March 7th, 2022
We expect jock schools like Clemson to game US News ratings.

Nobody was that shocked when, a few years ago, a Clemson administrator reported that ‘on surveys distributed by U.S. News, the Clemson brass “rates all programs other than Clemson below average.”‘ The main reaction to this revelation was laughter.

But when a math professor at Columbia accuses it of gaming rankings, things look more serious.

But still amusing. Michael Thaddeus describes, among other things, a school suddenly deciding that its entire immense medical faculty – overwhelmingly engaged in research and patient care – is actually an instructional unit.

Even on its own terms, the ranking is [for all schools] a failure because the supposed facts on which it is based cannot be trusted. Eighty percent of the U.S. News ranking of a university is based on information reported by the university itself. This information is detailed and subtle, and the vetting conducted by U.S. News is cursory enough to allow many inaccuracies to slip through. Institutions are under intense pressure to present themselves in the most favorable light. This creates a profound conflict of interest, which it would be naive to overlook… Even as Columbia has [lately] soared to 2nd place in the ranking, there is reason for concern that its ascendancy may largely be founded, not on an authentic presentation of the university’s strengths, but on a web of illusions.

February 16th, 2022
“Driven by arrogance, and motivated by self-aggrandizement, Wilson was willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted.”

So nu, so far John Wilson is just a capitalist, and a morally exemplary one at that. He doesn’t seem to have, for instance, stolen billions of dollars from poor Malaysians. He just bribed a dude to make sure his three dumdum kids got into good colleges. By prevailing Goldman Sachs standards, his lying, cheating, and depriving actually worthy applicants of a seat at Stanford, is petty crime at best.

So he got a pretty petty sentence – a year and some change in jail.

December 14th, 2021
There are few Americans so deeply and widely awful as to merit the moniker “lying sack of shit.”

But Elizabeth Kimmel, whose endless criminal prevarication has ruined her life and the lives of her children, merits it. The latest Varsity Blues parent to go to jail, Kimmel knew no bounds when it came to rigging bogus admission to hot schools for her dumb rich kids.

Or are they dumb? Her insane machinations condemn them to this judgment; and yet in the case of her daughter at least, a letter has surfaced that suggests otherwise. Kimmel’s lawyers of course described her throughout as motivated by pure philanthropy as she handed hundreds of thousands of dollars to corrupt, now also imprisoned, college coaches; but prosecutors had other ideas about her character.

‘In their pre-sentence memo, federal prosecutors disputed the Kimmel camp’s sunny view of the wealthy La Jollan’s charitable disposition, citing an e-mail authored by an unnamed Bishop’s faculty member. [Bishop is the high school the daughter attended.]

Days after [Kimmel’s] arrest in this case, a teacher at her children’s high school, unprompted, sent [Kimmel] the following e-mail:

“Attached is the college letter of recommendation I wrote for [your daughter] six years ago.

“‘Without a single reservation, I believed in her qualifications— her powerful intellect, her uncompromising sportsmanship, her sterling character — when you did not.

“‘Many of the faculty at Bishop’s — I could list ten off the top of my head — remember you as boorish, your treatment of us demeaning, insulting, unprincipled.

“‘But we loved your children and, in spite of their parents, always had their best interests at heart.

“’To that end, please forward my letter to [your daughter].”‘

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

And, sad as it is to say this, given that letter about her, UD will add that Georgetown should rescind her degree.

December 9th, 2021
Now that he’s been found guilty…

here are UD‘s Jussie Smollett posts from 2019, when the story broke. A most contemptible man.

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

It was too hard to believe that any of this could be made up, because what kind of person would do something like this?

A former supporter of Smollett’s gets to the heart of so many hoaxes – from people (many of them academics) pretending to be minorities, to people pretending to have been physically attacked because of their minority status. You have to be one sick fuck to conceive of this behavior, let alone pull it off, and then sustain the hoax into the indefinite future. What kind of person…?

But our job is not to stand around being incredulous. After all of the destructive hoaxers we’ve encountered over the last few years, and in anticipation of others, we owe it to our social world to educate ourselves in the ways of our Smolletts and Bourassas. We have to try to see them coming. As UD has often said (having covered such hoaxers on this blog for a long time), one common tip-off is trying too hard. These people lay it on too thick: They claim large and proliferating minority memberships (tribal, ethnic, etc.); they claim the people who beat them up did this and did that and oh yeah I just remembered they did that too… Look into almost any recent high-profile hoax and you see this characteristic of overdoing, overkill, as if the hoaxer fears insufficient minoritization/torment will fail to convince. Or – just as likely – their motive isn’t really a motive at all, but rather an uncontrolled manifestation of their madness. Nuts don’t act in measured ways.

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

Update: A Smollett juror illustrates the peril of overdoing.

November 30th, 2021
Is Moshe Porat still a tenured professor at Temple University?

An April 2021 Bloomberg article says he remains a $300,000 a year tenured professor there, though he hasn’t taught or published research since 2018.

And he was just found guilty of enough fraud to send him to prison for 25 years.

