A former assistant professor of accounting at the University of Tampa has pleaded guilty to stealing $120,000 from the American Spaniel Club. She was accused of writing 71 Spaniel Club checks to herself between July 2006 and March 2007 to feed an Internet gambling addiction.Instead of doing jail time, Lippincott, now a part-time accounting professor at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, was sentenced to 15 years’ probation. During that time, she is required to pay $500 a month until June 2009 and $1,000 a month after that until her probation ends, the Tampa Tribune reported…

It’s different there. In the United States, the revelation that the headmaster of an expensive private school was a liar who bought a fraudulent Ph.D. from a diploma mill would cause his dismissal. In Mississippi… well, hell… I mean, hell… you know… he’s a good old boy… We all just love him to death… And he’s so good to the kids…

Pat Taylor acknowledges it - and so does his boss. [Why hide it? Who gives a shit whether a degree is real or not? If it’s good enough for Cal State Long Beach, it’s good enough for Jackson Academy!]

Taylor received a doctorate in secondary education from LaSalle University in Mandeville, La., in 1996 - the same year FBI agents raided the institution.

Its founder, James Kirk, pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion, admitting he used LaSalle and his church to swindle LaSalle students out of $36.5 million, taking $1.5 million of that cash to buy himself a white-columned mansion. He also admitted setting up his World Christian Church as a bogus front to avoid paying income taxes.

Author John Bear, a nationally renowned expert on diploma mills, said about a dozen states have passed laws that make it a crime to claim a degree from LaSalle or similar bogus institutions in resumes. “It’s nothing you would want to use in any public way,” he said.

Mississippi, however, has no such law, Bear said.

The resume of Taylor - who was chosen as headmaster in 2007 after a nationwide search - can be viewed on the Jackson Academy Web site or at clarion ledger.com.

Peter Jernberg, president and CEO of Jackson Academy, defended the educator, saying he was well aware throughout the search process that Taylor had earned his doctoral degree from a diploma mill. “That wasn’t even an issue,” he said.

A doctoral degree was not required for the position, but a master’s in education and significant administrative experience were, he said. [Classic defense of diploma mill scum: Who cares? We weren’t interested in hiring at that degree level. Plus we didn’t care whether we hired frauds.] “The committee spent the majority of its time exploring the impeccable record of service and accomplishments Pat Taylor had at St. Paul’s Episcopal School (in Mobile), where he served for 34 years. Every reference the committee checked gave their highest recommendation of Pat Taylor.”

Taylor has never misrepresented anything about his background, Jernberg said. [In Mississippi, you boast of your diploma mill degree.] “The headmaster, board and parents of St. Paul’s Episcopal School were more aware than us of the circumstances of Pat’s doctorate, and they had no issues with it for the 11 years he continued to serve there after earning it,” Jernberg said. [So sue us! We jest don’t care.]

JA parents reached Tuesday weren’t bothered by the revelation or wouldn’t comment. Byron Edgecombe, vice president of the JA Association, said the fact that Taylor earned his degree from a diploma mill “doesn’t concern me at all. He’s done a very good job when he’s been here.”

Each year, JA parents pay up to $9,900 a year in tuition.

Taylor said he didn’t realize LaSalle was a diploma mill until after he graduated. [Another classic move. Not my fault if I’m so fucking stupid I can’t tell a diploma mill from a university. People in Mississippi like me this way!]

Since his release from prison, Kirk has started several other academic institutions, some of them in Mississippi, Bear said.

Taylor said he did, however, know LaSalle wasn’t accredited.

Asked why he would get a degree from an institution that wasn’t accredited, he replied he was more interested in the help the institution offered.

“I was looking for some kind of structured program to do some research under. I didn’t need another degree,” said Taylor, who received a master’s degree in education in 1977 from the University of South Alabama.

Asked why he listed the doctoral degree on his resume if the degree didn’t matter, Taylor replied, “The truth of the matter is my resume was made up many years ago. I haven’t subtracted from it.”

