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.

[T]he professor said that he didn’t visit the site on purpose, and that he wasn’t used to working with a laptop…

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UD thanks Andrew.

… 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.

… has died.

He knew how to improvise. On one occasion, he gave a beautifully constructed and coherent talk at Stanford, even though the school’s president, after he introduced him, “inadvertently picked up Dworkin’s detailed lecture notes from the lectern.”

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“Each person must take his own life seriously: he must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity.”

… is the chancellor of Southampton Solent University… In England, yes, of course… Are you thinking an American university could cook up a chancellor with a name like that? And until recently Lord West of Spithead’s University, “which currently sits 117th out of 120 in the university league tables,” featured among its business faculty a “senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” who seems to have directed all that innovating entrepreneurial energy to the distribution of cocaine. Out of her home.

For Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, the question was whether truth was a woman.

For the contemporary German philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger, the question is: Supposing his favorite soccer team is a woman?

In an article, and now in an interview (Zeit Online: “You are serious about your feminization [of soccer] thesis?”), Eilenberger warns of androgynous-looking, collectivist-minded new coaches and players on the team. Bayern Munich is starting to play like a girl!

To those who’ve ridiculed him as “Philodoof,” Eilenberger darkly notes that the feminization of soccer is only a small part of “the end of man” generally – the end of masculinity itself.

Some professors are this cynical and arrogant.

I don’t think many are; but there are enough out there to have inspired the satire.

Madeleine Honig and UD met as undergrads at Northwestern University, and have remained friends. One of UD‘s most vivid memories is a particular image of Madeleine – a very young freshman because she’d been admitted a year or two early – marching exuberantly along the campus lakefront on a sunny day. UD was sitting in one of the newish lakefill buildings, watching her, and marveling at her beauty as the wind whipped her black hair. She seemed entirely happy, entirely open to the world.

Madeleine’s father, Arnold Honig, died last year. He was a physicist at Syracuse University, a “physics icon,” “internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of highly polarized nuclear spin systems.”

This one’s by an accounting professor on the subject of fraud. So a paper about fraud which seems to have fraudulent elements.

The authors claimed to have used data involving 150 US audit offices and 2,614 auditors of a CPA firm. But when it later came to light that the 150 offices were both domestic and international, that prompted other questions by the journal about the data. [James E.] Hunton declined to answer the questions, saying the data were confidential.

Further review of the article (see the exchanges here) suggests other problems with the data.

The professor – a big-shot at Bentley University – has resigned.