Monthly Archives for February 2011

Professor Records His Class Trip to China: Images Expose the Naked Truth

Here’s a sordid little item that’ll put the “hump” into your Humpday. Colby College in Waterville, Maine has accepted the resignation of popular economics professor Philip H. Brown. In an announcement all-too characteristic of the kind of moral leadership and courage displayed by all-too many college presidents, Colby’s William “Bro” Adams “wrote to students and employees on January 28 that Brown had resigned after college officials had indicated they were prepared to fire him over ‘violations of student privacy.‘”

Just how, you might well ask, did the former professor “violate” the privacy of his students? It’s not like he demanded the registrar share FERPA-protected confidential information about the students’ personal lives. Or like he walked into the women’s locker room to catch a glimpse of a group shower. It’s more like…wait a minute…it’s virtually like he walked into the locker room.

Back in January, on a trip to China—part of his aptly named course “Made in China”—Brown placed a web cam in the bathrooms of the lodgings his female students were assigned. Better yet, he had enlisted an unwitting student to do the installation by insisting the “first aid kit” be stationed in the bathroom wherever the students bedded down.

I knew Michael Caine, Professor Brown, and you are no Michael Caine.


Soon his students’ clothing-optional bottoms became the kind of targets of opportunity budding commies turned capitalists can only butt dream of. The professor, in his defense, was merely engaging in a harmless bit of multiculturalism, celebrating as he apparently was the Chinese Moon Festival, in which lovers spend “a romantic night together….Even for a couple who can’t be together, they can still enjoy the night by watching the moon at the same time so it seems that they are together at that hour.” Or something like that.

The professor had his epidermal study of his students cut short when one of them discovered a picture of her unclad bottom in the trash bin of Brown’s laptop, a computer that all students on the trip shared with their teacher. Lest you think this student was snooping in places on the laptop where she should not have been, she was merely retrieving a copy of a blog entry she’d deleted by mistake. As any computer jockey knows, this happens. A lot. By the time the students were back in the States, many more revealing pix had been rooted from the trash and forwarded to the college, which brings us back to “Bro”’s courageous memorandum to faculty and staff. Appropriately, this tale ends with ex-Professor Brown out on his keister.

But although the story is over, there are still lessons to be learned. First: if you are going to web-cam students in the buff, do not store the resulting images on the same computer you are loaning out to said students. Second, empty your trash and delete your history. These simple steps won’t prevent someone who knows his way around hard drives from figuring out what dirty little secrets you are hiding, but it will avoid the kind of surprise discoveries that send a co-ed into fits of anger and revenge when she realizes the Instamatic of her pert little bottom wasn’t good enough to make it into the permanent archive and was instead callously consigned to the rubbish bin.

Professor Brown is denied a terminal sabbatical.

The lessons do not stop there. If you click over to Rate My Professors and read the students’ reviews of Professor Brown, you will learn that numerous students rate him as “best I ever had,” a teacher capable of making the dry subject of economics come alive. If I still had the scales on my eyes about academia, I would read these reviews—and there are many, many of them—and weep at the tragedy of a deeply flawed man whose gifted teaching will now be wasted because of his dark compulsions. But those scales fell away a long time ago, so now I read those reviews and ask myself, not for the first time, when was it that society determined 18 to 20-year-olds were capable of sitting in judgment on the faculty in whose classrooms they sit.

Forget the Super Bowl—This Prof’s Career Is Headed to the Toilet Bowl

Academics are famous for not knowing how to play nice. Perhaps being the hapless tot relentlessly tormented by the other kids in class—chased around the room, cornered, then stuffed in the trash can—renders future college teachers incapable of learning the social graces. Whatever the reason, I always get a big laugh when I read the call of yet another college president or, better still, a “public intellectual” for the hoi polloi to return to civil discourse and polite disagreement.

As usual these myopic hypocrites ought to get their own houses in order before telling the rest of us what to do. For in those hallowed and hushed halls of higher learning lurk society’s least civil members, the entitled professorate. Take my advice: should you ever stumble upon two academics in the heat of argument, hurling citations, references, and peer reviews at each other, turn and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, lest you become collateral damage. For when the fighting escalates, trust me, you do not want to get caught in the crossfire.

Consider a recent debate between Professor Tihomir Petrov and an unnamed colleague, two mathematicians at California State University—Northridge reported by the LA Times. You’d think a campus devastated by a 6.7 earthquake had withstood the worst damage it could. Not so. When these two brainiacs got into it, what began as difference of opinion soon escalated into a pissing match of seismic proportions. And, ultimately, the arrest of one of the intellectual combatants.

The trouble began in earnest when Professor Petrov took matters into his own hands. In the dead of night, when no one was around, he launched the first of two stealth attacks. Stealing up to his enemy’s door, he grabbed his willy and let fly a steady stream of hot, steamy invective right at Professor Unnamed’s door.

In the days that followed, Professor Unnamed plotted his revenge, positioning hidden cameras to catch and record the next nocturnal assault. It wasn’t long in coming. Flushed with the success of his first foray, Professor Petrov reloaded at the local brew pub and once again deployed his chemical weapon at the doorstep of his foe.

After the second assault, police raided Professor Petrov's armory.

Alas, the cameras caught it all…just as the anger had trickled out of him, Professor Petrov was caught bare handed, arrested and charged with two misdemeanors. “What about my First Amendment right to free expression,” the captured warrior was heard to cry as he was escorted in diapers from the campus.

Like underpaid professors everywhere, Professor Petrov
evidently did not have a pot to pee in.


So while I am in complete agreement with those who call for a measure of politesse in daily discourse, I am inclined to regard any advice in this regard from academics as something less than golden.

Ad from the deportment class offered by the local community center Professor Petrov enrolled in to fulfill his community service.

NOTE to readers: Even though the mommy bloggers would have you believe otherwise, their little darlings are not the first to be teased or tormented by classmates. When I was in kindergarten or the first grade, one sad little boy, Vance Toweler, was routinely dumped in the garbage can by a gang of bullies. I cowered in my chair, afraid to do or say anything lest I be next. This went on forever, with no intervention until one day Vance was gone. The teacher announced he and his family had moved to England. I hope he had nicer classmates there.

Am I Too Early to Be Late?: A College President Grapples with the Issue of Time Management

Turning the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education on a cold and icy winter’s day is a sure-fire way to make you forget the frozen tundra outside your door.

The Day-Before-Groundhog-Day edition of the Chronicle provides some much-needed comic relief in the form of sage advice from

Roger H. Hull, a former president of Beloit College and Union College (N.Y.), [who] offer[s] practical tips for college presidents on small things they could to increase their success in the job. Mr. Hull, who now runs a foundation for youth in Schenectady, N.Y., is the author of Lead or Leave: A Primer for College Presidents and Board Members.

Among other things, he [says]:

If you can stay for only part of an event, come at the end of it rather than leave early. Coming late signals you had another commitment, while leaving early says you’re not interested.

One wonders what suggestions former President Hull has for the overbooked administrator who is heading out the door early from a “commitment” in order to show up late at an “event.”

Am I too early to be late?

Artist's rendition of President Hull rushing off early from his commitment so that he can be late for his next event.

If you know the answer let me know and I’ll pass it on to Roger.