A guest blogger at Simon Johnson’s Baseline Scenario laments

potent credit default swaps, a key ingredient to the [economic] crisis. The existence of this $60 trillion (now $45 trillion) notional value market, protecting and connecting counterparties across the system, led to a $180 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG.

She notes that one of their champions was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers. And she reminds us that “during Larry Summers’s tenure [as president of] Harvard, certain swaps were put in place; then, according to Nina Munks of Vanity Fair, ‘for reasons no one can seem to explain, the university simply forgot to (or chose not to) cancel its swaps. The result was a $1 billion loss.’”

Thoughtful, well-written, even well-titled article about a case of plagiarism at Connecticut College. A popular and high-profile senior, chosen to deliver one of the commencement addresses last year, was found to have plagiarized much of it.

His last name is St. John, and the student journalist writing the piece titles it The Revelation of St. John. Nice.

UD‘s covered quite a few commencement speech plagiarism stories. People really seem to panic when contemplating how to deliver tired truisms in a new way.

… St. John gave his speech alongside Class President Nick Downing, President Lee Higdon and the keynote speaker, philosopher Martha Nussbaum. St. John’s speech was by far the most well-received of Commencement – more relatable and persuasive than even Nussbaum’s.

“The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities, and hang on,” he told the crowd on Tempel Green. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, you must rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony.

“Imagine getting caught with your optimism hanging out in today’s day and age. It feels so risky.”

… In November, according to Vice President of College Relations Patricia Carey, a member of the Administration received an anonymous note suggesting that St. John’s speech was plagiarized. Upon closer inspection, they found that extensive passages and many phrases were not St. John’s but writer Barbara Kingsolver’s, from her 2008 commencement address to Duke University. Roughly a third of his speech, including the most noteworthy lines and general theme, clearly derive from Kingsolver’s writing. Her speech became the skeleton for his.

Kingsolver’s address, entitled “How to be Hopeful,” is one of Education Portal’s 10 Famous and Noteworthy College Commencement Speeches, listed alongside speeches by Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart and Steve Jobs. It has been reprinted on various websites in its entirety.

“The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on,” her address said. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children’s only shot. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky.”

From an article in Slate about laptops in university classrooms:

… George Mason Law professor Michael Krauss has been banning laptops for five or six years now.

The way his first-year law-school classes are taught, Krauss said, is by asking questions for the students to answer in discussion. Distractions and the Internet aren’t Krauss’ concern in banning laptops; the reason for the ban is that laptops have “become a substitute for thinking.” The material in a law class requires a lot of thought to help understand concepts, and students who type verbatim what is said in class into their notes aren’t giving themselves any time to absorb and analyze.

… Tablets like the iPad will only make it harder for students to pay attention in class and for schools to ban the device. Since the iPad can be used to read textbooks, professors might be unsure which students are goofing off and which are legitimately studying. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to mind. In the fall, the school is going to give each new incoming student a MacBook and an iPad. How distracted will those students be?…

… The board at Goldman has seen its constitution change in light of the financial crisis, with Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, standing down, and Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey who is becoming entwined in the Galleon hedge fund scandal, resigning.

… The change in constitution of the board could help Goldman deal with some of its issues head on…

So Gupta left because he’s about to be accused of insider trading. And Simmons? The writer for CNN Money doesn’t really say why she’s leaving, though she seems to think Goldman will be better able to deal with its issues “head on” without Simmons.

And why is that?

Because Simmons is incompetent as a director of a complex financial organization. She seems to be good at being a university president. She should probably have stuck to that. But now, after a decade at Goldman Sachs, she’s in deep doo-doo.

UCLA has been building a big conflict of interest case against one of its faculty members for some time, and today the university announces a suit against him to recover millions of dollars.

If you’re an academic physician, or any other sort of university professor using your office mainly as a place to do private business (and of course collecting your university salary on top of that), maybe you should read this.

A group of UCLA staff members entered a medical school professor’s office late at night in January 2008 to gather electronic evidence of alleged prohibited outside activities involving Dr. Robert Lufkin.

In their lawsuit, the Regents claim Lufkin owes the University for the millions of dollars that he earned while acting as a director, shareholder and consultant at outside medical and technological firms U.S. Radiology On-Call, Prohealth Advanced Imaging and Mediasmith.

