Terry L. Newman, Medium.
It is now accepted as fact in many academic fields that you cannot teach issues about specific groups if you are not a member of those groups. In my first article for Quillette, I wrote about a professor in my Master program who proclaimed to our seminar that white sociology professors were incapable of teaching courses on race. Of course this is not true. You do not have to be non-white to teach the subject of race respectfully and knowledgably. The same understanding has permeated qualitative research methods in the social sciences, the idea that only a member of an insider group can understand and research that group…
Campuses constantly hold talks about white supremacy and white privilege, as if lurking behind every corner. Speakers are brought in on pedagogical days to sensitize staff in already overwhelmingly progressive faculties in the humanities. Guilt has become something associated not with one’s actions, but one’s demographic. Is it any wonder why someone might choose to abandon the burden of their whiteness, and embrace, instead, the pristine, blameless identity of the marginalized?[W]e should recoil at the thought of our individual worlds becoming so small and so narrow that the only research we can participate in is research about ourselves. This is the insider doctrine…
[U]ntil we overcome the divisive insider doctrine which plagues us both inside and outside the academy, the idea that only members of groups can understand one another, [we will have more Jessica Krugs.]
The latest from GW’s provost. This blog will continue to follow the story.
[As a high school senior, Krug was] disciplined for having plagiarized a piece that ran under her name in the school’s literary magazine.
A fellow academic who knew [Jessica] Krug back at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recalls how she used to identify as half Algerian, saying that her father was a white man of German ancestry who had raped her mother.
*****************
In addition to the position and resources Krug stole from academics of color, she also stole from the many students who viewed her as a trusted authority to help them make sense of the world and their own identities within it. The Cut spoke to four of Krug’s former students about reckoning with her deception in the wake of her Medium essay, and how they are coming to terms with her betrayal:
“For her to have built her entire persona on a lie is just so deeply hurtful, but also it’s coming to the point where it’s just like, Oh yes, of course a white woman will go and try to trick all these Black and brown students. … [T]he way I looked up to her, the way I wanted to impress her, [combined] with the power dynamics [and the fact that] the relationship was built on a lie is more important than the subject matter of what she taught.”
*****************
“[She] lied with such poise and ease … She ridiculed any students that were still in the learning process that didn’t understand things… It’s a very weird thing now looking back and just realizing that the whole class was kind of a mirage.”
******************
“We thought that we were being taught African history by a Black woman. And now it’s just like, What else was a lie?“
*******************
“I thought I was reading a suicide note [when I read her confession]… [S]he was very adamant that she was from the Bronx — she had a very heavy accent throughout the whole class. She would come in with huge hoops and a nose ring and a crop top and tight, tight cheetah pants. She has a big tattoo on her arm of the socialist symbol [the hammer and sickle]… There was a good number of classes she didn’t show up to, that she canceled like 30 minutes before the class. It seems like she was a bit scattered or a bit out of place in what she was doing in her life. She wasn’t committed to showing up to this lecture.”
[T]old us her father was Tuareg from N. Africa. My ex, who’d lived and traveled extensively through Africa began asking questions that we never got satisfactory answers for.
[Now] the story of a Puerto Rican grandfather began to come out.
As she started claiming more and more that she was Black I didn’t quite buy it but I honestly didn’t know what to do with it.
[S]he dyed her hair dark. Before it was a dusty blonde.
So many times she accused me of not being Black enough in terms of politics. She was hardcore and woker-than-thou with it.
I’d always talk to my ex about how her Black identity felt weird to me. Like I couldn’t get a grasp on her story. But I’d never come across someone who lied so extensively about her background. Lesson learned.
The chair of GW’s history department does the right thing – contacts students who signed up for her courses, writes openly about the situation, and announces that he’ll keep her out of the classroom. Now the larger university needs to say/do something.
Krug will of course hold out for a fat severance check (I’m assuming she has tenure), and she’ll get one, because GW is being ridiculed, every day, all over the world. If GW dawdles, she’ll get a lawyer and threaten a lawsuit. She likes to make noise.
