Category Archives: Academics

The Chronicle: Full Professor, What’s That?

By Jonathan G. Katz

Sixteen years after receiving my Ph.D., I am, at long last, a “professor.” I don’t dare tell my mother.

“You mean, you weren’t a real professor all this time?” I can hear her say.

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Houston Chronicle: Dr. Doom speaks his mind

When classes resume at the University of Texas at Austin this week, 90 impressionable undergrads will file into an ecology class taught by a chatty zoology professor known — not always out of earshot — as Dr. Doom.

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The Chronicle: Ohio U. Requires Hearings for Graduates Accused of Plagiarism Who Want to Revise Theses

Graduates of Ohio University’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology who have been accused of plagiarizing portions of their master’s theses will be required to appear before a panel that will decide if they will be allowed to rewrite the compromised theses or face harsher penalties, the university announced on Wednesday.

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Boston Globe: In a bid to save it, college class incorporates Earth

Sitting around their steamy University of Vermont conference room, the discussion was both academic and technical, esoteric and political. Ultimately, it was practical for a dozen students from the University of Vermont and Vermont Law School, who set out on a simple but bold mission — to incorporate the Earth.

The goal: Prepare a report for the 6 billion “shareholders” of Earth Inc. about the state of the planet’s air, water and human resources, using corporate culture to inspire the world’s inhabitants to think of Earth — and its resources — as something in which they have a stake.

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The Chronicle: Debate Over Psychologists’ Role in Military Interrogations Continues at Conference Sessions

Psychologists’ roles and ethical responsibilities in relation to war, terrorism, torture, and coercion remained a hot topic of debate as the American Psychological Association opened its annual conference here on Thursday, a day after its governing council adopted a resolution condemning the use of torture.

The resolution approved on Wednesday had linked the association’s policy to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but did not go far enough to please some members of the association. In panel discussions on Thursday, debate over the psychologists’ obligations in upholding human rights and the extent to which practitioners should be involved in military interrogations of foreign detainees remained fierce and wide-ranging, with speakers touching upon the practical concerns of carrying out the new policy and critiquing the association’s stance on the highly politicized issue.

Among those who feel the new resolution does not go far enough is Leonard S. Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, who spoke on a panel on Thursday. Mr. Rubenstein has asked the psychologists’ association to adopt a “bright line” policy, similar to guidelines issued by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, that would ban practitioners from any involvement in military interrogations.

In his comments on Thursday on “ethical dilemmas for psychologists dealing with war, terrorism, torture, and coercion,” he questioned whether it was ethically sound to allow psychologists to act as behavioral consultants in environments such as the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He described such environments as closed and “without due process, where the law allows coercive interrogations,” and where “the social psychology of the situation so much leaves the psychologist to identify with the intelligence function that ethical independence is impossible.”

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The Chronicle: Federal Judge Says Case Brought by Christian Students Against U. of California Can Proceed

A federal judge has cleared the way for a lawsuit alleging that the University of California violated the constitutional rights of several applicants by refusing to recognize some credits the students had earned at their Christian high school.

The case has attracted national attention because of the possible ramifications for colleges that reject credits for courses deemed too religious and lacking in academic rigor. Particularly at issue in this case are science textbooks used by the Christian school and how those textbooks present evolution and creationism.

In a ruling on Tuesday, Judge S. James Otero, of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, declined to dismiss the key complaints made by Calvary Chapel Christian School, including the charge that the university system had violated the right to free exercise of religion of five graduates of the Christian school when the university refused to honor courses it deemed too religious.

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Commentary: Friendship Among the Intellectuals, By Joseph Epstein

ìIt is painful to consider,î wrote Samuel Johnson about friendship, ìthat there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.î

Too true. Some friendships die on their own, of simple inanition, having been quietly allowed to lapse by the unacknowledged agreement of both parties. Others break down because time has altered old friends, given them different interests, values, points of view. In still others, only one party works at the friendship, while the other belongs to what Truman Capote called (in a letter to the critic Newton Arvin, his ex-lover) ìsome odd psychological type . . . that only writes when he is written to.î And then of course there are the friendships that end when one friend betrays or is felt to betray the other, or fails to come through in a crisis, or finds himself violently disputing the other on matters of profoundest principle.

These days, such principled disagreements tend often to involve ideas, and to be endemic among supposedly educated people and especially among intellectuals. The ideas themselves are as likely as not to involve politics. Even more than differences over religion, political disputes seem to ignite ugly emotions and get things to the yelling stage quickly. That may well be why, in 18th-century clubs and coffeehouses, politics was often prohibited as a subject for discussion.

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Guardian Unlimited: Q: How do you make £1.6m a year and drive a Ferrari? A: Sell essays for £400

The multimillion-pound trade in internet cheating which sees thousands of students hand over money in return for bespoke essays is to be investigated by a committee of MPs, it has emerged.
The move comes as the Guardian unveils the scale of the market in online plagiarism, estimated to be worth £200m, which has seen a boom in the number of companies offering tailored essays in the last 12 months.

