UD thanks Roy Poses for alerting her to the civil fraud charges brought against Ezra Merkin today.

New York’s attorney general brought civil fraud charges against hedge fund manager Ezra Merkin on Monday, saying he duped investors by secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi fraud without their permission.

… New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he ignored glaring red flags about Madoff’s investments in an effort to reap huge fees from clients.

Merkin and his Gabriel Capital Corp money management firm “betrayed hundreds of investors who entrusted him with their savings,” the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court said.

… The lawsuit also said Merkin mixed his personal funds, including his management fees from his Ascot and Gabriel funds, with the funds of his management company. Cuomo contends Merkin used management firm funds for personal use, including buying more than $91 million in art for his apartment…

That last thing… the art thing. That’s mainly a huge number of huge Rothko paintings. World dealers are salivating.

It’s unclear to UD why Sussex University without any consultation has shut down its linguistics program.

Usually UD doesn’t blog about such things, not having the time to explore in depth particular – and perhaps complicated – decisions of this sort at any given university. But in this case she makes an exception, since this seems an uncontroversially strong program in a crucial academic field.

“I already need a change of clothes.”

“It’s brutal.”

“Terrible.”

“It’s gotta go back.”

“It’s going to.  Supposed to be seventy degrees tonight.”

“Seventy!  Break out the long underwear.”

It’s Open House, and many Key West properties – glorious green islets with small pools behind ship carpenter’s cottages – are available for viewing. On Fleming and Elizabeth and Eaton, on hidden lanes like Poorhouse and Catholic and Gecko, Key West’s white eyebrow houses release their shutters and let you in. They’re on the market.

From the front hall you see clear to the blue water in the back, where cats and doves and lizards live. The massed palms and hibiscus hide the house and its water garden from view, so it is your world, your sunny windy palm-sheltered world alone.

How to convey the joy and comfort and excitement that this kinetic self-contained world makes me feel? I see myself so clearly, leaning into that chaise, typing on a keyboard on my lap and listening to the purling of water. I smell honeysuckle in the heat, and jasmine.

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

Even when it’s not Open House, I’m sidetracked always, on my long daily walks, by the mysterious beauty of the half-hidden islets of Key West. Some have little lettered signs by their front doors (One Martini Two Martini Three Martini… Floor!). All have bicycles thrown against the thin white columns of the facades. Seabirds stand on the tin roofs, and potted geraniums on the porches.

On the street in front of the houses very old women on Vespas wave at you and speed by.

The heat is enormous; you feel as though you’re walking through a mobile steamroom, a sauna tricked out just for you, steady hot air pushed through to make you sweat. There’s wind, but the wind’s hot too. So you pace yourself. You have to pace yourself.

You’re carrying a citrus smoothie you bought at Help Yourself, a food market so pure, raw, natural and organic you could plotz.

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

At Help Yourself, heat-addled UD ordered not a smoothie, but a coolie. I’d like a coolie, please. I’ll have a coolie. Maybe she was thinking about how nice it would be to be cool.

The woman at the counter understood what UD meant but looked at her funny, and it came to UD that she’d not only made a mistake, but used a derogatory word for an Asian laborer.

While she waited for the salads she’d also ordered, UD looked at two articles in a natural living magazine.

One was about a 57-year-old Danish former Playboy playmate who looked 27. She’d had no surgery, she said, but attained this result through eating “raw.” UD stopped reading at the word raw.

The other article was about a woman who left her bathroom every morning in an ecstasy because her shit didn’t smell since she started eating raw.

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

When she got home, UD eyed the ceiling fan hard at work in her bedroom and wondered if she could figure out a way to hang her damp bra from one of its blades.

… at our house on Capitol Hill many years ago.  I recall a calm, unpretentious man with whom it was instantly easy to chat.  I think I recall correctly his disappointment with our pathetic liquor cabinet.

Mr UD , who studied with him at the University of Chicago, admired his independence, his strong sense of individuality.  He did his own work, utterly unreliant on any form of received wisdom.

