… the Central Michigan University math professors not guilty of plagiarizing a grant they took part in have begun to identify themselves.
One of the seven mathematics faculty members listed on the original National Science Foundation proposal that was found to be plagiarized confirmed she did not participate in writing the proposal.
Mathematics associate professor Lisa DeMeyer was one of the seven faculty members on the investigative staff for the grant proposal and was a senior staff member on the project.
She said in a letter e-mailed to Central Michigan Life she did not participate in writing the grant proposal.
“I assisted the co-principal investigators developing course materials, that was going to be my job but the project was stopped before the work was complete,“ DeMeyer said…
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Update: The plagiarists have been revealed: Manouchehri — now sharing her gifts with another university, Ohio State — and Lapp.
Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
You bet.
This story offends on so many levels UD doesn’t know where to start.
Oh, sure she does. She’ll start by linking you to this article, detailing the gangrenous corruption of Jack Bonner, a DC lobbyist whose firm sends fake letters to Congress on behalf of pharma and other clients. The letters – full of pretend mistakes to make them look authentic – appear to have come from just plain American folks, and argue on behalf of issues dear to Bonner’s corporate clients’ hearts. They are of course written by Bonner’s firm.
After decades of this practice, Bonner for some reason got caught at it, or offended someone high up or something, because Bonner recently got, as TPM writes, “hauled before Congress,” where he swore up and down he’d be a good boy from now on.
To that end, he hired an old friend, American University professor James Thurber, as his ethics adviser, to produce an ad cleaning up Bonner’s rep, presenting him to the world as a scholar and a gentleman. And how else to do this but through the university?
Here’s the ad.
Having done some guest lectures and workshops for AU, Bonner turns out to be a regular philosophe.
Classy to use the respectability of the university to clean this guy up… Classy to drag students into it — We love you, Jack! — as well as AU… Although AU’s been so scandal-ridden for so long that a make-the-lobbyist-look-pretty ad doesn’t add much …
But here’s the grangrene on the cake: As TPM notes, even now Bonner’s giving a workshop at AU on how to do his thing!
Grassroots Lobbying
The Art and Craft of Lobbying
Instructor: Jack Bonner
October 24 & October 31
This weekend workshop is designed to teach the craft of grassroots lobbying as practiced in Washington, D.C. Emphasis is on the detailed strategies and applications of grassroots lobbying. Students are exposed to the latest developments in the field with practicing lobbyists and gain practical grassroots skills.
As TPM comments, “[W]ho better to teach those ‘latest developments’ than a guy whose firm just got caught sending forged letters urging wavering members of Congress to vote against climate change legislation, on behalf of a coal-industry client but purporting to come from local community groups?”
From TPM‘s latest post on the situation:
“The university is aware of the ad and is looking into the facts of the situation,” [an American University] spokeswoman told TPMmuckraker. “The university does not endorse individuals or organizations.”
The ad was placed — and, according to the AU spokeswoman, paid for — by the school’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, which is run by long-time professor and political expert James Thurber.
So now Thurber’s in trouble and he’ll have to turn around and hire Bonner’s firm to place ads calling Thurber a scholar and a gentleman…
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Update: Thurber has apologized.
Independent Study.
It’s one of those phrases. It’s like the word non-profit. They both sound so damn good until you look closely at what they might actually mean.
Harvard University and the NCAA, for instance, are non-profits.
And independent study at universities with major sports teams is often code for Players do jackshit and get one A after another.
It’s independent, see. It’s between professor and student and it’s none of your business what anybody does or doesn’t do to get credits.
UD has followed one independent study scandal after another (Auburn’s the biggie) since she birthed University Diaries.
Now there’s one at Marshall University — not sports-related, but, as is the West Virginia custom, political corruption-related.
The Marshall University student newspaper reports:
West Virginia State Treasurer John Perdue’s daughter, Emily Perdue … received two incompletes [in independent study courses] from [Marshall University College of Education and Human Services professor] Laura Wyant.
The incompletes were changed to letter grades [both A] by Rosalyn Templeton, dean of the college of education, after a meeting with the student and her father. Templeton was not listed as an Instructor of Record when she changed the incompletes, which is a violation of university policy.
Wyant’s really pissed.
Professor Laura Wyant presented a petition with 42 faculty signatures to the executive committee Monday asking them to investigate.
The grades in question are for Emily Perdue in two independent study courses last spring.
Wyant says Education Dean Rosalyn Templeton improperly removed her as Perdue’s instructor and took over the grading herself. Wyant said Perdue and his wife both met with faculty and administration officials before the change was made.
Wyant gave an interview a couple of weeks ago:
… Wyant said Emily Perdue never showed up for any class meetings and never turned in any work during the semester.
“It was a concern to me when my students don’t come to class or show progress in the course, and I usually call them in and talk to them,” Wyant said.
She says nothing happened until the end of the semester in May when Emily and her father met with several school officials, including herself and Dr. Rosalyn Templeton, the dean of the College of Education and Human Services.
