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Friday, March 12, 2004
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PORE JUD IS DAID
Another day, another loony prez at boony u. High salaries, low qualifications, ethical confusion and emotional instability have done in quite a few university presidents lately; and today’s specimen, featured in this morning’s New York Times and everywhere else, is Richard T. Judd of Central Connecticut State University, who at an annual salary of $200,000 cannot spell ("From what I have been advised," he wrote one of his faculty members a few years ago, "you breeched the tenets of what I asked the faculty in this program to do."), and whose scholarly works, far as I can tell, amount to an out of print co-edited textbook on emergency “first responders.” It may be his background in emergency responsiveness that inspired Judd a few years ago to impersonate a police officer in order to force some guy he thought was speeding to pull over. He flashed the lights on his state car and pretended his CCSU i.d.card was a police badge and got thirty days probation. CCSU figured he meant well and forgave him. But Judd’s plagiarism problem again has the merde flying. Using student-patented techniques of international web crawling plus cut and paste, Judd concocted an opinion piece that the now very angry Hartford Courant, blinded by his prestigious position, published. “Judd, 66, is on a trip to the Middle East on university business and could not be reached Tuesday for comment,” the Courant reports. “Talk Tuesday among faculty was that Judd was being called back to Connecticut early.” Yep. This time I think he’s as dead as pore Jud who got up on that blazing haystack in Oklahoma! Why, though, does it take blazing haystacks for universities to notice that their presidents are off their nut? Judd’s done all kinds of other questionable and embarrassing stuff involving faculty appointments and use of state funds during his rather short tenure. The man is a manifest catastrophe and as of this writing he’s still a university president. At least John Silber, still haunting the halls of Boston University, has a respectable scholarly background and made some good appointments. I’m genuinely puzzled as to why so many university presidents on obscure campuses are allowed to become little Ubus, throwing their weight around and getting crazier and crazier. Judd’s breeches have long been untenanted, but it took rank outsiders who happened to have read an editorial of his to notice. |