For years on this blog I’ve followed journalists and professors who plagiarize. I’ve learned that almost all of them do it for a living. They’ve done it before; they’ll do it again. They are lifers. Taking the work of others is what they do.

So UD wasn’t surprised by this follow-up article to the case of Patricia Linn, who has written pieces for an Australian law society journal.

After a reporter uncovered an initial plagiarized piece of hers (and after the predictable refusal of the law society to face up to what The Australian had uncovered), the society itself checked her other pieces.

The [organization] has consistently refused to give any explanation to The Australian but it seems that somebody inside the society has gone back and checked Ms Linn’s articles…

A curious item appears in the October edition, which is now being mailed to Queensland’s solicitors. Buried on page 12, it is headed “Errata: People and Performance Articles” and it deserves a full public release.

It reads: “Parts of the content of the People and Performance article Talking to yourself — self-help or self harm? (Proctor, June, 2009) are attributable to Shelley Holmes, founder and CEO of the Centre for Breakthrough Leadership.

“Some parts of the content in the People and Performance article, Believing is doing — you can empower yourself (Proctor, July, 2009) are attributable to Shelley Holmes, Elizabeth Scott MS of About.com and Associate Professor Susan Santo of the University of South Dakota.

“Some parts of the content in the People and Performance article, Candidate Interviews — How to use behavioural questions (Proctor, August, 2009) are attributable to the Australian Institute of Management — Queensland and the Northern Territory.

“The Queensland Law Society apologises for these omissions.”

As the reporter points out, errors and omissions doesn’t quite say it.

But my point here is that no one should be surprised that Linn’s a lifer.

An undergraduate chemistry student slashed the throat of his lab partner during class. It sounds as though she will survive, though her injuries are very serious. She lost a lot of blood.

LAPD detectives were seeking a motive in the stabbing of a UCLA student by a classmate, and people across the Westwood campus remain stunned at the sudden violence.

… Students in the chemistry lab watched helplessly Thursday afternoon as their classmate suddenly slashed the neck of the female student, causing serious injuries.

The attack occurred just past noon on the sixth floor of Young Hall, prompting swift police mobilization and leaving students shaken by the violence as word spread across campus.

Police have booked [Damon] Thompson on suspicion of attempted murder.

Thompson was arrested inside Young Hall minutes after the incident. The name of the victim has not been released. She was rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which is on campus, in critical condition. She underwent surgery and her condition was improving.

Los Angeles Police Department detectives said they don’t know the motive for the attack. A law enforcement source said there might have been a verbal altercation before the slashing, but details were unclear. Both students were seniors, and some campus sources said they may have been lab partners.

… UCLA student Saad Ahmed said the violence left even unflappable med and pre-med students in shock.

“There was blood all over the place, so much blood where you thought, ‘Is she going to make it?’ ” Ahmed said. “People were panicking, they were in disbelief, saying, ‘How could this happen at UCLA?’ “

The echoes with the recent Yale incident are disturbing.

… is charming. Starting with the headline —

PROPHYLACTICS IN PROXIMITY

— and moving on through the essay. Really nicely done. Tight and bright.

Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize.

Devoted readers know I like to write these. Here are a few. I take a newspaper article and make a poem out of it.

Here’s the article from which I’ve made my latest newspaper poem.

Here’s the poem:

A Lunar Crash Won’t Hurt the Moon

And the rock resumes
Its even, meteoritic,
Temper.

Susan Moeller, a finance professor at Eastern Michigan University, spoke at a recent trustees’ meeting and told them that the school’s a mess academically and gives most of its money to a losing football team.

“We’re down to 57 percent regular faculty, and the other 43 percent are lecturers and part time. Searches are being held back, and I’m unhappy that they spend so much money on athletics and not academics. It’s important that we have full time faculty.”

… “Over the last few years, the budget for academics was cut by four million dollars,” she said. “They need new programming. They redid the football stadium before they redid the academic buildings. … The football coach makes more than the president.”

EMU’s president responds: “We had no increases in athletics budget this year aside from necessary pay raises.”

Necessary pay raises. Wonder what they are. I mean, universities all over the country are doing furloughs, salary reductions… What are the necessary raises at EMU?

UD’s guessing those are the raises that raise the football coach’s salary yet HIGHER than the president’s — or else…

You know…

Or else the coach will do what all peeved university football coaches do when the university peeves them: Sue, sue, sue, sue, sue.

… derived from Kleist and Kafka, that fits snugly, in our time, to the dull needy nastiness of life under authoritarian regimes.

I’ve been reading, this morning, Herta Müller’s novel The Land of Green Plums (1993; English translation, 1996), and it’s just that sort of thing — a deadpan chronicle of psychic and physical degradation under the Ceausescus.   Excerpts:

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

As she speaks, something gets stuck on her tongue. The child thinks, it can only be the truth sticking to her tongue like a cherrystone that refuses to go down. As long as her voice keeps rising to her ears, she will wait for the truth. But once her voice grows silent, thinks the child, everything will have turned out to be a lie, since the truth has gone tumbling down her throat.

