There’s much to like in this story of plagiarism in a British prison.
A prison source said lags took poetry ‘very seriously’ and were furious when poems were ripped off.
He said: “It wasn’t just the prison worker who complained, it was at least eight prisoners…”
Spring hopes eternal, as it were. So there are all these poems and songs about disappointment, as the world regenerates but you – despite your hopes – do not. Or not very much. College boys are writing sonnets… But I’m on the shelf…
From the many-petaled bouquet of disappointed spring poems, take this one, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
SPRING
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of downs and fleuries, signifying nothing…
Rather bitter, aren’t we? Well, as the heart grows older, natural beauty in itself isn’t enough to subdue morbid thoughts. The post-romantic poet neutrally observes the crocus; she ain’t reveling in it. She notes the killing spikes, not the flowers.
The flowers probably aren’t out yet – it’s early spring…
Too early, as in the amazing Ted Hughes poem about the spring, in which he recalls gathering daffodils with Plath – to sell them – and the way the daffodils, like Plath and Hughes, were weirdly premature … or, better to say, immature. The whole poem regrets, abhors, the poets’ arrogant, oblivious immaturity, their belief that they inhabited a world of perpetual spring and daffodil windfalls.
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
Sure, says Millay, there’s no death – it’s apparent (as in observe, note her almost comically dry language) that the earth is ever-renewing. But since we’re not…
And actually the earth isn’t either:
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too…
That’s Philip Larkin, The Trees. He’s talking about trees bursting into life each April.
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing…
A tale told by an idiot, brain eaten by maggots. And then the poem shrinks to its smallest bit as the poet comes out with it: Life in itself / Is nothing… Like Leopold Bloom, soulsick at the futility of human existence as he surveys men in a pub stuffing their mouths: No-one is anything.
Only one thing interrupts our tidy step-by-step declension – ridiculous April, that idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. Babbling brooks, farcical flowers. A total jerk, Spring.
… tries to protect his school from becoming affiliated with Click-Thru U. He will lose this fight, but how good of him to wage it.
[Western Governor’s University] does not offer a college education. A college education is about going through a process that leaves students transformed. That’s why it takes time. Learning is hard — brain research demonstrates that real learning requires students to struggle with difficult material under the consistent guidance of good teachers. WGU denies students these opportunities. In fact, its advertisements pander to prospective students by offering them credit for what they already know rather than promising to teach them something new.
By giving students opportunities to take courses in the arts and sciences, college prepares graduates for more than just their jobs. College graduates are expected to be capable of making sense of the social, political, economic and scientific challenges facing their country and world. Unlike at WGU, our college students do more than fulfill a small set of technical competencies. They become thoughtful citizens and human beings…
… notes the love affair between the right and the for-profit tax siphons. [Subscription]
[F]raud appears to be a standard element of the business model. Since the government guarantees almost every loan regardless of whether the students can pay it back, the institutions have an incentive to sweep in as many students as possible, regardless of their prospects of graduating. … The question at hand is whether the federal government should apply some performance metric to its college loans or simply hand out cash willy-nilly. Amazingly, handing out cash willy-nilly has become the conservative position in this debate.
Otherwise, you risk losing your temper.
Yesterday, the SEC went after an FDA chemist who made a mint trading on inside information about approved and unapproved drugs.
Mr Liang is accused of using confidential information about clinical trials of new drugs to trade the securities of 19 pharmaceutical companies ahead of 27 public announcements.
Today, a friend of UD‘s sister sent her an email: “This guy’s wife made my wedding cake!”
University Diaries wrote about this chick years ago. She’s finally – minutes ago – been hauled into court. I guess it takes awhile to pull together a 24-count federal indictment.
Karen Pletz is apparently one of those rare university presidents who steals from her university. And when you’re prez, you can really steal. There are documents to be forged, vouchers to be fiddled, charitable contributions to be falsified… Pletz was a bank executive before she became president (salary: $1.2 million) of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and she knows how to do all this shit.
Yes. Of course I’ll follow the testimony in this case. The details will be amusing.