And no – despite all the histrionic self-cancellation language in her bullshit letter to the world, no way will this woman have the decency to leave GW. She’ll plant her ass there until they pay up. She’s got a long life of vileness ahead of her, and will need to subsidize it.
In an interview with the New York Times, [one of the people who outed Krug] said the allegations [against her] came up during a discussion about [the] late novelist H.G. Carrillo.
Carrillo’s sister revealed after he died in April that he was not a black Latino, who fled Cuba with his family as a child, like he had claimed his entire life.
His sister said he was an African-American born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.
[The] junior scholar came forward with claims that Krug had also been lying about her identity.
Your blogueuse was herself on the tenure committee reviewing Carrillo! We turned him down because we simply could not make sense of his creative/scholarly portfolio, and also because he seemed a seriously troubled, unreliable person. He listed works that never appeared in his file; students reported that he could be strikingly irresponsible in his dealings with them… I don’t remember that many details now, but I remember rather liking his fiction writing, and tending toward wanting to award tenure. Almost everyone gets tenure… But it was as if he didn’t really want tenure – he was evasive and not terribly cooperative with our committee…
Of course, now that we know he was a fraud, his ambivalence makes sense – the closer you get to tenure, the higher your profile becomes, and the greater your threat of exposure.
Krug is not George Washington University’s first professor to fabricate their identity.
Novelist H.G. “Hache” Carrillo taught creative writing there full time for eight years until 2015. Carrillo’s true name was Herman Glenn Carroll…
Oy.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency features Jessica Krug’s early years in Jewish Day School and in a Conservative synagogue.
… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.
Krugman points out that
our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
There are larger and larger areas of this country where
[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.
Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…
We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…
Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.
Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults, armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.
Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?
These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.
Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?
UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.
If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.
The blogosphere is having fun with Paul Krugman today (see my own take on things in the post just below this one). But lest we forget: Krugman has always been hypocritical about making his own big bucks. This is from Andrew Sullivan’s website, years ago:
KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980′s and 1990′s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.
“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…
I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.
… have columns facing one another and playing off one another nicely. The Social Contract, headlines Krugman; The Amateur Ideal, headlines Brooks. Both writers want to say that in some realms of life capitalism’s competitive market ethos should be suspended; that, underlying all of the purely financial contracting among us, a social contract impels us to act in self-sacrificing ways for the good of the polity.
David Brooks regards the university as one of the most social contracty places in America, and well he might. Universities are non-profits, enjoying immense tax and other advantages, because the state defines them as privileged locations of social good. Unlike the justly detested for-profit schools, universities aren’t in it to make a buck. They’re dedicated to educating people. Brooks even thinks they have a moral mission:
As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.
UD understands how religious schools might perceive themselves as having explicitly moral missions (Catholic Seton Hall, for example, despite having had to blast more imprisoned alumni names off of buildings than any other school in America, and having hired one of the foulest coaches known to humankind, presumably sees itself in this way.) but she does not believe the non-religious university has – or should have – a moral mission. See Clifford Orwin for a nice expression of her views.
Brooks says what he says about withering because he, like everyone else, sees the amoral hypercapitalist joke amateur university sports (basketball and football, that is) has become. He laments, in a pointless way, the withering of the character-rich amateur university sports tradition. Couldn’t we bring that back? Its “lingering vestiges”? Even in the face of billion dollar tv contracts?
Lingering vestiges. Aren’t they kind of like whispering hope? Durn pretty language. But really.
How is Brooks going to gather up and preserve the lingering vestiges? Reverse the ten-year, billion-dollar contracts? Has Brooks noticed what the most popular major in America is? It’s business. Brooks doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the American student:
College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passion, not coldly calculating professional interests.
No – it’s thrilling because it’s played by essentially professional players who are really good. And listen: Who spouts moral mission language at the university? It really isn’t faculty, or even administration. It’s precisely the clever sports programs. Go there – to your six-million-dollar coaches and money-under-the-table boosters – for all of the moral mission, character-building language you can stomach. UD‘s been there – at a host of university sports conferences – and she’s heard it all. If Brooks wants to play right into the hands of Nick Saban he can go on gassing about moral character. Nick’s right there with you. He’s been there waiting for you.
