in case you missed it l ACADEMIC B.S.?

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On the same day we found out that fired professor Ward Churchill had his appeal heard by the state Supreme Court, we learned that a Republican regent candidate committed academic misconduct that was at least as bad as anything old Ward ever did, if not moreso.

According to media reports, candidate Matt Arnold has been telling people he has a master’s degree in international economics from Johns Hopkins. Talk about fabrication and falsification.

But the best was when he was called on the lie and said he did everything for the degree except the thesis.

“I was more interested in getting on with my life than trying to, quite frankly, waste more time in pursuit of academic B.S. that no one cares about,” he told The Denver Post in a story that was dutifully carried by its various clone publications.

This guy wants to be on the governing board of a university? Why? So he can eliminate “academic B.S.?” Oh, and the week before, Arnold was accused of sending out messages misleading voters into thinking he was being endorsed by the Arapahoe County Republican Party.

Looks like this race will be a shoo-in for his opponent, Brian Davidson.

CU ATHLETICS WINS AGAIN Hold the phone. First we find out that University of Colorado administrators have had to loan the athletics department millions of dollars — again — to bail them out of another deficit. This time, it was $10 million. The department hasn’t even finished paying off its $8 million loan from 2006 (part of which was needed to pay disgraced former football coach Gary Barnett millions to go away).

Then we find out a few days later that the athletics department is installing new video scoreboards at Folsom Field for a cool $7 million.

Hmmm. Does this strike anyone else as odd? The department can’t pay its bills but finds the cash to replace its video screens? Oh, we’re sure there’s a logical explanation like last time, no tuition funds used, paid for with advertising revenues, blah, blah, blah.

After all, this is just par for the course. Can’t make the payments on that 2003 expansion of the stadium that cost $42 million and was completed just before the fit hit the shan in a football rape and recruiting scandal? Don’t worry, athletics, the rest of the university will bail you out.

Kind of reminds us of something former CU Regent Bob Sievers said in 1998 when a similar proposal to replace the scoreboards came before the board.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I TOLD YOU THE “DINGO ATE MY BABY” From Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes ( Julia Louise-Dreyfus) uttering the phrase for comic relief to Meryl Streep’s more dramatic rendition in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, the odd phrase “dingo ate my baby” has been floating around for nearly a quarter of a century.

But for Lindy Chamberlain- Creighton it has been 32 years since she first uttered the phrase in all sincerity and sparked a bitter debate that divided Australians into two camps and landed Chamberlin-Creighton in prison for being suspected of killing her 9-week-old infant daughter Azaria while on a camping trip in the Outback. Lindy was later freed on new evidence supporting her story, but it was only this week that the coroner finally changed Azaria’s death certificate to reflect that she had, indeed, been killed and eaten by a dingo.

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