Uh-oh

I entered the date for my qualifying exam on my cell phone’s calendar.

I typed in “qual” (7825) using the T9Word (“guess what I’m typing”) option.

Its first guess was “suck”.

I hope that’s not a bad omen.

18:26 EST | permalink | /academics

Coincidence?

• September 2000: Enter Princeton University.
• September 2001: Shirley Tilghman is installed as the first female president of Princeton University.
• September 2004: Enter Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• December 2004: Susan Hockfield is installed as the first female president of MIT.
• February 2007: Drew Faust is selected as the first female president of Harvard University.

I sense a trend.

15:11 EST | permalink | /academics

Kafka on the Charles, Chinese child theft, and the usual sex scandals

Two stories hit the wires recently: a tiff between Princeton University and the townies (dog bites man; sky blue) and a child custody dispute in Tennessee. Both emerge from a little-discussed and highly sordid corner of college life: University justice.

First, from the Princetonian, there’s a fight between Princeton University and the local prosecutor over a case of assault involving some undergraduates. What appears to be at issue is the University’s judicial process, which the locals think is interfering with their investigation.

For reasons that also remain unclear, Mercer County assistant prosecutor William Burns threatened the University with legal action when it began its internal disciplinary hearing. “If you continue to demand [that the victim] supply documents pertaining to any criminal charges, you may be charged with … Obstructing the Administration of Law [and] Hindering Prosecution,” Burns was quoted as writing to the University on Jan. 8, according to a reply letter by University General Counsel Peter McDonough.

Given that the University judicial process (oops, two judicial processes — the Honor Committee, which handles in-class cheating, and the Committee on Discipline, which handles everything else) has never been a shining example of transparency, I tend to side with its critics, whatever their reasons. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t tell us prosecutor’s beef is.

The alleged assault victim’s lawyer has a more pointed critique:

The recent conflicts between the University and law enforcement authorities show that current practice of dual, independent frameworks is unacceptable, Murphy said. Calling the University disciplinary process an attempt to “resemble a fully-functional mini-criminal trial,” Murphy said that the University’s efforts usurped the power of local authorities.

My feelings exactly — you’ll see why in a moment.

A bigger-deal case just made the national headlines: a Chinese couple won custody of their daughter after the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision of a Memphis judge who had awarded custody to a foster family.

According to the article, the parents, Shaoqiang He, and his wife, Qin Luo He, fell upon hard times and sent their month-old daughter to live with another family [editor’s note: WTF?!] temporarily. When they wanted her back, the other family refused to give her up.

The case spurred the usual complaints about anti-Chinese prejudice in the judicial system; how it was stacked against foreigners with poor English; the usual. (Interestingly, half of the Google hits during my searches on the subject were from English-language versions of Chinese newspapers.) But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is how the He family’s financial difficulties came about. According to the AP story:

Anna Mae was born in 1999 shortly after her father, a student at the University of Memphis, was accused of a sexual assault. He was ultimately acquitted, but the charge cost him a scholarship and the student stipend that was his family’s primary source of income.

A 24 January 2002 article from Life magazine provides a bit more detail.

Anna Mae was born on Jan. 28, 1999, into poverty and turmoil. Her father, “Jack” Shaoqiang He, 37 – known around this friendly Southern town as “Mister He” – was a visiting college professor from China who came to the USA on a student visa and was pursuing a doctorate in economics at the University of Memphis.

Here he married “Casey” Qin Luo, 34, a Chinese woman he met through a friend back home. She spoke no English, but she shared his strong faith and love for America, Mister He says. They planned to build a good life together.

But in 1998, when Casey was pregnant with Anna Mae, her husband was charged with assaulting a fellow student. He and the student, a Chinese woman named Xiaojun Qi (pronounced Key), went to a computer lab alone; a week later Qi went to school officials, displayed bruises and said Mister He caused them during a sexual assault.

Mister He vehemently denies the allegation. He says he left the lab feeling uncomfortable after the woman asked him for a $500 loan. But the university dismissed him, his income from the university vanished and his student visa hung on his collegiate appeal.

On Thanksgiving in 1998, the Hes left their one-bedroom apartment and went to the grocery store. They were attacked by several men, and Casey was knocked down. That night she began suffering vaginal bleeding. Her condition worsened until doctors finally, in January, delivered Anna Mae by C-section, one month premature.

With a $12,000 hospital bill, a criminal assault charge and a continuing legal fight to try to get reinstated at the university, the Hes sought help in caring for their baby. Friends at their church suggested a local adoption agency.

Mid-South Christian Services agreed to place the baby in a foster home for three months. They placed her with Jerry and Louise Baker.

