Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

When, in 2004, UD started blogging at her flagship campus, University Diaries I, she was amazed at the story of Kerri Dunn, a visiting psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College who earned her own Wikipedia page, a year in prison, and a $20,000 fine for covering her car with gruesome symbols, including a swastika, and then claiming to have been the victim of a hate crime. The trusting students, faculty, and administration at the college first made Dunn a heroine — there were speeches in her honor — but then the two guys who happened to have been taking a walk while Dunn was spray painting her car came forward and described what they saw.

UD has covered so many hate crime hoaxes since Dunn that nothing along these lines amazes her anymore. Self-created attacks are common enough on and around American university campuses that a play — Spinning Into Butter — has been written about the phenomenon. A typical recent incident involves a University of Colorado student who claimed three homophobes had carved an X in her cheek, and then admitted that she’d done it herself.

But the thing is really getting around when it gets to UD’s own campus, George Washington University, where a Jewish student was just discovered to have drawn swastikas on her own door. The campus, rightly appalled at the swastikas, had been in an uproar about fascists lurking, but now it looks likely that most, if not all, of the swastikas around campus were the work of this woman.

Her motives? UD Googled her and sniffed around a bit. A freshman, she is a very ambitious student journalist — won journalism awards in high school — and indeed is a reporter for the GW newspaper, The Hatchet. Though I guess she’s probably been fired... Anyway, the motivation here, I suspect, is akin to the motivation of the firefighter who sets a blaze in order heroically to put it out. You create an incendiary news story centering around yourself, and this gives you endless opportunities to write articles and opinion pieces and essays about yourself and the traumas you’re undergoing, and about our anti-semitic society, etc. Generic desire for attention plus specific professional ambition seems to have been the ticket here.

What is to be done? I think Claremont McKenna, deeply embarrassed by its sanctification of Dunn, would tell you that exactly nothing’s be to done until everyone’s sure of the attack’s authenticity. It looks cold to withhold sympathy and outrage, but there are too many sociopaths out and about.

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

...and, as an arty type, I’ve got my bag of treats for the night: The Day of the Dead passages in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano; Richard Wilbur’s poem, “In the Elegy Season“...

I even lectured on Kafka’s kafkaesque “Metamorphosis” today.

Yet this year, with Letters of Ted Hughes set for release tomorrow, I find myself reading and rereading a Hughes poem about this time of year.

The Seven Sorrows

The first sorrow of autumn

Is the slow goodbye

Of the garden who stands so long in the evening —

A brown poppy head,

The stalk of a lily,

And still cannot go.

The second sorrow

Is the empty feet

Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.

The woodland of gold

Is folded in feathers

With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow

Is the slow goodbye

Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers

The minutes of evening,

The golden and holy

Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow

Is the pond gone black

Ruined and sunken the city of water -

The beetle’s palace,

The catacombs

Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow

Is the slow goodbye

Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.

One day it’s gone.

It has only left litter -

Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow

Is the fox’s sorrow

The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds

The hooves that pound

Til earth closes her ear

To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow

Is the slow goodbye

Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window

As the year packs up

Like a tatty fairground

That came for the children.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

It’s always a cheap thrill when psychiatrists — especially academic psychiatrists — turn out to be infantile, ridiculous people.

An even more thrilling cheap thrill is when they turn out to be insane homicidal monsters (Hannibal Lecter; that guy in the film Dressed to Kill). But in real life we must make do with the infantile and ridiculous.

It’s a cheap thrill because it’s the bluntest of ironies when these priests of secular American culture, these fonts of mature life-wisdom, turn out to be preening prancing fools who screw up their lives and embarrass their institutions and hurl lawsuits at one another to the point where the New York Times takes note.

Two eminent academic psychiatrists, colleagues at Columbia University, so ludicrously took against one another that there’s a high-profile lawsuit raging, with flamboyant charges and counter-charges thrown. Theirs wasn’t primarily an intellectual dispute, which might have lent the proceedings some dignity. The boys just couldn’t get along.

The guy who got fired — the guy who’s suing Columbia University for fifteen million dollars — complains that the other guy called him “the Brad Pitt of psychiatry.”

The guy who still has his job at Columbia is “restrained and scholarly in nature.” The guy suing is “outspoken, a media favorite.”

Their photos do tell a story. Here’s the guy who still has his job. Grim.

Here’s Brad Pitt. Whee!

UD has no special training, but she speculates that Brad got all the girls, while non-Brad, though smarter, deeper, and more serious, was left holding the Rorschach blotter.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

This post’s subtitle rewrites something Hamlet said: How all occasions do inform against me...

Prose discloses. However much you think you’re hiding, the way you write, the grain of your language, gives away all sorts of things about you. Are you a snob? Do you think you’re better than other people? Are you terrified of self-assertion? Are you vindictive? A prude? A prune? Your prose will tell.

