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.

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.

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”….

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.