Until we can pivot our eyes back to what universities are – intellectual institutions – we’re going to stay all misty-eyed as Nick Saban and Jim Calhoun (Coach sets an example, you know! Here’s one of Calhoun’s hero recruits. Really made good. Lectures British civil servants! All because of the early example set by the richest public employee in the state of Connecticut!) lecture us on how universities are places that make us better men.
I’ll write about Krugman in a moment.
Jon Stewart weighs in on Katie Britt. But his rhetorical question shows that he just doesn’t get it. The sort of Christians Britt’s addressing smile with all their heart when they sing the words
Anyone who, like UD, sits at her piano and sings through hymnals in which every other song delights in personal salvation through submersion in gobs of blood, knows that exulting when you use phrases like steeped in the blood is the Evangelical order of the day. Britt’s audience represents a decidedly sanguinary sanctuary.
********************
Here’s a variant of the same clueless liberal problem. Paul Krugman thinks he’s mighty clever when he writes
The other day [Trump declared] “I will stop the killing, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.” Which towns and cities, exactly, have been sacked and plundered? Did Attila the Hun swing by for a visit while I wasn’t looking?
Same haha rhetorical question thing as Stewart’s. Same smug shock at over the top bloodiness.
Trump’s people are apocalyptic, guys. Its an ongoing battle between the blood of damnation and the blood of the redeemed. Attila the Hun didn’t swing by, but Lucifer did.
This language, from Britt and Trump and their preacher, isn’t lurid. It’s descriptive.
The question is not Why is a violent woman running around the big city being violent? That’s not newsworthy. The question needs to be put to Hunter College: Why is one of these on your faculty?
Part of the answer lies in ye olde erotic attraction to radically chic violence that Leonard Bernstein made famous in that same city in the ‘seventies. Shellyne Rodriguez’s art, she tells an interviewer, “highlight[s] the audaciousness of the Biker Boys who take the streets undeterred by NYPD’s futile crackdown.” Makes elements of brainy artsy NY go pitapat.
This sort of thing also exists on some sort of urban mischief continuum with the non-revolutionary, white collar crime (undeterred by the SEC’s futile crackdown) that has always found representation on the boards of trustees of the sorts of schools that think Shellyne Rodriguez is cool. Recall the many high-level lawless money men/university trustees we’ve featured over decades on this blog, starting with Yeshiva University’s dynamic duo, Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. At the very top of this mafia today are of course Trump/Giuliani (who hold far grander positions than mere trustee) and a whole world of superrich rapacious give-a-shit NY bad boys… UD‘s just saying that when a significant high-profile portion of the local culture is composed of high-risk-loving financial criminals (see Steven Cohen, Brown University etc. etc.) quite a few of them holding powerful positions on university boards of trustees, we shouldn’t be too surprised that this sort of world has room for other sorts of sociopaths. The school that hired Rodriguez features convicted insider trader and trustee Leon Cooperman.
These white/nonwhite criminal twains, trustee and professor, meet with a mutual thrill, a tacit sense of recognition, at a campus cocktail party, say, and if Rodriguez hadn’t attacked a man with a machete the other day, Cooperman would probably eventually have signed off on the tenure of Hunter’s own Jessica Krug. (‘Perhaps one of the most disgusting things [Krug] publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.‘) High-flying scofflaw cultures tend to have no trouble with nasty pieces of work like Rodriguez. Self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive meets self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive.
Yes, yes, post-machete, post-other forms of non white collar violence, Hunter has dropped Rodriguez like a hot potato.
Hunter happily goes on loving itself some bad boy Leon Cooperman, but then he’s not a poor artist. He’s a rich insider trader. He gets to keep his trusteeship.
So the question of how Hunter College found itself holding on to Rodriguez in the first place has two answers: Ever-popular radical violence, and the allied and fully mainstreamed “audaciousness” of NY white collar criminality.
