She’s a Cambridge University law professor, and that’s the title of one of her articles up there: Private Libel and Public Accountability.

Scholarship, Karl Marx tells us, repeats itself first as something or other and second as farce. (That’s not the exact quotation.) And as Palmer’s private trashing of historians whose work touches on the same subjects as her husband’s work becomes public, she and her husband (Orlando Figes) definitively enter the farce era.

A prominent British historian has found a new way to get in trouble: Orlando Figes, a historian of Stalin’s Russia at Birkbeck College, London, and a contributor to the New York Review, has admitted that his wife has been publishing hostile comments about rival historians at Amazon.co.uk under a pseudonym.

… According to The Guardian, Figes’s attorney conceded that Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, a lawyer and lecturer at Cambridge University, had posted reviews at Amazon describing Rachel Polonsky’s book “Molotov’s Magic Lantern” as “dense,” “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Robert Service’s book about Trotsky was called a “dull read,” and his history of communism was dismissed as “rubbish” and “an awful book.”

Figes’s book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” on the other hand, was described by the same reviewer – posting under the psuedonym “Historian” — as a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history, the work of a writer with “superb storytelling skills.” The reviewer concluded, “I hope he writes forever.” …

The wife of the writer Orlando
Adores him as if he were Brando.
If only Ms Palmer
Had been a bit calmer
She might have avoided a scando.

Woke frightened at five this morning from the loudest crash I’ve ever heard. Shook the house. Seemed inches away, somewhere on our property.

Mr UD slept through it, natch.

I glanced at my laptop on the bedside table. Its lights blinked off, one after another — green, red, gold, white. Out.

Tripping over the dog, I went to the living room and looked out of the big windows at the back woods, expecting to see an enormous, semi-dead tree on the ground, blanketing the ground cover with leaves and broken limbs. Nothing there.

I checked the front windows for a tree on the lawn. No.

Back in bed, I woke up Mr UD. Was it some chemical explosion on the train tracks? An airborne toxic event?

He dressed and walked up Rokeby Avenue. A few feet away from our yard, one of our neighbor’s enormous, semi-dead trees had crashed into the street, taking all the electrical wires with it. “They’re hot, the wires,” said Mr UD. “They’re sparking.”

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

Asplundh trucks appeared, as did Garrett Park’s mayor (he strode up and down in front of our house, talking into his cell phone) plus the town administrator, who sat in one of the town’s adorable white trucks with Garrett Park written in green on each door, and somberly watched as the Asplundh guys set up orange cones and took out electric saws.

By eight o’clock they’d cleared Rokeby, on either side of which lay stacks of thick wood. Regular readers know that UD‘s property already has plenty of stacks of wood along its forested sides, left over from earlier tree removals. Now there are many, many more, just adjacent.

The town a few years ago planted a delicate magnolia in front of my neighbor’s house. That seems to have been wiped out.

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

So again we’re dark. We lose electricity in the winter, we lose it in the spring.

I told Mr UD I was writing a post about what it’s like, losing light and heat and electricity all the time.

“You’re calling it ‘The Ontology of the Outage’? Don’t you mean the metaphysics of the outage?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. And I originally went with that title. But consider the alliteration you get with ontology… I’ve spent the morning going back and forth between the values of style and content…”

“And you’ve chosen – of course – style. You always care more about stylish writing than about accuracy.”

“Right. What are you gonna do about it?”

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

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, says Elizabeth Bishop. But she’s kidding. Read the poem. She’s being ironic.

Losing light and heat all the time is actually pretty easy to master. Almost getting killed by trees is more difficult, but let’s put aside, for the moment, that problem.

I remember when my Uncle Mario, a wealthy developer, came to visit us just after we bought our Garrett Park house. “You don’t have grounded wires?” He was appalled. “You’re gonna lose electricity every time the wind blows. And look at these enormous, semi-dead trees.”

Oh. Pishposh. UD, an old hippie, is heavily invested in not living like a wealthy developer. If the price of her maintaining a mental self-image of debonair freedom is constant darkness, it’s a price she’s willing to pay.

