U. of GA Press Recalls Short Stories, Revokes Prize

Brad Vice's short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, earned a fairly complimentary review in last Sunday's SF Chronicle. It may well be the last review the book will get, as the University of Georgia Press has announced that it is withdrawing the collection from bookstores.

"On October 13," according to UGA's official statement, "the Press learned from the Tuscaloosa Public Library that one of the stories in Vice's collection, 'Tuscaloosa Knights,' contained uncredited material from the fourth chapter of the first section of Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama, a publication of the University of Alabama Press. UGA Press immediately froze stock of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train and contacted Brad Vice for his response. Vice admitted that 'Tuscaloosa Knights' borrows heavily from Stars Fell on Alabama and that he had made a terrible mistake in neglecting to acknowledge Carmer's work. He further stated that he had done this without any malicious intent whatsoever."

In addition to recalling the book from circulation and allowing the publiciation rights to revert back [UD style note: "revert back" is redundant] to Vice, UGA will also re-assign the Flannery O'Connor Award it gave Vice last year to one of the other finalists.

At the very least, the extra $950,000 seems unwise under these unpleasant circumstances. Mr. Ladner certainly made contributions to American University: The endowment grew dramatically, as did the qualifications of the student body. But Mr. Ladner has already been compensated generously for his efforts, and his own actions and sense of entitlement were the primary cause of the current mess.

The board ought to reconsider. Then it has to figure out how to heal itself. Its auditing and oversight efforts failed the university; they must be improved. The next president probably shouldn't serve on the board and surely shouldn't be as dominant as Mr. Ladner was in selecting trustees. The mechanism for selecting board members is insular and self-perpetuating. It should be changed.

In 2002, he became concerned about Bush’s abnormal behavior. Using applied psychoanalysis, a scientific method of studying historical figures and foreign leaders, Dr. Frank reached his conclusions based on massive amounts of public documentation — autobiographical and biographical accounts, public video footage of the President, and statements by Bush’s associates and relatives. This is the first case study of applied psychoanalysis on a sitting president.

Dr. Frank diagnosed the President suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); an Oedipal Complex; untreated and uncured alcoholism (“dry drunk"); paranoia; sadism; psychical reality; and a megalomania complex.

He was clear enough in April, but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering “Excuse me,” reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed; his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything - everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative; he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear - longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.

-- But then I said, ah, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century are James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Joyce is interested in changing the form of the novel in relation to the character, whereas Marcel Proust, the great moralist, is in the great tradition of Descartes and Montaigne...

...The American literary culture is still very much alive – there are real poets here – John Ashbery is a remarkable poet; we have four remarkable novelists still alive and at work: my friend Philip Roth, my friend Don DeLillo, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon, and that remarkable, reclusive novelist Cormac McCarthy...

When she reminisces, she talks of piano lessons and her brief attempt at ballet -- not of Connor setting his dogs loose on brave men, women and children marching for freedom, which is the Birmingham that other residents I met still remember. …When Rice was growing up, her father stood guard at the entrance of her neighborhood with a rifle to keep the Klan's nightriders away. But that was outside the bubble. Inside the bubble, Rice was sitting at the piano in pretty dresses to play Bach fugues.

Professor Anna M. Agathangelou will be participating on a collaborative panel on the questions surrounding racialized sexualized politics within the neoliberal political economy through an understanding of empire. Professor Agathangelou’s work on geographies and migrations aims to make visible the relations of power within the production of knowledge, in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms. It aims to locate these processes with the larger geopolitical contexts of the production and reproduction of empire. For this discussion, Professor Agathangelou will draw on her book in progress, co-authored with L.H.M. Ling, Seductions of Empire: Complicity, Desire, and the Insecurity in Contemporary World Politics.

