… to the sexual harassment charges against him. (Background here.)
The general idea is that the student was the sexual aggressor throughout.
Some of it’s a bit shaky.
Ludlow further denied that he knew the student was underage, believing she was 22 at the time.
“Because of this, he believed her to be older than a traditional freshman would be,” the document states.
Admittedly this is a newspaper quoting from a document, but huh? Because he believed she was 22, he believed she was 22? On what was he basing that belief?
Ludlow says that when NU’s investigation began
he even offered to obtain and provide security video from his building’s elevator and receipts from the restaurant and bar showing how many drinks had been ordered.
I’m not sure what any toing and froing on camera would tell us, unless the camera captured the student hurling herself on Ludlow and Ludlow sternly escorting her to a cab. Similarly, the number of drinks wouldn’t tell us much, since Ludlow and the student are likely to have had drinks earlier in the evening as well.
… she’s able to watch certain stories grow, take a particular shape…
Most stories go nowhere, but some stories – like the ongoing one about the University of Chicago undergraduate found dead in his dorm room – rather quickly go national, and then international, and it’s worth considering why.
After all, hideous as it is, several American university students die each week. They get too drunk to find their way home and meet misadventure; they get drunk and get in fights and get beaten to death; they get hazed to death; they kill themselves; they overdose or they drink themselves to death. Some years, some schools (in the last few years, Cal Tech, Cornell, Chico State, NYU; most recently, the University of Pennsylvania) suffer as many as three or four student deaths in one semester or one year, and the press takes notice, and people at these schools agonize over what in their campus culture might be contributing to this. Sometimes, some schools, like UD‘s own U of C, experience an individual death whose details capture public attention.
It should also be said that high-profile schools, like the University of Chicago, are more likely to receive a lot of attention merely because they are high-profile.
So this particular death, this death at Chicago, featured two of these press-attracting elements: It happened at a high-profile school, and there’s a lurid quality to one of its details.
The student’s absence was not noticed for a number of days. His body, as it lay face-down on the floor of his dorm room (he lived in a single), was, by the time it was discovered, decomposing.
This is undoubtedly a chilling detail. It’s certainly chilling to ol’ UD, since she has no trouble envisioning with precision the scene at the dorm. She lived directly across from it – International House, it’s called – during her last two years in Hyde Park, and often visited.
Newspapers like USA Today (DEAD STUDENT LAY UNNOTICED IN DORM FOR DAYS) will exploit this lurid detail; they will use it, perhaps, to say or suggest something about the anonymity and indifference of big cities, or of big city schools. But UD‘s of a different mind. It doesn’t seem that strange to her that any grown-up (outside of the sort of people who have bodyguards) might die and fail to be discovered for a few days. We grant each other a lot of space, a lot of independence, in this country, and college in particular is a time during which we leave people alone to think, read, explore.
Initial results in this death suggest no foul play; toxicology reports are pending. Suicide or an overdose is most likely.
Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.
She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.
The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…
… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.
His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.
Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.
But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:
“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”
This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.
I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.
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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.
[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.
de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.
The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.
[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.
Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.
During the Dominique Strauss-Kahn business, a writer for the New Yorker noted the anxiety with which “many in Paris” are witnessing “the ‘Italianization’ of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…” Their country after all had not long ago produced (just like Italy) an accused rapist as a leading candidate for political office. Strauss-Kahn came close to being president; Silvio Berlusconi, convicted of tax fraud and sex with an under-age prostitute, was Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister.
UD has always been intrigued by the ways in which states fall into depravity, and the way they care about that (the French care, according to the New Yorker writer) and don’t care about that (the Italians don’t care). Italy is so depraved, and so indifferent to its depravity, that Italianization has become a globally portable noun, toted around to designate a national culture’s relaxed descent into moral turpitude.
