… Margaret Soltan, Girl Reporter, there’s this.
Er, a law professor is suing his dean for retaliating against him after the law prof accused the dean of sexual harassment.
Among the dean’s alleged sexually harassing behaviors:
The suit said the professor complained [to university authorities] about alleged inappropriate touching and comments involving women colleagues, including a bare-skin, summer-dress “caress” that [the professor, Raymond] Ku and his wife found “unnerving and creepy.”
The lawsuit also claimed the dean questioned Ku about circumcision as the professor prepared to convert to Judaism. Mitchell said the conversion would put Ku in two of his favorite groups — Asian and Jewish, the lawsuit said.
Are you outraged yet?
Well, how about this:
The dean is rumored to have slept with a law student! The dean has been married and divorced four times! Someone told Ku that the dean makes demeaning statements about women! (UD is getting all of this from Ku’s complaint, which you can read here. Scroll down.)
When you combine these transgressions with the dean’s outrageous assertion that Ku has been been put in two of the dean’s favorite groups, it all adds up to …. what? What seems just? A million in damages? Two million?
… involving admissions, financial aid, and national rankings, for some time. Or so it appears. And because the campus newspaper, The Hatchet, has been aggressive in its investigative reporting lately (it broke the now-national need-aware rather than need-blind story), the university can expect its year-long string of bad news stories to lengthen.
These stories include – for good measure – the messy and mysterious firing of the business school dean, and another charge of system-gaming, this one alleging the inflation of GW’s endowment growth by its investment officers.
The investment story includes this yummy morsel:
[The whistle blower] also claims that she had previously “questioned [the Chief Investment Officer’s] ethics,” pointing to his private consulting services as a conflict of interest.
She said after confronting him about his monthly trips to the Bahamas for the private consulting, he announced that he would end his outside consulting services.
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UD‘s student, Jacob Garner, with whom she’s working on his senior thesis about David Foster Wallace (Jacob just got back from the University of Texas, where he went – with GW research fellowship money! – to look at Wallace’s papers) notes in his Hatchet column that in fact GW had no reason to lie about its need-aware policy:
When you look at the actual issue – why GW needs to be need-aware – it starts to make sense. People will understand. So why lie?
GW’s endowment of $1.3 billion hardly rivals those of need-blind colleges Northwestern and New York universities, with endowments that stand at about $7 and $3 billion respectively.
Administrators are searching for ways to bring in as much money as they can, and being need-aware is an obvious way to increase tuition revenue. But administrators shouldn’t be lying about our admissions policies.
If you can work up any tears over Phoenix cutting thousands of jobs you’ll cry at anything.
The proper response is good riddance.
UD‘s faith in scams remains strong; she’s sure some other outfit will figure out how to take billions of our tax dollars in order not to educate Americans. Perhaps Phoenix itself will regroup to scam another day. But for the moment, what good news.
… Yeshiva could not have done any better. A university whose sexual and financial scandals dwarf the sexual and financial scandals of all other American universities; where the vilest sexual abusers continue to be hired and kept on the faculty until pressure from journalists forces Yeshiva to fire them; where the school’s long history of sexual abusers means that it now faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential settlement costs from a massive ongoing lawsuit… A school perfectly happy to keep Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees long after suspicions of his massive criminality were rampant but hysterically punitive when a woman student wrote a short story with mild sexual content…
And here it goes again. You simply cannot keep Yeshiva University from being the most obscenely hypocritical university in America.
Within twenty-four hours of [a Yeshiva student] posting [a] survey [about sex], the University Dean of Students contacted [her] via email and phone informing her that her housing scholarship had been revoked.
No whores wanted here! We’re a religious establishment! What would Zygmunt Wilf and Ira Rennert and Julius Berman say! What shamelessness!
Outrage among students at Yeshiva’s disgusting behavior forced the school to back down. Good thing, because FIRE would have had a field day with this.
Yeshiva University: You simply cannot keep a bad school down.
What you gonna do when she is gone?
If you’re the University of Alabama, famed for your rabid fans and regally compensated coach, you’re going to “review photos and video of the [student] section during games to determine which organizations are leaving early and violators could have block seating privileges taken away.”