The Politics colloquium utilizes a transnational feminist Marxist analysis to examine the role that desire and desire industries have come to play within the re-structuring of the neoliberal political economy, with particular focus on racialized, sexualized formations within “peripheral states.” This discussion builds upon Professor Agathangelou’s book, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States to pose broad questions about the politics of exploitation, violence and desire, and the role of transnational feminist praxis, feminist International Relations, and cross bordered social movements challenging the racialized, gendered violences of transnational capitalism, neocolonialism and empire.

Anna Agathangelou is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Politics at York University and the Co-Director of the Global Change Institute based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has published numerous articles on issues of migration, reproduction and formal/informal economies, transnational desire industries, decolonizing feminist methodologies, security and militarization, and cross-bordered feminist interventions into the neoliberal political economy. Her work engages in debates within the fields of feminist and cultural studies, international relations, international political economy and sexuality, human rights and trauma studies.

…'Cultural competence' would not be a request but a requirement. In its five year projection, [an Oregon Department of Education] summit proposed to "revise rules to achieve high cultural standards including possible revocation of licensure for culturally incompetent behavior" and "to require cultural competence for license renewal."

Indeed, SB50 [a bill mandating this, which did not pass] would have authorized the establishment of "standards for cultural competency and require an applicant for a teaching license to meet those standards."

In short, teachers would be required to advocate a specific vision of social justice to be licensed.

Dave Mowry, a legislative coordinator for Rep. Linda Flores, noted in The Oregonian on May 11, "[T]he Teachers Standards and Practices Commission and the Oregon Department of Education are backtracking, saying they really didn't mean it… Then why is it in the definition and the five-year plan and on the commission's Web site?"

Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.

What, then, to do? Karabel proposes that colleges extend affirmative action from race to class, as some have tentatively begun to do, and end preferences for legacies and athletes. I am on record elsewhere as having renounced the legacy privilege on behalf of my son—not that I asked him at the time—but Karabel's own narrative has persuaded me that the elite universities are unlikely to end affirmative action for the overprivileged. If anything, The Chosen demonstrates the danger of imagining great universities as miniature replicas of the social order, and their admissions policies as simulacra of the national reward system. Yes, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are plainly open to, and in many ways driven by, our animating national ideals; but Karabel shows us that their admissions choices are profoundly shaped by cultural, political, and economic considerations that can not be wished away. If we care about equality of opportunity, perhaps we would do better to focus our attention on the public schools, on the tax system, on such social goods as housing and health care. I don't think we can prevent meritocratic privilege from reproducing itself; we can, however, increase the supply of meritocrats.

"I'm both more productive intellectually than they are and I'm having more fun. It must drive them crazy," he said in an interview.

Later, he added: "I'm publishing like crazy. I'm all over the place. I try hard not to rub it in."

' "I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me," he says.

But why?

"They are too stupid."

He can't say that!

"No, they don't get it. And I don't want to have an hour's conversation about it."

But they have read the same texts?

"Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don't.... It is a fault. But I am not as bad as Bernard Williams. He apparently was horrible to people. He could not tolerate people being less clever than him. [UD tolerates people who don't know when to use "he" or "him."] He was quicker than anybody else, and if they were not as quick as him, he would show his disdain for them." '

The Irish government’s chief science adviser has been asked to provide Micheal Martin, the enterprise minister, with details of his doctoral thesis following allegations that he was awarded it by a bogus university [Pacific Western University to be precise].

“We may or may not have a copy. We should have one, somewhere,” [PWU’s president] said.

John Bear, an FBI consultant and an author of a guide to distance-learning colleges, described a qualification from PWU as a “ticking time bomb on a person’s CV. …It will be interesting to see if [McSweeney] presents his PhD and makes it public,” said Bear. “It is embarrassing to have a qualification from this university and to use it to call yourself a doctor.”

