Professors

A week after a reported campus hate crime drew national attention, sparked protests and shut down the prestigious Claremont Colleges, police on Wednesday called the incident a hoax staged by a professor who slashed tires, shattered windows and spray-painted racist graffiti on her own car.

Clayton Christensen achieves the difficult feat of being at once imposing and humble. When I visited him last autumn at Harvard Business School, he laid out with quiet authority his latest thoughts on disruptive technology, the concept that justly made him famous in the mid-1990s. But he also took time to chat about his son's college basketball team, a poster of which hangs on one wall of an office full of family photos and memorabilia. Although he places great value on his family and faith — he is a devout Mormon — his research and teaching have dominated his public story.

When UC Irvine advertised four years ago for a mathematical political scientist, Sung-Chull Lee was one of few in the country who could claim such an esoteric title. Lee, 36, uses numbers and mathematical equations, instead of words, to predict and discuss human behavior. At UC Irvine, he belongs to an elite team of researchers under the direction of Duncan Luce, a renown professor in the cognitive sciences.

"Here we are - no, I mean there we were… Flash! The distant shipping in the Thames is gone. Whirr!… Dustheaps, market gardens, and waste grounds. Rattle!...Shock!...Bur-r-r-r! The tunnel…I am… flying for Folkestone…Bang!… Everything is flying. " -- "A Flight," by Charles Dickens, describing a rail trip from London in the journal "Household Words," 1851 :: Who knew that Charles Dickens, master scribe who brought us Scrooge, Copperfield and tale upon cautionary tale of hard 19th century life, was a transit aficionado with a story to tell traffic-snarled Angelenos about their plight?

INSIDE ROOM 309,a third-floor classroom in concrete-and-brick Van Allen Hall on the University of Iowa campus, Ken Nishikawa was standing at an old-fashioned blackboard. He was lecturing to a weekly graduate seminar in plasma physics when Dr. Lu Gang's first shot rang out. * At first, some of the graduate students in the room thought it might be a firecracker. It was Friday afternoon, last Nov. 1, and one of the students later recalled thinking it must be some sort of prank.

The University of Colorado professor who likened 9/11 victims to a Nazi leader was fired in retaliation for his controversial remarks, a Denver jury ruled Thursday. Jurors in the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Ward L. Churchill agreed with the embattled professor's contention that he was the victim of a "howling mob," not the perpetrator of academic misconduct. However, they awarded him only $1 in damages, an amount Churchill dismissed after the verdict as unimportant.

In Berkeley, city leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists put up a billboard to denounce him. But in suburban Orange County, Professor John Yoo -- the primary architect of the Bush administration's policy on harsh interrogation techniques that many consider torture -- has found relatively calmer waters. Yoo is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, on leave from his tenured post at UC Berkeley to teach foreign relations law.

Three professors from Claremont took the engineering profession's highest honor Friday, winning $500,000 for creating a new way to teach engineering students at Harvey Mudd College. Clive Dym, Mack Gilkeson and Richard Phillips, all veterans of engineering, were awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize by the National Academy of Engineering, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC. Nearly two decades ago, the trio came up with a program that added hands-on learning and experimenting to a curriculum that focused mostly on theory and principle.

Re "UCLA Alumni Group Is Tracking 'Radical' Faculty," Jan. 18 I have noticed that the right wing always claims that professors are indoctrinating students into leftism. What seems to go unmentioned in response are two obvious points. First, if we were doing so, recent election results show we haven't been too successful. Second, it isn't that we have been indoctrinating anyone. The right wing is so used to total lock-step agreement that it can't conceive of the possibility that liberal professors don't indoctrinate their students.

News of the "Twinkies diet" is hard to swallow – especially amid all the recent angst about marketing fast food to kids . To top it off, the news comes from an unusual source. [ For the record, 2:35 p.m. Nov. 9: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Mark Haub was a professor at the University of Kansas. He is from Kansas State University.] Mark Haub, a nutrition professor at Kansas State University, went on a convenience store junk food diet of Twinkies, Nutty Bars, Little Debbies and other sweets to see whether weight loss was all about calorie counting, no matter the calories, CNN reports . In two months, Haub says he lost 27 pounds, lowered his body mass index and even lowered his level of "bad cholesterol.