For years, Lufkin had allegedly been working with these companies while failing to report his involvement and income in accordance with UC policy…

According to the Regents’ complaint submitted to the court, Lufkin had been using University resources to build a “directly competing business.”

“(Lufkin had been) siphoning away patients to the detriment of the University and generally building his own business when he owed a duty to his employer of undivided loyalty to advance his employer’s interests,” according to the Regents’ complaint…

She’s a Cambridge University law professor, and that’s the title of one of her articles up there: Private Libel and Public Accountability.

Scholarship, Karl Marx tells us, repeats itself first as something or other and second as farce. (That’s not the exact quotation.) And as Palmer’s private trashing of historians whose work touches on the same subjects as her husband’s work becomes public, she and her husband (Orlando Figes) definitively enter the farce era.

A prominent British historian has found a new way to get in trouble: Orlando Figes, a historian of Stalin’s Russia at Birkbeck College, London, and a contributor to the New York Review, has admitted that his wife has been publishing hostile comments about rival historians at Amazon.co.uk under a pseudonym.

… According to The Guardian, Figes’s attorney conceded that Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, a lawyer and lecturer at Cambridge University, had posted reviews at Amazon describing Rachel Polonsky’s book “Molotov’s Magic Lantern” as “dense,” “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Robert Service’s book about Trotsky was called a “dull read,” and his history of communism was dismissed as “rubbish” and “an awful book.”

Figes’s book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” on the other hand, was described by the same reviewer – posting under the psuedonym “Historian” — as a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history, the work of a writer with “superb storytelling skills.” The reviewer concluded, “I hope he writes forever.” …

The wife of the writer Orlando
Adores him as if he were Brando.
If only Ms Palmer
Had been a bit calmer
She might have avoided a scando.

Woke frightened at five this morning from the loudest crash I’ve ever heard. Shook the house. Seemed inches away, somewhere on our property.

Mr UD slept through it, natch.

I glanced at my laptop on the bedside table. Its lights blinked off, one after another — green, red, gold, white. Out.

Tripping over the dog, I went to the living room and looked out of the big windows at the back woods, expecting to see an enormous, semi-dead tree on the ground, blanketing the ground cover with leaves and broken limbs. Nothing there.

I checked the front windows for a tree on the lawn. No.

Back in bed, I woke up Mr UD. Was it some chemical explosion on the train tracks? An airborne toxic event?

He dressed and walked up Rokeby Avenue. A few feet away from our yard, one of our neighbor’s enormous, semi-dead trees had crashed into the street, taking all the electrical wires with it. “They’re hot, the wires,” said Mr UD. “They’re sparking.”

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

Asplundh trucks appeared, as did Garrett Park’s mayor (he strode up and down in front of our house, talking into his cell phone) plus the town administrator, who sat in one of the town’s adorable white trucks with Garrett Park written in green on each door, and somberly watched as the Asplundh guys set up orange cones and took out electric saws.

By eight o’clock they’d cleared Rokeby, on either side of which lay stacks of thick wood. Regular readers know that UD‘s property already has plenty of stacks of wood along its forested sides, left over from earlier tree removals. Now there are many, many more, just adjacent.

The town a few years ago planted a delicate magnolia in front of my neighbor’s house. That seems to have been wiped out.

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

So again we’re dark. We lose electricity in the winter, we lose it in the spring.

I told Mr UD I was writing a post about what it’s like, losing light and heat and electricity all the time.

“You’re calling it ‘The Ontology of the Outage’? Don’t you mean the metaphysics of the outage?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. And I originally went with that title. But consider the alliteration you get with ontology… I’ve spent the morning going back and forth between the values of style and content…”

“And you’ve chosen – of course – style. You always care more about stylish writing than about accuracy.”

“Right. What are you gonna do about it?”

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

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, says Elizabeth Bishop. But she’s kidding. Read the poem. She’s being ironic.

Losing light and heat all the time is actually pretty easy to master. Almost getting killed by trees is more difficult, but let’s put aside, for the moment, that problem.

I remember when my Uncle Mario, a wealthy developer, came to visit us just after we bought our Garrett Park house. “You don’t have grounded wires?” He was appalled. “You’re gonna lose electricity every time the wind blows. And look at these enormous, semi-dead trees.”

Oh. Pishposh. UD, an old hippie, is heavily invested in not living like a wealthy developer. If the price of her maintaining a mental self-image of debonair freedom is constant darkness, it’s a price she’s willing to pay.

