It’s an old tradition, and an important one, among our highest-profile student athletes: Showing your team colors while in the act of armed robbery.
Back in ’09, several University of Tennessee Vols did it; and now a University of West Virginia Mountaineer has picked up the torch.
West Virginia defensive lineman Korey Harris was arrested Friday for first-degree armed robbery that allegedly occurred in Morgantown on July 12. Harris and two other men broke into a home and held two victims at gunpoint. It presumably didn’t take long to catch Harris, as one of the victims saw the number 96 on Harris’s team-issued sweatpants and figured it out.
Whether Cohen will ultimately face criminal charges, Frenkel said to “look at the example” of Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director charged in the insider trading investigation of Raj Rajaratnam’s Galleon Group. “The SEC brought an administrative action against Gupta,” Frenkel recalled, “and within 30 days, the next thing you know, there’s a criminal indictment.”
Will our highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, get hit with criminal, and not just administrative actions? Stay tuned!
But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.
******************
Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:
[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”
[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”
SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!
I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Aim even higher!
I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.
Higher!!
For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.
La Kid, last month.
Giant’s Causeway in the rain.
Er, none; and if you want to understand what’s going on at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, at the University of Miami, or the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you could do worse – as this commenter on a recent article has it – than think in terms of criminal syndicates.
People wonder why Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor accused of sexual harassment, opted to leave UM rather than fight. Well, some reports had it that President Shalala was in a rage and would make sure he was fired.
If this is true, it would make perfect sense in the context of UM’s years of criminal scandals. We are talking, at schools like UMDNJ, Chapel Hill and UM, about scandal-fatigue, about administrations that are saying stop. No more.
Basically McGinn has the misfortune of teaching at a school that can’t afford any more bad publicity. Its president is really pissed off. She didn’t sign on to be the butt of jokes, a permanent petitioner at the NCAA, a symbol of what’s worst in American universities. You come to her with some guy in philosophy who somebody says wrote some smutty remarks to a student and BOOM! That’s it. Donna’s had it. She explodes. All of her problems come from men. Men who beat up other men on the football field. Men who buy whores and cars for her athletes. Men who write smutty emails… Of course the irony is that of all the men beating up on Donna, McGinn is by far the most innocuous; in fact, he’s liable to be innocent of the charges. But McGinn has had the misfortune of being the last in line, the tipping point. Right now, Shalala is like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: You whip out a cigarette and she’ll fucking blow you away.
… has made a remarkable film about mass killings in Indonesia. It is echt postmodern in being a surreal reenactment – by the killers themselves – of long-ago events altogether too real. Hyperreal.
“The Act of Killing” becomes a complex rendering of men for whom guilt has no normal way of expressing itself, and for whom killing was, from the very start, a kind of theatrical performance.
I think there’s a link between this film and the uproar over the adorable rock and roll photo of Tsarnaev on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone. Those who massacred in Indonesia did so in part under the glamorizing influence of American gangster movies. The editors who cynically aestheticized Tsarnaev’s image on their cover did so under the influence of the same violence-glamor, violence-voyeurism.
In his basically positive review of Josh’s film, the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane says he doesn’t understand what Oppenheimer means when he calls The Act of Killing “a documentary of the imagination.” But what’s not to understand? Does Lane have trouble with
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare…
also? Sometimes historical conditions make it possible for people to act out their most brutal fantasies; sometimes things get so sick that we glamorize the most brutal among us. Humanity’s self-alienation, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Without artists like Oppenheimer (and, say, writers like The White Hotel‘s D.M. Thomas, and other filmmakers like Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who made Hitler: A Film from Germany) we’d get even more lost in that funhouse than we are.
Its richest, highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, has just been sued by the SEC for failure to respond to insider trading at his hedge fund. Despite the personal fortune of nine or so billion dollars on which Cohen can draw in his defense, chances are good that he will be banned from the securities industry.
Brown has already had to deal, recently, with a crooked trustee. Brown’s last president notoriously signed off on Lloyd Blankfein’s 2007 Goldman Sachs bonus of $68 million.
Does Brown wish to be a laughingstock? The sort of place fronted by people full of high-minded rhetoric about the social good, and run by people whose greed – and collusion in greed – knows no bounds?
How long will Steven Cohen continue to be a Brown University trustee?
I
Doldrums
From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.
Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.
Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.
UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.
Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.
********************************
II
An Update
** UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.
** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.
Saturday, 11 January
651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local
5:15–6:30 p.m.
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.
Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.
** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.
Let’s see… That was July 6, 2013, and today is July 18, 2013, and the head of Glaxo North America was telling the New York Times on July 6 that her company was definitely going to avoid the massive corruption (her dainty description of what Glaxo did wrong doesn’t quite cover the matter – unless you think three billion dollars in fines for failure to report the status of a couple of studies sounds about right) for which Glaxo has long been renowned.