Why is this post’s title The Taking of Pletz’s Lexus?
The U.S. attorney’s office is seeking forfeiture of Pletz’s Lexus convertible.
Why is this post’s category TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE?
Because she couldn’t have it done it without them.
A lobster shell golf ball for use on cruise ships.
The Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship Series.
Until he was fired, Junker “was paid $592,000 to stage either two or three football games a year.” In 2008, Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earned $645,386 “for staging one football game.”
… in an Economic Principals post about Harvard professors and lucrative international consulting. The first claims that Lawrence Summers lost Harvard’s presidency in part because of his involvement in the Andrei Shleifer scandal:
After its mission to advise the Russian government on behalf of the US State department collapsed in 1997 amid a welter of conflict of interest charges, Harvard closed its Institute for International Development. After losing a long court battle [and having to pay the government tens of millions of dollars as a result], and partly as a consequence of it, the university relieved Lawrence Summers of his presidency (but made him a university professor) and revoked economics professor Andrei Shleifer’s endowed chair.
This is the first time UD‘s read someone connecting Summers’ loss of the presidency to the Shleifer case. I certainly hope it’s true, because I’ve been baffled for years, reading the details of that scandal, as to why Summers suffered no consequences. But maybe he did.
The second returns us to the much-discussed question of the Harvard-dominated Monitor Group, and its ties to Gaddafi:
In a statement last week, Monitor wrote that “just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya.” That was certainly true in Cambridge. What dissenting Libyans in Tripoli witnessed was a parade of well-paid visitors flattering their half-mad dictator, and a squad of Harvard-connected consultants bent on creating a National Security Organization for the government, designed to augment the existing security apparatus with a new corps of MBA-trained personnel officers.
It does look pretty unseemly… Richly rewarded Harvard professors pumping up an extremely, I may almost say ostentatiously (to quote Lady Bracknell) half-mad dictator…
In 2006, a psychiatrist who wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association about conflicts of interest among many of its authors heard back from an editor there. Conflict of interest? WTF?
So conflicted doctors hook your patients on drugs that fuck them up. So?
[In my practice, I see] young men who have breast lesions and abnormal breast development from atypical antipsychotics; [I see the results of financially motivated prescription] in sudden unexpected deaths, or “suds,” from psychiatric drugs in individuals who had no risk factors for sudden death; in tic and dyskinetic movement disorders in kids arbitrarily prescribed stimulants, and the huge weight gain and symptoms of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults who receive a sedative, such as quetiapine, for sleep.
So?
This man, Bobby Lowder, remains on the board of trustees at Auburn University. Read all about him here.
The latest sex and money for Auburn players scandal is coming soon to a tv screen near you. Bobby Lowder has instructed Auburn to have no comment in response to the players’ allegations.
Auburn: The shame of the nation.
Just-fired Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker explained to a group of investigators that the $1,241 he charged the bowl for “a visit to a high-end Phoenix strip club” was a legitimate business expense:
We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments… It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.
Sports Illustrated lists Junker’s activities as CEO:
[F]unneling money to politicians through bowl employees; coaching witnesses, and altering documents during [an earlier] investigation … taking junkets to college football games with politicians and their families — all on the bowl’s dime. On page 210 is a charge that the bowl footed the $33,188 bill for Junker’s 50th birthday party, a four-day bacchanal in Pebble Beach that had, according to one attendee, “absolutely no business purpose.”
But they’re all like that: “The Sugar and Orange Bowls have also recently come under withering criticism for the excessive compensation of executives and extravagant expenditures.”
You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to follow all the sleaze in big-time university sports. Here at University Diaries, we do our best…
Professors at the University of Vermont are outraged that the president and board of trustees have just given a $320,000 salary to the recently hired dean of the business school.
$320,000 is way above average for b-school deans, and UVM has only sixty business school students.
And it goes without saying that UVM, like most universities these days, is in big financial trouble, with talk of layoffs, salary freezes, etc.
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Greed and status-mongering. The pillars of the American university.