… has already attracted a number of thoughtful responses. If you’re interested, it’s here.
… a con coquotte… a fraud frotteur… This blog’s HOAX category is on fire with scammed credentials, faked memoirs, and plagiarized everything.
And UD always loves to put another log on the fire.
Conwise, though, it’s been a pretty cold winter. There’s been no really big bilking — the sort of thing that involves not merely made up shit in a book, but an author’s fake self-presentation, etc.
So UD‘s pleased that the Hiroshima thing has happened.
The Hiroshima thing departs in one way from one of UD‘s oft-stated rules about hoaxes:
In the matter of the hoax, Europe is holocausts, America addictions.
In other words, Europeans make up shit about how when they were seven the Nazis chased them around Bulgaria, while Americans make up shit about how cocaine put holes in their nose.
Yet this latest thing, this Hiroshima thing, is American.
The author of the now-pulped Last Train from Hiroshima, about the bomb’s immediate aftermath in Japan, lied about his Ph.D.
Henry Holt & Company, which stopped printing and selling “Last Train” earlier this week because of questions about the accuracy of several sections as well as concerns that some of the people quoted or portrayed in the book did not exist, had also questioned whether Mr. Pellegrino actually held a doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Yes, what about kindly old Father MacQuitty, and kindly old Father Mattias, who presided over the funeral of MacQuitty? Like James Frey‘s heroin-hags, these men of the cloth were too good for this world.
… from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UD moved to Paris for a year, where she did dissertation research.
Through a mutual friend, she met Lisa Nesselson, a fellow Northwestern University graduate who, with her boyfriend, Glenn Myrent, had moved to the city to write about film.
Lisa’s friend Mark Hunter happened to be moving back to the States for a few months, and UD was able to sublet his apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumiere, steps away from Montparnasse, and a few doors down from where Samuel Beckett once lived.
This connection to an apartment was only one of many kindnesses displaced UD received from Lisa, who went on to translate several books and work as a film critic.
Her wit and charm, and her distinctive voice, have now brought her to radio and tv.
When UD first knew her, Lisa was struggling – living in a ridiculously small seventh-floor walkup in Paris, doing this and doing that to stay in France, watch films, and write about them. All these years she’s persisted in doing what she wants to do with her life, in the city where she wants to do it, and UD salutes her.
… you know you’re a for-profit.
That’s what the guy who runs Phoenix University made last year. And who cares? He can give himself whatever he wants, even if graduation and student loan repayment and job placement rates are shit. Even if his entire industry is under major legal and federal government scrutiny for squalid recruitment practices and false claims.
In January 2009, a commenter at Insider Higher Ed – the thread is in response to an interview with Harold Shapiro, once president of Princeton and now chair of DeVry, another for-profit outfit – wrote this about horrid snooty non-profit universities and refreshingly egalitarian for-profits:
Consideration for and impeccable service to the customer is gradually becoming the market’s expectation in higher education. [H]igher education’s customers are losing their tolerance for prissy Mandarins.
And, you know, you hear this rhetoric a lot among the for-profits… Those non-profit snobs… Yet doesn’t $6.5 mil sound way more Mandarin than the few hundred thou Harvard’s Drew Faust takes in? Especially considering that she’s not too above it all to make sure she graduates almost every one of the people who pay her university’s tuition?
I mean we are not kidding around here! When Kaplan’s last CEO resigned in 2008, he “receive[d] his base salary, which was not disclosed, and incentives, in addition to $46 million related to the Kaplan stock option plan. Honoring the noncompete clause of his contract will net [him] an additional $30 million by November 2011.”
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Anyway. As with the pharmaceutical industry, when it’s all about money, unsavory things can happen. Unattractive compromises tend to get made. Here are two recent examples.
UD‘s friend Jonathan sends her this Barron’s piece (scroll down) about the Washington Post’s relationship to Kaplan.
Even more striking, Stephen Burd at New America Foundation just went after the Chronicle of Higher Education for soft-pedaling its coverage of the for-profits, from some of whom it receives not only significant advertising revenue, but also conference sponsorship.
Burt tells his reader stuff about the for-profits that the Chronicle fails to mention.
A student at the University of Wisconsin River Falls talks about clickers.