Two issues bother me about Yale's endowment - and those of Harvard and Princeton and many other schools. First, the men and women who run these endowments are fantastically well paid by most standards, running into the high six figures, sometimes even seven or eight figures annually. Their pay is on a par with partners at major investment banks, although it is not in the same league as top hedge fund managers. But they earn that pay largely because they get into these fabulous private-equity deals that most of the rest of us in the Yale family cannot enjoy.

That is, they take the big fat endowment contributed by us little minnow alumni as a group, thereby getting Yale into great deals, and are then paid spectacularly as individuals for managing the money we gave for love of alma mater. I would not for a moment begrudge them the money if they were wizard stock pickers. But to think that they are players in the private-equity game because we alums donated money that we thought would go to scholarships - that's a bit painful.




…Second, and more troubling, the immense scale of the endowment and its gains dwarfs my pitiful little gifts. If Mr. Swensen and his pals are making a few billion a year for Yale in capital gains, say $3 billion, that's equal to about one million gifts of $3,000 from individual alumni. But there are only a few tens of thousands of us alums, so what we give has to be totally insignificant unless we are terribly rich. Why give the money, then? (For that matter, why charge tuition? Compared with the gains that the endowment is making, tuition is a drop in the bucket of Yale's income.)




As for my contributions, maybe we could look at it this way: I support an organization called the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which provides social, emotional and material support to widows and widowers and children of military personnel who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If I contribute $10,000 to this group, the gift makes a huge difference to it. I support an organization called Soldiers' Angels that sends support packages to military personnel and their families. If I give $5,000, it means a lot. I also support the Friends of Animals Foundation, a kennel for abandoned dogs and cats on the west side of Los Angeles. If I give $15,000, it saves many animals' lives.

Gifts of these sizes are virtually meaningless to Yale, so why bother giving to it? My resources are very far from limitless, so why not give where it makes a difference?

Is it possible that giving to Yale right now is a bit like giving gifts to Goldman Sachs or Brown Brothers Harriman? I am sure that there are fine people in those places, and investment bankers are almost always intelligent, hard-working men and women. I enjoy their company. But they really don't need my money, and other people do.

I love Yale, and I am deeply grateful to Yale. It is a star in my sky every day and night. But at this point, is it an investment bank or a school? I am really not sure, and this troubles me. I would love to be shown that I am wrong, but I am not certain that I am.

And they should all go **** themselves--and I hope it hurts when they do and that they catch a disease and puke all over themselves and die, horribly, somewhere near Clark and Diversey [in Chicago] where four off-duty male nurses, all clad in black leather, remove their bodies to a nearby hospital where they are cleansed, disinfected, dressed in women's clothing and dumped into a sewer.

Student Group Faked Abduction
at University Place ATM, Police Say

What many students feared was an abduction on South Campus Tuesday night turned out to be an initiation rite for a Northwestern organization, University Police said.

A student told police she heard someone shout “Put your hands on the ATM!” at the U.S. Bank ATM on the 600 block of University Place at about 10:45 p.m, Assistant Chief Daniel McAleer of UP said. She then told police that she saw two people lead two others away from the ATM. They placed them in a car parked outside her window on the north side of the street, McAleer said.

Five male students involved in the incident have been referred to Student Affairs, McAleer said. He declined to say which student organization was involved in this incident.

…“They still may be charged criminally in this incident, disorderly conduct probably,” he said

LOS ANGELES - Wal-Mart heiress Elizabeth Paige Laurie, accused of paying a fellow college student $20,000 to do her homework, has returned her University of Southern California degree, officials said.

The move came nearly a year after Laurie's freshman-year roommate, Elena Martinez, told the ABC newsmagazine "20/20" that she had written term papers and done assignments for the heiress for 3 1/2 years.

"Paige Laurie voluntarily has surrendered her degree and returned her diploma to the university. She is not a graduate of USC," the school said in a statement dated Sept. 30. "This concludes the university's review of the allegations concerning Ms. Laurie."

USC spokesman James Grant said Wednesday the university had no further comment.

