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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

IN A DIFFERENT TIME,
IN A BETTER TIME…..


UD would have met Cliopatria’s Ralph Luker through an online dating service which would have matched the two of them based upon their shared love of long walks on the beach and investigating plagiarism cases.

Following Sally Greene's lead, Luker has been writing about Dean Bryan Le Beau’s plagiarism of both Cornel West and Russell Baker for a 2003 commencement address that Le Beau performed at his university.

The shamelessness of this case, plus Le Beau’s obvious ability to have written the thing himself, suggests to UD not the desperation she saw in the plagiarizing high school principal she talked about in a recent post, but rather a sort of executive arrogance, in which you get a flunky to write the thing for you because you’re too busy or cynical to do it yourself.

THE SURFACING
OF THE FLUNKY


If UD’s right about this, then the next chapter in the Le Beau story will be the surfacing of the flunky. Watch for it.

CHACUN A SON PLAGIAT

The question of where you go for your plagiarism, likely to be of increasing importance as plagiarism becomes more and more part of the rich fabric of American culture, is an interesting one to UD. She can understand using Baker, who is funny and has a nice conversational style. But West?

THE LOST WEEKEND

Confronted with what he’s done, Professor Le Beau had the classic reaction of academics caught graduating from diploma mills or plagiarizing. The similarities between his text and West‘s, Le Beau said, were “a shocker.”

Watch for Le Beau, citing the recent study uncovering mental illness in half of the American population, to announce that he suffers from dissociative disorder.

RETROSPECTIVE
IRONY EFFECT


Here are some lines from the commencement speech, and from a comment Le Beau made on a humanities council website, that represent what UD calls the Retrospective Irony Effect, as we now read these comments in light of subsequent events:

Commencement:

"[What matters is] acknowledging your interdependencies and interrelationships with one another."

"Friedrich Nietzsche said it well when he observed: 'It is not simply a question of having the courage of one’s own convictions, but at times of having the courage to attack one’s convictions.' That is how we grow, as individuals, as communities, as nations. My guess is that you are all familiar with Socrates line, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I would add – the examined life is painful, risky, and full of vulnerability. And yet, to revitalize public conversation, we have to ensure self-criticism and self-correction, both as individuals and as a nation – both in our individual lives and in our lives as a nation."

Website:

“The best preparation for any career is to learn critical reading and thinking skills, effective communication and the substance of the culture in which we live. An education in the humanities provides that.”