If any of this is truthful testimony, we have in Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan a character beyond the wildest imaginings of Michel Houellebecq.

According to the complainant, the assault occurred very soon after her entry into [Tariq Ramadan’s] room: slaps to the face, arms, breasts and punches in the belly, oral sex and sodomy imposed by force, new blows, a new rape. “He dragged me by the hair all over the room to get me into the bathtub to urinate on me,” she said in her complaint, claiming to have finally managed to escape only in the morning.

… went after fascist Robert Spencer when she caught sight of him in her local gym. I kind of thought that was cool, the way she just went up to him while he was stretching his biceps and called him a nazi and all. I even celebrated her in song.

I was less enthralled when I found out Fair had gone hammer and tongs at a woman who wrote in an opinion piece that she had decided to vote for Trump. The woman has filed a complaint about her with the university.

With this latest incident, in the Frankfurt Airport, Ms Fair has shifted altogether from refreshingly confrontational to Diary of a Mad Housewife. The story just broke, and there aren’t any good sources yet, but let’s go with the Daily Mail anyway…. Oh, Kansas City Star just picked it up… That’s better…

So what seems likeliest to have happened (police say they have witnesses, and I’d think they’d also have security footage, but whatever) is that they told her her deodorant was basically a liquid and she couldn’t carry it on the plane. She freaked and called them nazis, which as you may know in Germany is not at all, legally speaking, a good idea. After she was hit up with a fine, she wrote an essay blaming it on sexism (German police do this to so many women at airports!), or on a young man with a nazi haircut nearby who upset her, or some such bullshit. I mean, writing that way in her own defense was as stupid as shouting nazi to security police at a German airport. In kindness to her, I won’t link you to the essay, but I’m sure you can find it.

Christine Fair is now, how you say, a woman with a past. Not much, however, Georgetown University can do about her. Beyond awaiting her next bimbo explosion.

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

Update: The German authorities do not intend to play nice.

And yet and yet and yet. After following this professor’s behaviors (chronicled above) for some time, UD offers the following theory: She’s not really out of control. She’s an attention-whore. And she’s getting what she wants.

Pharmacy professor Richard Morrisett will remain at [the University of Texas], despite pleading guilty to a felony charge after strangling his girlfriend until “she saw stars”…

The Florida Atlantic University professor who believes Sandy Hook was a hoax, with the parents of the dead children diabolically pretending to be parents of dead children, has lost his legal effort to get reinstated into his tenured job at that most pathetic of American universities.

He tried to make it a free speech case, but FAU successfully argued that it fired him because he doesn’t fill out required forms.

Jurors were first asked to decide whether Tracy’s blog posts were “a motivating factor” in the university’s decision to fire the professor from his 11-year tenured position. If they answered that question yes, they were to decide if the school would have terminated Tracy if he hadn’t publicized his conspiracy theories.

Since they answered no to the first question, they didn’t have to answer the second one. By deciding that Tracy’s blogs weren’t a “motivating factor” for university officials, they apparently accepted FAU’s claims that Tracy was fired for failing to fill out a mandatory form reporting his outside activity to his bosses.

You and I know why this veteran conspiracy theorist didn’t fill out those forms, right? Because the forms came directly from the Office of Aliens Trying to Fuck With My Head and Damned If I’m Going to Give Them the Keys to my Precious Bodily Fluids.

So it’s all over except for this. Why is FAU, a vile school that tenures the vile, allowed to exist?

… to help them understand what “extra credit” means, and how it differs from “extortion.”

Through the long life of this blog, UD has read one account after another of some professor somewhere offering extra credit if the kids will help her husband distribute campaign literature (he’s running for school board!), or if they will show proof that they gave blood (blood donation is a virtue, and I want to encourage it!), or will show proof that they voted (it’s your civic duty!), etc., etc. But just like professors who force students to buy the very expensive textbook they themselves wrote, professors who exploit students politically or materially ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. (Lesson One: Forget ‘Beyond Good and Evil.’ Let’s Start With the Basics of Wrong and Right.) The very fundamental idea that a classroom of students does not constitute one great big desperate business/political rally opportunity seems beyond the grasp of many professors, if the daily paper is anything to go by.

So for instance this Kutztown University professor thought it would be a great idea to offer to up the grade of any student who attended an anti-GOP tax rally on campus. I mean, you want a lot of people there in order to make a statement, and there are all these people sitting right in front of you, ready to be organized in exchange for an A for Political Effort on My Behalf.

She’s had to revoke the deal.

UD will add that she doubts any of the professors who do these things understand that they’ve done anything wrong. Remember that Doonesbury title, “But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There”? It’s like that. But My Students Were Just Sitting There.

… Thunderbird School of Global Mismanagement, this Duke lecturer brings her … intriguing … training to those few lucky high-collared non-journalists able to enter the mystic precincts of her class on the hush-hush subject of the hedge fund.

From her syllabus:

Please come to class with a polished appearance – I will not ask you to come in business attire, but collared shirts are appreciated, THANK YOU!

(UD, an old hippie, has a similar template on her syllabi:

Please come to class with a disheveled appearance – I will not ask you to come in freak attire, but FREE THE WEED t-shirts are appreciated, THANK YOU!)

Audio recordings of the course are verboten and students are instructed that they may not under any circumstances spill the top secret shit the guest speakers (the class is almost all guest speakers and other forms of student and visitor presentation) are willing to share with its carefully vetted enrollees.

Oh, and:

Anyone who is on the staff of [the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle,] is not permitted to take this class.

