… will steal from it.
After decades of honing their larceny on their own government’s education subsidies, they seem to find stealing European Union education money a piece of cake.
Roughly translated, the title here is WHERE’D YOU GET THE PORSCHE?
The London Evening Standard looks at the details behind the professors’ acquisition of around – in American dollars – three hundred million:
It is claimed that over 10 years, the academics — who would normally earn between £1,300 and £1,700 a month at most — drove up the costs of their work and funnelled the cash to bogus mailbox firms which they set up in Cyprus. They spent the money on a “fabulous lifestyle”, building villas, taking holidays and buying fast cars and fine wine…
… is that of Greece. The system there isn’t merely corrupt; it’s quite violent. It has long been an object of contempt on this blog. [The link is to a search on UD of the word “Greece.” It will take you to some relevant and some irrelevant posts. Scroll through.]
As the EU and IMF prepare to bail out the country, an article in the Wall Street Journal explains why it’s money down the drain. The country is profoundly corrupt, and more money will no doubt make it more corrupt.
An update on a recent enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:
The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.
The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.
There are two models for this.
One, typified by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is a comprehensive institution, almost entirely devoted to extortion of private and public funds. Other examples of the-university-as-criminal-conspiracy are Asia University (currently available for purchase at seven billion won) and Panteion University in Greece.
The other model involves top-down, restricted theft, as in the recent case of Hungary’s National Defense University. Here the extortion seems to have been performed by the rector, on his own initiative.
The rector of the Zrinyi Miklós National Defense University – Hungary’s higher education facility for military personnel – was placed on remand last Thursday on suspicion of abuse of office. János Szabó had to be wrestled to the ground by National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) officers while attempting to resist arrest the previous Tuesday.
Szabó had allegedly told the Hungarian arm of the German parcel carrier DHL that it was the subject of an investigation over personnel transporting drugs and arms. He is alleged to have offered to use his influence to have the probe stopped, in exchange for DHL signing a contract with a security firm nominated by Szabó.
Scrappy Hungarians! Can you imagine an American university president wrestled to the ground while resisting arrest? You know they’d go quietly.
… is the author of
Tea, D.A. Powell.
From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:
In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….
Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.
Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.
In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.
Night-Music
At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.
Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
*******************************
Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)
Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.
It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)
Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground
Thronged is wonderful.
*************************************
Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.
We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…
Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.
*****************************************
D.A. Powell
coal of this unquickened world
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
***************************
Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.
The Independent provides more detail about Greek universities:
… [A]cademics and concerned citizens are increasing calls for authorities to revise – if not scrap – the so-called asylum law which in recent years has allowed extremists to seek haven within university campuses, turning them into launching pads for their offensives against police.
“This has to stop,” said Ioannis Karakostas, a professor of law and deputy rector of Athens University. “These extremist elements are abusing the law to suit their own agendas and not the founding spirit of the law, which is to shelter and shield free thought.”
The rector, Christos Kittas, was attacked last Saturday when about 100 masked anarchists stormed the soaring green gates of the university – seizing control of the marble neo-classical building amid violent riots sparked during demonstrations commemorating last year’s police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15.
Because of the law, thousands of officers and riot police stood idle, watching youths destroy the building, tear down the Greek flag, set it ablaze and then hoist a black-and-red anarchist banner over the university’s rooftop. The televised scenes sent shock waves across the country, fanning debate on the controversial asylum law.
“I felt dead inside watching people who could be my grandchildren or students commit crimes and vandalise the shrine of free thought,” Mr Kittas said on Wednesday.
To the fury of the “anarchists”, the board of directors at Athens Law School have proposed a raft of bold measures to shield the institution from further attacks including student identification cards intended to ward off militant intruders…
What’s most striking to UD about the unbelievable Greek story – beyond the violence – is the apparent nothingness of the violent forces themselves. Various journalists give them various names — “anarchists” in those telling quotation marks, anti-government forces, radicals — but from what I can tell they’re nihilists who like to bludgeon people and burn buildings.