“The dean and her and her father went into a closed door meeting,” Wyant said. “When the dean returned, she said, ‘I will be assuming the responsibilities for this student,’ and that was the end of the discussion.”
Wyant added, “When Dr. Templeton made it clear that she was going to be handling this student’s academic progress then I said, ‘Well, she needs to be in a class in your name.’ I made several attempts to make that happen and every time they were disregarded.”
[The interviewer asks:] “Yet those grades changed and had you seen any of Emily’s work?”
“No, I had not seen any work, and the grade was changed and that was the concern for me because my legal adviser said if I changed a grade without seeing the work or supervising the work then that could be fraud,” Wyant responded…
After denials up and down from the school’s president and a bunch of other administrators, the school is now investigating.
Her winning grant proposal to the NSF was plagiarized, as was its research. The school she just left, Central Michigan University, has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the NSF, and, as one faculty member put it:
“We are under budget constraints, and this is a lot of money… I’m concerned that colleagues of mine committed what is a major breach of academic integrity. We tell our students all the time that they shouldn’t plagiarize in their papers, and here we have colleagues who should know better.”
Now at Ohio State she lists on her webpage cv the very grant.
2005-2007, Co-PI (with Douglas Lapp): CONCEPT: CONnecting Content and Pedagogical preparation of Teachers. National Science Foundation.
Here she is. Ohio State’s picked a winner.
From an article in the Globe and Mail:
The world gasped last week as rotund, owl-browed author Salman Rushdie, 62, attended a writers gala – with 26-year-old Harvard grad and stunner Min Lieskovsky on his arm.
… Mr. Rushdie has become the poster boy for the intellectual who routinely lands babes much to the bewilderment of everyone.
… The brainiac holds a particular sex appeal for women. From Woody Allen, who dated Diane Keaton and married Mia Farrow, to Malcolm Gladwell, who according to the Daily Beast’s Sean Macaulay is quite the “love guru,” and Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, who reportedly gets hit on by breathy groupies at book signings, it’s clear that geeks can captivate.
… “The idea of dating or hooking up with a prof [remarks one female student] is one of those kinky dreams I’m sure many girls have.”…
Nothing kinky about it, and it happens so often… and the student gets pissed and tells on her professor so often … that University Diaries constantly has to decide whether to blog about the latest imploding professor/student affair.
But what UD finds strange about the Globe and Mail story’s effort to explain this phenomenon is this: The article never considers, as it maunders on about power, the most likely explanation of all.
People with highly educated, original minds know stuff. They are much more cerebrally organized, and thus probably much more interesting, than other people. They have wit. They may even – a few of them – have wisdom. As we stagger about in the dark, desperate to understand the world and ourselves, we’re drawn — sometimes deeply — to people who seem to shed lots of light.
A University of Nevada Reno student sees what his professor’s capable of, and promises to behave.
San Francisco Chronicle:
… This year, UC Berkeley’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics – whose football team is in the Bowl Subdivision – is projected to run a deficit of nearly $6 million, rising to $6.4 million next year.
To make ends meet, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau expects to lend the athletes more than $12 million.
… The last time the athletes ran up a multiyear debt – owing the university $31.4 million by 2007 – the bill was forgiven…
[A] group of [Berkeley] faculty members who have dubbed themselves a Sports Grinch Club objects to the use of any university funds being spent on intercollegiate athletics.
“We ought to stop subsidizing this program,” said Michael O’Hare, a professor at Cal’s Goldman School of Public Policy. He and others say the loss to the school far outweighs any benefit because elite athletes generally have lower graduation rates and receive unfair benefits compared with regular students.
He said the Faculty Senate – the voice of tenured instructors in university governance – will consider a nonbinding resolution at its Nov. 5 meeting to end the subsidies.
O’Hare called “deeply depressing” the Knight Commission’s new report, in which university presidents acknowledge that they have little control over the escalating costs of their football programs.
[A] Cal spokesman … said, “There’s a reason that 10,000 students come to every home football game.
“They’re not just at Berkeley to attend class. They come to be part of a community.” …
And you know… you just know… with Berkeley’s notorious difficulty getting people to apply to that school, let alone decide to come, that without heavily funded athletics, the campus would have to shut down.
UD‘s got the impression that many American university students now routinely check Rate My Professors before taking a course. Despite RMP‘s obvious limitations, students really have to.
Why? Because unwise tenure decisions at some universities have wedged into place professors like this one.
Recently disciplined by the Ohio State University Office of Human Resources, the professor (this is his self-published book) has generated many student complaints about his teaching.
Here is a recent newspaper article about him.
… who was fired from his position at the University of Poznan for pro-democracy activities, including underground publishing, but was welcomed back after 1989, has died. During his years of protest against the Polish regime, he went on hunger strikes and went to prison.
A Popperian, Nowak urged his students, as they write in an introduction to a volume in his honor, “to look for holes in his theories.”
