U. of GA Press Recalls Short Stories, Revokes Prize

Brad Vice's short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, earned a fairly complimentary review in last Sunday's SF Chronicle. It may well be the last review the book will get, as the University of Georgia Press has announced that it is withdrawing the collection from bookstores.

"On October 13," according to UGA's official statement, "the Press learned from the Tuscaloosa Public Library that one of the stories in Vice's collection, 'Tuscaloosa Knights,' contained uncredited material from the fourth chapter of the first section of Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama, a publication of the University of Alabama Press. UGA Press immediately froze stock of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train and contacted Brad Vice for his response. Vice admitted that 'Tuscaloosa Knights' borrows heavily from Stars Fell on Alabama and that he had made a terrible mistake in neglecting to acknowledge Carmer's work. He further stated that he had done this without any malicious intent whatsoever."

In addition to recalling the book from circulation and allowing the publiciation rights to revert back [UD style note: "revert back" is redundant] to Vice, UGA will also re-assign the Flannery O'Connor Award it gave Vice last year to one of the other finalists.

At the very least, the extra $950,000 seems unwise under these unpleasant circumstances. Mr. Ladner certainly made contributions to American University: The endowment grew dramatically, as did the qualifications of the student body. But Mr. Ladner has already been compensated generously for his efforts, and his own actions and sense of entitlement were the primary cause of the current mess.

The board ought to reconsider. Then it has to figure out how to heal itself. Its auditing and oversight efforts failed the university; they must be improved. The next president probably shouldn't serve on the board and surely shouldn't be as dominant as Mr. Ladner was in selecting trustees. The mechanism for selecting board members is insular and self-perpetuating. It should be changed.

In 2002, he became concerned about Bush’s abnormal behavior. Using applied psychoanalysis, a scientific method of studying historical figures and foreign leaders, Dr. Frank reached his conclusions based on massive amounts of public documentation — autobiographical and biographical accounts, public video footage of the President, and statements by Bush’s associates and relatives. This is the first case study of applied psychoanalysis on a sitting president.

Dr. Frank diagnosed the President suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); an Oedipal Complex; untreated and uncured alcoholism (“dry drunk"); paranoia; sadism; psychical reality; and a megalomania complex.

He was clear enough in April, but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering “Excuse me,” reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed; his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything - everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative; he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear - longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.

-- But then I said, ah, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century are James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Joyce is interested in changing the form of the novel in relation to the character, whereas Marcel Proust, the great moralist, is in the great tradition of Descartes and Montaigne...

...The American literary culture is still very much alive – there are real poets here – John Ashbery is a remarkable poet; we have four remarkable novelists still alive and at work: my friend Philip Roth, my friend Don DeLillo, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon, and that remarkable, reclusive novelist Cormac McCarthy...

When she reminisces, she talks of piano lessons and her brief attempt at ballet -- not of Connor setting his dogs loose on brave men, women and children marching for freedom, which is the Birmingham that other residents I met still remember. …When Rice was growing up, her father stood guard at the entrance of her neighborhood with a rifle to keep the Klan's nightriders away. But that was outside the bubble. Inside the bubble, Rice was sitting at the piano in pretty dresses to play Bach fugues.

Professor Anna M. Agathangelou will be participating on a collaborative panel on the questions surrounding racialized sexualized politics within the neoliberal political economy through an understanding of empire. Professor Agathangelou’s work on geographies and migrations aims to make visible the relations of power within the production of knowledge, in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms. It aims to locate these processes with the larger geopolitical contexts of the production and reproduction of empire. For this discussion, Professor Agathangelou will draw on her book in progress, co-authored with L.H.M. Ling, Seductions of Empire: Complicity, Desire, and the Insecurity in Contemporary World Politics.

The Politics colloquium utilizes a transnational feminist Marxist analysis to examine the role that desire and desire industries have come to play within the re-structuring of the neoliberal political economy, with particular focus on racialized, sexualized formations within “peripheral states.” This discussion builds upon Professor Agathangelou’s book, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States to pose broad questions about the politics of exploitation, violence and desire, and the role of transnational feminist praxis, feminist International Relations, and cross bordered social movements challenging the racialized, gendered violences of transnational capitalism, neocolonialism and empire.

