… yesterday’s New York Times account of Elie Wiesel’s having crushed a play about him through the use of legal threats is compelling.

Wiesel and Bernard Madoff were fellow trustees of Yeshiva University. They occasionally dined together. Wiesel invested lots of his money with Madoff. There’s every reason they should appear in a play together.

But Wiesel doesn’t like appearing in a play with Madoff, and he has, with remarkable vulgarity, gone after its writer, an artist who, as she says in the article, “can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it.”

The word for Wiesel’s behavior is disgusting.

After UD leaves Rehoboth Beach, she goes to Upstate New York, where she has a house. Not far from that house is Stageworks/Hudson, where she and Mr UD will go to see the revised version of this play, Imagining Madoff. Unable to deal with Wiesel’s threats, the writer has removed his name from her play’s list of characters. But UD gathers that his spirit, if you will, lives on. We shall see.

Meanwhile, as is so often the case when people act in the way Wiesel has acted, Imagining Madoff is receiving far more publicity than it would have if it had run as originally written.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

General James Mattis

I take articles about universities and I jazz them up with arch comments, etc.

But I cannot be funnier than this article is all by itself.

A university has provoked international condemnation for disciplining a lecturer over claims he sexually harassed a colleague by showing her a research paper about oral sex among bats.

Leading academics have rallied to support Dr Dylan Evans, a British scientist, after University College, Cork (UCC) imposed sanctions on him over the allegations.

They argue that Dr Evans’s punishment threatens to erode freedom of academic debate by ruling out certain topics if they are deemed politically incorrect by some people.

An online petition has been set up calling on the university to repeal the sanctions and has been signed by high-profile academics including Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University.

Dr Evans was disciplined following a formal complaint from a colleague, to whom he had shown an article from the journal Public Library of Science One entitled “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time”.

The woman, who has not been identified, complained that she felt “harassed”, “hurt” and “disgusted” by his actions.

She alleged that the incident came after repeated examples of his “inappropriate” behaviour, in which he kissed her on both cheeks and complimented her appearance.

Dr Evans denied the allegations, claiming he had not intended any offence by showing her the article as it was a formal publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Although an investigation cleared him of sexual harassment prior to the bat incident, it upheld the woman’s complaint about the article. It was accepted that Dr Evans showed her the article as a joke with sexual innuendo and it was not his intention to cause offence.

Professor Michael Murphy, the UCC president, punished Dr Evans by ordering him to undergo a two-year period of “monitoring and appraisal” and to complete special training.

Dr Evans said he had been deeply upset that his colleague had been offended by the article and was troubled that his name had been tainted by an allegation of sexual harassment.

He told The Times: “I was absolutely devastated by the complaint, as I certainly had no intention of upsetting her. She is an esteemed colleague who I hold in high regard.”

He said he had been very interested by the paper, which documented a rare example of oral sex in a non-human animal, the short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx.

Dr Evans added: “I can live with the sanctions, but I can’t live with a factual finding of sexual harassment against me. It has very serious career implications for me.

“I’m also very worried about the precedent this sets. This means that if you share published science with a colleague, and she happens to find it offensive, it is no defence that you were discussing a peer-reviewed paper without intent to offend. It bodes ill for academic freedom.”

The case has been hotly debated in academic circles after several related documents, including the woman’s original complaint, were posted on the internet.

Professor Pinker, of Harvard University, described the sanctions as “absurd and shameful”.

He said: “It runs counter to the principle of intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, to say nothing of common sense.”

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, has also added his name to more than 2,400 signatories on the petition. He called the sanctions “an outrageous violation of academic freedom”.

——————————

You’d be batshit not to sign the petition.

He has won his court battle. Slowly, England’s libel laws become more sane.

The science writer Simon Singh has won his court of appeal battle for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action.

Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.

He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.

The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.

In May last year, high court judge Mr Justice Eady, in a preliminary ruling in the dispute, held that Singh’s comments were factual assertions rather than expressions of opinion – which meant he could not use the defence of fair comment.

Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley allowed Singh’s appeal, ruling that the high court judge had “erred in his approach”….

… Fabriqué en France.

A French mystery writer is being sued for defamation by the owners of the well-known Parisian fabric store where she set her latest crime novel.

Lalie Walker’s psychological thrillers are often set around Paris, and her latest, Aux Malheurs des Dames, is no exception.

… [T]he book takes place at Marché St. Pierre, a 60-year-old landmark store in the Montmartre district of Paris known for its extensive selection of fabrics and low prices.

