More time to work on his mousse treatment.

[Erwin] Sniedzins, who said he was on the hunt for a master’s degree to “validate” his professional and life experience, thought [Kings Lake University] was real.

“It felt like they were more legit than the other ones. Their website’s pretty good. And when you phone, you get someone there,” Sniedzins said.

After his experience was “validated” by the university, Sniedzins said he paid the $8,100 fee, and received a master’s degree in education, specializing in technology in education.

The university mailed him the degree and several other signed, stamped and apparently certified documents. He said he even received a graduation cap and gown.

Sniedzins repeatedly told CBC Toronto that he never suspected a degree based on life experience that required no academic work, studying or exams could be fake as it was in line with his approach to education.

… Any doubts Sniedzins may have had were also eased by what appears to be a sworn affidavit, included in his package of documents, supposedly signed by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.

“I really feel stupid if [it’s a diploma mill], and I’m angry about it,” Sniedzins said.

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UD thanks Jack.

This blog has chronicled the ways some professors exploit the sitting ducks, the trapped rats, they encounter each week.

There’s the professor (now in jail) who on the first day of class had everyone write down their social security number and pass it forward to him. The professor who used her graduate students as slaves. The professors who forced their students to sell tickets to sports events for them. A professor who simply stood in front of his graduate students and told them to hand over $10,000 or else.

But the most venerable method of making hay out of your students is the buying-my-book-is-a-requirement thing. A perennial favorite, b-m-b-i-a-r takes many forms, the most recent on view in Australia, at RMIT University, where a bunch of guys in the business school made buying their extremely expensive e-book an inescapable expense for all:

College of Business students were told they had to purchase textbooks written by their lecturers to access the mandatory tests.

These textbooks were sold on a website which Fairfax Media has found is owned by an RMIT lecturer.

The site sells textbooks written by a number of RMIT Business lecturers.

… “Your grades are behind a paywall and your money went into the course coordinator’s pocket,” [one student] said.

Another student, Renata Majdandzic, said she only bought a textbook from the site so that she could sit her tests.

“I just wasted $60 on a book for nothing,” she said.

“I never even looked at these books but we have to pay for them just to do a test that should be included in the [university] fees”.

… commission, General “Buck” Mnuchin couldn’t have come at a better time.

UD has amused herself over the years, compiling various stupid maneuvers professors perform to avoid banning laptops in their classrooms.

There was York University’s Henry Kim:

Kim is fully aware that his students aren’t listening to him because they’re watching shit on their laptops. Instead of banning laptops, however, Kim has taken a page out of Erich Honecker’s East Germany and turned his students into a spy network. If a student sees another student using her laptop for non-class purposes (Kim has already had his students swear some ridiculous pledge, etc.), she is to report that to Kim.

“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class.”

Comrade Honecker speaks! Creating new social norms by encouraging students to turn in other students – that’s the solution to the laptop problem!

And now there’s some person at the University of Pennsylvania:

I had a professor last year who had the TAs sit in the back of the lecture hall, where they could see the screens of the students using their laptops. If they saw someone goofing off or not simply taking notes, they would ring a bell, and everyone would have to close their laptops for several minutes before they could reopen them to continue taking notes. This didn’t help anyone focus; rather, it stirred up anger in the students, that they were being treated like animals who needed to respond to the ring of a bell.

Same basic Honecker approach – designate a person or persons who tell on the naughty laptop user – but I love the addition of a bell… Like Captain von Trapp’s dog whistle… Another thought experiment generating new social norms…

… Ezra Merkin, no one can be surprised that the school is in a ratings free fall. This blog has spent years detailing the damage that this school, with its conflict-of-interest-riddled trustees (a group that boasts such stellar characters as Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf), and its greedy, morally clueless president, did to itself over the last ten years. You don’t get to brutalize a university the way this pack of rascals did (and some of the rascals are still there, rascaling around) without paying a very high price.

The old and globally popular trick of publishing poems you’ve translated from one language to another as your own has caught up with the celebrated DesRuisseaux, a plagiarist who had the good sense to die last year, shortly before a careful reader noticed that if you translate one of his poems (back) into English it’s actually the work of Maya Angelou. This discovery drew the interest of Ira Lightman, a plagiarism detective.