One minor point: according to Factiva, the marriage between Shaoqiang He, 37 and Qin Luo, 33, is listed in the marriages section of the January 9, 2002 Memphis Commercial Appeal – meaning that the parents would not have been married at the time of the birth of the child in four years before, in 1998. Either the Appeal article is mis-dated (it wouldn’t be the first time), or the Life author has his timeline wrong (“husband” should have been “future husband.”)

Soon after the Baker family foster placement, the legal wrangling over the child began. But the interesting part is how they got there: the University judicial process that prompted the He family to place their kid in foster care in the first place. It reminded me of a case on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s website:

A Harvard graduate student has been barred from continuing his studies because a fellow student accused him of sexual assault in January of 2002. The student was acquitted on all six counts of rape and assault by Middlesex Superior Court last August and his accuser was shown to be fabricating parts of her story at the trial. Despite this, Harvard has not readmitted him and has not dropped its own charges against him.

(FIRE, it should be noted, is a pressure group — if you hadn’t guessed when you saw that they refer to Harvard as “Kafka on the Charles.” Not that I disagree with much of what that they do.)

The Boston Globe and the Harvard Crimson also covered the case. As a biographical tidbit, the non-assault didn’t happen in Child Hall, which is right near where I used to live. It’s the Gropius-designed wall on the left side of this photo. Apologies on the lack of a better picture.

I don’t know what has happened to the student in question, Georgi Zedginidze. The latest word that I saw was a Crimson columnist blasting the University’s policy of wrist-slapping convicted rapists while simultaneously jack-booting the acquitted. The author laments the “Coalition against Sexual Violence’s” successful demands to eliminate the right of confrontation from the University judicial process.

Erin O’Connor, who writes about academic excess, had similar complaints about the He case back in 2004:

Had officials at the University of Memphis accorded Shaoqiang He due process, had they held firmly to the tenet that in this country a person is always innocent until proven guilty, he would not have been expelled on the basis of an accusation. He would not have been deprived of his education, he would not have had his career prospects ruined, and he would not have lost his daughter.

[…]

The Hes plan to return to China after the dispute about their daughter is settled.

If they do plan to return, now that they have four children, I wonder how they’ll skirt the one-child policy? I understand that a lot of Chinese who intended to go back elect to stay in the U.S. when they realize that their kids will get the worst of it when they return.

On that note, despite O’Connor’s closing line, Larry Parrish, the lawyer for the foster family, accused the Hes of engineering the dispute as a means of staying in America. An article in the University of Memphis’s student newspaper quotes Parrish:

“Jack He is extremely intelligent and very fluent and is a con-artist. He is the best I’ve ever seen,” Parrish said. “He plays on the sympathies of other people. He creates situations that are not real.”

Parrish contended the Hes were using the situation as a way to stay in America. If not for the custody battle the Hes would have been deported, Parrish said.

Parrish also said, “he is the most dishonest witness I have ever seen. That’s why the courts have found him completely without credibility.”

I assume this is the usual character assassination one would expect from an thorough attorney. Does it lend any credence to the original charges against He? It’s doubtful: He was cleared by a court of law.

And that’s where the stories converge: in each of these cases, a University judicial system ignored the verdict of a court of law and soldiered on, either finding the student guilty or thrusting him into academic limbo. In the Harvard case, Zedginidze had taken a leave during the trial, and was all but told not to petition for re-admission, as Harvard might (if he reapplied) actually find him guilty of rape and expel him.

According to the Globe, if Zedginidze managed to persuade the university to schedule a hearing, he’d have no right to confront his accuser, no right of cross-examination, and no right to an attorney – in other words, standard practice for the Star Chamber a University tribunal. The Honor Committee at Princeton has much the same rules. I’m not sure about the Committee on Discipline, but I’d be shocked if it were much better.

As for the He case, the articles that I’ve read do not give the specifics of the University’s sanctions. Was He actually expelled? Was he “persuaded” to take a leave of absence, as was Zedginidze? Or did the U. of Memphis just cancel his fellowship? As doctoral students are generally paid by the University to go to school, the latter would be a crippling loss. In most fields, if you are paying for a doctorate, you’re probably being ripped off. There is a quid pro quo, of course: the students provide fairly cheap labor, which is why schools (particularly schools of the humanities) admit so many of them. But I digress – you can read more about that here.

In any event, one can only be happy that the He family has been reunited. One wonders how we ended up with a system were unaccountable-bureaucrat courts can ruin students’ careers (and, indirectly, break up families) on the basis of allegations that real courts have found to be baseless.

On the other hand, would Shaoqiang He have fared better, had he not been in tried by the University of Memphis’s tribunal, but in his native China?

The awful part is that I’m not sure.

20:52 EST | permalink | /academics/kangaroo-courts

Bleg! Bleg! Bleg!

My brother Davide’s soap opera “The Gates” made the semifinal round of the SoapU contest. If you can spare a second, I’d love it if you could help him out by voting for his episode. (Voting takes about three seconds – you don’t actually have to watch the episode if you’re in a hurry.)

