Hilarious article in, of all places, a legal journal, by bad boy Brian Tamanaha, who has broken the decorous silence we’re supposed to maintain about the greed and hypocrisy of American law professors. Tamanaha rightly targets progressives – like the Critical Legal Studies (Crits for short) people – who pat themselves on the back for their advocacy on behalf of the world’s oppressed, but who jealously guard their own wealth and status — all the while ignoring the oppressed in their own classrooms.

Tamanaha isn’t the first law professor to go there – that would be Kristin Luker – but he’s way farther out than Luker.

As the cost of legal education rose to astronomical heights, loading more and more debt on the backs of students, erecting an enormous economic barrier to access to the legal profession with major class implications, the Crits said nothing. Like other law professors, they have been playing in the academic sandbox, enjoying the increased income and release from teaching that followed from and was funded by the immense rise in tuition.

“How,” asks Tamanaha, “could developments so contrary to progressive causes occur at a time when most law professors are progressives?”

His answer:

Why we did not resist is straightforward: we benefited personally. Tuition increases meant yearly salary raises, research budgets to buy books and laptops, additional time off from teaching to write (or to do whatever we like), traveling to conferences domestically and abroad, rooms in fine hotels, and dining out with old friends. A sweet ride it has been. After becoming accustomed to such treatment, it seems normal to desire even more pay, and not think twice about traveling to Hawaii or taking the family to the annual Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference, held every summer at a luxury resort.

He concludes with a series of questions, among them:

Can we tell our friends in [progressive legal organizations] that it is unseemly to attend a conference about the future of legal education in Hawaii when so many law students and recent graduates are struggling desperately in the here and now, and can we suggest that they should have fought the rise of tuition as hard as they fought to preserve job security for professors?

Can we ask the liberal law professors at California-Irvine how they can preach to their students that they should engage in public service when they charge $50,000 tuition, loading students with debt, while insisting on getting top dollar for their own professorial services?

*****************

At least conservative professors, like Todd Henderson, tend less toward hypocrisy. Henderson likes money, wants huge amounts of it, and seems to resent/consider himself in competition with people who make more than he does.

*****************

The progressive law professors’ quandary recalls, for UD, the immortal statement of one who has solved it — Fulvia Morgana, the sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World:

Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.

… of János Starker’s cello.

Starker has died, at age 88.

Starker was known for being tough on his students. Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, asked Starker to come speak to his team.

Afterward one of the players came up to Starker and asked if he could tell Starker a joke.

“Mr Starker there was a car accident and three cellists died and they all tried to get to Heaven,” the student said. He then goes on to explain the joke. St. Peter asks the first two with whom they studied. They answer they studied with Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Rosen. St. Peter tells both of them they have to go to Hell.

The third one tells St. Peter he studied with Starker. Then comes the punch line.

“St. Peter says ‘You may come in. You already went through Hell.’”

… like the one about Anna Nicole Smith… Musicals full of weird pop culture juxtapositions and unlikely people singing arias… Imagine a once-famous, now-imprisoned, professor of computer engineering. Make him Japanese. Make him married to Rita Coolidge, who will sing of her fidelity to him (“If it takes forever I will wait for you!”). Occasionally Coolidge will enter a reflective mood and sing of her long-ago wacky ‘sixties life with ex-husband Kris Kristofferson (“Your love kept liftin’ me higher!”). The opera will flash back to the professor’s years of thievery at the University of California Irvine, where he double dipped with such intensity that he eventually became the first UC system professor to spend eight years in jail for conflict of interest. The chorus will be composed of frightened graduate students plotting how to report their mentor to the authorities without destroying their own careers…

Diederik Stapel just got a long write-up in the New York Times, complete with color photo of the man in jeans plus bummed-I-got-caught look on his face. He’s sorry, he’s mentally ill, he’s written a book. Go to it.

That’s disgusting enough, but the email he sent about it (he doesn’t think he should be fired) is even more disgusting.

Turns out when he rewrote student comments he was “in a very dark and vulnerable place.”

Poor baby.

************************

Hm. Things have been bumpy in that department for awhile.

… is probably better to let you go.

UD has seen, over the life of this blog, very similar abuse of students. Often, as in this case, it’s political. You decide you’re not going to teach the math or physics class students signed up for. You’re going to corral them into voting for your candidate. You’re going to acquaint them, intimately, over the course of fourteen weeks, with your solutions to the world’s political, environmental, and spiritual problems.

***********************

By the way – one more note about professors. I share it with you, though I know not what to make of it.

In my Aesthetics class this morning, we were talking about poverty, and in particular the homeless. A number of students began discussing a woman who stands outside their dormitory begging.

“We all,” said one of them, and all of the others nodded in agreement, “think she looks like a sociology professor.”

************************

UPDATE: UD‘s buddy Veblen sent her this quiz:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/somody/quiz.html

UD got nine out of ten!

Mr UD got seven out of ten.