A call seeking comment from Bill Laurie, the father of Elizabeth Paige Laurie, at his Paige Sports Entertainment company was not immediately returned. The family has repeatedly declined to comment on the cheating allegation.

Martinez said at the time of the "20/20" broadcast that she joined the ROTC to earn money for college but eventually dropped out because she couldn't afford tuition at USC. She said she learned a great deal by doing Laurie's class work.

Martinez has an unlisted phone number and could not be reached for comment.

Laurie, the granddaughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton, was given a bachelor's degree by the USC Annenberg School for Communication in May 2004.

After the homework allegations surfaced last November, the University of Missouri removed Laurie's name from a sports arena named for her.

Laurie's parents, billionaires Bill and Nancy Laurie, the daughter of Walton, had received naming rights for the building in exchange for donating $25 million toward its construction.

[N]eed is viewed generously and aid is now given to students from families with six-figure incomes. Yet budgets at all of the twelve leading schools except MIT expect that the full tuition amount be paid by at least half of the applicants they enroll. The result is that students whose parents can pay the full amount will have an extra edge.

What [Ross] Douthat says of Harvard applies to most of the other colleges on the list. His fellow members of the class of 2002, he says, were "a wildly privileged lot, culled from the country's upwardly mobile enclaves and blessed with deep, parentally funded pockets." He estimates that 70 percent of his peers came from families with incomes exceeding $100,000 a year, with many well over that. The standard story is that an Ivy League education is open to talented young people regardless of income or origin. Douthat says this seldom happens in practice. "Meritocracy is the ideological veneer, but social and economic stratification is the reality."

Douthat's one-word title [Privilege] explains how most of his classmates got to the head of the admissions line. The preparatory schools their parents sent them to taught them how to outwit the entrance tests and gave them a shrewd sense of how college admissions work. Once at college, he tells us, they apply those skills to "avoidance of academic work" and "maneuverings to achieve maximum GPA [Grade Point Average] in return for minimal effort." This language says more about Douthat and his friends than Harvard students as a whole. All those I've met would cite courses they found intellectually challenging, and where they put in more work than was required. But by whatever route, almost everyone at Harvard gets As, and most graduates go on to well-known professional schools that bring them further up the ladder.




Benjamin DeMott has noted recently in these pages that special consideration for athletes in many sports aids the already privileged. While the elite schools sponsor football and basketball, they reserve even more places for teams like skiing, golf, rugby, crew, squash, lacrosse, and sailing—sports that are harder to master if you haven't attended a well-endowed high school. Some shrewd parents now tell their children to forget about editing the yearbook and go out for the squash team.




As matters stand, one measure of a university's prestige is how little teaching is asked of its tenured professors. Although there are more endowed chairs at the top, more undergraduates are now taught by graduate assistants, adjuncts, and part-time faculty who will never be promoted. Some even handle full loads for a third of the $100,000 that professors get even if they don't teach. Unfortunately, that saving is what makes the six-figure salaries possible.





Far too few of our nation's undergraduates are getting the educations they want and deserve. The easiest reply is that they have only themselves to blame, as we often hear in reference to their careerism and partying, and remarks like Douthat's that students devote the least amount of effort to their studies. Or in professors' laments about student apathy, lax attendance, and indifference toward assignments.

Yet my own observation is that young people of college age have a capacity for intellectual curiosity, and will respond when their minds are aroused. This is in fact happening at many independent liberal arts colleges, where their professors' first commitment is to teaching undergraduates. I have visited many of these schools and seen how students are encouraged to use their minds, including those who may have first enrolled there for sports or other nonacademic activities. While faculty members may not engage in much research, they work together to maintain a common curriculum. Moreover, I have no doubt that the 322,791 students now at these colleges do not differ inherently from the millions who are being ignored on mega-campuses. I am also convinced that despite differences in endowments and faculty salaries, as good an education can be had at Coe College in Iowa, Whitman College in Washington, and Knox College in Illinois as at brand-name schools like Williams and Swarthmore.

