… 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
… I would join SeekingArrangement.com.” A Columbia University student, fresh out of a physics class where the professor took off his clothes in front of a film about 9/11, wonders why her required class requires her to watch things like this.
There are of course precedents. Denis Rancourt didn’t strip, but he did other crazy political shit in what were ostensibly courses about physics.
What is it about physics? I guess you take the big picture, and then it becomes imperative that you WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! your captive audience.
It’s always possible, of course, that Emlyn Hughes is having a mental breakdown in front of his class. Plenty of precedent for that too, sadly.
And, finally, it’s possible Hughes is just a mad attention slut.
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UD thanks Jon.