Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.

UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.

Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.

“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”

KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.

Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?

I put out a call for applications for new FtB bloggers a while back, the response was a bit overwhelming — we got scores of applicants. Every minute of my free time today was spent organizing and reviewing and making short summaries for other FtBians to help them get through the pile, and I’m feeling a bit bleary-eyed now. So stop applying! No more for this round!

If you’re one of the applicants, we’re going to have the big evaluative review over the weekend and make some decisions then. We’ll contact people yes or no early next week.

Note that if we turn you down this time, it’s not necessarily an absolute rejection — we’ve got so many applicants that the field is particularly competitive, and some applicants will be deferred simply because we can’t cope with suddenly adding 40 blogs to the network. Don’t be discouraged, it may be that we’re just trying to get our first few bites down, and we’ll get around to gobbling you up eventually.

We’ll have a whole bunch of changes appearing next week, so stay tuned.

Me. I’m the example given for ludic.

Yet again, people are asking why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? I have a different answer than you’ll find at that link. It’s because so many smart people are idiots about psychology. I deal with a lot of atheists, and one of the many flaws in that group that have been coming to the fore lately is the obliviousness they have to their own motivations.

[Read more…]

Sometimes it seems that way. The latest example comes from the College of Saint Rose, where the president, Carolyn Stefanco, has won an award. What great accomplishment deserved recognition?

Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.

Oh. “Popular” programs. I’m in one of those! Good thing I don’t have to worry about biology being shuttered, and it’s that other side of campus that’s more at risk. Who needs foreign languages, for instance? Or in another trend I see a lot of, let’s bugger philosophy. What a joke major! Don’t you know the purpose of college is to get a high paying job, to cite a recent exchange.

The award was for being a “disruptor”. It comes from…business. Of course.

“Disrupter,” a word native to start-up culture, typically describes someone who balks at conventional wisdom and comes out ahead. A disrupter discovers newer, better ways to run businesses and manipulate industries.
“To flourish in business these days is to make disruption and change work for you and your business,” Mike Hendricks, editor-in-chief of the Review, wrote when the paper announced the winners. “You have to recognize the need and opportunity for change and risk the status quo.”

We do need better ways to support higher education — I think faculty would welcome innovators who could shake up the status quo, because we’re getting worried. The problem is that a university is not a business, and our goal isn’t to make money — it’s to teach and learn. Coming in and disrupting education to make more money kind of ignores the whole function of the institution. It would be as if a business hired me, an academic, to “disrupt” their status quo, and I declared that I was going to “disrupt” that whole crap about profits and economics and instead redefine their purpose to be all about giving their expertise to the community. I don’t think it would go over well with the stockholders.

Unfortunately, the people who’ve been handed the reins of our universities are too often sitting their with a stockholder mentality.

Unsurprisingly, the faculty had a no-confidence vote on Stefanco. Also unsurprisingly, the board of trustees affirmed their confidence in her.

Simon Newman, the university president who said This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads, has resigned.

This is what happens when you hire somebody to run a university who has no competency to do so.

Mr. Newman has almost 30 years of experience working as an executive with a strong background in private equity, strategy consulting, and operations. He is the former managing director of the private equity fund JP Capital Partners, as well as president and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, founded in 1997.

During his career he has started or co-founded four different businesses, completed more than $33 billion in transactions, and raised more than $3 billion in equity funding for ventures and bids he originated. He has led several business turnarounds and delivered more than $200 million in profit improvements.

There’s nothing in that list of accomplishments to suggest that he was at all appropriately prepared to run an educational institution. But some people see dollar signs and figure that’s what a university is all about, so they bring in the money man.

Next up for eviction: Bruce Harreld.

During the Dec. 9 meeting of the UI Staff Council, Harreld said that any instructor who goes into a class without having completed a lesson plan “should be shot.”

The business world must be a really tough place if they routinely deal with difficulties with summary executions.