He said because he was already working full time as the principal at St. Paul’s, he looked at a number of institutions where he could do his doctoral work by correspondence.

“I didn’t have time to do a residential program,” he said. “And (LaSalle) was reasonably affordable.”

He said he chose LaSalle because someone on the staff at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital had recommended the institution. (There is a legitimate LaSalle University in Philadelphia, Pa.)

Taylor said he could not recall the name of the professor under whom he did his doctoral dissertation, which included research on the best college options for students with learning disabilities. [Hm. Which professor at LaSalle was it now? Let’s check the university’s records! Get the registrar on the phone.]

He said he spent two to three years working on his research, which included a survey of college admission offices. “It was significant survey work,” he said.

His thesis was published, he said, but not copyrighted or recorded in the Library of Congress. [It’s somewhere around here.]

Because of the significant work he did, he said he feels he earned the degree.

He said he’s never tried to mislead anybody regarding the degree, which he said he feels he earned because of the work he put into it. “Part of the charge to do this was I was fulfilling a request from my previous school to do this research,” he said.

His former boss, Bob Rutledge, now serving as interim headmaster at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, said he was the one who encouraged Taylor to apply.

“We needed some research on learning disabilities,” he said. “I’m the one who asked him to do it.”

Rutledge said St. Paul’s paid for Taylor’s expenses at LaSalle, including paying a typist to type his dissertation. [Got his dupe school to pay for the thing too.]

Taylor worked nights and weekends for two years on that paper, he said.

The research proved helpful, leading to changes in the learning disabilities program at St. Paul’s, Rutledge said. “The degree was just a byproduct, not a goal.”

He praised Taylor as the most- dedicated educator he knows, saying he knows no one who has more insight into children.

“As an educator, he’s one of the best I’ve ever known,” Rutledge said. “He was so child-oriented. We put the child first and the institution second - and it paid off. We built a very successful school.”

As for Taylor continuing to list his doctoral degree on his resume, “I feel he earned it. I would not question that.”

clarion ledger

UD has already blogged about the romance novelist who in one of her novels plagiarized from an essay about ferrets in a scientific magazine.

UD pointed out at the time that bodice hacks, who may produce many novels each year, plagiarize routinely; but she singled out this instance because it was amusing the way the author had nineteenth century romantics saying “Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.”

In this Christian Science Monitor update of the story, the novel’s author continues to protest that she’s done nothing wrong… I mean, it’s fiction, after all, so why should it matter that she’s stolen someone’s words? … The actual writer - a hunky outdoorsy type who chases after many animals besides ferrets - says “I got more attention from this single incident of plagiarism than I’ve gotten from anything else I’ve written in my 16 years as a journalist.”

He’s philosophical about it. “At first, I was miffed. But the absurdity of this story about endangered ferrets appearing in a romance novel – it was beyond absurd.”

…Ben Dattner, an organizational consultant in Manhattan, has a technique designed “to vividly illustrate how stories are memorable and PowerPoint is forgettable.” Dattner asks his master’s-level classes at New York University to put away their notes after team presentations and call out details they remember from the slides.”The students are often shocked at how few bullet points they can summarize after listening for 20 minutes — usually around 5 percent of the PowerPoint content,” he says. “However, students generally remember about half of the [non-PowerPoint] stories or anecdotes in the presentation.”

Moore puts it this way — “more data doesn’t change people … but emotions motivate them.”…

newsday

Washington State University officials should be thoroughly embarrassed by the fact that the Pullman university will lose eight football scholarships for failing to meet the latest NCAA academic progress standards.

In a nationwide report released by the NCAA, WSU’s football program was the only sport among the four Division I programs in the state … to face potential scholarship losses. And WSU is the only Pacific-10 Conference school to lose football scholarships.Only the University of Idaho, which lost eight scholarships, and Akron, which lost nine scholarships, equaled the punishment dished out to Washington State.