What UD loves about the institutional response to this final directive is that the school apologizes for the instructor’s “poorly worded” approach, which might give the unwary student the “perception that any student group is being excluded.” It’s like, when Donald Trump said “Grab ’em by the pussy,” his poor phrasing might have given some the perception that he was talking about grabbing pussies.

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

A walk down memory lane.

In real time.

The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side:

Much of our
of borEdom
Toward talks in
it misled Him
diplOmatic skill to
place to place but Does it look
at present Most
fivE Iranian fishermen
cuTbacks would not

It went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and the Times, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”

More time to work on his mousse treatment.

CS50 Updates Course Policies, Asks Students To Go To Class

Okay, not the Onion. But Onion-worthy, no?

Look at this last part of the article, where one of the professor’s teaching assistants praises his experimental, innovative, problem-solving approach to teaching:

For at least one former CS50 staffer, the changes to the course signal [David] Malan’s willingness to solve problems through experimentation.

“Seems like he’s continuing to experiment and learn as I think he should and does relatively well,” said former CS50 teaching fellow Mark D. Grozen-Smith ’15. “I’m glad that we have innovation alive in such an impactful, high-demand class.”

Asking students to attend your course! Why didn’t I think of that?

They tend to be unable to stop doing stuff, saying stuff, creating keepsakes of their itinerary, as they – in principle – try to put more and more distance between themselves and the police. The Northwestern University microbiologist who seems to have stabbed a guy to death is on the lam; but while on the lam he has made an apology video (intended for his family, but now, one presumes, in the hands of the authorities), and has stopped by a library in Wisconsin to make a donation in the name of the guy he allegedly killed. I’m gonna guess that his next move will be suicide.

A non-academic would have made a beeline for a trailer park in upper Temagami and hunkered down there silently smoking and drinking until everyone forgot about him. He wouldn’t have made everything such a production already!

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

UPDATE: Both suspects have surrendered in San Francisco.

[The] associate director for research in the Regional Primate Research Center [at the University of Washington] … created a hostile work environment for a woman under his direct supervision because he “persistently, and for an extended period of time, made unwanted sexual comments and jokes,” and reminded her often that he could fire her. The investigator also found that [he] had a sexual relationship with another woman under his direct supervision, and that he viewed pornography on his work computer even when he was warned not to. … [He also] asked employees to solicit a prostitute for him…

The university had received complaints about [his] behavior on six separate occasions, as far back as 2006…

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

UD thanks Seelye.

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

And if you want to know absolutely everything the big adorable lunkhead did, go here.

It’s rare that a university professor kills; when he does (it’s almost always he), it’s almost always a husband or boyfriend killing a wife or girlfriend in a rage.

This much-covered case of a Northwestern University professor allegedly stabbing a young man to death in the professor’s apartment sounds like something similar, although this might have been a gay relationship.

To the newsworthiness of a professor killing (and a professor from a major university), we can add the fact that the guy specialized in the plague!

Oxford College Treasurer and
Black Death Professor
Sought in US-Wide Murder Manhunt

Here’s hoping he didn’t arm himself with a few bacilli on his way out of town.

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

He’s on the run. Maybe I saw him last Wednesday.

I was on the metro, the red line, from Bethesda into the city to have lunch with a friend, and across from me on the train sat a guy who looked somewhat like the description and photo the police provided. He was probably in his forties, athletic, on the tall side, and what really struck me was the t-shirt he had on: It said VASSAR on it, and the guy graduated from Vassar.

He had a lot of luggage, but lots of people on the DC metro carry lots of luggage.

And – yeah, I hear you – would a smart guy like this one wear a shirt that had Vassar emblazoned on it?

All well-provisioned universities need access to an Emergency Title Reserve, a list of names they can immediately slap on a professor with a named chair when the original name on the professor’s chair suddenly becomes… well…

Take Mary Waters, the socially conscious Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard until it turned out Zukerman had stolen around fifty million dollars from the United States government. When it looked likely Zukerman would go to prison (that is in fact his current primary residence), Harvard was able to scrounge around in its ETR and come up with the name of some schmuck willing to sit there until he or she was needed (Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do or die).

Zukerman stole from the poor to give to the rich, as did the fascinating Esformes family, long one of the filthiest nursing home operators in Chicago, but now, in the person of Philip Esformes, “charged … in what has been touted as the nation’s biggest Medicare fraud case.” These named chair donors don’t think small – if you’re going to steal from America’s struggling taxpayer, steal tens – hundreds? – of millions! Then spread it around among the deserving rich so you can get your name emblazoned in some hoitsy-toitsy joint like Harvard, the University of Chicago…

Nothing says whitewashing like a university chair. If Bernie hadn’t suffered a reversal, hands down there’d have been a Madoff chair at Yeshiva University.

So Nir Uriel, once touted as the Esformes Chair in Medicine at Chicago, has been re-named the Block Professor.

UD of course has nothing against universities scrambling to dump crooks and replace them with saints. She has only two comments to make about this.

1. Better make sure the second-in-command is pure as the driven snow. It would be positively Rube Goldberg to have to keep giving their professors new names.

2. Instead of just quietly doing it, UD thinks universities should announce the change. Disclosure matters, and there’s a way of writing this sort of news release that makes it honest and unembarrassing.

For many years the University of Chicago has been pleased to be the recipient of financial generosity from the Esformes family, which endowed a professorship in our medical school. We have, however, now removed the Esformes name from that chair, because members of the family have been accused of Medicare fraud.

Disgusting
Tragic
Outrageous
Despicable
Egregious
Shocking
Contemptible

“Watch this space,” announced President Nikias, “for additional adjectives as appropriate.”