Invisible Adjunct is following the shockadelic stories of Matthew Richardson, the Oxford engineering student who faked his way through most of a lecture series on global economics after the organizers of a Beijing conference invited the wrong Matthew Richardson to come speak; and pop feminist icon Naomi Wolf, whose penchant for presenting tales of her adolescent angst as liberatory discourse has led her to pen an article accusing renowned Yale English professor Harold Bloom of traumatizing her when he put his hand on her thigh more than twenty years ago.

Absurdity loves company, so I thought I would proffer a few more instances of academic nonsense for readerly delectation. For the fiscally minded, there is the story of the Korean student who launched a kill-for-hire website in order to pay off his loans. For animal lovers, there is the story of the University of Georgia fraternity brother who has been charged with animal cruelty after killing a rabid raccoon with a pellet gun. The fraternity brother who then skinned and ate the raccoon has not been charged. For those looking to shore up arguments against faculty-student relationships, there is the murder/suicide of a Cal State education professor and graduate student. First he stabbed her and decapitated her, then he stripped naked and threw himself in front of a truck--and all for love. Donna Tartt's creepy campus fiction pales in comparison.

Finally, for those who enjoy the spectacle of university administrators whose principled positions vary as the wind does, here's a Time piece on how Harvard admins first decided to approve a sex-based student magazine (trumpeting the First Amendment and denying that the magazine's intention to feature nude photos of Harvard students would make it pornographic) and then changed their minds after the world laughed at them for refusing to admit that they had given a group of Harvard students official permission to publish porn on campus. While Harvard administrators twist and turn, the founders of H-Bomb are unflappable. Whether the magazine is approved or not, they plan to publish it--and distribute it at this spring's commencement.

UPDATE: Via Fenster Moop, the moment critics of academic double standards have all been waiting for: white professors charging a black colleague for creating a hostile environment with her racist remarks. Particularly worthy of note is the shameless intellectual dishonesty of the accused, who denies there were KKK allusions embedded in her comment about "pull(ing) the white sheet or hood off your head and expos(ing) you for who you really are." "Sheets and hoods are also used by children at Halloween," she explained. "I have nothing to defend."

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Bruce has more on the murder/suicide.