… has long been something like the following: Our eminent, money-generating professors will occasionally behave dishonorably – even in ways that have significant legal, not merely moral, repercussions.
We will deal with these events with Ivy gentility — we will say little or nothing, at least publicly. If we punish, we will not say publicly what that punishment was. We will never issue a public statement admitting that something bad happened on our faculty.
So, whether the event was Andrei Shleifer and Russia, or Lawrence Summers and Andrei Shleifer, or three law professors, plus a Harvard Overseer, and plagiarism, Harvard will deal with it quietly, admitting nothing, doing little (at least little that one can measure) by way of punishment.
If, as is the nature of Faustian bargains, Harvard loses a little of its soul with each of these events, well… The main thing is that Harvard can expect its faculty to be still about these things, to keep quiet, to be discreet.
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It isn’t always. It was really pissed at Summers and his, er, implausible remarks about his knowledge of his protegé Shleifer’s activities, for instance.
And now, in the notorious case of the Harvard-packed Monitor Group and its relationship to the Gaddafi regime, one Harvard faculty member has decided to say something. Directly to Drew Faust, Harvard’s president. Her reported response to him is telling.
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“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary,” said Harry Lewis, current Harvard professor and former dean, to the university’s president at a faculty meeting. “Shouldn’t Harvard acknowledge its embarrassment, and might you remind us that when we parlay our status as Harvard professors for personal profit, we can hurt both the university and all of its members? … We can’t keep having these economists go off to foreign countries and fill their pockets and create these huge embarrassments for the university.”
Here, on his blog, is his full statement.
Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her “scold in chief.”
That’s a sweet put-down, no? It implies, first, that Lewis is nothing more than a scold, and that no one, including Drew Faust, would want to join him in being a scold. A scold. Uncool. A finger pointer. A finger shaker. Some sort of uptight hyper-moralist. Because I mean there’s no clear wrongdoing here, moral ambiguity and geopolitical complexity being what it is… Remember what Benjamin Barber said: Everyone gets paid.
And after all, if the only thing you can do is scold, what’s the point? Harvard is only one small weak voice in the wilderness; it has no leverage in the larger world; it’s just a teeny overlooked little thing… When it speaks, no one listens.
In the middle of Monterey Square,
in a hot city with – on this day –
occasional wind and rain, stands
one of many American monuments
to the memory of Kazimierz Pułaski,
who fought for American independence.
(Click on the image to read the inscription.)
The monument emerges out of a mist made
up of trailing tree moss. From the pretzeled
limbs of live oaks, the gray veils part to
reveal iron railings, an obelisk, and a pale
slab under which may or may not lie the
remains of the soldier.
This was the acceptance speech that this year’s winner of the University of New Mexico teaching award gave yesterday.
Non-acceptance speech, I guess. Must have been pretty embarrassing for the president, Dave Schmidly, to present the award, and then sit down and hear what the recipient had to say about him.
President Schmidly presented the “Presidential Teaching Fellow” award to Dr. Howard Waitzkin, a distinguished professor in family and community medicine, sociology, and internal medicine at UNM. Upon accepting the award, Waitzkin unexpectedly gave a speech about the UNM administration’s poor performance supporting faculty and students.
“The values that most of us on the faculty and most of the student body think need to be preserved are those that focus on the advancement of education and the advancement of knowledge,” he said. “The priorities here have been on buildings, athletics and other areas that are not core to the University’s mission.”
… In his speech, Waitzkin talked about the resignation of Faculty President Doug Fields on Monday due to the unwillingness of administration to listen to faculty’s ideas on governance and budget planning. He also cited the faculty’s no-confidence vote in President David Schmidly last spring.
“Because of the deterioration of UNM’s educational mission, last year the faculty gave President Schmidly a strong vote of no confidence,” Waitzkin said. “Rather than resigning, the president has continued much of the same practices, which have provoked several scandals and reduced morale for many faculty members and students.”
Waitzkin cited financial changes, cutbacks in key programs and utter lack of support for faculty as the reasons why he decided to speak out at the awards ceremony. He said lack of support for teachers from the administration has led many faculty to teach in a “sad, alienated way,” and others to leave the University…
Tenure is controversial, and I guess it should be. But you have to admit that this is a story not only about courage, but about tenure.
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And — Schmidly? He’s going the way of Ceausescu. It’s going to become increasingly difficult for him to be seen in public.
… rules.
Supreme leader Khamenei usually holds conferences with top students who are pre-selected to speak. These students usually go on stage and praise Khamenei. Then Khamenei usually speaks and talks about how much he values their ideas.
But this Wednesday October 28th, the conference was different. After the students spoke, Khamenei asked if anybody had any questions. Mahmoud Vahidnia, a math student from Sharif University who is also winner of the International Math Olympics, stood up and said courageously:
“Yes, I have some words with you.”
