Shakespearean Limerick About Monica Crowley

Now Harper and Collins, most growly,
Suspend their edition of Crowley.
“You blackguard! Whoreson!”
Crieth vilified Mon.
“Thou playest against me most foully.”

The obsessively plagiarizing president of Spain’s King Juan Carlos University allegedly steals work from his own father (author, by the way, of the “hagiographic entry for Francisco Franco in the 2011 Diccionario Biográfico Español,”), but I’m sure Dad doesn’t mind. (I wonder who he named little Francisco after?) What sort of father would object to his son stealing his work?

I bet Luis stole his work from his father. These legacy things are very Spanish.

Meanwhile, Francisco has refused a request from the regional parliament to testify about the matter. He’s way not in the mood to talk about it.

… is such a great phrase. It used to be the name of a New York City drama group, but I don’t think they’re active anymore. May UD use it? It could be this blog’s subtitle…

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Fernando Suarez, the chancellor of Madrid’s King Juan Carlos (speaking of miscreants!) University, “has been accused of copying other historians’ work and that of his students, over a period of up to 10 years.”

Ten years? I rather doubt it. If he’s been kicking around long enough to enchancellor a university, it’s gotta be more like twenty years. Start with the dude’s dissertation, suggests UD.

Suarez is a classic plagiarizer: He’s been at it forever; he lifts from his betters, he has really pissed people like Bernard Vincent off, and he’s fiercely defending himself against this nefarious plot against his good name. He argues that aside from being the victim of said evil conspiracy, he didn’t make any money off of whatever he did or didn’t do, and it was the fault of other people and so he’s innocent.

Colleagues are currently trying to remove this big ol’ butt-boil from the Spanish university system, but as of this writing Suarez remains firmly affixed to that country’s higher education establishment.

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Sign a get-rid-of-him petition here.

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UPDATE: More detail on the dude’s wondrous multifarious self-defense:

Suarez fought back against the accusations on Nov. 25, when he denied that his methods constituted plagiarism, alleging that his academic publications generated no economic profit and had limited print runs.

He said that the plagiarism cases uncovered by journalists were actually “dysfunctions, because I’m human.”

“We work with avalanches of material in our research teams,” Suarez said, adding that the accusations against him were an attack against the university “by the usual suspects.”

Let’s review, shall we? I’m off the hook because

1. I made no money off of it.

5. Goddamn anti-intellectuals.

A word of advice for Suarez from ol’ UD, who has been covering plagiarism stories for a long, long time:

He’s pretty much out of hope at this point. Chances are excellent that he’s about to have his ass handed to him. But should Suarez opt to keep up the struggle, UD would urge him to expand on #3. Now’s the time to release biographical material about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother — a trauma so total that in order to cope he split off into two personalities, Good Suarez and Bad Suarez…

I reviewed your paper for the Annals of Internal Medicine, but I liked it so much I put my name on it and submitted it to another journal! Of course I made sure the other journal was obscure enough to fail to catch your attention but whooooops…. è colpa mia!… I played the angles and figured a fancy American like you wouldn’t notice an obscure Italian like me in the pages of no-name EXCLI Journal…

At least however I tried to show a fine Italian hand; you on the contrary have showed truly poor form by complaining about the matter publicly.

Dr. Michael Dansinger, of Tufts Medical Center, has taken to print to excoriate a group of researchers [Oh right. I put all my friends’ names on it too. Happy to share the credit!] in Italy who stole his data and published it as their own.

And what’s even more disappointing in your behavior is how you discovered my little mistake!

Dansinger was tipped off to their duplication while searching the internet for papers bearing his name.

Narcissism is an ugly character trait. Had I known how egotistical you are (searching the internet for your name!), I and my associates would never have chosen you. Next time forget it! Basta! You’ve put me through enough.

Faced with a famous, high-level plagiarist/physicist, a person the government just put at the head of an important scientific panel, France’s education minister has opened an inquiry into the curious cuttings and pastings of Etienne Klein.

We will see if UD is correct in identifying the source of Klein’s problem. UD suspects he hires people to write his books for him, but fails to read what they write before he puts his name on it.

If UD has said it once, she’s said it a hundred times: Keep an eye on the help.

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That panel he’ll be heading?

… the mission of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (IHEST) … is to restore trust between scientists and society.

Famous French popularizer of science Étienne Klein is apparently a serial plagiarist. Like Cary Grant in that movie, he is a very classy thief, his pinches revealing un homme très cultivé – Zweig, Zola, Bachelard… AND… UD is thrilled to add… Klein steals from an old friend of the Soltan family! Roman Jakobson was a Harvard colleague and Cambridge neighbor of Jerzy Soltan’s. Even after death the two men remain neighbors – their graves lie a few feet away from each other in Mount Auburn Cemetery. And even after death (especially after death – all career plagiarists know it’s better to steal paragraphs from people not in a position to complain) Jakobson is making himself useful…

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Recalling UD‘s typology of plagiarists, Klein is clearly an Atelier, done in, I’m going to guess, by one of the many little people he hires to write his books for him.

Comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, UD does not bother reporting plagiarism stories unless they are really really big. Plagiarism is boringly internationally endemic, and now that everyone’s got detection software it’s all too much of a muchness. But Redscar McOdindo, a Kenyan poet still in his twenties, makes the cut.

