You can say it was a long time ago… standards were different then… you were in a hurry… the university passed you, after all, so it’s their problem… it’s all political… you’re going to sue the school because you swear that you didn’t… you were just a little sloppy…

You can say all the things people caught plagiarizing say; but at the end of the day you’ve been done in by a plagiarism-detection technology you could never have foreseen, and you’re going to lose your job.

Annette Schavan, German Education Minister, has resigned.

Why sure. You might have noticed that football – and hockey – are extremely violent. Most of the people who play them aren’t violent off-field, but some are.

On-field brawls are common, as at the Super Bowl, when officials had to keep breaking up fights.

Fans and viewers barely notice. It’s structural to the game, college and professional.

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You don’t have to be the University of Miami – America’s best-known Thug U – to have thuggish people on your team, and it shouldn’t be a big deal when this or that commentator notices the thug-factor, especially when it begins to produce a crime-wave in your community.

As it has at the University of Montana, where for years now its football team has really been acting up. The latest thing is a lot of rape cases, and when a member of the board of trustees stated the obvious about them –

“The university has recruited thugs for its football team and this thuggery has got to stop.”

– he got in all kinds of trouble, with the school and fans issuing indignant denials that the team is thuggish.

But – you know – a lot of football teams are thuggish. Some of the best – the winningest – are on the thuggish side.

What do we gain by denying that even well-bred university lacrosse players can be thuggish? A lot of these university sports guys drink and drug too much, are treated like royalty, etc., etc. It’s just not a good situation. It’s a situation that can create mayhem.

Rather than attacking messengers like Pat Williams, communities like Missoula should look a bit more squarely at how they recruit and treat athletes. That they have created an ongoing problem is a (you should excuse the term, given what we’re finding out about long-term health outcomes for football players) no-brainer.

Go here for background.

I

UT and CPRIT have different numbers for the amount of money the [state] agency has allocated to the University in grant funds [for cancer research], and neither institution was able to explain the discrepancy.

[A University of Texas spokesperson] said UT has been awarded $29.3 million by CPRIT so far, while the agency’s website states CPRIT has granted $38.4 million to UT since 2010. The page lists individual grants awarded by CPRIT.

CPRIT information specialist Ellen Read said financial employees at the agency do not know why there is a discrepancy, but that they believe the agency granted $37.9 million to UT-Austin, not $38.4 million.

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II

The recipient of the biggest grant given by the state’s cancer-fighting agency had spent $1.3 million — or one-sixth of its taxpayer money — on nonallowable costs such as bonuses, moving expenses and honorariums for board members before it ceased operations, Texas lawmakers were told Wednesday.

The Statewide Clinical Trials Network of Texas, or CTNeT, shut down last week after the state stopped advancing it money.

… Two of the [CPRIT’s] top executives, Bill Gimson and Alfred Gilman, who helped approve a $25 million grant to CTNeT, also served on CTNeT’s board.

… CPRIT had advanced the network $8.6 million of its total grant … [N]onallowable costs — cited as $301,000 in [an] audit – [have] grown to $1.3 million.

[M]ost of that increase was to pay CTNeT board members $9,000 apiece each quarter for attending board meetings. …Gimson and Gilman …were drawing $300,000 and $700,000 annual salaries from CPRIT…

… CTNet officials tried to “backdate” the paperwork to justify the honorarium.

Let’s see… Cancer or me? Cancer or me? … Me!

… you become a laughingstock.

“With the revocation of her Ph.D. title, the life’s work of Annette Schavan has been destroyed. As German education minister, she is the leading figure for professors, postgraduates and students. She has been education minister for more than seven years — education and research are her core values, the basis of her political actions. When now, of all things, it comes to light that the education minister has cheated on her doctoral thesis, it’s as if the finance minister were caught hiding his money in Switzerland or the transportation minister were driving drunk.”

Swathes of MBA candidates are being rejected across this land of ours because they plagiarized their admissions essays. This article cites the “Managing Director” of Penn State’s b-school –

Many of the new cases are international applicants from East Asian countries, where borrowing from published sources without attribution is not considered wrong…

– and UD’s gotta ask: Huh? Did you just say that people in East Asian countries don’t think plagiarism is wrong? I mean, yes, people plagiarize like it’s going out of style in East Asian countries… But do you really think that means these people – who come from cultures of education Americans are supposed to envy – don’t understand the ethical implication of …

Are you sure you wanna call it ‘borrowing’?

