A Florida Coastal School of Law student who complained of sexual harassment by a professor was arrested on an identity theft charge after investigators said she created a fake e-mail account in his name to try to verify her allegations.

Laurie Anne Green, 28, was released on her own recognizance after turning herself in on the misdemeanor charge Wednesday with her lawyer at the State Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors had been investigating the charges since March.

“I’m disappointed after all this time that she was charged at all,” said her attorney, Hank Coxe.

Meanwhile, the professor sued Green on Thursday. He says his employment at the Jacksonville law school was terminated after Green’s complaint, according to an arrest warrant.

The warrant says Green complained to school administrators that Professor Mike Jorgensen had sexually harassed her. She gave them an e-mail she said he sent her saying he wouldn’t provide favorable references for her. Investigators determined the e-mail came from an account the Pennsylvania woman had created using Jorgensen’s name, the warrant says.

… a professor “’sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years, with a two-year supervision order on September 5. He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register and fined £1,000,’ for having been found with, among other things, photographs of two-day old babies posed in sexual acts” (to quote UD’s earlier coverage of this story)… No outcry there… But it’s not okay for a student to flash her tits on a bridge:

… [The photo] shoot was done on Clare College bridge, which goes over the River Cam and is visited by thousands of tourists each year.

It is the first time a student has appeared topless in a University publication and it has caused an outcry.

One student from King’s College said: “I can’t believe she agreed to pose for the magazine. Everyone has been talking about it. I’m sure she must really regret it now.”

Another student, from Clare College, who did not want to be named, added: “Lots of students and professors have seen this. It’s a very risky thing to do when you are studying at one of the top universities in the country.” …

Yes, what a big risk! She must really regret it! She should have stayed in the safe confines of her university, with nice people like that Professor Hammond.

****************

ud thanks vjesci

… or does UD know how to pick them?

The National Book Awards were announced last night at a black-tie dinner at Cipriani’s in New York with more than 700 in attendance. Mark Doty… received the poetry award for his collection, “Fire to Fire”…With less fanfare (they sent out a press release), the Lannan Foundation has announced its 2008 literary awards and fellowships. But who needs downtown dinner when they’re getting a $150,000 literary award? That big prize goes to poet August Kleinzahler…

Not that the awards committees asked me… It’s just that, like me, they know how to read.

Here are some UD posts that mention Doty, and here are some of my Kleinzahler appreciations.

UD admires the poetry of both men, but it’s their essays that really thrill her.

UD’s particularly delighted to see Kleinzahler, an ill-tempered enemy of Garrison Keillor, National Poetry Month, and university creative writing programs, clean up.

He has overseen a profoundly corrupt, wasteful, and destructive sports program at a once-important American university. The scathing report issued today about what he did singles out again and again his failure, as president, to lead, his arrant disregard for the soundness and reputation of his institution. Only a local newspaper’s investigations into his recklessness brought the scandal to light.

If you can read McCormick’s preening, cretinous response to his own disgrace without puking (he’s quoted at the end of the article), you’re a better man than I am.

… William Epstein’s devastating description of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, so if you want to know the larger reality of the place that lies behind the latest USA Today article (they’re doing a series) about university athletics, go here.

Las Vegas is a city based on con games, and its university, offering little in the way of education and lots in the way of gasbag language about how wonderful it is, very much reflects the city.

The biggest con on campus, of course, centers on athletes.

******************************

Solomon Smart, Elton Shackelford and Dustin Villepigue all played for prominent athletic teams at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

They all graduated with a degree in university studies.

And they all have been hesitant to cite their degree on job applications. They say it raises too many red flags. [Know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em. When it comes to a diploma mill degree, better not show your hand.]

… UNLV administrators have long sought to diversify and enhance the school’s national academic profile. Its start-up of the university studies degree less than five years ago, intended to further those efforts, has become so problematic that the program is being phased out. [These two sentences are so unlikely to be true. UNLV has done little to enhance academics - the university remains in one of the lowest tiers - and the program seems to have been quite cynically conceived.]

Athletes flocked to it. During the 2007-08 school year, a little more than 5% of all UNLV juniors and seniors majored in university studies. Among them were 60% of the juniors and seniors on the football team, 58% of those on the baseball team and 83% of those on the men’s basketball team.

