… is the mantra of many an academic scammer, as in the case of Ireland’s Fergus Heffernan, a floridly compulsive liar with a thriving business as a lecturer on mental health.

Like a lot of degree frauds, Fergus seems to have decided somewhere way back that having issued himself a PhD, he might as well manufacture an array of further achievements.

[H]is doctoral qualification in psychology is fake …

[An] investigation also revealed he had falsely claimed to be a visiting professor at a number of top international universities, and that his claim to have served with the Irish Defence Forces in Lebanon in 1976 was untrue — as there was no conflict in Lebanon until 1978.

In response to these discrepancies, he said he used the wrong terminology and that he was a “visiting lecturer”.

He also claimed that he was in fact in Lebanon in 1978.

… [He] claimed to be a visiting professor at Trinity College Dublin, Boston University, and Columbia University in New York.

All three institutions have ­confirmed they have no record of any employment or affiliation with Mr Heffernan.

There is always a required and bittersweet rhetoric of death in moments like these, especially when it involves a once-star athlete dying young.

The time you won the champions’ game
Gainesville sang and cheered your name
Prof and prez let out a cry
And home they brought you shoulder-high.

That school so hard recruited you!
Yet now it’s silent. (Aaron who?)
Hero of a college town
Now a god without a crown.

Smart lad, who slips away
From fields where glory does not stay;
Or fields that never glory knew —
For all who saw the truth of you.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than jeers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now round that early-laurelled head
Gather fans who sometime said
He’s made us proud to be UF!
… Why don’t we feel too much bereft?

Things have gotten so twisted that no one asks why a violent sociopath was not only admitted to a respectable American university, but aggressively recruited.

Why are so many universities, like the University of Florida, criminally negligent (hello, Baylor) in welcoming to their campus community people who stand a reasonable chance of hurting members of that community (and environs) very badly?

Why – as if it weren’t bad enough – do these universities actually indoctrinate these admitted students in ever more heightened aggression (see, for instance, the EAT YOUR ENEMIES sign at the luxurious new cafeteria for University of Oregon athletes)?

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I mean, duh. You want the biggest and nastiest and most hopped-up fucking assholes out there for your football team.

So what’s all of this doing at a university?

The University of Florida’s finest.

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He has been linked by prosecutors and a civil lawsuit to a series of assaults, shootings, and, ultimately, three killings.

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If some poor sap spilled a drink on him or challenged him in any way, that person was likely to stop at a red light, have an SUV pull alongside and see flashes from the barrel of a .38-caliber handgun.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, feel it for Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. Hernandez was acquitted last week of murdering them, but that was more a case of crafty lawyering than justice being served.

Feel sorry for Odin Loyd. Hernandez didn’t just shoot him. He executed him in a deserted industrial park.

Take a bow, Urban. “Meyer didn’t care, as long as the team was successful.” But of course it takes a village, not just one coach who let a violent troubled young man keep being violent and troubled because he played good football. It took the University of Florida fans, the University of Florida admissions committee, the University of Florida leadership…

Urban thinks that because he sprinkled God-dust on Hernandez and paid for his babysitters, he was one of the good guys.

Hernandez joins Lawrence Phillips as one of the pantheon of university sports heroes dead in jail by their own hand.

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UD thanks David.

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We’re going to be getting a lot of this shit in the next few days. It’s not that we exploited – nay, encouraged – this wreck because we wanted to watch him play ball…

If you must read it, try not to vomit.

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Gotta love the headline.

HERNANDEZ SUICIDE MARS NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS’ WHITE HOUSE VISIT

The Butcher of Livonia goes to jail. No bond. Good.

Since she’s a product of one of this nation’s best medical schools – Johns Hopkins – and because the name Johns Hopkins is about to be dragged in the mud big time, I’m thinking a statement dissociating themselves from this woman would be a good idea.

An even better idea would be revoking her degree. If degree revocation means anything, doesn’t it mean this?

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Zero tolerance will also include some of the following:

The parents could face charges of child neglect, child abuse, and transporting their children across state lines for the purpose of criminal sexual activity. Since they transported the children across state lines, the charges are federal and have combined penalties that could lead to sentences of over ten years in federal prison. Even if the parents aren’t charged with crimes, their children could be permanently removed from their custody. Additionally, depending on their immigration status, they could also be deported from the United States. Federal law allows for the deportation of immigrants if they break the law, explicitly mentioned in the statute is “aggravated felony.”

