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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, February 19, 2005

SYMPATHETIC DENTISTS


Weary of the Ward Wars (thanks to Philip Klinkner for this neat Ward Churchill phrase), UD has been bending her ancient glittering eyes over Google News with more than ordinary desperation lately, searching, searching, searching, for … what? For anything university-related wild and wacky enough to knock Ward off his pedestal, that’s what!

And damned if she hasn’t found it. We American academics might be odd, we might have our lapses, but we’ve got nothing on the Germans. List, list, o list to the tale of Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten.

Von? Von, you say? Well, we’ll see about that aristocratic von, my little pretties … along with many other matters Pr. Dr. R.P.v.Z.-related. Hold on to your homburgs.



An eminent thirty-year career in the field of anthropology has been cut short by revelations that Protsch - a “flamboyant” man fond of fat gold watches, Cuban cigars, and late-model Porsches, a man who claimed to own penthouses in New York, Florida and California, where he “hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf” - has all this time been making up data (from the beginning of his career he seems to have been “unable to work his own carbon-dating machine“), stealing and selling artifacts, plagiarizing everybody else’s work, and dealing in fake fossils.

“The scandal only came to light,” it says here in the Guardian, “when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department’s entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.” There were 278 skulls, asking price $70,000 (= one new Porsche).




Protsch is not the son of “a dashing general in the hussars,” as he claims, but “the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch.” In a related development, his university is “investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis’ gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor’s instructions.”




Protsch is the reason UD was reading with avid erotic interest in the Science section of the New York Times just a few days ago about the mind-blowing possibility that modern humans and Neanderthals might have lived at the same time, and, you know, done it. But Thomas Terberger, the man who unmasked Protsch, has thrown cold water on that possibility: “Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. Prof Protsch’s work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish.”



Some aspects of the Protsch story are a little on the gross side. For instance, the way a suspicious scientist figured out that one skull Protsch dated at 27,400 years of age actually “belonged to an elderly man who died in 1750,” was that when the scientist cut it open “it still smelt.” (Possible Der Spiegel headline: German Scientific Establishment to Protsch von Zieten: YOUR SKULL SMELLS.)

And then there are the 12,000 headless skeletons in the anthro department’s bone cellar, their heads removed by Protsch and “apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.” Sympathetic dentists?




Here’s the Euro angle on all of this. “It’s deeply embarrassing. Of course the university feels very bad about this,” said the man who led the investigation into Protsch. The president of Frankfurt University apologized to everyone “and acknowledged that the institution’s administration had ignored the professor’s misconduct for decades despite existing proof for his mistakes.” The president plans to sit down with his faculty and review “the basics of appropriate scientific research behavior.” (Avoid the decapitation and sale of skeletons, the shredding of Nazi documentary material…)

But his most hard-hitting response is that though he’s not going to punish Protsch in any way (Protsch has had to resign, of course, but then his career is almost at an end, anyway), he will review his pension and give some consideration to maybe withholding it from him.

Finally, in its defense, the university has “pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack.”

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What? The Protsch photo is really a photo of King Gyanendra?

UD couldn't find an amusing photo of Protsch. And it seemed as good a time as any to remind her readers what that fool Gyanendra is up to in poor Nepal.

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Photo Update: Jeff at JVC Comments suggests this photo might do for the subject at hand.