It seems as if officials at WSU have forgotten their first obligation to students is to provide them with an education. Academics should come ahead of athletics. It’s not as if the NCAA has exceedingly high standards. Only schools that fall below a graduation rate of 60 percent are subject to scholarship penalties.

the olympian

… sing the Pirates of Penzance, “our cautious way we feel…”

So too the cat-like NCAA, as it slowly, stealthily, begins to reveal the fiscal catastrophe of American university athletics. It won’t name names in its latest report — you wouldn’t want to reveal which universities waste tons of public and private money on their sports programs… I mean, if you did that, students could, you know, decide whether they want to attend schools that make them subsidize insolvent teams…

Murray Sperber considers the latest NCAA cocktease:

… The reality, which the NCAA now acknowledges, is that institutional subsidies for intercollegiate athletics usually come out of funds that could go to academic purposes.

… The problem with the new report and previous ones, however, is the lack of openness. The report provides fascinating financial facts but never names individual colleges, not even public institutions with egregious athletics-department deficits.

… Peter Likins, a former president of the University of Arizona and head of a recent NCAA task force on financial reform, told one journalist: “Our purpose is not your purpose. … Our goal is to facilitate decision making by responsible authorities.” Apparently, for him, reporters, taxpayers, and donors are not “responsible authorities” and do not deserve full disclosure on how colleges use their money.

But more public scrutiny is definitely needed. The seas of athletics-department red ink are growing as fast as the oceans are rising from melting polar ice caps. [Clunky simile.]

Film students gathered yesterday at Cal State Long Beach to discuss, with the department chair, the case of two faculty members who over-reached on their professional credentials, embellishing their online biographies with fictive degrees, awards, and teaching appointments.

With the whole world watching, both men have un-wish-fulfilled their pages. Ivy League schools and international prizes have vanished like the fade-outs in Avia - Vampire Hunter (2005).

But the damage - to the school’s reputation and to its students’ degrees - has been done, and students are rightly pissed to have been studying with frauds.

… [M]any students express[ed]… concerns about the credibility of their future degrees.

… Kyle Menkelkamp [said] “they would be an easy let-go” and junior Andrew Pauling [said] “they should resign on their own.”

Resigning on your own because you’ve acted unethically means understanding the difference between right and wrong. These two only understand the difference between making shit up and being up shit’s creek.

This is Robert Sapolsky of Stanford - I’m even as I blog watching him talk about writing.  Here’s the transcript of his remarks. 

And his comment about music reminds SOS of a theory she has about writing:  She suspects there’s a link between being musical and writing well.  She doesn’t mean being musical and writing poetry — that would seem to be an obvious connection.  She means being musical and writing good non-fiction prose.  You’ve got some inner sense of rhythm and rhyme going all the time because of your musical activity — because of your musical brain, which is almost always — at least for SOS — generating music…  So that as you write there’s this constant - what - lyrical mental revision going on that makes your essay flowing, alliterative, shapely.

If SOS is right, this is good news for young writers who are musical.  For those who aren’t — guess they have to find another route… or do things more artificially to get to the same place?  Or accept that they’ll never write as well as the musical types?

From the Stanford Daily:

In a recent Bio 43 lecture, the following equation appeared at the bottom of a  PowerPoint slide explaining “Offspring Genotype Frequencies”: Q’=1/2*2PQ+2PR+(1/2)Q2+(1/2)2QR=2(P+1/2Q)(R+1/2Q)=2pq. As the professor waved his laser pointer around and explained the slide, filled with variables and other equations, I took a look around to see if other students were as unengaged as I was. A roomful of blank stares, tapping pencils and busy Facebook checkers indicated that very few of us were processing or benefiting from anything the professor was saying. By the time I tuned back into the prof, the next slide was up, this one filled with more charts and equations.