Richard Rorty, in his philosophical essays about postmodernism, expressed anxiety about the Italianization of the United States. He routinely described us as “rich, fat, tired North Americans,” cynical about all of our institutions, and sinking back, in the absence of belief in the possibility of social improvement, into our comforting consumer goods (Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, is the best fictional evocation of this cultural mood).
But that was only our high culture, Rorty was quick to caution; our elites – financial, intellectual – are Italianizing, as in figures like Lawrence Summers, who despite his remarkable moral grubbiness, seems set to become our next federal reserve chair. (Hm. Not so fast, UD.)
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One way to understand the Oklahoma State University story is to suggest that Italianization has now invaded our great plains states, the country’s symbolic center of rectitude.
Look at Iowa’s long-serving senatorial scold, Charles Grassley, and tell me whether, when you look at him, you can think of anything but rigidly upright stands of wheat. Then look at this dude. The expression on President Obama’s face says it all.
So traditionally America – especially America’s heartland – was the exception, the clean place, the corny, cock-eyed optimist of nations, with the corniest locale the plains of Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. “Blondie and his frau out of the plain states came!” says cruel sophisticated George, mocking the newly arrived wholesome faculty couple in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Now that the plains states are epicenters of football scandal (yes, given structural corruption, there are plenty of other football scandal locations), you see the beginnings of Paris-style anxiety about Italianization even on the plains.
From Penn State to the Miami scandal to Johnny Manziel’s autograph saga to alleged violations at top college football programs across the country, the NCAA has never faced more “culture” issues than it does today.
“Culture” here designates not merely the corruption itself (everyone knows college football is rancid), but indifference to it, everyone’s fine Italian hand waving away any embarrassment or shock over the fact that Nick Saban, recipient of $5.3 million a year from one of the poorest states in the union, routinely tells journalists to shut up when they ask about his dirty program. (“Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, stamped out of one news conference last week like a petulant child, all because reporters dared to do their jobs. He would talk about the football game, not the system of big-time college football, the system that made him rich and famous. Never that.”) Just like Joe Paterno, this guy’s got a fucking statue! These guys are our heroes!
UD’s pretty confident that Saban’s statue will meet the same fate as Paterno’s… But maybe not. Maybe by the time the massive Alabama scandal hits, the process of Italianization will have advanced to the point where no one gives a shit.
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Anyway, my point is that the plains were our last bastion. Now it’s pomo meh. Meh. Rape at Montana, rape at Colorado, pimping at Oklahoma, drugs at Iowa, meh. The plain-spoken plains have spoken. They’re on board. Benvenuto!
… Pinafore. In the fraud case of Professor Charles L. Bennett, it was, according to the FBI, his “brother and cousin” who improperly benefited (along with Bennett himself, of course) from his personal use of government funds. Northwestern University, on whose faculty he sat while distributing his NIH grant to himself and his brother and his cousin, should have seen that happening, and so has had to choke up “$2.93 million to settle claims of cancer research grant fraud.” The whistle-blower – a purchasing coordinator at NU’s med school – gets almost $500,000 of the proceeds.
Lucky South Carolina College of Pharmacy has pried Bennett free of Northwestern and successfully recruited him to its faculty. What a coup! The center he’ll be running is “is particularly focused on economic return on investment.” So is Bennett.
… a sample of his great prose, and some words about why it’s great.
This is from Herzog, the book UD considers by far his best.
Moses Herzog, an urban American intellectual in his forties, is having a slow-motion nervous breakdown as his personal life falls apart. Here he’s in Chicago on a hot day, getting into his car to take his young daughter (who lives with his about-to-be-ex-wife and the man with whom she was unfaithful to Herzog) to visit an aquarium.
He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” The air from the west was drier than the east air. Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.
Let’s analyze this paragraph. My comments are in parenthesis, in blue.
