… she ain’t go no tv.

… ballistics.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/blogs/chopping-block/os-cb-florida-state-seminoles-fsu-shooting-athletes-20130321,0,7078921.post

… John Wilson, artist.

Wilson knew UD’s father-in-law in Paris,
where they both studied with Leger.

… with good puns in them.

The story is so new that only this one has so far emerged:

Jane Goodall is Sorry for Monkeying Around Proper Attribution in New Book

Which is lame.

So… Can we do better? Monkey. Chimp. Goodall. Primatologist. Must be something here.

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OK:

GOODALL APES OTHERS’ PROSE

Yeah. Still lame.

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Totally predictable lame puns on the book title starting to appear:

Jane Goodall: Seeds of Plagiarism

Yeah.

… How about:

ME: Tarzan.
YOU: Plagiarist.

… and eventually people will start asking how you’re paying for it all.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/19/tenured-mcgill-professor-fired-after-accounting-twerps-uncover-159500-in-improper-spending/

Senator Charles Grassley – echt-American right-wing nerd – and Andrew Ross – left Euro hipster – find common ground in their disgust at the big-money machine New York University has become. Both wonder why a non-profit uses its extensive tax breaks to bleed its students for tuition, underpay its faculty, and give millions of dollars to administrators.

The culture gap between faculty and administration is pretty staggering lately. We’re scrambling to offer unpaid MOOCs; they’re looking for more Helen Dragas and Steve Cohens to put on the university’s board of trustees.

And indeed herein lies the problem, if you ask UD. Ross asks:

“Faculty who don’t necessarily get concerned with governance issues or for whom academic governance is not something that turns them on, these revelations I think turned the stomachs of a lot of people,” Ross added. “Just the scale of the payouts, multimillion dollar loans, multimillion dollar homes that were purchased, and the salaries. They really add up to a package of questions that have led to requests for further investigations.”

Part of the answer to this package of questions involves that board of trustees. NYU’s – like most fancy schools’- is dominated by hedge fund managers and the like. This means that over the last couple of decades the people with whom administrators consort on a daily basis are multimillionaires and even (Steve) billionaires. Larry Summers, Ruth Simmons – their immediate world has been the world of Goldman Sachs, where earning less than twenty million dollars a year is a mark of shame.

It’s not merely that high-ranking administrators these days consort with hedgies; like presidents Summers and Simmons, they often are hedgies, or they sit on the boards of hedge funds.

Trustees have always been rich, of course; but when ascending to an administrative university position now means that your compensation standard rises from six figures to seven or, uh, ten (Steve), you are going to feel compelled to shake down the school for big bucks. Otherwise you won’t be able to live with yourself.

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One practical recommendation for NYU from UD: Book a Greg Mankiw “politics of envy” talk and make faculty attendance mandatory.

Along with all of the other blessings of university-sponsored alcohol sales at football games (extra police, obnoxious behavior, etc.), you’d think making a profit would be a no-brainer. You charge thirsty idiots immense sums for camels’ piss — What could go wrong?

The University of Minnesota fought so hard for the right to sell booze at its stadium… Its president lobbied and testified… UM students deserved alcohol…

And it won! But now… Where’d all the money go?

… Tenured Radical and Joe Fruscione, are featured in this PBS report about academia and retirement.

The most macabre headline is this one, in USA Today:

EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, CORPSE, FOUND ON UCF CAMPUS

A dorm was evacuated, and the campus closed, after – in response to a 911 call – police found a dead person in a dorm room and, near him, an assault weapon and improvised explosive devices.

This is a big story because it’s part of an emerging new normal for certain disturbed Americans. UD guesses that this suicide had in mind going out with a bang, as in Aurora and Sandy Hook. For whatever reason, though, he decided to skip the part where he murders forty people, and instead went straight to killing himself.

… is featured in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

Not only am I the only gurrrrlll [scroll through the pages]… I’m the only one without a beard. Or at least stubble.

And yes. Fine. I’m also the only one who doesn’t have fifteen billion students. But then I’m the only one not teaching computing, engineering, or a how-to.

…has just been moved forward.

[Steven Cohen] maintains his innocence, despite SAC agreeing to pay the biggest insider trading fine levied by the SEC. Not only his reputation, but that of his industry, now rests on it.

