Meanwhile, Katie Granju thinks that such talk is union-busting in disguise.

“Nobody’s perfect.” That was the reaction of Louise Bimpson, our Corporate Director of Human Resources, to the complaint by Bill Wakeham, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth, that physics departments contained too many upper middle-class white men. While admitting that the description fitted the Poppleton Department of Physics, which currently consists of 14 upper middle-class white men, she claimed that such imbalances were endemic in universities.

“Our Sociology Department, for example, contains more than the average number of lower-middle-class whingers. There is also an abundance of cigarette-smoking aesthetes in the English Department, a surfeit of very elderly men wearing brown corduroy in the History Department, a plenitude of demented crystal-gazers in the Department of Complementary Medicine and a superfluity of people in higher management with extreme language difficulties,” she said.

Ms Bimpson said she expected such differences would iron themselves out in time. “You only need to look back to the bad old days when this university was seriously overloaded with academics committed to a life of the mind. Just look at it now.”

Yes, what a horror that was.

Asheville, North Carolina. Some Althouse-style cafe-photoblogging. No, I haven’t been back there — this is from the weekend trip last month.

Doubtful.  It’s certainly exposing the way the current legal system renders governments powerless against barbarians. There are traditional remedies for this problem.  Sooner or later they will be invoked.

UPDATE:  Maybe he should start focusing on bureaucratic problems in responding to the Los Angeles fires before he branches out to global issues. . . .

Young, a former adjunct professor of management information systems, said he believes he made the right move. He said trials are public for a reason, and plagiarism should be treated the same way. He added that exposing cheaters is an effective deterrent. “They were told the consequences in the syllabus,” he said. “They didn’t believe it.” . . .

“You have to hold them accountable,” he said. “If you don’t, you hold a grave danger of having an illiterate society.”

Roundup at TaxProf.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh thinks the University may be in the wrong here.

UPDATE:  Eugene Volokh emails a clarification

Thanks very much for the link to my post, but I should note that I don’t think the university is in the wrong for firing him:

I can’t speak to whether FERPA indeed applies here. But I’m inclined to say that a university wouldn’t be violating academic freedom — or, as to public universities, the First Amendment — if it provided that a faculty member generally may not publicize embarrassing things he learns about specific named students as a result of his teaching, even including dishonest conduct by those students.

I do think the university might not be doing enough about plagiarists, based on its own statement that it’s not clear that a professor could even give an F to a student for plagiarism.  But as to the firing, I think the university’s action is at least permissible.