Spencer’s Fair Queen

More than most, Fair’s full of the living fire,
Kindled within to make the nazi feare:
No feare of noise to make while he perspires,
Not loath to spit upon his training gear.
Through your disdain blindsided guest
Denies his name and utters not a sound.
But you will not allow mad minds to rest
In fascist hopes on race war futures bound.
You stop his thoughts and pinion him within,
You stop his tongue, and teach his gym to freake,
You quick’n the storme his passion did begin,
Strong through your cause as you your vengeance wreake.
Dark is the world, where your rage shined never;
Sad is he borne, that may behold you ever.

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“In 1932, some German people were probably saying between bites of wiener-schnitzel, ‘this is some fucked up shit,’ and then didn’t do anything.”

Christine Fair

… wow.

Oakland University [business school] professor Joseph Schiele is charged with seven different counts including possession with intent to deliver, felony firearm and operating a drug house.

… [T]ips from Oakland University [in Rochester Michigan] students started to pile up in January 2016. Students were reporting something suspicious was going on at the professor’s home.

An array of drugs was on offer, including ketamine.

“Oh my goodness … ketamine? I was thinking like Adderall or weed, or something. That’s a big jump. Wow,” said student Nichole Hill.

The coverage includes a way scary mug shot. Professors typically do not look this scary.

This story is shocking on many levels, but the most shocking appears in the headline. A B-School professor is Giving Drugs to Students.

Not selling drugs to students?

How to spot research fraud.

An envelope containing a bundle of bills amounting to 200 million won ($177,000) was found in a student locker at Sungkyunkwan University campus in Suwon, Gyeonggi.

The owner happens to be a professor of Sungkyunkwan University and husband to attorney, Choi Yu-jeong, who was arrested last year for her involvement in corruption.

The life science student association at the Sungkyunkwan University Natural Sciences campus in Suwon was undergoing spring cleaning on March 7 when they discovered a locked locker. Unable to identify the owner, they forced open the locker.

Inside they found a yellow envelope containing 1,800 50,000 won bills and 1,000 100 dollar bills. The student association immediately notified the school and reported this to the police.

… The attorney, Choi, was charged for having received 5 billion won each in legal fees from Jung Woon-ho, former Nature Republic CEO, and from another individual named Song for bribing the judiciary. Choi was sentenced to six years in prison and 4.5 billion won was confiscated, leaving the possibility of future discoveries.

As always, camera-work played an important part.

She stares abstractly into the middle distance in her official University of Minnesota economics department photograph, avoiding your eye. Students report a similar social avoidance, with some claiming she neither holds office hours nor responds to emails. Since 2003, even the Minnesota Department of Revenue has gotten the cold shoulder from her.

… Beth Elaine Allen, 64, is estimated to owe the state more than $50,000 in outstanding taxes, penalties and interest over a five-year period. Charges say Allen failed to pay income taxes since at least 2003, but due to the statute of limitations for tax crimes, charges are limited to years 2010 to 2015.

A strange case, methinks. After her moderately priced condo was foreclosed on a few years ago, she moved to a $94 a day residence inn; she pays $700 a month to store her belongings. At the residence inn, police found “a 2013 Mercedes-Benz, 19 letters from the Department of Revenue and 60 letters from the IRS and Philadelphia Department of Revenue.” Apparently she spends “thousands on travel, restaurants, grocery stores, liquor and wineries.”

Yet another engineering professor seems to have set up a private business in order to steal university/grant funds. So routine is the phenomenon of engineering professors accused of setting up private businesses through which to steal money that UD has proposed stationing armed guards in front of engineering offices to save time.

No point in covering all of these stories – there are too many of them. But this Norfolk State professor is a chatty lad whose broadly dispersed outrage inspires UD to make an exception.

In this case the missus set up a business selling lab supplies at an insane markup to her man, with the university footing the bill. Auditors had the nerve to discover that the address for Missus Lab Supplies is the professor’s home.

… boring.

Wouldn’t you like to know how to do that?

Why should UM fire a tenured professor who’s got so much to share about high finance techniques?

A spokesperson for the university

could not provide details about what the school policy is on faculty members who face criminal charges [apparently that stuff in the headline is, like, illegal].

So UM is all of a mucksweat. What to do? What to do? Wait until after his [HUGELY EMBARRASSING NATIONAL PUBLICITY] trial? I mean, chances are the guy is totally innocent, this is all a bad dream, and he’ll be back in a flash, his gravitas intact, sharing with his charges the ins and outs of investing…

As big-city lawyer Simkin says in Herzog… But OTOH, if it didn’t get more corrupt, Saul Bellow couldn’t have written hilarious scenes like this one with Simkin… And our own wee UD wouldn’t be able to feature on her blog major machers (to keep the Yiddish thing going) like the Howard E. Buhse Professor of Finance and Law at the University of Minnesota. This guy was a dean; he got an award in counseling…

While holding down a demanding job as a law prof, Edward Adams was running multiple personal businesses, and he was doing some pretty amazing counseling there too. After allegedly embezzling lots of his investors’ money (the FBI describes the “brazen theft of millions of dollars of investors’ funds over the course of several years”), he started to worry that the “theft [would be] uncovered through bankruptcy litigation.” So he

convinced shareholders to convert their worthless Apollo stock into stock in a new company — Scio Diamond Technology Corp. — that [Edward] Adams secretly controlled…

These have got to be the stupidest investors since Bernie Madoff’s lemmings.

