Of course, if you ask UD, it’s disgusting enough that Brown University, with its talk of doing good for the world, has among its trustees someone who can’t think of anything better to do with $155 million than buy a Picasso with it. What a role model for the students.
An intellectual model too. His situation prompts the following logic challenge:
… the head of the system’s ethics committee has resigned due to massive plagiarism.
As with most plagiarism cases, Jane Goodall’s plagiarism, and – see this post’s quotation – sloppiness, is far worse than initially thought.
Jonathan Hart’s done done it but someone done told on him.
Jonathan Hart was appointed professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Alberta in 2004. In 2011, he was also appointed professor of English studies at Durham University. Neither was a part-time position, and it appears that neither institution knew about Professor Hart’s dual roles until the facts came to light at the end of last year.
A spokeswoman for Durham confirmed that it no longer employed Professor Hart but declined to comment further on an “individual staffing matter”.
A spokeswoman for Alberta said the institution had “become aware” of the fact that Professor Hart had also taken a position at Durham and was “looking into” the matter.
How’d he do it?
You know.
Teach one class a week… Semester off here, semester off there… Get a bunch of guest lecturers and TAs to teach your courses… Get a bunch of independent studies and handle them mainly online… Get only tiny grad courses and cancel class sessions left and right…
His next publication:
Jonathan Hart, “Toward a Definition of the Doppelganger.”
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So – a few more words on this. Here’s a hiring notice from Durham (Scroll down to #5.) So he’s been at it since September 2011. Bravo! The only thing vaguely comparable UD can remember is that gorgeous jet-setting pair, Jacko and Sainfort, late of both Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota. Hart kept the scam going for two years; J&S were discovered more quickly, but then Minnesota in its dithery nice Minnesota way held on to them for another five years.
Here’s a little bad news for Jonathan Hart, above and beyond the notoriety he’s now enjoying: Georgia Tech went after J&S in the courts bigtime. Georgia Tech was not amused. We are talking mucho reimbursement plus a felony charge.
I guess all universities need to be known for something; and at Missouri State University it’s hilarious, high-level mismanagement of money.
Naturally, the big money loss is about sports. There’s a new stadium about whose profitability the university lied (details here and here and here and here and here and here).
But there’s also the manager of the bookstore, whose decade-long theft of millions of dollars went unnoticed.
The US Attorney thanks MSU for its “quick actions.” Guess they do things more slowly in the heartland.
(And let UD simply state for the record, that if you think no one else at MSU knew what Mark Brixey was up to…)
It takes a lot of tax revenue to bail out the University of Minnesota’s football and basketball programs.
That the Gophers were in better shape than before [just-fired football coach Tubby] Smith arrived left some people wondering whether the [firing] made sense, especially financially. The university has been under scrutiny for its administrative costs, described as out of control by a January Wall Street Journal report.
The university had already paid more than $4 million since 2006 to former coaches Monson (basketball), Glen Mason (football) and Tim Brewster (football).
Sen. Terri Bonoff, DFL-Minnetonka, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said she would not enter a debate on whether the firing was justified.
“But it is my responsibility to provide oversight to financial management,” she said. “And I was concerned that his contract was extended with an increased buyout if there were concerns about his performance.”
Yes, that was strikingly stupid wasn’t it, doubling his buyout months before firing him.
There’s no indication that the citizens of Minnesota care that big stretches of their university are run by stupid people.
… titled Seeds of Hype: Wisdom, Wonder and Plagiarism from the World of Plants, is now up at Inside Higher Education.
As usual, a large limb has broken off onto our front yard during this late March snowfall. UD‘s practiced eye sees this one as quite loppable. She’s more worried about traumatized early spring shoots.
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She’s just back from her first lopping.
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The Tao of Lopping.
With each clean cut yielding a core of yellow wood, there’s a good feeling: the offshoots from the main trunk give easily, and it’s pleasant to think you’re putting things right branch by branch.
With cold fingers despite your gloves (first you try rubbery garden gloves, then a rather nice pair of leather ones), you gather a few lopped branches and toss them over the wooden fence so the town maintenance men will pick them up.
But then you wonder: Would they prefer one large unlopped limb? Too late to ask the question; you’ve lopped the thing… But you think of the wood chipper and wonder if you’re doing things right.
The tao of lopping: There is no right. There is no wrong. There is snow falling on ‘thesda, your cold hands, your pleasure at each clean cut.
