Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Wow.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Wow.
… He cherished, like all his family, ties of affection and family mythology to his lowland Scottish heritage. The Scottish virtue of unswerving loyalty meant unreflecting acceptance of Great Britain as the font of all that mattered in the world besides the bush Australian ethos of strength and endurance.
What began as an adventure ended in horror too profound for speech. The farewells, the adoring young ladies, the troopship, England, and the training on Salisbury Plain, were in line with all the British empire tales heard in childhood. The daily slaughter of the trenches never ceased to be a part of his nightmares. A childhood spent hunting kangaroos made him an excellent shot and earned him the post of sharpshooter, the man sent ahead alone to pick off the enemy. About this he could not speak, except to describe the common experience of the trenches, a kind of fellow feeling for the opponent. His worst memories were the screams of wounded horses, and the sight of men being driven back to the trenches at rifle point.
For Memorial Day, Jill Ker Conway’s description of her father in The Road from Corain.
On the eve of the Sunshine Act’s introduction, Newsweek revisits the sordid situation at university medical schools in regard to conflict of interest with big pharma. Starting in September, American consumers will have access to information about “all payments and other valuables given by Big Pharma to physicians and teaching hospitals.”
This blog has over the years covered so many greed-crazed COI’ers at so many university medical schools that you’d think UD just copies and pastes everything that shows up on Google News. In fact, she’s extremely selective, posting only about those stories involving arrant – sometimes fatal – disregard of patients, plus immense pharma payouts. She’d link you to a few of these stories right now, but they have a triggering effect on her.
Meanwhile, it’s good to keep in mind that med school COI mischief doesn’t stop with the stuff the Sunshine Act illuminates. Given last year’s bad publicity about George Washington University’s business school (this article, which summarizes events, also features the latest form of fallout), one might forget that in 2009 its med school was also in trouble — both on probation and headed by a
provost and vice president for health affairs, [who] also has received money and stock options for serving on the board of directors of Universal Health Services, which owns the university hospital.
Williams was paid nearly $680,000 in annual compensation by GWU, according to the university’s 2006 tax returns, its most recent, and UHS reported in Securities and Exchange Commission filings that he received compensation from the company that calendar year of $122,000, including stock options.
GWU leaders asked Williams to resign from the corporation board and this month accepted his resignation, effective by the end of the academic year.
Ain’t nuthin the Sunshine Act can do about this popular form of self-enrichment.
Putin’s culture hack gets a big prize from an Italian university, reports Maria Lipman in The New Republic. So much disgust ensues that the vice rector responsible for granting the prize has resigned.
“Premeditated mass murder” just outside one of America’s most idyllic, envied campuses.
The statement in my headline comes from an article in The Daily Nexus, the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper.
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Update: There was only one shooter.
[A] YouTube video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” appeared to be connected to the killing spree.
In the video, a young man sits behind the wheel of a parked car and rants about how he’s been ignored by women at UCSB and that his sexual advances have been rejected. He promises to go to Isla Vista on Friday night to seek revenge against women — especially sorority members — by slaughtering them.
Rodger’s Facebook page indicates he’s from Calabasas, and shows him sitting in a black BMW coupe.
The gunman’s car was a black BMW coupe.
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My searching around online suggests the shooter may have been the son of a Los Angeles-based film director/photographer.
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A somewhat similar act of femicide.
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Confirmation: The shooter is the son of Peter Rodger, “a special unit director on The Hunger Games and director of Oh My God, a documentary the screened during the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.”
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There are of course also similarities to the Virginia Tech massacre: A mentally disturbed young man of college age makes an angry video promising revenge on a world that has disrespected him; he then gets a gun and starts shooting in areas full of college students.
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Incredibly, it gets worse. The shooter stabbed his three roommates to death before he began shooting near UC Santa Barbara.