That makes UNLV one of two schools among 142 studied by USA TODAY at which more than 55% of the juniors and seniors on all three of the men’s teams studied were in the same major. (The other is Georgia Tech, where management was the major of 82% of the juniors and seniors on the football team, 83% of those on the baseball team and 62.5% of those on the men’s basketball team.)

Two other former UNLV football players, Aaron Straiten and Chris Bowser, say the number of players from the team being in the same classes led to cheating.

“If I had a test Monday, and a friend had a test in that the next day, or if you had a test early in that day and your friend had a test later in the day, you would share answers. Of course you would: We were teammates,” says Straiten, a university studies major who was suspended from the team twice last season — in September for “not meeting academic expectations,” and in November for “off-the-field issues,” coach Mike Sanford told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in those months. Straiten’s scholarship was not renewed for the 2008-09 academic year.

“Football players hang around with other football players,” says Bowser, a December 2006 graduate in sociology, a major popular with football players before the university studies program was introduced. “Somehow, one guy gets a list of answers — I don’t know how — and he shares it with the other players. You go in, and you take a test, and you know what the answers are.”

UNLV spokesman Dave Tonelli indicated school officials would look into the activity Straiten and Bowser described.

“UNLV investigates all allegations of academic misconduct reported by students or faculty,” Tonelli wrote Monday in an e-mail. “UNLV takes allegations of academic misconduct very seriously, and expects all students to abide by a student code of conduct, which clearly defines academic misconduct and potential sanctions.” [Sure.]

In January 2004, UNLV began a new academic division it called the University College. According to interviews with UNLV officials, it was created without the athletics department in mind. UNLV was eager to increase the overall rates at which it retained freshmen for a second year and graduated students within six years. [UNLV has low enrollment and high dropout rates. It figured a way to retain students was to create a joke department from which anyone could graduate by doing close to nothing.] At that time, UNLV students could be in good academic standing with at least a 2.0 grade-point average, but many major programs — the access points to most of the university’s academic advisers — required at least a 2.5.

The solution: Create a bachelor of university studies degree program that required a 2.0 GPA for entry and graduation, and assign academic advisers to it.

“The Faculty Senate wanted to deal with the advisers’ problem. The administration wanted to deal with the graduation problem,” says Bill Robinson, a former UNLV Faculty Senate chair and part of the three-professor steering committee that designed the program. “I wanted to make sure it didn’t become a dumping ground for athletics.” [Finger-pointing time.]

Robinson says original curriculum and staffing plans, which included students emphasizing two areas of study and having two mentors, got “watered down” because “there were way more students in University College than we’d planned for.” [I wonder why. You announce a new program with a dumpster GPA and you're surprised that ... ] A revised University College Strategic Plan dated May 20, 2005 (just more than a year after the program’s launch) said Year 1 enrollment — projected to have been 1,700 — was 2,613.

Why did so many athletes cluster in the major? UNLV’s football, men’s basketball and baseball teams had significant numbers of transfers, and the university studies degree requirements allowed transfers to use relatively large portions of the academic credits they had earned at other schools. Also, the athletics department academic advisers were housed in University College.

“It’s only natural that there was a move to encourage students into that degree,” says Neal Smatresk, UNLV’s provost since June 2007. [Not only natural, but hey. Obvious. As in - the degree was set up in order to create a cluster.]

Smart says that at the end of his sophomore year, he did not have a high enough grade-point average to get into a major in the business college.

“A regular student would’ve been able to retake classes and increase his or her GPA,” says Smart, a defensive back and special teams player. “I couldn’t and stay eligible. So, the only thing I could do is go into university studies to stay eligible.”

Since graduating in December 2007, Smart, who lives in Phoenix, says he has had difficulty keeping steady employment. He has worked as an electrician, a carpenter, an exterminator and a part-time clerk at an immunization clinic. He also has taken music classes at Glendale (Ariz.) Community College.

“It is heartbreaking to me that my degree isn’t worth more. But I just have to deal with it,” Smart says.

Shackelford, after graduating in May, briefly worked as a bouncer at a bar in Las Vegas. “But I said to myself, ‘This ain’t me. I didn’t go to college for four years to be a security guard,’ ” he says. So, he quit, and after failing to find another job, a few months ago he moved in with his brother in Kennesaw, Ga. Two months ago, he passed a test to become a probation officer, but remains out of work.