Whether it’s charity tax write-off luxury boxes in university sports arenas full of drunk local businesspeople, or pharma-sponsored institutes that produce pill-friendly research, or big oil-sponsored institutes (big oil money makes pharma money look sparse) whose directors live exactly like big oil executives, it’s all good. It’s all good for the American university, which after all has to support its operations somehow.

Local news reporters seem to think the University of Houston – ground-zero for big oil money – overlooks the unseemly greed of its oil-subsidized faculty. But these reporters are operating with an outmoded notion of what universities are. UH is fine with it.

Ouch. Ooch. Eech. When three whippersnappers from a public university accuse a couple of fancy-pants Harvard economists of having messed with data, it does rivet the attention.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are accused of having fudged their stats in order to argue that high levels of public debt create economic stagnation or decline. Republicans have used the study to justify their sharp attack on the budget deficit.

Details here.

More details here.

An orthodox rabbi named Broyde
Has created an internet droid.
The job of ‘Goldwasser’
Is to kiss Broyde’s asser
So that Broyde may most fully love Broyde.

He’s a professor at Emory law school.

… takes no risks.

Though sometimes this strategy can backfire. As it were.

James Barseness, an art professor at the University of Georgia, interacted with one of his students in a town in Costa Rica – during a UGA study abroad thingie – and is in the process of losing his job because of it. Sex with students is one thing; sex in public, in front of other students, is another.

“You are charged specifically with engaging in sexual activity with an undergraduate student … under your supervision in a public area during the Costa Rica 2012 Maymester study abroad program held on the UGA Costa Rica campus. This sexual encounter was witnessed by students and caused substantial disruption in the program,” Mick wrote in a February letter to Barsness. “You later told (the student) that she should not tell anyone about the sexual encounter and you were going to deny that it occurred so that you would not lose your job.”

Jonathan Hart’s done done it but someone done told on him.

Jonathan Hart was appointed professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Alberta in 2004. In 2011, he was also appointed professor of English studies at Durham University. Neither was a part-time position, and it appears that neither institution knew about Professor Hart’s dual roles until the facts came to light at the end of last year.

A spokeswoman for Durham confirmed that it no longer employed Professor Hart but declined to comment further on an “individual staffing matter”.

A spokeswoman for Alberta said the institution had “become aware” of the fact that Professor Hart had also taken a position at Durham and was “looking into” the matter.

How’d he do it?

You know.

Teach one class a week… Semester off here, semester off there… Get a bunch of guest lecturers and TAs to teach your courses… Get a bunch of independent studies and handle them mainly online… Get only tiny grad courses and cancel class sessions left and right…

His next publication:

Jonathan Hart, “Toward a Definition of the Doppelganger.”

***************

So – a few more words on this. Here’s a hiring notice from Durham (Scroll down to #5.) So he’s been at it since September 2011. Bravo! The only thing vaguely comparable UD can remember is that gorgeous jet-setting pair, Jacko and Sainfort, late of both Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota. Hart kept the scam going for two years; J&S were discovered more quickly, but then Minnesota in its dithery nice Minnesota way held on to them for another five years.

Here’s a little bad news for Jonathan Hart, above and beyond the notoriety he’s now enjoying: Georgia Tech went after J&S in the courts bigtime. Georgia Tech was not amused. We are talking mucho reimbursement plus a felony charge.

… and eventually people will start asking how you’re paying for it all.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/19/tenured-mcgill-professor-fired-after-accounting-twerps-uncover-159500-in-improper-spending/

… band.

[Professor] Frampton sees academia’s denizens as creative misfits who deserve special protection. “People who are socially inept can nevertheless be the most creative people,” he told me one afternoon on the telephone. “It’s very important that they can’t be fired. This is the genius of tenure.”

Turns out the Argentine legal system doesn’t extend special protection to tenured professors. He’ll be in jail for awhile.

The New York Times article about a man this blog has followed closely for the duration of his martyrdom (type FRAMPTON in my search engine) strikes the right tone — that of telling an extended joke.

… Weimann also paradoxically hangs on for dear life to the immutability and virginal inviolability of literary genres. Everything else in human life is supposed to be transformed in the name of human ‘progress,’ and humankind is invited (ordered?) to participate in the mutation with whoops of joy, but hands off the sacrosanct rules of narrative art! ‘The loss of the temporal dimension,’ he writes warningly, ‘means the destruction of the specific narrative effect, namely the representation of temporal processes, development, mutation, changes, etc.’ And this is reprehensible because, ‘in back of the aesthetic negation of narrative stands the ideological negation of self-transforming reality, the negation of the historicity of our world.’ … Weimann thinks it is morally inadmissable for mankind, even if it prefers to do so, to take refuge in art from ‘historicity’…

…The Russians… [have] brought out bulldozers… to break up outdoor exhibitions of abstract art by their younger painters, who were curiously indifferent to the glories and achievements of the historical process.”

Joseph Frank, who here takes down a stodgy Marxist critic of literary modernism, has died, age 94.