So, uh, let’s step back and review.
Although we are assured that fan rabidity is positively mythic at Alabama (you can’t walk for all the statues of coaches all over campus; watch for Penn State’s toppled Paterno statue to be re-erected with full honors at UA), everybody walks out once it’s clear the team has won the game. In the most recent case, victory was obvious well before half-time, see, and the stands emptied…
But get a load of those stands! Part of the wild carefree business of being a Bama fan is constant electronic surveillance. Whee! And just so you know, kiddo — Your school is watching your every move, and if you leave your fucking seat your name is entered on UA’s Enemies of the Tide list and you will be punished. Okay? ‘Kay?
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UD has written a good deal – and she will write more as the problem intensifies – about what she calls fantasms: the vanishing fans of university football. She has suggested some remedies for the situation short of UA’s (and other schools’) petty and doomed-to-fail procedures. (What do all the cameras pick up when they’re filming – for a national audience – students who don’t want to be there? Students who are drunk and displeased? Expect an uptick in mooning.)
Short of the placement in the stands of animatronic fans (not all universities will want to go this route), UD sees no alternative to the use of drones. The Phantom (Fantom?) Drone is available at Amazon for under five hundred dollars and can, with, say, five or so others, continually buzz the student section in such a way as to make use of any mounted weaponry unnecessary.
… To the rogue’s gallery that runs and has run Yeshiva University, we must add Julius Berman, who continues to hold a place of honor on one of that farcically scandal-ridden university’s boards of trustees. Berman’s chair emeritus of the all-boys board of Yeshiva’s seminary. And like several of his amazing Yeshiva compatriots, he sure does know how to get into trouble.
[Susan Fuhrman, head of Teachers College Columbia University,] finds the birth of alternative teacher schools “upsetting.” “I worry about cutting that kind of preparation off from the scholarship and from emerging research” that a university offers, she said. “It can sound like I feel threatened. I don’t. But it just worries me as a trend.”
There are 3.3 million public school teachers in America, and they probably can’t all be trained by start-ups. Raising up the standards of our university programs should be an urgent priority. But one reason for the widespread mediocrity is that universities have had a cozy, lucrative monopoly. It’s about time the leaders of our education schools did feel threatened.
This blog has for years followed the scandal of America’s schools of education. Their notorious mediocrity continues to generate alternative forms of preparation for the profession.
[U]niversities have proved largely immutable. Educators, including some inside these institutions, say universities have treated education programs as “cash cows.” The schools see no incentive to change because they have plenty of applicants willing to pay full tuition, the programs are relatively cheap to run, and they are accountable to no one except accrediting agencies run by, you guessed it, education schools. It’s a contented cartel.
Miss Ole Miss gets it said.
Some wag placed a recent official Ole Miss ad just below her YouTube. LOL.
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(“Sweetheart, William Faulkner drank enough whiskey to float Oxford.” — From the article’s comment thread.)
Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.
She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.
The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…
… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.
His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.
Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.
But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:
“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”
This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.
I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.
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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.
[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.
de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.
The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.
[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.
Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.
[Michelle] Crawford was hired [as a business professor] despite the fact she [had been] disbarred as a lawyer and faced criminal prosecution. [Crawford is the sister-in-law of an ASU trustee.]
Crawford was a licensed attorney in North Carolina before she was disbarred in about September 2008 “for misappropriation of entrusted funds and failure to reconcile her trust account,” according to [a] report. She was hired as a business professor at ASU in 2011 and was retained through August or September 2013 (different dates have been reported). She was indicted April 19, 2012, in U.S. District Court in North Carolina… Crawford, also known as Michelle Mallard, pleaded guilty July 10 to “mortgage fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and embezzlement in violation of the wire fraud statute.”
She faces a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.
It’s never too soon to start learning. If tradition means anything to you.
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Duke pays Coach K, the genius who thought this photo-op up, ten million dollars a year. By some standards, he’s the highest paid college coach in America.
Expect him to earn twelve or thirteen million next year.
… can be found here, at Inside Higher Ed.