimbursed by the San Francisco Unified School District at taxpayer expense.

Ackerman, a member of many national education organizations, took 32 work-related trips around the country last year, often staying in luxury hotels and eating at high-priced restaurants.

While in San Francisco, she paid for scores of working lunches and dinners -- frequently at such well-known restaurants as Jardiniere, Hayes Street Grill, Palomino and Morton's.

Charges include $1,743.78 spent on a reception at San Francisco's Argent Hotel for members of the Council of Great City Schools and their spouses. Ackerman said participating districts rotate hosting the receptions -- and that some of the board members questioning her spending habits attended the reception.

Here in San Francisco, Arlene Ackerman has achieved goals that other school districts would love to emulate. Is it best for our schools and our kids if we get rid of her, with no feasible replacement waiting in the wings and a shrinking pool of competent applicants?

We don't think so.

Gladwell: This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

INDIANAPOLIS - Vince Young's horribly low score on the Wonderlic intelligence test - reportedly 6 of a possible 50 - has given teams at the top of the NFL Draft plenty of extra work to do. It also might end up changing how the picks fall at the top of the first round.

He had the best passing efficiency in college football, he won 30 of 32 games and he was on track to graduate in four and a half years. Intelligence is not a factor here at all.

"Vince is very bright. I hate that people had to take a shot like that that's unfair and untrue. Also, I probably couldn't pass that test myself if I tried. I've read it, and it seems really stupid to me."

NFL prospects average a score of 19 (three points short of the average adult worker), though the outcomes inform some positions more than others, according to the Tribune. What concerns some coaches are particularly low scores.

Which number in the following group of numbers represents the smallest amount?
7, .8, 31, .33, 2

Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests $4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?

It's believed that Pat McInally, a product of Harvard and a former punter with the Cincinnati Bengals, is the only NFL draft prospect to score a perfect 50.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

You Are 22% Evil

A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well. In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil.

In the meantime, the college was also under attack by the press, chiefly the New England Courant, in whose pages sixteen year old Benjamin Franklin, writing under the name of "Silence Dogood," reviled Harvard for nurturing pride, conceit, extravagance, idleness and ignorance.

Some literature has even shown that an industry composed of workers cooperatives, Posner's analogy to faculty-run universities, in a competitive environment tends toward efficiency because these cooperatives have to bid against each other, and against other industries, for labor and capital. Much of that literature would apply to universities run by professors, and to other aspects of the structure of American universities.

imagine the reaction of the CEO of a business firm, and his board of directors, if after the CEO criticized one of the firm's executives for absenteeism, ascribed the underrepresentation of women in the firm's executive ranks to preferences rather than discrimination, dealt in peremptory fashion with the firm's employees, and refused to share decision-making powers with them, was threatened with a vote of no confidence by the employees. He and his board would tell them to go jump in the lake. But of course there would be no danger that the employees would stage a vote of no confidence, because every employee would take for granted that a CEO can be brusque, can chew out underperforming employees, can delegate as much or as little authority to his subordinates as he deems good for the firm, and can deny accusations of discrimination.

imagine the reaction of the board of directors of a business firm, if the CEO faced repeated open revolt by the executives and employees of a major profit center. He points out that executives in other divisions support him explains his problems to his board as being due to the lack of faith of his subordinates in that division in his vision for the future of the firm. His board would tell him to go jump in the lake.

Because universities are organized as nonprofit entities, there are no shareholders, and hence no owners in the conventional sense.

• The task force will identify some real problems with the status quo
• The task force will propose solutions that don't address these problems, and in some cases are insane.

• The faculty will identify some real problems with the task force report. This is not hard.
• The faculty will mostly complain, and the alternatives proposed will include throwing more money at the status quo.

First, we recommend that all undergraduate students take a specially developed course in each of their first two years. We call these courses "Signature Courses." These Signature Courses will expose students to broad issues that transcend individual disciplines and demonstrate how different disciplines discover and expand knowledge. They will introduce
students to top faculty and to the rich array of resources available only at a great research university. In short, from the moment they arrive on campus, students will benefit from a shared intellectual experience and will discover what makes a UT education distinctive. (See Part III.)

...the only noticeable change for freshmen, proponents say, would be the new Signature Course. That course, said art history professor Linda Henderson, would be designed to "wow" students with UT's most engaging professors.