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[One of the victims’] father told a child protection investigator that “if they knew what would come of it, this would never have happened,” the petition stated.

All we wanted to do was sentence our seven year old girl to a life of humiliation, shame, pain, anguish, and sexual mutilation; had we known we could get picked up for it, we’d for sure not have done it.

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It’s all the more shocking that a female doctor would engage in such practices. As an American female physician myself and as a human rights defender, I demand that, if guilty, the doctor be prosecuted to the fullest extent with the harshest punishments, though a federal imprisonment of five years (the current maximum sentence) seems paltry in comparison to the crime.

Without question, if found guilty the doctor in question must be stripped of her license to practice medicine permanently and be rendered a felon. Her alleged longstanding deception of parents (who claim they did not know, some reports suggest) and of the local medical community should also influence the severity of her punishment.

… These girls can never be made whole again. At age 7, years away from their own sexual knowledge, denied an intact clitoris, they will never experience sexual gratification as consenting women. Yes, they may be able to have babies, but their pregnancies, labor, and deliveries will be high-risk because of the profound anatomic destruction to the birth canal. And this is not even accounting for the incredible psychological injury they will come to experience.

When it’s not about much except football, you’re going to choose some of your professors from among professional sports agents.

There was Professor Carl Carey Jr.; and, if they’d only played their cards right, these other guys might also have shaped the young minds of that state. For who better to teach UNC’s student athletes than the agents who will be representing them when they go pro?

The only mistake these other guys made was … Well, you don’t just hand them the money right there and then, dummy!

First you gain their friendship and respect by interacting with them in the classroom; later you bribe them to make you their agent. Dummy!

Arrest season comes early this year for the SEC, and a local writer in Alabam assures us there’s nothing to see here.

When you have a group of 100-plus young men between ages 18 and 22, the law of averages dictates that a handful of them are going to get into trouble of one fashion or another.

As I wrote nearly three years ago, this sort of thing goes on everywhere and has for decades. Your least favorite team isn’t “recruiting thugs” or cutting corners on character any more than your favorite team is or ever has.

And anyway, I wouldn’t enjoy too much schadenfreude at the expense of your rival team if I was you. As history has shown us, your time is probably coming.

RELAX. Twas ever thus; it’s universal; and it’s completely 100% natural. These guys are just like all the other guys hardwired for violence. Richie Incognitos are not made; they’re just random young men statistically likely to get into trouble.

Why, UD wonders, do people like this dude bother writing articles about a perfectly natural phenomenon? He knows it will happen every year, and he admits it’s entirely unremarkable. So what is the point of covering each crime?

Or if you insist on covering something that’s not newsworthy but simply normal, why not cover it honestly? Why not admit that what’s abnormal here is a system of universities and their administrators turning themselves inside out to recruit not normatively trouble-making young men, but carefully nurtured steroidal grotesques like college star Richie Incognito? Let the university-cultivated and university-venerated Incognito stand for the legions of highly evolved human battering rams that dominate life at many of this country’s universities.

Remember what the Alabama guy forgot: The whole sick feed ’em and need ’em system set up by universities, of all places.

There’s your story: The angry pummeling gods of the American university campus, and the students, faculty, and leadership that love them.

She stares abstractly into the middle distance in her official University of Minnesota economics department photograph, avoiding your eye. Students report a similar social avoidance, with some claiming she neither holds office hours nor responds to emails. Since 2003, even the Minnesota Department of Revenue has gotten the cold shoulder from her.

… Beth Elaine Allen, 64, is estimated to owe the state more than $50,000 in outstanding taxes, penalties and interest over a five-year period. Charges say Allen failed to pay income taxes since at least 2003, but due to the statute of limitations for tax crimes, charges are limited to years 2010 to 2015.

A strange case, methinks. After her moderately priced condo was foreclosed on a few years ago, she moved to a $94 a day residence inn; she pays $700 a month to store her belongings. At the residence inn, police found “a 2013 Mercedes-Benz, 19 letters from the Department of Revenue and 60 letters from the IRS and Philadelphia Department of Revenue.” Apparently she spends “thousands on travel, restaurants, grocery stores, liquor and wineries.”

Probably 1914.

…gets you.

Yet another engineering professor seems to have set up a private business in order to steal university/grant funds. So routine is the phenomenon of engineering professors accused of setting up private businesses through which to steal money that UD has proposed stationing armed guards in front of engineering offices to save time.

