Les UDs have what they always considered a posh neighbor across the street from their Shady Hill Square house in Cambridge. Fifty yards from their ivied walls lies the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rather vague outfit to both UDs, but one they feel sure does good and high-minded things.
I don’t know why neither of us has ever had any interest in figuring out just what the AAAS does. Talking about it now, we were able to eke out a memory that the AAAS publishes the journal Daedalus, and that our long-ago neighbor and friend John Kenneth Galbraith was a member (we think). I’ve always been pleased that their rather small building in a large park keeps the view in that direction green and leafy…
All very nice, you say. And yet — who knows what evil lurks at Irving and Beacon Streets? A reader sends UD (UD thanks her reader) this scathing article from the Boston Globe, detailing an organization whose leader lied about having earned a doctorate (a lie that continues to help her get federal funds), makes an unconscionable salary (almost $600,000) for the head of a very small non-profit, and “requires workers to chauffeur her between the office and her luxury apartment along the Charles River in Cambridge.” (Back in 2003, the Globe had already taken notice of this woman.)
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Now if your problem is that you’re perceived as high-handed and out of touch, how do you deal with that?
Well, you instruct one of your underlings to instruct reporters that they are to report to your expensive public relations person who will condescend to say the following:
“Neither the academy nor President Berlowitz is going to respond to subjective, interpretive, and gossipy allegations from former employees and unnamed sources. …Nor are they going to respond to personal questions that are irrelevant, do not belong in the public domain and, frankly, smack of sexism.”
Wow! Winner! Touched all the bases there. Advised her not to speak directly to the press. Not even to answer the phone, a job for subordinates. Announced that James Devitt, NYU spokesman who looked at that school’s records in regard to President Berlowitz, is just a mean ol’ stupid ol’ gossip. Plus you’re all sexists!
All UD can say is, next time I see the Berlowitz limo whizzing by I’m gonna let out a Bronx cheer loud enough for her to hear and tell her to move the hell out. She’s lowering the tone of the place.
… now swirls around the Chief Rabbi of France: plagiarism, academic fraud…
Which goes to prove one of the fundamental rock solid oft-stated UD principles:
Find one instance of plagiarism for any one person, and you’ll find lots more; and, almost certainly, you’ll find that the same person has engaged in other forms of malfeasance.
Details on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has emerged.
Further investigation …showed Bernheim noted on his CV a high academic status that he may not actually hold.
His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agregation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions.
However university “agregation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim.
The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agregation lists kept by the French education ministry either.
“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agregation,” she said.
“This is the first instance that is so blatant.”
… I guess. When we were at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland decades ago, UD‘s then-boyfriend, David Kosofsky (brother of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), took it into his head that we should pretend to be Israelis. Little UD must have passively gone along, but the evil genius was David; and UD remembers how horrified and trapped she felt when she realized that the inane scheme was working all too well — that people at the school indeed assumed he wasn’t lying (what kind of a freak would lie about such a thing?) and in a kindly way inquired about their backgrounds, asked if there were special foods they should prepare for them at dinner, wondered if they’d been traumatized by that country’s difficult history, etc., etc.
UD felt shame. She insisted that David figure out a way to stop the game.
To this day, UD can’t enjoy the whole Sacha Baron Cohen thing, where you laugh at the efforts of well-meaning people to be polite and understanding toward some fake identity you’ve made them believe in. The word for this is cruel, and it’s not exactly news that everyone has the capacity to be cruel, and that some people have a large capacity.
As to the Manti Te’o hoax at Notre Dame, UD can only say what she’s said for so long in this blog category (hoaxes are so common, they’ve got their own category on University Diaries): The world is full of vaguely sociopathic game-players, and, you know, let the buyer beware. Walk down your street of dreams – don’t let me stop you – but do yourself a favor and wonder occasionally if the uncannily exact match between certain inspirational stories on offer (see also Lance Armstrong) and your desires in regard to inspiration is just too close for credibility.
I’m a sap too – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But as an inveterate hoax-watcher, I do begin to see patterns.
When it comes to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this blog.
These details from the Eric Smart scientific misconduct scandal on that campus round out the picture of UK as one of America’s most third-world universities, featuring not only an intensely corrupt athletics division, but a high-profile research lab whose now-disgraced director seems to have been protected by people in the administration.
Tim Bricker, the former chair of pediatrics, wrote [Smart] a recommendation letter to the state’s teacher certification agency, calling him “an outstanding teacher.” Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart’s personnel file that detailed his yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.
UD began university life, as some of her readers know, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
She hadn’t been there long before she felt the seductive pull of simply making up people and quotations for her stories. Listen to any radio call-in show to grasp how dumb and halting most real people are. Much better to use your literary talents to fashion Wildean bon mots in the mouths of unique and deeply moving human specimens.
Journalists who do this long enough, like this one from the Cape Cod Times, may eventually get caught. She has been fired.
When does a university start tipping over into Auburn territory? When does it accumulate so many scandals of so many kinds – athletic, research, financial – that it begins to get that University of Kentucky smell?
