Nemazee’s Harvard pedigree, his generosity and his political hobnobbing created a facade of legitimacy that led people to overlook the possibility of deception.
One of UD‘s perennial themes. Universities routinely function as respectability cover for criminals.
… says Lady Bracknell. And the professorial ideal emerging in our own age is a curious, double-edged one.
Both edges have as their essential condition an enslavement to technology; but while one annihilates the instructor’s self, the other makes her a multitasking hypomaniac.
The hypomanic ideal is based upon imitation of the professor’s students. They are surrounded by distracting technology; she is surrounded by distracting technology. An English professor at the University of Maryland
… lets students bring laptops to her class, uses technological aids in her lectures, and has even received e-mails from students while class was taking place.
The other ideal is the online nullity, the nowhere woman who sends hundreds of faceless names a smileyface when they get an answer right.
From a conversation between two writers on the staff of the Cornell University newspaper:
… Faculty and staff ought to engage students, one on one, in a discussion that reaches far beyond careers and academics. Part of this involves the faculty realizing just how important a role they play beyond the laboratory and the lecture hall. They are mentors for all of us, and their efforts are part of a bottom-up approach to making Cornell not just a place of instruction, but a home.
… I attended a dinner late last week with the Board of Trustees where Susan Murphy gave the closing remarks. Tears came easily to her and the rest of the room — full of millionaire movers and shakers — in part for the loss of Matt, William and Bradley, but perhaps in greater part for the feeling of helplessness adults and outsiders must feel in their attempts to prevent future tragedies and ease our suffering. We, the students, know what’s up with our classmates (or at least more so), and everyone else is almost completely in the dark….
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I don’t say the following is beautifully written, but of all the stuff I’ve been reading in the last few days about suicide – in the wake of the Cornell story – it states most concisely the core facts of the phenomenon.
The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable. In this way, acts of suicide invigorate and inspire innovation and remind us all of what really matters in life.
Shouldn’t Republicans or Democrats or somebody be outraged that “between 2001 and 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid,” and that “like any government revenue stream, the one flowing to the bowl committees is guarded by an army of high-paid lobbyists?”
From a review in the Boston Globe of Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, by Mark Yost.
From Hassan Nemazee’s website cv:
– Member of the Visiting Committee of the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University 1998 – 2005
– Member of Visiting Committee on University Resources, Harvard University 1986-2002
– Member of the Middle East Center Advisory Council at Harvard University 1990 – 1994
– Member of the International Affairs Planning Committee, Harvard University 1990-1995
– In 1996 was named a John Harvard Fellow
– Taught seminars at Harvard and also in Japan and Korea in conjunction with Harvard University.
Nemazee will go to prison for twenty years or so because of his Madoff-style fraud.
In addition to seeking to force Nemazee to forfeit $292 million, the indictment seeks his interest in five pieces of real estate, 16 corporate entities and one hedge fund, 14 securities accounts, 32 bank accounts, a 2008 Maserati Quattroporte, and a 2007 Cessna airplane.
“For more than ten years, Hassan Nemazee projected the illusion of wealth, stealing more than $290 million so that he could lead a lavish lifestyle and play the part of heavyweight political fundraiser,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said last week.
“Today’s indictment exposes the brazenness of Nemazee’s schemes and marks the end of his decade of deception.”
The man is virtually a creation of Harvard university:
Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken [oil company, with which Nemazee is connected] received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the nation. Robert G. Stone, Jr., a figure with ties to US intelligence and to the Bushes, was head of the Harvard board of overseers that approved financial strategies. Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. (Prior to going to work for Nemazee and Quasha, Terry McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging that company’s own Enron-like accounting. Both Quasha and Nemazee, like Bush, have Harvard degrees, and both have sat on prestigious Harvard committees in recent years.)
Madoff and Merkin got respectability cover from Yeshiva University; Nemazee got that and more from Harvard.
UD awaits details of Nemazee’s financial relationship with Harvard University.
She also awaits Harvard’s public reckoning with its extensive institutional support of one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.
Eleanor Salotto disappeared over a month ago. It looks as though her body has been found (by a group of men out fishing) in the James River.
Sweet Briar’s president, who has a blog, has been writing about her. There’s also been a Facebook page.
She was chair of the English department.
… Fabriqué en France.
A French mystery writer is being sued for defamation by the owners of the well-known Parisian fabric store where she set her latest crime novel.
Lalie Walker’s psychological thrillers are often set around Paris, and her latest, Aux Malheurs des Dames, is no exception.
… [T]he book takes place at Marché St. Pierre, a 60-year-old landmark store in the Montmartre district of Paris known for its extensive selection of fabrics and low prices.
… The corporation that owns the store, Village d’Orsel, is suing for two million euros ($2.7 million Cdn), according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.
“No one can have anything to do with or talk about the Marché Saint Pierre without the authorization of the owner and the director,” Robert Gabby, the store’s director…
CBC News
One of the writers whose work Gerald Posner plagiarized showed up in the audience of a talk Posner recently gave at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.
The plagiaree is not happy about having been plagiarized, and told Posner about it, as you can see in this film clip of the event.
If everyone Posner has plagiarized had showed up, they’d have had to turn away the rest of the audience. But it was apparently just this guy. And the guy’s wife:
[A]fter the reading, [the plagiaree’s wife] asked Posner[:] “Are we still going out for a drink to discuss this?” Posner exploded. His plastic face turned red: “Yeah, I’m a thieving cocksucker.” “Yes, you are a thieving cocksucker,” [she] replied. And then an elderly lady came running towards them: “This is a botanical garden. It’s a peaceful place. Can you please take it some place else?”