This is because writing is consciousness. Your writing is your own peculiar, particular, specific, inimitable, personal, individual, consciousness.

Good writers to a large extent control the effects of their consciousness. They are aware of writing’s disclosing power, and they decide what and how they want to disclose.

A number of writers said useful things about writing in general, and writing for blogs in particular, in a recent symposium at 10 Zen Monkeys.

One of them quoted Italo Calvino:

Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination — in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.

Note the language of control: A good stylist selects an attitude, decides how she wants to connect with the world, enters into a certain role, projects a chosen self... None of this implies inauthenticity. It points to an informed and strategic deployment into prose of an aspect of one’s consciousness pertinent to the subject matter at hand. Of course, if you’re writing a novel, you’re explicitly taking on an alien consciousness; but if the form is the essay or blog post, you’re shaping your own consciousness into a mode of address intended to pull a reader into your world.

As another contributor to the Zen Monkeys symposium writes,

good prose infuses nonfiction, whether criticism or journalism or essay, with an almost poetic and emotional sensibility that ideally reflects in style and form the content that one is expressing.

Not emotion for emotion’s sake — histrionic, manipulative writing alienates — but an emotion appropriate to content, and, more broadly, a verbally intriguing sensibility that attracts and holds the reader.

This same contributor worries, though, that the rapidity of web culture, and its pressure on writers to have opinions about everything,

is not an encouraging environment from which to speak from the heart or the soul or whatever it is that makes living, breathing prose an actual source of sustenance and spiritual strength.

But UD/SOS isn’t so sure. Blog writing has a cumulative effect. Over time, on the strongest blogs — Andrew Sullivan’s, for instance — many posts create a rich persona, a complicated and even moving human individual. UD has watched Sullivan struggle with his religious faith over many years on his blog, so that with each new post on his doubts, the fragility and intricacy of belief is further illuminated.

Along the same soul-crushing lines, another contributor worries that

Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter’s Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.

Again, UD has her doubts. As does yet another contributor, who writes that

The profusion of written thoughts and emotions [on the web] is certainly overwhelming, but the true writer is likely to be a selective and highly skillfull reader, and thus has many jewels to select from, to be inspired by, to be wowed by, and to otherwise cause the truly ambitious to carry forth with passion and a whip-smart disposition.

Again, this is Calvino’s point: selectivity rules. Wilde, a supremely gifted writer and reader, would surf the web like a master, steadying himself on a few first-rate blogs and learning from them. Since he was a narcissist, he would certainly check his SiteMeter more than once a day, but from it he would come to understand the nature of his audience, and with this knowledge, he would sharpen his prose yet more, carving out for himself a readership worthy of his efforts. Rather than inform against him, Wilde’s on-line prose would probably have elaborated an enormously appealing consciousness, and informed his readers in the way the world looks to a living, breathing soul.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

One of UD’s readers sends her an article from the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which represents an instructive fable on the importance of maintaining honor among thieves.

In this sequence of events, one diploma mill fraudster brought down another, only to be brought down himself by the guy he brought down. If you catch my drift. It’s a bit complicated. Let’s take a look at the article:

The seeds of Norman Fenton’s downfall were planted in May 2005 when he testified in U.S. District Court in Harrisonburg.

Fenton took the stand that day as an expert witness in the case against Perry Beale, a medical physicist who was accused of defrauding hospitals throughout central Virginia.

However, prosecutors learned, soon after the hearing, that Fenton too was a fraud.

Beale and Fenton both checked imaging equipment in radiology labs. Fenton reported Beale to the authorities for doing the work incorrectly, and Beale was duly discovered to have faked his credentials. Fenton testified against him in court, and Beale got four years in jail plus a big fine.

Beale was pissed. When investigators, acting on a tip about Fenton, interviewed Beale in his cell, he told police about how Fenton himself had graduated from the laughingly obvious diploma mill (obvious to everyone except the people paid to check on these things) that calls itself the University of St. Moritz.

Fenton subsequently described calling the mill and not only buying a Master’s for $500, but being talking into a cum laude Ph.D. for an extra $250. He also described whipping up various professional certificates for himself at the local Rapid Copy store. State licensing agencies saw nothing amiss.

So Fenton, like Beale, gets mail fraud. But he also gets perjury, for lying on the stand about his university degrees. He’s in prison now too.

There’s a local angle here: Fenton attended UD’s own George Washington University. He didn’t graduate.

And there’s a Psycho angle: Fenton’s wife says she always assumed her husband graduated from GW. “Strange as it would seem, apparently he thought so too.” Fenton’s pastor says he was

“able to compartmentalize his academic background” to the point where he actually believed what he claimed.

I’m sure both of these people think they’re helping Fenton in saying these things. But they only add “mentally disturbed” to his cv.