… but this is one of those stories… those Sorceror’s Apprentice stories… those Strega Nona stories… those shaggy dog stories… in which more and more things pile up and it gets crazier and crazier until you have to laugh. UD has to laugh, anyway.

So all day on and off she’s been following the story of Marcello DelCarlo, a biochem professor at Rush University in Chicago (his faculty webpage was up earlier today; let’s see if it’s still there) whose morning began with a domestic battery charge. His girlfriend says he shook her violently.

That’s bad, certainly, but not bad enough, professor-behaviorwise, to get you mentioned on University Diaries. (Yes! It’s still there!)

Then, when police looked through his apartment, they found

… more than a dozen cardboard tubes filled with an explosive substance and capped with plaster … One of the devices ignited as police bomb and arson investigators tried removing it, causing a small fire that was quickly extinguished by the unit’s fire sprinkler system, according to prosecutors and witnesses. The block-long building was evacuated, and the remaining devices were taken from the home and destroyed.

Although the professor scoffed that they were merely little firecrackers he’d fashioned for July fourth, the police added to his domestic battery misdemeanor “felony possession of an explosive or incendiary device.”

And then when the police talked some more with the girlfriend, she told them “he made the explosives and traded them for meth.”

Oh. And:

On Monday a Cook County judge set DelCarlo’s bail at $225,000. He is currently serving a sentence of six months of court supervision — a form of probation — for a January conviction for misdemeanor possession of ammunition without a valid firearm owner’s identification card and possession of an unregistered handgun.

To keep geese off the quad –
students find barefoot frisbee
à la feces unappetizing –
Boise State University
has constructed predator
silhouettes. Coyotes.

Seems a good seasonal job for
students: Predator Silhouette Mover.

Among the many student-authored attacks on laptop use in the classroom that UD has read, this one, by a student at the University of Maine, stands out. The writer specifies a destructive aspect of classroom laptop use that I’ve thought about but been unable to formulate very well. I’m grateful to her for helping me clarify it.

….This semester, I wanted to take an elective class outside my major, which had such high demand I had to e-mail the department, talk with the department’s administrative assistant and meet with the instructor before getting in.

After devoting all that time just to enroll, my classmates’ behavior has been extremely disappointing. Of the more than 20 students in the class, about half were there last Wednesday, and all but three were on their laptops, checking e-mail, playing games and surfing the Web.

It doesn’t end there. One who had foregone the computer was texting on her cell phone under the desk the entire class. That left two of us listening attentively to the professor….

Everyone talks about how distracting it is to have bevies of computer screens bursting with sports, porn, and Facebook surrounding you during a lecture or discussion. But few people focus on how demoralizing it is to realize that, although you’re in a university classroom, almost no one’s taking education seriously. No one’s even thinking. They’re just farting around.

UD is aware that students farted around in 1959 too. But puh-leeze. They doodled, exchanged notes, and stared out the window. They didn’t have an international command and control center on the desk in front of them.

This writer understands the institutional implication of a failure to be serious:

These laptop addicts should think about how their actions reflect on them, as well as their major and, ultimately, the university. With talk of consolidating colleges and eliminating programs, they should consider what affect their attention or apathy could [have on] future students at UMaine.

Indeed. Why hold classes if you can’t hold classes?

UD‘s heart goes out to this writer — this still-serious student. If it’s not too late, and if she can afford it, the student should drop out of UMaine and find a serious school.

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

UD finds moving the writing of students who are aware of the contempt for professors and universities much laptop use in classrooms represents. But UD finds downright baffling statements like this one from a dean.

Jim McClellan, dean of liberal studies at [Northern Virginia Community College’s] Alexandria campus who has taught there for 35 years, said he is most concerned with how to reach millennial students and would like to see this matter discussed broadly [at an upcoming summit on community colleges].