To vote, just go to SoapU.com and click the preview pic next to “The Gates; Columbia University; Davide Barillari”. The show should start playing. You can click one of the rating buttons below the video to vote for the episode. (I recommend a “10”, but of course, I’m biased.)

I had some trouble with Firefox, but your mileage may vary – I have some exotic extensions installed. Internet Explorer worked perfectly, though.

If you had a chance to vote, thanks!

14:24 EST | permalink | /academics/columbia

That’s not something you see every day

BE Professor Threatens Hunger Strike to Protest Tenure Denial

By Joyce Kwan STAFF REPORTER

An African-American associate professor has threatened to go on hunger strike unless the provost resigns and his tenure is granted, protesting what he claims were racist motives behind the denial of his tenure. The Department of Biological Engineering decided not to advance BE Associate Professor James L. Sherley.s case for tenure on Dec. 13, 2004. Since then, Sherley has asked senior administrators to overturn his department’s decision.

[…]

In a December letter sent out to MIT faculty calling for support, Sherley said, “I will either see the Provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office. This is the strength of my conviction that racism in American [sic] must end. What better place to kill a small part of it than at a great institution like MIT.”

There’s no doubt that the tenure process needs reform. That the current system makes it very difficult to have women to have both children and a high-powered academic career is beyond dispute. The left decries the lack of minority professors at top schools and cries racism. The right regularly blasts “tenured radicals” and demands limited-term contracts for faculty. (A small number of (usually obscure) schools have even tried this.) I have my doubts that Prof. Sherley’s tactic will work, but I’m also surprised that more of the media haven’t picked up on this.

Incidentally, if you read magazines like First Things or The Weekly Standard and see references to an MIT professor who bashes embryonic-stem cell research and flogs adult stem cells, it’s often Prof. Sherley. See, for instance, this and this, both by my former college classmate Ryan Anderson.

21:40 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

Overheard in the Lamont Cafe

“Oh my God, do you think Goldman Sachs would have me take the Chinatown bus?”

21:48 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

ObPhDComicsRef

This strip is absolutely perfect. In a few panels, it conveys the disorientation and, er…wait, what was I talking about?

20:12 EST | permalink | /academics

Here’s one for the search engines

As googling for the neologism “Tilghwoman” will confirm, Google appears to have dropped the online archive of Tiger PDFs from my junior year at Princeton. Perhaps the link above will fix that.

(Interestingly, as of this writing, Yahoo!’s search engine still returns a hit for “Tilghwoman”. Score one for Yahoo.)

03:44 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

God Hates Westgate!

Westgate is a dorm for (married) grad students at the extreme Western edge (duh) of the MIT campus. In February, a fire broke out in one of its utility rooms, forcing an evacuation:.

A basement electrical fire forced residents of the Westgate apartments to evacuate the building around 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Westgate President Giorgia Bettin G said that nobody was injured.

Of course, where there’s fire, there’s smoke. In this case, lots of smoke. Enough to permeate the carpets of the whole building and the clothing of the residents. Fortunately,

…residents were provided with free laundry this week, since clothing may have been contaminated by the smoke.

Thank goodness for small things. Of course,

It is not clear if the smoke will pose health problems for the residents, which include young children.

Strangely, there was no-one at MIT who the Tech asked to comment on air pollution. Fortunately, the residents didn’t have to eat there:

The Westgate government coordinated free meals at Next House and Tang, provided by MIT dining.

(although it’s not like they could if they wanted to:)

Flyers posted around the building yesterday instructed residents not to use stoves and microwaves.

Now, electrical fires tend to cause electrical outages. In this case, the MIT shifted the building’s power source it to a generator until a tie-line could be installed:

MIT Facilities is switching the building power source for the Westgate highrise apartments to an electrical tieline connected to nearby Tang Hall yesterday evening or today, said Director of Housing Karen A. Nilsson. An electrical fire Sunday morning had left Westgate highrise apartments relying on a generator for power.

(Don’t you love The Tech? Can you imagine another college paper even using the term “tie-line”?)

But that’s all fun and games. The best part happened just this week

“Residents of Westgate might be spending some time at the Holiday Inn this spring break — but not for vacation. Low rise units A-E, approximately 30 apartments, underwent water shutdown Wednesday afternoon, said John P. Heiney G, a Westgate resident who does not live in the affected area.

Hm? Was this like AY2004-05, when the City of Cambridge’s swiss-cheese water mains left Perkins Hall bone-dry at least twice?

Not so fast:

John G. Engle, program manager of the MIT Facilities Department, said that the decision to do the shutdown was made after residents reported “the distinct odor of oil” in the drinking water. All hot and cold water was disconnected after one resident said water was foul-smelling and discolored, and another filed a follow-up complaint sometime between last Friday and Tuesday morning, he said.

