Prague Daily Monitor:
German economist Christian Roehl, one of the authors whose book Czech university professor Martin Svoboda allegedly copied, told Czech Radio (CRo) Wednesday that Svoboda was one of the authors of the book and no plagiarist.
Svoboda was accused of plagiarism and forced to resign from the post of dean of the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Brno’s Masaryk University on Tuesday.
Zdenek Rucka, member of the faculty’s academic senate, said Svoboda published two books as his own works in the past years but they were actually mere translations of the German work Generation Zertifikate – Die Emanzipation der Geldanlage by Roehl and Werner Heussinger.
The book by Roehl and Heussinger was issued in 2004 and Svoboda is mentioned in the acknowledgements. Svoboda published both Czech books a year later and he does not mention Roehl and Heussinger anywhere in them.
Roehl told Czech Radio that Svoboda is one of the authors of the book. The three authors had agreed that while in Germany the book would be issued under Heussinger and Roehl’s name, in the Czech Republic Svoboda would be its official author, Roehl said…
Vancouver Sun:
A group of professors in Saskatchewan are criticizing a scholarship that’s being offered to the children of fallen Canadian soldiers, calling it a “glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan.”
Sixteen University of Regina professors have drafted an open letter to school president Vianne Timmons, stating their concerns.
“It’s about associating heroism with the military intervention of Afghanistan,” said Jeffrey Webber, a political-science professor at the school…
The open letter, endorsed by Webber and his colleagues, asked for three things: the immediate withdrawal from Project Hero; public pressure on government to provide funding for universal access to post-secondary education; and a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian “imperialism” to be held before the end of semester exams…
Before the end of semester exams! WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.
A letter to the University of Minnesota paper from a Minnesota graduate:
Those who care more about education at the University of Minnesota than how its sports teams do will want to check out a report on athletes’ graduation rates and related topics from the March 18 PBS NewsHour.
Only The Minnesota Daily had the courage to prepare a comprehensive report on the University athletics department. The gutless Star Tribune and Pioneer Press took a pass, since they revere intercollegiate athletics and apparently are willing to tolerate failure in the classroom and misbehavior off the field as the price a school pays for hiring “student-athletes.”
If you are fed up with embarrassing, costly, anti-education intercollegiate sports at the University, now is the time to express your thoughts to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and your elected state senators and representatives. Demand a halt to the misuse of your taxpayer dollars and a public investigation by the Legislature into the future of big-time sports at the University.
Will Shapira, University alumnus
Will needs to get his head out of the clouds and start caring about what really counts: Should rich people be allowed to get blasted at the new stadium?
Lost amidst the news that NCAA rejected Memphis’ appeal regarding 38 vacated wins from the 2007-08 season is that the university is now looking into the possibility of suing John Calipari.
The school was punished for having used an ineligible player — Derrick Rose — after it was determined that his SAT was invalidated.
… During the 2007-08 season, Calipari was awarded $200,000 for reaching the Final Four and another $160,000 for winning 81% of his games. With 38 wins being taken off the books, including off of Calipari’s overall record with the school, those bonus levels would no longer be met…
… writes in the New York Times about “the horror of multiple suicides.”
In a time of unrelenting connectivity, through Facebook, Twitter and our smartphones, paradoxically it is too easy to stop connecting directly with those most able to help our young people.
I’m not sure what this means. In the Huffington Post, the mother of an NYU student who recently killed himself writes in response to David Skorton’s NYT letter:
I am also encouraged to see that I am not the only who believes that connectivity disconnects people. I think that we need to [go] back in order to go forward.
I think both writers need to clarify what they mean. It seems intuitively right to me that part of what’s weird about being in your twenties today is that you’re always online in a variety of pseudo-social ways… That you’re maybe addicted to these bizarre tethers that aren’t really tethers… But I’d like to know more about why people think there’s a link between this and self-destruction.
… might – under pressure of having fucked up the university but good – be opening up a tad.
It would certainly be interesting to know how they lost ten billion dollars worth of endowment in one year. It would be interesting to know lots of things.
But UD doesn’t really expect the Harvard Corporation to give up its business secrets.
Ezra Klein, Washington Post:
Twenty years ago, someone with my [political] interests would’ve spent a lot more time reading books because blogs simply didn’t exist yet. Magazines were around, but the advent of the Web led to daily content, so I’ve also spent more time reading those. But I can’t deny it: So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I’ve had with blogs, periodicals and other people. Books aren’t even that close.
Amy Bishop’s prick is her husband, of course, James Anderson, who lies and lies and lies.
He initially told investigators the family didn’t own a gun, though his wife had a borrowed one in the house.
“Get rid of it,” he recalled telling her. “I didn’t want to have it. I didn’t feel we needed it.”
During Bishop’s first hearing today, a police investigator reported that
[T]he gun used in the shooting, found in a bathroom trash can on a floor below, was purchased in 1989 for [Bishop’s] husband, James Anderson, through a man in New Hampshire identified as Donald Proulx.