Nowak was also a Marxist.
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Mr UD just got back from food shopping.
“Nowak. Yes. He was the only Marxist in Solidarity.”
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Mr UD reads this post and says:
Popperian? Maybe in this restricted pedagogical sense; but intellectually he was an anti-Popperian. Popper thought there could be no rational guidelines to scientific discovery. Nowak’s famous phrase, as I recall it, was “caricature in the service of explanation.” The scientist attempts, in Nowak’s view, to capture in a few lines the essence of a phenomenon. Popper would deny that one can say anything about what he considered spontaneous creative guesses about phenomena. For Popper, falsifiability is the only criterion distinguishing real from pseudo science.
A professor at Wellesley gets her bike back by writing to the idiot who stole it and then tried to sell it on Craigslist.
And they’re fine, fine. Sensible, fine. But as UD ponders her own gratifying media stuff over the last few years, she thinks she might have something to add to the GW list… Scathing Online Schoolmarm also has a few things to say…
Here are some of UD’s university’s suggestions for faculty on how to handle media appearances, with UD/SOS adding some thoughts in blue ink.
* Are you the right person? Only agree to talk about what you know about. If you can’t help (i.e. if you are not the right person), offer to find someone who can. [Pish posh. You’re the right person. Go for it. Is UD an expert on the Dan Brown oeuvre? Wing it.]
* Be prepared. If the call takes you by surprise, tell the reporter that you’re busy but will call back in 15 minutes or so. This will enable you to collect your thoughts, gather information, and make notes. [Maybe I’m in a faster lane than GW, but I wouldn’t recommend this. Er… gimme a few minutes to collect my thoughts… I’ll call you back… Meanwhile the producer’s on the line to someone who shoots answers back immediately…. See, this is the sort of thing a professor will do … Lemme check a reference or two and… Nein. Just do it. Go with it.]
* Stay positive. Be friendly and conversational, even if the reporter seems to be adversarial. However, don’t be lulled into flippancy or forced humor. [I guess this is okay, but it’s drifting toward bland. Be yourself. If you’re un p’tit peu non-standard, not entirely amiable, go with it.]
* Avoid jargon and complex language. Use plain, simple language as though you were talking to a friend or neighbor. Define technical terms and use examples, anecdotes. [Absolutely. Excellent advice. For talking or for writing.]
* Speak slowly and clearly. Reporters are writing down notes or typing them into a computer. They will be more likely to get it right if you take your time. [This may be true for talking to a reporter from the Washington Post on the telephone; but television appearances tend to be a little sharper, a little faster-paced in terms of speech, in UD‘s experience.]
* Stay on message. Repeat primary points to make sure message is clear and accurate. Don’t veer off topic. [I guess this is true. Though the other day in my DeLillo class I suddenly for no particular reason started talking about the new scary film, Paranormal Activity, and the place LIT UP.]
* Never go “off-the-record.” Expect everything to be quoted. That’s no reason to be nervous—just be aware. [SOS says: Lose the quotation marks.]
* Avoid “no comment.” It implies confirmation. If you can’t comment, provide an explanation, i.e., a personnel matter, pending legal issue, etc. [Lose the effing quotation marks.]
* Stay calm. If you “flub” an answer, start over and rephrase your response. [What did I tell you???]
One final piece of advice: Don’t watch tv. Don’t own a tv. UD doesn’t watch or own a tv, and look how well she’s done with the medium. Possibly there’s a connection.
… a Harvard professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health, has died in a car crash. His wife and mother were also killed:
[H]is SUV veered over the center line on a rural New Hampshire roadway and struck an oncoming car, killing its driver as well, police said. … “We don’t know where any of the vehicles were coming from and where they were going,” Guinard said, adding that “there was nothing to indicate” that alcohol was a factor in the crash.
… Lagakos had until recently served as head of Harvard’s biostatistics department, a rotating post, and had developed statistical methods used for numerous clinical trials on AIDS research in the United States…
… of UD’s friend, Lisa Nesselson, and a professor in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts (note way cool faculty webpage), has died. She was 57.
Friedberg wrote about the strange new world of screen media — the constant presence of screens, our constant scanning of screens — but she was also an historian who complained about the “presentness,” as she called it, of media studies. She was interested in shifts in the ways we envision the world, and her work went back as far as the sixteenth century.
In an email to me, Lisa, who lives in Paris, writes:
She was smart and funny.
She and [her professor, novelist and screenwriter husband] Howard liked to stay at the Hotel Louisiane because of its spartan style and famous guests.
The only drawback to their incredibly cool house [in the Hollywood Hills] was that it didn’t have enough walls for the giant vintage film posters they brought back from France.
There’s a tiny clothing boutique a few blocks away from here called Hug & Co. and …Anne liked to take a photo in front of it with her son each time she was here.
Friedberg’s very vivid web presence, in interviews and films and interactive sites, reminds UD that to her it does indeed still seem strange and new, this online history we leave of ourselves…