A transfer to UNLV from Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kan., Shackelford says of his university studies diploma: “I think it’s a meaningless degree. … To tell you the truth, I think it’s lower than an associate degree.”

Villepigue, a forward-center on UNLV’s men’s basketball team who graduated in May 2006, has spent the past three seasons playing professionally in Israel, Bosnia and Mexico. He also has worked part-time in his father’s carpet and upholstery cleaning business.

He says he’s “definitely pleased with what I’ve got” — his emphasis areas were marketing and business administration — but if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t major in university studies. A transfer with stints at Gonzaga and Dixie State, a junior college in Utah, prior to UNLV, he takes responsibility for his choice of major.

“When I got to UNLV … academics weren’t important to me; athletics were,” he says. “Looking back now, though, I wish I went another way.” [One of the problems these guys face at UNLV is that higher education isn't important to anyone there. Except Epstein and a few others on the faculty and among the students. Certainly administrators don't give a shit about it. I doubt they know what it is. They care about sports.]

Smatresk says in an effort to improve “up-front support for students who come to the university with learning and skills gaps,” UNLV is turning University College into the Academic Success Center [Love the name. Part of that wonderful pr thing UNLV has going.] and transferring the university studies degree to the College of Liberal Arts, where it will be folded into the interdisciplinary studies program. Students who had become university studies majors by Sept. 1 will have until Spring 2010 to graduate; then, the degree will no longer exist.

“Athletes were probably pretty much always given reasonably good advice coming into the university about career pathways but maybe were biased by, ‘I’m an athlete, therefore I want kind of the path of least resistance,’ ” Smatresk says. “And I think this is fair to say that’s not just a UNLV situation, that’s a national situation. [What a scummy set of remarks. Yeah, transfer the blame to the clueless, exploited athletes. And help yourself sleep at night by telling yourself everyone does it. Some schools do it, to some extent. Few schools do it as thoroughly and cynically as UNLV.]

“We kind of want to flip that situation to say, ‘What is it you really want to do?’ Instead of having a convenient path of least resistance, we want to encourage them to think more actively about their careers and their futures and then help them down that road.” [Balls.]

A Baltimore Sun columnist is unhappy about a recent study suggesting tv’s for losers.  Let’s “tune” in!

“Study” Perpetuates Out-of-Date Thinking About TV [SOS is jolted out of her tv stupor -- Is this guy going to "go to town" on the "quotation mark" or what?]

**************************

I have tried to ignore this “study” done by two sociologists at the school where I earned a Ph.D. in American Studies, the University of Maryland, College Park.

But I see this survey — it is not really a study as much as a survey of other surveys — getting picked by international press services as “evidence” of America as a nation of hopeless TV addicts who are both pathetic and ignorant as they get their daily dose of short-term, instant gratification.

And smoke is coming out of my ears that such wrong-headed, out-of-date thinking should be perpetuated even in the wake of tens of millions of viewers actively engaging in the recent presidential campaign through their TVs — an engagement that took them into the voting booths.

Here is the university’s summary of the study. But, guessing some readers won’t get to the end of it, let me raise a few of the many issues I have.

First, people have been socialized through the media and studies like this to feel they have to apologize for watching TV, so it is not surprising that the researchers find evidence of such apology in the answers respondents give even as they acknowledge the pleasure TV offers.

But the last paragraph, is the killer with one of the researcher using the old “addiction” metaphor to sell the results. University of Maryland sociologist Steven Martin likens the short, temporary pleasure of television to addiction: “Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” he says. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”

I am also troubled by the sociologists going beyond their data when they talk about how time might be more “usefully” spent…

Almost one quotation mark per paragraph. SOS finds a “winner.”

… UD is knocked back. Hard.

These are the sorts of stories in which University Diaries specializes. This is the sort of thing UD reads all day long. Sigh.

Prosecutors today plan to dismiss a felony assault charge against a University of Oklahoma football fan accused of nearly castrating a University of Texas fan during a bar fight in Oklahoma City, attorneys for both sides said Tuesday.

