Desert me…
We’re just like that. We deceive each other. This Wheeler whippersnapper, this latest Great Deceiver … So in love with him was Harvard…
Harvard’s just like everybody else. It has its idealizations, and if you can simulate them…
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I’m going to remind you, in this post, of some of Harvard’s Great Deceivers — students, professors, overseers. Just some of the people University Diaries has covered over the few years of this blog’s life.
Nothing special about Harvard, mind you. All universities, all over the world, are taunted, hurt, and deceived. I’m using Harvard as an example.
A particularly strong example, actually, because Harvard has immensities of money and power, and therefore as an institution it should be better equipped than others to protect itself against deception.
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But look at the Wheeler thing. He was about to graduate. He almost made it all the way through. He got this close to totally lying his way to a Harvard University degree.
Blair Hornstine was another matter. She was admitted to Harvard, and then, before she arrived, Harvard revoked the offer. She had cheated her way to valedictorian of her high school, plagiarized articles she claimed to have written in her local newspaper…
Hornstine was solidly on the Wheeler track to success, in other words, but a lawsuit she filed against a competing candidate for valedictorian was so disgusting that it hit all the papers, and Harvard began looking more closely at her.
Harvard kept Kaavya Viswanathan, even though by the time she was a sophomore she was a world-famous plagiarist.
Faculty deceivers? Charles Ogletree, Laurence Tribe. Alan Dershowitz (he has denied it). Most of the faculty plagiarists come from the law school. Lee Simon came from the medical school.
Overseers? Doris Kearns Goodwin.
So many. And others, you have to figure, who won’t get caught.
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Words of wisdom, UD?
Only a few.
First, since we’re always hurting and deceiving each other, and since, given the potential rewards, you can expect idealization simulators to be particularly active at places like Harvard (as Jayson Blair was active at the New York Times), those places in particular have to be vigilant. Where were the people entrusted with Harvard’s integrity while Wheeler was doing his thing?
Second, since Harvard doesn’t punish faculty and overseer deceivers (in a couple of cases it announced it was going to do something or other to them, but it didn’t tell us what, so that doesn’t count), it shouldn’t be surprised to find deceivers among its students. The Crimson rightly points out that if you’re known to be an oligarchy that protects its own, you can expect to attract the malsain, or at the very least to predispose your students toward cynicism.
For the public face of Harvard and for internal relations as well, it is crucial that the university maintain more consistent disciplinary rules for instances of academic dishonesty. Until then, the glaring double standard set by Harvard stands as an inadequate precedent for future disappointments.
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He isn’t true, he beats me too, what can I do?
You can examine your idealizations. You can stop using double standards.
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UPDATE: Another list. And what about that guy… that Iranian-American…? Hold on.
Name’s Nemazee. (Scroll down.)
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UPDATE AGAIN: The Harvard Crimson interviews a guy who knows a lot about admissions procedures. How did Wheeler slip through?
Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said that Harvard could not be wholly blamed for Wheeler’s ability to slip through the admission process.
“There is not any institution in this country that can afford to or does verify everything people submit. It’s just not a practical possibility,” Nassirian said. “You can’t really fault Harvard for not calling every high school and obtaining a duplicate copy of every transcript and every recommendation people submit.”
True. But here’s something you can blame Harvard for. In order to get their cherished, lowest-in-the-world admit number each year (6.9% is the 2010 figure), Harvard sends out tens of thousands of You-oughta-apply-to-Harvard letters every year. Harvard knows perfectly well that almost none of the people it sends these letters to will get in; it also knows how astonished and flattered these same people will be to get such a letter… How likely they will be, in their youthful naivete, their cluelessness as to how Ivy League schools select students, to indeed apply…
These pawns, these soon to be heartbroken pawns, are crucial to Harvard’s ever-escalating number of applicants. Rejecting this enormous crowd makes for a hell of an admit number.
If these useful rejects were smart, they’d agree to apply only if Harvard guaranteed them, say, a one hundred dollar payment for doing so. They are a crucial part of Harvard’s maintenance of its market position, and should be rewarded as such.
Anyway… My point, in connection with the Wheeler fiasco, involves the impossibility of Harvard maintaining much control over the application process, given how many people they’ve told to apply.
UD‘s Aunt Delores, who died recently, lived in a strange house. It was enormous. It stood on a hill overlooking a big highway in Pikesville, Maryland, near Baltimore. She had sheep. She had a shepherd.
