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Tuesday, October 19, 2004
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APPLE SEASON AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
It's October in Foggy Bottom, and apples are falling out of trees. Bad apples. In commenting on the ongoing embezzlement scandal at the university [see UD's post of 10/13/04 below], two officials have picked up on the same seasonal image. A trustee, using a figure that literary critics like UD are trained to describe as "self-reflexive," calls the soon to be indicted miscreant "an unfortunately bad apple that doesn't reflect on the University but reflects on itself." And a faculty member seems to allude to Yeats's silver apples of the moon: "You've got a bad apple, and the bad apple tarnishes everything else." The tarnishing has certainly begun. The Department of Transportation has suspended much of the multi-million dollar grant while they investigate further. GW has suspended the center's research, and has halted construction of its research building. As regular readers know, UD doesn't subscribe to the one bad apple theory. Although she doubts that misbehavior on this particular scale is common, she's still more inclined to think in terms of bushels. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Update, a few hours later: UD just met up with a high-ranking GW administrator while waiting in line at a kiosk for her latte. The high-ranking GWA insisted on paying for her coffee ("Now that I'm an administrator, everyone hates me. I have to buy my friends."), and UD happily took the h-r GWA up on the offer. UD ever so subtly drew this person into a conversation about the campus embezzlement scandal, and this person said something rather beautiful and also sad about it which UD will now quote: "I think it's time people stopped thinking that professors are more moral than other people." |