Attorney Billy Bock said District Attorney David Prater notified him late Tuesday that he intends to dismiss an aggravated assault and battery charge against 54-year-old Allen Michael Beckett.

Beckett was accused of tearing the scrotum of 35-year-old Brian Christopher Thomas during a June 2007 altercation at a Henry Hudson’s bar on the city’s northwest side.

First Assistant District Attorney Scott Rowland confirmed Tuesday night that prosecutors plan to dismiss the charges today. Rowland said additional witnesses who were with Thomas on the night of the fight have come forward since the charges were filed.

“These cases are not stagnant,” Rowland said. “We became aware of additional witnesses that came to light that made it appear much more like a mutual combat situation.”

Thomas testified in March that he received more than 60 stitches and still endures pain, although there was no permanent damage.

He claimed that Beckett taunted him about wearing a Texas shirt into the heart of Sooner country and that Beckett attacked him without provocation.

But Beckett, a federal auditor and church deacon, maintained that Thomas became angry when he commented on his Texas shirt and that Thomas was the aggressor.

“My client was cornered in a position where it was either fight or flight,” Bock said. “He grabbed him in between the legs because he (Beckett) was much smaller and much older.”

Bock also said the rivalry between the football powerhouses was not a major factor in the dispute and that charges were filed simply because of the heinous nature of Thomas’ injuries.

“If my client had hit him in the nose, this case never would have been filed,” Bock said. “My client didn’t even go to OU.

“It was just a bar fight, and not much of a fight.”

Thomas’ lawsuit against Beckett and the pub’s owner, seeking more than $100,000 in damages, still is pending, Bock said.

Yes, it’s all there. Cretins. Castration. Church deacon slash federal auditor, mutual combat. The heinous nature of the injuries…

How many of these stories am I supposed to read? When do I catch a break?

My new icon.

UD’s covered, on this blog, the spectacle of Penn State’s president begging the legislature for more money while flying to his beggary in a private plane. The Penn State paper said:

Penn State President Graham Spanier traveled to Harrisburg last month to ask for higher state appropriations for the university.

Somehow he didn’t get laughed out of the building after showing up in one of the university’s $5 million planes.

What could possibly be more hypocritical than flying to the state capital in a private, university-funded plane and asking for increased appropriations?

Penn State is one of the least supported state-related institutions in Pennsylvania — only about 10 percent of the university’s total operating budget comes from state grants. This is miniscule, even for a state that ranks 45th in the nation in per capita support for higher education.

At the Feb. 28 hearing before the state Senate Appropriations Committee, representatives questioned Spanier about his extravagant mode of transportation.

The university’s two Raytheon Beechcraft King Air B200s are paid for through the general budget, which is supported mostly by tuition and appropriations…

But private planes are SOOO much more efficient. It would have taken two hours for Spanier to drive himself to the session, whereas with the plane — only a tad more expensive — it took fifteen, twenty minutes…

When pressed, university presidents with private planes and limousines will explain that you can’t impress rich donors unless you are also rich.

This argument, added to the argument about time efficiency, pretty seals the case, I think… Add to it the reasonable desire of many people to feel that… I don’t know… that big buzz you feel … when you’re… going first class all the way… When you’re doing things that most people don’t even dream of doing… Don’t even know you can do… I think we can all sympathize with the desire to pump yourself up with a sense of your specialness…

So: efficiency, impressing others, that sense of thrill … What’s not to like… And if, because you’re bleeding your institution with your demands for luxury, you have occasionally to beg appropriators for more money, this too is understandable, as in the appearances yesterday of auto executives in front of Congress:

The CEOs of the big three automakers flew to the nation’s capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy.

The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.

All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM’s $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.

“We want to continue the vital role we’ve played for Americans for the past 100 years, but we can’t do it alone,” Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee.

While Wagoner testified, his G4 private jet was parked at Dulles airport. It is one of eight luxury jets in the GM fleet that continues to ferry executives around the world despite the company’s dire financial straits.

“This is a slap in the face of taxpayers,” said Tom Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste. “To come to Washington on a corporate jet, and asking for a hand out is outrageous.”

Wagoner’s private jet trip to Washington cost his ailing company an estimated $20,000 roundtrip. In comparison, seats on Northwest Airlines flight 2364 from Detroit to Washington were going online for $288 coach and $837 first class.

