Category Archives: Faculty

Nevada: UNR whistle-blower accused of plagiarism

Reno Gazette-Journal: UNR whistle-blower accused of plagiarism

University of Nevada, Reno professor and whistle-blower Hussein S. Hussein is undergoing his second disciplinary hearing in three years, this time for allegedly plagiarizing work done by his graduate students and improperly keeping a portion of research money that should go to UNR.

Newly Tenured — at Age 68

Inside Higher Ed: Newly Tenured — at Age 68

Once while in her 20s, Victoria Lichterman got two job offers within a week. One was full-time assistant professor status at Brooklyn College, where she then taught speech and theater. The other was a principal part in a television soap.

Being young, she turned down Brooklyn’s offer and, for just a matter of months before a change in producers, portrayed Dorothy Royce in Search for Tomorrow. “I’ve done a lot of acting in my life, a lot of acting, so trying to remember what this character did is not right on the top of my head. But I know that she ran a personnel office and, through that office, ruined people’s lives,” says Lichterman — who, of late, and much later in her own life, at last returned to academe.

Georgia: Sexual harassment allegations don’t hinder professor’s career

Red and Black: Sexual harassment allegations don’t hinder professor’s career
Former professor at University of Texas San Antonio

A former University professor resigned and obtained a new job in academia before his sexual harassment investigation was completed.

Anthropology professor Benjamin G. Blount left the University in May 2004 and immediately began working as a professor at the University of Texas San Antonio.

Blount continues to teach there today, said James McDonald, the University of Texas San Antonio’s associate vice provost.

Timeline of Events in the Blount case
1991: A graduate student accused Blount of trying to kiss her. The complaint was dropped.

1996: Four students made sexual harassment allegations against Blount. All four students dropped their complaints.

2003: An undergraduate student accused Blount of touching her inappropriately. He was found in violation of the policy. The University issued him a letter of reprimand, told him to take a sexual harassment class and eliminate interactions with undergraduates.

2003: A female professor issued a sexual harassment complaint against Blount.

2004: Blount resigned before the Office of Legal Affairs completed the investigation. All parties involved in the investigation agreed not to
discuss it.

Berkeley scientists also targets by animal rights activists

Santa Cruz Sentinel: Berkeley scientists also targets by animal rights activists

Berkeley police detectives investigating a two-month string of animal rights-related vandalism targeting the homes of UC Berkeley scientists will begin probing possible connections to a spate of similar crimes in Santa Cruz, including last weekend’s attempted home invasion of a local biomedical researcher.

Uganda: All University Staff to Lose Permanent Jobs

allAfrica.com: Uganda: All University Staff to Lose Permanent Jobs

The Monitor (Kampala)

THE Ministry of Education has started drafting a policy document to phase out permanent jobs at all public universities to improve staff performance and efficiency.

All employees, including academic staff, would instead be hired on temporary basis, Mr Gabriel Opio, the state minister for higher education said yesterday.

Professors React to Agreement on Bush Library and Think Tank

The Chronicle: Professors React to Agreement on Bush Library and Think Tank

Provisions in the agreement, which was publicly released by Southern Methodist University on Monday, made some professors think that the university would not cede too much control to the think tank, while others were not so sure.

Columbia U. Professor Denies Plagiarism, Saying Accusers Instead Stole Her Work

The Chronicle: Columbia U. Professor Denies Plagiarism, Saying Accusers Instead Stole Her Work

A Columbia University professor who was found to have committed numerous acts of plagiarism struck back at her accusers on Thursday, saying it was they who stole her work and accusing administrators of blackmail and intimidation.

In a lengthy interview with The Chronicle, Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia’s Teachers College, spelled out her side of the story. She said she believes that her accusers are motivated by professional envy and possibly racism. Ms. Constantine also contended that the president of Teachers College, Susan H. Fuhrman, is biased against her.

Columbia Cites Plagiarism by a Professor

The New York Times: Columbia Cites Plagiarism by a Professor

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was propelled into the national spotlight when a noose was found on her office door last fall has been found to have plagiarized the work of a former colleague and two former students, the college has announced.

Victim, Victimizer or Both?

Inside Higher Ed: Victim, Victimizer or Both?

When The New York Times ran a profile of Madonna G. Constantine in October, she told the newspaper that by the time she had earned tenure, in 2001, she had published 30 articles. “Most people may go up with 15 or 20,” the paper quoted her as saying. “I figured as a black woman, I needed to at least double that.” That same article quoted Susan H. Fuhrman, president of Teachers College of Columbia University, as saying that she had heard “nothing but accolades” from Constantine’s students.