A New Yorker article about a literary/academic fraud named Hache Carrillo, who was a colleague of UD‘s (she sat on the tenure committee that wisely turned him down, unlike the unwise GW history department that tenured his fellow fraud Jessica Krug, and as a result spent years very publicly paddling up shit’s creek), has appeared.
You’re probably not interested in the patented New Yorker long-form details of this pretty trivial cultural figure, but the article does feature a neat and sweet summary of the many literary frauds (venture even slightly out of just this one fraud category, and you’ll end up with an article too long even for the long-form New Yorker) who’ve tried to put one over on us in the last decade or so.
Go ahead and think of all the successful, high-functioning frauds who must as we speak be running around our literary landscape befrauding everyone cuz they haven’t been (won’t be?) caught.
*****************
I guess administrators like the one in my title are worth thinking about. Before we condemn this anonymous person, let’s stipulate that a lot depends on the letter this person received. Was the letter writer a credible source? Oh yes. Is it likely that the letter was a naked example of envy, paranoia, nuttiness? Very, very unlikely. Does an administrator routinely get letters warning that a faculty member is a fraud? No. Does that mean you dismiss it as just a weird thing and throw it away? No.
Maybe you worry that anything you do could trigger litigation from Carrillo if he gets wind of it and so you toss it.
Okay, but let’s say you should do something. Fraud being as popular as it is, you should indeed do something. What do you do?
UD suggests that you pass it along to the dept chair/head of creative writing basically without comment. Maybe you scrawl a couple of question marks atop the letter by way of saying huh I dunno you deal with it. Hell, maybe that’s what was done, and the person we need to talk to about doing nothing is/was inside the English department.
But anyway we fired the dude, and he died a few years ago, so none of it amounts to much beyond another lesson universities should learn (most won’t) about the not inconsiderable number of people out there laying siege to their schools through fraud. Schools spend a lot of time worrying about larcenists and sexual predators, as well they should; but frauds do really really serious harm, and the fact that GW had two in succession – and tenured one! – is an institutional embarrassment.
Latest UD posts at IHE
Archives
- 2024 (712)
- 2023 (733)
- 2022 (852)
- 2021 (751)
- 2020 (789)
- 2019 (753)
- 2018 (803)
- 2017 (749)
- 2016 (863)
- 2015 (861)
- 2014 (1052)
- 2013 (1019)
- 2012 (1187)
- 2011 (1399)
- 2010 (1372)
- 2009 (1450)
- 2007 (1)
Categories
- 54: The new elderly (1)
- ADA DOOM (193)
- amy bishop (32)
- AYE (5)
- bad writing (24)
- Balinesia (1)
- be still my heart (193)
- beware the b-school boys (154)
- beach blogging (5)
- blog (98)
- blogoscopy (31)
- blood blogging (8)
- chesapeake (4)
- chief inspiration officer (48)
- class (16)
- CLICK-THROUGH U. (6)
- CLICK-THRU U. (126)
- code brown (14)
- conflict of interest (312)
- contest! (8)
- da guy's got balls (13)
- defenses of liberal education (33)
- delillo (78)
- democracy (919)
- demon rum (69)
- diploma mill (118)
- dispatches from the classroom (16)
- end the erasure of women (92)
- evil dr phil (1)
- EVITA (6)
- extracts (179)
- faculty project (34)
- failure to yield pun (3)
- father/son gunnies (10)
- FGM (56)
- floridly overwritten (4)
- foreign universities (159)
- forms of religious experience (704)
- free speech (72)
- fresh blood (40)
- Genius of the Carpathians (214)
- gevalt (2)
- ghost writing (54)
- goathean (2)
- goddess (2)
- Gomer (26)
- good writing (110)