The owner of one online organisation says he employs 3,500 specialist writers who have written more than 15,000 essays for students wanting a leg-up in university courses. The company made £90,000 in one week in May and the owner has a Ferrari and a Lamborghini in his garage.

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Inside Higher Ed: Rallying Behind Open Access

If universities pay the salaries of researchers and provide them with labs, and the federal government provides those researchers with grants for their studies, why should those same universities feel they can’t afford to have access to research findings?

That’s part of the argument behind a push by some in Congress to make such findings widely available at no charge. The Federal Public Research Access Act would require federal agencies to publish their findings, online and free, within six months of their publication elsewhere. Proponents of the legislation, including many librarians and professors frustrated by skyrocketing journal prices, see such “open access” as entirely fair. But publishers — including many scholarly associations — have attacked the bill, warning that it could endanger research and kill off many journals.

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Inside Higher Ed: SAT Controversy Continues

For months now, the College Board has been saying that it has new measures in place to prevent a repeat of the embarrassing scoring errors on the October SAT. On Thursday, the board released a much-awaited report, which said — yep — that the board has new measures in place to prevent a repeat of the embarrassing scoring errors on the October SAT.

The board released the report at the insistence of a powerful New York State senator, who had threatened legal action to obtain it, and to whom board officials promised the report months ago. While some critics of the board said it was good that the report was finally out, the emphasis of the study — on steps taken and that potentially could be taken to improve scoring accuracy — bothered many. They said that the report revealed little about how the scoring errors took place or why they took so long to discover and report.

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The Chronicle: Chinese University Presidents Assail ‘Rock Bottom’ Academic Ethics

Presidents of some of China’s top universities lashed out at the country’s worsening academic corruption, putting the blame on what they called an illogical focus on research and falling ethical standards, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.

“Over all, academic ethics have hit rock bottom,” Zhu Qingshi, president of the University of Science and Technology of China, told Chinese and foreign university leaders who were taking part on Friday in a weeklong Chinese-Foreign University Presidents’ Forum in Shanghai.

In a rare example of sharp public criticism of the government’s higher-education policies, Mr. Zhu said most Chinese graduate students were so desperate to attain their quota of published papers that they often missed opportunities to engage in real research. Chinese universities require master’s and Ph.D. candidates to publish a set number of research papers each year in key journals.

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The Chronicle: U. of Arizona Professor Faces Charges in Turkey Over New Novel

A professor at the University of Arizona faces a possible trial in Turkey based on the content of her latest novel, which traces the lives of a Muslim-Turkish family living in Istanbul and an Armenian-American family in San Francisco.

Elif Shafak, an assistant professor of Turkish and women’s studies in the university’s department of Near Eastern studies, has been charged with “denigrating Turkishness” in The Bastard of Istanbul. “The novel deals with the question of ‘memory and amnesia,’ mainly through Turkish and Armenian women’s stories,” Ms. Shafak explained by e-mail. “It deals with two particular taboos in Turkish society. One of them is a political taboo — the Armenian question. The other is a sexual taboo — incest. The novel is highly critical of both the nationalist and sexist fabric of Turkish society.”

The Turkish government officially rejects the widely accepted view that the killings of as many as 1.5-million Armenians during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide. Ultra-nationalist lawyers and prosecutors in Turkey have vigorously pursued those who even suggest otherwise. The nationalists cite the controversial Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which criminalizes insults to the republic, Turkishness, and various state institutions.

Last year Turkey’s most internationally acclaimed novelist, Orhan Pamuk, went to trial on similar charges for remarks he had made in an interview with a Swiss publication. The trial was adjourned soon after it began and the charges dropped.

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Inside Higher Ed: New Model for Scholarly Publishing

It’s hard to attend scholarly meetings these days without someone talking about the “crisis of scholarly publishing,” which goes something like this: Libraries can’t afford to buy new scholarly books; in turn, university presses can’t afford to publish books no one can buy and so cut back on their sales of monographs; in turn, junior professors can’t get their first books published and have a tough time getting tenure.

Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.

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The Chronicle: ‘Nature’ Experiments With Open Peer Review

The influential science journal Nature began on Monday an experiment with a new form of peer review, in which some reviewers’ names would be revealed to authors.

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The New York Times: Senator Proposes Creating Board to Oversee College Admissions Tests

The chairman of the New York State Senate’s higher education committee filed legislation yesterday calling for the creation of a state board to oversee standardized testing, to be paid for by a tax of $1 per test on each college and graduate admissions test given in the state.

The chairman, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a Long Island Republican, said an oversight body was needed after problems like the mis-scoring of more than 5,000 of the SAT examinations taken last October.

“The testing people are very cavalier about what this test is in the lives of the test takers,” Mr. LaValle said yesterday in an interview. “Test takers feel they have so much riding on this exam — acceptance into the college of their choice and whether they will get the careers they want. The testing companies just don’t get how important it is.”

Mr. LaValle said he expected the Senate to approve his bill to be approved before the legislative session ends in June.

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