Here is a summary translation of what the student said to Khamenei:
“Why can’t anyone criticize you in this country, isn’t that ignorant? Do you think that you make no mistakes? Why have they made an idol out of you that is so unreachable and that nobody can challenge? I have never read an article about your performance in any newspaper because you have shut down all the media that is against you in the country. Why does national TV show all the events untruthfully? For example all the events after the election. Why do you support them [national TV shows], when everyone knows they are lying? Since the president of national TV is directly selected by you, then you are responsible for all this.”
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Khamenei evades answering the student and calls his words not truthful. He claims that people criticize him every day and he listens to them and then fixes his errors.
… Rumors say that the student has been arrested.
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Via Andrew Sullivan.
In the wake of his death, his students remember him. Here are some of their comments.
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He took great pleasure in making sure we understood all the possible innuendoes present in “Canterbury Tales,” shared with us the fact that he always identified with King Lear, and that Percy Shelley made no worthwhile contributions to English literature. There was always delight in his voice when he would tell the story of how he went to a staff meeting in 1987, didn’t like it, and hadn’t been back since …
He was profoundly influential in my academic life at LU. Specifically in his Satire class, where he taught me how to incorporate my subversive self into my understanding of what it is to be “academic.” I’ve always wanted to write him to let him know how meaningful his classes and views on literature were to me, so I guess now will have to do.
In the last three years, I was lucky enough to hear many of his memories and make my own with him, ranging from escaping an evening bat attack in Main Hall together to riding back from 2009’s senior dinner in his car, trapped under an umbrella. However, these were the most thrilling adventures; most of my favorite memories of Professor Goldgar take place in his office, on worn-in chairs with a thermos of coffee, where we talked about our mutual hatred of Octoberfest and old people… One of my favorite exchanges took place one one particular night when I stopped in to say hi on my way back from the YMCA. I updated him on life and told him about a recent incident in which I’d been caught stealing a cookie off a full, pristine recital table outside Harper Hall. “Why would you feel bad about that, Nicole?” he asked incredulously. “If I see a cookie, I take the cookie. If it’s on a table, on a friend’s plate, I don’t care – I take the cookie.” I love telling this story and thinking about the solemn look in his eyes as he told me to “take the cookie,” which I suppose is tantamount to”follow your dreams” in the world of Goldgar. I consider myself lucky to have known Professor Goldgar, who gave his all to me from the time I first met him three years ago until the very end. He always treated me first and foremost as a friend, rather than merely a student and for this I will always be grateful.
I can’t sum up BG of course, but if I were to try, I’d say he was a lovely curmudgeon who was fiercely dedicated to his students and took absolute joy in being hilariously naughty while also imparting great truths… BG was lovingly sarcastic, right to the end. I visited him a few weeks before he passed away and gave him a card expressing how much he meant to me. He read it, and looked up with tears and love in his eyes, and said, “Laura, you’re such a damn sap.”
[A]lthough he has a well-earned reputation as a purveyor of caustic wit and curmudgeonly satire, the moment I will remember most from his classes is his reading of the final stanzas of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in a lilting cadence with the famous drawl now turned to serious and transparent purpose, making Eve’s words to Adam on the threshold of Eden come alive – I still cannot hear those lines in any other voice than Bert’s. So he lives on.
[H]e had a way of criticism, which made the receiver almost proud to have gotten his attention. Once he came to class carrying a poster, which he read aloud to us: “Avoid jokes that target people or groups of people.” He read this with a deadpan glare, daring the class to come up with a joke that meant something without targeting people or a group of people. With his wit, his critical ear, and his high standards, Professor Goldgar reminded everyone to take learning seriously and to take loving it seriously, too.
In particular, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project, which has successfully defended Lucia Joyce scholar Carol Shloss against venal, vindictive Stephen Joyce, who controls the Joyce Estate, and has blocked her work.
The Stanford scholar who wrote a controversial biography of James Joyce’s daughter has settled her claims for attorneys’ fees against the Joyce Estate for $240,000. The settlement successfully ends a tangled saga that has continued for two decades.
As a result of an earlier settlement reached in 2007, consulting English Professor Carol Loeb Shloss already had achieved the right to domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship the Joyce Estate had forced her to remove from Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). She also had achieved the right to republish the book in the United States with the expurgated material restored. After that settlement was reached, Shloss asked the court to award the attorneys’ fees and costs she had incurred in bringing her suit, and the court granted that request. The parties eventually settled the amount of the fees and litigation costs Shloss and her counsel were to receive at $240,000.
… Shloss said that the suit is a game-changer because now literary “estates know they can get hurt.”
“They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies,” she said. “We’ve established that if you don’t pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws protect, you might have to pay something as the Joyce Estate has had to pay.”
In a tartly worded Feb. 24 filing to determine attorneys’ fees and costs, Shloss and her legal team argued that “the cost of litigating this case, which was substantial, was a direct result of the Estate’s assiduous and energetic efforts to prevent Shloss from exercising the rights the U.S. copyright laws encourage, and its ‘scorched earth’ approach to litigating the early stages of the case to see if it could bully Shloss into capitulation.”
The whole account is worth reading.
The former head of the National Institutes of Health explains it nicely and concisely.