After the hearing, Wagoner declined to answer questions about his travel.

Ford CEO Mulally’s corporate jet is a perk included for both he and his wife as part of his employment contract along with a $28 million salary last year. Mulally actually lives in Seattle, not Detroit. The company jet takes him home and back on weekends.

Mulally made his case Tuesday before the committee saying he’s cut expenses, laid-off workers and closed 17 plants.

“We have also reduced our work force by 51,000 employees in the past three years,” Mulally said.

Yet Ford continues to operate a fleet of eight private jets for its executives. Just Tuesday, one jet was taking Ford brass to Los Angeles, another on a trip to Nebraska, and of course Mulally needed to fly to Washington to testify. He did not address questions following the hearing.

“Now’s not the time to do that sort of thing,” said John McElroy of the television program “Autoline Detroit.”

“Now’s the time to be humble and show that you’re sharing equally in the sacrifice,” McElroy said.

GM and Ford say that it is a corporate decision to have their CEOs fly on private jets and that is non-negotiable, even as the companies say they are running out of cash.

Private jet travel is perhaps the greatest perk of all for CEOs, who say it allows them to travel more efficiently and safely, even in a recession.

AIG, despite the $150 billion bailout, still operates a fleet of corporate jets. The company says it has put two out of its seven jets up for sale and is reviewing the use of others. Though there are no such plans by GM or Ford.

Same idea. And frankly, if you don’t get it… well… of course, you wouldn’t get it, would you. Don’t strain yourself.

Social sciences, sociology, communications,
management, multidisciplinary studies - these
are the dark arts into which university athletes
are lured by coaches rewarded with millions of
dollars a year for luring them.

These are the crap majors into which football
and basketball students are clustered. “A major
in eligibility, with a minor in beating the system,”
as a wise onlooker puts it.

When these unemployed ex-athletes wake up one morning feeling seduced and abandoned, when they gaze at their bedroom wall on which they’ve proudly displayed their so long sucker diploma, they are horrified, embarrassed, and angry. Long ago, in their innocence, they didn’t know there were universities so evil as to evolve an entire conspiratorial apparatus dedicated to destroying their education and exploiting their body. Now they know better.

One sadder but thanks to his university no wiser athlete tells USA Today that he “dropped down” to a you’re-stupid major when everyone around him pointed out the obvious: His playing schedule was far too demanding for him to be an actual student. He wasn’t clever enough then to see the set-up: Adulation, free education, playing time… in exchange for … for shit! Nothing! How can a whole big university dispense degrees that are nothing?

“Stupid… a waste….crap… a joke.” These are the descriptions the athletes now give of their college years. Here are the schools - members of a much bigger coven - that inspired these words.

USC
Georgia Tech
Boise State
Kansas State
Colorado State
University of Oklahoma

Here’s a companion article in which the perennially popular idea of not clustered but custom-made majors for athletes is again floated.

Says Penn State’s Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science: “To me, a career related to sports is very viable, just like in music. … I think there’s a lot of bias against so-called non-intellectual majors — theater, music, dance, PE, kinesiology — majors that don’t rely so much on words and numbers.”

Yeah. What’s a university got to do with words and numbers and shit?

… gets at one complex, high-level source of very bad writing.

He’s writing about William Kristol. Packer’s arguing that the New York Times should fire him.

He wrote badly because his world view had become problematic at best, untenable at worst, and he had spent too many years turning out Party propaganda to summon the intellectual resources that a difficult situation required. Now the Times owes it to its readers to find someone better.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds the process by which a lively literate mind degenerates into propaganda fascinating. She was trying to make the same point Packer’s making in her recent post (and in her comments in response to reader comments) about Joseph Epstein’s anti-abortion piece in the Weekly Standard. As she wrote in that post’s comment thread:

Epstein’s one of many secular conservative intellectuals for whom Sarah Palin is a profound challenge. In one sense, she represents everything he hates and has written well about all his life. She has a confused mind whose contents express themselves via convoluted, ugly, sometimes incomprehensible speech. There’s no way Epstein - an unapologetic, very self-conscious member of the cultural elite - can truly endorse this woman as a possible President of the United States. Like the very similar William Kristol, he must abide as best he can in bad faith. The vehemence of his essay here is of a piece with McCain’s nastiness in debate with Obama. These are essentially decent men who care about moral and civic standards. They are trapped, and they know it. Bluster is what they have left.