When you add the current insider trading scandal in the University of Michigan’s medical school to the psychology department scandal … when you throw in long-established questions about the university president’s extensive, lucrative, and possibly conflictual corporate board activity… and when you add years of high-profile athletic scandals, including the president’s recent very own Rich Rodriguez debacle… Well, UM’s heading into the red zone.
… to its most basic moving parts.
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Transcript:
Two academic men in suits chat. Looks like Harvard Yard in the background.
So the for-profits mop up $32 billion in taxpayer money a year, even though a majority of students quickly drop out!
And for presiding over these empires of failure, the average for-profit CEO is paid over $7 million!
— 7 million? Seriously?
Seriously.
— Does it come with balloons and a 4-foot check?
No, I imagine it’s a discreet transfer of wealth.
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UD thanks Dirk.
The pseuds who pretended to have written it have no shame.
You would think their universities would have a smidgeon.
I’ve already, on this blog, compared Jonah Lehrer to Johan Hari – both of them madly successful, incredibly prolific writers whose prolificness indeed turns out to be incredible. Hari looked like the greater sinner of the two – he plagiarized and made up quotes, while Lehrer, last we heard, was guilty merely of self-plagiarism.
However, a tenacious writer and Bob Dylan freak has
[put] to rest the notion that Lehrer’s most egregious literary sins were a matter of the inaptly titled “self-plagiarism.” That’s the offense that the New Yorker uncovered in June, after Jim Romenesko reported that one of Lehrer’s posts for the New Yorker repeated material that he’d written in the Wall Street Journal.
The Dylan guy pestered Lehrer about quotations from Dylan that appear in one of his books. Turns out that, like Hari, Lehrer makes stuff up. His editor, in firing him, says it’s a “terrifically sad situation,” but UD wonders why he says that. Hari’s writing a book, and I’m sure it’ll do well (just as I have high hopes for von Googleberg’s book — and he got a job at a fancy Washington think tank too!); these guys always pop back up with something. Lehrer will write a book about his downfall and then he’ll write a book about his recovery (thanks to Buddhism, a woman, the sheer humbling indignity of it all…) and all will be well. As Gore Vidal put it in one of his greatest essays, “For those who cannot sing songs, a patter of penitence will do.” I’m assuming none of these guys can sing songs.
It’s not sad. These stories are kind of funny – in the sense of farce. Even James Frey has done fine.
It’s alright, ma. He’s only bleeding a little.
… is the latest social psychologist to be Simonized.
Wonderfully, his work had to do with morality. He proved by numbers that tall people are more ethical than short people.
I mean, he proved it until he got Simonized.
University Diaries has chronicled scads of professors and students caught on security camera stealing, taping harassment notes to themselves on their doors, scrawling swastikas on their doors… The most spectacular case of this was Pomona professor Kerri Dunn (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/aug/19/local/me-dunn19), although in that case it wasn’t a security camera. A bunch of guys saw her spray painting her car with racist slogans.
Only a few days ago I wrote about the occupational therapy professor filmed returning some amazing products he’d gifted himself out of his university’s endowment (http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=36404). He’d been tipped off that university officials suspected him of theft.
Now there’s this:
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-new-britain-ccsu-bias-made-it-up-0703-20120702,0,4275448.story
This variety of campus story has become, over the years I’ve written this blog, incredibly common. A student reports a hate crime against herself. Once again security cameras film her staging it.
It seems to be about drawing attention to oneself – like Dunn, you get to address big rallies of students and faculty outraged on your behalf.
Sometimes, as allegedly in the Madonna Constantine case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Constantine
people do hate stuff to themselves in order to deflect attention from other problems they’re having.
But this is usually about pathetic love-me motives.
… but it’s pretty clear that there are at least two groups of clever people out there actively checking your letters and numbers, your words and your music, your alpha and omega. So don’t be paranoid, but look sharp.
There are all those Germans with their plagiarism-detection websites… They’ve taken down a defense minister and many other high-ranking people and they’re definitely still at it.
And then there are statisticians like Uri Simonsohn. Uri’s a young Wharton professor who checks out your numbers and on finding them bogus destroys your career.
That may sound harsh, but do we really want social psychologists feeding us all sorts of bullshit all the time and gaining fancy professorships thereby? I don’t think people should be rewarded for taking advantage of our propensity to believe anything.
How could the guy who discovered gems like this now be accused of research fraud????
… because school administrators with fake degrees usually look for jobs in nowheresville sorts of places, and Wasser managed to become (until he was found out) superintendent of a large New Jersey school district. Doc Pendley, who came to the wee Columbia California school district burnishing a LaSalle University degree (the LaSalle scam operated out of Louisiana before its operator went to prison), is far more typical.
Pendley’s bullshit degree is only the beginning of Columbia’s problems.
Pendley and the Board of Trustees have faced criticism within the past several months for their handling of a May 2010 criminal incident involving Pendley’s 24-year-old son, Brennan, who worked as an after-school aide at Columbia Elementary.
Brennan pleaded guilty in June of last year to having sex with a minor, then an eighth-grader, in a classroom.
Since then, comment at district board meetings has centered on John Pendley’s hiring of his unqualified son for the job…