At least they’re all MIT grad students — the sort of guys who gargle with 10W40 and rinse with ethylene glycol. Right? Oh wait…

The shutdown, issued by the Cambridge Water Department as a precaution in response to the reports of contaminated water, affected half of Westgate’s residents, including small children and pregnant women. About 25 families chose to be relocated to the Holiday Inn in Somerville, Heiney said.

Whoops! At least it doesn’t happen often.

Or, wait…

“Because of the construction there have been periodic water shutoffs and we would always get brown yucky water just after the water had been down,” said Heiney.

Let this be a lesson: family life and grad school don’t mix. Stay tuned for the boils (does acne count?), lice, and locusts.

02:55 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

This has to be some sort of prank, right?

Butte High School
“Home of the Pirates”

Do they actually call themselves the Butte Pirates? That’s got to lead to some awkward moments during school cheers.

I know, I know, I should be working. But I had this juvenile urge to see if Wikipedia had a butt pirate article. You’ve got to hand it to Lucene’s stemming algorithm:

21:14 EST | permalink | /academics/highschools

Low point

At some point on Saturday night, someone asked me where I was in my graduate studies. I told them:

If grad school were the digestive system, I would be in the duodenum.

What’s worse is that I don’t remember who received this tidbit, or, for that matter, whether it was Carlos’s or Zak’s party where I met them. I suspect the former, but can’t be certain. This isn’t due to alcohol, by the way – I think it’s some sort of memory loss. Maybe from ingesting too much Teflon from nonstick cooking pans. (I used to use a metal spatula.)

What’s worse still is that “the duodenum” may be a bit optimistic.

04:59 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

Oh, so that explains it

Malcom Gladwell’s latest article on elite-school admissions is well worth a read:

If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”

In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.

10:42 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

Emblematic

BDSM emblem. (source)	HST emblem. (source) (HST imprint is on the other side of the frisbee.)

Coincidence? I think not.

(One wonders what the New Pathway emblem looks like…)

02:06 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Time decay

Some uplifting thoughts on graduate study from Emanuel Derman’s My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance:

…[A]s a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.

23:22 EST | permalink | /academics

Cliffs Notes for The Organization Kid

David Brooks compresses his 2001 article into a single page.

02:37 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

More impressions from Reunions 2005

Still just as hideous: The tables on the third floor of Frist still have those dehumanizing battleship-gray full-length lamps. You can’t see the face of person across from you. You can’t see the faces of the people at the other tables. You can only see their heads and their bodies. You are aware of the presence of a person, but not who they are. They belong in a French science fiction film.

16:08 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Early impressions of Reunions 2005

I just noticed that this blog wasn’t negative enough. That’s easily fixed.

Reliving another private Princeton tradition: while hacking on a broken program, struck with overwhelming urge to sleep. Something about the sub-three-hours last night probably had something to do with it. Threw coat over head, set alarm on phone, collapsed onto Frist couch. Spent very little time wondering what the older alums would think.

Now I know what Gordon Zellaby felt: while elbowing my way through a crowd of septuagenarian alums and their silent, blank-staring, flaxen-haired grandchildren. Thankful that whatever the admissions office means by “diversity” in a given year, it never means more of these people.

Another miserable failure of the Chimpoid administration: the marriage initiative. Many of the older married alums are displaying tumor-like beer guts. Can there be anything worse than an institution that apparently encourages this? Maybe marriages, like laws, should require periodic reaffirmations to remain in effect. (I can’t imagine that this crowd sees much divorce; there’s too much money involved.) Whatever the social cost, it would force more people into the gym.

15:35 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

Good old days

Do you think grad school is too hard? Oh, for the glorious fifties:

[snip]

I arrived with my wife, Helene, in August 1951 from the University of Alberta, to try for a Ph.D. in chemistry. The Butler Tract was filled with veterans from WWII, so we had to seek housing elsewhere. Our first room was with a family on Ewing Street and later with another family on Princeton-Hightstown Road. My assistantship paid $1,200 from which $700 was deducted for tuition. Health care? Dental care? Never heard of them.

Helene is a nurse and worked at the Princeton Hospital for $120 per month, meals included. We had to buy an ancient Buick so that we could get from our quarters to work - thank goodness insurance was not required!

And the Castle on the Hill - after about a year or so I heard of it but never during my three years was I so much as invited to share a meal, let alone to be immersed in a Princeton experience. I did have many rewarding experiences with undergraduates in my laboratory classes.

We had our first child in 1952 and got a discount from the hospital because Helene worked up to her final day, and walked down the hall to deliver. A kind obstetrician also gave a discount. Helene continued on the night shift while our daughter and I burned the midnight oil.

[snip]

G. William Goward *54

Clinton, Conn.

