… but there’s one more in the clearly infinite line of plagiarizing German politicians – Florian Graf, Christian Democratic Union parliamentary leader, seems to have plagiarized his doctorate.
This is becoming so routine a story, so utterly predictable a series of events, that Graf has chosen to skip the traditional discovery-of-plagiarism steps —
1: Outright, outraged denial.
2: Insistence that whatever’s in the thesis, it was approved by a university committee, so any mistakes are the fault of the reviewing faculty.
3: Acknowledgment that one was very busy pursuing one’s political and family life while writing the thesis, so corners might have been cut.
4: Explanation that your work for the parliament (or wherever) doesn’t require a higher degree, so the whole thing is irrelevant.
5: Offer to rewrite the thesis.
6: In light of the university’s decision to review the thesis (the plagiarism was discovered by a website specializing in running theses through plagiarism-discovery software), a statement welcoming the review, since you are confident the thesis is absolutely fine.
7: In light of the university having discovered flagrant, blatant, omnipresent plagiarism, a statement that you are stepping down from your position.
— and has instead asked that his thesis be withdrawn. Perhaps he is hoping that this straightforward acceptance of the situation will play as dignified and reality-based, and his colleagues in the CDU will leave him alone.
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UD thanks Chris.
… writes an amusing and enlightening opinion piece in the Washington Post, about the Cartagena scandal. Roberto used to be a merchant seaman:
When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge’s ancient mariner knows that seamen don’t blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew — someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they’d mumble darkly that a crew member had “Jonah’d” the ship — done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge.
Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. All would nod gravely. In my day, seamen were convinced that this was such a serious infraction it could threaten a ship’s survival. More than once I saw fellow crew members, who’d come back to the ship so drunk they couldn’t remember where they’d been, make superhuman efforts to send money to a woman ashore in a desperate attempt to avoid the curse of the unpaid prostitute.
… wins the George Washington University
Battle of the A Capella Bands.
Here’s a photo from the GW newspaper,
of that night’s soloist, Laura Scuderi.
La Kid conducted two of their three songs.
They perform again tomorrow night
at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium, at 8.
And here’s a photo of the group
going nuts because they’ve just won.
La Kid has her back to the camera;
she’s got a pink headband on.
Here’s a photo also taken last night,
outside Lisner Auditorium, as the group
celebrated its victory. La Kid
is in the back row, all the way to the
right. (Click photos to enlarge.)
UD was a few feet away from
all of this, hyperventilating.
Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick…
Salman Rushdie remembers a fun word game he played with Christopher Hitchens.
Over breakfast, Les UDs have started coming up with some of their own:
To Have and Not Have
The Siblings Karamazov
Pride and Prejudgment
Darkness at Eleven-Thirty
The Way of All Skin
The son of a disgraced Chinese leader Bo Xilai received three traffic tickets while driving a Porsche [costing around $80,000] in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Bo Guagua, son of the ousted Communist Party chief at the center of a widening corruption scandal, had earlier this week sought to downplay his allegedly lavish lifestyle as a student at Harvard University.
Harvard must be pissed. If they’re ever going to begin growing their endowment – currently an anemic 32 billion – it’s going to have to come from guys like Bo.
France’s socialist presidential candidate says that, if elected, he won’t seek to overturn a law banning face-covering Muslim veils enacted by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives.
… and I hear them when I spend time in the Shenandoah and it’s always thrilling to hear them… So UD is happy that Washington State University is going to so much trouble to save a bunch of Great Horned babies whose nests were destroyed.
Not only are they being hand-fed, three times a day, “cut-up mice soaked in water” (WSU veterinary students must spend all their time slicing mice), but “People working with the baby owls are instructed not to talk when feeding them.” Lest they imprint.
Bear-bolstering at the University of Colorado.
Or, if you’re just joining us, my Massive Open Online Course on poetry has just enrolled four hundred people from around the world.
Onward and upward. This Saturday, I’m recording a lecture on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, At the Fishhouses.
Mona Eltahawy pulls no punches in this spectacular essay, one of the few UD‘s seen worthy to be read alongside the essays of George Orwell. Eltahawy and Orwell share an incandescent anger which lies unsteadily under hyper-controlled prose. This latent, labile, anger sustains the riveting tension and clarity of their unsettlingly poised voice. After you read Eltahawy, read Orwell’s How the Poor Die. The same outrage, the same strange, meticulous composure; and of course the same focus upon a large segment of hated humanity.
(Eltahawy makes me think, too, of D.H. Lawrence, for she begins her essay with an excerpt from a modern Egyptian short story that captures the crushing nihilism of a cruel marriage; and that same thing plays out in Odour of Chrysanthemums)
What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman’s face. Women are not to be seen or heard — even their voices are a temptation — so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.
And so women able to utter speech must utter it with a vengeance.
Notre Dame’s Most Revered Father Jenky
Made its faculty members quite crenky:
“This embarrassing shmoe
Called the Prez Uncle Joe.
We are going give him a spenky.”
Not knowing you don’t have a PhD is the academic equivalent of not being able to find your ass with both hands, thinks ol’ UD.
It’s not as if you can overlook having to write a long manuscript over a number of years and then go to a room full of people and defend its arguments over a number of hours. It tends to concentrate the mind.
Yet the University of Pennsylvania has (had) a dean, a vice-dean of education, who (see this post’s title) has made just this claim. He’s been calling himself doctor for years based on his incorrect assumption that he has a PhD.
It’s like all those German politicians (and one Hungarian) (and millions of Korean) assuring us that they didn’t know they plagiarized their dissertations. It’s just really odd.
Anyway, Penn has put this guy on leave while they untangle the web he weaves.
***************************************
UD thanks Ian.
From an interview with Brishkay Ahmed, who made the documentary film Story of Burqa: Case of a Confused Afghan.
“The older people my father’s age or the experts I interviewed, oh my God, they’re dying to get rid of this cloth. Over and over they make that statement.”
Ahmed supports women’s choice to dress modestly and wear the hijab to cover their hair, but she believes the burqa should be banned everywhere.
“I have never met a woman in Afghanistan who has said she has worn the burqa because she likes it – never,” Ahmed said. “The fear associated with it is why it’s still hanging in the closet because [women] have been killed for not wearing it… The entire world needs to ban the burqa and I’m not scared about saying this and there is one reason: I’m a filmmaker and I’m not supposed to be politically correct. It’s not my job,” Ahmed said.
The moving memorial ceremony for Christopher Hitchens reminds me to link to his defense of burqa bans.
LOL. Well, the lawyer for the three California professors suing to keep a valuable set of very ancient bones above ground isn’t diplomatic, but my sense is that he’s pretty much got it right. Strictly legally, the Kumeyaay tribe may be able to bury the two skeletons, though they don’t seem to be ancestors; but “No other set of New World remains… holds such a high degree of research potential.” They’re way old.
UD thinks a compromise is in order, maybe involving a ceremony that would not involve, or that would delay, burial.