What happened to raising your hand? What happened to being able to answer out loud? Reliance on technology may be the reason people with doctorates resort to PowerPoint and point and click in order to manage their classes. I understand the application in rooms of over 200 students. However, if no one else has noticed, our school holds a 30-1 ratio.
This short paragraph from a Wall Street Journal profile of one of the world’s worst financial criminals allows UD to say to you once again (she says it all the time, most recently in this discussion of Amy Bishop) that being highly intelligent and getting a great university education has little – sometimes nothing – to do with morality.
Clifford Orwin, a professor of political philosophy, makes the point:
[G]ive me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.
This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.
Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.
By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.
Stanley Fish overstates the case, but he gets at it too:
Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. [Humane] texts [are] concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.
One of the corollaries of these truths is that business schools waste all sorts of money and generate all sorts of cynicism among their students by adding ethics courses to their curricula.
Business school catalogues should title these courses what they are: sops.
SOP 101
ADVANCED SOP
STUDIES IN SOP
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOP
ADVANCED INDEPENDENT STUDY: SOP
… did everything he could to warn us.
It’s much, much, much worse now.
And scads of people are warning us.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
… Brittney Griner takes the pressure off of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert.
In UD‘s recent squirrels-at-universities post,
she forgot to mention squirrel fishing.
The sport originated, according to a number of
sources, at Harvard, where students attached
nuts to fishing poles and, as squirrels grabbed
onto the food, lifted the squirrels off the ground.
(See this primer and film.)
UD‘s very attracted to the idea of squirrel
fishing. There’s a sweetness and an
inventiveness here. You need very little
equipment. Squirrels are plentiful everywhere.
No one gets hurt. Competition is keen,
and there’s lots of room for strategy (type
of nut, placement, timing once the squirrel
locks on, etc.). Squirrels disrupt our lives
in countless ways, and this feels like an
innocuous form of revenge.
Wherever it originated, it seems most
prominent at the moment at Berkeley.
… the thumb of Pharma.
From The Canadian Press:
After months of balancing a woman’s religious beliefs with her desire to learn French, the Quebec government stepped into her classroom to offer an ultimatum: take off the niqab or drop the course.
The woman opted to keep her Islamic face-covering and has filed a human-rights complaint against the government.
In a province where the government frequently faces accusations of doing too much to accommodate minorities, these actions have prompted a fair bit of praise. [In Canada, as in Europe and much of the Middle East, opposition to the niqab and burqa is strong. These identity-annihilators are outrageous anywhere, but they’re real insults in university settings.]
The woman began taking a French course designed for immigrants at a Montreal college in February but she refused to remove her niqab while men were present . [As you read, note that the woman’s motives, as presented here, have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with hatred and fear of men.]
The college was initially willing to accommodate her, but eventually balked as her demands escalated.
According to a report in a Montreal newspaper, she was allowed to give an oral with her back to the class and asked men to move so they wouldn’t face each other. [Wouldn’t face other men? Wouldn’t face her? Whatever.] [Update, from another source: “[S]he demanded that male students who were sitting around her move their places so that she could sit surrounded by women. That was accommodated by the school.” … Good morning, class. Okay, ladies! Form your phalanx!]
The breaking point occurred when the woman again refused to take off the niqab, though teachers had stressed it was essential they see her face to correct her enunciation and facial expressions.
In what appears to be a highly unusual move, provincial Immigration Minister Yolande James intervened. Officials from her department, acting with the minister’s knowledge, met with the woman to discuss her options.
“The government has specific pedagogical objectives in its French courses,” said James’s spokesman, Luc Fortin.
“We couldn’t accept that these objectives, or the learning environment in the class, be compromised.”
Several groups, including several teachers’ unions, applauded the government for drawing a line in the sand. So did moderate Muslim groups…
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UD thanks David.
Despite winning football seasons in recent years, sports finances for Oregon State University and the University of Oregon both fell in the red by the end of the last fiscal year, according to a report the State Board of Higher Education’s finance committee will review Friday.
Oregon State intercollegiate athletics’ ending balance, what the board calls working capital, was $5.9 million in the hole as of June 30, 2009, and the University of Oregon’s sports programs posted a $642,000 deficit.
State Board policy requires universities to keep their ending balances positive. The board probably will ask administrators from each university to come up with a plan to bring working capital, current assets minus liabilities, into the black.