- great writing (145)
- guns (741)
- harvard: bar fly (4)
- harvard: foreign and domestic policy (102)
- harvard: gearing up for the winter (7)
- harvard: handouts (10)
- headline of the day (368)
- henry purcell (13)
- heroes (136)
- heroines (103)
- high as a kite (43)
- hoax (258)
- how to make ud happy (19)
- How We Learn (36)
- hymnal (1)
- intellectuals (65)
- it's art (117)
- it's good to be the king (10)
- james joyce (74)
- jesus thinks you're a jerk (5)
- just plain gross (373)
- kind of a little weird (507)
- limericks (163)
- lion's willy (3)
- little hitler (4)
- Little Ick (12)
- march of science (230)
- merchandise (193)
- merkin muffley (2)
- merkins (12)
- Ministry of War (14)
- misconceived literary adaptations (1)
- morning mantra (1)
- newspaper poem (16)
- notes from a broad (1)
- nothing gold can stay (1)
- oedipus madoff (9)
- Of Mice and Men (1)
- Online Makeover (14)
- pill mill u. (7)
- plagiarism (325)
- poem (424)
- PowerPoint Confidential (15)
- powerpoint pissoff (50)
- professors (654)
- program support coordinator (2)
- protect yourself from bad poetry (2)
- satanic two-party system (1)
- Scathing Online Schoolmarm (287)
- screwed (132)
- screwed up (6)
- sentences that make UD laugh (26)
- smackdown (11)
- snapshots from a country (2)
- snapshots from assateague (10)
- snapshots from australia (1)
- snapshots from bath (1)
- snapshots from cambridge (8)
- snapshots from cherry springs (3)
- snapshots from corning (4)
- snapshots from dublin (21)
- snapshots from galway (9)
- snapshots from hawaii (1)
- snapshots from home (1,325)
- snapshots from houston (2)
- snapshots from hungary (2)
- snapshots from hyde park (2)
- snapshots from iceland (1)
- snapshots from india (11)
- snapshots from ireland (16)
- snapshots from kent island (1)
- snapshots from key west (66)
- snapshots from kurdistan (1)
- snapshots from la (1)
- snapshots from lisbon (1)
- snapshots from london (7)
- snapshots from malaga (1)
- snapshots from marbella (1)
- snapshots from mexico city (2)
- snapshots from munich (1)
- snapshots from new york (13)
- snapshots from Paris (5)
- snapshots from phoenix (2)
- snapshots from poland (1)
- snapshots from prague (2)
- snapshots from rehoboth (177)
- snapshots from sanibel (14)
- snapshots from scotland (1)
- snapshots from sedona (16)
- snapshots from shenandoah (16)
- snapshots from summit (30)
- snapshots from thailand (1)
- snapshots from the alps (1)
- snapshots from the azores (1)
- snapshots from the caliphate (1)
- snapshots from the Chesapeake (7)
- snapshots from the dolomites (1)
- snapshots from utah (7)
- snapshots from venice (7)
- snapshots from vermont (2)
- snapshots from Virginia (4)
- snapshots from warsaw (17)
- snapshots from west virginia (2)
- snapshots from zakopane (2)
- soltan inc. (58)
- somewhat baffled online schoolmarm (2)
- sounds and looks very samuel beckett (21)
- Sport (146)
- sport (2,747)
- STUDENTS (435)
- suicide (37)
- swaddled masses yearning to breathe free (8)
- tax syphon u. (2)
- tea (28)
- TEACH NAKED (2)
- TEACHING BEAUTY (2)
- technolust (216)
- THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME (3)
- the melnyk chronicles (1)
- the most irresponsible university in america (5)
- the piece that passeth all understanding (4)
- the rest is silence (37)
- the shame of a nation (11)
- the university (422)
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (2)
- tiny (2)
- TRUMP DEATH WATCH (2)
- trust me – i'm a doctor (7)
- trustees trashing the place (225)
- ud officially embarrassed to be a woman (6)
- ud's hippie years (11)
- UD/DC (6)
- unhoused (1)
- VERY LIKE A CME. (4)
- We'll get through this. (46)
- what do english professors dream? (1)
- where the simulacrum ends (33)
- you're wrong (1)
- Your Morning Giggle (48)