Are they planning to return it? Are you saying they think it’s okay because they fully intend, after they use We shall fight on the beaches, to return it to Churchill?

… has certainly boosted its rank with its sordid abuse of the new, incredibly generous, state cancer institute, CPRIT. The good people of Texas agreed to give a lot of tax money to this agency, which promised to improve cancer research and treatment for them.

But as soon as its board got hold of its three billion dollars, they allegedly began gifting themselves huge salaries, tossing huge grants to their friends, and ignoring huge swathes of rules and regulations. As one of UD‘s oldest friends – a grants specialist at a local university – writes to her:

Bottom line: a state agency with a gigantic budget and a mission of curing cancer in our lifetime has run amuck – spending huge sums of money in a manner that appears to be governed by favoritism, fails to hold grantees accountable, and fails to manage actual or perceived conflicts of interest. To me, the most damning aspect is the resignations of high ranking officials – they must know even more than what has been revealed to date, and they appear to be abandoning the sinking ship.

A local journalist writes:

[W]e suspect that Governor Perry has been sluicing cancer research money to his buddies.

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How gross is this?

As gross as it gets.

And most of the state’s major universities have been along for the ride.

… on the campus of UD‘s beloved University of Chicago.

[A University of Notre Dame hockey player] was asked to leave Brothers Bar and Grill Sunday night after patrons accused him of taking beer from their tables. [Police say the player] punched the [restaurant’s] 35-year-old manager in the face and stepped on her head when she fell.

… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

The University of Düsseldorf on Tuesday evening stripped the doctorate of German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan for plagiarism…. In 2011… popular defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, was forced to resign when it was uncovered he had copied large chunks of his doctoral dissertation.

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UD thanks Chris.

… comes to China.

[See AP photo here.]

… context. You look at a school like Syracuse University, which had a bad on-campus brawl early Sunday morning (major fighting; several arrests), and you ask yourself What else? What’s it been like on that campus for the last few months? You scroll through various corruption and violence related posts that pop up on this blog when you type syracuse into UD‘s search engine…

And it’s clear that Syracuse has got what you call a trend.

Er, the Ravens are winning… Which is TOO exciting for UD, given that she greeted existence itself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland… In fact, UD‘s Baltimore roots are impeccable: Her mother’s family – the Kirsons and the Wassermans – were all Baltimoreans. Her grandfather, Charlie Wasserman, was an engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric (“He had a lot of patents for smokestack thingies,” says UD‘s sister as UD types.). Her father graduated from Johns Hopkins, as did her uncle. Her aunt was a teacher in Baltimore public schools. Her mother was an x-ray technician at Hopkins. UD lived in Baltimore until she was eight years old, at which point the family moved to England, where her father had a post-doc in immunology. Then they moved back to Baltimore for a year, and then her father got a job at the National Institutes of Health, so the family moved up (class and moneywise) to ‘thesda.

UD and her sister are laughing madly at the commercials. Mr UD sits stonily.

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Interception Baltimore!

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Touchdown Baltimore!!

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An ad with a guy driving a truck out of the nose cone of a passenger aircraft.

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Lots of fights on the field. The announcers seem to be preparing us for an on-field riot.

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Baltimore intercepts again. They’re dominating the game for sure.

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A song my mother used to love to sing.

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Wow. Another Baltimore touchdown. 21 to 3.

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Oh. My. God. Baltimore just took the ball all the way.

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Wow. Half the power in the Superdome has gone out. Used up all the electricity on Beyonce.

Weird. Survivalists all over the country must be preparing their weaponry.

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No one here understands any of the Bud Light commercials.

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Baltimore’s in the lead, but SF is close to a TD. The tension would be so thick you could cut it with a knife if I really cared.

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Four seconds to go. I think we won.

… so female embryos do not sexually arouse ultrasound technicians.

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Story has jumped to the UPI.

News from Russia.

An applicant recently filed a trade mark application for Пушкин (Pushkin) to provide catering services… The Patent Office declined the registration, arguing that the word Пушкин is the name of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and registration of his name as a trade mark would not be in the public interest.

… is the chancellor of Southampton Solent University… In England, yes, of course… Are you thinking an American university could cook up a chancellor with a name like that? And until recently Lord West of Spithead’s University, “which currently sits 117th out of 120 in the university league tables,” featured among its business faculty a “senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” who seems to have directed all that innovating entrepreneurial energy to the distribution of cocaine. Out of her home.