And maybe Glaxo will avoid that form of corruption – I mean, the form that involves paying American university professors to put their names on bogus studies your advertising people have written and thereby endangering, well, basically endangering the entire population of the world… While ripping the world off to buy the drugs that will kill it…
Anyway, that was then. This is now, several days later, and now this humongous story about Glaxo using whores and bribes to take over the Chinese market is breaking all over the place, and I’m sure Glaxo is again shocked shocked that hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese people are unable to afford medicine because the price of pills has been jacked up by Glaxo paying prescribing doctors to jack off.
“Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after drugs were prescribed,” [one] newspaper claimed.
[An investigator] said consumers were being defrauded. The official Xinhua news agency, which was given access to [a Glaxo executive] in detention, quoted him allegedly saying medicine that cost 30 yuan to make could be sold for 300 yuan.
The sums quoted by the police, if correct, suggest GSK was spending a significant proportion of its annual sales revenue on bribing doctors. In 2012, the company’s sales in China rose 17pc, to nearly £759m, from 2011, according to its annual report.
I wonder if Glaxo is also offering sexual relief to UCLA professors.
You know, lots of university professors are walking around with Glaxo in their name. Take this one, at today’s scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers University: Ah-Ng Tony Kong, Professor II and Glaxo Professor of Pharmaceutics. When does the name of a person (the Paterno Chair, the Ira Rennert Professor) or a company get so yucky you kind of think you might want to refuse it?
A company like Glaxo – could its vileness become so generally known that universities would begin turning down naming rights for their faculty?
Nah.
*********************
Update: The Yellow Peril made us do it!
We don’t do this sort of thing.
I don’t know. Just because it made me laugh out loud.
… Jerzy Soltan, shows up (painted) at 4:42 in this film about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor. Les UDs have inherited some Fangor paintings (including a number of his famous circles). UD has great memories of summers in upstate New York at the Fangors’ farmhouse.
The excellent website culture.pl features a good biography of Woytek, as well as a series of photos of his work, him, and his wife Magda.
University Diaries, I’ve had occasion to say, couldn’t exist without Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is part of a tiny American university elite, a group of schools so arrogant, so dishonest, so mismanaged, so inbred, so simply without a clue, that their unceasing scandals provide a good deal of this blog’s content.
Yeshiva, furthermore, is a religious institution, which makes its very bad behavior that much more astounding. To a man (there aren’t any women in positions of authority there), the Yeshiva representatives UD has experienced appear to her to be pious hypocrites.
Yeshiva’s latest catastrophe was totally expected. Let me quote in its entirety the short notice the Jewish Daily Forward just placed on its website.
Yeshiva University’s credit rating has been downgraded by a major ratings agency amid large and growing deficits, a falling endowment and fears of costly litigation stemming from recent allegations of sexual abuse at its high school.
Moody’s downgraded Y.U.’s debt from A2 to Baa1, putting it below the median credit rating for similar institutions.
The agency says that the litigation prospects of the alleged sexual abuse victims will largely determine if the debt is downgraded further.
Since its peak in 2007 Y.U.’s endowment has cratered, falling 45%, doing handily worse than the stock market. Y.U.’s reliance on hedge funds, in particular, has been extremely damaging. It was also slammed by the financial crisis and damaged by its entanglement with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scam.
Meanwhile, the federal lawsuit filed last week by former students at Y.U.’s affiliated high school, alleging administrative negligence in response to abuse they suffered there, is demanding over $380 million in damages. According to Moody’s the attendant publicity may have large consequences for Yeshiva’s fundraising efforts.
As a commenter on this notice writes, “the major damage to the YU bond ratings is not just because of the lawsuit, but because YU has probably lost the confidence of donors.” One Yeshiva donor, Andrew Sole, tried to warn Yeshiva as far back as five years ago. Read his letter calling for the resignation of the entire board of trustees here. The letter, it goes without saying, was ignored.
And note the word “entanglement” up there, relative to Bernard Madoff’s scheme. Madoff, you recall, was a high-ranking, much-venerated trustee of Yeshiva University up to the moment he was taken into custody. Ezra Merkin was also on the board of trustees at that time, working, in consort with Madoff, the sort of financial magic that has become the stuff of legend. Yeshiva tried to make itself out to be a victim of Madoff’s, but it was an enabler, it made plenty of money off of him while the making was good, and it looked the other way when anyone could see that Madoff’s returns were totally impossible.
“Moral bankruptcy,” Algemeiner newspaper said of Yeshiva University earlier this year. That moral bankruptcy has so disgusted donors that it threatens to become financial bankruptcy.
