Turns out there’s a bunch of engineering types with that name who teach here and in Europe, and it’s their misfortune to share a name with THE Ashutosh Tiwari – the Ashutosh Tiwari allegedly guilty of so much scientific and financial misconduct that – UD‘s not sure, but she thinks that the guy has basically accomplished everything you can possibly accomplish in the academic malfeasance line. I really think he’s exhausted all conceivable avenues of scholarly fraud. Ghostwriting. Fake degree. Plagiarism. Faked research. Predatory conferences and journals. Fake university affiliation. Fake credentials. More. More.

Tiwari has erased his manifold web presences as fast as Yeshiva University scrubbed references to trustee Bernard Madoff once his fraud hit the papers.

The lazy whorish Swedish university that lolled around for years letting Tiwari do his thing has now shaken itself into bug-eyed alertness and begun an investigation.

… poetry magazine, money guy Bill Miller has given seventy five million dollars to the Johns Hopkins University philosophy department.

Victor Brombert, New Yorker:

In 1941, a week or two after my family’s safe arrival in New York Harbor on a freighter overcrowded with refugees escaping from Nazi-occupied countries, an old friend of my parents took us on an excursion to a small town in New Jersey. He parked his car on what I now know to be Witherspoon Street, near the corner facing the Princeton campus. Looking at the scene of university life before me then, I was struck by the confident gait of figures in tweed jackets moving along the alleys, carrying books and briefcases. No hurry, no sombre faces. Without my realizing it at the time, a series of idyllic images settled in my mind, and I carried them with me throughout the war, all the way to devastated Berlin, where, in the fall of 1945, I determined that this was the kind of life I wanted: to live with books, to study, to learn, perchance to teach.

… A sonnet by William Wordsworth extols the contentment of students in their “pensive citadels” — strongholds not for the exercise of power or for war but for the joy of studies.

Once Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer named after the tragic poet, sensed some plagiarism in this Daily Beast essay, he pressed on, and discovered gobs of it.

The author, Lizzie Crocker, lifted much of this Weekly Standard essay about outing people. She has resigned/been fired from the Daily Beast.

All that’s left is why. As you, dear reader, know, this blog has been attempting to answer that question for a long time.

Chatterton says it’s because, given the vast ideological divide between the rightwing Standard and leftwing Beast, Crocker figured no one would read both her piece and the one by the Standard writer, Alice B. Lloyd. But he then goes on to note the irony that the content of the piece (an analysis of the ethics of revealing anonymous sources) fits both places perfectly well… And indeed UD and Chatterton can’t be the only people in America who read both of those magazines…

No, UD proposes that this instance of plagiarism falls under her Ambition category (see her categories here). A little searching reveals Crocker to be a young and very ambitious writer; my guess is that she leads her life at breakneck speed, and that she speedily gobbled Lloyd’s writing, and that there’s a reason they call it breakneck.

Until they took it down, the Royal Philharmonic conductors page included an entry on Charles Dutoit which listed some of his honorary degrees. They took it down because

Monsieur Dutoit
Is hot to trot.
All his Mais non!s
Have come to naught.

Will the schools revoke the degrees?

UD predicts that maybe one will follow the Nevernevernever Yale model (To be sure Dr Mengele performed some questionable surgeries, but we never revoke an honorary degree…), while the others will announce that they are passing Dutoit’s, uh, baton back to him.

… the Old Post Office. Most recently, it was transformed into the Trump Hotel.

Now this.

Architecture is certainly a living thing.

O dio! Something’s fahny
With my Modigliani.
Mio santo Amedeo –
They’re stripping off his halo
And I want back my mahny.

A candidate running for Illinois attorney general was robbed at gunpoint while he was taking promotional photos for his campaign Thursday afternoon in the Northwest Side ward where he’s also the Democratic committeeman…

Aaron Goldstein, 42, and several members of his campaign team were in the middle of taking publicity shots when the robbery happened…

“So, as far as the campaign, we are moving forward,” [Goldstein’s campaign manager] said. “Basically, this was a totally a random act of violence in the community. But when it happens to you, of course, you’re shooken up.”

