“Dartmouth College Professors Investigated Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations” (nytimes) describes three professors who will receive fat salaries while not working: they’re on “paid leave”. This is distinct from professors who receive fat salaries when not working while on “sabbatical.” The article contains the inevitable TED talk mention.
Suspicious activity:
Dr. Heatherton and Dr. Kelley were among the authors of a 2012 research study on how images of food and sex affect the brain. As part of the research, 58 female college freshmen underwent brain scans shortly after arrival on campus while viewing 80 images each of animals, environmental scenes, food items and people — some involved in sexual scenes or consuming alcohol. Six months later, they were called back to the lab, weighed and questioned on their sexual behavior.
One good question is how an American college student would be able to recall his or her “sexual behavior,” since most of it seems to occur at a blood alcohol 2X the legal limit for driving (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football))
My comment on the piece:
If they do get fired it will be a good illustration of how my University of California professor friend explains his tenure: “I can be fired for any reason… except incompetence.”
Here’s a comment that might spur some grad school (but probably not Computer Science!) applications:
(from Paolo Francesco Martini) I don’t know the specifics in this case, but as a former Psych professor in the seventies at American colleges, I have to say that I can’t recall ever being subjected to such intense and persistent seduction as I was by my female students. I took to keeping my office door open during ‘visits’ by my most ardent admirers and had to physically peel attractive young women off me. Maybe it was my animal magnetism, but my female colleagues never reported this kind of behavior on the part of their male students. In fact, men and women tend to have different reactions to authority figures and power in general, which is the real issue here: men are generally diffident about sucking up to it, while women attempt to seduce it. Asking a thirty year old to hold out forever in the face of such pulchritude is unreasonable, when we’re talking about people who have not taken an oath of celibacy. By the way, no, I never had sex with a student: it seemed obviously unethical. But the flesh is weak, and it is facile to think of these men as predators and their students as victims.
Related:
- New Hampshire family law (calculate cashflow that might ensue in case whatever the professors did with students resulted in pregnancy)
- “Who Pays for Free College? Crowding Out on Campus” (new paper by Alonso Bucarey, an MIT Econ PhD): “Free tuition increases enrollment to selective programs, making these programs more competitive and pushing them out of reach for many poor students who would otherwise have qualified.”
- “Tuition-free MIT” (my idea from 1999 for helping MIT, not poor students, by making MIT free)
College Tuition are HIGH because their customers (ie. students) are ABLE and WILLING to pay for it, period. And, the reason students are able and willing to pay for it is because — as a government and as a society — we have chosen to subsidize, guarantee and forgive loans to help people attend college to obtain degrees (even those with little to no economic value). It’s that simple.
Subsidies always drive up costs and increase the production (and consumption) of the unwanted. This is true of housing, this is true of healthcare, this is true of farming and this is true of education.
It is like asking why are manufacturers are charging $100,000 for say a big screen TV, when you give buyers a $20,000 tax credit to buy them, then guarantee $100,000 loans for buyers making a meager $30,000 a year, charge them a 1% interest and forgive or suspend repayments if they lose their job. Of course people will buy them and of course manufacturers will charge what they can.
For those young ladies that need instruction:
https://m.wikihow.com/Seduce-Your-Professor
Do they teach the concepts of due process and innocent until proven guilty at Dartmouth?
From the article:
“Maggie Pizzo, a junior math major, said she was concerned that the professors had been put on paid leave during the investigation as opposed to suspended without pay”…” ‘By paying them, it seems to be condoning the acts,’ whatever they were, she said, as well as being ‘disrespectful’ toward whoever brought the allegations of misconduct.”
Why so much law enforcement involvement? 5 agencies and an Attorney General:
“Attorney General Gordon J. MacDonald of New Hampshire said his office was part of a joint criminal investigation by five law enforcement agencies into allegations of ‘serious misconduct’ by the professors”
I thought Title IX kangaroo courts were the standard operating procedure nowadays.
Ahh what the heck, just hang ’em. Tenured bastards.