The played-for-a-sucker state of Maine offers an alliterative definition of plagiarism, a definition similar to Zygmunt Bauman’s. For Bauman, what others call his plagiarism is merely trivial punctuation error, the sort of thing only trivial people would notice. In the same way, when the state of Maine discovers (via the pissed actual authors) it has given almost a million dollars of taxpayer money to a consultant who plagiarized rather lengthy sections of a report he submitted to the state on the subject of welfare (shades of James Feinerman – though he used Wikipedia), it plays the punctuation card. Plagiarism is an imperfect placement of parentheses (UD is trying to keep the alliteration going); a picayune pleonastic protuberance; a paltry parsing of prose… The consultant himself puts it down to “footnoting problems,” but the real problem is that the consultancy guessed wrong. It guessed the original authors wouldn’t read the consultancy’s obscure little report, or wouldn’t care that they were plagiarized.
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UPDATE: You knew this was coming. You knew it if you read this blog. I have almost never reported a case of one copied source. Plagiarists are career copiers.
[T]he authors took information from as many as five other sources, without attribution or with improper citations of the original source…
Among their many plagiarized sources: the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.
Well, what’s public service, after all? Providing plagiarizable material to a guy being paid – well, so far he’s been paid $500,000 and I’m not sure the state’s going to be able to get that back – a guy being paid to produce a report about the state welfare system … I mean, the guy’s firm is private, not public; its job is to make money with the least labor output. The Muskie School is there to provide a Public Service… Really, to provide for the public welfare, if you will… And it has done so!
It has written his report for him!
MAINE: THE CONSULTANCY WELFARE STATE
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Waste, embarrassment, lots of things of interest to people who pay taxes in Maine. If I lived in that state, I wouldn’t be happy to know that I was subsidizing a plagiarist.
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Funny the way incredibly stupid public statements come back to bite you on the ass.
“While we do not excuse errors in the report, we are also concerned that the media and Democrats have chosen to politicize punctuation over policy, instead of evaluating these critical reform recommendations on their merits,” Mayhew said in an email to the Press Herald on Wednesday.
Seriously, Commissioner? You pay a guy almost a million bucks for a report that is dead on arrival, then you learn belatedly that he plagiarized parts of it, and now you’re dismissing any and all criticism of this boondoggle as a partisan plot to “politicize punctuation?” What’s next, a statewide ban on semicolons?
A retired professor from way down south testifies.
… the University of Tennessee staggers piteously along like O in her tiny mules and painfully cinched waist, America’s campus epicenter of sadomasochism.
Paralyzed by debt and despair –
Tennessee’s situation makes frighteningly clear the high cost of bad coaching hires, as the athletic department owes $7 million to recently fired coach Derek Dooley and his staff on top of $11.4 million paid out in buyouts to other football, baseball and basketball coaches. Declining attendance has also taken a toll on Tennessee’s financial situation as it has proven difficult for the school to fill the stadium when losses outnumber wins. Ironically, improvements to the stadium that sits partly empty helped drive the expansion of the debt.
– UT lashes out at others and itself in a perennial bacchanalia of desperate perversion. [Trigger warning goes here.] Its students inject themselves anally with alcohol. They lie still while fellow students pour hot sauce over their penises. They’re asking for it! If you won’t pour the Tabasco on the front, they’ll inject the Zinfandel in the back. One way or another, the University of Tennessee is going to punish itself for…
For what? O’s motives are notoriously obscure… Imagine trying to understand a drunk and masochistic institution that’s fucked itself over financially forever.
Maybe one good way to think about Tennessee’s current life of the mind is to recall another literary work – Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Imagine that, instead of the reckless racing of cars, the Australians, as they await apocalypse, decide to fuck and suck themselves to oblivion.
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A reader sends in a limerick:
Does my penis go well with Tabasco?
Does this Zinfandel into my ass go?
Front porch or back door,
What college is for
Is much more than you learn in a class, bro.