A student who is now basically majoring in beer at the University of Arizona could be presenting a paper on Molière at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College. Plenty of teachers know how to provide the best in undergraduate education. The question is whether they will ever reach the larger number of students who should be learning from them. The recent trends in higher education suggest that the prospects of that happening are not good.

Despite Lady Gabriella [Windsor's] academic and romantic success in America, there is, however, one aspect of campus life that she may warn [Princess] Beatrice about. Shortly before she graduated, she wrote about the social life at Brown University, documenting her fellow students' alcohol abuse, drug taking, sexual licentiousness and all-round bad behaviour.

She said she thought that it would be like living in Dawson's Creek, the American television soap opera featuring clean-living teenagers, but, in fact, she was confronted by drunken students, who indulged in "week-long vomiting sessions," and the widespread use of cannabis.

"Young men and women limp to classes bleary eyed from the previous evening's excesses," she told an interviewer. "In England everyone gets this out of their system at 14 and I can't help feeling that younger teenagers have more dignity in their disgusting alcoholic exploits than these supposed adults."

Bringing laptops and wireless Internet access into classrooms was supposed to enrich classroom discussions by, for example, allowing students to import information from the Internet and share it with the rest of the class. But instead some students are using their laptops to message friends, shop online, peruse Web sites and pursue part-time jobs. The result: There is a rising backlash against classroom computer use from professors and schools.

[Selective university admissions in America] have become our primary mechanism for convincing ourselves that poor people deserve their poverty, or, to put the point the other way around, they have become our primary mechanism for convincing rich people that we deserve our wealth.

If there really aren't [significant class differences at our best colleges] - if it's your wealth (or your family's wealth) that makes it possible for you to go to an elite school in the first place - then, of course, the real source of your success is not the fact that you went to an elite school but the fact that your parents were rich enough to give you the kind of preparation that got you admitted to the elite school. The function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard.

Affirmative action - designed to convince all the white kids that they didn't get in just because they were white - plays a somewhat bigger role (hence the passionate support for it among upper-middle-class white students: Every black face they see on campus makes them feel better about themselves).

What one is complaining about, however, in attacking the way tenure works within ... specific institutional cultures and across academia as a whole is not something like cronyism. It’s about administrative structures like departments, about the premium that the organization of academic places on inward-turning specialization, about modes of achievement that often rest on bygone publishing regimes and practices of readership which have no more than a decade’s worth of life left to them.

Patricia Duff knows what a 4-year-old girl needs to live a ''moderately luxurious'' life on a ''rough parity with an Upper East Side family'' -- about $4,400 a day. That covers lodging in a $5 million 10-room apartment on the Upper East side and a house in the Hamptons, $2,500 worth of ''prints'' for her closet and $1,450 a month for dining out.

On the witness stand yesterday, Ms. Duff presented a detailed budget listing Caleigh's monthly living expenses. According to Ms. Duff, she spends $9,953 each month on travel expenses for Caleigh and her nanny. A total of $3,175 a month is spent on clothing for Caleigh, and $3,585 on ''recreational'' activities, she said. The cost of Caleigh's personal domestic employees -- apparently nannies and maids -- is $30,098 a month, and the 4-year-old dines out at a cost of $1,450 a month, Ms. Duff said.

In a June 1998 affidavit, Ms. Duff estimated her monthly child support needs at $87,000 a month. The figure that she proposed yesterday was $132,000 a month.

She also included a request that Mr. Perelman pay part of Caleigh's housing costs. The cost of the Upper East Side apartment and the Connecticut and East Hampton, N.Y., homes that Ms. Duff is proposing would range from $1 million a year to $750,000 a year, she said. She also estimated $1.3 million to $2 million in initial first-year start-up costs.