“The nature of students has changed in the past few years as a result of technology,” McClellan said. “We see shorter attention spans. We see students who think there’s nothing wrong with texting or using laptops to message back and forth in class. We have students who arrive late and leave early or just don’t pay attention at all. I think I slept through most of my junior year of college, but I at least tried to do so [in]conspicuously. I think there’s no interest among students to cover up not paying attention in class. How can we teach students who have grown up in this environment and with technologies we just couldn’t imagine when we came up?” …

Well, let’s see what the problem might be.

Instead of banning laptops and other technology from your classrooms, you do everything you can to encourage classroom and out of classroom use of technology. You make this effing big deal about it! We’re special! Everyone at our school gets a Mac! And all that other technoshit too! We drag our faculty into special seminars on how to encourage their students to bring laptops to class! On how to PowerPoint everything so they don’t have to teach! Our professors get special introduction of new teaching techniques points on their annual reports for showing students how to download lectures so they don’t have to go to class!

Listen, McClellan.

Far be it from UD to keep you from attending an exciting summit with the vice-president’s wife where the international news media films you wringing your hands over your obnoxious students. If that’s the picture of your college you want to broadcast to the world, go to it.

But there are other things you can do about the situation.

The president of Brown University, who for ten years has been a director at Goldman Sachs, issues a no-comment in response to the university’s newspaper.

Simmons wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that it would not be appropriate for her to comment on the situation at this time.

Why is it inappropriate for a director of a company to say something in response to government charges of fraud against it? Did the students ask Simmons whether she supports the company’s press release expressing outrage at the charges and vowing to defend its honor? Does she disagree with that statement? As a director, didn’t she have to review and vet it?

What’s inappropriate is for a leader of a university and a corporation to say nothing to both sets of her constituents (students, stockholders) when the attention of the world is focused on a claim of illegal behavior for which, as a director of the company, she may have to take some responsibility.

At the very least, Simmons needed to confirm her support for Goldman’s official statement in response to the charges. She is a Goldman official. She represents the company.

A University of Maryland law professor comments in the New York Times:

[What’s particularly] galling is the constant refrain from both Wall Street C.E.O.s and former regulators that no one could have predicted the [housing] crisis. However, the S.E.C. allegations are premised on the fact that hedge funds and Goldman Sachs itself were so convinced of cataclysmic failure that they were looking for investment vehicles that would profit each time a homeowner defaulted on his or her mortgage.

In other words, there were competent and smart people making billions because they could foresee the obvious: people with poor credit would not be able to repay their home loans.

In short, it was not that no one knew…

What did Ruth Simmons know?

Did she – as she will eventually say – know nothing?

Then why was she a director of Goldman Sachs? Why did GS pay her many millions of dollars for being a Goldman Sachs director? For ten years?

Another commentator at the NYT asks:

Why have there been no criminal charges? Why did the S.E.C. only name a relatively low-level Goldman officer in its complaint?

Ruth Simmons is a very high-ranking Goldman officer. Eventual criminal, not merely civil, charges will surprise no one. I’d say Brown University needs to start asking itself whether it has a president able to give the campus her full attention.

Or whatever partial attention she’s been giving it. As Pablo Eisenberg asks:

Did it not concern the Brown board that its president was [until recently] spending an inordinate amount of time and attention helping to direct and oversee three major corporations at a time when universities and colleges are themselves under increased financial stress, experiencing a crisis in financial aid and facing serious questions about systemic faculty and staff inequities?

One of the corporations she continues to oversee is now in very serious legal trouble. Through omission or commission, Simmons helped get it there. What is she going to do about that? What is going to happen to her because of that?

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

Simmons isn’t the only Goldman Sachs director suddenly struck silent.

William W. George, a Harvard Business School professor who has served on Goldman Sachs’s board since 2002, referred a request for an interview to the company’s press office. His Twitter account, which lauded JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon for his firm’s better-than-expected earnings on April 14, remained silent on the controversy surrounding Goldman Sachs.

George is the author of 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis.

Lesson #1: RUN CRYING TO THE COMPANY’S PRESS OFFICE

… at Syracuse University.

Rumor has it Brown University has a lock for next year on Lloyd Blankfein, who will speak to graduating students on “Doing God’s Work.”