Wow. Bill Cosby, Moshe Porat. Temple really knows how to pick ’em.

November 28th, 2021
There’s always some dude.

In the case of Bernie Madoff, it was Harry Markopolos, who knew instantly, easily, that he was looking at a Ponzi scheme.

In the littler case of Temple University’s Moshe Porat, who wangled a number one ranking for the university’s business school by similarly brazen malfeasance, it took John Byrne, founder of Poets & Quants, no time at all for grotesque numbers to jump out at him.

[O]nly 16% of students at the University of Maryland’s business school had submitted scores on the GMATs or GREs. At the University of North Carolina’s business school, only 15% did. Both schools show large enrollment increases that year…

“Contrast these numbers with number one Temple,” [John Byrne] wrote. “Temple was able to increase its online MBA enrollment by an impressive 57% to 546 students from 351. Yet, the school claimed that 100% of the incoming class provided either a GMAT score or a GRE.”

Of course, that 100% figure turned out to be false. It was actually 42 of 255 students, or 16%.

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

UPDATE: Guilty.

Porat [and others] falsified how many students had taken standardized test scores to get in, faked incoming students’ GPAs, made it appear the college was more selective than it was and lowered how much its graduates owed in loans, according to the indictment.

November 25th, 2021
The Japes of…

Rath.

February 10th, 2021
I woke up this mornin’ / Realized what I had done / I stood alone in the cold gray dawn I knew I’d lost my morning sun / I lost my head and I said some things / Now comes the heartache that morning brings

Mike Shirkey’s real, real, real, sorry! Dint mean nuthin by it. Just thinkin out loud and all. Free country.

Sing it.

February 2nd, 2021
‘Trump impeachment lawyer says he doesn’t believe Epstein committed suicide’

He was burned to a crisp by a Jewish space laser.

January 31st, 2021
Ah yes. I remember it well.

One of thousands of bogus holocaust survivor stories, Mischa Defonseca’s (a made-up name to go with her made-up story) got covered on University Diaries a few years back because the bogus story was so immediately, so obviously, bullshit (parentless, she was raised by wolves; at the age of seven she stabbed a Nazi to death) and yet she got very far with it indeed. Made a lot of money off of it. Oprah came calling.

Which seemed odd to UD at the time, but of course now in l’age du Trump … I mean, UD has come to understand that millions of people will believe anything…

Though to be entirely honest some teeny mewling desperately rational part of her still resists this knowledge…

Anyway, there’s a new Sundance film all about this lovely person; and if your idea of a good time is a couple of hours in her world, go for it.

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

UD’s own brush with holocaust-liar fame: She was a student of Paul de Man’s when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

December 18th, 2020
ISISN’T

But I swear to God I committed actual atrocities!

October 31st, 2020
Bizarre. I mean, in Texas, that self-representation counts as a real negative.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tx., who currently finds himself in an unusually competitive race against Democratic opponent MJ Hegar, previously falsely represented himself as a graduate of Oxford University in England in the run-up to his successful election to the Texas Supreme Court, press and public records show.

In Texas politics, the word “intellectual” [or (God forbid) “professor”] is the equivalent of saying “fucks goats.” So why would Cornyn want to claim such a thing – and a foreign thing – in the first place? Texans are looking to elect people like Rick Perry, a cheerleader at Texas A&M.

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

Ride ’em, cowboy!

October 29th, 2020
That’s one small step, Furman…

…but I think we’re ultimately looking at a giant leap in other race/ethnicity professor/fakes. Get ready.

September 22nd, 2020
The Spazz Age

The history of the twenty-first century American university will be told by the lummox children of billionaires.

September 15th, 2020
‘Jessica Krug was taking advantage of the rules set up by an identitarian economy that exists both inside, and now increasingly outside, the university: an economy that bestows status and access to financial benefits and prestige … based solely on the color of your skin.’

Terry L. Newman, Medium.

It is now accepted as fact in many academic fields that you cannot teach issues about specific groups if you are not a member of those groups. In my first article for Quillette, I wrote about a professor in my Master program who proclaimed to our seminar that white sociology professors were incapable of teaching courses on race. Of course this is not true. You do not have to be non-white to teach the subject of race respectfully and knowledgably. The same understanding has permeated qualitative research methods in the social sciences, the idea that only a member of an insider group can understand and research that group…

Campuses constantly hold talks about white supremacy and white privilege, as if lurking behind every corner. Speakers are brought in on pedagogical days to sensitize staff in already overwhelmingly progressive faculties in the humanities. Guilt has become something associated not with one’s actions, but one’s demographic. Is it any wonder why someone might choose to abandon the burden of their whiteness, and embrace, instead, the pristine, blameless identity of the marginalized?[W]e should recoil at the thought of our individual worlds becoming so small and so narrow that the only research we can participate in is research about ourselves. This is the insider doctrine…

[U]ntil we overcome the divisive insider doctrine which plagues us both inside and outside the academy, the idea that only members of groups can understand one another, [we will have more Jessica Krugs.]

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