He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. [Ends on his strongest word – pockets – and a word tonally at odds with the other words in the sentence. It kind of pops out sharply – pockets – at the end of a sentence that has been mainly about mushy words. This little wake-up, this little satori, at the end of the sentence, rouses us for the next sentence, subliminally leads us to expect an intensification or deepening or emotionalizing of the idea of personal disorder. The keys, we must be led to understand – but led at the same time as Herzog himself is led to understand, since it’s the motion of his consciousness moving unsteadily toward difficult truths that we’re following in real time – symbolize Herzog’s inner deterioration, his having lost the key to existence. We must grasp this subtly, incompletely, obliquely, as a particularly defensive and clotted human consciousness grasps it. Note, then, how his prose will accomplish this feat.] There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. [Attempting to organize himself mentally, Herzog first simply lists the keys and their provenances; this is a familiar mental game we all play, pulling our thoughts together by identifying things, listing things. Formally, it’s also a clever move, since this list serves as a kind of summary of the plot so far, reminding the readers about the scenes and characters we’ve encountered.] “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” [Bellow will interrupt his stream of consciousness with the intrusive facts of immediate social reality. His character has not fallen so far that he’s psychotic, unable to register and assimilate external event. Yet the narrative back and forth between long involved paragraphs of thought, memory, reasoning, and sudden brief flashes from the outside world conveys the difficulty Herzog’s having negotiating his oppressed and trying-to-puzzle-it-out consciousness and the simple fact of other people and a daily social life.] The air from the west was drier than the east air. [Note that this very simple, essentially monosyllabic sentence will be followed by a series of more and more complex sentences as Herzog gradually transitions from the outer world – he has just said something to his daughter – to his much more engrossing inner world.] Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. [All of Bellow’s books are about the effort to intensify consciousness, to apprehend the truth of the natural, the human, and the divine. He has endowed Herzog with the same hypersensitive awareness he gives most of his protagonists, an awareness at once the glory of humanity – our insight and lucidity are amazing, our distinguishing power – and – at least for people like Herzog – our doom. For Herzog is debilitatingly self-conscious, a comic figure asking for more illumination than his human mind can yield. His wife in fact has left him for an idiot, but a big happy lusty idiot.] In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. [Note by the way the indirect discourse technique Bellow has adopted here. We’re clearly in the mind of Herzog, but things are being rendered in third-person. But notice also, later in this passage, that we will slip out of third into first-person. Bellow learned this technique – and so much else – from James Joyce’s Ulysses. He even got his hero’s name – Moses Herzog – from a minor character in Ulysses. Moving always from third to first back to third, etc., is a way of registering not only our restless consciousness, but the way we shift from regarding ourselves with a certain neutral objectivity to often simply being enmeshed in a direct and not particularly reflective way in the ongoing business of being us. And this idea of instilling oneself into one’s surroundings — isn’t that the way we perceive and encounter and lend meaning to the world? We interpret it as a projection of our consciousness; we shade each external object with our particular internal emotional condition, our inner coloration. Thus, for instance, Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning” talks about passions of rain.] As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. [This bizarre sentence and idea is one mark of the great writer. It has an almost repellent anatomical literalness, a grotesque and off-putting oddness. And yet this sentence has an important function in the evolving consciousness of this passage, moving us yet closer to the disordered, suffering, vulnerable existential state of Herzog. He is becoming naked in this passage, exposed, just as his mental illness, if you will, involves the destruction of his privacy, defenses, self-control, self-respect. He has been laid bare by misfortune. It’s like Prufrock:
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall…
When very bad things happen to you, suddenly everyone can see you. It’s one of the many indignities of misfortune: There it is in all its glory for the world to see: Your weakness, your failure.]