No point in covering all of these stories – there are too many of them. But this Norfolk State professor is a chatty lad whose broadly dispersed outrage inspires UD to make an exception.

In this case the missus set up a business selling lab supplies at an insane markup to her man, with the university footing the bill. Auditors had the nerve to discover that the address for Missus Lab Supplies is the professor’s home.

A good strong headline. A woman who allegedly butchered many seven-year-olds confronts justice. Here’s hoping it discourages other butchers in this country in the same line of work.

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Half a million girls.

Here’s what you need to understand. Bouncing Baby Boy universities – like the University of North Carolina – want to watch their football/basketball games, want to use their jumbo building blocks to make new stadiums and arenas, want to pay their superhero ADs and coaches tens of millions of dollars AND WANT ABOVE ALL TO BE LEFT ALONE. That’s why UNC is as one coming down like a ton of legos on the president of the University of Maryland for having told UD’s hubby, Mr UD, at a UMD faculty senate meeting, that UNC deserves the death penalty. BOO. WAHWAH. BAD MAN. HURT THE BAD MAN.

NO ONE gets to interrupt the boys’ concentration on their games, their construction projects, and their dispensing of money to themselves and their friends; and certainly not no-count absurdities like university presidents… or, even worse, trustees.

As in – the U of Smell, known once as the U of L, and more formally as the University of Louisville, just had a major trustee eruption in the figure of pizza billionaire John Schnatter.

His outburst has of course been totally ignored by the university – BAD MAN. HURT THE BAD MAN. – but not by the media, which, ever since U of L’s athletics program turned out to be running a whorehouse for the players – a whormitory, as the place has been dubbed – has been a media magnet. The whormitory is after all only the latest sex and/or money sleaze coming out of that sleaziest of American universities, and it’s the kind of car wreck you just can’t look away from.

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Schnatter’s problem is that, rather than join the boys and keep playing games and building sports arenas and giving millions of dollars to coaches until the whole university collapses under the weight of debt and derision, he wants to try to fix things. He thinks there may be something wrong with the university. Athletics, he announced at a recent public meeting of the trustees, is “sucking the life blood out of this place.” He claimed that the athletics leadership won’t even speak to trustees, that it operates in a silent arrogant world of its own.

Here’s what AD Tom Jurich – er, I mean some spokesperson – said in response.

“Tom (Jurich) does not have any comment on what was said.”

I am not going to dignify your outrageous comments about my non-responsiveness with a response.

It’s beyond comic. It’s beyond tragic. It’s beyond tragicomic. At this point, Chicago State University’s den of thieves – a bunch of people educating virtually no one, all at Illinois taxpayer expense – is simply a national disgrace.

And as yet another high-ranking CSU administrator – this time the dean of the school of pharmacy – is accused of the theft of money (in her case, money intended to help minority pharmacists), those of us following this school (read my Chicago State University posts for background) have got to ask where the stewards of state taxpayer money are in all of this.

The Student National Pharmaceutical Association contends Carmita Coleman, Chicago State’s interim dean of the College of Pharmacy, siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization’s bank accounts for clothes, food and trips during five of the years she was executive director.

… [T]he alleged theft was discovered in late 2016 as the organization and Coleman were embroiled in a separate legal battle over the association’s leadership. [She refused to step down. Lucrative position, plus she must have known she’d get discovered if she lost the gig.]

Coleman was appointed executive director of the student association in 2006 and re-appointed four times, most recently in 2014.

National association leaders moved in late 2015 to appoint a new leader of the student group. Coleman, in response, tried to rewrite the bylaws to sever the two groups and allow the student organization to appoint its own director.

The national association in early 2016 went ahead with the appointment of a new director, Kimberly Lewis, a North Carolina-based pharmacist and professor. Coleman, however, refused to resign her position or turn over control of the association’s bank accounts, financial documents and other proprietary information, according to the federal lawsuit.

The national association sued Coleman in Cook County Circuit Court last May to try to oust her, records show. By October, according to the federal lawsuit, Coleman had agreed to step aside and transfer the bank accounts to Lewis in exchange for dismissing the state court litigation.

When Lewis came to Chicago to transfer two bank accounts to her name, the agent told her three other accounts for the student association recently had been closed, according to the lawsuit.

Lewis asked to see statements for the other accounts and found pending charges for a Carnival cruise …

Ladies and gentlemen of the great state of Illinois: I give you the dean of the school of pharmacy at CSU.