Brian Barry, who has died at 73, had a political philosophy “best … described as egalitarian liberalism – the view that, along with protecting traditional liberal freedoms, the ‘just’ state must promote economic redistribution from rich to poor and provide equality of access to public services.”

Barry was famously pugnacious in argument and uninhibited in his criticisms of those with whom he did not see eye to eye. Colleagues who bought his books would quickly pass over prefatory tributes to Gertie the cat and go to the index to discover the identities of his latest victims. Terms such as “astonishingly crass”, “obscurantist”, “cavalier” or “complete rubbish” were characteristic put-downs.

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

UPDATE: Excerpts from an exclusive interview this evening with Mr UD, who worked closely with Brian Barry at the University of Chicago.

“What did he look like? Big teddy bear…

I had just finished studying John Rawls with John Rawls, at Harvard. His big book on justice had recently come out, and the course there was basically Rawls responding to his critics. It wasn’t until I took a two-semester seminar in justice with Brian at Chicago – a course that featured Brian’s critique of Rawls – that I began to understand Rawls. In other words, I didn’t get Rawls as well, studying with Rawls, as I got Rawls studying Rawls with Barry. If that makes sense…

I went to his office to introduce myself before the semester started. I was already an admirer of his work. Finding him was a little difficult, because there was a geography professor on campus also named Brian Barry, and it was Barry’s first semester, and it wasn’t entirely clear where his office was… I found him, and he was really welcoming; we had a long chat, and he ended by saying “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you!” I remember his office was very dark; he kept all the lights off…

The seminar was great. After it was over he organized an informal weekly gathering at his apartment so we could continue talking about justice. Various faculty gave papers; Brian served beer.

You know that book we have, The Incomplete Book of Failures? He introduced me to that book. He used to read out of it during class. He especially liked to read from the famous phrasebook, English As She Is Spoke.

I once bumped into him coming out of Regenstein Library. His arms were full of books — twenty of them, say. I said something like I see you’re finally reading a book or two. And he said I just finished writing a book on utilitarianism and now I have to read up on the subject to put in some footnotes.”

… of a book about misleading health statistics.

Another problem — increasingly — is conflict of interest. As pharmaceutical companies fund more of their own trials, the studies may be designed to yield the sunniest results possible. Allowing a new drug to shadow-box against a placebo, for instance, promises more marketable results than pitting it against a competing drug that’s already on the market. Publicizing only surrogate outcomes without mentioning whether the patient benefits in any substantive way is another common drug company dodge. So is burying — or at least minimizing — side effects or other shortcomings…

… is that only the powerless get punished for it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a plagiarist who, as Slate‘s Timothy Noah writes, lied about what she did, has suffered nothing for her behavior; on the contrary, she continues to be honored with awards of the sort Vanderbilt’s about to give her. The only people at Vanderbilt pissed off about this are its students.

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty maintains his support for Vanderbilt’s decision to honor historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of criticism from students.

Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and well-known historian, is the recipient of the 2009 Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal and will be the keynote speaker on Senior Class Day. Goodwin was also the center of a plagiarism scandal…

In 2002, Goodwin was accused of plagiarism in two news articles. Goodwin addressed the accusations in Time Magazine, asserting the errors were unintentional. Although Goodwin provided footnotes for her sources, she attributed her failure to “provide quotation marks for phrases I had taken verbatim” to mislabeling in her notes due to the large-scale nature of her research. She also confessed to having previously reached a “private settlement” with an author of one of her sources.

Senior Meghana Bhatta, an investigative member of the honor council, said Goodwin provided a “feeble excuse that would not even stand up in a high school classroom, much less in the world of academia.”

“Vanderbilt is sending a flawed and hypocritical message to its students and to other institutions by hosting an admitted plagiarist,” Bhatta said. “I hope that the administration realizes that we risk losing credibility in the eyes of the public by demonstrating support for a woman who does not stand for the ideals of our school.”

The allegations resulted in her resignation from several positions, but she still retained the support of many scholars and readers.

“I think she has answered those accusations and she gave ample credit to a source that she used,” McCarty said. “She worked out an arrangement with that author, but she in no way attempted to present that work as her own.” [Er. Yes she did. That’s why she paid said source an ample sum of money to shut her up.]”