Hillary Reinsberg, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, reminds us that you can be highly selected, and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still get a cheesy education.
The lights go dim, eyes begin to shut and the room gets quiet. Sorry kids, if you’re looking for a story about the bedroom, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Welcome to a college lecture hall in 2010.
Too many classes begin the same way: with an often cheesy PowerPoint presentation. The professor hooks up a projector to a computer and spends ninety minutes clicking through a series of slides. In order to best see the projection, the lights are usually dimmed or shut off entirely. Blinds are closed to trap out the sunlight, making the room feel like a claustrophobic cave.
And on a Monday afternoon in a beautiful old lecture hall, I feel like I’m being pitched a product in a cheesy office sitcom. Oh, and the dark room makes me sleepy. Get me out of here!
… [P]rofessors should think of the future of the students they should hope to inspire. A generation of students accustomed to lackluster and lazy slides on a projector will enter the workforce with the idea that this is a good way to do things…
The only way these professors are going to change (it’s not a matter of their learning that what they’re doing is cheesy; they already know that) is for all of us to keep complaining. Loudly.
In this post, UD noted that Seton Hall University employs, at an enormous salary, a borderline psychotic basketball coach.
This doesn’t distinguish Seton Hall, of course, from many other mad-dog-affirmative universities UD‘s covered on this blog. But Seton Hall understands itself to be a serious Catholic institution, featuring, for instance, faculty retreats devoted to quiet thought about values, and this did seem to UD a notable contradiction.
Under pressure of a big New York Times article last week about its filthy program, Seton Hall has fired this man.
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Remarking on his unemployment, the New York Times now writes:
[Coach] Gonzalez is originally from Binghamton, N.Y., the site of the state university whose foray into Division I basketball has caused shame to all university officials who are capable of shame. If Binghamton is still on the make, it might want to consider Gonzo.
In April 2009, organisers invited three radical Islamist preachers to address the [City University London’s Islamic] society’s annual dinner, with the “brothers” and “sisters” segregated, and the latter forbidden to ask questions.
Put aside the radical preachers; can you imagine any American university sponsoring a student group that segregates women students and makes them shut up?
Madonna Constantine (here are all my Constantine posts; scroll down) has lost her wrongful dismissal suit against Columbia University.
Undaunted, she’ll press on with whatever else she can think of that’ll divert time and money from Columbia’s efforts to educate people. Specifically, she’ll see if she can’t make some money from one of these two remaining sources:
1.) A $200 million defamation suit.
2.) A federal discrimination case.
At seven AM pickup trucks arrive. They back up to the boat slips and their drivers unload ropes and pots and throw them into the back of the boats.
They’re going eeling. I think.
Last night we watched the sunset and then a canopy of stars over the dark bay. From here.
Sun’s up on this side now. Downstairs, our innkeepers prepare breakfast.
… a new novel by Diane Meier, is a mix of university novel and chick lit. Unlike much contemporary academic fiction, it doesn’t take up some grand theme (sexual harassment, political correctness, free speech, student unrest), but instead focuses throughout on the emotional awakening of a repressed professor, Joy Harkness.
In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that “While earlier academic novels had been idyllic, satiric, ironic, or even embittered,” more recent instances of the genre, by writers like Philip Roth and Francine Prose, tend to be “cosmic, mythic, and vengeful.”
Meier’s novel is none of these things. It is more like Jane Eyre, a first-person account of a withdrawn and emotionally wounded woman’s emergence out of self-protective self-control. Like Jane, Harkness, an English professor, substitutes the world of literature for a personal reckoning:
We humans are, after all, lying in wait for the next great story. I know. Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daily Miller – their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reasons I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own.
The reflections on literature Meier places throughout the narrative, though, aren’t particularly illuminating, since the writers Harkness admires most – in particular, Henry James – feature themes at odds with the comic and even utopian themes at the core of chick-lit. The attainability of radical self-transformation toward moral perfection and domestic bliss is the fundamental conviction of chick-lit, and this conviction animates The Season of Second Chances. Consider, on the other hand, the fate of the characters Harkness just listed: Bovary, Miller, Gatsby, Othello, Medea…
So there’s a curious knottedness at the center of this novel. It must convince us of Joy’s initial dark Jamesian convolutions; it must then make her breakthrough into the light plausible and sympathetic. But – in accordance with its genre – this is a relentlessly plot-driven novel. It has no time for the dense flows of interiority James gives us for people like Isabel Archer.
Novels like the Bridget Jones series also, like Season, offer self-consciously literary narrators, but in their purely comic way these narrators are aware of the vast gulf between the realities of their ridiculous lives and the grand romantic contrivances of their favorite heroines’ lives. Season of Second Chances lacks this comic lightness; it’s morally didactic in a pretty straightforward way.
I liked the novel, actually — it was easy to keep reading. But Season locates itself in an ultimately less than satisfying fictional netherworld — it’s neither a modernist Jamesian novel affording us the pleasure of insight into the ambiguities and entrapments of moral consciousness, nor a postmodern confection like the Bridget Jones novels, affording us the weightless pleasure of satirical self-recognition. I guess I’m saying that for me, an English professor happy to encounter English professors in the pages of novels, Joy’s being an English professor – being in a university setting at all – seemed incidental.