Writing - and speech - are intimately disclosing acts. The real difference between a good writer and a bad writer lies in the degree of awareness each brings to this truth. The good writer knows that, like it or not, she’s going to be giving away many things about the quality of her consciousness whenever she writes anything. She’s a good writer largely because she has some degree of control over what she discloses, over the effect she creates, over the human being that materializes, when she sets pen to paper.

One of the reasons SOS can, in her posts analyzing very bad writing, be cruelly amusing, is that she discloses again and again the obliviousness of the bad writer as to what he or she is giving away in prose.

***************************

Anyone who takes writing seriously can trace in the prose of writers like Epstein and Kristol the wages of arrogance.

Yes, my friends! The wages of arrogance! (Here at the beach, UD’s been watching tv for the first time in years — and she’s mesmerized by the televangelists.)

A person’s free to be as arrogant as he likes, of course; but you’re supposed to hide this — and other off-putting tendencies — in your prose.

To be sure, you can get away with arrogance if you’re a powerful individualist, a powerful writer, and powerfully indifferent to public opinion. Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens are the only two writers UD can think of like this.

********************************

Writerly arrogance is particularly ineffective when in the service of populism.

To put it more simply: When arrogant people try to use their prose to attack arrogance — those uppity elites who scorn Sarah Palin — the result is just plain lurid.

… what with various professors — well, ex-professors — getting sentenced for this and that. 

There’s the porn guy from the Wharton School.

And there’s wife-bludgeoner Raphael Robb, whose case UD has followed rather closely, because of its astounding brutality.

At the guilty plea hearing, Robb told Judge Paul W. Tressler that he “just lost it” on Dec. 22, 2006, during an argument about holiday vacation plans with his wife, Ellen Robb, who had been wrapping Christmas gifts. Robb said he began flailing at his wife with an exercise bar.

… that her essay, “The Online Amplification Effect,” is showing up on syllabi. She’s also seen it in internal university planning documents.

UD assures you that when she conceived the tagline for her blog — To change things. — she never thought she’d do anything remotely like that. But whatever.

In a sense, this is one of the less flashy beach sunrises — no trippy yellows and pinks — but its indolent study in whitegray is so staggering that I’ve hopped out of bed (I can see a lot of the sky from my pillow), thrown on sweats and leggings, and taken in the thing on the balcony.

This massive formation of thin clouds from the top of which the sun drives grayblue rays to a pewter sea has a stirring complexity. Not just its indolence, which lets the beauty rest in the frame longer than sunrises usually do, and not just the monochrome calm of pewter, gray, and white; but also the three distinct layers of clouds.

The background clouds are thick unmoving grays. A caravan of bluegrays migrates over them. In front of the bluegrays, quite close to me, float large black dirigibles that seem to scan the other clouds as they overtake them.

And in the time it’s taken me to write this, a bluer background emerges behind the thick unmoving grays. Even on this mid-November day, the sun may get its way.

… on bucolic college campuses (see post below), but they’re certainly set up nicely for chairs of economics departments:

Kristie Feder, 54, of Gallatin, Columbia County, was arrested and charged with third-degree criminal possession of marijuana, a felony, and unlawfully growing of cannabis, misdemeanor, on Friday.

[The] Bard College professor is scheduled to appear in Gallatin town court Wednesday for allegedly having a marijuana growing operation at her home.

State troopers arrived at the home because a neighbor reported that she had not seen Feder in a few days. Feder had several pets, including a potbellied pig, roaming free on the property … and the neighbor was worried according to troopers.

Upon further investigation, troopers allegedly found 16 marijuana plants, ranging in size from 18 inches to seven feet, on Feder’s property. Police believe the plants were grown mainly for Feder’s personal use.

Feder was arrested at Bard College, where she heads the economics department, and given a ticket to appear in court.

Feder specializes in land use.

*********************

UPDATE: ‘Put Weed on it…’

Investigator Abdul Weed said Feder was arrested at the state police barracks in Livingston after being brought there from her home at about 1:45 p.m. Friday.