Are You There God?
It’s Me, Margaret
has got to be the most cringe-inducing book title UD has ever encountered. To add insult to injury, it takes UD’s name in vain.
UD’s narcissism and mental retentiveness mean that she has never quite been able to brush this title out of her mind. It comes back to her, unbidden…
She thought of it today as she compared her amply-attended-to self to poor is-anyone-there Margaret. Not only, for instance, does UD’s blog have readers; it has responsive readers who send her well-chosen and wonderful things.
One of those things UD had already come across herself, and she'd been going back and forth on whether to post about it. As longtime readers know, UD avoids naughty professor stories. Professor A downloads child porn. Prof B steals from the department till. C sells cocaine down the lane. UD takes note of these things as they flash out over Google News, but unless there’s some weird twist to them she lets them go.
The professor prostitute story did detain her for awhile, however, as it did one of her readers, who rightly assumed she’d find it of interest. The Washington Post picked it up today from the Baltimore papers, and, given its titillating nature, other newspapers will almost certainly do the same. UD wouldn’t have mentioned it without nudging from her reader, because, again, when you take in the details of the case you end up with a sad human tale that has little to do with universities, really…
Still, it is curious, provocative, whatever, that a former professor of sociology at one of the University of Maryland campuses would end up fired from that job and self-employed as a prostitute in her suburban home. The woman was a strong feminist -- her research, which sounds legitimate enough, involved at-risk women and girls. Yet she falsified data, filed frivolous suits, got divorced, went bankrupt, and got canned.
The Post account includes some nice detail: “Most of Britton's neighbors declined to talk about her yesterday, saying only that she was a nice woman whose daughter visited from college occasionally. They also said she had two pet pigs.”
But really, there’s little here to distinguish the story from any number of other stories involving people whose lives spiral down and who get desperate… Her having been a professor, and the enormous perceived gap between being a professor and being a prostitute, has appealed to the media.
A second reader sent me a tale of another disgraced former professor, this story sufficiently complex to warrant a few paragraphs of quotation. It's from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (with, certes, occasional parenthetical comments from UD):
In the late 1980s, a history professor from Marquette University named John William Rooney walked into the French National Archives in Paris [Ah, I remember it well! Many moons ago, UD had a fellowship that sent her to Paris and that library.] and walked out with a copy of the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau, a woven paper with red wax seals and a green silk cord through which Napoleon Bonaparte agreed to give up the French empire and accept exile.
The opportunity to steal a major piece of history, Rooney said, was too tempting to pass up.
"If you were to stand in front of the pyramids of Egypt, you might pick up a chip, too," he said last week during an interview in which he admitted stealing the document. [What a compelling analogy. How true.]
But the decision is continuing to haunt him more than 15 years later.
In 2002, a federal court in New York convicted Rooney of conspiracy to transport stolen property after his friend, Marshall Lawrence Pierce, put the treaty up for auction. Rooney was placed on probation and ordered to pay a fine. The American Embassy in France returned the document to the archives
Rooney thought that was the end of his legal trouble. But in November, a Paris court agreed to try him and Pierce on charges of receiving stolen goods. The case, which will be heard sometime this year, means that Rooney - now 74, retired and living in Wauwatosa - could be sentenced to up to three years in prison, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. [Prenez vos mouchoirs.]
"We are looking forward to seeing them punished for this major crime to our patrimony," a spokesman for the French Ministry of Culture said in an e-mail interview. Rooney, who was born and raised in Birmingham, Ala., attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery before doing graduate work at a Belgian university, he said.
He was hired by Marquette in 1971. A professor of 19th century history, Rooney made an impression on students and colleagues alike, said James Marten, chair of the university's history department.
"He was very flamboyant," Marten said. "He had a real following among some students."
During summer breaks, Rooney would travel to foreign countries to conduct research. Among his destinations was the French National Archives.
"I took out hundreds of documents from there, if not more," Rooney said. [Excellent preparation for your trial in France.]
Between 1987 and 1988, he checked out the Treaty of Fontainebleau and a cluster of letters from Louis XVIII of France, said the French Ministry of Culture. Rooney said he didn't think it was wrong to bring the documents back to the U.S.
"You could say the document got into the national archives because it had been stolen at some point before," he said of the 1814 treaty. "You could say that they stole it." [UD declares a tie here between cretinism and degeneracy.]
But the French National Archives didn't see it that way. In 1996, the archives received a phone call from Sotheby's in New York. Pierce had put the treaty up for sale through the auction house and inquired about selling the cluster of letters. Sotheby's wondered if the archives were interested.
"Our manuscript expert called the French National Archives and said - 'There's this extremely important French document, would you be interested in buying it?' " said Matthew Weigman, a Sotheby's spokesman.
The National Archives wasn't. Instead, the French authorities launched an investigation of Rooney and Pierce. So did the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Documents still missing
Five years later, the two men were tried in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on charges of possessing, transporting and conspiring to sell stolen goods. The U.S. attorney's office in New York didn't have jurisdiction to charge Rooney for theft.
At the time, Rooney and Pierce were living together in Tennessee. Rooney, who resigned from Marquette in 1992, had moved there to work for the University of the South in Sewanee, where he served as a visiting professor in 1995 and 1996. Pierce, 30 years Rooney's junior, was described in press articles at the time as a student of history and an aspiring novelist. [Did you see the movie A Love Song for Bobby Long? This is like totally the plot, man!]
Tiens. UD thanks both readers.
|