… 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.
2. I only printed a few copies.
3. Everyone’s human.
4. Material-avalanche.
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…
December 16th, 2016 at 3:47PM
Given the now public nature of what he has done, “sore thumb” might be better: asses are usually covered. This prompted me to google around to see if “embarrassed” has roots in ass-baring, but, so far alas, it appears that no.
Still, I like your metaphor as one painfully immediate and immediately painful. It’s always great when language works directly on the senses.