I thought to myself, “It’s cool, the lecture will be posted on  Coursework, and I can look through it later.” Upon further reflection, I decided it wasn’t cool at all. What is the point of sitting in Hewlett for an hour when I’ll have to go over it all by myself later? Lecture should be a time of quality explanation of concepts, and out-of-class work should be for re-familiarization of those concepts. Something tells me that, not long ago, this was how things worked at college. But this isn’t how it works anymore, and I think this is largely the fault of professors’ dependency on PowerPoint. So far this year, I have taken the following classes that used PowerPoint as the primary lecture tool: Advanced French Grammar, Chem 31A and B and Bio 43. All of these classes, however, require writing and derivations that simply cannot be presented effectively on a slide. When a prof takes the time to write on a board, students are able to visualize the logic of equations and the structure of sentences. It also forces the class to move at a pace conducive to note taking.

Lectures that don’t depend on PowerPoint are typically more engaging, as well. I hear that  Robert Sapolsky just gets up and talks during his Human Behavior Biology class — sans PowerPoint — and that’s supposed to be one of the most interesting classes on campus! In my own class schedule, I have encountered very few professors who either 1) don’t use PowerPoint or 2) use it effectively. Only Econ 50 with Ran Abramitzky gives me hope that some profs can overcome PowerPointlessness. He used a tablet laptop, and his slides contained a title and some x and y axes. Then he filled everything in as he spoke.

My observation is that professors who use PowerPoint tend to load a lot of text and graphs onto their slides, post the slides on Coursework and call that a lecture. I ask you, fellow students, to not settle for such half-ass teaching. There is something you can do, and that is give feedback. Shoot a quick email to your prof or head Teaching Assistant and mention that you would appreciate on-the-board explanations. Mention these issues in your end-of-quarter evaluations. Our professors are certainly capable of teaching in different ways — they just have to know the demand is there. I sent one email to the head Bio 43 TA, and, the next day, the professor mentioned in class, “I know that these equations don’t mean much to you like this on the slide, but go home and practice and you’ll get it.” Obviously that wasn’t the response I was looking for, but it was a start. What if more people sent emails and spoke up? Save Stanford from the infectious PowerPoint trend. Otherwise, you’re being gypped of time, money and respect.

AUX ARMES, CITOYENS!

[And don’t miss the How I Write streaming video: click under Sapolsky’s picture at the left of the screen.]

♥Matt DeSalvo sat in silence at his Yankee Stadium locker before his major league debut on Monday, buried in the written word. It is his most comfortable position.In his hands, he held a small book with gilded edges. It was not a scouting report, and it was not a Bible, either. It was Confucius, DeSalvo said later, and the pages were covered with circled passages and notes he had made in the margins.“It’s just what I’m reading right now,” DeSalvo said. “I like to read different philosophies, just anything, the way I see this world. We spend a whole lifetime trying to figure ourselves out. Like I’ll read a book and try to think, what’s this mean to me? And I’ll apply it to myself.”When he finishes Confucius, DeSalvo will cross another title off his list of the 400 books he wants to read before he dies. He is halfway through the list already, having devoured 17 books during spring training alone. Teammates marvel at this.

“For me to read a 200-page book,” said the reserve catcher Wil Nieves, who caught DeSalvo in the minors, “it would probably take two years.”

When he finishes the list, DeSalvo said, he will write another novel. His first, called “Love’s Travels,” was written three or four years ago and has been seen only by himself and an editor. Its topic, he said, is the way a person’s concept of love changes over time.

“He’s bright, there’s no question about that,” said Mark Newman, who oversees the Yankees’ farm system. “But he’s also exceptionally curious, which I think, for a person’s life, is maybe more significant. I mean, he really wants to know things, and not just the way to throw a changeup.”

…For a while, he was consumed with “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. He found the central fable applicable to his life.

“I took a lot out of it, like the struggle of humanity, how Sisyphus rolls a boulder up a hill and he finally reaches where he wants to be, and the boulder rolls down the hill,” DeSalvo said.

“Most people in that situation, what do they do? They’re like, ‘Aw, man, I got to go get this.’ But what he says is, why not see that boulder as your ultimate goal? It’s almost as if you’re proud to be pushing that boulder, that boulder’s giving you meaning.