His comment appears in a long article (subscription) about UD‘s acquaintance, Paul Thacker, described as Charles Grassley’s “bulldog” in the fight against the dangerous corruption of academic science.
“Paul’s good,” said the senator, sitting across from Thacker. “If you’re going to be successful in these investigations, you gotta have people like Paul.”
The article notes that scientists grown accustomed, as Zerhouni says, to lying about the money they stand to make from their own research results don’t like Paul Thacker one bit. Too bad.
… Assholes.
As in — Where’s the Frank Zappa statue? I wrote about it – and my adoration of Zappa – around this time last year. What’s up?
It’s been more than a year since the city accepted a statue of eccentric composer and Baltimore native Frank Zappa, and city officials are still not sure exactly where to put it.
The statue, valued at roughly $50,000, was a gift from a Lithuanian Zappa fan club. And officials are looking to place it in Fells Point.
Fells Point community groups approved a location at Fleet Street and South Broadway, according to Tracy Baskerville, director of communications for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. But the location is being reconsidered, she said.
“We’re looking for a place where people will congregate,” said Baskerville.
HUH?
I don’t mean to hound Baskerville, but PEOPLE WILL CONGREGATE WHEREVER A STATUE OF FRANK ZAPPA EXISTS.
FOOLS!
… a University of Washington football player ran down a purse snatcher in downtown Seattle. He was one of a number of people chasing the thief, who was arrested:
… [Skyler] Fancher decided to sprint after him — in his flip-flops.
The chase lasted about 10 minutes, according to Fancher. It included two other men, one of whom suffered knee and nose injuries while trying to catch the purse snatcher. During the pursuit, Fancher, who has had two surgeries on his right leg since he injured it during spring practice, also climbed a wall….
They’ve put together a Facebook campaign to keep their ridiculous board of trustees from renaming one of their campuses after His Excellency Mitch Maidique, FIU’s money-grubbing, football-mad, just-retired president.
Cast your eye over UD’s Maidique posts over the last few years to get a sense of this absurd character, and then consider signing the students’ petition. My signature is Number 447.
The students worry about the cost of renaming buildings and all at a time of austerity. Which is fine. It’s a fine worry. But they should also worry about rewarding a president for having done a bad job, and about permanently embarrassing an ambitious school by plastering this guy’s image and moniker all over the place.
Bernard L. Fulton started his teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in his native Boone County, W.Va.
… Fulton … was still talking schools recently when he ate lunch with [the] Greenhill [School’s]headmaster. He built his reputation in Dallas, where, starting with a vision and a three-room building, he founded the Greenhill School in 1950.
Mr. Fulton, 99, died Sunday … at his Dallas home.
… Greenhill headmaster Scott Griggs said Mr. Fulton’s life mission was to create great educational opportunities for children.
“I had lunch with him two weeks ago, and he spent an hour and a half talking about schools, education, public schools and our challenges we have today,” Mr. Griggs said. “At the age of 99, he was still thinking about what we could do to improve upon education.”
Mr. Fulton was 8 when his father died of blood poisoning, a complication of a compound fracture he received in a railroad accident at his Boone County lumber company. The boy helped his mother raise his three younger siblings.
Mr. Fulton, a high school running back, declined football scholarships to Notre Dame and Princeton to attend Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., which was closer to his family…
This is one of my worst puns. It’s not as bad as this one in a Wall Street Journal headline — the article’s about credit-rating downgrades at universities —
BIG MOAN ON CAMPUS
— but it’s pretty bad.
A campus building in Chicago now bears the name of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose Solidarity movement in the ’80s helped trigger communism’s collapse.
Former Polish President Lech Walesa (LEHK vah-WEHN’-sah) spoke Friday at a ceremony at Northeastern Illinois University where the classroom building was named in his honor.
And yes, I’m only running this post to make Mr UD happy.
He’s Polish, in case you didn’t know.
My referral log tells me that many Vanderbilt people are reading UD on the insult of your university having rewarded a plagiarist with a medal and the keynote speech on Senior Class Day.
Know that you are not alone. When the University of Virginia gave her a high-profile appointment, people there were also outraged.
As Randy Newman reminds us, it’s a great big dirty world.
But it’s incredibly important to kick against that world. Keep it up.
“We must educate those who will lead the institutions that will serve as engines of prosperity in our economy. But we must also instill in them the importance of ensuring that these engines of prosperity are engines for all,” intoned then-President Larry Summers at a Harvard religious gathering.
But Summers’ own engine rides so high… the throttle on that thing… It’s like… here’s Larry on his prosperity engine:
Why is he riding so high?
According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.
So let’s say he worked 100 days total, that’s $52,000 per day.
And assuming he worked about 12 hour days, that’s $4,333 per hour.
Ride ’em, cowboy! Hell, plenty to go around! With his common touch, Summers is just the man to ensure that America’s engines of prosperity are engines for all.
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Point of Clarification: Why only one day a week?
Because he was a full-time professor at Harvard at the same time.
