Mitzi Wasserman Rapp with
her four children.

Campsite, Bavarian Alps, 1960.

UD: White cardigan, badminton racquet.

… honors a scientist at the university who was murdered, two years ago, allegedly by her husband. His trial has just begun.

UD has followed, on this blog, quite a number of university-related murders, many of them the murders of estranged wives by enraged husbands.

So enraged that the murderers made it pretty easy to discover and convict them.

Two cases out of several in the last few years come to mind – George Zinkhan, a University of Georgia professor who wasn’t tried and convicted because he decided – with the police closing in – to dig his own grave and kill himself; and Rafael Robb, a University of Pennsylvania professor about to be freed after serving five years for the murder of his wife.

Five years seems about right. Except for having bludgeoned a defenseless woman to death in one of the bloodiest crimes the state of Pennsylvania has ever seen, he’s been a really good boy.

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

Update: Ah. They revoked the parole.

… as Neil Young would say.

Helpless schools like the University of Charleston will never be anything but sports factories and arrest generators. They’ll take anyone tall for their basketball teams, including people with arrest records for very serious crimes. When their players team up and get arrested together, the schools haul out their presidents to say we feel helpless.

Someone needs to step in and help America’s sports factories/arrest generators. Alone, they are helpless.

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

UPDATE: And now: Three from each team!

This is the second mass arrest of University of Charleston athletes in the last few weeks.

Three University of Charleston football players have just been kicked off the team for drug dealing. You’ve got to acknowledge the remarkable degree of teamwork in both Charleston sports – three-man strategy in each case.

I quoted this in a post a long time ago, and its source – Truman State University’s newspaper – no longer has it online.

I’ve always been moved – angered – by what that student found it necessary to plead. Her Teach us something! haunts me. It’s so easy to put away the PowerPoints and the laptops and smartphones and the rest of the other barrier technologies and just turn the lights back on and look at people and talk to them. Assuming you have something to say beyond a verbal data dump. The PowerPointed plus laptopped classroom is what UD has long called, on this blog, The Morgue Classroom, where everyone ‘s dead – instructor and students.

We can expect more outbursts like this one in our secondary schools and colleges – more Teach Us Somethings – as teachers and professors continue their dance with death in the classroom. The outburst has gone way viral; Jeff Bliss’s statement (“They need to learn face to face.”) is getting national and international attention.

It’s icing on the cake that this happened in Texas, one of our most ignorant states. What are they up to in Texas high schools that’s making the news? A one million dollar football scoreboard.

*********

(UD thanks JND and UD‘s sister.).

In an article about soccer Saudi-style (“Protest against performance and royal interference has had the most far-reaching effect in Saudi Arabia where princes are known to phone during a match to order the change of a player.”), a writer falls into the impregnable/impregnate trap.

Football is defeating efforts by wealthy Gulf States to impregnate themselves against the wave of protests that have swept the Middle East and North Africa in the past two years and sparked a brutal civil war in Syria.

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

Explanation of problem:

The two words have very different etymologies.

Impregnate comes from Latin impraegnare, which means ‘to be imbued or saturated with’.

Impregnable comes from Middle French imprenable, itself derived from Latin prehendere, which means ‘to take, grasp’.

That they have come to look so similar in English today is just coincidence.

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

SOS never merely curses the darkness. She always lights a candle. So: The writer might instead use:

fortify
defend
protect

She lives for stuff like this.

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

We always lose lose lose

but we take solace in our booze.

Free market, baby. When students don’t give a shit about your professional football team located on a university campus, they will buy and sell and buy and sell their student tickets to make a buck.

You taught them how the game’s played, with your trillionaire coach and athletes/pretend students and all. Bit late in the day to complain that you get to make a fortune but your players and the student fans get nothing but massive student fees to pay for your fortune.

Sure, the students will show up for the big games. They want to get drunk and excited and maybe win something. But they don’t give a shit about the team, and they’re certainly not showing up for blow-off games. Why should they? What’s your problem?

…tedious by a lieutenant governor.

Or, uh, Drew. My Drew. Lazy, dim, and… er… let’s say not entirely straightforward. But can he ever coach swimmers! The taxpayers of Indiana can’t wait to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to my Drew!