19:01 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Jasper Johns this ain’t

Tucked away in the back of the Wiesner Art Gallery in the student center at MIT is an absolutely delightful exhibit:

(Foreground: American flag, ripped. Reflective lettering on surface: “ALLIES OF EVIL.” Background: American flag. Reflective lettering on surface: “BIN LADEN FOR PRESIDENT.”)

Even better is the artist’s statement:

Protest Flags
These were the confluence of two separate plans - one to dye flags black, in order to convey a very different and unfamiliar visual impression of these well-known icons, and the other to use ‘sacred cloth’ as a medium for other messages, in order to attract more attention. Fortunately, September 11 2001 provided an almost limitless supply of these banners on every street corner, and subsequent manipulation of these events to commit further mass murder for political gain provided a moral imperative to protest. Unfortunately, many variants of the flags did not receive the dye well; I therefore saved the well-dyed ones for their naked visual impact, and applied lettering to the fainter ones. I made several slogans, wearing and carrying them in protests in New York and Boston. My goal was to attract strong initial attention from the visual effect of the lettered flag, but then to act as a challenge by having the slogans be slightly ambiguous and more than slightly provocative, forcing viewers (protester and protested alike) to pause and query whether or not they truly understood and agreed or disagreed with what was being expressed.

(emphasis mine)

The aforementioned dye-dunked flag is here. I couldn’t find the artist’s name anywhere, but I wonder if it’s the same person who was responsible for this high-minded postering campaign:

The text at the bottom reads “Only fascist apologists for war crimes have the instinct to tear down this poster.” (Zoom in to see it.)

Or maybe the artist was behind this campaign, which presumably has something to do with the MIT flag debacle:

In case you missed the punch line, it’s “Flags are a one-way message of hatred.” And, in case you didn’t know, “Flags promote the common misconception that US citizens have the right to free speech.”

(N.B.: I suspect that the second poster was in jest. I’m not so sure about the first. And as to the flags – well, if that’s irony, it’s certainly over my head.)

15:50 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

The Hot One Hundred and Ten

Update: There are mistakes in this list which I have yet to fix (namely, some people have advised theses indicated in the catalog but not in this dataset). I plan to fix this at some point. Mea culpa.

The thesis catalog is quite spotty about advisors; well over 30,000 of the 53,820 records do not have advisors entered. Of those that do, I now present the Hot 110; the advisors with at least 20 theses to their names. They are sorted by number of theses, with ties broken arbitrarily.

