Suing
101
The latest trend in
malpractice law is educational lawsuits. The Chronicle of Higher
Education reports that nearly 30 students are suing their universities
for "breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation, or negligence." Most of the
claimants are angry at the poor quality or low value of the degrees they
received. James M. Houston, who earned a Ph.D. in educational leadership from
Northern Arizona University
in 1995, is seeking $1 million in punitive damages for an education he says
makes him a "fraud."
Other
litigants are suing over degrees that were never awarded. A student who had
enrolled at Lorain County Community College in Ohio in 1993 but never graduated
from the school's nursing program is suing for breach of contract and violation
of consumer protection laws, Community College
Week reports. According to that publication, the student contended that
"the catalogue of course offerings and academic policies created a contract
that obligated the college to provide him with a nursing degree." He complained
that courses required for his degree hadn't been offered during the time of his
matriculation, forcing him to leave before earning the degree. But an appeals
court threw out the suit, stating, "Ohio does not recognize educational
malpractice claims for public policy reasons."
Cutting
Off the Nose ...
According to the Southern
Illinois University Daily Egyptian, SIU's medical school has "changed its
long-standing policy of cutting the limbs off of cadavers to fit them into
wardrobe boxes" before shipping them off to be cremated. An e-mail message sent
to local media and the Illinois Board of Higher Education had claimed that
student workers were employed to remove the limbs and that the policy was
designed to save money. Both charges turned out to be false. But the school of
medicine has stated that "in the future no student workers will work with
cadavers or disintegrated anatomical remains. Further, we will no longer
physically alter anatomical remains." SIU says the new policy is more
respectful of people who have donated their remains to the cause of
science.
In other
cadaver news, a technique developed by a German anatomy professor named Gunther
von Hagens, which allows him to preserve and study the body in detail, has
occasioned protest. Plastination, as the preservation method is called, involves the
replacement of blood by a colored polymer, which maintains its shape as the
flesh is gradually removed. The entire circulatory system, down to the tiniest
capillaries, can be examined at full scale. An exhibition of von Hagens' work
has toured Japan and Germany, and protesters have called it an affront to human
dignity--which the German Constitution requires citizens to preserve.
Go
Fish
Stanley Fish, the flamboyant
Milton scholar, legal theorist, and academic celebrity (David Lodge based his
jet-setting Professor Morris Zapp on him), has left Duke University and the
English department to which he attracted a parade of stars and controversies.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education , Fish will become dean of
liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a respected
commuter campus making a bid for greater prestige and attention. Fish's wife,
Jane Tompkins, who has made her disenchantment with conventional teaching and
scholarship the subject of both her courses and her writing, will teach one
course a year in the school of education.
Fish is
not the only academic celebrity making a somewhat mysterious job switch.
Philosopher Richard Rorty (whose work was the topic of "Out of
Left Field" in Slate ) has given up his chair at the University of Virginia (and a
salary that made him the highest-paid public employee in the state) in favor of
a nontenured post at Stanford, where he'll teach until he retires--or until a
better offer comes along. His reason: He wants to be nearer to some members of
his family.
Face
It
A
professor of English at the University
of Mainz, Germany, believes she has figured out what William Shakespeare
really looked like. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel believes the closest
likeness may be a death mask most other scholars think is a fake.
Hammerschmidt-Hummel, working with a team of scientists using advanced
photographic techniques, found close similarities between the mask and a famous
bust of Shakespeare, which she believes was copied from it. In particular, the
bust bears traces of "three small swellings on the nasal corner of the left
eye"--swellings that are evident on the death mask as well. The mask also shows
a swelling in the upper left eyelid, which, according to Professor Walter
Lerche, head of the Horst-Schmidt eye clinic in Wiesbaden, Germany, could be
evidence of a rare form of cancer that may have killed the bard. British
Shakespeare scholars remain skeptical, both of the death mask's authenticity
and of the possibility of discovering Shakespeare's true face.
All
Politics Is Local
Another NYU video
controversy: NYU's Project on Media Ownership, under the direction of
journalism Professor Mark Crispin Miller, recently completed a study of the
effects of local television news on the civic life of Baltimore. PROMO's report
claimed that local TV news foments fear and hostility among city residents and
suburbanites alike by devoting a disproportionate share of its broadcast time
to crime. Such "inadvertent anti-urban propaganda" also hurts Baltimore's
reputation and economy.
But the
nonprofit research firm Public
Agenda, whose polls PROMO used for the report, has publicly disavowed it.
In its own press release, given to the Baltimore Sun and posted on the organization's Web site,
Public Agenda charged that PROMO's report "while using data that are
technically correct, distorts Public Agenda's findings by presenting them in a
biased context and tone." In particular, the pollsters charge that PROMO
downplayed the extent to which respondents' fear of crime was based on the
experience of crime--53 percent of those polled had said that they or someone
they loved had been the victim of a crime. Miller stands by his conclusions and
insists that "anyone who reads my overview and their report will see that there
is absolutely no disagreement."
Girls!
Girls! Girls!
New York
University has filed a lawsuit against the operators of a soft porn Web site.
The site purported to display footage, picked up from an "NY University Dorm
Cam," of young women dressed in skimpy clothing bearing the NYU insignia
cavorting in a room decorated with NYU paraphernalia. The site promises that
the women will "romp for your enjoyment in their own dorm room." Visitors to
the site have included journalistic bon vivant Anthony Haden-Guest, who noted
in a recent "Talk of the Town" piece for The New Yorker that among the
"humdrum vulgarities that have become the bread and butter of the Internet,"
one can cop "a peek at some female NYU students who have wired up their dorm
room." But the university's suit refers to the rompers as "alleged NYU co-eds"
and assures all concerned that "there is no 'NYU Dorm Cam' installed in any NYU
dorm room."
The
Class System
Students
at less prestigious British universities will soon be able to take courses with
such Oxford and Cambridge luminaries as physicist Steven Hawking, literary
critic Terry Eagleton, and paleontologist Richard Dawkins, through a national
system of video linkups. The plan has drawn criticism on a number of fronts.
Some say it slights the teaching abilities and intellectual talents of
professors who don't happen to be world famous but who do a perfectly good job
instructing their pupils at places such as Bristol or Newcastle. Others point
out that world-class scholars don't always make the best teachers and worry
that the videos will pacify the minds of students rather than stimulate them.
"It would be like watching television," a professor at Brunel University told
the Sunday Times of London, which published a story about the proposal.
"You would lose that excitement of a live performance on a stage."
Doctor's
Fees
University of New Orleans
historian and best-selling author Stephen Ambrose is credited as a consultant
on Stephen Spielberg's World War II epic Saving Private Ryan . But
Ambrose did his consulting after the film was completed. According to a story
in the New York Observer , Spielberg's people approached Ambrose this
past spring and arranged a screening for him. Once he'd seen the film--which he
loved--Ambrose signed on for less than $100,000, a pittance by Hollywood
standards. The Observer speculates that Spielberg, who seems to have
borrowed heavily from Ambrose's books in Ryan , was anxious to avoid
another lawsuit like the one that plagued his last movie, the slave trade epic
Amistad . (For more on the Amistad flap, see this
Slate
"Cheat Sheet" on plagiarism.)
