Internet Scofflaw

Here’s a disturbing story:

Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell-phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives.  Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.

The scientists would not say where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.

Ethical questions?  I’d say so.  Set aside the likely illegality of the study, the privacy issues, and the issues of human subject research.  By refusing to reveal where the study was done, they make it impossible to reproduce their results, thereby making the study useless.  (Of course, it would probably be hard to reproduce it anyway, due to the other ethical problems.)  I imagine that they’re holding that information back because of concern for legal consequences.

At Inside Higher Ed:

Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students. Professors said attendance rates are considerably lower than at many institutions — although most institutions serve students with better preparation.

One reason that this does not happen (outside Aird’s classes) is that many professors at Norfolk State say that there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass.

Aird said that figure was repeatedly made clear to him and he resisted it. Others back his claim privately. For the record, Joseph C. Hall, a chemistry professor at president of the Faculty Senate, said that DeLoatch “encouraged” professors to pass at least 70 percent of students in each course, regardless of performance. Hall said that there is never a direct order given, but that one isn’t really needed.

(Via Instapundit.)

Dartmouth gets another black eye, courtesy of one of its English instructors. One Priya Venkatesan, after (deservedly) receiving profoundly negative course evaluations, decides to sue:

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
To: “WRIT.005.17.18-WI08″:;, Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.
The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit.
I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

One’s first inclination is that this has to be a hoax, not just because of the idea of a lawsuit over course evaluations, but also because the person who wrote this was teaching English at Dartmouth. Nevertheless, the story seems to be for real. Still, I’m pretty sure Ms. Venkatesan hasn’t yet consulted a lawyer.

I think someone is about to be bumped from the Internet’s most hated people.

(Via Roger’s Rules, via Instapundit.)

CORRECTION: Venkatesan is an instructor, not a professor.  (Corrected the title, but I can’t correct the permalink.)

UPDATE: Another one sues his students!  This one is an actual professor, apparently, and a law professor to boot.  (Via Instapundit.)

In an April 4 editorial, the New York Times lambasts John Yoo, formerly a lawyer in the Justice Department, for his legal memo on interrogation that the Times says authorized torture. There’s a lot of blowhardiness to rebut here, and I’m not going to bother. But, there’s an astonishing statement in the middle:

Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, never directly argues that it is legal to [do various bad things].

(Emphasis mine.) Yoo, a tenured professor at Berkeley, took a leave of absence to work at the Justice Department before returning in 2004. During that leave, he produced a work of legal scholarship that proved politically unpopular. For the New York Times, that is apparently grounds for revoking his tenure. Nay, more than that; it is “inexplicable” that his tenure was not revoked.

Am I reading too much into one word? It’s hard to see what else “inexplicable” could mean, since “he has tenure” would otherwise appear to be an explanation. Moreover, I’m not the only one to read it this way. Other observers took it the same way, including the Dean of Law at Berkeley, who felt the need to put out a statement explaining academic freedom and tenure to the New York Times.

(Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)

UPDATE: Paul Campos, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, comes out and says it explicitly, and laments the lack of seriousness of those like Berkeley’s Dean of Law (and me) who think academic freedom might be an issue. (Via Instapundit.)

An e-mail received today:

Hi. I am not a student at your school but the professor of my class is out of town and I am stuck on a homework problem. If you could help me then I would appreciate it. I need to work the following problem, using only rules of inference and not conditional or indirect proofs.

. . . logic problem follows . . .

It used to be that when you tried to get strangers to do your homework for you, you would pretend it wasn’t homework.

The US News and World Report rankings of graduate programs are out.  In addition to ranking schools by strength in fields overall, they also rank specialty areas such as programming languages.  (No permalink.)  Let’s take a look:

1	Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA
2	University of California–Berkeley Berkeley, CA
3	Stanford University Stanford, CA
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA
5	Cornell University Ithaca, NY
6	Princeton University Princeton, NJ
	University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL
8	University of Texas–Austin Austin, TX
9	Rice University Houston, TX
10	University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI

This list seems pretty much random.  I’m glad to see my school on top, but the rest of the list is so strange that I can’t honestly take much satisfaction from it.  The University of Pennsylvania, which has one of the strongest groups in PL, doesn’t make the list at all!

Are all the US News rankings this bad?  Probably, yes.  One of the principles I’ve learned is when the media is wrong about anything of which I have direct knowledge, it’s probably wrong about everything else as well.

BONUS: Glenn Reynolds has some related thoughts about law school rankings.

At Baylor University, Inside Higher Ed reports:

Senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not rigorous enough and so applied new standards, which have never been shared with faculty leaders, let alone with those who submitted tenure portfolios under the old standards. Largely as a result, tenure denials at Baylor this year — which have been about 10 percent annually in recent years — shot up to 40 percent.

(Via Instapundit.)

Setting aside the unfairness of this, Baylor is shooting themselves in the foot here.  It really can hurt recruiting if prospective hires worry that they won’t be treated fairly.  I can think of one major institution in particular (not mine, in case you’re wondering) that developed such a bad reputation that it was unable to hire anyone that would meet their standards for tenure.