Anna Agathangelou is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Politics at York University and the Co-Director of the Global Change Institute based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has published numerous articles on issues of migration, reproduction and formal/informal economies, transnational desire industries, decolonizing feminist methodologies, security and militarization, and cross-bordered feminist interventions into the neoliberal political economy. Her work engages in debates within the fields of feminist and cultural studies, international relations, international political economy and sexuality, human rights and trauma studies.

…'Cultural competence' would not be a request but a requirement. In its five year projection, [an Oregon Department of Education] summit proposed to "revise rules to achieve high cultural standards including possible revocation of licensure for culturally incompetent behavior" and "to require cultural competence for license renewal."

Indeed, SB50 [a bill mandating this, which did not pass] would have authorized the establishment of "standards for cultural competency and require an applicant for a teaching license to meet those standards."

In short, teachers would be required to advocate a specific vision of social justice to be licensed.

Dave Mowry, a legislative coordinator for Rep. Linda Flores, noted in The Oregonian on May 11, "[T]he Teachers Standards and Practices Commission and the Oregon Department of Education are backtracking, saying they really didn't mean it… Then why is it in the definition and the five-year plan and on the commission's Web site?"

Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.

What, then, to do? Karabel proposes that colleges extend affirmative action from race to class, as some have tentatively begun to do, and end preferences for legacies and athletes. I am on record elsewhere as having renounced the legacy privilege on behalf of my son—not that I asked him at the time—but Karabel's own narrative has persuaded me that the elite universities are unlikely to end affirmative action for the overprivileged. If anything, The Chosen demonstrates the danger of imagining great universities as miniature replicas of the social order, and their admissions policies as simulacra of the national reward system. Yes, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are plainly open to, and in many ways driven by, our animating national ideals; but Karabel shows us that their admissions choices are profoundly shaped by cultural, political, and economic considerations that can not be wished away. If we care about equality of opportunity, perhaps we would do better to focus our attention on the public schools, on the tax system, on such social goods as housing and health care. I don't think we can prevent meritocratic privilege from reproducing itself; we can, however, increase the supply of meritocrats.

"I'm both more productive intellectually than they are and I'm having more fun. It must drive them crazy," he said in an interview.

Later, he added: "I'm publishing like crazy. I'm all over the place. I try hard not to rub it in."

' "I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me," he says.

But why?

"They are too stupid."

He can't say that!

"No, they don't get it. And I don't want to have an hour's conversation about it."

But they have read the same texts?

"Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don't.... It is a fault. But I am not as bad as Bernard Williams. He apparently was horrible to people. He could not tolerate people being less clever than him. [UD tolerates people who don't know when to use "he" or "him."] He was quicker than anybody else, and if they were not as quick as him, he would show his disdain for them." '

The Irish government’s chief science adviser has been asked to provide Micheal Martin, the enterprise minister, with details of his doctoral thesis following allegations that he was awarded it by a bogus university [Pacific Western University to be precise].

“We may or may not have a copy. We should have one, somewhere,” [PWU’s president] said.

John Bear, an FBI consultant and an author of a guide to distance-learning colleges, described a qualification from PWU as a “ticking time bomb on a person’s CV. …It will be interesting to see if [McSweeney] presents his PhD and makes it public,” said Bear. “It is embarrassing to have a qualification from this university and to use it to call yourself a doctor.”

Two issues bother me about Yale's endowment - and those of Harvard and Princeton and many other schools. First, the men and women who run these endowments are fantastically well paid by most standards, running into the high six figures, sometimes even seven or eight figures annually. Their pay is on a par with partners at major investment banks, although it is not in the same league as top hedge fund managers. But they earn that pay largely because they get into these fabulous private-equity deals that most of the rest of us in the Yale family cannot enjoy.