Angelou? Ce n’est que la pointe de l’iceberg.

At latest count this poet laureate ripped off at least ten other poets – translated their work into French and put his name on it.

The book has been pulled; and, in an effort to save the guy’s ass, various supporters ask us to believe that when he wrote the book he suffered from Dementia (Inadvertent Global Plagiarism Type).

… a mushroom.

What else is he going to blame it on? His elbow?

The controversial poem titled “avenidas” can be translated as following: “Avenues / Avenues and flowers / Flowers / Flowers and women / Avenues / Avenues and women / Avenues and flowers and women and an admirer.”

… The Berlin college Alice Salomon Hochschule … painted [the poem] in large lettering on the south facade of the college …

… In April 2016, the general student committee (AStA) wrote an open letter to the rectorate of the college, criticizing the prominent position of the poem.

“A man who looks out into the streets and admires flowers and women,” wrote the students. “This poem not only reproduces a classic patriarchal art tradition in which women are exclusively the beautiful muses that inspire masculine artists to creative acts, it is also reminiscent of sexual harassment, which women are exposed to every day.”

The controversial lines will soon be painted over.

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One German observer argues that a school which cannot recognize how a lyric poem works “should cease to award a poetry prize.”

UD agrees. You have to think prophylactically. The chance of any future poem chosen for the prize being a species of sexual harassment is very high. Better avoid the problem altogether.

MORE

More than the buyout clause that makes us pay
More than the perks we give you every day
More than the students’ heads you bashed to bits
More than the seasons full of lethal hits

More than you’ll ever know
Our arms long to hold you so
Our school will be in your keeping
Waking sleeping laughing weeping

Longer than always love will never fade
Yes far beyond forever you’ll be paid
You are the coach we do adore
And our heart is very sure no one else could love you more

Wotta shocker.

Happy Valley’s cult of the Dear Leader will remain unconvinced that Jo Pa knew about Sandusky for thirty years, and spent all that time protecting him.

… a once-fine organization that lately has a curiously self-serving tendency to label lots of groups and people – people like Ayan Hirsi Ali – haters.

You can’t fault the organization for whipping up terror at the thought of women like AHA having a voice. I mean.

You can’t say the U of Smell, which provides its athletes with prostitutes in the comfort of their own dorm, stints when it comes to rewarding its currently-in-hiding president. Ex-president.

He and his cronies got their hands on the big-goody-levers at the university (no one to stop them – it’s Kentucky!) and they began to pull and pull and pull til they couldn’t pull no more! And then, in the immortal words of their great literary predecessor, they pulled themselves up to their magnificent height and announced:

And now I shall fuck off.

Goodbye, Monsieur Ubu! It was fun while it lasted! Enjoy your goodies!

… this blog follows the bounces… For instance, the dumb Australian political establishment, rather than ignore Pauline Hanson’s now-notorious burqa stunt, decided to make a big deal out of it, decided to use it as a way to broadcast to the country their goodness and her evil.

But here’s the deal on the burqa: Don’t go there. If you insist on going there, you’re quickly going to find out that a strong majority of the people you assume are applauding your virtue favor a ban on it, and also on the niqab.

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And right after that unpleasant discovery, politicians of all sorts – seeing an opportunity – are going to wage a big ol’ campaign to ban it, as it has been banned in so many other countries.

If the self-regarding moralists in Australia had listened to ol’ UD and just not gone there, the broadly shared but still pretty latent upset many Australians feel at the sight of socially annihilated women would probably have stayed latent. But now that you mention it …

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As with the British journalist Allison Pearson, once the burqa is as it were in your face, it’s hard to keep ignoring it.

… I was uneasy at the sight of a five-year-old girl in Tower Hamlets given into the [foster] care of a woman who wears a burqa, which covers her whole body and face. …I consider the burqa to be an extremist garment, which makes the wearer unable to interact with wider society. Therefore, I would not want a child of any religion or ethnicity fostered by someone who wears one. Plenty of people agree.

Foster carers of all kinds do a wonderful job, but social workers are bidden to place children in environments that are sensitive to their needs… A carer in a burqa is hardly a tolerant role model for a British child in the 21st century. Courageous Muslim women in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are fighting to cast off the life-limiting garment which a misogynist belief system imposes on them.