The article in October was prompted by a noose found outside Constantine’s office — a discovery that shocked many at Teachers College and led to rallies, discussions and vows to improve the climate for minority students and professors

Conservatives Just Aren’t Into Academe, Study Finds

The Chronicle: Conservatives Just Aren’t Into Academe, Study Finds

Divergent life choices may explain the dearth of right-wing scholars

On Thursday mornings, a half-dozen faculty members from Pennsylvania State University’s campus here gather at Kuppy’s Diner to talk politics. Like most professors, all of those in the Kuppy’s gang are Democrats — all except Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy

Michigan Professor Loses Longshot Campaign to Be President of Czech Republic

The Chronicle News Blog: Michigan Professor Loses Longshot Campaign to Be President of Czech Republic

The presidential dreams of a University of Michigan professor ended today, when, after failing to produce a valid ballot in two previous rounds of voting, Czech lawmakers re-elected the incumbent, Vaclav Klaus, to another five-year term as president of the Central European country, Agence France-Presse reported.

The Czech-born academic, Jan Svejnar, is director of the International Policy Center and a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He had mounted what was initially viewed by many as a longshot bid for the Czech presidency.

Colorado: Faculty says ‘no’ to Benson

Rocky Mountain News: Faculty says ‘no’ to Benson

Boulder faculty representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly rejected a resolution supporting Bruce Benson to be the next University of Colorado president. The vote was 40-4, with three abstentions.

Physics professor Uriel Nauenberg, who chairs the Faculty Assembly, said the group “would prefer a presidential finalist with substantial executive managerial experience at a peer academic institution and a distinguished record of accomplishment in that arena.”

Hate in Their Midst at CSU Long Beach

Inside Higher Ed: Hate in Their Midst

Scholars, documentary producers, and genocide survivors have gathered at California State University at Long Beach this week for the President’s Forum on International Human Rights, which is focused on modern genocides and society’s responsibility to prevent them. Participants report that the sessions have been engaging and intense, and the gathering is being praised for focusing attention on the most vile forms of hate. Some of those who have been participating, however, wonder if the university needs to look a little closer to home.

Also this week, a white supremacist Web site called Vanguard News Network (its motto is “No Jews. Just Right.”) drew attention to an article in the Long Beach student paper about how some professors there want more distance between the institution and a psychology professor, Kevin MacDonald, who has applied evolutionary psychology to studying Jews in ways that scholars find offensive and inaccurate.

Marxist critic Eagleton faces axe at debt-hit university

The Guardian: Marxist critic Eagleton faces axe at debt-hit university

Terry Eagleton, Britain’s leading Marxist literary critic, faces the axe at Manchester University, where he has been involved in one of the most ferocious literary spats of recent years with the novelist Martin Amis.

Professor at Israeli College Threatened With Dismissal Over Uniformed Student

The Chronicle News Blog: Professor at Israeli College Threatened With Dismissal Over Uniformed Student

An Israeli college professor’s refusal to teach a student wearing a military uniform has led to a campus debate about free speech and the possible dismissal of the professor, The Jerusalem Post reported today.

UCLA Professor’s House Is Firebombed

The Chronicle: UCLA Professor’s House Is Firebombed

The house of a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles was damaged by a firebomb left at the front door early Tuesday in an attack apparently orchestrated by animal-rights extremists, the university said in a news release. No one was at home when the device ignited, charring the door.

The incident was the second attack in four months against Edythe D. London, a professor of psychiatry and of molecular and medical pharmacology who uses primates in her research on nicotine addiction.

A statement issued today by the North American Animal Liberation Press Office said “animal liberationists” were responsible for placing the incendiary device. The press office relays messages from the underground Animal Liberation Front, but is not officially related to the group.

ACADEMIC GLAM: MEET PROFESSOR ZIGGY, CHAIR OF STARDUST

The Globe and Mail: ACADEMIC GLAM: MEET PROFESSOR ZIGGY, CHAIR OF STARDUST

We will Rock U; Canadian universities have plunged giddily into the age of celebrity, poaching big-name academics from rival schools to head flashy new foundations and to attract students and donors. But does it hurt serious scholarship and intellectual exchange when you turn the ivory tower into a platform for superstars? John Allemang investigates

2 February 2008
The Globe and Mail
F1
English
2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Far from the ivory towers, in a world that Northrop Frye would never recognize as his own, two bald, silver-painted musclemen flex their protruding pecs and buttocks before a captivated black-tie crowd. Naked but for streamlined Speedos that reveal as much as they conceal, the statuesque artists from Cirque du Soleil perform a deliciously languid acrobatic ballet that fills the stadium-sized banquet hall of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre with the potent perfume of homoerotic physicality.