In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, [Note that words like extraordinary and therefore mark what’s left of Herzog’s intellectual orientation. His impressive reasoning mind is being overtaken by emotional chaos, but this language marks his effort to keep analytical dispassion alive. Thus we remain in the third-person for this; only when he’s at his most naked will Herzog move into first-person.] familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. [Creating your version of the world is knowing it the only way we can know it; it is marking it with our consciousness in the way a dog marks his territory, makes it his.] Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. [Note that assonance: walls/buckled/slabs/slums/exhaled/smells. Notice buckled and slums. Notice slabs/slums/smells. All of it gives poetry, of all things, to this sort of description, and thereby – since it is Herzog’s poetry – gives his consciousness individuality, romance.] Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. [You see how we’ve gone from that earlier short monosyllabic sentence to this massive list, this amazing and still-romantic rendering of Chicago? And see how he’s kept his degraded/glorious contradiction going? Glittering, golden, vast, lovers… We could take these words and make this place a Wordsworthian delight. But also sluggish – see how sluggish picks up and extends the slabs/slums/smells series? – and crust, decay, scrawny, murders… See too how subtly Herzog personalizes this passage, reminding the reader of his particular losses and the way they mark the city’s land – the graves of Herzogs. Notice above all at this point how much Bellow is juggling: The immediate present of his daughter, the drive to the aquarium; his rageful, troubled consciousness; his analytical, truth-seeking consciousness; his personal coloration/interpretation of the city and larger world; his reckoning with his past and with death…] And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. [By now, you’re picking up on Bellow’s constant poetic shaping of his language: all of those short i’s: with, this, infinite, activity, reality.] Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. [A recurrent theme in Herzog is the character’s privileged American immunity from real suffering — physical suffering, the suffering of poverty, the sort of suffering so comprehensive as to make it impossible to take that analytical step backward and see reality.] Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. [I think we are meant to smile at this as a species of delusion, arrogance. Bellow always described Herzog as a comic send-up of intellectual arrogance. Here we have a man, Moses Herzog, exceptionally intellectually gifted and yet living one of the stupidest lives imaginable. His big brain isn’t doing him any good. Arguably it’s making things worse.] Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. [Vigilance-fund signals the truth of what I just wrote. This is Herzog self-aware enough to satirize his endeavor.] This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. [Okay and note: No paragraph break as we switch to this family theme. This is stream of consciousness. Also, it’s not as if we haven’t been prepared for what will now be a memory of and meditation on death, and the weird relationship of the living to the dead. Already his family cemetery has been mentioned.] Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. [Herzog heads into his memory of the day of his father’s funeral. Like everyone, he moves, consciousness-wise, via associations. The particular spring weather this day has prompted thoughts of the same weather that day. And again the poetry: roses, magnolias. To his other conflicts in this passage we can add the conflict of death on a day of intense flowering life.] Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. [Cool, huh? Start with the end: Of course now we get one of our forays into first person: Most of MY life… Having really stripped himself as this passage concludes, Herzog has nowhere else to go but to the “pitiful” fact of his own particular fleshly, enslaved self. This passage has taken us from the heights of rational consideration of the world to the nighttime depths of one vulnerable infantilized weeping utterly overcome slob. The air was wickedly perfumed; his dreams were evil. The obscene grotesquerie of his father’s death inspiring in Herzog not noble philosophical despair but ecstatic sexual liberation so strong as to inspire a wet dream — what are we to do with this? These are incoherent ideas, incoherent feelings – one’s beloved father’s death as a seductive spectacle of freedom? – and then this absurd final sentence, written as if part of a grant application:
Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.
So – nothing new here. Like all of us, Herzog is torn between instinct and reason, his animal and higher nature. This passage puts us right into the seriousness, pathos and comedy of that grappling. It reminds us (the dreams, the nocturnal emission) just how enslaved our instincts are, and how elusive the keys (you remember the keys) to ourselves and to the world.]
Fadela Amara, “[French] founder of the activist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises, translated as ‘Neither Whores nor Submissive,’ and later … the Secretary of State for Urban Policies,” spoke a couple of days ago about France’s anti-burqa law at the University of Chicago’s International House (UD lived in an apartment directly across the street from I House when she studied there).