“And even though the boulder rolls back down, you dwell on how you succeeded in pushing it up and dwell on life — Hey, I have something to do still. So it’s almost like giving meaning to your life.”…

——————————————————————–

♥When people meet Adrian Flygt they usually have one of two polar opposite reactions.

One group is shocked to learn that philosophy students do things beyond reading books.

The other is puzzled that a physically imposing athlete would spend part of his time studying the ethical dilemmas involved with hunting.

For the past two years, Flygt has balanced the intellectual challenges of the academic world with timbersports competitions that involve wood-cutting contests.

For Flygt, who hopes to someday teach high school, the very different challenges are part of his attempt to find balance. “I think the two complement each other well.”

His presence in both worlds helps break down barriers, a process he described as amusing and validating.

“The perception is that people in academia get lost and are too far removed from the world.”

And students in the classes he assists with are surprised he competes as a lumberjack. “(They’re) shocked at the idea of someone who is getting a master’s degree in philosophy doing something aside from reading,” Flygt said.

He joined the CSU logging sports club in 2006; he had never competed in timbersports events before, though he had seen them on TV.

Flygt, who is originally from southern Wisconsin, already had experience chopping wood. “I’d never done it for the sake of competition,” he said. “I had done it for the sake of work.”

These events are not all about brute strength, Flygt said. They require technique. He developed his technique during the past summer after the death of a friend.

The training paid off when Flygt won the STIHL Timbersports Collegiate Series Western Title April 26. It was one of five qualifier events for the national collegiate championships.

On June 27, Flygt will compete in the national championship, and for a chance to compete professionally next year, in Columbus, Ga. Footage from the competition will be aired on ESPNU.

… some of Jerry Springer’s accomplishments, as he prepares to address the law graduates of UD’s alma mater, Northwestern University:

… Northwestern has no problem giving an honorary degree to its law school commencement speaker this year, the disreputable TV host Jerry Springer. In 2000, a guest on Springer’s show was brutally murdered by her ex-husband just hours after a segment aired called “Secret Mistresses Confronted,” featuring the estranged couple…

Setting up just the right circumstances for a catastrophe — The speaker search committee at NU’s law school has the same skill set…

…turns itself into scum central to win games.

How does Indiana University athletic director Rick Greenspan continue to keep his job?… The IU basketball program is in a shambles…. [Greenspan] has become the sour, overbearing, fear-mongering face of IU athletics. Under his tutelage, the school’s signature program hired a known cheater, sold its soul for Eric Gordon, cost the program millions of dollars in legal fees and stood by as several members of the basketball team had academic trouble….

Bob Kravitz at the Indy Star.

…Professor Peacock? Professor Plum? … who devoted his blog to the language emanating from American schools of education. He’s long since closed up shop, but in an earlier incarnation UD linked to his blog. She often thanked him, in the course of quoting from this or that post of his about eduspeak, for being willing to go where UD refused to go, for actually reading the trash…

David Thompson, an impressive blogger, operates in much the same way, only he’s off every day to the art dump.

I thought I’d post a footnote of sorts to yesterday’s item on Professor Caroline Guertin, she of the limpid prose and limitless expertise. Here are a few short extracts from Guertin’s essay, Wanderlust: The Kinesthetic Browser in Cyberfeminist Space, published in 2007 by the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology.

The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision — felt not seen — and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster’s subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder its majesty.

Nudged into motion, the meandering subject in cyberfeminist space is a comet in orbit around her own story, around her subjective experience of a text that keeps changing, spinning off into an uncharted future. According to Paul Virilio, we are no longer beings who inhabit a temporal plane. Instead, in Open Sky, he argues we have become passive agents who are acted upon like film — exposed, underexposed, overexposed — and are nakedly subject to the effects of light speed.

And,

We inhabit our bodies differently when we are out of phase, oscillating in the turbulence of dynamic space, that space where the textual body is written as contextual knot. The ways of moving in virtual space are directed and mapped by the knots that span spatio-temporal rifts. Without movement, we cannot cross the space-time divide.