“I find it odd that Vanderbilt, a university that makes every freshman sign the honor code, would reward her for work that was admittedly taken without notation from other sources,” [said a student] in regard to Goodwin’s past….

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

Update: The DKG Plagiarism Archive at University Diaries. Note that she ran into exactly the same trouble at the University of Virginia. Those pesky damn students.

In the case of Todd’s university?  Not much.

And your students know it.

Excerpts from “Your Professor’s PowerPoint Presentation,” in  College Humor.

The same slide show I’ve been

using for five years.

My entire job is to click a

button a few times and read

slides written by my TA.

Copied these points directly from the book.

You won’t believe how much they pay me to provide this effort-free method of teaching….

UD thanks Jason, a reader, for sending her this.

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

UPDATE: Anger at lazy professors overusing PowerPoint has become part of campus life. Opening sentences from an editorial at the Stevens Institute of Technology:

As students, we can sometimes feel discouraged that our concerns are not being addressed. Whether we want to see better food in Pierce, more parking spaces on campus, or fewer PowerPoint presentations in class, it is easy to feel that we have no recourse in these matters…

…on this blog, because I’m about universities. But don’t lose sight of the larger sleazy picture.

… a brief engagement.

Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, earned more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from companies such as Bank of America Corp., Ciitigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that later received taxpayer funds in the economic bailout.

The hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. also paid Summers more than $5 million in salary and other compensation in the past 16 months, according to a financial disclosure form released by the White House today. Summers served as a managing director at the New York-based firm until December, according to the report.

Summers, a Treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton, spoke to Citigroup, Goldman and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. audiences twice last year. Lehman, which went bankrupt in September, paid Summers $67,500 for an engagement on July 30, the filing showed…

A man stands up to give a speech. Did he write it himself? Probably not. How original is it? Let’s figure not very. How long did he speak? Forty minutes? Probably not even that. Is he especially beautiful, compelling, charismatic?

Is the outfit paying him in a position to give a guest speaker almost $70,000?

… Ah fuck it. I’m sure the expenditure makes… made… terrific sense for Lehman. Let’s look to the future: Isn’t it a good feeling to know that the man in whom the nation has vested our economic future knows how to turn a a few words into a check for $67,500 made out to himself?

Oregon Health and Science University issued a warning Friday evening after five monkeys escaped from its Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton.

One of those monkeys was captured around 8:00 p.m.

Jim Newman with OHSU said the group of males escaped while their cages were being cleaned around 1:00 p.m.

Newman said animal handlers had been tracking the Japanese Macaques on the Primate Research Center’s campus around SW 185th and Walker. The university decided to alert the public after the animals left the grounds of the campus and were spotted near the MAX line.

Newman said the monkeys are all about 20-35 pounds and were used as breeding animals to expand the primate population at the center.

Staff are using cages with food inside in the hopes of luring the animals inside.

According to Newman, “It is believed that the animals pose little to no threat to humans because they retreat when they are approached. However an animal that feels threatened could bite.”

The University also said the escaped monkeys haven’t been tested to see if they carry diseases that are low risk to primates but higher risk to humans.

A researcher who has written a book about the grant and fellowship review process describes how various disciplines fared on the panels she observed. Here’s English.

… Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” Perhaps because of the influence of poststructuralism in the discipline, literary scholars are particularly aware that the standards of evaluation are intersubjective, resulting from the interaction of panelists. They’re ambivalent about how successful a peer-review panel can be. Asked whether “the cream rises to the top,” they emphasize that doesn’t necessarily happen. Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.

Even if you didn’t have such relativistic views of excellence, the question of how to evaluate literary studies remains open. At one point, there was agreement on mastery of close reading, how language works. But three trends have undermined that consensus: critique of canonization and of privileging the written text; a widening of interest to include history, anthropology and the social context in which a text is written; and challenges — whether from Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism — to the whole idea of “representation.”

