… Hauser immediately after the sanctioning of Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, it’s time to pause and think about the striking number of very high-powered faculty there who over the last few years have been under a cloud, or disgraced or, like Hauser, forced out. What’s it mean?

Keep in mind, first, that simply by virtue of happening at Harvard, faculty news gets a lot of attention. For all we know, multiple high-ranking faculty at Clemson have been punished or forced out for research misconduct, conflict of interest and failure to report massive income, conspiracy to defraud, failure to register as a lobbyist, plagiarism, etc. But we don’t pay attention to Clemson; we pay attention to Harvard.

Still, whatever the numbers, it’s pretty amazing that during the course of this blog I’ve followed endless stories of the most high-powered professors in the world — high-powered Harvard professors — doing bad things.

Most of these stories involve what I’d call crimes of grandiosity. Not opportunity; grandiosity. You work your way to the top legitimately; then, at the top, the same cleverness and ego and competitiveness and sense of invulnerability and restless insistence on more that got you to the top tips you in the direction of recklessness.

To be sure, some of these cases are boringly about personal greed (Biederman and Shleifer in particular); but all of them involve as well a significant element of empire-building, power-mongering, and arrogance. Many involve people who, bizarrely, don’t need to break rules in order to maintain their position of prominence in the culture. They break them anyway. So say also that there’s some operation of pleasure at work here; that these particular personalities have been drawn to the rarified, high-energy setting of Harvard because there’s visceral gratification to be had by scoring repeatedly and scoring big.

Read Mark Scroggins’ amusing post about the president of the University of Florida and his Clemson-like approach to the US News and World Report rankings.   The proprietor of the fine blog Culture Industry is a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University.

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Update: BERNIE MACHEN THINKS YOUR SCHOOL SUCKS

“Witnesses say 57-year-old Zinkhan first targeted Clemson University professor Tom Tanner, whom Zinkhan believed to be having an affair with his wife, Marie Bruce. He took aim at her next. Then he reportedly shot 63-year-old Ben Teague, the small theatre group’s father figure, who some say died trying to save the others. “

… FITS’ to print.

Again UD‘s grateful to FITS News for news of the unanimous passage of the Clemson University faculty resolution expressing “strong disapproval” of administrative self-serving in the matter of salaries.

UD will continue following, on FITS News, the story of Clemson University’s slow release from the clutches of its leaders.

… when she lived on Capitol Hill, died too soon.

But before he died, Judge Graae had a chance to do something brave and important.  He had the guts to put the DC housing authority in receivership, and many, many people benefited from this.

The drama at Clemson University, starring a retired French professor, is kind of like that.   John Bednar has obviously decided, at an advanced age, to do something brave and important.   He has very publicly accused the Clemson administration of serious corruption, and he continues to do so.

For this, he has been pilloried by Clemson’s leadership, and by many in the Clemson community.

We should all be so lucky.

… a (really well-written) scandal-sheet. Or it might be exactly the sort of clearinghouse for developing stories, and public commentary on them, that strong journalistic blogs are meant to be.

Its target, Clemson University, is already experiencing terrible publicity because of its Animal Farm-based management structure. FITS suggests that there’s more wrong with Clemson than that.

We’ll see.