Richard Florida, controversial inventor of the “gay index” recipe for urban success, must feel right at home.

There are 1,600 overachieving partygoers in this dressed-up, silk-wrapped concrete bunker who have come to nibble on smoked salmon and arugula, sip Niagara merlot and hear Mr. Florida give the keynote speech at the 120th annual dinner of the Toronto Board of Trade.

But as the sexually charged warm-up act surely indicates, the recently hired director of the $120-million Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, “one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness” (to quote his website), is not your typical university lecturer. When a hyper-agitated electric violinist named Dr. Draw takes to the stage and thrashes his way across the jumbo video screens that permeate the cavernous dining hall, the dusty libraries and cash-starved classrooms of the old economy seem far, far away.

But this is just the prelude to the evening’s star performer, symbol of the refreshed face of Canadian academe – a tanned, perfectly coiffed globetrotter who puts chief executive officers and policy-makers at ease with his charismatic visions of the coming prosperity.

When he strides onto the stage, to the retro-cool keyboard notes of a tune aptly titled The In Crowd, Mr. Florida sounds nothing like a traditional professor. Northrop Frye, for example, rarely spoke of himself as “we,” as Mr. Florida is inclined to do, being careful to acknowledge his glamorous wife, Rana, who runs his business operations.

He mentions CEOs such as Jack Welch and Carly Fiorina, with whom he “got to share stories.” He plugs his new book, Who’s Your City?, explaining why where we choose to live is the most important decision in our lives. He gives out his e-mail address and, sensing that a crowd softened up by Dr. Draw could get impatient with too much theorizing, he makes jokes about his own fluent wordiness (“I’m a professor – I come from the Fidel Castro school of public speaking, which means you’re probably dying for a drink”).

To call Richard Florida merely a researcher in urban planning would be to diminish his much-sought-after message that leveraging “the creative class” is the best way to validate a city’s aspiration to greatness.

No, this is definitely an academic superstar in his element, a leader of the new breed of attention-getting, money-attracting celebrities who are changing the way universities approach their intellectual mission.

When the University of Waterloo poached bestselling political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon away from the University of Toronto this month, to help create the Balsillie School of International Affairs (drawing on a $33-million donation from BlackBerry pioneer James Balsillie), or when the University of British Columbia wooed away University of Colorado Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman to undertake a $10-million study of science education, they likewise were recognizing a fundamental truth of higher learning in the global economy: If you seek status, go for the stars.

Even universities, it turns out, are not immune to the modern obsession with celebrities. For Peter Munk, chairman of Barrick Gold Corp. and the lead donor to the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, the shift to an academic star system makes perfect sense. “You get more publicity, more recognition, more fundraising. It may be unfair, but that’s how the world works.”

It’s certainly how the university world is working now, even in the social sciences and humanities, which traditionally were viewed as lacking the commercial clout that makes investing in scientific and medical superstars an easy business decision.

“The star treatment is happening to younger people much faster,” notes Linda Hutcheon, who holds the honorific title of University Professor at the University of Toronto. “They’re just getting tenure and already they’re living in the fast lane of academe. Publish a good book, and you’ll find you’re being invited to give a talk at Yale and Harvard.”

Academic administrators now readily acknowledge that the rules have changed: Aided significantly by a Canadian dollar that is trading at par with the U.S., they have become much more aggressive in the hunt for talent as intellectual pursuits are globalized and international rankings determine an institution’s ability to recruit students and to solicit public and private funding, both of which are proving much more responsive to name-brand academics.

“We don’t hide the fact that it’s a coup for us to attract a Nobel Prize winner,” says John Hepburn, UBC’s vice-president of research.

The UBC website devotes a separate page to trumpeting the university’s ascent in a number of independent ratings systems, and the hiring (or “poaching,” as it’s known in the world of academic recruitment) of a Carl Wieman can only enhance the university’s upward aspirations – even as it is being questioned for spending millions on a physicist who has stopped doing research in his field.

“Here’s a case of a university paying big money to a Nobel laureate who’s not even teaching physics,” says Jim Turk of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. “Now, he’s a professor of education, but that’s not what he won his prize for.”