Moral of the tale?

‘For his ’substantial’ help in prosecuting Fenton, Beale received a one-year reduction in his own sentence. He is now being held in a halfway house in North Carolina and expects to be released in January.’

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

“[T]here is an emerging concern about double standards,” writes a University of Sydney professor to an array of university leaders. Unlike some elite American universities, this Australian university contains at least one faculty member principled enough to make a fuss when his institution ignores plagiarism among high-ranking professors. Professor Peter McCallum, reports the Sydney Morning Herald, notes that “unless the university [deals] with the issue openly and fairly, students [will] not understand why it [is] acceptable for academics to reproduce material while they [are] not allowed to...”

The Australian plagiarism case is wild and wacky — go to my flagship campus for details — but the main thing involves the dean of the university’s music conservatory being a serial plagiarist. She was asked to leave the school temporarily, while — I guess — the university looked into the matter. But she recently returned, and the university said nothing, and she said nothing.

It’s as if it never happened. Only it did. She plagiarized. On a rather large scale.

Again, as in the American cases past and present, professor and institution shove the thing under the rug. But blatant plagiarism is easy to see: You’ve either lifted someone else’s words or you haven’t. Just ask David Leonhardt of the New York Times, who, as he was reviewing the in-part plagiarized Ian Ayres book (see the post just below this one), began to read, in that book, his own words: “...I came across two sentences about a doctor in Atlanta that were nearly identical to two sentences I wrote in this newspaper last year.... [Many] readers will...assume the words are his.” Leonhardt doesn’t seem to be very happy about this.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

“Several passages in Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres ... new book are unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years, an investigation by the [Yale Daily] News has shown.”

In this measured language, very similar to the language the last student investigators of high-level plagiarism used in the Southern Illinois University newspaper, the editorial staff at Yale announces their findings. The SIU students found that the president of their university plagiarized significant stretches of his doctoral dissertation, while Yale’s students found that a law professor there plagiarized parts of a mass market book he just published. But it looks to UD as though the form of plagiarism was exactly the same in both cases: Both men simply stuck passages from other writers into their text when it suited them, and gave either minimal or no attribution. In some of the passages in question, neither used quotation marks, even when they quoted at length, verbatim.

Although various knowledgeable observers at both institutions have called this activity what it is — plagiarism — it’s pretty clear to UD that both men will go unpunished, with all the attendant damage this will do to the integrity of universities and the idealism of students. After all, when it comes to students, the behavior’s severely sanctioned.

UD bases her prediction on precedent. Two high-ranking Harvard law professors have plagiarized in the last few years and received no punishment. One of them, Lawrence Tribe, employed exactly the same excuse Ayres has: It’s okay to plagiarize when you’re writing for the unwashed masses. My “well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience through the omission of any footnotes or endnotes — in contrast to the practice I have always followed in my scholarly writing,” said Tribe, “came at an unacceptable cost: my failure to attribute some of the material...” The other plagiarist, Charles Ogletree, took the more conventional route among high-profile scholars and blamed it on his research assistants. Both men emerged from their scandals without a mark on them.

Note the high-handed nature of these excuses: I am too important and busy a person really to write — or at least write with any care — these mass-appeal books out of which I expect to make a lot of money. I have a group of assistants who research and write them for me, and then I put my bankable name on them... What do you expect to happen? ... I mean, of course a certain slippage will occur when other people are doing the writing and I don’t even bother to read what they’ve written.... So what?

So what? agrees Harvard, and now, almost certainly Yale. As the Harvard newspaper noted of its law school’s scandals, the university has one set of rules for its famous professors, and another for its students.

These cases — and there will be more of them — are instructively clear instances of oligarchic corruption.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

Brown University student, 2007:

‘...so as to end up flaccid, immobile, alone on the carpet of a dorm room, shirtless, wheezing, intellectually menopausal, cutting lines on an IBook with a pre-paid Discover card, watching consecutive hours of user-generated porn, in the dark, in a hoodie, apolitical, remorseless, eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips from a bag without a napkin: like some hero, pretending to be otherwise, on a Wednesday, during discussion section.’

Allen Ginsberg, 1956

‘...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear...’

A very clever Brown student, for a class project on public political art, fashions a series of official looking plaques with funny, true, provocative prose on them, and attaches them to various university buildings. Sharp-eyed Inside Higher Ed takes note, and in its article about this wonderful gesture quotes befuddled students and professors as they attempt to interpret the things.

UD was particularly disappointed in the interpretation of the professor who teaches the course: “The prose seems to be like an excerpt from a memoir or autobiography or journal...”

This guy’s job as teacher is to put the student’s gesture — although charmingly done, it’s by no means an original one — into as clear a context as he can, so that his students understand the aesthetic and social history that made what the student did possible, and from which the student drew.