… but this is one of those stories… those Sorceror’s Apprentice stories… those Strega Nona stories… those shaggy dog stories… in which more and more things pile up and it gets crazier and crazier until you have to laugh. UD has to laugh, anyway.

So all day on and off she’s been following the story of Marcello DelCarlo, a biochem professor at Rush University in Chicago (his faculty webpage was up earlier today; let’s see if it’s still there) whose morning began with a domestic battery charge. His girlfriend says he shook her violently.

That’s bad, certainly, but not bad enough, professor-behaviorwise, to get you mentioned on University Diaries. (Yes! It’s still there!)

Then, when police looked through his apartment, they found

… more than a dozen cardboard tubes filled with an explosive substance and capped with plaster … One of the devices ignited as police bomb and arson investigators tried removing it, causing a small fire that was quickly extinguished by the unit’s fire sprinkler system, according to prosecutors and witnesses. The block-long building was evacuated, and the remaining devices were taken from the home and destroyed.

Although the professor scoffed that they were merely little firecrackers he’d fashioned for July fourth, the police added to his domestic battery misdemeanor “felony possession of an explosive or incendiary device.”

And then when the police talked some more with the girlfriend, she told them “he made the explosives and traded them for meth.”

Oh. And:

On Monday a Cook County judge set DelCarlo’s bail at $225,000. He is currently serving a sentence of six months of court supervision — a form of probation — for a January conviction for misdemeanor possession of ammunition without a valid firearm owner’s identification card and possession of an unregistered handgun.

To keep geese off the quad –
students find barefoot frisbee
à la feces unappetizing –
Boise State University
has constructed predator
silhouettes. Coyotes.

Seems a good seasonal job for
students: Predator Silhouette Mover.

Among the many student-authored attacks on laptop use in the classroom that UD has read, this one, by a student at the University of Maine, stands out. The writer specifies a destructive aspect of classroom laptop use that I’ve thought about but been unable to formulate very well. I’m grateful to her for helping me clarify it.

….This semester, I wanted to take an elective class outside my major, which had such high demand I had to e-mail the department, talk with the department’s administrative assistant and meet with the instructor before getting in.

After devoting all that time just to enroll, my classmates’ behavior has been extremely disappointing. Of the more than 20 students in the class, about half were there last Wednesday, and all but three were on their laptops, checking e-mail, playing games and surfing the Web.

It doesn’t end there. One who had foregone the computer was texting on her cell phone under the desk the entire class. That left two of us listening attentively to the professor….

Everyone talks about how distracting it is to have bevies of computer screens bursting with sports, porn, and Facebook surrounding you during a lecture or discussion. But few people focus on how demoralizing it is to realize that, although you’re in a university classroom, almost no one’s taking education seriously. No one’s even thinking. They’re just farting around.

UD is aware that students farted around in 1959 too. But puh-leeze. They doodled, exchanged notes, and stared out the window. They didn’t have an international command and control center on the desk in front of them.

This writer understands the institutional implication of a failure to be serious:

These laptop addicts should think about how their actions reflect on them, as well as their major and, ultimately, the university. With talk of consolidating colleges and eliminating programs, they should consider what affect their attention or apathy could [have on] future students at UMaine.

Indeed. Why hold classes if you can’t hold classes?

UD‘s heart goes out to this writer — this still-serious student. If it’s not too late, and if she can afford it, the student should drop out of UMaine and find a serious school.

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

UD finds moving the writing of students who are aware of the contempt for professors and universities much laptop use in classrooms represents. But UD finds downright baffling statements like this one from a dean.

Jim McClellan, dean of liberal studies at [Northern Virginia Community College’s] Alexandria campus who has taught there for 35 years, said he is most concerned with how to reach millennial students and would like to see this matter discussed broadly [at an upcoming summit on community colleges].

“The nature of students has changed in the past few years as a result of technology,” McClellan said. “We see shorter attention spans. We see students who think there’s nothing wrong with texting or using laptops to message back and forth in class. We have students who arrive late and leave early or just don’t pay attention at all. I think I slept through most of my junior year of college, but I at least tried to do so [in]conspicuously. I think there’s no interest among students to cover up not paying attention in class. How can we teach students who have grown up in this environment and with technologies we just couldn’t imagine when we came up?” …

Well, let’s see what the problem might be.