Ms. Duff's time on the witness stand was not as contentious as in recent days, when she was repeatedly reprimanded by Justice Franklin R. Weissberg for failing to answer questions. When asked whether Caleigh's nanny also flew first-class on four weekend trips to Florida in 1997, she replied, "Absolutely."

Ladner did not return phone calls made yesterday to his university-owned residence.

His attorneys, David Ogden and Randy Goodman, also did not return phone calls.

[For] Professor Booth, literature was not so much words on paper as it was a complex ethical act. He saw the novel as a kind of compact between author and reader: intimate and rewarding, but rarely easy.

Towson University President Mark Perkins was forced to resign in 2002 after less than a year on the job amid disclosures that he had overseen more than $1 million in college-paid upgrades for his university-owned residence , expenses that included a $25,000 plasma-screen television and an $80,000 elevator. Perkins also commissioned a $25,000 gold medallion to wear at his inauguration.

[M]uch of the uproar has focused on extravagances for the university-owned president's home, the Lou Henry Hoover House … Mr. Kennedy has been ensnared in the controversy from its outset. Stanford had charged the government for part of the cost of such items as flowers and antique furniture at the house, as well as for depreciation on a university-owned yacht, the Victoria.

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, says there is something to Ladner's defense. College presidents today are expected to spend so much of their time fundraising that universities are justified in picking up many of their expenses, and in paying for the kind of luxury that will impress a potential donor. This is especially true in Washington, he said, where the bar for entertaining is very high.

WHERE CRONIES DWELL

Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying "cronyism" and calling for "mainstream" values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers?

Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.

…Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas, had a preponderance of Republicans (by 10 to 8). At the rest of the schools, there was a 6-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. The ratio was 4 to 1 at Northwestern and New York University, 13 to 1 at the University of Southern California, 15 to 1 at Columbia.

…Some academics argue that their political ideologies don't affect the way they teach, which to me is proof of how detached they've become from reality in their monocultures. This claim is especially dubious if you're training lawyers and journalists to deal with controversial public policies.

…Journalism attracts people who want to right wrongs, and the generation that's been running journalism schools and media businesses came of age when government, especially the federal government, was seen as the solution to most wrongs. These executives, like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped their institutions to reflect their views.

But those views are no longer dominant outside newsrooms and academia.

…I'm not suggesting that journalism or law schools should be forced to have ideological balance on their faculties - this is one of those many problems that doesn't require a solution by government. But it's curious how little the schools seem to care about it.

They keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty. But the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter of course. As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?

Prof Declares Himself Victim of Plagiarism:

Sociology prof speaks out;
some scholars say
issue is driven by race

By Mara Gordon
October 11, 2005

As leading scholars across the country have chosen sides in a plagiarism scandal that has rocked the Penn Sociology department since summer, the three professors at the center of the storm had remained silent.

But yesterday, the would-be victim in this saga of alleged "conceptual plagiarism" took a stand.

Penn Sociology professor Elijah Anderson released a statement accusing one of his colleagues of under-citing his work in her new book.

For the first time, Anderson publicly said Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Choose Motherhood Over Marriage -- co-authored by Kathryn Edin, another Penn sociologist -- "owes a strong and almost entirely unacknowledged debt to" his previous books.

The controversy erupted last week when Sociology professor emeritus Harold Bershady sent an e-mail to the Penn Sociology department. In the Sept. 29 memo, Bershady said that Edin and her co-author Maria Kefalas -- a St. Joseph's University professor already accused of plagiarizing material in one of her previous books -- had stolen ideas from Anderson and neglected to acknowledge it.

Sociology Department Chairman Paul Allison released a statement last Wednesday announcing that the department stood by Edin's work.

Thirteen prominent sociology scholars also wrote a letter to The Daily Pennsylvanian that called Bershady's claims of undercitation "absurd."

Until yesterday, Anderson was unwilling to discuss Bershady's charges. But under pressure from an academic community that increasingly supported Edin, Anderson spoke out.