1. (70 theses) Bhatt, Swati
2. (57 theses) Danielson, Michael
3. (56 theses) Liu, Bede
4. (53 theses) Cherkes, Martin
5. (53 theses) Cadden, Michael
6. (47 theses) George, Robert
7. (46 theses) Comer, Ronald J
8. (45 theses) Herbst, Jeffrey
9. (43 theses) Wheeler,John A
10. (40 theses) Kornhauser, Alain L
11. (40 theses) Goldman, Michael
12. (38 theses) Katz, Stanley
13. (37 theses) Wolf, Wayne
14. (37 theses) Sandberg, Robert
15. (37 theses) Mulvey, John M
16. (37 theses) DiBattista, Maria
17. (35 theses) Bonini, William E
18. (33 theses) Rosen, Lawrence
19. (32 theses) Vanderbei, Robert J
20. (32 theses) Kulkarni, Sanjeev
21. (31 theses) Garvey, Gerald
22. (31 theses) Danspeckgruber, Wolfgang
23. (31 theses) Calder, Kent
24. (30 theses) Kuhn, Harold W
25. (30 theses) Danson, Lawrence
26. (30 theses) Cooper, Joel
27. (30 theses) Cook, Perry
28. (29 theses) Wolpert, Julian
29. (29 theses) Wilmerding, John
30. (29 theses) Kateb, George
31. (29 theses) Jolly, Alison
32. (29 theses) Gleason, William
33. (28 theses) Wood, Michael
34. (28 theses) Wagner, Sigurd
35. (28 theses) Trotter,Hale F
36. (28 theses) Cadava, Eduardo
37. (28 theses) Billington, David P
38. (27 theses) Richardson, James
39. (27 theses) Mendelberg, Tali
40. (27 theses) Forment, Carlos
41. (27 theses) Fischle, Mark
42. (26 theses) Woolfolk, Robert
43. (26 theses) Wilder, Gita
44. (26 theses) Silver, Lee
45. (26 theses) Ramadge, Peter
46. (26 theses) Poor, H Vincent
47. (26 theses) Kornhauser, Alain
48. (26 theses) Hammoudi, Abdellah
49. (26 theses) Fuss, Diana
50. (26 theses) Crerar, David A
51. (25 theses) Weigert, Martin
52. (25 theses) Tilghman, Shirley
53. (25 theses) Smith, James A
54. (25 theses) Schor, Esther
55. (25 theses) Littman, Michael
56. (24 theses) Suppe, John
57. (24 theses) Roche, Thomas P Jr
58. (24 theses) Powell, Warren B
59. (24 theses) Nunokawa, Jeff
60. (24 theses) Naquin, Susan
61. (24 theses) McPherson, James M
62. (24 theses) Maxwell, Robert
63. (24 theses) Littman, Michael G
64. (24 theses) Levine, Arnold
65. (24 theses) Fernandez, Kelly Patricia
66. (24 theses) Enquist, Lynn
67. (24 theses) Deodatis, George
68. (24 theses) Ashenfelter, Orley
69. (23 theses) White, Lynn
70. (23 theses) Ullman, Richard
71. (23 theses) Sigmund, Paul
72. (23 theses) Faulk, Patricia
73. (23 theses) Doig, Jameson
74. (23 theses) Dobson, Andrew P
75. (23 theses) Billington, David
76. (22 theses) Wolfson, Susan
77. (22 theses) Seleny, Anna
78. (22 theses) Schwartz, Jeffrey
79. (22 theses) Nelson,Edward
80. (22 theses) Knoepflmacher, Ulrich
81. (22 theses) Judson, S Sheldon
82. (22 theses) Goedde, Petra
83. (21 theses) Suleiman, Ezra
84. (21 theses) Sturm, James C
85. (21 theses) Soboyejo, Winston
86. (21 theses) Shapiro, Harold
87. (21 theses) Scovronick, Nathan
88. (21 theses) Calaprice,Frank
89. (21 theses) Jamieson, Beth
90. (21 theses) Gould, James L
91. (21 theses) Flint, Jane
92. (21 theses) Emerson, Caryl
93. (21 theses) Drakeman, Donald
94. (21 theses) Colomina, Beatriz
95. (21 theses) Adelman, Jeremy
96. (20 theses) Wolf, Wayne H
97. (20 theses) Shenk, Thomas
98. (20 theses) Rubenstein, Dan
99. (20 theses) Prucnal, Paul R
100. (20 theses) Prakash, Gyan
101. (20 theses) Reynolds,George T
102. (20 theses) Lyon, Stephen
103. (20 theses) Lizzeri, Alessandro
104. (20 theses) Kobayashi, Hisashi
105. (20 theses) Jones, Maitland Jr
106. (20 theses) Hollocher, Hope
107. (20 theses) Hollister, Lincoln S
108. (20 theses) Durbin, Enoch
109. (20 theses) Curtiss, H C Jr
110. (20 theses) Bogan, Elizabeth
111. (20 theses) Arnold, Oliver

18:23 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

I don’t need a hobby. I need fewer hobbies.

This is a catalog of the most popular words and phrases in Princeton senior thesis titles from 1926 to 2004.

An update, inspired by this classic Prince column:

21:58 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

Nothing new under the sun

The Old Grey Lady has just noticed the Anscombe Society, a newly-formed Princeton student group dedicated to promoting chastity.

Whatever. Back when I was there, the school also had a chastity-promoting club. We just didn’t have a pretentious brit-fop name for it: we called it the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

See also this post from 2003.

14:45 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

GSAS vote result

From: Benjamin G Lee <bglee@fas>
To: gradsdirect@deas
Subject: [gradsdirect] FW: poll results
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:06:11 -0500

Results of the GSAS vote on Larry Summers:

Total participants: 1543

1. I lack confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.

Affirm - 608
Deny - 699
Abstain - 90
Need more information - 146

2. I regret the President's mid-January statements about women in
science and the adverse consequences of those statements for individuals
and for Harvard; and also regret aspects of the President's managerial
approach. I appreciate the President's stated intent to address these
issues, and to seek to meet the challenges facing Harvard in ways that
are collegial and consistent with longstanding faculty and student
responsibilities in institutional governance.

Affirm - 945
Deny - 362
Abstain - 149
Need more information - 87

The first question is (at least) direct. I’m pleasantly surprised that President Summers garnered a majority of the votes cast for a position (rather than abstentions and NMI).

The second question is a mishmash of several questions that any useful poll would separate; everybody who voted on it probably interpreted it differently.

21:37 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Troll of the week

Don’t miss this excellent, excellent troll post from insidehighered.com. It’s 1500 words of a college instructor complaining about students leaving his class to use the bathroom. The comments range from incredulous to irate, which is the hallmark of a truly great troll. It’s not quite up to the quality of Is your son a computer hacker?, but it’s very, very close.

20:21 EST | permalink | /academics

Text of the GSAS poll on President Summers

The Graduate Student Council of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is holding a poll on the same questions that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the faculty responsible for Harvard College and GSAS) considered last week. The text of the poll is below:

Graduate Student Vote on President Summers

Questions marked with a red asterisk (*) are required. You must answer all required questions to have this survey considered complete.