Instead of banning laptops and other technology from your classrooms, you do everything you can to encourage classroom and out of classroom use of technology. You make this effing big deal about it! We’re special! Everyone at our school gets a Mac! And all that other technoshit too! We drag our faculty into special seminars on how to encourage their students to bring laptops to class! On how to PowerPoint everything so they don’t have to teach! Our professors get special introduction of new teaching techniques points on their annual reports for showing students how to download lectures so they don’t have to go to class!

Listen, McClellan.

Far be it from UD to keep you from attending an exciting summit with the vice-president’s wife where the international news media films you wringing your hands over your obnoxious students. If that’s the picture of your college you want to broadcast to the world, go to it.

But there are other things you can do about the situation.

The president of Brown University, who for ten years has been a director at Goldman Sachs, issues a no-comment in response to the university’s newspaper.

Simmons wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that it would not be appropriate for her to comment on the situation at this time.

Why is it inappropriate for a director of a company to say something in response to government charges of fraud against it? Did the students ask Simmons whether she supports the company’s press release expressing outrage at the charges and vowing to defend its honor? Does she disagree with that statement? As a director, didn’t she have to review and vet it?

What’s inappropriate is for a leader of a university and a corporation to say nothing to both sets of her constituents (students, stockholders) when the attention of the world is focused on a claim of illegal behavior for which, as a director of the company, she may have to take some responsibility.

At the very least, Simmons needed to confirm her support for Goldman’s official statement in response to the charges. She is a Goldman official. She represents the company.

A University of Maryland law professor comments in the New York Times:

[What’s particularly] galling is the constant refrain from both Wall Street C.E.O.s and former regulators that no one could have predicted the [housing] crisis. However, the S.E.C. allegations are premised on the fact that hedge funds and Goldman Sachs itself were so convinced of cataclysmic failure that they were looking for investment vehicles that would profit each time a homeowner defaulted on his or her mortgage.

In other words, there were competent and smart people making billions because they could foresee the obvious: people with poor credit would not be able to repay their home loans.

In short, it was not that no one knew…

What did Ruth Simmons know?

Did she – as she will eventually say – know nothing?

Then why was she a director of Goldman Sachs? Why did GS pay her many millions of dollars for being a Goldman Sachs director? For ten years?

Another commentator at the NYT asks:

Why have there been no criminal charges? Why did the S.E.C. only name a relatively low-level Goldman officer in its complaint?

Ruth Simmons is a very high-ranking Goldman officer. Eventual criminal, not merely civil, charges will surprise no one. I’d say Brown University needs to start asking itself whether it has a president able to give the campus her full attention.

Or whatever partial attention she’s been giving it. As Pablo Eisenberg asks:

Did it not concern the Brown board that its president was [until recently] spending an inordinate amount of time and attention helping to direct and oversee three major corporations at a time when universities and colleges are themselves under increased financial stress, experiencing a crisis in financial aid and facing serious questions about systemic faculty and staff inequities?

One of the corporations she continues to oversee is now in very serious legal trouble. Through omission or commission, Simmons helped get it there. What is she going to do about that? What is going to happen to her because of that?

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

Simmons isn’t the only Goldman Sachs director suddenly struck silent.

William W. George, a Harvard Business School professor who has served on Goldman Sachs’s board since 2002, referred a request for an interview to the company’s press office. His Twitter account, which lauded JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon for his firm’s better-than-expected earnings on April 14, remained silent on the controversy surrounding Goldman Sachs.

George is the author of 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis.

Lesson #1: RUN CRYING TO THE COMPANY’S PRESS OFFICE

… at Syracuse University.

Rumor has it Brown University has a lock for next year on Lloyd Blankfein, who will speak to graduating students on “Doing God’s Work.”

… in Washington DC, UD will read excerpts from the Sirens chapter of Ulysses.

Location: Guapo’s Restaurant, 4515 Wisconsin Avenue, NW (Tenleytown Metro).

Time, Date: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, June 16.

Sponsors: Harvard Club of Washington, and American Independent Writers

Free and open to the public.

This guy tells you why you should consider signing this petition.

(I’m signature #1089.)

…. about the lengthy relationship between Brown University and Goldman Sachs is getting as long as the period of time Brown’s president has spent away from campus overseeing the compensation packages of that firm’s traders.

Here’s the post. Keep an eye on it and its many updates.

As one of Goldman’s directors, Simmons should soon be making a statement to the Brown community on recent events.