Digby Wolfe, an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer who helped producer George Schlatter develop "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," a landmark TV series that became an overnight sensation in the late 1960s, has died. He was 82. Wolfe, who later became a professor of writing at the University of New Mexico, died of lung cancer Wednesday at his home in Albuquerque, said his wife, Patricia Mannion-Wolfe. The British-born Wolfe - an actor, writer, singer and comedian whose early career included writing for the BBC's satirical "That Was the Week That Was" and hosting an Australian TV variety show - moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'60s.

A UC Berkeley law professor who helped the Bush administration create policies to justify harsh interrogation techniques and prolonged detention may not be sued by an American citizen detained under those conditions, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in 2002 and declared an "enemy combatant," may not hold professor John Yoo liable for "gross physical and psychological abuse" that Padilla said he suffered during more than three years of military detention.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Wednesday granted a third — and final — defense request to delay the arraignment of a UCLA chemistry professor and the UC Board of Regents on felony charges stemming from a 2008 lab fire that killed a staff research assistant. Judge Shelly Torrealba ordered professor Patrick Harran and lawyers for the regents back into court June 7, effectively setting a deadline for them to reach a plea agreement with prosecutors on charges in the death of Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji.

Pop quiz: The University of California ... A) is overpopulated by liberal professors. B) is afflicted by a "cancer of politicization. " C) is contributing to the dumbing-down of college education. D) is ripe for more aggressive oversight by the university's Regents. E) all of the above. According to a report by the California Assn. of Scholars, the state branch of a national organization founded "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," the answer is E. But when the group shows its work, things aren't that clear.

Two California researchers whose groundbreaking work has documented the dangers of air pollution have been awarded the 2012 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. John H. Seinfeld, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, was recognized for research leading to a greater understanding of the origin, chemistry and evolution of particles in the atmosphere. Seinfeld's work has helped foster efforts to control the effects of air pollution on public health. Seinfeld's recent work includes research into how soot billowing from diesel trucks and industrial smokestacks contributes to climate change and how biogenic emissions from plants and trees affects air quality.

The interview begins on a cheerful note. USC law professor Thomas Lyon asks a 4-year-old to tell him about her last birthday. She says she took ice cream, chocolate and cake, "mixed it up and ate it. " Then she shared some with her brothers. Lyon gently turns to the tragic matter at hand. "Tell me why you came to talk to me; tell me what happened," he asks the child, the only eyewitness to a homicide. At first she mumbles "hmm" a few times and rocks in her chair as Lyon repeats the question.

Jaysen Gillespie wants to turn things around on professors. We all know that professors grade students. He wants students to evaluate professors, and not just in quiet conversations or on private report cards. Gillespie's Irvine-based Studentinfo.org (http://www.studentinfo.org) takes student opinions public by posting their critiques of professors and other college instructors on the Internet.

Prosecutors cleared the way for the release today of court records that could provide more information about the slayings of two Dartmouth College professors. Authorities have released few details about the killings of Half and Susanne Zantop, and have fought media attempts to get judges to release information about the teens charged in the deaths, their possible motives and other evidence. Robert Tulloch, 17, and James Parker, 16, both of Chelsea, Vt.

The world's largest natural products convention, a celebration of all things healthy and eco-friendly, was being held at the Anaheim Convention Center Saturday when F. Sherwood Rowland, 84, died at his home in Corona del Mar. It's not much of a stretch to say that Rowland, 84, helped spawn the industry that drew more than 60,000 people and 2,000 exhibitors. In 1973, the UC Irvine chemistry professor and a young researcher on his team, Mario Molina, discovered that manmade chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons destroyed the Earth's fragile and vital ozone layer.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the UC Irvine chemistry professor who warned the world that man-made chemicals could erode the ozone layer, has died. He was 84. Rowland, known as Sherry, died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the university announced. In 1995, Rowland was one of three people awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work explaining how chlorofluorocarbons, ubiquitous substances once used in an array of products from spray deodorant to industrial solvents, could destroy the ozone layer, the protective atmospheric blanket that screens out many of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.