It’s been years since UD was there, but she remembers the complicated, rambling interior and exterior of the place pretty well…
Or does she? UD will have a chance to do a little memory experiment this weekend, when she and various other ‘thesdan family members will drive to the house and have a look around.
She can certainly expect lots of changes. It’s this year’s Baltimore Symphony Associates’ Directors’ Show House. It’s been “re-imagined by 20 interior designers and 4 landscape designers.” Ten thousand people are expected to visit.
UD will chronicle her visit here, at University Diaries.
This blog has chronicled the reduction of higher education to indoctrination in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. The latest development: State seizure of private universities.
Chavez sent a message via his Twitter account to students of privately funded Santa Ines University, letting them know their school was being taken over by the government and tuition will be free.
“Students of Santa Ines University, I just approved a nationalization plan for the good of everyone. Now: FREE!” beamed Chavez last week on the microblogging website, which he uses frequently after having set up an account last month.
University officials weren’t available to comment on the charges, but students said the government’s reasons for taking it over were just an excuse to tighten its grip on the country’s education system.
“This is the worst of many bad moves by Chavez,” Carlos Chavez, a leader of the university’s 3,000-strong student body and who is not related to his president, told Dow Jones Newswires. “He’s going to impose his revolutionary, Marxist, socialist agenda on us students, and he’ll kick out good professors who allow us to study capitalism.”
The nationalization of the school was made official Monday, when the government’s newspaper of record, the Official Gazette, announced the “forced acquisition” of Santa Ines, and said it has been renamed Jose Felix Ribas University, in honor of a Venezuelan independence hero.
[Joe] Biden received a first-edition copy of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” signed by the author, James Joyce, and valued at $3,500. The story is a chapter from the Irish writer’s famously complex novel, “Finnegan’s Wake.”
The giver was Margaret Spanel of Hightstown, N.J., a donor to Democratic candidates. The information was included in Biden’s annual financial disclosure report, released Monday.
Spanel, 97, sent the book to Biden after hearing him say Joyce was his favorite poet, the vice president’s office said…
The philosopher Simon Critchley, in Truthout:
I’m convinced that the conditions which we find ourselves in give us modest grounds for belief in emancipation and hope. One of the figures I continually come back to, is the figure of passive nihilism and I think we live in a time of pervasive passive nihilism. In the face of a chaotic and bloody world, one withdraws into oneself to cultivate practices of self-perfection. This can be linked to all sorts of new age beliefs, as well as to those that cultivate a sort of literary or aesthetic pleasure. I don’t share this feeling. I feel that human beings, in concert, in the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary outcomes.
I hate cynical irony, the form of knowing irony that’s just a form of protection from any sort of engagement with the world….
Properly understood, cynicism isn’t cynical – it’s opposed to moral hypocrisy, pride, pretension, luxury and people who think that they know what they’re talking about. To that extent, I’m amenable to certain forms of cynicism.
Critchley is moderating a new blog at the New York Times about philosophy.
From an article in Newsweek on efforts to understand how to improve education in primary and secondary schools:
…[T]he scientific basis for [the choice of] specific curricular materials, and even for general approaches such as how science should be taught, is so flimsy as to be a national scandal… “There is a dearth of carefully crafted, quantitative studies on what works,” says William Cobern of Western Michigan University. “It’s a crazy situation.”
… [T]he scientific vacuity of education research [into what should be taught in science classes] is …exasperating.
… Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that when one compares the importance of education with “the frivolous inertia with which it is treated,” it is “difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage.” That was 80 years ago.
She’s going to blame the fools on his church’s hiring committee.
Monseigneur Pastor His Holiness Rafer Byrdsong did everything humanly possible to reveal his comprehensive fraudulence to the Third Baptist Church of Suffield, Connecticut. He provided reams of obviously bogus educational and other background documentation. A local news channel reports:
… He claimed he was a Navy chaplain. When the I-Team received his service records, it was discovered he was in the Navy, but as a cook.
The Chaplain Corps said they never heard of him.
No records exist for many of Byrdsong’s former parishes, and officials in Florida and California said there were no records that the colleges and universities he claimed to attend ever existed either.
When the I-Team looked in to the school that supposedly gave Byrdsong a doctorate, it was discovered there was a school with a similar name that would give anyone a PH.D. to anyone who pays for it, with no classes required.