"I never imagined that I would be dismissed with such utter confidence by respected figures of the discipline I have devoted my scholarship and career to serving," Anderson wrote of the letter that backed Edin. "I find their letter unconvincing and disturbing."

Anderson wrote that Edin and Kefalas took credit for ideas he originally cultivated in several books he published in the 1990's.

"What standards for acknowledging the prior work of other scholars will [Edin's supporters] -- and the academy generally -- stand by?" Anderson wrote. "Would they or any reasonable academic tell their students that they need not footnote or acknowledge in these circumstances?"

Adding further fire to the debate, Kefalas already faced charges of plagiarism when she published Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood in 2003.

Arnold Hirsch, a History professor at the University of New Orleans, discovered that Kefalas had used language similar to that in his 1983 book, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.

To resolve the dispute, Kefalas published a list of corrections on her faculty Web site at St. Joseph's University. The list cites Hirsch's book more extensively.

As buzz over the recent controversy at Penn circulated throughout sociology departments across the country last week, discussion has turned towards race.

Several prominent black sociologists said the Penn Sociology department's support for Edin was an example of the work of a black professor -- like Anderson -- being ignored.

"There is a history, in the profession, of black scholars being marginalized," said Bryn Mawr sociology professor Robert Washington, who is familiar with both Promises I Can Keep and Anderson's books. "That marginalization typically meant that people ignored their work ... One possible perception of this [situation] is as an outgrowth of that history."

Anderson was the first black sociologist hired at Penn. As one of the country's preeminent black scholars, many said they see him as a role model for minority academics.

The undercitation in Promises I Can Keep "not only offends Professor Anderson, it is offensive to all fair and balanced scholars, particularly scholars that are members of minority groups," University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee sociologist Anthony Lemelle wrote in an e-mail interview. "Dr. Anderson [is] being relegated to the position of invisibility."

Acknowledging that the board's "tortured deliberations" had "taken an inappropriately long time," Bains, in her statement, accused Ladner of fighting "every aspect" of the probe. She said he failed to produce documents and he claimed "that the University is contractually required to pay for every limousine ride to his gym to work out and every item of food and drink that he consumes, with no tax consequences to him."

Bains recently proposed a plan that included annual audits of senior officers, student and faculty representatives on the board, more oversight and zero tolerance for financial and ethical lapses.

Carmen Group’s most notorious client is the corrupt regime of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. U.S. authorities are probing how $115 million from Amoco (see David Work), Phillips Petroleum and Mobil landed in the foreign bank accounts of Nazarbayev and his top officials. In a solicitation obtained by the Financial Times, Gerald Carmen [father of David] offered to burnish the regime’s U.S. image for just $1 million.

In a case seen boosting the credibility and profile of blogs as sources of news and opinion, the Delaware Supreme Court this week found that four bloggers accused of defamation had the right to remain anonymous…. Chief Justice Myron Steele … called the Internet ... a "unique democratizing medium
unlike anything that has come before."

One key issue under investigation has been the 1997 contract that Ladner signed with then-board chairman William I. Jacobs. Jacobs said in an interview Wednesday that he told board members there was a new contract for Ladner but did not have it passed around.

Robert Pence, who was on the board from 1989 to 1998, distributed a letter to the board yesterday saying that he has asked many of his fellow trustees about their recollections of the contract. "Anyone who says they discussed this with me (or all of the then-current members of the board) is not telling the truth," Pence said.

Jacobs said on Wednesday, "We did not want the contract to be in the newspaper the next day, and if anybody wanted to know specifics about the contract, they could find out whatever they wanted." Nobody asked, he said.

There was an incredible amount of diversity even within the groups [that had booths at Cornell‘s recent Diversity Fair], such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. It is not necessary to be either Hispanic or an engineer to join. “Our name deters people,” lamented Kathya Chiluiza ’05, a member of this networking group.