One of America’s great universities is in the trust of the current biggest target of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

UD assumes there’s a person at Brown whose full-time job, at this point, is Steve-watching. If Cohen is pulled in by the government, and is still on Brown’s board at the time, it will be embarrassing for Brown, which has already had to dump one trustee for attracting the attention of the SEC… and there’s the recent embarrassment over its ex-president’s activities on the Goldman Sachs compensation committee…

Yes, in defenestrating Steve, Brown stands to lose not just millions but perhaps billions of dollars, Steve being the kind of guy who routinely takes in billions in compensation. But look at it this way: SAC is losing clients very rapidly, what with all the bad publicity. Steve will be paying a huge chunk of his billions in his own defense; and of course the firm has just paid out that big ol’ insider trading fine. There will be lawsuits against SAC by investors. Etc. The money might not be there anyway.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: I wouldn’t talk to an underage investigator either.

— as King Henry might have said if he’d been around today to watch the entire nation go the way of Alexandra, Virginia, where forty percent of the population is currently on antidepressants. Who told so many people that, whatever they were experiencing, they had to take pills of uncertain utility and serious side effects? Possibly for years?

Despite escalating outrage and dismay at hugely growing numbers of Americans being told they are mentally ill and must be medicated, the psychiatrists who have just completed the latest DSM (the medical and insurance establishments’ official list of mental disorders) stuffed it full of yet more ways for us to think of ourselves as mentally ill.

Inevitably, those among us even somewhat eccentric are increasingly unprotected from pharma’s it’s a mad mad mad mad world business model. Children are especially vulnerable; they must rely on the common sense and protective instincts of their parents to keep doctors like Kajoko Kifuji from laying waste to them.

We all know about the hundreds of thousands of twitchy little boys who are having ADHD meds thrown at them; we should also, as UD‘s pal Allen Frances points out, think about gifted kids, whose sometimes unusual affect also excites the madness mongers. He quotes an expert on gifted children: “When pediatric diagnoses are carelessly applied, gifted children are frequently mislabeled with ADHD, autistic, depressive, or bipolar disorders.”

It’s an old problem, one that this blog has followed with concern for many years: How do you handle it, public-relations-wise, and logistics-wise, when a politician or money man whose name you’ve plastered all over campus buildings goes to jail for corruption? Certain schools – Seton Hall, most prominently – experience this problem over and over again.

There’s an interesting sort of time-sensitive aspect to it. Most cases, to be sure, are after the fact – the name went up, the guy went to prison, the name got sandblasted. Rising action, climax, denouement. Some are before – Georgetown was going to name Douglas Ginsburg, but the SEC named him first. And a few are sort of during – Nevin Shapiro’s little student lounge plaque had just gone up when when Nevin went down.

Many and varied are the problems associated with de-naming. If, like U Miami, you’ve only done a little plaque, piece of cake. Just take it down. When we start moving in the direction of engraving, however, we’re talking big money. Sandblasting doesn’t come cheap. It’s also embarrassingly loud. You can have some guy steal into Nevin’s room at night and remove the thing; but does this guy look like the quiet sort? Why not just yell We made a terrible mistake or We consort with criminals at the top of your lungs? And try explaining to Seton Hall parents why hundreds of thousands of their tuition dollars went toward pulverizing the names of crooks from three of your buildings. So far.

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

Forget trying to see these things coming. No school – up to and including burnished ones like Brown, which will eventually have to do something about trustee Steven Cohen – is likely to scrutinize a politician or a hedgie and decide they’d rather not go there. Money is money, and you don’t want to insult a person from the money class. Word gets around. This is about cleanup.

UD has long proposed the erasure/sheeting approach. Inspired by Hasidic groups who erase images of women from photos (Hillary Clinton is the salient example here), and Muslim or Muslim-sensitive groups who sheet women in photos (Southampton University’s advertising materials are the go-to place here), UD has proposed simply adding or subtracting letters from the name.

So in the most recent case – jailed, disgraced Pennsylvania state senator Bob Mellow – you’ve got a couple of universities there with MELLOW engraved on buildings.

They could sheet/erase, by way of adding, pulling, or shifting letters. MELLOW, without too much work, could be altered to read FELLOWS, which sounds very British (Fellows of All Souls); for less money, they could go in the other direction – down-home and friendly – by dropping the M and W and putting an H at the beginning of the name: HELLO! They could be whimsical and add YELLOW to the name… Joycean, and put an S at the beginning (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”)… They could do homage to Saul Bellow by changing only one letter…

Yes, don’t they have one of their own?

In a bout of surreal postmodern self-reflexivity, the German writers of a satirical tv account of plagiarist ex-Defense Minister Von Googleberg themselves plagiarized freely from earlier political satires, including Britain’s Yes, Minister.