God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy coach
Without reproach
From sea to shining sea.

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

(UD thanks Jon.)

Take note!

… and never was a speaker better chosen. Wong, not long ago head of UCLA’s Plasma Physics Lab, has devoted his life to thinking about how to amass mucho green from the government and from UCLA. A venerable 75 years old, he has pled guilty to stealing millions upon millions of greenbacks from these generous sources by…

You know the deal. You’ve read this blog long enough to know how the phony invoice thing works.

Wong created fictitious invoices at [one of his businesses] that claimed [it] had manufactured and sold to [another of his businesses] certain nanotechnology components. Fraudulent invoices totaling $160,000 were then submitted to the Defense Department for payment. Wong also caused [his businesses] to submit false vouchers to the Department of Interior for improvements on his privately owned land, as well as equipment and labor costs unrelated to the government Department contract.

He could go to prison for five years.

UCLA might give some thought to taking this page down. And… he keeps being described as emeritus. With all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto?

It helps for everyone in the world to heap contempt on it, to be sure. And, as we all eagerly await the publication of the latest DSM iteration, everyone is heaping contempt.

But the real way you do it is this: You calmly and amusingly treat it like the joke that it is. You let its absurdity percolate into the culture. For instance, you call your group show of high-profile wacky artists DSM-V.

What? You think this is small potatoes? You get more excited about big-shots like Thomas Insel getting all serious and concerned about the DSM?

Wrong. When the very letters DSM become universal shorthand for whoa way over the top baby you know it’s the beginning of the end.

That’s all test centers in the entire Republic of Korea. Pretty amazing country – cheaters, plagiarists, as far as the eye can see. UD has covered endemic plagiarism there; now it looks as though charging people lots of money for getting SAT questions in advance is also pretty close to endemic. Details, if you can stomach them, here.

Speaking of cheaters, the outfit that sued your blogger and hundreds of others lo these many years ago (refresh your memory here – scroll down) is of course no longer an outfit, having been eviscerated by this country’s legal system. In case you thought there was no more pain our courts could inflict on these trolls, get a load of this happy news.

Keep it coming.

This hurts my feelings?

This hurts my feelings?

This is a woman (an English professor at Barnard College, whose class is notorious for massive cheating) whose children have ballsy Daniel Ellsberg’s DNA coursing through their veins (she’s married to Ellsberg’s son). And she’s pathetically announcing to her large audience that it has hurt her feelings??

I’m not saying she should handle the problem this way, and produce a viral YouTube revealing to the world that she is an ass (the professor in the YouTube got his exam questions out of a book – too lazy to write his own – and thereby made it supersimple for students to get the questions in advance). I’m saying that having shown yourself a sap by your grading method (Ellsberg asked students to grade themselves), you don’t double down on the sap by making it clear that your emotional frailty will guarantee that you’ll just move from one way of being manipulated by your class to another.

In the Barnard case as in the ranting biz school professor’s case, the instructors were too lazy or too fragile or whatever to run cheating-aversive courses (I don’t say cheating-free, since it’s always possible that even in the best-run course some students will cheat). Instead of doing obvious things – writing questions students won’t be able with little effort to find in a book; not asking students to grade themselves; not allowing smartphones in class – these professors virtually welcomed their students into the world of naughty.

Even worse is the way such people tend to respond to the revelation of cheating. Of course both must have known it had been going on for years; neither one is stupid. They just let it continue until it got so bad they got pissed off (the guy) or until some poor honest soul in the class told them about it and forced some form of response (Ellsberg).

What they tend to do is get all police state about it. Ellsberg went from hippie to Kim Jong-un in no seconds flat, installing her students in device-free isolation chambers overseen by high-ranking administrators and administering there a big ol’ scary exam on which most of her students’ grade depended.

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

Here’s UD‘s take: If you are a cheating-enabler sort of professor — if you give take-home exams and shit like that, shit that guarantees cheating — own it. Be that thing. Get defensive when people call you on it and say it’s no one’s fucking business how you run your classes. Don’t get all schizodemento and hurl yourself from one extreme to another and hypocritically protest to the class how shocked and hurt you are. That’s what Sartre called being in bad faith. Not a good place to be.