I believe very strongly that we can choose to discharge him without any golden parachute and without any further loss of valuable university funds. I support the resolution of the business school asking the trustees to provide no golden parachute.


He has given no indication whatsoever that he is considering stepping down despite the fact that the faculty, the deans and the students have called for his resignation. … I wish it were already over. I had hoped that when the deans, the faculty senate and the students overwhelmingly asked Ladner to resign that he would have recognized that American University comes first and he would have resigned.

Regrettably, he has done just the opposite. He has dismissed the votes of no confidence and made it clear that he will fight to the end, including, as he has stated, litigation. This saddens me no end. I hope before the board meets next Monday, the 10th, that Ladner will rise above his selfish pursuits and do the right thing for the university by resigning.



[Ladner’s salary] was always wildly out of line. Even though A.U. does not rank among the top 75 universities in this country measured either by size or reputation, Ladner's total compensation would have ranked him among the top 10 of all university presidents in the country. One can only assume now that the audit committee has uncovered the additional expenses incurred by him that his total compensation would clearly put him near/if not at the very top... [T]he salary of our longest serving tenured professor is but a few thousand dollars more than the salary and benefits Ladner gave his chef.

According to a recent count by Daniel J. Solove of George Washington University, 130 law professors have active blogs. David Chalmers of Australian National University lists 85 philosophy professors or Ph.D. students with blogs, mostly oriented to the discussion of philosophical issues. In both of those disciplines, those who don't either blog or read and comment on others' blogs are cutting themselves out of an increasingly important set of discussions.

…Why are so many academics beginning to blog? Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

…What advantages does blogging offer over the more traditional forms of academic communication? Blogging sacrifices some depth of thought -- it's difficult to state a complex thesis in the average blogpost -- but provides in return a freedom and flexibility that normal academic publishing can't match. Consider the length of time it takes to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal. In many disciplines, a period of years between first draft and final publication is normal. More years may elapse before other academics begin to publish articles or books responding to the initial article. In contrast, a blog post is published immediately after the blogger hits the "publish" button. Responses can be expected in hours, both from those who comment on the blog (if the blog allows them) and from other bloggers, who may take up an idea and respond to it, extend it, or criticize it. Others may respond to those bloggers in turn, leading to a snowballing conversation distributed across many blogs. In the conventional time frame of academe, such a conversation would take place over several years, if at all.

…Once you get used to this rapid back-and-forth, it can be hard to return to the more leisurely pace of academic journals and presses. In the words of the National University of Singapore philosophy professor and blogger John Holbo, the difference between academic publishing and blogging is reminiscent of "one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible."

…Most important, the scholarly blogosphere offers academics a place where they can reconnect with the public. The links between academic argument and wider public debates are increasingly tenuous and frayed. It's far harder than it used to be for academics to become public intellectuals (not that it was ever very easy, or very common). This has malign consequences, not only for the quality of debate on both sides of the divide, but also for public perceptions of the academy. It's also a source of considerable frustration to many academics, who either believe that their academic expertise could be valuable to a wider audience, or resent the distorted public perception of what they do. Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual.

A Penn Sociology professor has accused one of his colleagues of committing "conceptual plagiarism" in a scandal that has enveloped the department and generated buzz at universities across the country.

In an e-mail memo obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, professor emeritus Harold Bershady accused Sociology professor Kathryn Edin of stealing the "analytic scheme" of her new book from Elijah Anderson, another Penn faculty member in the same department.

Bershady said that Edin's book -- Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, which she co-authored with St. Joseph's University sociology Maria Kefalas -- took many of its concepts from several works by Anderson. The problem, Bershady said in the memo, was that they gave him very little credit.

"I do not believe Edin and Kefalas have plagiarized Anderson's work in the literal sense of lifting sentences," Bershady wrote. "They have done something more subtle and more grievous. ... They have in effect committed a kind of conceptual plagiarism, taken Anderson's ideas and concepts and represented them as being their own."