You are logged in as: Joseph Barillari  (HUID: redacted)

(your answers will be separated from your identity before they are visible to course staff)Last Tuesday the FAS faculty voted “lack of confidence” in President Summers. Today and tomorrow GSAS students will have chance to vote anonymously on the same question. Harvard and the world want to know what thousands of Harvard graduate students think about their university president.

Polls will be open from 7am Monday (March 21) to 5pm Tuesday (March 22).

The two questions are those offered to faculty last week.

It’s a quick and easy process, and the results are vital to the ongoing debate.

---

1.*	I lack confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.
	Affirm Deny Abstain Need more information
2.*	I regret the President’s mid-January statements about women in science and the adverse consequences of those statements for individuals and for Harvard; and also regrets aspects of the President’s managerial approach. I appreciate the President’s stated intent to address these issues, and seek to meet the challenges facing Harvard in ways that are collegial and consistent with longstanding faculty and student responsibilities in institutional governance.
	Affirm Deny Abstain Need more information

Copyright ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College

I would be curious to know the results of both polls broken down by department; or even just with the science and non-science departments separated.

I’d be wasting pixels if I commented on the controversy itself; instead, I’ll point the reader to FAS Prof. Steven Pinker, who published a detailed treatment of it in TNR. Shortly after President Summers’s speech, he also appeared in a delightful interview in the Crimson:

CRIMSON: Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.

Update: see this.

16:46 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

If only “The Organization Kid” had been written in 2005

Someone should give David Brooks an account at princeton.thefacebook.com. I’m sure that if he saw this, he’d have an orgasm on the spot.

(Yes, I’m aware that it’s probably just a response to this. The truth should never get in the way of a good story.)

Last names and faces obscured to protect the guilty.

03:04 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

I wonder if this is the joke issue

2004 President Resigns In Plagiarism Scandal

By Emily M. Craparo

Two months after their election to class of 2004 president and vice president, Alvin M. Lin and Nikhil S. Gidwani resigned in the wake of revelations that their campaign platform was largely plagiarized. The positions remain vacant.

Gah. You should at least be creative with your empty promises and cloying platitudes. (It’s not as though anyone’s going to call you on them!) But here’s the best part:

Lin’s apology letter to the class of 2004, drafted to announce his resignation, itself contained a sentence from President Clinton’s 1998 speech to the nation admitting an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I wonder if Clinton wrote that sentence himself, or if an uncredited speechwriter did.

(N.B.: 90% of this article is lifted from The Tech. Ha! —Ed.)

00:04 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Inspector Proctor

Alex Kazazis placed the collected Inspector Proctor strips online for your enjoyment. I suggest reading them all (there are only twelve), but if you’re pressed for time, this is one of my favorites.

23:16 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

JP topic on spatial annotation

Using the campus map and floorplan info at http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg , write a program that outputs a TADS or Inform source code file that contains a spatially correct MIT campus. Bonus points for handling corridors correctly (easy method: split them when you run out of reasonable exit directions to use), more bonus points for building a reasonable model of the outside map. Extra super bonus points for descriptive text of the public areas.

I’m tempted to try this myself.

22:42 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Oversloganated

The heck with “bench to bedside.” I’d like to see some “bench to bedroom” technology transfer.

(I’m adding the former to the “overused slogans in biomedical research” list.)

20:04 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

The tragedy of the mirror image

Members of the National Socialist party of China demonstrate near Harvard Yard. Film at eleven.

Or maybe it’s just Falun Gong. Either way, I’m nervous.

15:39 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Makes you want to donate to the Porc, doesn’t it?

Shut Down Final Clubs

[snip]

Final clubs are only the most direct representation of the patriarchy structurally inherent at Harvard. The power dynamics between men and women on a Friday night at the Spee are mirrored in the rest of life on campus—men speak more than women in class, students will have more male professors, sexual assault happens and goes unreported and men are likely to be much more financially successful after college, in part because of the networks that final clubs enable.

[snip]

Men have space and resources at Harvard. Women don’t. Where can female students go to feel safe? Often, people propose getting a student center, or even buildings for women’s clubs, as the best solution. Yet though Harvard needs new social spaces, they cannot coexist with final clubs. Women’s clubs not only have several centuries of power and resources to catch up with, but they also reinforce heterosexist gender binary and economic exclusiveness. While elite male clubs exist, women cannot be equal anywhere on Harvard’s campus.

[snip]

Julia M. Lewandowski ‘06, is a history and literature concentrator in Dudley House. She is co-founder of SASSI-WOOFCLUBS, Students Against Super Sexist Institutions - We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs. For more information about SASSI-WOOFCLUBS , e-mail lewand@fas.harvard.edu.

Sassy Woofclubs?