… The corporation that owns the store, Village d’Orsel, is suing for two million euros ($2.7 million Cdn), according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

“No one can have anything to do with or talk about the Marché Saint Pierre without the authorization of the owner and the director,” Robert Gabby, the store’s director…

CBC News

… when she blogged about a British hypnotist who’d graduated from the notorious diploma mill, La Salle University. When the Daily Mail pointed out his bogus degree, the hypnotist successfully sued the newspaper and received a very large sum of money.

Mr Justice Eady, who heard the case without a jury, said he could not accept that the newspaper had discharged the burden of proving that the sting of the words complained of was substantially true.

Huh? La Salle’s bogosity is easily discovered; the paper said nothing that wasn’t true. How could this have happened?

And now there’s the Simon Singh thing. Singh said nothing that wasn’t true of chiropractors, but their organization sued him for libel anyway. And they might win, because it’s England, land of loony libel laws.

There’s now a Libel Reform Campaign in England, acting in support of Singh and for reform of the libel laws.

UD, a signer of the Libel Reform petition, received from them an email about an event she’d love to attend but can’t. If you can go, go to the “Houses of Parliament next Tuesday, 23 March, for a mass meeting with MPs to convince them to commit to libel reform.”

The Libel Reform Campaign has booked Committee Room 15 at Parliament, and MPs know that we’re coming. Please, if you can, come and join us. Simon Singh will be joining us to tell MPs about the real effect of our libel laws.

The political parties are on the verge of signing up to once in a generation reform of our libel laws. But we don’t have them signed up yet. This is our last chance to lobby parliamentarians before the general election.

Social critics, inside and outside of universities, can’t function – as Singh himself explains – if they’re afraid of being sued for telling the truth.

I mean, imagine if Freehold New Jersey’s James Wasser had been able, after taking money from the school district to pay for his diploma mill degree, to sue the system – shaking it down for yet more money – when it named him as a bogus degree holder. That’s England today.

… what expensive webs we weave when first we prosecute for libel.

From the transcript of Simon Singh’s appeal in response to the British Chiropractic Association’s libel action against him:

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I want to come back to something I raised before lunch which is still troubling me and it still has nothing to do with the outcome of the case, but here we are. Your clients [the BCA] are very steamed up at what they perceive to be a very serious libel. It has been said about them that they have indulged in happily promoting bogus treatments. Your case is – their case is: “That is absolute nonsense. We don’t. That’s not what we are running our professional lives for.”

It is now two years on, jolly nearly, since the matter that caused all this umbrage was published. The opportunity to put it right was not taken. The end of this litigation will not be for another how long – another twelve months?

MS ROGERS QC: Well that depends on a number of factors.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: Yes. So all the opportunities to put this right – to make it clear to the public that these allegations are nonsense – simply have not been taken, and yet it matters. I quite understand that it matters to your client that they should not have to put up with defamatory statements. I am just terribly troubled about the entire artificiality of all this and all of the huge expense. Somebody at the end of this litigation – somebody – is going to pay a vast amount of money. It will either be Dr Singh out of his funds or it will be your clients out of the contributions made by the subscriptions paid by their members. I am just baffled.

MS ROGERS QC: If your Lordship thinks that my clients relish spending years and money and time on this litigation, that is not right.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I do not think anybody is relishing this. No, forgive me. I am not for a moment thinking anybody is relishing it – plainly nobody is relishing it. But, at the end of the day, as to this issue about whether there is any reliable evidence [supporting various claims of chiropractic cure] or not as we speak now, it is either there or it is not. If there is reliable evidence, goodness gracious, why isn’t somebody publishing it?

Precisely the argument made to Calvo-Goller by the editors of the journal she believes libeled her. They offered her prominent space in their journal to comment and set things right. Instead, she sued, and is currently a figure of fun among the scholarly communities of the world.

Things have gone yet worse for the BCA. The trial has attracted enormous publicity to the way they advertise, and indeed to the legitimacy of the health claims they make.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

As the British Chiropractic Association’s battle with Simon Singh continues to work its way through the legal system, chiropractors are counting the financial costs of a major backlash resulting from a libel action that has left the Lord Chief Justice “baffled”. What was originally a dispute between the BCA and one science writer over free speech has become a brutally effective campaign to reform an entire industry.

A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures from the General Chiropractic Council.

