God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy coach
Without reproach
From sea to shining sea.

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(UD thanks Jon.)

Take note!

… and never was a speaker better chosen. Wong, not long ago head of UCLA’s Plasma Physics Lab, has devoted his life to thinking about how to amass mucho green from the government and from UCLA. A venerable 75 years old, he has pled guilty to stealing millions upon millions of greenbacks from these generous sources by…

You know the deal. You’ve read this blog long enough to know how the phony invoice thing works.

Wong created fictitious invoices at [one of his businesses] that claimed [it] had manufactured and sold to [another of his businesses] certain nanotechnology components. Fraudulent invoices totaling $160,000 were then submitted to the Defense Department for payment. Wong also caused [his businesses] to submit false vouchers to the Department of Interior for improvements on his privately owned land, as well as equipment and labor costs unrelated to the government Department contract.

He could go to prison for five years.

UCLA might give some thought to taking this page down. And… he keeps being described as emeritus. With all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto?

It helps for everyone in the world to heap contempt on it, to be sure. And, as we all eagerly await the publication of the latest DSM iteration, everyone is heaping contempt.

But the real way you do it is this: You calmly and amusingly treat it like the joke that it is. You let its absurdity percolate into the culture. For instance, you call your group show of high-profile wacky artists DSM-V.

What? You think this is small potatoes? You get more excited about big-shots like Thomas Insel getting all serious and concerned about the DSM?

Wrong. When the very letters DSM become universal shorthand for whoa way over the top baby you know it’s the beginning of the end.

That’s all test centers in the entire Republic of Korea. Pretty amazing country – cheaters, plagiarists, as far as the eye can see. UD has covered endemic plagiarism there; now it looks as though charging people lots of money for getting SAT questions in advance is also pretty close to endemic. Details, if you can stomach them, here.

Speaking of cheaters, the outfit that sued your blogger and hundreds of others lo these many years ago (refresh your memory here – scroll down) is of course no longer an outfit, having been eviscerated by this country’s legal system. In case you thought there was no more pain our courts could inflict on these trolls, get a load of this happy news.

Keep it coming.

This hurts my feelings?

This hurts my feelings?

This is a woman (an English professor at Barnard College, whose class is notorious for massive cheating) whose children have ballsy Daniel Ellsberg’s DNA coursing through their veins (she’s married to Ellsberg’s son). And she’s pathetically announcing to her large audience that it has hurt her feelings??

I’m not saying she should handle the problem this way, and produce a viral YouTube revealing to the world that she is an ass (the professor in the YouTube got his exam questions out of a book – too lazy to write his own – and thereby made it supersimple for students to get the questions in advance). I’m saying that having shown yourself a sap by your grading method (Ellsberg asked students to grade themselves), you don’t double down on the sap by making it clear that your emotional frailty will guarantee that you’ll just move from one way of being manipulated by your class to another.

In the Barnard case as in the ranting biz school professor’s case, the instructors were too lazy or too fragile or whatever to run cheating-aversive courses (I don’t say cheating-free, since it’s always possible that even in the best-run course some students will cheat). Instead of doing obvious things – writing questions students won’t be able with little effort to find in a book; not asking students to grade themselves; not allowing smartphones in class – these professors virtually welcomed their students into the world of naughty.

Even worse is the way such people tend to respond to the revelation of cheating. Of course both must have known it had been going on for years; neither one is stupid. They just let it continue until it got so bad they got pissed off (the guy) or until some poor honest soul in the class told them about it and forced some form of response (Ellsberg).

What they tend to do is get all police state about it. Ellsberg went from hippie to Kim Jong-un in no seconds flat, installing her students in device-free isolation chambers overseen by high-ranking administrators and administering there a big ol’ scary exam on which most of her students’ grade depended.

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

Here’s UD‘s take: If you are a cheating-enabler sort of professor — if you give take-home exams and shit like that, shit that guarantees cheating — own it. Be that thing. Get defensive when people call you on it and say it’s no one’s fucking business how you run your classes. Don’t get all schizodemento and hurl yourself from one extreme to another and hypocritically protest to the class how shocked and hurt you are. That’s what Sartre called being in bad faith. Not a good place to be.