Still, a Nobel’s a Nobel. Academic insiders may know that the difference between a prize winner and the runner-up is infinitesimal, in physics as at the Olympics, but to the wider world it’s what turns a good research school into a great one – by its mere presence, apparently.

A tad more American?

Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon doesn’t have a Nobel Prize to his name, but the wide-ranging political scientist has won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for The Ingenuity Gap, a book that analyzed the failure of conventional thinking in an increasingly complex world. In some traditional academic circles, that kind of acclaim in itself is enough to make him suspect. “His big ideas go in one ear and out the other,” one deep-thinking colleague says dismissively.

Mr. Homer-Dixon himself acknowledges his sense of isolation at the University of Toronto as the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies: “I never felt like I had an intellectual community there.”

Academic superstars need attention in order to flourish. So when the highly entrepreneurial University of Waterloo came calling, prizing the international reach of his work and reputation, Mr. Homer-Dixon was predisposed to listen. “They’re so interdisciplinary, just like I am. For the first time, I feel like I’m in the same kind of culture. There’s an omnivorous appetite for ideas and knowledge, and that to me is like oxygen.”

Enriched oxygen, in this case. While Waterloo officials say they are not paying Mr. Homer-Dixon a premium to leave Toronto, the associated perks, benefits and general ego-coddling are significant.

“It becomes a question of where you can make a more significant impact,” says Amit Chakma, the university’s academic vice-president. “Here’s an upstart place, it’s innovative, and Tad gets to have an important role in shaping an institution that’s not just a dream but is backed by one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs.”

Mr. Homer-Dixon will play a large part in selecting both big-name research professors and promising graduate students for the new Balsillie School.

In return, Mr. Chakma says, “we’ll use Tad’s name as an example to bring other top scholars to Waterloo. This sends notice to the academic community that we mean business.”

Thanks to Waterloo’s energetic pursuit, Mr. Homer-Dixon ought to feel much more wanted than he was at U of T. Yet he is something of a reluctant superstar. “This whole brouhaha surrounding my move struck me and members of my family as bizarre,” he says on his cellphone, while in transit from a conference in North Carolina. “But I suppose it is a reflection of the Americanization of the Canadian academic world.

“I actually wrote about this star system in The Ingenuity Gap. In a global economy, where information can travel across the World Wide Web without friction and people have the ability to relocate relatively easily, those who are identified as best-of-category can market themselves across a wider geographical area. People get bid up, as a result, but the difference between the first and second rank is often minuscule and arbitrary. I’m not sure that having academic stars is a good thing, even though in this case I may benefit.”

Well, we are Canadian, with a lingering sense of egalitarianism and an underfunded (but affordable) public education system that cannot compare with the big-bucks attitude of the well-endowed private U.S. universities. We do not take naturally to an academic star system – and indeed, whatever the privileges of rank accorded to Canadian stars and foreigners lured here, they do not compare with what is currently available at the upper tier of American universities.

Waterloo requires the Homer-Dixons of this world to teach a minimum of two courses, but at a Stanford or a Duke, superstars can avoid teaching altogether, provided that they bring in enough research funding, lure a suitable number of easily impressed graduate students, publish dependable bestsellers or deliver face time in the media and at international conferences. It is often said of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (with which the would-be world-class Balsillie School is already comparing itself) that at any given time, half of its highly esteemed professoriate is on a plane flight from one conference or consultancy to another.

“We can’t afford to have 50 per cent of our faculty up in the air,” Mr. Chakma admits.

Star systems and bidding wars make much more sense south of the border than they do here – or did until Canadian universities started figuring out ways to get around their funding constraints. As university business schools, for example, find ways to deregulate their tuition, it becomes more logical to lure a guru like Richard Florida, knowing that his name (to say nothing of his non-stop blogging) will reach a global network of well-heeled applicants.

“I don’t like being considered an academic rock star,” says Mr. Florida, sounding more and more like a low-profile Canadian than a go-getting native of Newark, N.J. But even though he rejects the label – because it implies an absence of basic seriousness and academic purpose – he recognizes the phenomenon, one that he believes will soon overwhelm what he calls “the quasi-socialist system” of university rewards.

Seven-figure scholars

“There’s a need in this world for public intellectuals,” he says. “Which is why, 20 years from now, star professors are going to be making a seven-figure salary. If you compare the superstar phenomenon in art or music or sports, there are academics who are creating something much more saleable.”