14 sections per semester, averaging 240 students, will accommodate 6,720 freshmen. Each section will be divided into groups of 20, which will meet weekly for discussion, oral presentation, and feedback on writing. These discussion groups will be led by experienced and specially trained teaching assistants, working closely with the courses' professors. The professors will also circulate among the discussion groups and actively participate in writing instruction and evaluation.

This course will be taught in multiple topical sections that will differ in content and focus, depending on the particular interests and expertise of the faculty who design and teach them.

Faculty will propose topics to University College or be recruited by the College to teach the sections. For example, one topical section (possibly entitled "Global Climate Change") might investigate global climate change from the perspectives of earth science, social impact, world politics, and economics. Another topical section (possibly entitled "Conceptions of Nature in Science and Art") might investigate how scientists and artists construct theories and visions of the natural world.

...the course ideally will involve some form of collaborative teaching that represents various disciplines.

...how scholars can cooperate or usefully disagree and how different disciplines can aid in the quest for knowledge by framing each other's questions, interpreting each other's results, and engaging in dialogue.

...past efforts to create such "first-year experiences" have been utter failures in giving students much of anything, though they did provide for their own on-campus vacation time.

The Commission of 125 was a group of citizens convened to express a vision of how The University of Texas can best serve Texas and society during the next 25 years. The group included 218 members chosen for occupational, ethnic, and geographic diversity. Ninety were honorary members who had served as members of the UT System Board of Regents or one of two previous planning efforts--the Committee of 75 (which concluded its work in 1958) and the Centennial Commission (1983).

more than 250 people from inside and outside the university who worked in 11 theme groups, three white paper panels, and a number of special study groups

[UT students] live in closer proximity to other nations

• The Engineering School hates it
• Many faculty in the College of Natural Sciences hate it.
• The Dean of Business hates it.

UT President Bill Powers, who chaired the task force, said Monday that many of the criticisms are based on misconceptions. Powers and other members have said the proposed structure would barely affect students' first year [emph added]...

...university professors, of all people, should not require mollycoddling; they should be willing to embrace leaders who ask hard questions about how well they are doing their jobs. The tragedy is that the majority at Harvard seems to have known that. But, in university politics as elsewhere, loud and unreasonable minorities can trump good sense

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

Just so you guys know...while some of the examples are pretty silly (they fall into the category of the student providing too much information, IMHO), for the most part I think the Profs in the article come off as looking like jerks.

As I've been saying all along you are in doubt...ask me. By blog, by email, or in person (All of these are better than by phone)! The article suggests that this may not be true of all your profs. And I might not feel this way if the class had 200 people in it. But a lot of the stuff that the article suggests is inappropriate is appropriate, as far as I'm concerned. I trust you guys to be grown up enough to tell which is which.

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

He [Michael J. Kessler, an assistant dean and a lecturer in theology at Georgetown University] added: "It's a real fine balance to accommodate what they need and at the same time maintain a level of legitimacy as an instructor and someone who is institutionally authorized to make demands on them, and not the other way round."

While once professors may have expected deference,...

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated.

"The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

Many professors said they were often uncertain how to react. Professor Schultens, who was asked about buying the notebook, said she debated whether to tell the student that this was not a query that should be directed to her, but worried that "such a message could be pretty scary."

"I decided not to respond at all," she said.

But student e-mail can go too far, said Robert B. Ahdieh, an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta. He paraphrased some of the comments he had received: "I think you're covering the material too fast, or I don't think we're using the reading as much as we could in class, or I think it would be helpful if you would summarize what we've covered at the end of class in case we missed anything."

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.

"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.

Here's what I've been sending out to the people (now up to 92, as of 10:56am) who have been writing to upbraid me in various ways:

Thank you for your email. When I agreed to be interviewed by the NYT, I had no idea I would be misquoted or that those misquotations would cause such indignation in the readership.
For the record, what I actually said was that I suggest to students that
1. When they have asked a prof for something and the prof has supplied it, they say thank you, and
2. They should not ignore email from a prof or other person in power, esp. when that email asks a direct question.

My reaction to most of the faculty complaints was, basically, "What planet are you people from?"

UD wonders: Was this piece necessary?

In at least some of the instances cited in the Times, I can't help but wonder if the objection is that email pierces some of the elaborate layers of defenses that some faculty at large research institutions have erected between themselves and their undergraduates.

I think that everyone who works at a university should have to remind themselves of this, every day: WORK IS WHAT WE DO BETWEEN MEETINGS.

if you spend all day in meetings, you were doing NOTHING. Sure, you were AT work, and you were not having fun, but you didn't WORK.

Texas A&M University hasn't offered a journalism major since 2004, but President Robert Gates says it will be revived in the next couple of years.
...
But liberal arts dean Charles Johnson said the current program - limited to a journalism minor - is serving the students well, and there isn't a demand for resurrecting the department and the major.

Gates recently reiterated that the journalism department had become a shelter for students who couldn't get accepted to the Mays Business School. The key to a good journalism program, he said, is coupling small classes and intense interaction between students and their professors.

Tommy DeFrank, A&M's inaugural journalist in residence and Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the New York Daily News, said when he spoke recently at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center that he disagreed with the changes.

"I argued against it before the decision was made," he told the audience. "I thought it was made by well-intentioned people who are clueless about the profession of journalism, and I'm sorry it happened. ... I do think the notion of a university of this magnificence and caliber without a real journalism program is basically an obscenity. And I'm hoping to do everything I can to help beef up this program, and I hope the day will come that the department is reinstated."

The Graduate School of Journalism recently opened the Roone Arledge Broadcast Lab for the study of broadcast journalism. The state-of-the-art facility is named for the late ABC News broadcaster Roone Arledge and features a newsroom named for the late pioneering journalist Fred Friendly.

Although no major in journalism is offered, the Department of Literature offers a major in writing that can emphasize journalistic writing, and the development of writing skills is stressed in many disciplines. Many courses offered in the humanities and social sciences will provide the kind of broad-based preparation needed by practicing journalists. Several student newspapers are published on campus, providing ample "laboratory" opportunities for students to practice journalism.

Is this the cross?

The first report (9 MB! pdf*) on the Chemistry Dept. explosion from last month has been released. News coverage here and here. From the report: Upon examining the tank on January 24, 2006, Mr. Gustafson immediately pointed out that the cross where the internal tank regulator and the rupture disk should have been attached had been sealed with two brass plugs. Mr. Gustafson also pointed out that you could see on the external tank where the vaporizer piping that loops around the internal tank had been pressured by the swelling of the internal tank, forming visible rings on the external tank. All of these, according to Mr. Gustafson, were a direct indication that the pressure relief and rupture disk had probably failed at sometime in the past and the openings sealed. Without these two safeguards in place, it was only a matter of time until an explosion occurred. This is kind of like sealing off the vent on a pressure cooker. It gets worse, when you consider the places where OHS disagreed with the external report. OHS does not agree with his conclusion over the pipe plugs being the same size and type, and therefore possibly installed at the same time. Although we may never know the timing of the plug installations, OHS would note that one plug appeared to have corrosion, indicating that it may have been in place for a longer period of time... So, this means that there could have been more than one person at more than one time who didn't think about what it meant that the tank was venting. Since I don't think Al Qaeda snuck in and sealed these ports, it suggests that the modifications were done by people who you'd think were smart enough to understand the consequences of evaporating a large volume of liquid N2 in a closed container...If they were thinking about it, which they clearly weren't. Of course, it doesn't even require understanding that PV=nRT...it requires thinking "I wonder why the manufacturer put this thing here where the gas is escaping?"

The Times reported on Wednesday that contrary to his résumé on file with NASA, Mr. Deutsch, who is 24, never graduated from Texas A&M. Yesterday, in an interview with The Times, Mr. Deutsch said he had written the résumé in anticipation of graduating.

"When I left college," he said, "I did not properly update my résumé. As a result, it may appear misleading to some. However, I was up front with NASA about my undergraduate status when they hired me."

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch.

" The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

...officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

#### Contacts:

Erica Hupp/George Deutsch NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. (Phone: 202/xxx-xxxx/xxxx)

Rob Gutro Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (Phone: 301/xxx-xxxx)

Jim Scott and Stephanie Renfrow NSIDC, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo. (Phone: 303/xxx-xxxx and xxx-xxxx)

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority...

...Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Dr. Hansen had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,"

...many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.

Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.

They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies.

In October, for example,