One result is that literature proposals don’t do as well in multidisciplinary panels. One panelist told me, “At some point, somebody said, ‘Gosh, we’re giving all the awards to historians.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not surprising.’…

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced on Wednesday that the investment assets of Harvard University had been seized in order to restore stability to the global financial system. Treasury officials reported that the total amount taken under federal control was just over $30 billion despite losses which accrued to the Harvard endowment during the ongoing financial crisis. In exchange for the seized assets, the Treasury has issued 10-year Treasury Bonds to the University maturing at a value of $36.57 billion in 2019, an annual interest rate of two percent. To magnify the benefit created by the seizure, the Fed has structured the transaction, through fractional reserve banking, to leverage the assets into over $3 trillion in bonds for sale to foreign governments that are holding U.S. dollars in reserve. “Since these bonds are backed by the Harvard name, the Chinese are going to be clamoring to reinvest their money in the United States,” said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Members of the G20 expressed relief at the news of a concrete plan to support the value of the U.S. dollar.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust expressed deep concern about the news, and warned that it will likely necessitate further staff layoffs and tuition hikes. “Professors and students will have to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The loss of endowment dividends, which contributed almost thirty-four percent of our annual budget, will force us to scale back our generous extra-curricular dining opportunities, which are currently consuming almost a quarter of the University’s gross annual revenues. In addition, we will most likely be unable to continue expansion of innovative departments like sub-Saharan social anthropology and nanophotonic synthetic bioengineering. Nonetheless, she admitted that, “Given the current economic gloom, the rate of return on these illiquid bonds will probably be much better than any other investment during the next decade.”

President Obama praised Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan. “This venerable institution of scholarship, much like the troubled financial and automotive firms, is simply too big to fail. It is for this reason that we are confident this plan is in the best interests of the American taxpayers and the stability of the world economy.” The Dow Jones Industrial average was up 372 points, or 6% on the announcement. Former Harvard University President Larry Summers was credited with having crafted the plan to prop up the faltering Treasury. “With the bravado emanating from the Chinese putting the stability of the dollar in question and Peter Schiff detailing the inevitability of a currency crisis on YouTube, it was unavoidable that we make some immediate announcement to reestablish the security and stability of Treasury Bonds. The real danger was that our intervention would be too small or too slow.”

President Obama saluted the patriotism displayed by Drew Gilpin Faust in her graceful acceptance of the U.S. Government’s plan. “Harvard’s President has shown us that we are all going to have to make certain changes in order to make a real commitment to responsibility and reaffirm the enduring promise of America.” Faust, for her part, was somewhat skeptical as to the University’s ability to oppose the government’s actions. “Last week, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying that this sort of asset seizure would probably be constitutional even if subject to strict scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment. That statement has put the kibosh on any litigation we might have pursued.”

Acting Dean Howell Jackson assured HLS students that the University’s changing financial circumstances would in no way affect the law school’s public service initiative or summer public interest funding. “Our legendary fundraising machine has been hard at work this year, and has already raised over $100 million, which will go to extending protection for LIPP, SPIF, JIFFY, PEP, and all our other public interest programs.” He also noted that, although there would be some belt-tightening in the funding for student activities, HLS students will continue to enjoy some of their traditional perks. “We will be continuing to provide morning coffee three days a week, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we will have to switch to Sanka.”

Harvard Law Record

… the University of California Riverside professor who wrote a generous blurb for Jenny’s and my book, has died.

… Mr. Elliott grew up in a three-room apartment in a gritty Baltimore neighborhood. His father drove a truck. His mother operated a loom that produced corporate emblems.

After earning his bachelor’s degree, his family’s first college degree, from Loyola College in Baltimore, he got his master’s degree from Bowling Green State and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

After 17 years teaching at Princeton, he came to UCR for the opportunity to shape a growing campus, he said in a previous interview.

… Liam Corley, who earned his Ph.D. at UCR in 2004 under Elliott’s guidance, also remembered him fondly. Corley, an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly Pomona, is deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy.

“Emory was a selfless man,” Corley wrote in an e-mail to UCR officials after they informed him of Elliott’s death. “He was always in high demand as a mentor, teacher, speaker and scholar, but he had the generous gift of always paying attention to the person before him.”