Gray said Proulx told federal agents Anderson, who was living in Massachusetts, asked him to buy the gun because Anderson was having problems with a neighbor and New Hampshire didn’t have a waiting period for gun purchases.
… soon to be installed in honor of Ted Hughes, UD looks at one of his poems.
September
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.
We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads
Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.
*********************************************
Let’s look more closely.
September
[A funny month, neither here nor there. Summer still, but there are suggestions of fall. The poet locates his poem in this emotionally vulnerable season, its warmth and light and profuse life slowly being undone by something darker and colder. Transitional states make us, of course, think of time and its slow but unstoppable motion.]
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
[Lovers sit in a windowed room, embracing passionately and watching night come up. Engrossed in one another and in the soft gradual rhythms of the natural world, they don’t feel the passage of time. A perfect moment of infinite bliss. Yet the word “late,” meaning not merely late at night but late in the summer season, already signals trouble.]
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
[A repetition, or a deepening, of the first two lines, with the very nice formulation “arms hold.” We do not merely hold one another in a steady embrace; our arms, like some mechanical object we’ve successfully repaired, “hold.” There’s a sense already of the tentative, jerry-built nature of this “hold.” Note also the linguistic care taken here, with variations of the soft s and the short i throughout – sit, this, kisses, is, is… Makes for a lulling feel which fits the lovers as they sit in a timeless trance.]
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
[See how he’s still doing it? It, is, mid, still…]
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
[Infinity of light in the eye; oceanic endlessness in the body — This is love, which transcends time, which creates its own glorious world of permanence amid a world of impermanence.]
Time is nowhere.
We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
[Now, in full night, the lovers get up to go to bed. Their passionate embraces are over. The poem is about to make a significant shift in mood and theme.]
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
[From the idea of their needing no clock because their love triumphs over time, we move, with their standing up, to the idea of their needing no clock because they are so aware of their transience that they need no clock to remind them of it.]
Minutes uproaring with our heads
[Not only are they aware that they are slaves to time and not the eternal lovers they felt themselves to be before; they positively scream with the painful awareness of their own brevity. Each minute uproars within their heads as they break away from their bliss into the world of time.]
Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
[Off with their heads! When the arms no longer hold, the head gets all mobbed up with the senseless, brutal world outside the beloved’s embrace.]
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.
[From an entire sea under the silk of the wrist we end in sad little pools into which the life of the lovers – their late summer leaves, their crowned heads, their crowning moment – is cast.]
Financial Times:
A long-delayed academic paper analysing use of multiple sclerosis drugs failed to disclose all of the authors who worked on it, sparking fresh concerns over the practice of “ghost writing” in medical journals.
Karen Facey, a researcher, was commissioned in September 2007 to prepare a paper for the British Medical Journal on the government-backed “risk sharing scheme” for MS treatment and commented on subsequent drafts, but was not cited either as an author or a contributor in the final version published last December.
The issue has come to light at a time of growing efforts by medical journals to clamp down on “ghost writing”, the process by which medical writers prepare draft papers often on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, and then find academics willing to lend credibility by adding their names to the work…
Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.
Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.
Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.
… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.
But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”
This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.
Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…
But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…
I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.
Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …
Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.
A plagiarist so vile his colleagues persisted in outing him despite their university’s attempts to shut down their complaints has now sued the people who outed him.
A 45-year-old professor at the prestigious Xi’an Jiaotong University in Northwest China’s Shaanxi province was sacked on Sunday after six of his colleagues repeatedly posted letters to the university and on the Internet exposing his academic scandals.
… “The university even questioned our motives,” said [one of the six]. “Some university leaders told us that we could share some awards with Li, if we kept quiet about the scandal. It was such a humiliation!” the 81-year-old academic was quoted by China Central Television (CCTV) as saying on Saturday.
… Using their real names, the six professors then exposed about 30 examples of Li [Liansheng] plagiarizing the work of others online, which attracted more than 60,000 comments from netizens in a single month.
… In response to the allegations, Li sued his former teachers who exposed his plagiarism on the Internet, blaming them for sabotaging his reputation, according to a July 2009 report in the Shanghai Daily.
Li’s lawyer told Xi’an Beilin district people’s court that the six senior professors used insulting phrases such as “academic thief” and “rat on campus” in their posts on a website about Li, the newspaper reported.
His counsel also demanded the six professors make a public apology and each pay compensation between 120,000 and 150,000 yuan ($17,600 to $22,000), said the report…
Madonna Constantine seems to be the model here.
… says Hamlet, and when it comes to readying yourself to snatch a diploma mill degree at just the right moment, no one does it better than Chris Oleyte, Director of Readiness for the US Army Aviation and Missile Command.
He wanted a promotion; he needed a degree for the promotion; he bought a degree.
Of course it doesn’t matter whether the guy in charge of America’s missiles has an education! Chris knows that.
The cynic. Look at him in his photo, all wrapped up in the flag…
Six other people in charge of our weaponry bought their degrees alongside their buddy Oleyte — and UD, veteran of diploma milling, will predict here and now that they all graduated from the same post office box. Teamwork is what the army is about.