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Or, if you like:
The tao of Sheryl Sandberg: Lean in.
… Mr UD turned up
a portrait of her.
Woman at the Window, Portrait of Zofia Borucinska, 1908. It’s in the National Museum of Warsaw.
It’s also featured in this book, whose author describes Kazimierz Stabrowski’s “model in a peacock crown and radiant, shimmering blue dress with peacock eyes.”
Click on the image for a larger view.
… the author shares a memory of his time there in the ‘seventies.
Assigned to [Robert] Berman for tenth-grade English, I took a seat one September morning alongside sixteen or seventeen other boys. We waited in silence as he sat at his desk, chain-smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and watching us from behind dark glasses. Finally, Mr. Berman stood up, took a fresh stick of chalk, climbed onto his chair, and reached above the blackboard to draw a horizontal line on the paint. “This,” he said, after a theatrical pause, “is Milton.” He let his hand fall a few inches, drew another line, and said, “This is Shakespeare.” Another line, lower, on the blackboard: “This is Mahler.” And, just below, “Here is Browning.” Then he took a long drag on his cigarette, dropped the chalk onto the floor, and, using the heel of his black leather loafer, ground it into the wooden floorboards. “And this, gentlemen,” he said, “is you.”
I think they really need to update this webpage. It says Stanley Chesley is a member of the Kentucky bar, but he’s not. He’s been disbarred.
The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of famed class action lawyer Stanley Chesley, a partner at Waite Schneider Bayless & Chesley Co. in Cincinnati, for “unreasonable” fees received in the settlement of a class action. Under Ohio Rules of Professional Responsibility, the disbarment may provide grounds for disbarment in Ohio as well.
Eh, unreasonable is a relative thing. You think it’s unreasonable for Stanley to have collected 20.5 million dollars for doing nothing in a class action suit. Others may differ.
Let’s see what he did for his cut of the settlement.
[Chesley] show[ed] up at the mediation and [went] through the motions of announcing the agreement.
Nice work if you can get it; and he doesn’t have to pay back anything, so fine. However, his greed appears to have embarrassed the bar enough for them to dump him.
Ohio’s next.
UD, an English professor, is a big believer in re-reading what you wrote and editing as the need arises. Go to it, Cincinnati.
Prohibiting your faculty from using industry representatives to ghostwrite their articles! Now I’ve seen everything! The gall.
On UD‘s front lawn this morning is a Razor Scooter.
Why?
Les UDs are having a contest. What’s the back story? How does a silver scooter end up on your front lawn very early on a Saturday morning?
So far Mr UD hasn’t come up with much. Mainly he’s embellished UD’s scenarios. UD has three scenarios.
#1: Rokeby Avenue in front of our house is an ideal scooter/skateboard street. It attracts many people – often very young people – who UD watches fly down Rokeby’s incline all day. Especially all-Saturday, which today is.
So a kid was on the thing this morning (again, has to have been very early – I saw it at 7:30 AM) – or, wildly, late at night? Late on the night of the meteor streak?? Late at night strengthens my theory, which involves a bad spill.
Kid takes a bad spill; his buddies (parent?) help him (carry him?) and need to ditch the scooter. It’s light – they’re in a hurry – they toss it.
The toss theory involves the fact that the scooter (a 2009 Razor made in Shenzhen Guangdong) does seem to have been thrown onto our lawn — when I lifted it, pretty sharp indentations appeared in the soil at each point of the scooter.
Mr UD’s embellishment is that it was a family on their way to Garrett Park’s Saturday farmer’s market with their kid; again, they ditched the thing, figuring they’d fix up the kid, check out the market, and then retrieve the scooter.
#2 A neighbor of UD, noting that UD has had trouble walking lately (probably arthritis in one of my feet), has, in an act of charity, put the scooter on UD‘s lawn for her use.
#3 It’s ‘thesda. People throw out nice things all the time. The scooter – which probably cost around hundred dollars – works fine, but is certainly scuffed. Its rider suddenly decided it was old or creaky and then and there discarded it. It’s a five-minute drive to the sporting goods store.
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Update: Various additional theories have come in.
UD‘s sister the Morrissey fanatic: Petty theft, joyride, ditching after joyride.
UD‘s neighbor Koneti: Big item pickup is in a few days, and people are putting things out in front of their houses. A kid noted the discarded scooter, and the rest is the same as UD‘s sister’s theory.
Are you kidding me? That would be amazing.
Why should Chelyabinsk Oblast get all the fun.