We want our rights! And we don’t care how! We want our revolution… NOW.
Income inequality hits the American university! Sports slaves at Syracuse and Boise State are moving their slow thighs, and what rough beast slouches toward Alabam’ to be born?
Why do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top?
Boise State’s president rages against the NCAA big boys muscling out mid-major programs like Boise State by making it more and more expensive for schools to compete. In a spectacular instance of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bob Kustra attacks “programs that look less and less like they bear any relationship to the university’s mission and role.”
Ah, mon Kustra! Here’s your school! Here’s your school! Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! “It seems they are never satisfied with their bloated athletic budgets,” hisses Kustra, whose own budget bulges like an Idaho spud on steroids. Then he gets real high and mighty.
It is sometimes hard to believe that our finest universities and their presidents are behind this effort to fuel what the former NCAA President Myles Brand termed the “arms race” in Division 1 athletic budgets. You would think that the primacy of the academic mission and the long-held principles of amateur athletics would trump the drive toward commercialism and professionalism in the athletic department. You would think that university presidents would be up in arms at the way the NFL and the NBA use the universities’ athletic departments as training camps and minor league clubs for professional sports.
It is beyond me why university presidents are so quick to fall in line with powerful conference commissioners who seem to be calling the shots with these NCAA reforms. But I have no doubt why the power conferences are working to separate themselves from some Division 1 universities who still see the value of equity and fairness in athletic funding. Lately, those pesky mid-major programs such as Boise State and many others have showed up the big boys for what they are – wasteful models of athletic spending that cannot be justified.
Little late now to be moving them slow thighs, ain’t it, Kustra? You didn’t give a shit about evil commercialism until the big boys began making your school pay through the nose to stay in the big leagues. Now you sound like ol’ UD herself with all that excellent rhetoric about universities having something to do with academics.
Face it. You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.
It’s a little late for Syracuse, too. Faculty there has finally decided to squawk about that school’s wasteful degrading ridiculous sports program. A local reporter talks to an economist who specializes in sports.
“Pay is up for coaches, pay is up for administrators,” [Andy] Schwarz said. “Athletic departments are hiring people, building new facilities. It doesn’t look like any losing business that I know of. But if you can say you’re losing money, there are a lot fewer questions. You don’t have people asking what you can do for them. The only people annoyed at you if you’re losing money is a few faculty members, and you can sort of manage that.”
At Syracuse four of the five highest-paid university employees are members of the athletic department, including athletic director Daryl Gross and women’s lacrosse coach Gary Gait. Gross, basketball coach Jim Boeheim and former football coach Doug Marrone all made at least $150,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012, according to tax documents released by the school last week.
But the program’s losing money, see, so lay off, Little People of the Faculty.
Faculty of Syracuse University! You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.
UD‘s not ashamed to say that she has missed Arthur Porter, and that she is therefore mucho excited as Canada enters another round of Portermania. Porter was the much-loved, much-gifted CEO of McGill University’s hospital, until it turned out that he’d rigged a bid on a new facility in order to arrange an 11.25 million dollar kickback for himself. The Bentley just wasn’t cutting it for Arthur Porter, a man responsible for “perhaps the biggest fraud ever perpetrated in Canada.”
UD‘s only regret is that he’s Arthur rather than Joseph Porter; if he were [Sir] Joseph Porter, she could write a whole version of When I Was A Lad for him (sample line: But when the breezes blow, I generally go to Panama.)
But really, beyond that, UD has no complaint at all. The yummy revelations of spectacular greed and corruption at McGill University and environs will keep coming and the whole thing will be far more interesting than (yawn) Rob Ford. Personal collapse stories call for our compassion, certainly; but the Arthur Porter story is about the collapse of a university’s board of trustees as well as a region’s legislative body. It’s about how Quebec continues to claim its title as the most corrupt province in Canada.
Once a fraudster, always a fraudster. For some people it’s a way of life. It’s the way they roll.