… in Washington DC, UD will read excerpts from the Sirens chapter of Ulysses.

Location: Guapo’s Restaurant, 4515 Wisconsin Avenue, NW (Tenleytown Metro).

Time, Date: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, June 16.

Sponsors: Harvard Club of Washington, and American Independent Writers

Free and open to the public.

This guy tells you why you should consider signing this petition.

(I’m signature #1089.)

…. about the lengthy relationship between Brown University and Goldman Sachs is getting as long as the period of time Brown’s president has spent away from campus overseeing the compensation packages of that firm’s traders.

Here’s the post. Keep an eye on it and its many updates.

As one of Goldman’s directors, Simmons should soon be making a statement to the Brown community on recent events.

In The Mark, a Canadian online forum, yet another professor — this one at the University of Ottawa — states the obvious.

After almost 10 years of teaching undergraduates, I’m through with the internet, at least in my classrooms. No more will I allow students to use laptops or other electronic devices in my classes. In the new attention economy of an always-on, everywhere-available wireless internet, I admit defeat. I cannot compete against the seductive spectacles offered by 1.7 billion internet users. I’m pulling the plug on the wireless classroom.

… [Students are] utterly addicted to the net, largely incapable of exercising discipline over their media use, and extremely uncomfortable at the thought of being offline for a 90-minute lecture.

A simple thought experiment should have made it clear to university IT departments that installing wireless internet in all classrooms without so much as an off switch was inviting trouble. Imagine giving all students a portable television to bring with them to class. Now connect a telephone and a typewriter to the TV. Throw in every available cable channel in the known universe. Add a database of most modern music and movies. Include direct lines to all of their friends, all of their classmates, and 1.7 billion strangers.

… Professors cannot police the laptop use of 60, 80, 200 students or more (nor should they be expected to). Education is not a problem to which technology is the solution…

A crime story out of Canada reminds us (UD likes periodically to remind us) that fake or diploma mill degree holders are often comprehensive, career criminals. Scratch a fake degree, find a world of fraud.

From the Murray State University newspaper:

… Murray State intercollegiate athletics expenses rose by $421,967 from 2008 to 2009 resulting in the highest amount in University history to $4.9 million.

On behalf of the [university Senate Finance] committee, which consists of six faculty members, [Winfield] Rose recommended to the Board of Regents “… we find the size of this subsidy and its growth inappropriate. … We further encourage the President and the Board of Regents to freeze the athletic subsidy at its present level immediately and to eliminate it totally over the next decade.”

… “We are under no illusion that what we have to say will be taken seriously by the Board or by the administration,” Rose said.

… The members of Faculty Senate who voted in favor of the Finance Committee’s recommendation believe there should be a cap on athletic spending.

“How far does it go in these tight financial times?” Rose said. “Does intercollegiate athletics have a virtual blank check on the University’s bank account?”…

Yes. It’s Kentucky, after all.

… is that of Greece. The system there isn’t merely corrupt; it’s quite violent. It has long been an object of contempt on this blog. [The link is to a search on UD of the word “Greece.” It will take you to some relevant and some irrelevant posts. Scroll through.]

As the EU and IMF prepare to bail out the country, an article in the Wall Street Journal explains why it’s money down the drain. The country is profoundly corrupt, and more money will no doubt make it more corrupt.

An update on a recent enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:

The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.

The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.

From the Slovenian Press Agency:

Secretary General of the government Milan M. Cvikl is facing allegations from a law expert that he copied an entire section of his book on reforms of EU legislation …

The head of the European law department at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Matej Accetto, said in an article published on the web that the core section of the book “Reformed Law of the European Union” is in many ways a Slovenian translation of the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

“Sentence after sentence of Cvikl’s book follows from the Wikipedia entry. Including the last sentence…which is meant as an example of what has been said,” said Acceto.

He believes that “reasonable doubt has been dispelled” that Cvikl used plagiarism in his book and added that the book should never have been published.

In response Cvikl, who is Slovenia’s candidate for a member of the European Court of Auditors, denied Acceto’s allegations…