Tales of Academia

Here are three stories on the foibles and follies of academia, offered for your reading pleasure:

-First, courtesy of Tim Blair, is the saga of three MIT grad students who authored a program that created seemingly professional research papers by stringing together random computer science jargon. As a joke, they submitted two such papers to an academic conference, only to have one actually accepted for presentation.

-In the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash covers Ward Churchill on tour. Churchill, the execrable pseudo-academic demagogue who called the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns" and argued that America got what it deserved that day, continues to milk every possible second out of his 15 minutes.

-Finally, at FrontPage Magazine, Jon Sanders describes what has to be the worst college course ever offered: 9/11 as told exclusively from the perspective of the anti-Semitic, conspiracy minded fever swamp. The most credible source used in the class is Fahrenheit 9/11. Yes, it is that bad.