Well, wow. The psychic landscape around here resembles the setting of Waiting for Godot – raw.

Or it’s like Mad Max – a Hobbesian war of all against all, played out on America’s busiest media highways, with desperate gangs (TheraPeuts, PsychíaCrips, DataDevils) truncheoning each other for the biggest piece of the pathology pie.

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

Our depressed nation has long taken its orders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; but the DSM has – like much of its clientele – grown mulish, morbidly obese… Even as each edition trumpets new and improved deficits, the high-tech, data-gathering world is passing it by.

So the DSM is in denial. Facing obsolescence and repudiation, its editors brightly inform us that it remains America’s go-to book for the blues.

But, you know, the bottom line isn’t about this approach or that approach to psychic disturbance. The bottom line is that more and more observers are simply disgusted at the massive numbers of people in this country who have been persuaded – by television commercials, by the DSM, by doctors – to think there’s something clinically wrong with them for which they have to take pills for years. (‘[S]ome pharmaceutical companies that have enriched themselves by selling psychiatric drugs are now cutting back on further research on mental illness. The ‘withdrawal’ of drug companies from psychiatry, Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Harvard and former NIMH director, wrote last month, “reflects a widely shared view that the underlying science remains immature and that therapeutic development in psychiatry is simply too difficult and too risky.” Funny how this view isn’t incorporated into ads for antidepressants and antipsychotics.’) The DSM has helped to make a lucrative fetish of pseudo-debility in the American population, and as long as there’s money in it and a total absence of biomarkers, it will, it seems, keep doing that.

Even when we get somewhere with biomarkers it won’t make any difference. Do you think an absence of any discernible ground for mental illness will stop a person who has been taught by this culture to think of herself in that way? To think of all of life’s difficult passages as illnesses rather than difficult passages? “The struggle of psychiatry since 1980 has not been to fashion more and more illnesses, but rather to convince us that when we are unhappy, anxious, compulsive, etc., we have a mental illness. In this they have been successful, at least to judge from the vast increase in numbers of people seeking treatment. It’s a predictable outcome of the DSM approach to mental suffering.” The science can tell us what it likes; until we stop liking the image of ourselves as debilitatingly neurotic it won’t make any difference.

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

Remember what Nietzsche said about the DSM.

“The DSM is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration … The DSM is an illusion of which we have forgotten that it is illusion, a set of metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigor… Yet we still do not know where the drive to produce DSMs comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to have DSMs…”

It is better (as Bismarck said of laws) not to see them being made.

Certainly universities do all they can to conceal the details that go into the making of people like Richard Herman; but a zealous Chicago Tribune reporter has stridden (look it up) into the sausage factory. We, who would never dare, are in her debt. Hold it cheap / May who ne’er hung there!

Jodi Cohen has come back with a tale so exhaustively, precisely instructive as to the manufacture of moneyed academic malingerers that it is worth our while to attend.

Start with the fact that as then-chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Herman personally presided over arguably the largest scandal in the history of the University of Illinois – the now-notorious special admissions scandal.

Herman was “the ultimate decision-maker” for the applicants who were connected to trustees, lawmakers and other powerful people. Herman at times overruled admissions officials to enable the students to get into the school.

So this would seem to be a man who helped bring national disgrace to his institution. What to do with him?

Well, Herman is a math professor. He can teach math. A lot of students need help in math. So he goes back to the math department and teaches math, yes?

NO, because now that he’s dragged an entire university system into the mud he’s too eminent.

“I don’t think you should expect him to teach a freshman calculus section with a ton of students.” Quote unquote. From an emeritus professor there. And the university agrees. Not only should this man not have to teach freshmen, he should teach no math courses at all. Apparently the whole field is now beneath him.

But OTOH the university is paying him over two hundred thousand dollars, so he should do something, right?

Weeeeelllll… A man of his stature can’t be expected to live in Urbana-Champaign, which is where he … uh… something for $212,000… He can only be expected to commute in once a week from Chicago. This unfortunate mobility problem radically diminishes his ability to, you know, be there.

Now, after he resigned in disgrace, he did condescend to teach two courses a year at this inconvenient location. In the College of Education, because you wouldn’t want him sullying himself by teaching in his field of expertise. Unsettlingly, however, “His biography on the College of Education’s faculty website is blank.”

