Sometimes ol’ UD just has to laugh. The email postmortem on The Dragas Rebellion at the University of Virginia confirms her hapless, incredibly expensive hiring of Hill+Knowlton Strategies to write the shit she wanted to put (under other peoples’ names) in newspapers and student blogs about how pathetic UVa’s president was.
If UD‘s laughing at this dupe (recall that UVa only avoided paying the firm’s obscene bill – over $200,000 for… what? – by getting some rich guy on the board of visitors to pony it up), imagine how the guided communications consultant is splitting its sides.
Does anyone actually buy this bullshit anymore? A high-profile Canadian scientist, recipient of much government research largesse, claims
1. he didn’t know an article on which he was the senior writer was plagiarized; and that
2. an underling of his, a woman, did all the bad stuff; but that
3. as a fine upstanding human being he’ll take the fall for it because he
4. should have known what was in the article.
How noble! Far from imposing any punishment on this great and good man, cruelly betrayed by his sneaky subordinate, who earned second-author status on the article because she was responsible for all the writing in it and he did jackshit, let us increase government support for his research!
… the universal connection between overexertion and plagiarism.
The prolific writer is also a stand-up comedian and was a Liberal Party candidate for Marrickville in the 2008 NSW local council elections.
********************
(My original post title said Canada’s. UD thanks Jeremy for correcting her teeny geographical error.)
You don’t want to overuse technology. You don’t want students staring at tv shows on their laptops, or texting their friends. If there’s noise in the hall, you should shut the door. If you have to breastfeed your baby, you should do it somewhere else.
American University, down the street from UD’s GW, has responded correctly to a professor there who took her breastfeeding baby (who was sick that day) to class.
“The faculty manual requires professional conduct in the classroom at all times, including a focus on high standards for teaching and respect for students,” said the administration’s statement, which a spokeswoman said was based on a range of policies already in place at the university. “For the sake of the child and the public health of the campus community, when faced with the challenge of caring for a sick child in the case where backup childcare is not available, a faculty member should take earned leave and arrange for someone else to cover the class, not bring a sick child into the classroom.”
… is that any particular revelation of corruption threatens to set off a chain reaction.
Take your typical southern university system — a crony dumping-ground, a favor-repayment franchise, a post-tailgate barrens of the blitzed and bilious. As with the 2009 Mary Easley scandal at North Carolina State (scroll down for several posts), one fallen crony begats another which begats another yea to everlasting. More recently, the unpleasantness in the University of North Carolina’s Afro-American Studies department has touched off a spate of panic-auditing which has begat more fallen cronies, among them a sporty, well-compensated couple that travels about hither and yon on the taxpayer’s dime.
… that I ignore most of them and only feature the very worst. The Florida A&M hazing death definitely rates inclusion. The family of the student beaten to death on the marching band’s bus has sued, and FAMU has argued that the kid brought it on himself.
This ignores the fact that FAMU has spent decades ignoring a hazing culture that anyone could see was spinning out of control. UD thinks the school should take the fall – might knock some sense into all the other sports factories that do the same sort of thing.
… other sites, was down for most of the afternoon. Her host, GoDaddy, apparently got hacked.
But I’m back, to share with you the Headline of the Day:
MEN CAUGHT WITH TINY PRIMATES IN THEIR UNDERWEAR IN DELHI AIRPORT
The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…
The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.
The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.
As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:
… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.
One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.
***********************
UD thanks Maurice.
You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.
A writer at Jezebel uses really hurtful language to describe Boston University’s fun-loving hockey players. In the tradition of George Huguely, they call their sexual conquests “kills.” As at the University of Montana, a campus so rape-positive that students must now watch don’t rape, don’t get raped films and then pass a test about them before they can register, it’s all about the athletes.
I mean, it’s also about the bars, boosters, and coaches.
There is a widespread belief that behavior by the [Montana] football team has been tolerated by the program’s infrastructure. Three of the lawyers representing players, for example, are on the National Advisory Board for Grizzly Athletics…
*************************
[O]ne [Boston] team member said [the hockey coach] “cares too much about hurting the important players’ feelings… He’ll criticize, then apologize.”
*************************
[A] shady student-athlete-friendly sports bar … T’s Pub [has been cited as] “part of the problem,” since hockey players could (until recently) drink there for free without showing IDs. [Athletes bring in business.]
**************************
Yes, it takes a village. And why is the village the way it is?
Mayor John Engen of Missoula said the city was cooperating and would make any needed changes. He said he believed the scandal would pass if the public and the students felt the issues had been addressed, but in the meantime, with the football team under a cloud, “it’s hard to know what people are going to pin their hopes and dreams on.”
What else are people going to pin their hopes and dreams on?
**************************
UD proposes that big-time sports universities set aside some part of their enormous athletic budgets to establish Comfort Women dormitories, safe and supervised havens for the teams.