And paste. The man has been raiding ladies’ panties all over the world (he steals women’s poems about things like female genital mutilation, and basks in the praise of poetry judges who marvel at his ability to write with intimate sensitivity to the other gender’s point of view), and he’s been doing it for years.

As is common in these stories, no one in the international poetry establishment suspected a thing as McOdindo collected one award after another. A sharp-eyed reader of one of his victims exposed him, at which he immediately shut down his blog and disappeared from the face of the earth.

… Wendy Taylor, whose 43-year-old sundial sculpture stands on the banks of the River Thames near London’s Tower Bridge, told British news outlet The Independent that a holidaying art aficionado alerted her to the apparent replica [of the piece in Shanghai].

… The Chinese version, by an unspecified artist, has stood in a park next to the Huangpu river, which courses through the commercial hub, since 2006, Shanghai media reports said.

It has since been removed and [a] journalist saw park workers filling its circular base with plants and flowers on Thursday.

At the same time [journalists watched] workers removing two other statues, one of which resembled “Lute Being Played by Evert Taube”, which stands in the Swedish capital Stockholm.

The other bore a striking similarity to the centrepiece statue of the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Might as well get all our spring cleaning done at the same time.

His student’s plea on behalf of the school superintendent who has spent his tenure plagiarizing from everyone says it all.

This is Russia’s culture minister, whose medieval history dissertation is, experts say, “scandalous, a real parody.”

A Catholic university said the president of Mexico met the requirements for graduation with a law degree, while acknowledging parts of his 1991 thesis were plagiarised.

Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City issued a statement late on Sunday, saying the thesis submitted by then-student Enrique Pena Nieto – elected president in 2012 – conformed with the standards of the time.

“The thesis introduced original ideas” and used outside ideas with and without citations, the statement said. “The (current) general regulations of our institution are not applicable to former students.”

… 197 of 682 paragraphs in [Mexican President Enrique] Pena Nieto’s [law] thesis were copied from authors ranging from Mexican historian Enrique Krauze to University of New Mexico academic Linda Hall.

An Anglican priest in Australia plagiarizes three books of biblical commentary. Finally his publisher figures this out.

Three volumes by Peter T O’Brien, a theologian, author and priest, have been recalled and destroyed by Eerdmans publishing. Editors found several instances where the text ran “afoul of commonly accepted standards with regard to the utilization and documentation of secondary sources”.

… The initial allegations were made against O’Brien’s ‘The Letter to the Hebrews’. But further examinations of his ‘Letter to the Ephesians’ and Epistle to the Philippians’ found they were also “untenable”.

But this is by far the best part:

“In the [three] New Testament commentaries that I have written, although I have never deliberately misused the work of others, nevertheless I now see that my work processes at times have been faulty and have generated clear-cut, but unintentional, plagiarism.”

… about an allegedly corrupt school superintendent in Florida, you know that lots of people in that system must have been aware of his activities for years, but until a brave administrator finally called him on it (she has already been “locked out of her school district email and can no longer access her data”) he just kept at it. I mean, it’s Florida… He must have figured…

And he did enjoy a long run. You can sort of trace the guy getting more and more imperial as time went on, to the point where he was allegedly “forcing staff to write papers that he used to complete his Master’s Degree.” He’s also alleged to have, with astonishing abandon, labeled students learned disabled, since the system gets extra funding with each such student.

Also, since you don’t have to include these students in determining graduation rates, graduation rates look much better…

I like the eugenicky feel of this guy, with his manipulation of populations for the betterment of his budget and his salary (higher degrees earn you more). UD is settling in for what will certainly be Further Tales of the Superintendent.

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PS: The Superintendent comes from an interesting family. His old man, Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant, is famous for alerting the citizenry that the people behind the Common Core idea want “every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”

His mom’s pissed because she and the old man were just found guilty of Homestead Exemption Fraud – onaccounta they claimed the exemption for a property they don’t, you know… exactly live in.

Madame Van Zant’s defense is a real brain twister. UD‘s been swirling it around in her head for some time. Although the property has sat abandoned for eight years,

“We’ve been anticipating moving back very shortly for a long time,” she said.

This reads to UD like one of those Chomskyian sentences you need to diagram, but even after you diagram them they don’t yield up their meaning…

Everyone’s been asking him to, and UD has the transcript, hot off the press, of the candidate’s statement:

I have no one but myself to blame. I do not lay the fault or the blame of the charge at anyone else’s feet. For no one is to blame but Donald Trump. I take the responsibility. I take the blame. I take the fault. The Republican party leadership has been compassionate and kind and considerate and long-suffering toward me with some exceptions. To the thousands and thousands of ordinary Republicans who are godly, that uphold the standards of the Grand Old Party, its representatives that are heralds and criers of redemption, its candidates on the front lines… I have sinned against you and I have brought disgrace and humiliation and embarrassment upon you. I beg your forgiveness. To my campaign staff, you that are already bearing an almost unbearable load, to continue to say and tell the great story of Donald Trump, I have made your load heavier and I have hurt you. Please forgive me for sinning against you.

I know that so many would ask why, why? I have asked myself that 10,000 times through 10,000 tears. Maybe Donald Trump has tried to live his entire life as though he were not human.

Many ask, as I close, this: Will the campaign continue? Yes, the campaign will continue. Under the guidance, leadership and directives of my fine staff, we will continue to take our “Midnight in America” message all over the country. Thank you. Thank you and God bless you.

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There is already, however, talk of plagiarism.