UD’s guess is that the closest inspiration for the student was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which features the same long lines of slightly surreal, comic, and sordid description that we see in the student’s work, the same mood of exhausted withdrawal and delusional self-mythologizing.

You’d be doing your students a favor if in your class you used this media event as an opportunity to interpret a profoundly influential and original icon (sure, Ginsberg’s read his Whitman, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud — but, like Henry Miller who read the same stuff, he’s done something new with them) of American political poetry... Along the way, you might make the point that concepts like creativity and originality get flung around pretty freely at places like Brown, and that they’re actually rare and difficult to achieve. Ginsberg knew exactly who his precursors were — he was deeply read in the French surrealist and similar traditions — and American students interested in this line of poetic and social expression should know their precursors too.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

The saddest of university events in September are the suicides of sensitive, displaced, and troubled freshmen. To a new school and city they bring an old weight of personal grief.

Like Allan Oakley Hunter of NYU, their deaths are the impulsive dramatic gestures of the young, rather than the considered, quiet exits of the old. A failed love affair becomes the final intolerable thing, and they jump off of a roof. A fight with their father pushes them over the edge, and they leap from a window.

At UD’s own urban university, as at the very similar NYU, there have been an unsettling number of student suicides over the last few years, with all of the sorrow and self-scrutiny among people on campus that attends them. How can we improve our psychiatric services? Can professors and students be taught to develop an eye for the signs of impending suicide among their students and friends? Is there something about our urban setting which contributes to a sense of alienation?

Hunter was “fascinated with morbidity,” a friend says. In his suicide note, he cited Kurt Cobain. He was “a loner type with a wild look in his eye.” Musical, bookish, independent, he’d missed classes and become disheveled and absent-minded... But none of this is particularly abnormal for an artistic freshman in an intense academic and urban setting, and UD doubts she would have made anything of it... She wouldn’t in any case have known Hunter well enough to detect variations, which is what makes September so risky. An uptick in vulnerability combines with a setting full of strangers.

“Part of suicide’s pain is the elusiveness of any easy answers,” wrote NYU’s president about Hunter in a letter to the campus community.

His words reminded me of “The Suicides,” a poem by Donald Justice. It ends like this:

When the last door had been closed,

You watched, inwardly raging,

For the first glimpse of yourselves,

Approaching, jangling their keys.

Musicians of the black keys,

At last you compose yourselves.

We hear the music raging

Under the lids we have closed.

Justice’s suffocatingly symmetrical final words in these two stanzas suggest the entrapment by the self, the sense of no exit, that, despite its elusiveness, the suicide conveys to the world.

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

Every fall semester is the shock of the new.

The courses repeat; the classrooms don’t change; but every September there’s a jolt.

Partly it’s the surprise of a long summer ending, the sudden intrusion of a social world into my solitude. For months I’ve quietly read and written, my afternoons organized around brewing tea, clipping hedges, and walking the dog. The sense of independence and freedom has been heady, and I don’t give it up easily.

In part it’s the peculiarity of my city. Summer’s a down time for Congress — for news generally — and like a lot of Washingtonians I tend to gauge the intensity of my life by the larger political bustle. July and August here are mainly about tourists plodding through the subway. In September they’re gone, and the long black limousines are suddenly back, blaring by my office on their way to the White House.

Above all, September’s jolt is about the newness of the personalities that present themselves to me among my students. I suppose you could do a typology of George Washington University students if you wanted to; but few of them actually play to type. Each comes at you with a specific blend of energy and intellect, bellicosity and sensitivity.

They get to me.

A little bit of my response to them is self-recognition, the business of being thrown back into earlier versions of oneself. You encounter in a certain sophomore the shy girl trying to wise up and butch up that you were in your sophomore year, and that’s a startling thing.

Much more of it is the ability to perceive youth itself as, year after year, it appears again.

“I’ll be missing Wednesday’s class,” said one of my students to me, in a strange, dazed tone, a few years ago. “My voice professor... Well, you probably heard... She killed herself... There’s a memorial service...”

Yes, I knew one of my colleagues had done that, just as I knew, scanning my student’s face, that I was witnessing in real time her assimilation into actuality. I sensed, sentence to sentence, the erosion of her easy assurance about existence.

A week later, this student again came up to me after class. “You know,” she said, a little embarrassed, “I went to this, uh, group therapy session at the university. Grief counselors for her students and all that... I was appalled... It was so dry, so simplistic, a bunch of buzz words. Actually, I was almost laughing. Don’t these people know how complicated life is? There aren’t easy answers, and it’s stupid to act as if there are... I wanted to tell you, because, you know, these poems we’re reading, they’re difficult because they don’t have answers, and I like that. I like poems that let you feel what it feels like to be confused... I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

Not at all, not at all. Jolting me awake.

Comments