… is your blogger’s latest dispatch from her hometown, Garrett Park, Maryland.

The place has an astounding consistency. Jockshop di tutti jockshops, it now has its trustees busy looking into two new degree offerings:

How to Make Beer.

How to Keep Turfgrass Looking Good.

… perhaps German’s plagiarist ex-Defense Minister – now known for all eternity as Baron von Googleberg – will give it a break. Perhaps he’ll stop trying to get speaking gigs at places like Dartmouth (where an online protest petition forced him to back out) and Yale (where much of his audience got up and left as he began to speak).

To those who say this is shutting down free speech, a Dartmouth professor responds.

“No one debates his right to express his views …Academic institutions are just not the place.”

[She] said that a person who has committed such blatant acts of academic [dishonesty] does not belong in an academic setting like Dartmouth.

“You wouldn’t invite Lance Armstrong to give a talk at a sports academy,” she said.

… “It sheds a bad light on Dartmouth.”

Ouch.

This is a line from a letter written to the president of Harvard from an alumnus, a pissed off rich guy. The letter is quoted in the Crimson.

The guy is an Ivy League T. Boone Pickens. An east coast Phil Knight wannabe. He’s in a rage because he’s just seen his investment in the school’s basketball team get shot to hell because of a cheating scandal.

You can understand his anger. A titan of industry takes over a sports team, he expects it to win. T. Boone’s luxury box tantrums when Oklahoma State football fucks up are the stuff of legend.

But wait a minute. This is Harvard University the guy’s talking about. When he says like many the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assigns he’s not talking about some jock shop. He’s talking about Harvard University!

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So. Let us put this matter into perspective. Let us look at the problems that conspired to produce the cheating scandal that broke up the basketball team this guy was bankrolling. Let us then consider solutions.

1. Yes, Harvard’s notorious for short-changing undergraduates. This isn’t going to change. Catering to professors who only want to teach graduate students is a Harvard thing. If you want to teach at a first-rate school that takes undergraduate and graduate instruction equally seriously, leave Harvard and go to Princeton.

Harvard’s relative indifference to its undergraduate component will inevitably produce some stupidly designed courses like this one, with its absurd take-home exam (take-home exams are invitations to cheat), inexperienced instructor, etc.

2. Bogus, easy-A, jock courses are the name of the game at big sports universities (for details, see recent events at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and no one cares, since winning is more important than educating the people recruited to play on the teams. Harvard is supposed to have a different ethos, but as long as it’s got a sports program that rich guys like the letter writer blow lots of money on, it’s going to have courses like this on offer.

3. Et ainsi, the letter writer can’t have it both ways. Either you put your money on a truly competitive team some of whose players are – inevitably – not scholars, or you settle for a reasonably but not dramatically competitive team made up of scholars. If the guy had put his money on a legitimately scholarly team, he’d be writing pissed off letters to Drew Faust about what losers they are, how she has to take recruiting more seriously, etc. He put his money on a not legitimately scholarly team, and now he’s pissed off because they’re not legitimately scholarly.

Solutions:

There’s only one solution.

1. Harvard should do what Oregon and Oklahoma State have done, and give the team to the titan. Phil Knight and T. Boone run basketball and football at Oregon and Oklahoma State. They basically own the teams. They bought them. Make Thomas Sternberg pony up Knight/T. Boone levels of support and give him the damn basketball team.

Like most other plagiarists, Chris Spence, former Director of Education of the Toronto District School Board, made a habit of it. It wasn’t a technique; it was a way of being. Once one instance of his plagiarism was found, hundreds of others emerged.

All of his books contain plagiarism. Steven Kupferman goes through a bunch of examples.

For a reader, the irony [of Spence’s thefts] can sometimes be unbearable. At one point, Spence writes: “It takes hard, steady work to improve student achievement, yet the culture around us values convenience, short cuts, expediency, and painless learning. These and other obstacles can seem daunting, but we must not let them daunt us.”

A fine defense of never taking the easy way out.

Except that those words were first used in a 1999 speech [PDF] by a career education advocate named M. Hayes Mizell.

… stand for all. Let this soul, dead in his bed from heroin and alcohol, represent all of the students who, this academic year, will drug to oblivion.

Not far from graduating from Oklahoma State, he’d been a wrestler in high school, and the autopsy notes his hardiness. “The body is that of an unembalmed, well developed, well nourished white male appearing consistent with the reported age of 22 years.”

The language of the autopsy is somehow beautiful.

The body is clad in a white hospital gown.

Needle marks are noted; a fatty liver. He had been in a hospital before, for toxicity, but this time had been too much.

I’ve said that. Haven’t I said that? Haven’t I, in my occasional posts about how attractive and fashionable GW students are, pointed out their texture-drivenness? Or if I haven’t said exactly that, I’ve implied it. UD has always been struck by the stylishness of her students.