… Yiannis Panousis, a prominent criminologist at the University of Athens … was hospitalized in February after being set upon during a lecture by extremists with iron bars and sledgehammers.
It’s business as usual in the Greek university system, where a law keeping police off of university campuses has made them ground zero for assholes who throttle people trying to give lectures…
Anastassios Manthos, rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, who was knocked unconscious in a similar campus raid last year, said things had gotten worse. “The violence in universities, and in Greek society in general, is explosive and unprecedented,” he said.
Not business as usual. Worse.
…[T]here is a general climate of fear in universities…
One campus has decided to do something:
[T]he Athens Law School on Tuesday took a bold step toward restricting access to its campus, approving a program to issue identity cards for students and to place guards at its gates.
From Nature.com:
Economist Achilleas Mitsos, one of Europe’s leading research policy-makers, has been tasked with a root and branch reform of the research system in his homeland, Greece.
Director general of the European Union’s research commission from 2000 to 2006, Mitsos has now been appointed general secretary for research in Greece’s new socialist government. He spoke to Nature about his ambitious plans to overhaul the research system of a country where money for science is scarce and cronyism is rife…
[Mitsos:] There is too little competition, too little evaluation of performance, and there is a lot of dead wood. Even scientists who do very little work continue to get a share of what little money there is for research. And most scientists are civil servants, so they are guaranteed employment until retirement.
… A large part of the academic community has always resisted the idea of quality control and evaluation, and in the past politicians have never insisted on it. Last year, the former [centre-right New Democracy] government did actually introduce a law that tried to address some of the problems, but it was overcomplicated and unworkable. [That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in response to its introduction a zillion Greeks ran into the streets of Athens and started burning it down.]
… Greece is a small country, and we can’t expect to find evaluators and peer reviewers for all scientific areas within Greece who are both experts and free of conflict of interests. So we will have to involve foreign scientists. That means that all grant applications and research programmes will have to be written in English — I don’t see a problem with that. [Others certainly will.] …
Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:
… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.
… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.
The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.
In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …
After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.
“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …
Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.
Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.
And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;
for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.
But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.
… settles in for more years of state-sponsored locked-in syndrome with occasional violent twitches, the British system begins to show a little movement.
Britain’s elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today.
Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.
… “The trouble is all, universities are too dependent on the government. You don’t want to be subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”…
France, Italy, and Greece remain the hopeless paralytics of European higher education, leaving the path clear for Germany and England and everybody else.
From the excellent student newspaper at benighted Southern Illinois University:
… Reports from The Associated Press this week link trustee Frank William Bonan II to $30,000 his father and uncle donated to Blagojevich in November, a month after he was appointed to the board.
Those donations came during a one-day fundraising trip by Blagojevich to Mount Vernon, which netted him $42,000. Of that money, $30,000 came from Market Street Bancshares Inc. and its managers, J. Hunt Bonan and F.William Bonan I.
Records from the State Board of Elections show Blagojevich was the beneficiary of about $25,000 in donations from at least two other trustees between 2005 and 2008.
[The chairman of the board], who was appointed in 2004, contributed $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2005 and 2006. Tedrick also contributed another $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2002 and 2003.
Trustee John Simmons, a 2004 appointee who is an attorney from Alton, and his wife, Jayne, contributed three $5,000 donations between 2006 and 2008 for a total of $15,000….
The comments on the article suggest that, uh, everybody’s pretty disgusted with this disgusting board.
SIU had better watch it. Corruption levels like these … I mean… look at what’s going on in Greece. People can get really angry after enough of this.
An essay about Greece in Harvard International Review.
[T]here is a certain cult of student unrest in Greece which goes back to 1973, when the occupation of the Polytechnic school by students contributed to the overthrow of a military dictatorship which had ruled Greece since 1967. The cult of this occupation persisted well after the reestablishment of democracy in 1974. It is celebrated every year and taught at schools as one of the most glorious events of Greek history. Those who lived it have often kept a belief that the politicization and mobilization of the youth is essentially good for democracy, even when it takes violent forms.
… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.
The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.
“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.
Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.
In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.
The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.
The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.
There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.
But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.
Background here.