Upon closer inspections, all of the documents given by Byrdsong to the church when he applied to be pastor were full of misspellings.
The certificate for the doctorate even had the word diploma misspelled.
… While digging into Byrdsong’s past, his ex-wife was found. She said she divorced him and brought bigamy charges against him when she found out he was married to five other women. She said hearing what Channel 3 found made her sad, but it wasn’t a surprise.
Pamela Mann said, “Can he preach? Yes. Can he teach? Yes. Does he have the persona that would bring people to him, yes, as any good con artist would.”…
I don’t care how small your church is. If you can’t even be bothered to check one of the claims a candidate for pastor makes, it’s your fault when you end up with Elmer Gantry.
“I hold degrees in Accounting and Law,” says candidate Ron Holly on his website. He’s running for Treasurer of Monterey County, California. Yet his law degree, writes the Monterey County Herald, “comes from a non-accredited diploma mill of a law school.”
Ron Holly is not a lawyer…
I’ve watched politicians and bureaucrats in Monterey County for almost 30 years now. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been more insulted than when I heard the evasions and excuses emanating from Ron Holly when he and two other candidates for Monterey County treasurer-tax collector showed up at The Herald on Thursday to seek our editorial board’s endorsement for his candidacy.
The Board of Supervisors doesn’t care. He’s got their endorsement.
Amid all the graduation happiness, a sad event at UD‘s campus, George Washington University. A student fell from a fifth-floor dormitory window and is in critical condition with internal injuries. This story includes a video – an interview with one of the students who found him and called 911.
Police think it was an accident.
UD has covered several stories like these over the years. There are two likely explanations. One, the student was very drunk and stumbling about. Two, suicide attempt.
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Update: The student who fell from the window has died.
Police are still investigating the cause.
Yet the mother of a Reed College student who died of a drug overdose (background on Reed’s drug problem here) makes a telling complaint:
In [Barbara] Tepper’s … letter [to the Reed campus], she … urged Reed College to provide more counseling to students struggling with stress, to expel and not just suspend students who use or distribute illegal drugs and faulted college counselors for prescribing sleeping pills to her son who had trouble sleeping.
“I was very upset because that’s sending a very clear message if you don’t feel good, chemicals will solve your problem,” Tepper said in an interview Thursday. She said that when she learned her son was given sleeping pills by a campus psychiatrist, she was furious.
“I told Sam, ‘You’re 20 years old. I don’t want you taking sleeping pills. Go out and run around the block. Make yourself physically tired, and you’ll fall asleep.”
The larger point here, about America as a profoundly pill-dependent culture, and about the way easy recourse to pills can predispose people toward overuse and abuse as well as weaken their ability to solve their problems non-chemically, is a terribly important one.
The IRS mailed 400 questionnaires to nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers and is reviewing an additional 13 that failed to respond, the agency said.
This is all about Senator Charles Grassley’s complaint (he’s the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee) that many extremely wealthy universities, holding billions of dollars, hoard their endowments. Since non-profits get all that money in large part because they get amazing tax breaks, they’re obliged to use it… To spend it, reasonable amounts of it, so that, for instance, students aren’t priced out of an education, or made to take on outrageous debt.
The IRS survey found that 344 institutions had an average spending target of 4.7 percent to 5 percent of their endowments each year on operations.
… Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he’s concerned that 5 percent has become a “ceiling” for colleges and that wealthier institutions should be spending more. The finance committee held hearings in 2007 on rising tuition costs and growing endowments at colleges including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, prompting the institutions to provide more financial aid.
… Forcing universities to spend more of their endowments would discourage diversified investing and push them toward more conservative portfolios, said James K. Hasson Jr., a lawyer at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Atlanta, who represents tax- exempt institutions.
“A mandate would remove flexibility and creativity from the tools available to colleges,” Hasson said. “There doesn’t seem to be a crying need for a legal mandate.”…
Right. With a mandate, Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, wouldn’t have been able to put together those clever credit default swaps.
As I write, a wood thrush is in its second hour of hurling itself against one of our tall windows in a match of wits with its reflection.
This writer witnessed the same thing:
[The thrush’s] incessant battles with its own reflection would seemingly wear out the bird as it energetically attacks the windows, then sits back as if attempting to figure another way to get to the rival that’s invaded its territory. It may then disappear for a few minutes or as long as an hour before returning to continue the one-sided battle – not realizing that its foe is really its own reflection.
Apparently this can go on for days.