Did you not see Cam Newton
Splattered all over the Superdome turf
And Dante Fowler Jr. slam Tyrod Taylor’s head
So hard into the EverBank Field grass that he sent him
Straight into concussion protocol?

The 60 mph collisions from 1970 are 90 mph now.
And it’s not Volkswagens anymore. It’s 18-wheelers.
Ben Roethlisberger is bigger than Dwight White was
When he played for the Steel Curtain.

… the word of the day.

Dzhisös, the hohliest ov mortal men
On this, our fallen earth of eoliths,
To thee we offer selihoth, amen:
Qui thollies peccata mundi, inwith.

Human rights trump human rites.

Annice Kpana thanks a bride for making her her bridesmaid, and in so doing explains her class attendance policy at Columbia.

Is this the same Annice Kpana who in 2010 filed for Porsche Cayenne-related bankruptcy?

Today Annice Kpana was arrested, along with a Columbia University financial aid director and two other women. She was part of a convoluted but rewarding scheme in which the financial aid director

funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the three students between 2013 and 2017, inflating their cost-of-attendance figures on forms in years where they weren’t enrolled in any courses so they could obtain large stipends. In turn, according to the complaint, they paid her back with kickbacks in tens of thousands of dollars — sometimes including “love” or “Thank you!” in the memo line of personal checks.

So… the story is starting to bounce around big time, because it’s Columbia, and because it went on for a long while (some sources say it lasted much longer than four years). And because… why did it take the school so long to catch on? How did it finally catch on? There’s plenty more to know. Columbia hasn’t issued a statement.

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

From the full complaint:

“[D]uring several of these years, KPANA was also receiving federal student aid in connection with her enrollment at unrelated institutions.”

… scandal of big-time American university sports.

A sample:

In May, Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, announced that it would increase its athletics allocation by $1.6 million while cutting $31 million from the rest of its budget and laying off dozens of employees. The faculty union pointed out that basketball, Wright State’s most popular sport, regularly failed to fill even half the seats in the campus stadium and decried the decision as absurd. “There’s no way of reconciling it or justifying it. It’s simply outrageous,” says the AAUP’s [Rudy] Fichtenbaum, who teaches at Wright State.

We prefer – we even assume – this trajectory, in which human character is not utterly set at birth, but expands toward some form of realization and even – given a strikingly bad set of character traits – conversion over time.

The story of one of this blog’s minor, persistent, characters – Yeshiva University benefactor Ira Rennert – represents an all too human reminder of the difference between literature and life. For as this multi-billionaire enters his 83rd year of life, as he winds down his tale, he simply persists in his awfulness.

And this is interesting. UD finds it interesting to contemplate such a man, with his Long Island residence so notorious that, when he was on trial for looting the retirement fund of one of his businesses (he was found guilty), his lawyer begged the judge not to allow the jurors to see photographs of it because it would “inflame” them; a man, who having been made to repay the retirement funds, is now suing his lawyers for that amount.

Whenever America’s obscenely rich behave obscenely, there you will find Rennert — flying his private helicopter illegally; polluting the world’s environment; cheating on his taxes, bankrolling illegal settlements.

Like Bernard Madoff’s right-hand man, Ezra Merkin, Ira Rennert is a very high-profile pious person. His name ornaments a business institute for Orthodox Jewish entrepreneurs; he was until recently head of New York’s most prominent synagogue. Ezra Merkin’s synagogue. All three men (along with comrade in whatever Zygi Wilf, after whom a Yeshiva campus is named) were/are majorly involved with/major donors to the extremely curiously run Yeshiva University.

But that, of course, is literary: religious hypocrisy.

Well, you’d think so.