… movie. UD thinks of its name whenever a big research fraud story breaks, since the trapped honcho almost always blames his years of image manipulation, plagiarism, data futzing, etc., on the others – shadowy research assistants in the corners of the lab of whose evil ways the honcho was tragically ignorant.
So it is with Shigeaki Kato, a University of Tokyo bigshot who studies molecular signaling. He’s at 43 retractions and counting. Note the use of the passive voice plus the others in his comment.
[Kato is quoted as having said] “there is no doubt that there was impropriety.” He is also quoted as apologizing and explaining that he didn’t catch the impropriety because he trusted his lab members.
Kato’s fraud goes back sixteen years! Talk about trust… I mean, I think we’re past trust and into naivete at this point… It’s the purest of heart who always get pulled down by the world.
… pages from his American imprisonment diary.
Le scoop on le pimping. Note the video of a protest at Cambridge University over his having been invited to speak there.
Today’s headline on NPR.
Maybe it’s time for Brown University to revisit its none of your fucking business position on the question of trustee Steven Cohen.
… Gored.
All praise to Todd Wallack, the Boston Globe reporter who put up with all the shit the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its risible public relations firm threw at him to try to make him go away.
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UD thanks Barney.
… trustee Steven A. Cohen – featured an exhibit titled: Move Along, Nothing to See Here.
What Brown University is currently exhibiting – institutional indifference to the university’s continued association with le très malsain M. Cohen – is a show of the same name: Nothing to see here. Steve’s our guy, SEC be damned.
It’s been months now that we’ve known Cohen’s scandalous firm to be insider trading central; but, well, as a commenter on the latest Brown Daily Herald article writes:
Why would it affect Cohen’s [trustee] status? Steve Rattner gave the family weekend speech in 2012 after being charged in a pay for play scheme by the SEC, and paying huge fines.
Trustee Steve the First! Gone but not forgotten (scroll down). As to the Second: UD understands a university pausing for a very long moment before breaking up with a guy who makes nine hundred million dollars a year in salary. A guy with a personal fortune of around ten billion dollars. UD‘s heart goes out to Brown at this difficult time. Brown must work out a complex moral calculus: Filthy lucre vs. a shred of ethical integrity.
Stay tuned.
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As always, UD thanks Roy.
Late last week, the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the antitrust lawsuit filed against the [NCAA] by former University of California, Los Angeles basketball player Ed O’Bannon and a group of other former college athletes added six current college football players to their amended complaint; in response, NCAA vice president for legal affairs Donald Remy released a statement claiming that O’Bannon and company’s “scheme to pay a small number of student-athletes threatens college sports as we know it.”
“In particular,” Remy wrote, “we would lose the very real opportunity for at least 96 percent of NCAA male and female student-athletes who do not compete in Division I men’s basketball or FBS football to play a sport and get an education, as they do today.”
In other words? This is the end. Of everything. Make us share more of the pie with greedy revenue-sport athletes and their trial lawyers by eliminating amateurism, and say goodbye to women’s lacrosse. Don’t you want those hard-working young women to earn college degrees? Cue “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana.
Yeshiva University’s Moody’s rating has just been downgraded to Baa1 from A2; Moody’s is currently reviewing the university for further downgrades.
How does a university get to such a disastrous place?
It was not the work of a day. Yeshiva had to make itself so notorious that students didn’t want to enroll, and alumni didn’t want to donate. This took about five years, starting with the brilliant idea of putting Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – both YU trustees – in charge of Yeshiva’s money. Conflict of interest? Who cares.
The financial and reputational hit was a biggie. But Yeshiva was just getting started.
Instead of dealing forthrightly with its misbehavior, Yeshiva said nothing and simply erased Madoff’s name from all mentions on its website. (It couldn’t erase everything: “Madoff’s name was prominent in the program for Yeshiva’s annual Hanukkah dinner and convocation, a major fundraising event, held on Dec. 14 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, three days after he was arrested.”) It then went about characterizing itself as an innocent victim of this mean man and his friend Ezra.
With the Madoff/Merkin mess already destroying Yeshiva’s integrity, extensive sexual scandal now hit the newspapers. Decades of important Yeshiva University rabbis preying on children, or looking the other way while children were preyed upon, are the talk of the town. Yeshiva will probably have to settle hundreds of millions of dollars on the traumatized people suing it.
A third crucial component of Yeshiva University’s catastrophe is its inability clearly to admit wrongdoing, coupled with the continued prominence of people reportedly associated with wrongdoing. Take Hershel Schachter.
The power of the rabbinical school rabbis to intervene in student intellectual and extracurricular life could also undermine [Yeshiva University’s] efforts to compete with secular colleges. Rabbi [Hershel] Schachter, who objected to the study of the Christian Bible, also [said] he sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).”
Okay, so far just a jerk, the sort of anti-intellectual endemic on fundamentalist university campuses. But there’s more.
Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.
Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter, who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment.
No comment, of course; and Schachter retains a high rank at YU. So does Kenneth Brander.
Better recruiting is [YU President Richard] Joel’s answer to declining enrollment. Back in June, he tasked Rabbi Kenneth Brander, head of the Center for the Jewish Future, with a special assignment: to “re-invent recruitment strategies,” as Joel put it to the Stern College student newspaper, The Observer, in an October interview.
And here is Brander in the Jewish Daily Forward:
[T]wo men have told the Forward that they tried to warn … Kenneth Brander, about Andron. Brander led the Boca Raton congregation from 1991 until 2005, when he took a post as dean of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future.
One man who said that he was molested by Andron for three years told the Forward that he called Brander during the early 1990s.
“I told [Brander], he’s definitely a pedophile,” the man said, referring to Andron. “[Brander said] he would look into it, and he never called me back.”
Another man said he tried to warn Brander about Andron a little more than a decade ago.
The man said he tried to call Brander “four or five times,” but Brander did not respond. So the man said he “had to leave a very uncomfortable message” with someone in the Boca Raton Synagogue office. Later, a “third party” from the synagogue contacted the man to say that the allegations against Andron were “rumors” and that “in any case, it’s behind him,” the man said.
Brander may well be innocent of these charges; but as far as YU’s future goes, it doesn’t matter. The school is in free fall.
… UD rides into town to save his ass.
Barchi wants to hold on to two corporate money-for-nothing seats. Who wouldn’t? But as the leader of the state senate points out, they are both grotesquely obvious conflicts of interest. The corporations in question even do business with Rutgers.
Barchi would be an idiot to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money, yes. But his job, and whatever reputation Rutgers has left after its zillions of other scandals, are in peril. What to do? Hm, hm, hm…
So far, Rutgers hasn’t done much of anything. Barchi seems to think he can wait this one out, stonewall until everyone loses interest. UD isn’t sure this is a good move. UD can think of a better move.
Barchi can take for his model here the NCAA’s chief legal counsel, who warns that Ed O’Bannon’s class action lawsuit (details here) “threatens college sports as we know it.”
Take the high road, in other words. Go the dignity route. University presidents on corporate boards, university football and basketball – these are beautiful things, with venerable traditions… things we threaten at our peril… things that are simply the heart and soul of the great American university. When you threaten a president’s ability to double her compensation by attending biannual meetings with a biotech at the Regis Bora Bora, you threaten university life as we know it.
Despite Alexander Broughton’s ongoing legal effort to clear his fraternity’s name (see the famous video of Broughton and his attorney at the link), the University of Tennessee has shut down Pi Kappa Alpha — a significant setback for wine enemaists at UT. (Scroll down for background.)
Broader reforms have come to all UT frats in the wake of the butt-chugging incident, including mandated live-in house directors. “With friends like these,” said Marilee Studevort, vice-president of student life, “you don’t need enemas.”
Okay, I made up that last thing.
And yet this strange panorama makes a trip to the Burj inadvertently sublime. Every monument, at its inception, gives rise to its future ruin, and yet few face the prospect as directly as the Burj. From its state-of-the-art observation deck, one beholds the ageless, ungoverned desert. Futility is never more futilely refuted than with a monument. The Burj seems to have been erected to elucidate this fact.
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From The Names:
“I can’t get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can’t imagine what it’s like when the wind’s blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.”
… (or anyway that’s the famous phrase we all like) characterizes quite a few American universities.
Some of these village idiots aren’t in rural settings at all – echt-provincial Suffolk University (Boston), St. John’s University (New York), Yeshiva University (New York), and St. Louis University (St. Louis) are four urban cow towns whose brainless money grubbing (self-righteous money grubbing at that, if, like Yeshiva, St. John’s, and St. Louis, they align themselves with synagogues and churches) this blog has chronicled.
All American universities have closed, small-town aspects to them; here, we’re talking about truly tribal fortresses with certifiable martinets.
To turn a university (think of the word itself) into a banana republic, you need — call it structural cronyism. The president, the board of trustees, the coaches, the big-time donors — in order to make an intellectual institution deadhead central, all must be in synch.
You see the model at work at Oakland University in Michigan, whose women’s basketball coach was married to the school’s president. (Yes, yes, UD believes people should marry whoever they want.) Power seems to have gone to the coach’s head to the point where she did a sort of Mike Rice on her players, who report – among other cult rituals – bizarre physical and religious tests. Things got so weird that the Ceausescus of Oakland have now been toppled; but you’d think schools would learn, from one story after another of this sort, the difference between cherishing their particular identities and becoming rural idiots.
UD‘s neighbor in Summit, New York – just a bit further up Seven Ponds Road, in the house Wojtek Fangor used to own – is Yasuo Minagawa. He’s featured in today’s Wall Street Journal.
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UD thanks her sister-in-law, Joanna, for the link.