Or maybe,

The textual voyage is alive and kinetic, fractal and in flux, birthed as she travels through its fullness.

I suppose one could view the extracts above, and the essay from which they’re taken, as a sort of extended Zen kōan, insofar as they defy rational understanding and all known aesthetic criteria. More sceptical souls may wonder if these passages are in fact the results of some kind of seizure or medical condition, of which we must not speak.

As with Professor Whoever, you won’t catch even SOS going there. Thank goodness Thompson can stand it.

A Penn State student upset with a B- was arrested Tuesday for threatening to put his professor in a wheelchair unless he got a better grade, according to the criminal complaint.[The student] was arraigned Tuesday afternoon on misdemeanor counts of terroristic threats and harassment… He is free on $10,000 unsecured bail.

Police said they were contacted during the weekend by the dean of Penn State’s College of Business about a student who sent a angry and threatening e-mail to Visiting Assistant Professor Lukas Roth.In the complaint filed against Tsirogiannis, Penn State police detailed the contents of the e-mail.

“Lukas I am going to warn you one last chance I am going to ask I want a better than a B-,” the e-mail read. “If I see this on my elion account I swear to god I am going to (expletive) put you in a wheelchair when I see you. You will regret it and I don’t care if they kick me out of school.”

Tsirogiannis goes on to accuse the professor of cheating him on a test and refusing to “get cheated out of a letter grade.

“Don’t (expletive) around you will pay trust me I don’t care if I go to jail as long as I put you in a wheelchair,” the e-mail stated, according to the criminal complaint. Police contacted Tsirogiannis Monday and he admitted to being angry when he sent the e-mail, the complaint states.

“He stated he felt he worked hard to achieve his grade and it should have been better than a B-,” police said.

Centre Daily Times

…[T]here is no good a priori argument against multitasking. The case is at best an empirically-informed hunch about what is the best way to teach. I see some power to a parentalism argument that teachers should ban surfing because it impedes students’ ability to learn.Law students are adults who generally can decide for themselves what is in their best interest — but I still don’t think it would be a good idea to have beer or magazines available in class. As someone who has played way too much Minesweeper in my day, I think some activities are just a bit too tempting.

… The laptop screen is a billboard that is very visible to other students sitting behind the gamer. Surfing and game playing in particular can be very distracting — both visually and in the signal they send to others that you don’t care about class. Multitasking also makes students less present as participants in class discussion. Surfing doesn’t stop students from taking notes, but it degrades the quality of their attention.

Doonesbury has a great strip on just this point. In bouncing back and forth between his notes window, the surfing student is less likely to be following the discussion and to be able to ask or answer a question.

In recent years, I’ve tried to balance student liberty with my negative externality concern by allowing surfing, but only in the back row of class. In the back row, at least, it isn’t a visual distraction. And I view these back-benchers as virtually a step away from non-attendance.

But what’s still missing is basic information on how much surfing is going on. (Levmore claims, “Every teacher underestimates the amount of Internet surfing going on,” in his or her classroom.) The content of the laptop screen is visible to the class, but remains a mystery to the professoriate. I still hear colleagues tell me that surfing is not a problem in their class because they walk around the room.

In a world where alt -tab quickly shifts between windows, it is a fantasy to think that walking around is a sufficient deterrent.

I am tempted to ask students to collect data on how much surfing is actually going on (even when it is banned). I bet some readers will be upset with the idea of such monitoring. There is a growing sense of entitlement not just to surf but to keep your professor in the dark about whether you are surfing or not.

If the admission application simply asked students to check a box if they were willing to forgo classroom surfing, I imagine virtually all applicants would forgo their God-given right to play solitaire.

But even here, students push back that the implicit contract was also that professors would not teach badly. Some students see surfing as a medication to reduce the annoyance of poor pedagogy. Indeed, some clever students have even argued that surfing has a positive externality — Ayres and Levitt and Wolfers will have better incentives to teach well if they have to compete for students’ attention.