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

Father keeps the graveyards deep in his throat, between his collar and his chin, near his Adam’s apple. That way the graveyards can never pass his lips. His mouth drinks schnapps made from the darkest plums, and his songs for the Fuhrer are heavy and drunken.

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

There were fleas in the closets because there were fleas in the beds, in the suitcases with the patent stockings, in the long corridor. And in the eating area as well, and in the shower room, and in the cafeteria, there were fleas. In the trams, in the shops, in the movie theater.

Everyone has to scratch as they pray, Lola writes in her notebook. She went to church every Sunday morning. The priest has to scratch himself as well. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, writes Lola, here the whole city is alive with fleas.

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

The bodega, too, was a lie, with its tablecloths and plants, its bottles and the red-wine uniforms of its waiters. Here no one was a guest, they were all just refugees from a meaningless afternoon.

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

You could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear.

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

A mother takes the train into the city every week. The child is allowed to accompany her twice a year. Once at the beginning of summer, and once at the beginning of winter. The child feels ugly in town because she’s bundled up in so much thick clothing. The mother takes the child to the station at four in the morning. It’s cold, even in early summer it’s still cold at four in the morning. The mother wants to be in the city by eight, because that’s when the stores open.

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

That last paragraph conveys the prose style I’m talking about.  Anonymous — the mother, the child. Dully, robotically redundant:  A mother.  The child.  The child.  The mother. The content details the humiliating, unnatural conditions of life under the regime, but everything really gets conveyed by the affectless, dead-on-the-page prose, as if to say This world is so beyond belief, so incredible in its injustice and its distortions of human life, that it has killed the souls of the people who live in it.  Dead prose for dead souls.

Herta Müller’s British publisher reacts to her having won the Nobel Prize for literature. 

Details here, and I’ll see what I can find of hers in English today — maybe something I can blog about.

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

Two Updates:

First, from an email I just got from Vladimir Tismaneanu, a colleague of Mr UD’s who knows Muller:

Harsh critic of Communist dictatorships in EE.  As she put it, she lived for over 30 years in a dictatorship. This topic haunts her writing: fear, anxieties, courage, survival, dignity.

One of her best known novels, Der Konig veneigt sich und totet (The King Bows and Kills).

It’s a most appropriate decision twenty years after the fall of the Wall of Shame (the Berlin Wall), a tribute to all those who refused to bow…

And second, excerpts from an interview with her on Radio Romania.

From the Rutgers student newspaper:

“[Textbooks] come bundled with various technologies, including clicker technologies,” [a university technology specialist] said. “We still have not overcome the problem caused by different publishers using a variety of systems.”

Nick Arvaneni, a sophomore engineering student, said there is one type of clicker that is especially problematic.

“We had to buy a [personal response system] clicker. Right after that, the teacher said that we aren’t going to use them anymore. … You can’t resell the clicker and they’re more expensive than the others,” he said. “Once my teacher realized how complicated it was, she decided not to use the clicker — and now I’m stuck with it.”

Andrew Abdou, a University alumnus and information technology representative for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, thinks the clickers are more trouble than they are worth.

“The assortment of clickers you’ll collect is remarkable,” he said. “Clickers in general are just an advanced way of taking attendance. They don’t keep you any more engaged or provide a more interactive class experience.”

Clickers don’t stop students from skipping out on class.

“A lot of the time, students give their clickers to a friend to click for them,” Abdou said. “One time, a professor caught a girl doing that and he smashed the clickers against the wall.”…

… by a graduating senior.

Everyone [has] told me to stop thinking [negative thoughts] and to enjoy what should be the best time of my life. I never understood what is meant by that, ‘the best time of my life.’ I couldn’t understand how sitting in a lecture hall day after day listening to professors read off PowerPoint slides to rooms full of half-asleep students was ‘the best time of my life.’

From a student at the University of Arizona:

[I]n some ways clickers are great: they add a new level of interactivity to big, soul-sucking lecture classes, forcing students to stay more involved. What sucks about the clicker, on the other hand, is that it’s basically an indication of the permanence of the large lecture teaching method. It’s hard to find any faculty member on this campus who’ll say that teaching a 500-person class is a great way for students to learn. One big issue is that big classes force the subjects being taught to regress; that is, to be simplified and standardized in such a way that there’s always a “right” answer amidst several wrong answers. Obviously, very few disciplines are that cut-and-dried, and so the true depth of the material is lost as it becomes more and more processed for mass consumption.

What most professors will say, however, is that it’s the value of undergraduate education that’s changing. It has become more a necessity than a privilege, a ubiquitous prerequisite for marginal success in life (and a decently paying job). So the crux here is that classes are just going to get bigger and bigger — we should be thankful that nobody at this University, as of yet, has to endure being the class of 2020.