The council, which is responsible for regulating the profession and has 2,400 chiropractors on its books, informs me that it has had to recruit six new members of staff to deal with a fifteenfold increase in complaints against its members – from 40 a year to 600. While it declined to comment directly on the costs inflicted by the reaction to the BCA’s actions, it is clear that a six-figure sum will be involved for the extra staffing costs alone, to which will have to be added the considerable costs of any misconduct hearings.

Hymn #272

Give Me the Libel

Calvo-Goller Version

Give me the libel, star of gladness gleaming!
To cheer my sad heart lone, reviewer-toss’d!
No storm can hide that glorious settlement beaming.
Cour de Cassation! Seek and save the lost!

Refrain

Give me the libel – holy message shining,
Thy cash shall guide me in my narrow way.
Vengeful and chilling, law and rage combining,
‘Til freedom vanish as I take my pay.

2

Give me the libel when my heart is broken
When criticism fills my soul with fear,
O precious words by precious French judge spoken:
Hold up your laws to show revenge is near.

3

Give me the libel, all my foes enlighten,
Teach them the danger when they knowledge sow.
Once I’ve destroyed them, all my gloom shall brighten,
This light alone the path of wealth can show.

… the latest in Norwegian faculty speech codes.

The University of Oslo recently fired Arnved Nedkvitne, a medieval history professor with a mouth on him. He appealed, but a court backed the university, which argued that he often said mean things about his colleagues.

Spurred on by this victory, the university’s human relations specialist Mette Børing

… proposed to work out guidelines as a kind of code of conduct at the university with lists of words and expressions not to be tolerated when describing a colleague. She claimed this was needed, having four or five other cases on her table after the Nedkvitne case, with similar accusations of improper characterisations of colleagues. She said something had to be done.

This strange proposal brought her to the front page of the major Oslo finance newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, with a comment by Kristian Gundersen that he regarded this as a clear breach of his democratic right of expression. The following day, Oslo Rector Ole Petter Ottersen denied such a work was in progress.

Several people commented on the proposal with Professor Bernt Hagtvet of political science at the university asking rhetorically: “Would for instance the expression ‘braindead perfumed puma’ be accepted in her list of words?”…

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

Update: Limericks:

1.) From Ahistoricality:

There was a braindead perfumed puma
subsisting on gossip and rumor:
“When I make up rules
to govern these fools
I can fire all these Molly Bloomers!”

2.) Dave:

I said “you’re a puma: brain-dead, perfumed”
To the Dean, and my tenure was doomed.
It wasn’t much to the liking
Of a censorious Viking.
“Should’ve called him a lynx,” I assumed.

3.) UD:

The brain-dead and perfumèd puma
Lives deep in the hills of Exuma.
At first it was Prussian.
Then, quite briefly, Russian.
Until banned from the halls of the Duma.

In the aftermath of an organized shout-down of a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador, UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky clarifies the way free speech works:

The government, including public universities, always can impose time, place and manner restrictions on speech. A person who comes into my classroom and shouts so that I cannot teach surely can be punished without offending the 1st Amendment. Likewise, those who yelled to keep the ambassador from being heard were not engaged in constitutionally protected behavior.

Freedom of speech, on campuses and elsewhere, is rendered meaningless if speakers can be shouted down by those who disagree. The law is well established that the government can act to prevent a heckler’s veto — to prevent the reaction of the audience from silencing the speaker. There is simply no 1st Amendment right to go into an auditorium and prevent a speaker from being heard, no matter who the speaker is or how strongly one disagrees with his or her message.

… of vicious fanatics and their role in campus life.

The BBC:

… [A] working group …will be formed from university vice-chancellors and other academics [to] consider how to achieve the balancing act of preventing campus extremism without undermining the right for students and staff to hold free debates.

The group will “consider how universities can work with all relevant organisations, nationally and locally, to ensure the protection of freedom of speech and lawful academic activities, whilst safeguarding students, staff and the wider community from violent extremism”.

… Among the issues to be considered will be invitations to outside speakers – and whether controversial views should be banned…

Controversial isn’t quite the right word, implying as it does two sides to a question. There is no Should All Homosexuals Be Slaughtered? controversy, is there?

We invited Mr X to campus so that he can help our students understand why, as opposed to what some people argue, the answer to civilization’s problems lies in the mass murder of gay people…

… responds to the controversy described here [subscription], in which a new book about Heidegger’s Nazism goes beyond intellectual attack and calls for the criminalization of his writings as hate speech.