As with that subset of fraud we routinely cover on this blog – plagiarism – the danger in being a fraud is that you will eventually get caught because you keep doing it, and each time you do it you run the risk that someone’s going to figure out what you’re doing.
David Broxterman, ex-business professor at Polk State University, appears to be a case in point. Like Mathew Martoma, Broxterman allegedly stitched together official university materials and got his job at Polk based on them. He’s been teaching there for five years, snug as a rat in a rug. But then he went and (allegedly) defrauded someone else – a coin collector – who complained to the attorney general, who turned around and asked Polk to reexamine Broxterman’s papers.
Broxterman will possibly have to pay back his years of salary. He might also go to jail.
But the real problem here lies with Polk. Apparently Broxterman’s stitched together materials were laughably amateurish. Any idiot should have been able to detect the fraud.
Made numb and nihilistic by his bloody century, Różewicz was as tempted by silence as his great inspiration, Samuel Beckett.
Like Beckett, he relied on a set of vestigial but hardy lungs to cough out his art. He was like the drowning man in Dulce et Decorum Est: He plunged at you, guttering.
This would have to be anti-poetry, since beauty and meaning and compassion were lies, jokes, traps. So a lot of his poems are like this one, which is just an elaborate shield against the onslaught of verse, against the ever-present, degrading temptation toward higher things, toward – as with the philosopher’s stone – the possibility of transforming shit into diamonds.
we need to put
this poem to sleep
before it starts
philosophizing
before it starts
fishing
for compliments
called to life
in a moment of forgetting
sensitive to words
glances
it looks to
a philosopher’s
stone for help
o passerby hasten your step
do not lift up the stone
there a blank verse
naked
turns
to ashes
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Puts one in mind of the Yeats lines:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Yet Yeats spent all his years futzing with metaphysical solutions, while Różewicz was always Beckettian, always disgusted by life-blandishments. Poetry of his sort risks – as Beckett risked – redundancy, since the variety and intensity of simple natural life —
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights…
— isn’t available. What’s available are the stripped hard edges of unredeemed actuality. As Jaroslaw Anders points out, Różewicz tried for a sort of Camusian humanism:
Rozewicz’s humanism, his attempt to find a counterbalance to pessimism in “commonplace feelings,” is often strained and unconvincing. It is clear that he does not really like his heroes, or his heroines, of gray existence. He seems to realize that “eat and give birth” is hardly a moral program. It is interesting to observe how Rozewicz tries to resolve the metaphysical implications of his pessimistic vision. In some poems, he seems to come close to nihilism. In “Unde malum?” he calls human existence a “work-related/accident/of nature/an error.”
His poetry is a principled archive of the phobic distrustful forms of being generated by atrocity.
I know you don’t think so. I know you’re content to think of that state rarely … as a vague jewel set off to the left of the left coast…
But if you type Hawaii Athletics into this blog’s search engine, you’ll be shaken out of your vagueness.
Hawaii is after all a startlingly corrupt state, so you’d expect its university system to be a mess. And it is; it is a mess. But within that mess, athletics is a doubleplusgood mess. The people of Hawaii just bailed it out of its thirteen million dollar debt so as to clear the way for more astounding debt accumulation…
How do they do it? Well, no one goes to their games. So that would mean no ticket sales. And then there’s constant expensive mischief. Not just stuff that hits the national news, like the Stevie Wonder concert scam; we’re also talking NCAA rules violations and having to pay for internal investigations, etc., etc.
Hawaii’s athletic director, by the way, sure knows how to make a public statement. He “acknowledges” the latest NCAA investigation (this one’s of the basketball team) and ends this way:
Thank you for your understanding, respect and your continued support of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Athletics. GO BOWS!
GO BOWS! We love ya guys, and this is just the time to say it! In deep shit with the NCAA again: Huzzah!
A touch of Iran. Right here in the US of A.