A Boston University student ponders PowerPoint vs. the old ways.

What we potentially lose in our tech-laden classrooms is the explanation of slide-simplified concepts, the engagement of figuring out your professor’s handwriting and scribbling down whatever he/she just wrote, and even the need, and more importantly will, to go to class and learn. Hark! The herald angels chalked.

The essay’s an intriguing riff on boredom… UD has already encountered in her reading about universities speculation that professors and students are drawn to classroom technology because many of them have come to enjoy being bored…

Or is it, UD wonders, that the classroom session has morphed into the classroom sesshin — a Zen sitting with soft lights, muttering monks, and the white noise of heating systems? The dharma was downloaded last Wednesday, so you don’t have to listen… The hour and ten minutes devotes itself to the most radical revision of university education in our time: Empty your head.

… rather than Karol, but otherwise it’s an okay article.

Excerpts:

In Poland, it was “Byczek Fernando.”

The Polish translation of “The Story of Ferdinand,” a children’s book that chronicles the peaceful life of a Spanish bull who preferred the smell of flowers to the heat of a bullfight is also one of the few children’s books Carlos Soltan can remember from growing up.

So when Soltan and his wife, Margaret, moved into the former home of its author, Munro Leaf, in 1995, the couple began making the abode into “Ferdinand House,” a residence and shrine to the peaceful bull.

“It seemed appropriate to somehow maintain the continuity, preserve the spirit of Munro Leaf,” Soltan said.

Margaret Soltan, an English professor and writer, had grown up across the street from the house, but didn’t know Munro. She knew his wife, Margaret as a potter, adventurer and all-around “strong lady,” but upon moving into the airy cottage with giant windows, felt a writer’s belonging.

“It was such an irony to move into Margaret Leaf’s old house, and I thought it was such a marvelous irony that this was a writer’s house,” Margaret Soltan said. “I think it was when I slowly realized how beloved the book was. It just gradually occurred to me how really marvelous that book is.”

To pay tribute, the Soltans installed a small gold plaque by the door, proclaiming it “Ferdinand House.” In a town where folks know houses not by their current residents, but by their former ones, the Soltans had christened theirs for a larger-than-life fiction.

They installed two topiary bulls in the front yard, discovered after a long search at a Shenandoah roadside stand. The bulls, filled with sphagnum moss, sit not under Ferdinand’s favored Spanish cork tree, but just as serenely under the leafy canopy of Garrett Park. A Picasso sketch of bulls hung in the hall was bought in remembrance of Leaf. For years, the Soltans kept a copy of the tale by the door.

The book, written in 1936 — before the Leafs moved to Garrett Park — was received as a critique of the Spanish Civil War and universally adopted as a pacifist allegory. Leaf wrote more than 30 books, but “Ferdinand” has been read by generations of children and influenced pop culture. The band Fall Out Boy named an album “From Under the Cork Tree” after Ferdinand’s sitting spot, and singer-song writer Elliot Smith had a tattoo of the character.

“It was simple, the illustrations were very simple, the writing was very simple,” Margaret Soltan said. “Underneath the simplicity is kind of this fable, it’s not pushy or manipulative.”

The fable is still being told locally and not only in Garrett Park. Imagination Stage, a children’s theater in Bethesda, commissioned Washington, D.C. playwright Karen Zacharias to adapt the book into a musical in 2001. The result, “Ferdinand the Bull,” is being performed at the theater through Nov. 1.

Laurie Levy-Page, director of marketing at Imagination Stage, said she knew he was from Maryland but “had no idea Munro Leaf had lived nearby.”

… Margaret Soltan has frequently contemplated the character in blog posts about living in the house, from the children that stop to see the bull statue to her belief that the house somehow retains the essence of Leaf and his bull.

“My Ferdinands sit in the shade of a dogwood. Squirrels nibble their sphagnum moss; dogs bark at them. Children stop and point,” blogged Soltan last fall, noting that somewhere the couple even has stationery datelined Ferdinand House. “Is there such a thing as the spirit of a house? If there is, this one’s got a calm, expansive one, I guess.”

…sics.

…White Noise.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has defended a professor’s $219 purchase of the complete set of the 1960s series “Get Smart” as appropriate.

The Legislative Audit Bureau discovered the purchase of the 25-DVD set by a business professor during a review of credit card spending.

Auditors also wanted explanations for the professor’s purchase of seasons of “The Love Boat” and “Family Ties.” The professor, whose name was redacted from records, spent more so all three could be shipped overnight.

In an internal e-mail, the professor said clips from the shows would be used “to illustrate aspects of business and management” in his class.

UW-Madison called the purchases a “best judgment” and said the DVDs would be used for years, so purchasing instead of renting them made sense.