That is, they take the big fat endowment contributed by us little minnow alumni as a group, thereby getting Yale into great deals, and are then paid spectacularly as individuals for managing the money we gave for love of alma mater. I would not for a moment begrudge them the money if they were wizard stock pickers. But to think that they are players in the private-equity game because we alums donated money that we thought would go to scholarships - that's a bit painful.




…Second, and more troubling, the immense scale of the endowment and its gains dwarfs my pitiful little gifts. If Mr. Swensen and his pals are making a few billion a year for Yale in capital gains, say $3 billion, that's equal to about one million gifts of $3,000 from individual alumni. But there are only a few tens of thousands of us alums, so what we give has to be totally insignificant unless we are terribly rich. Why give the money, then? (For that matter, why charge tuition? Compared with the gains that the endowment is making, tuition is a drop in the bucket of Yale's income.)




As for my contributions, maybe we could look at it this way: I support an organization called the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which provides social, emotional and material support to widows and widowers and children of military personnel who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If I contribute $10,000 to this group, the gift makes a huge difference to it. I support an organization called Soldiers' Angels that sends support packages to military personnel and their families. If I give $5,000, it means a lot. I also support the Friends of Animals Foundation, a kennel for abandoned dogs and cats on the west side of Los Angeles. If I give $15,000, it saves many animals' lives.

Gifts of these sizes are virtually meaningless to Yale, so why bother giving to it? My resources are very far from limitless, so why not give where it makes a difference?

Is it possible that giving to Yale right now is a bit like giving gifts to Goldman Sachs or Brown Brothers Harriman? I am sure that there are fine people in those places, and investment bankers are almost always intelligent, hard-working men and women. I enjoy their company. But they really don't need my money, and other people do.

I love Yale, and I am deeply grateful to Yale. It is a star in my sky every day and night. But at this point, is it an investment bank or a school? I am really not sure, and this troubles me. I would love to be shown that I am wrong, but I am not certain that I am.

And they should all go **** themselves--and I hope it hurts when they do and that they catch a disease and puke all over themselves and die, horribly, somewhere near Clark and Diversey [in Chicago] where four off-duty male nurses, all clad in black leather, remove their bodies to a nearby hospital where they are cleansed, disinfected, dressed in women's clothing and dumped into a sewer.

Student Group Faked Abduction
at University Place ATM, Police Say

What many students feared was an abduction on South Campus Tuesday night turned out to be an initiation rite for a Northwestern organization, University Police said.

A student told police she heard someone shout “Put your hands on the ATM!” at the U.S. Bank ATM on the 600 block of University Place at about 10:45 p.m, Assistant Chief Daniel McAleer of UP said. She then told police that she saw two people lead two others away from the ATM. They placed them in a car parked outside her window on the north side of the street, McAleer said.

Five male students involved in the incident have been referred to Student Affairs, McAleer said. He declined to say which student organization was involved in this incident.

…“They still may be charged criminally in this incident, disorderly conduct probably,” he said

LOS ANGELES - Wal-Mart heiress Elizabeth Paige Laurie, accused of paying a fellow college student $20,000 to do her homework, has returned her University of Southern California degree, officials said.

The move came nearly a year after Laurie's freshman-year roommate, Elena Martinez, told the ABC newsmagazine "20/20" that she had written term papers and done assignments for the heiress for 3 1/2 years.

"Paige Laurie voluntarily has surrendered her degree and returned her diploma to the university. She is not a graduate of USC," the school said in a statement dated Sept. 30. "This concludes the university's review of the allegations concerning Ms. Laurie."

USC spokesman James Grant said Wednesday the university had no further comment.

A call seeking comment from Bill Laurie, the father of Elizabeth Paige Laurie, at his Paige Sports Entertainment company was not immediately returned. The family has repeatedly declined to comment on the cheating allegation.

Martinez said at the time of the "20/20" broadcast that she joined the ROTC to earn money for college but eventually dropped out because she couldn't afford tuition at USC. She said she learned a great deal by doing Laurie's class work.

Martinez has an unlisted phone number and could not be reached for comment.

Laurie, the granddaughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton, was given a bachelor's degree by the USC Annenberg School for Communication in May 2004.

After the homework allegations surfaced last November, the University o