… that one responds to stories like this with relief. That he didn’t have a gun.
The suspect is a 21-year-old student.
UD‘s poetry MOOC gets a wonderful review here. She is very grateful.
A New Yorker writer anticipates the release, next month, of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He finds it bizarre and unsettling, as does UD, that so many Americans are willing to medicalize their experience of life. Their children’s experience of life. He wonders why this organization, the American Psychiatric Association, retains its mental illness franchise.
The market for mental disorders is already enormous, thanks in part to the relentless effort of the A.P.A. to use the D.S.M. to convince us that our psychological suffering is best understood as diseases that should be treated by doctors.
Early spring, and UD‘s been
creating a system of paths through her
wooded half acre. Mr UD has
given names to the paths, and he has
called the entire complex
Ferdinand House and Park.
(Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
was the last owner of UD‘s house.)
Here are some highlights.
***********************
The first path, The Meadow Path,
starts here, at the
Balinese Wind Chimes.
Now you begin walking
The Meadow Path.
Many old vine-covered
trees have fallen.
Weather Vane at the beginning
of the Road to Nowhere.
The Middle Way,
with Poet’s Table in the
background.
Ferdinand the Bull.
And Isabella.
They’re coming after the chief rabbi of France again.
… Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, wrote on his website that he found at least one other instance of apparent plagiarism in “Caring for Others: At the foundation of Jewish law,” a book Bernheim published in 2002. Darde claims the rabbi copied excerpts from a book by Jean-Loup Charvet, “The Eloquence of Tears,” published in 2000.
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Ah, hell. Tablet got to that title before I did.
Division I Rutgers University gets the sort of attention about which other universities can only dream.
… now swirls around the Chief Rabbi of France: plagiarism, academic fraud…
Which goes to prove one of the fundamental rock solid oft-stated UD principles:
Find one instance of plagiarism for any one person, and you’ll find lots more; and, almost certainly, you’ll find that the same person has engaged in other forms of malfeasance.
Details on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has emerged.
Further investigation …showed Bernheim noted on his CV a high academic status that he may not actually hold.
His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agregation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions.
However university “agregation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim.
The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agregation lists kept by the French education ministry either.
“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agregation,” she said.
“This is the first instance that is so blatant.”
… on the subject of the Rutgers University basketball scandal – is now up at Inside Higher Education.
That didn’t take long. Plus:
According to a source, John B. Wolf, Rutgers’ interim senior vice president and general counsel who is believed to have recommended against firing Rice in December, was forced to resign from his position late Wednesday night and it’s not clear whether he will remain at the university in some capacity.
I guess the president of Rutgers figures that if he dumps a lot of people he can save his own ass by saying see how seriously I took this? I dismantled half the university!
Won’t work.
… are helping themselves to British universities. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
… for revealing the university’s disgusting corruption.
Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.
Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.
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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.
Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.