Amara knows France’s fundamentalist ghettos well; she has watched them become cults of “forced marriage, polygamy, [female] circumcision, and violence against women.” Outlawing the full burqa (the law had seventy percent support among the French) has had some effect on
[t]he strategy of radical Islamists … to send in veiled women to force unveiled women to wear the burqa. And this is a real battle that has been going on for 15 years in France. And women who do not wear the veil, who were refusing to wear the veil, have been harassed and attacked, either verbally or physically — verbally by insulting them and calling them sluts, because for them these are not women who are respectable…. So we decided to stop all of this. And to act in a way to protect the women who were resisting in these neighborhoods.
Israel – where any woman who boards certain buses or walks on certain streets can be assured of being called a slut and spat on – could learn from the way France is dealing with its fundamentalist bullies.
… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.
Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.
The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.
[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.
He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.
“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.
He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.
“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.
Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.
Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:
… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.
… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.
… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.
… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.
Paul Krugman says what UD‘s thought as she’s watched Newt Gingrich over many, many years.
Gingrich has the worst traits of the worst stereotypical professor: Vain, irritable, cynical, superior, verbally fat and polemically thin.
Yet stupid people read his fast-talking smooth-operator thing as smart; they think being a smug and dismissive know-it-all is what it means to be a smart person.
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On the first – and last – day that Mr UD attended one particular graduate course offered by the University of Chicago, the professor cast his eye ’round the seminar table and began the semester with the following statement: “You’re looking at the world’s most distinguished living political philosopher.” That’s a stupid person’s idea of a smart person – farcical self-regard plus a James Deen-hard conviction that you’re right about everything.
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UPDATE: This is what a smart person sounds like.
At a Natural Resources Committee hearing Friday on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) mistakenly addressed the professor as “Dr. Rice“ while calling his testimony ”garbage.”
Brinkley interrupted, saying: “It’s Dr. Brinkley, Rice is a university,“ and ”I know you went to Yuba [Community College in California] and couldn’t graduate — ”
Then it was Young’s turn to interrupt. “I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair,” he told the witness. “You just be quiet.”
Brinkley countered: “You don’t own me. I pay your salary. I work for the private sector and you work for the taxpayer.”
I recognize that Brinkley looks pretty irritable and self-regarding in this exchange. But I’d like to suggest that there are good reasons for his insolence, having had his ideas called garbage by a congressional bully. Young insults not just Brinkley, but the entire discussion, calling it “futile.” He calls Brinkley an elitist when it is Young (“I’ll call you anything I want to call you…”) who’s the elitist throughout the exchange. Brinkley’s what a smart guy sounds like when he’s speaking truth back to power (“You just be quiet.” – Infantilizing power at that.). Brinkley is one of Paul Fussell’s X‘s – people “impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit.” Gingrich may share the insolence, but the rest of his list is very different.
New to teaching, I was proudly gazing at a sign on my office door proclaiming “Assistant Professor Grossman,” when the department secretary knocked.
“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” she asked.
“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”
Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune
So true. And so seldom said. We’re supposed to weep for coaches who recruit upstanding young scholar athletes who turn out to be criminals. How could the coaches have known?
Their rap sheets?
“You can’t win big in college sports unless you’re corrupt and lawless,” Steve Rosenbloom goes on to explain.
The University of Kentucky has so much to be proud of: Its sports program; its stewardship of the state’s arts and letters… And now there’s something else: It’s hired its first invisible professor, a man students and colleagues will almost never see.
Boasting that he represents a world “now digital and global,” this education professor guy (Why should I bother going back to the article to check on his name?) will sit on his ass in Iowa and send emails to UK.
He does worry that he’ll “miss out on some of [UK’s] culture.”
Nah!
What a boon to the UK campus! I trust we’ll all profit from UK’s groundbreaking initiative and let everybody but our football players stay home.
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.
