Anthony Cupaiuolo recently got a letter from Columbia University offering him a Ph.D. for $600.

To be clear, Mr. Cupaiuolo already has a graduate degree from Columbia—a doctorate of social work, also known as a D.S.W. The letter was an announcement of the School of Social Work's D.S.W.-to-Ph.D. conversion plan, which would allow those who graduated with a D.S.W. from 1967 to 1992 to convert their degrees to the better-known Ph.D. (Columbia replaced the D.S.W. with the Ph.D. in 1993.)

According to a university document, holders of the D.S.W. had been pushing for the option to convert their three letters to three different letters for at least a decade.

That wasn't what bothered Mr. Cupaiuolo, who is a professor emeritus of public administration at Pace University. It was what he would have to do in order to get his Ph.D. In addition to the 600 bucks, he would have to provide four copies of...

From Drake University's undergraduate-admissions home page

The problem: High-school students are so bombarded with bland college-marketing brochures that they can barely distinguish one institution from another.

The solution: Slap a big "D+" logo on the front of your undergraduate-recruitment brochure, tell people you're being "edgy," and then sit back and wait for the applications to roll in.

That's what marketing officials at Drake University did as part of a new campaign called "The Drake Advantage." The text of the undergraduate-admissions page reads: "When we talk about D+, that’s what we mean. Every moment at Drake is one that has to the power to educate, to transform, to open minds and to unleash potential — to introduce who you are, to who you hope to become.”

Reading this, we're led to believe that either some prankster hacked Drake's Web site, or...

Twenty years ago the European particle-physics laboratory known as CERN gave us the World Wide Web. Today the lab and its choir give us a rollicking hymn about the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that scientists there hope to detect using the Large Hadron Collider. (The tune may sound familiar; it was originally "The Hippopotamus Song," by Flanders and Swann.) Call us old, but we find this ode to the boson far more listenable than the "Large Hadron Rap" of a couple years ago.

Back in the United States, we've been trading e-mail messages for the past couple of months with a PR guy at Iowa State University who has been politely but insistently promoting a video of a performance from the university's Summer Carillon Concert Series.

We love carillon music as much as the next blog, but it just wasn't right for Tweed. Then we ran across the video below, of a carillonneur ...

The University of Missouri greeted visitors to its new student center last week with banners bearing the word "welcome" in English, Spanish, Malay, Hungarian, and other languages. But the Farsi and Arabic translations had to be painted over because they were misspelled, according to a report in The Maneater, the student newspaper.

"It was an attempt to be as welcoming as possible, but unfortunately our translation was incorrect," Joe Hayes, assistant director of student unions, told the paper. "To be respectful, we blacked them out."

Jim Scott, director of the university's international center, praised the intention and was unconcerned with the mistake.

"It’s OK with me that they tried," he said. "These things happen."

The Beloit College Mind-Set List has added a new reader this month, a Mr. F. Castro, of Havana, Cuba, who — along with your grandmother and National Public Radio — was shocked to learn that American college freshmen think that Beethoven is a dog. A dog!

Mr. Castro writes in his blog (please raise your hand if you knew that Fidel Castro had a blog) about "a study published by Beloit College" that reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the U.S. education system: "I was stunned to realize to what extent education could be distorted and prostituted in a country with more than 8,000 nuclear weapons and the most powerful means of war in the whole world."

Beloit reports that it learned of the Castro essay "from a friend of the college in Havana," which set us to wondering about a couple things:

1. Does Beloit have connections to the communists, the Central Intelligence Agency, or both?

2....

How many college professors are the subject of a western-themed rap video? We know of one: Elizabeth Warren, the "new sheriff."

Via the Harvard Crimson's Flyby blog

The University of Victoria's Venus robotic exploration team found a rice cooker containing a broody octopus on the ocean floor, 1,256 meters below the sea's surface.

A robot at the University of California at Berkeley can pair socks.

At a time of war, recession, and a polarized society comes a course that teaches students not just to smile at life's challenges, but to laugh out loud. The noncredit eight-week class, offered through Sandhill Community College's Center for Creative Retirement, draws a crowd of about 10 60-something students from around Pinehurst, N.C., who are looking for a few good laughs, according to The Fayetteville Observer.

The class is taught by Kathy Shader, who is described by the Observer as a "certified laugh coach." To avoid injury through excessive mirth, Ms. Shader starts out each hourlong class with a series of breathing exercises that prepare the students for the "giggle therapy" that is to come. Laughter, says Ms. Shader, is an "amazing resource" that relieves stress, cuts tension, and imparts other healthful benefits.

After the breathing calisthenics, Ms. Shader leads the class...

No videos of lip syncs, goofy campus tours, or crazed mascots were available today, so we offer you these two with no obvious college affiliation but which nonetheless captured our attention. 

Via Boing Boing

Via Urlesque

Wheaton College in Illinois is one of "America's Best Colleges," according to Forbes.com's 2010 rankings of public and private colleges and universities. So is Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

One of the Wheatons is No. 59, and the other is No. 244, but neither college is certain which is which.

When Forbes released the rankings on Wednesday, the entries for both contained the Illinois institution's logo and the Massachusetts Wheaton's notable alumni (both errors had been fixed by the time of this writing). If the mixup sounds familiar, it is because the NBC journalist Ann Curry was showered with criticism back in May when she jumbled the two colleges' notable alums during a commencement speech at the Massachusetts Wheaton. 

Michael Graca, spokesman for the easternmost Wheaton, says that two days after Forbes posted its rankings guide, it still listed his college's data (enrollment...

Charlie Camp graduated last month from the University of Pittsburgh with a master's degree in public policy and management, and he owes it all — or much of it, anyhow — to his campaign donors.

Mr. Camp, a county commissioner in Beaver County, Pa., acknowledged to the Beaver County Times that he had paid $12,314 in campaign funds in 2009-10 to pay his tuition. The Republican official said money for books, parking, and other expenses came from his own pocket, as did $3,000 for the first semester of his graduate program, which he began in September 2008.

But Mr. Camp told the newspaper that after seeing two Democratic officials in Pennsylvania tap their own war chests to reimburse the Pittsburgh Steelers for tickets and travel to Super Bowl XLIII, he talked it over with some advisers and concluded that his tuition was a legitimate campaign expense.

According to the newspaper's report,...