Adams is busier than ever. I guess he’s still running a bunch of businesses. He’s still a bigshot law professor at Minnesota. He’s suing the local paper for defamation because of all the mean things they’re saying about him. And he needs to get his best suit dry cleaned for his first court appearance next week. UD hopes UM has a very long Faculty Annual Report form.

Here are more details, including a yummy statement from the university insisting that the guy’s activities are “fully outside” of his university role — moral turpitude not, I guess, being a UM thing.

What alarmed me most … was what I saw in the eyes of the [Middlebury College] crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have seen another human being.

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

Intelligent members of the Middlebury community — including some of my own students and advisees — concluded that Charles Murray was an anti-gay white nationalist from what they were hearing from one another, and what they read on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. Never mind that Dr. Murray supports same-sex marriage and is a member of the courageous “never Trump” wing of the Republican Party.

Students are in college in part to learn how to evaluate sources and follow up on ideas with their own research. The Southern Poverty Law Center incorrectly labels Dr. Murray a “white nationalist,” but if we have learned nothing in this election, it is that such claims must be fact-checked, analyzed and assessed.

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[W]hat the events at Middlebury made clear is that, regardless of political persuasion, Americans today are deeply susceptible to a renunciation of reason and celebration of ignorance. They know what they know without reading, discussing or engaging those who might disagree with them.

What $65,000 in yearly tuition and room and board gets you.

If you’re a much older suitor, it’s not a good idea to use your proximity to death as a come-on.

According to [a UCLA sexual misconduct] investigation, [Professor Eric] Gans contended his advances were welcome, but [Pamela] Thomason said the evidence shows the graduate student repeatedly tried to get Gans to cease unwelcome attention.

“The evidence reflects that Gans exerted psychological pressure on (the student) to submit, including references to his own mortality and to how she changed his life,” Thomason said in the report.

I’m going to be dead in a few months anyway so why not fuck me seems to UD one of the less auspicious approaches.

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

Ever wonder exactly what public relations consultants do?

They keep people from giving interviews and saying things like this.

Gans alleges that the whole situation was a setup by the student’s adviser and the department chair — “who are both women, by the way,” he said — believing that some of his colleagues were jealous of the “extremely attractive, sexy girl” he had as a student and of his academic prowess.

The Dan Markel case gets more farcical by the minute.

Interviews with inmates who spent time with Sigfredo Garcia in the Leon County Jail may corroborate what one of his co-defendants and investigators have said all along about the death of [Florida State University law professor] Dan Markel — that Garcia was allegedly recruited by the law professor’s in-laws in a murder for hire plot.

As the likely truth of what happened emerges more and more clearly, one is shocked again at the insanity and viciousness of the crime. Massacred for wanting to share custody of your children.

… these are all not merely commendable gestures, but will, in certain American university classroom settings, count as credit-bearing assignments.

Over the course of writing this blog, UD has chronicled the many ways professors accomplish two things: Get multiple people to help the professors in their far-flung personal commitments and endeavors; and avoid reading student papers/exams.

It’s win-win, really. You get a captive audience to do your bidding, whatever it may be, and you give yourself a break in terms of academic labor. For the student it’s win-win too – just cough up the good-cause donation, or knock on a district door or two, or endure that initial little pinch as the Red Cross pokes you… and presto! No need to write your final paper (automatic A) or take the final exam (again, automatic A).

UD herself has wondered if she could interest her students in washing her dog. UD’s dog is water-phobic, and the only way UD has been able to wash her is to capture her in her little fenced-in yard and race after her all over the yard while squirting the garden hose at her. The dog runs madly about, and UD runs madly about. Once the dog’s all wet, UD must attempt to hold her still while applying dog shampoo, and then it’s another runabout for rinsing. If, in exchange for not having to write their final paper or take their final exam, one or two of my students would wash my dog…

But no, no. In all the cases UD has mentioned, professors paid a price for these transactions. The latest instance, at the University of Central Florida, involves a psych prof who just a couple years ago was getting praised for doing shit like hypnotizing his entire class, but who’s now catching hell because he’ll drop all sorts of class requirements for students who give their money to a charity poker game. (Maybe the hypnosis was part of the deal: You put them under and then … When I snap my fingers you will awaken and give all your money to Saint Jude’s Hospital…)

Such a classy idea. On top of taking their money (their parents’ money… our tax money…) in tuition, you take more of their money in exchange for making their university tuition meaningless. At least the University of North Carolina’s athletes were on scholarship when the university arranged for them to have meaningless classes.

But anyway. Someone called an ethics hotline on the dude and he’s out on his ass and will have to find a whole new universe of suckers.