The attempt to make Horthy a worthy meets some resistance.
The attempt to make Horthy a worthy meets some resistance.
Corrupted? Corrupted? Corrupted by the big bad hedgie!
Young Sidney who lived at the foot of the hill
Whose fame every virgin with envy doth fill…
How far the delicate lassie has fallen – caught in the clutches of SAC.
… runs a CUNY program which makes its money the Trump way — by renting out its precious New York City space.
Of course, you could say that the space the program’s in is meant for the program.
And you could say that Wilson didn’t have permission to rent out the premises.
I mean, now that it’s figured out what Wilson’s doing, this is what CUNY is saying. Plus it’s really trying to get rid of the guy, since the rental thing is only one way, reportedly, in which he’s been, er, profiting from the center he runs.
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In response to the charges against him, Wilson’s doing far-left high-dudgeon.
“There is a long history of political persecution in the US, (and CUNY/BC) including the government frame-up of Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, W. E. B. DuBois prosecution, the frame-up of countless civil rights and labor leaders, and mass firings of CUNY faculty during the McCarthy era. This attack is part of that detestable history.”
It might work.
I speculated in this earlier post about the mysterious death, in custody, of a young Yale professor. He’d gotten violent with police (they had come to his house because of domestic violence) and had sustained a mild injury in the scuffle. He was then put in jail for the night. During the night he died, and not by suicide.
The wound sounded too small to have done him in. What then?
Samuel See was only 34, but the medical examiner has concluded that he had had a small heart attack a few days before his arrest; See also had meth in him. He died of “acute methamphetamine and amphetamine intoxication with recent myocardial infarct.” Meth is real bad for your heart. I’m going to assume the heart attack was meth-related.
So when I say cascade I mean a bunch of things seem to have conspired to kill him:
1. the heart attack;
2. the mental as well as additional physical trauma from the domestic violence/arrest violence;
3. being incarcerated and therefore not having his health and welfare closely monitored.
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UPDATE from the Yale Daily News: Background on See’s harrowing personal problems.
“Somebody once asked me how many professors work for me, and I said if you can ever find a professor who thinks he or she works for anybody, let me know.”
University of Washington President Michael K. Young.
… which has had its share of upheaval lately:
An assistant professor of English there has died in custody after being arrested (for fighting with officers) during a domestic violence incident.
UD speculates that Samuel See killed himself in jail.
Details of the arrest here.
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Yet more details here, including:
The 34-year-old is not believed to have taken his own life. According to New Haven Independent, the young educator had had recent run-ins with police.
This from Yale Alumni Magazine:
On September 18, he was arrested on misdemeanor charges of assault and breach of peace.
He was on a leave from Yale which apparently had been hurriedly arranged, since he was reportedly signed up to teach his regular roster of courses.
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There are a number of possibilities in this sad unfolding story. One is that during the fight he was more badly hit than thought, and that he died, for instance, of an epidural hematoma, the sort of brain injury that killed Natasha Richardson.
This is the second in a series of posts about the tendency of universities to deny things — things they’d be better off not simply denying.
Just below this post is a post about Columbia University’s decision to deal with a now-jailed professor who worked there for twenty years by telling reporters that he hasn’t been around for ten years. True, but he did work there, in an honored, high-profile position, for a long time, and it would be more seemly for Columbia at least to acknowledge that. You don’t want to be like America’s shabbiest campus, Yeshiva University, and pretend Bernard Madoff wasn’t an honored trustee on whom the university depended for financial advice. You want to be better than that.
Similarly, the University of Minnesota seems to think it’s fine to respond to reporters pestering them about a rather smelly clinical trial one of their professors ran by saying fuck you that was years ago. When you simply deny – worse, when you smear reporters for pursuing the story (the university’s communication director recently wondered in an email if a Scientific American reporter was a “wacko”) – the thing you’re denying keeps coming back to haunt you.
The trial was run by psychiatrists. Surely they’ve read Freud on the way denial works.
Here’s the most recent news report on the escalating Dan Markingson scandal.
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UD thanks Bill.
This blog faithfully covers the tendency of universities who hire and retain people who turn out to be big-time crooks to deny, deny, deny.
Most of these stories are about doctors who go to jail for running pill mills or ripping off Medicare.