Not only is his website blank; so are his class lists. The man has an uncanny ability to get his classes cancelled. It keeps happening. They just effing don’t fill! Who knows why?

Oh wait.

I mean, wait, and wait. Before the second wait. The first: Because the eminent chancellor can’t, curiously enough, get anyone to sign up for his courses, he “has twice switched to teaching online classes to make up for on-campus courses that were canceled for low enrollment.”

OOH LA LA online! Well, online. Yes, online. Talk about a sausage factory… Goes without saying that this solves the mommy don’t make me go down there problem. Plus, well, let’s just say that UD would love to know who’s teaching Herman’s online courses…

So the second wait. Second wait is how does this genius manage to get one course cancelled after another?

“Richard acknowledges that he probably missed a deadline for getting his information submitted in time to get included in the (catalog).”

That’s from a university spokesman, explaining one of the cancellations. The other? It was a grad ed course. But… whoops!

[B]ecause the UIC graduate program doesn’t offer a higher education degree track, there was insufficient student interest and enrollment.

This is the moment to caution you: Don’t try this at home. For all of these elements to come together, for all of this sausage-making to make a sausage, you need high-level strategic skills plus extremely high-level connections.

Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to have inside information which, if released, could ruin the careers of the high-level connections.

… to you, maybe… But to the American Psychiatric Association, with its eminent leaders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is an absolute goldmine.

… my hubby!  (♥!!)  Fill out these forms and help us get him elected!”

Quilty’s borrowing scheme didn’t work out at all well in Lolita (Humbert killed him anyway). Nor, more recently, did University of Texas baseball player Cameron Cox’s. He borrowed a teammate’s pee for a urine test – knowing that his own, I guess, would be drug-laced – and of course the other player was also drugging himself, so they both got in trouble.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

From the mouths of babes.

Architecture students at the University of Arizona rebuke the fancy eco-architects who built the 2007 extension to their old and – compared to the new glass architecture building – reasonably sustainable brick architecture school building.

It’s some kind of best-laid green plans fable for our times that, as Tom Beal writes in the Arizona Daily Star

The 2007 glass-and-steel addition to the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture – promoted by the university as “a laboratory for sustainable practices” – is one of the biggest energy wasters on campus.

In its first year of operation, it used four times the energy of the comparably sized brick building to which it is attached. Its glass walls and unshaded, exterior cooling ducts, combined with design changes made to save money during its construction, make it difficult to heat and cool efficiently.

A “green wall,” designed to shade the building’s south side, has yet to grow.

The Tucson heat, seasonal glare, reflected light and noise from traffic on East Speedway blast through its north-facing glass walls. Students say the glare can be irritating and disorienting.

Well yes, glass buildings in Tucson… Of course, they can be made energy efficient, but a lot of things have to work. Like that green wall…

“It was a great idea and it’s worked in other places, and I’ll be damned if I can explain why those vines struggle,” said [the building’s architect].

The building’s architect claims that eco-considerations were not foremost in the building’s planning, but the article featuring his work on the extension (and based, one assumes, on an interview with him) touts eco stuff first thing.

There is a kind of pedagogical genius to the building.

In a sense, the building is living up to its description as “a working laboratory for sustainable practices.”

Master’s in architecture candidate David Tapia Takaki said it is providing plenty of problems for the students to fix.

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

Add noise pollution to its other problems.

One of the big problems on the north edge is traffic noise, said [a student]. “It’s the cars on Speedway. If you are there one or two hours, you will not notice, but stay there all day and it can give you headaches.”

The Speedway! Named America’s ugliest street some decades ago, it remains a noisy thoroughfare.

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

All in all, an embarrassment.

From Harvard the gift of the Niall
Approaches with crocodile smile.
To contemplate him
Is to think of the hymn:
“And only the human is vile.”

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

Update: A British reader corrects my pronunciation of Niall (should sound like neel). All I can say in my own defense is that I had an Irish boyfriend once who pronounced it nile. (At least that’s how I recall it – it’s been a long time.) I’m also rebuked here:

Niall pronounce Nile is an Anglification of the name and it takes the heritage out of the name

Gevalt. Excuse me.

The killer was seventeen years old.