And then there are all the other academics who are making brilliant discoveries that have no intrinsic market value, at least not in the culture we inhabit, such as the classics professor who can decode ancient Greek mathematical equations from withered fragments of long-buried Egyptian papyrus. In a more hierarchical, star-driven academic world, where what is saleable becomes more valuable, what does not sell is in greater danger of being neglected and discarded.

This is where disinterested public funding is meant to pick up the slack, but even government agencies now feel the pressure to reward research that is demonstrably practical, useful and, if you believe the desperate sales pitches, profitable.

Is that such a bad thing? Jim Turk, of the university teachers association, thinks so. “Increasingly, the federal government is acting in a manner consistent with the private-sector approach,” he says. He points to the 2,000 Canada Research Chairs endowed by Ottawa at a cost of $300-million a year to help universities arrest the brain drain of their top academics and attract big names to Canada from the rest of the world: “Only 20 per cent of the chairs are in the social sciences and humanities, even though half of our students study in those areas and half of our faculty teach there.”

When Chad Gaffield, president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), hears complaints about non-useful research projects, he tells what he calls “the Sept. 10, 2001, story ” – as in, “You’re funding work on the 15th-century Middle East. Who cares about that?”

But even SSHRC accepts the enhanced value of big-name researchers and the combination of money and talent they can attract. “I wouldn’t trade for a minute what we’ve got for the environment on campuses 30 or 40 years ago. I’m really energized by the environment on campuses today.”

Daniel J. Levitin knows about this new energy if anyone does. He is a former California session musician and record producer who now – take a deep breath – runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University as a James McGill Professor and is the holder of the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication.

He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music, lists seven other academic affiliations on his website, is sponsored by the likes of Sony and Apple, earns appreciative blurbs from Sting and David Byrne and still finds time to post his iPod playlist for anyone who wants to know what a superstar McGill professor listens to in the new economy. (Answer: a worrying amount of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.)

If anyone should be an expert on the world of the academic rock star, it’s Mr. Levitin, who is reached by phone on a shopping expedition to The Bay. “Do I feel like a rock star?” he asks. “Not really. I certainly like the opportunities I’ve had to talk to the public about the brain and thought in general since the book became successful. But I’m just doing the same thing I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, the daily struggle to get students to think the way I want. The only difference is that more people are willing to hear what I have to say.”

There are perks, of course – a high enough salary to let him turn down the half-dozen offers he has had to leave McGill, the resources for a medium-sized lab and a cross-appointment to McGill’s music school, where he gets to teach a course on his pet subject, the philosophy and aesthetics of music production (with special reference to the “alchemy of interaction between recording technology, art and the artists responsible for its creation”).

But that by no means makes him an overprivileged superstar, and when he has had enough of the rock-star references, he answers with a personal story. “I was with the Police as a guest for part of their tour. The three of them had read my book, contacted me and set up a meeting in Montreal, at which point they invited me to come on tour. You know, the outside world sees the limos and the fancy hotels, but Sting is playing and practising four hours a day. They all have personal trainers; they’re always working out. They’re not lounging around or getting high. It’s not the hedonist life all the time.”

The message is clear: It’s hard work being a superstar. So don’t take these rockers so lightly. They’re giving it their all.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

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Promoting Career Flexibility

Inside Higher Ed: Promoting Career Flexibility

Many professors worry that colleges these days prefer a professional class of administrators to promoting faculty members. In turn, many administrators complain that faculty members — however good at their teaching and research — may lack key skills for more responsibility.

A new program at Simmons College — one of six master’s institutions receiving grants Tuesday to promote “faculty career flexibility” — aims to provide professors with a path to pick up administrative skills, without just adding on to their workloads. The grants are being awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which last year awarded similar grants to research universities.

Professors on YouTube, Take 2

The Chronicle: Professors on YouTube, Take 2

Since writing about how professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what they are up to:

Georgia: Professor Accused of Sexual Harassment Resigns

The Red & Black: 20 Years of Shame

After 20 years of intimidation and innuendo, crude comments behind closed doors and boasts of “freaky” hot tubs, a tenured professor in the College of Education quit the day before the University found him in violation of sexually harassing his female students.

William Neil Bender
, who teaches in the Communication Sciences and Special Education Department, has faced numerous accusations of harassment spanning back to 1988, the year when many of today’s freshmen and sophomores were born. According to documents obtained by The Red & Black, Bender tendered his resignation in September, but it will not take effect until May 6, 2008. During the interim, Bender is teaching two online courses, but “must refrain from having private and/or personal interactions with University students,” according to a document from the Office of Legal Affairs.