Jose Katz spent two decades as a respected Columbia University faculty member; his name appears on dozens of scientific papers coming out of Columbia labs. After he retired (probably before too, but who’s counting), Katz set about telling everyone who came to his office that they had angina and needed expensive invasive things done to them. In this way, he accumulated tens of millions of dollars, and now he’s going to jail.
Note that in this report a Columbia spokesperson insists says they haven’t seen Jose around campus for ten years; note too that his lawyer repeatedly calls Katz a professor. He’s a professor … he’s a professor…
UD isn’t, of course, saying that Columbia should somehow have sensed it had a crook in its midst. She is saying that having happily affiliated for years with a convict currently plastering his faculty status all over town, Columbia can do better than issue a flat denial of any connection. Something like this would be good:
Columbia University is dismayed that a person once in good standing on its faculty has been convicted of serious fraud. The university has strict employee vetting procedures in place, and as far as we know Dr. Katz broke no laws while at Columbia. But this case is a reminder that all schools need to remain vigilant.
… is interviewed in The Daily Californian.
Background here.
Er, a law professor is suing his dean for retaliating against him after the law prof accused the dean of sexual harassment.
Among the dean’s alleged sexually harassing behaviors:
The suit said the professor complained [to university authorities] about alleged inappropriate touching and comments involving women colleagues, including a bare-skin, summer-dress “caress” that [the professor, Raymond] Ku and his wife found “unnerving and creepy.”
The lawsuit also claimed the dean questioned Ku about circumcision as the professor prepared to convert to Judaism. Mitchell said the conversion would put Ku in two of his favorite groups — Asian and Jewish, the lawsuit said.
Are you outraged yet?
Well, how about this:
The dean is rumored to have slept with a law student! The dean has been married and divorced four times! Someone told Ku that the dean makes demeaning statements about women! (UD is getting all of this from Ku’s complaint, which you can read here. Scroll down.)
When you combine these transgressions with the dean’s outrageous assertion that Ku has been been put in two of the dean’s favorite groups, it all adds up to …. what? What seems just? A million in damages? Two million?
Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.
She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.
The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…
… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.
His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.
Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.
But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:
“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”
This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.
I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.
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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.
[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.
de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.
The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.
[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.
Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.
[Michelle] Crawford was hired [as a business professor] despite the fact she [had been] disbarred as a lawyer and faced criminal prosecution. [Crawford is the sister-in-law of an ASU trustee.]
Crawford was a licensed attorney in North Carolina before she was disbarred in about September 2008 “for misappropriation of entrusted funds and failure to reconcile her trust account,” according to [a] report. She was hired as a business professor at ASU in 2011 and was retained through August or September 2013 (different dates have been reported). She was indicted April 19, 2012, in U.S. District Court in North Carolina… Crawford, also known as Michelle Mallard, pleaded guilty July 10 to “mortgage fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and embezzlement in violation of the wire fraud statute.”
She faces a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.
Professors Robert Dworkin (University of Rochester) and Dennis Turk (University of Washington) are feeling no pain!
Read their hilarious emails about how they’re making tens of thousands of dollars off of pharma – which wants to listen in on American professors conversing about new developments along the Oxycontin line (We Americans ♥♥ LOVE♥♥ our Oxycontin. Just look at any town in West Virginia. Eli Lilly’s got us eating out of its hand!).
’20k [to attend a meeting] is small change, and they can justify it easily if they want to be at the table,’ Dworkin wrote to Turk in July 2003, after an Eli Lilly representative bridled at the price.
Dworkin’s absolutely right. Once you’ve got a national (soon to be international!) epidemic going, you’re talking real money. Dworkin knows Lilly routinely pays billions in fines every year for illegal this and that, and it really don’t make no never mind since when your profits are zillions you can laugh at billions. So this Lilly asshole has the gall to bridle at paying twenty thou to sit in a room for twenty minutes? UD finds it amazing the Dworkin/Turk gang isn’t demanding twenty million per meeting.
Possibly Dworkin and Turk are low-balling because they’re professors and not businesspeople and there’s a learning curve for them. This might be helpful for context:
[There’s a new rule,] unveiled by the S.E.C. … requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages… [Yet C.E.O. compensation continues, and almost certainly will continue, to rise.] Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As [one expert] told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.”
If Dworkin and Turk find themselves at all hesitant, they can tape this article to their refrigerators and reread it just before talking price with Lilly.