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A different heel, texture or shape of the booties can have a huge affect on any outfit.

The author of the article from which I’ve taken this post’s title is a GW freshman. She has plenty of time ahead of her to discuss affect and effect with UD.

… social work, which positively attracts first responders. What happens to those of us who teach aesthetics? Three of our students gather round us and recite Keats (Milton?) as we expire?

“[G]ases from the melting, brown load hindered firefighters.”

Pretty funny first sentence.

Another high-ranking German is being investigated for having plagiarized the thing that enabled her to call herself doctor.

UD‘s old pal Paul Lafolley is featured in the New York Times.

UD has never been a fan of his work, which has at once a sort of all over the place New Agey thing going on, and a pretty obsessive rigidity to it…

“Mr. Laffoley has yet to encounter a system of mystical thought he could not absorb into his own project.” Right. This is a nicer way of saying what I just said.

“Mr. Laffoley’s works may seem impenetrable, but they are not nonsensical. They limn a richly provocative cartography of consciousness itself and its heretofore under-realized possibilities.” Rather pretentious formulation there, and note that the critic never says what place or places in particular this map designates for consciousness to realize.

Because work like Paul’s is all over the place conceptually, its power and legitimacy rest heavily on the artist himself, as a sort of mystic sage. I’ve never been able to grant Paul that status, and his art as such is for me too catch-all to express anything in particular.

… lines of poetry.

Joe Biden is a fine vice-president; UD‘s glad to have him. She enjoyed listening to him just now, while she fixed evening tea (Creme de la Earl Grey from TeaLuxe. A generous pinch of it between my first two fingers and my thumb. Dropped into a scalded bright red teapot and flooded with just-boiling water.), addressing military people at an inaugural ball.

In honoring the families of the deployed, he quoted the line They also serve who only stand and wait. He attributed the line to Keats (even worse, he said his wife attributes the line to Keats), but it is from Milton.

318. On His Blindness

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

… just outside my bedroom window! Perched on a honeysuckle limb, it’s got a sharp eye on our bird feeder, which overflows with nuthatches.

It looks like this.

UD‘s feeling a bit unsettled about having created the killing ground for the hawk by hanging a bird feeder…

… UD was entering a blue line train at Foggy Bottom, and a woman with lots of luggage sat down next to her. The woman apologized for taking up so much room with the luggage, and UD commiserated. “No fun dragging lots of stuff from one car to another.”

The woman explained that she commuted twice a week to a lectureship at GW University’s school of business. “I teach a class in business ethics.”

Readers of the UD category Beware the B-School Boys know that UD has what to say about that.

In her shy, tongue-tied way, UD took advantage of the three minutes they had before they went their separate ways at Metro Center to tell this woman all about her area of specialization.

The woman was a good sport, and she came right back with a defense of the enterprise, and UD came back from the defense, etc., etc.

I swear it was all very amiable, with the woman (they exchanged names on the platform, but if you think UD remembers swiftly exchanged names on noisy platforms, you don’t know UD) insisting that “in the long run” unethical behavior destroys shareholder value, and UD insisting that short-term profit seems to suit a lot of people perfectly well, thank you, and that for instance insider trading – both unethical and illegal – seems absolutely rampant — you might say even structural to the economy — and even after the feds finally drag in Steven Cohen it will continue to be a practice many business people defend and engage in…

UD‘s hastily attempted point (swaying train, unsteady luggage, crush of commuters) was that business schools are hopelessly up against a humongous cognitive dissonance between moral scrupulousness and the nature of competitive financial markets. She was not saying, she yet more hastily hastened, that free marketeering was the work of the devil. She merely pointed out that mild to extreme cheating was endemic to the project, and the business school that fails to take this into serious account runs the risk of having its ethics component be a laughingstock.

You see, the rhetoric of university business ethics courses always looks like this. This Globe and Mail article begins, as most on the subject do, with the rampant reality:

Over the past decade, a succession of high-profile corporate crimes has spurred business schools, globally, to infuse business ethics and leadership into course content.

Not just the last decade, of course; corporate misbehavior and crime has been massive for decades. And business schools have been offering tons of ethics courses through all of those decades. But, you know, check out this category, Beware the B-School Boys. Just read the latest entry in it, about the dean of Columbia University’s business school.

Anyway, the Globe and Mail story goes on to announce that this new guy is really going to turn things around at Ryerson University…

Yet the language he offers his interviewer is dead jargon city. Leadership is a process, not a position… Let’s talk codes of conduct…

Faithful UD readers know what she proposes. Toss the courses. Initiate a lecture series featuring business cheats who got caught. These guys are often articulate, charismatic… Incentivize them by taking a bit of time off of their sentences for each speech.

A professor of rhetoric gives Armstrong an F.