UD thinks, by the way, that the New York Times, in quoting Richard Wolin about the issue –

Richard Wolin, the author of several books on Heidegger and a close reader of the Faye book, said he is not convinced Heidegger’s thought is as thoroughly tainted by Nazism as Mr. Faye argues. Nonetheless he recognizes how far Heidegger’s ideas have spilled into the larger culture.

“I’m not by any means dismissing any of these fields because of Heidegger’s influence,” he wrote in an e-mail message referring to postmodernism’s influence across the academy. “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.”

– should have revealed that he signed a petition in support of the book. He is more partisan than he appears in his remarks to the Times.

A student at U Albany has a few words with a Resident Assistant:

… When a student living on Indian Quad attempted to post a satirical representation of the definition of Chartwells food service on his door on the evening of September 22, his Resident Assistant forced him to remove the sign. He told the student that the sign was “inappropriate” and was “defacing school property” and thus “needed to be taken down.” The student complied…

Although I am not a resident of Indian Quad, as a witness and a fierce advocate of the First Amendment I felt compelled to question the Resident Assistant’s request, even if the resident didn’t want to. How could the R.A. censor this student’s opinion by forcing him to take down the sign? I waited for the Assistant to finish speaking with a separate resident and then questioned his knowledge of the First Amendment. The response? “The First Amendment doesn’t apply here. The sign was defacing school property, and that violates the Community Rights and Responsibilities Agreement.” When I reminded him that Chartwells wasn’t even part of the University (it is a third party entity contracted solely for food service), and thus any satirical criticism of it was not defacing school property the Assistant seemed uninterested. “I decide what is appropriate and what can go up [on the doors],” the Res Life student replied. I then turned around and pointed to the suite door directly behind me.

A picture of a man’s face with male genitalia drawn over it was prominently taped up for all to see.

“Is this appropriate to you?” I questioned. “If someone were to have a problem with it I would have to remove it,” the Assistant replied. “What about the profanity written on people’s doors, do you find that appropriate?” I countered. The Res Life Assistant gave the same response. “So essentially,” I concluded, “you would rather have genitalia and profanity on doors and walls than criticism of Chartwells?” The Assistant’s unequivocal response? “Yes.”

UD thanks Brad for the link.

Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:

… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.

… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.

The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.

In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …

After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.

“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …

Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

… and using eternal vigilance against people on its faculty who criticize the drug industry and faculty conflict of interest related to it.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest scandal out of this most pharmaloving campus:

Emory University has been accused repeatedly over the last year of looking the other way while one of its prominent physicians built extremely close ties to the pharmaceutical industry and — critics charge — failed to adequately report those ties as required by university and federal regulations.

But what if you are an Emory professor who happens to differ with the pharmaceutical industry? Then, it appears, Emory watches you closely — and if you are a blogger, the university can tell you that you must remove the Emory name from your Web site. That’s why a recent post on the J. Douglas Bremner’s blog Before You Take That Pill is called “I Am Removing the Name of My University From This Blog.” Bremner is professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory and as his blog title suggests (as does his book with the same name), he is an avid critic of the pharmaceutical industry.

In the post, he notes that he was recently ordered to remove the Emory name both by the interim chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and by the medical school’s executive associate dean for faculty affairs. In the letters, which he provided to Inside Higher Ed, they tell Bremner to remove Emory’s name, logo and letterhead from his blog because none of them can be used for “non-Emory business.” He was also told to report on when he had removed Emory from his blog.

The letters cite complaints that the university received about a blog post Bremner made in January in which he criticized the eviction of a man with bipolar disorder who was being forced out of his apartment for smoking. Bremner made his point in the form of a mock letter “To Whom It May Concern” giving his blessing for the man to continue to smoke. According to Bremner’s Emory superiors, complaints they received suggested that he was making “clinical recommendations for a patient you do not know and have never examined,” and these postings made them feel the need to tell him to stop using the Emory name.

… Bremner’s fans have noted with alarm his need to remove Emory’s name from the blog and they have been e-mailing about the situation, noting, for example, that Emory isn’t bothered by Charles Nemeroff, the professor at the center of the conflict of interest dispute, appearing with his Emory identification at events not related to the university (and sponsored by a pharmaceutical company) — but clamps down on a blogger who criticizes the industry.

… [The head of the AAUP] said that it was wrong and a violation of academic freedom for Emory to tell a faculty blogger not to use the university’s name in his identification or elsewhere on his blog.

“What they absolutely cannot do is say that he cannot identify himself as an Emory faculty member,” he said…

Ready, aim, FIRE?