They’re coming after the chief rabbi of France again.

… Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, wrote on his website that he found at least one other instance of apparent plagiarism in “Caring for Others: At the foundation of Jewish law,” a book Bernheim published in 2002. Darde claims the rabbi copied excerpts from a book by Jean-Loup Charvet, “The Eloquence of Tears,” published in 2000.

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Ah, hell. Tablet got to that title before I did.

… They comfort thee.

… in this film, has died.

Division I Rutgers University gets the sort of attention about which other universities can only dream.

… now swirls around the Chief Rabbi of France: plagiarism, academic fraud…

Which goes to prove one of the fundamental rock solid oft-stated UD principles:

Find one instance of plagiarism for any one person, and you’ll find lots more; and, almost certainly, you’ll find that the same person has engaged in other forms of malfeasance.

Details on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has emerged.

Further investigation …showed Bernheim noted on his CV a high academic status that he may not actually hold.

His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agregation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions.

However university “agregation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim.

The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agregation lists kept by the French education ministry either.

“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agregation,” she said.

“This is the first instance that is so blatant.”

… on the subject of the Rutgers University basketball scandal – is now up at Inside Higher Education.

…news story.

That didn’t take long. Plus:

According to a source, John B. Wolf, Rutgers’ interim senior vice president and general counsel who is believed to have recommended against firing Rice in December, was forced to resign from his position late Wednesday night and it’s not clear whether he will remain at the university in some capacity.

I guess the president of Rutgers figures that if he dumps a lot of people he can save his own ass by saying see how seriously I took this? I dismantled half the university!

Won’t work.

… are helping themselves to British universities. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

… for revealing the university’s disgusting corruption.

Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.

Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.

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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.

Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.

Yes, Mike Rice U is now into bold type, garishly warring and litigating personalities, and the baying press in pursuit of the next hilarious unguarded statement. Penn State is still there, a tabloid whose faculty and administration desperately insist it’s back to being a … you know … quiet legitimate scholarly sort of thing (even though, as you read this, the only Penn-State-related word blasting through your brain is SANDUSKY SANDUSKY SANDUSKY). Penn State can give Rutgers pointers… As can the perennial yellow journalism schools, like Auburn, which is in the news for (get ready for it) absolutely total corruption.

We all know big-time sports is the front porch of the university. We’ve been told that by boosters again and again. And it’s true. Eventually, you can see everything. In big, bold type.

… that the only change in university sports wafting out of The Steamed Rice affair will be totally closed practices. Quite a few university coaches behave like Mike Rice – Rice simply got caught. So you have to keep coaches from getting caught.

Caught by the normal world. The cynical, twisted world of universities dominated, as Rutgers is, by sports, will let the behavior go with a handslap. Too much money at stake. You want the coach to make each player as much of an asshole as he is so they’ll win games. Rutgers didn’t fire Rice until the normal world responded normally to his disgusting behavior. Disgusting in any setting, but really disgusting in a university. Rutgers has no shame.

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So. Lesson? George writes:

Lock the gym doors. Hang a notice declaring that practice is closed. Tape brown paper over the windows if necessary.

But that strategy is clunky and risky in its obviousness. Not only will locked gym doors attract attention; your university’s coach is likely to feel free to be even more violent if he knows he’s truly alone with the players.

No, the solution, as is so often the case in university education these days, lies in synchronous interactive online pedagogy. The only way to keep the coach’s fingers away from the players’ necks is to separate coach and player, placing the players in the gym and the coach well away from them. A reasonably simple bit of software (SafeCoach) will allow practices to proceed nicely, coach watching and screaming from the comfort of his home or office. Players can turn the sound down when coaches enter into their most acute psychotic episodes.

France’s chief rabbi sounds like a real prince. When plagiarism from Jean-Francois Lyotard was found in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, he tried to suggest that Lyotard had plagiarized from him.

Now that the whole damn book looks plagiarized, he blames it on his ghost writer.

Not that he acknowledged having a ghost writer. Only now does it turn out… Je suppose it doesn’t look very good for your meditations to have been written – er, collated – er, plagiarized – by someone else. Although Ghosted Meditations is a very beautiful, very suggestive title! … How would it be in French? … Fantôme Méditations… C’est beau!

I think… I think therefore I… I think therefore I hire a ghostwriter…

It’s strange how even the chiefest among us never learn. Didn’t Gilles Bernheim notice all the attention Jane Goodall got? Doris Kearns Goodwin? All those Harvard law professors? How high-profile does the hire-a-ghost-writer-because-you’re-too-grand-to-write-your-own-words-and-then-fail-to-read-the-resulting-plagiarized-manuscript routine have to be for someone like the chief rabbi of France to notice?

Out he goes, his “rehabilitation” having failed, explains the sainted Rutgers AD who attempted the on-court conversion.

Tim Pernetti now tries to save his own ass. Good luck.

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UD thanks Wendy.