19:26 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Only at MIT, part 3

“Did you know that just under half of the men at MIT pledge (i.e. join) a fraternity?” (rush.mit.edu)

• “Each semester Theta Chi’s GPA is consistently among the highest of all living groups.” — Theta Chi

• “…our house GPA is typically one of the highest among all fraternities,” — Nu Delta

• “We have one of the highest GPAs of all fraternities at MIT…” — Chi Phi

• “Our house GPA is consistently one of the top 5 on or off campus.” — Alpha Epsilon Pi

• “For the past couple of years, we have maintained a grade point average that is well above the all-men’s average, and one of the highest on campus - a 4.47 on a 5 point scale.” — Phi Sigma Kappa

• “With one of the largest varsity athlete populations on campus, along with the 3rd best GPA on campus (4.4/5.0),…” — Phi Delta Theta

• “Yes, our GPA is significantly higher than the campus average, but to us academics go beyond numbers.” — Zeta Beta Tau

• “Additionally, our house GPA is one of the best on campus.” — Theta Xi

• “…we’ve consistently had one of the highest GPAs on campus…” — Sigma Chi

• “SigEp brothers consistently maintain a high house GPA…” — Sigma Phi Epsilon

21:47 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Best PAW letter ever

I am a member of the Old Guard who was back for my 70th reunion and rode in a cart in the P-rade. I watched the younger classes march and was struck by the length and slowness thereof. It was longer and slower than the Death March on Bataan, thanks to the babies and dogs, which, in my estimation, do not have a legitimate place in the P-rade.

I recognize that the younger classes are larger than they used to be and that Princeton is now co-ed, but in the interest of a shorter and quicker P-rade, I suggest that participation be limited to persons 18 or older.

N. Conover English ‘34
Liberty Corner, N.J.

(Original here).

09:06 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

It doesn’t take long to become a curmudgeonly alum

In fact, I think I was one before I even registered as a freshman. (Note that the Princeton alumni association grants alum-status to anyone who matriculates at Princeton, so all I needed was the “curmudgeonly” part.)

But I’m not the only one. The Daily Princetonian’s new “Street” section features a sex columnist, Rachel Axelbank, who ruffled the feathers of a pair of recent alums with such tasteless gems as “cobwebs in her panties,” and “porking the circling buzzard.”

Rachel’s pants-happy prose also tripped my vulgarity threshold, but what irritated me the most was not the vulgarity, but the tendency — endemic to sex columnists — to dance around the issues with cute-yet-disgusting euphemisms. By contrast, I’m a firm believer in straight talk. As such, if I were still a Prince columnist (and had the necessary cojonoes*), I’d submit this, which I’ve had sitting around for several months, which I suspect would get me hauled before at least one of the University’s disciplinary committees, and which no-one would accuse of skirting the issues.

* Cute vulgarism.

13:06 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Update on photos

Photos are being updated in near-real-time. Check the photos page for details. If one of the links just gives you a directory listing, rather than a contact sheet, it’s still being updated – just check back in ten minutes or so.

Update: The photo count is nearly 1500.

22:00 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

1954/2004

Larger version

18:02 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

Columnar conclusion

My most-likely concluding column as a columnist for the Prince is online.

18:50 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Up, up, and ever up

The latest Prince column is up. Click for discussion of overindulgent course ratings.

21:49 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

OMG!!!!!111!!1!!! Redux

Second in a series.

Another instance of trolling at Princeton! The Prince reports that a controversy has marred the contest for the ‘06 presidential race:

It all started 1:39 p.m. Sunday, when Matt Mims ‘06 sent an email to Quadrangle Club’s email forum, requesting recipients to look at one of Thompson’s recent campaign emails.

Mims specifically pointed out one sentence in Thompson’s email — “Let’s get chris lloyd Out of office” — and argued that the capital ‘O’ in “Out” was a deliberate jab at Lloyd’s open homosexuality, “telling us that this is a reason we should vote against him.”

Within a few hours, a dozen emails were sent to the forum on the topic, including one from Thompson and several from his friends, who vigorously defended him and questioned Mims’ logic. Eventually, the flurry of emails died down, but feelings are still raw on both sides.

Alex reminded me that this is a reprise of the alleged “fniger” controversy on Slashdot, as recorded by Trollaxor.

Lastly we must not forget another thing that’ll cause all-around general trolling mayhem on Slashdot: [Slashdot chief editor Rob] Malda’s detestable spelling habits. The one time he was commenting on a story about disabling the finger server on UNIX systems, he misspelled finger as fniger. WHOA. The whole Slashdot community was up in arms over what was percieved as a barely hidden racial slur. To “stop the fniger server” was taken to mean that blacks shouldn’t be using Linux!!! What an idiot Rob Malda is, whether or not the “fniger fiasco” was intentional. 5/5 of all story submissions that day were trolls, and the signal to noise ratio mutated to 4:1 (troll:legit) for 3 days straight after.

It’s also the second time in the space of a few weeks that the Prince has covered trolling. Is a trend emerging?

18:02 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble