Je ne peux pas l’aider. Je LOVE plagiarism stories.

No, not all plagiarism stories. Your garden variety undergrad grab is a yawn.

BUT.

Give me certains éléments de l’intrigue… give me une histoire particulière … give me things that permettant d’opposer les termes de « hétérodiégétique » et « homodiégétique » (ou « autodiégétique » si tel est le cas); pour le second critère, il s’agit du niveau narratif du narrateur. Cette dernière distinction met en exergue les termes de « extradiégétique » et « intradiégétique » … and of course I am in heaven.

The case of Prof. Dr. Rene Lafreniere of the University of Calgary has everything UD loves in a plagiarism story:

The plagiarized article lectures us about ethics. The plagiarism is committed by heap big chief researcher who refuses to say anything about the matter and goes entirely unpunished. The plagiarism is discovered by an anonymous unimportant “sharp-eyed student,” who goes and tells the plagiarized author, who complains to the journal, which retracts the thing.

But what UD also loves about this species of plagiarism story is that no one is talking. The ethics report had four authors, with Lafreniere singled out as the plagiarist. But the journal editors, the publisher, the university, the authors – nobody’s saying a thing. Let’s all step lightly over this stinking turd and go back to the lab.

Well, one guy – a philosopher at the University of Illinois – has been willing to eke out a statement. He doesn’t take a stand on the matter pro or con, but he does narrate what I just narrated. I mean the thing about the sharp-eyed student.

Why does he say only this? Why doesn’t he condemn the man who stuck his toes into the turd? Why don’t the other two authors do this? Wouldn’t you be pissed off? Eager to dissociate yourself from Dr. Tartuffe?

The same year [as the plagiarism], the University of Calgary’s medical school feted Lafreniere, creating the “Rene Lafreniere Lectureship” to recognize his “13 years of outstanding leadership as department head.”

Okay fine yes it’s embarrassing. The man is busy and does what tons of busy people asked to put their names on things do – he finds someone else to do the work for him, and then he affixes his precious signature. I mean, probably there are layers and layers between Lafreniere and his plagiarism. He’s got a staff of assistants and if he’s really pushed to the wall he’ll blame them. He can’t be responsible for the plagiarism of the people he hires to do his writing for him!

The fine new blog, Retraction Watch, will no doubt be keeping an eye on this one. I’ve added its name to my Bookmarks.

A Veterans Affairs writer warns GIs.

Go to Google and search for “GI Bill schools.” The first link you get isn’t a page run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The first result is GIBill.com, and it uses the name of the most recognized public education program in existence to its financial benefit. It appears to be a legitimate site for information, but a cursory search of its privacy policy shows it is owned by an online marketing firm that, according to a major business publication, specializes in directing students to for-profit schools through its page. It’s a questionable marketing strategy that seeks to legitimize a page that serves little purpose other than to funnel student Veterans and convince them their options for education are limited to their advertisers.

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Update: Tom Ricks.

The about-to-retire president of the University of Kentucky done gone and increased the athletic director’s “base salary … from $475,000 to $600,000 annually and he is now under contract until 2019… Should the new president want to bring in his or her own athletics director, [the current AD’s] contract specifies that he would be paid $475,000 a year for up to five years, or up to $2.4 million.”

Hyuk! And he dint tell the trustees! Not a one of ’em. Har!

… and his Mississippi PhD.

Nicki Harrington, who will step down in June as chancellor of the Yuba Community College District [in California], named Al Alt interim chancellor until her successor’s term begins…

Greg Kemble, secretary for the academic senate, said Alt’s doctorate from a Mississippi-based business described as a diploma mill is part of the reason he questions Alt’s appointment.

“As human resources director, his expertise should be to identify diploma mills — such as the one where he got his Ph.D.,” Kemble said…

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Update: UD thanks Crimson05er for correcting her statement that the Yuba Community College District was also in Mississippi.

The University of Oregon alumni give virtually all their money to athletics.

“It’s called a donation or a contribution … when, in fact, as we have discovered in our research … it’s a transaction,” [Dennis] Howard said. “It has nothing to do with giving back to the University or a philanthropic motive. It is purely and simply a commercial transaction in which the individual is paying for tangible benefits: better seat location, access to the Autzen Club amenities. All of those things are driving those transactions.”

A UO student who has worked in the alumni office comments: “Supporting academics means supporting an idea, whereas an athletic donation is something a donor can see and enjoy.”

Me no like idea! BOO.

Utah Republican Rep. Chris Herrod (Provo) has introduced a bill eliminating tenure for all professors at public universities and colleges in the state.

UTAH: WHERE GUNS ARE MANDATORY, AND TENURE’S NOT EVEN AN OPTION.

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Update: Original article link has broken. Thanks, ricki, for letting me know. I’ve linked to a Bloomberg article.

[The 2012] budget proposes no changes to traditional Pell grants, which are currently at their highest level ever. What it does is halt, after just two years, a program launched in the 2009-2010 school year that allowed students to apply for a whole second Pell grant for summer school or if they took extra credits.

That program turned out to cost 10 times more than expected, and there was no evidence it was helping anyone graduate from college faster. Instead, it appeared to be the case that for-profit colleges were gaming the system to encourage students to apply for the additional grants to take academically questionable courses.

The tax-profiteers play their games and ruin a good program.

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Update: Trash talk.

VALENTINE

Listen – I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
— Iris Murdoch, letter to Raymond Queneau, 1952.

Listen! Of all the senses of love, the most absolute
Is this one, where I’m young and you’re older, married,
And we drift through cities foreign to us both,
Cities still ruined, and speak French,
And stand on bridges trembling over foul water.

The most absolute sense possible of love – listen –
Is this one. A charming ex-surrealist.
Une fille épatante. They climb the hills near
Innsbruck and talk about his psychoanalysis.
Irishwoman. A little bun. She loves Kierkegaard.

In the most absolute sense, listen, I love you.
Others can listen in after we’re dead and
Figure out what that means. Read all about it.
Letters journals novels memoirs.
Somewhere I say you have a very beautiful head.

I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
Are you listening? My heart, beating on a bridge
In Austria, and among all the questions in my head
This one is absolutely answered. I would do anything
For you… Come to you at any time or place…

After you die, I affect a calm farewell:
He was a natural, absolute philosopher…
Some statement of the sort was expected of me.
But listen. In the most absolute sense possible,
Love pulses and pulses and pulses.

… warns Canadians what they’re in for:

Big Pharma is also lobbying hard for the abolition of current Canadian regulations prohibiting direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Experience from the United States and New Zealand — so far the only two countries to permit DTC advertising — demonstrates these ads are a highly successful tool for the industry to persuade people to “ask your doctor” for the latest and most expensive products. Tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on campaigns for drugs. Industry calls this “public education” but it’s an education which invariably exaggerates benefits and downplays harms. If/when DTC drug advertising is approved in Canada, the costs to our health-care system will escalate dramatically. At the same time, deaths from prescription pharmaceuticals will become even more common, as will a range of serious side effects.

After dinner this evening with friends at Indian Ocean, we walked down Connecticut Avenue to Van Ness, and then up Chancery Center, to the Egyptian embassy. It was a clear, not too cold night, with a bright moon.

I hadn’t yet seen this street, full of new, massive embassies — with the Chinese particularly immense. It’s an all-over-the-place, neither-here-nor-there building, with the vague geometries of a synagogue.

As we walked up the hill to the embassy, a woman wearing the Egyptian flag as a dress passed us; she was surrounded by excited friends, some of whom carried a banner that read WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.

You remember Walk Like an Egyptian.

(This, I know you remember.)

Men with Egyptian flag face paint thanked us for being there and said that tomorrow at one o’clock there will be another gathering.

This one was winding down. There were happy groups of young people, a guy in a Cat in the Hat hat, a child flying the flag, a woman calling up the hill toward the embassy: “Hassan! Yasmeen!”

The floodlit United Arab Emirates embassy, with its big gold dome, was magical. The Egyptian embassy next to it looked like a small version of the woeful Kennedy Center. (Here’s a blog whose first photo shows the UAE embassy; plenty of photos of a recent protest at the Egyptian embassy follow, complete with people holding WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN signs. I guess it’s a thing now.)

We wandered around; a bunch of people dressed in the national colors asked our friend Joe to take their picture. Much laughter.

Happiness everywhere.

I never take for granted living in this city, where you can walk three blocks from your restaurant and, under a white moon, join up for a moment with something unearthly.

“[T]o progress to a point where the damage to the university is greater than the assets the person brings, [Stephen] Nelson said an investigation must reach ‘some threshold where enough people are sufficiently concerned.’ But that threshold is difficult to discern.

… Nelson said when a person has “a blackened or otherwise impaired public persona,” it may come time for the person to withdraw from the board in order to maintain a university’s reputation.

Brown University’s newspaper worries that its scandal-rich leadership is beginning to be a bit of a bother.

… Blum, and now Lee Bollinger: Hypocrites of the Century.

… from an insider.

[T]he leaders of [for-profit] companies, schools, and departments do not typically see their main function as furthering the education of students and their success; some do things that put finances over learning, and that’s when trouble, the media, and politicians strike.

… Those who work at not-for-profit colleges generally cannot get monetary bonuses for doing their jobs and are certainly not stockholders with a personal stake in the schools’ quarterly earnings. They get a promotion or a raise for doing a good job but not a separate check, and their admissions officers do not get cash bonuses.

Mubarak finally resigns.

The mood is upon our MBA schools once more. Happened after Enron and it’s happening again. The B-School Boys are running around like insider traders with their expert networks cut off, squawking about how many of their graduates are going to the slammer for financial sleaze. What to do? What to do?

So once again here’s this horseshit about changing the curriculum to make the guys compassionate, caring and the rest of the c‘s: We’re going to create “leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials.”

Here’s how we’ll do it: We’ll take really smart 25-year-olds who should have learned basic morality when the rest of us did – when we were five – and we’re going to put them in groups and make them work together and this will make them caring compassionate competent and characterlicious. Plus we’re going to make them take courses in which we lecture them on right and wrong and how right, even if it earns you less money, is better than wrong.

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Okay. So listen to UD on this one. It’s very late in the day, they’re entering a global capital market of a certain sort, etc., etc. There’s only one way you can get the attention of these guys. It’s cheap and it doesn’t involve messing with the curriculum. Actually it costs nothing.

Inaugurate a Guest Lecture series in which famous financial felons are whisked from prison for the day to talk to the guys. The felons get a little time off their sentences for each gig. If they turn out to be strong motivational speakers, they get lots of gigs and get lots of time taken off.

Since there will be a strong market in this activity, and since our jails are full of financial felons, MBA students have an embarrassment of riches speaker-wise. Each semester they must choose, from twenty guest felons, three talks to attend. Make it two. Make it four. But it’s a requirement. You have to go to some of these shows.

The felons do what Gore Vidal calls “a patter of penitence,” put up scary PowerPoints of them still in their gym shorts being led away in handcuffs, talk about how many people’s lives they’ve ruined, etc., etc.

If at some point in their presentation they are unable to cry – not loudly, but in a quiet manly way that the guys will relate to – the school should not ask them back. The idea is to scare the fuck out of the guys, and to appeal to what vestigial human emotions they may have left.

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As is always the case in stories like this, Harvard University is the focus. So let me address myself to that institution in particular.

If President Faust wants her MBA students to care about corporate responsibility, here’s what she does:

1. Hand a significant chunk of Harvard’s close to thirty billion dollar endowment over to global charities. If you spend it down, your own institution will look less douchey.

2. Acknowledge that your predecessor was a scandalously acquisitive capitalist who, as president, modeled that behavior for other people at the university. (“…[President] Lawrence Summers …made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks ‘too big to fail.'”) Pledge to avoid that sort of behavior at the top of the institution in the future.