University Diaries

Friday Night, Saturday Morning, Part Two.

Nineteen years old, armed with a big gun, out and about at 1:30 AM. Ready, aim, fire. How did Virginia State security let it happen? Does VSU have security?

‘If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs. A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work. They declined to investigate plagiarism concerns and accused his critics of a “vile campaign” to discredit him.’

‘Dr. Arday … worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police. When a scholar from [ ]

Friday Night, Saturday Morning

Twelve years ago, UD expressed amazement at the incredibly, endlessly, violent Virginia State University: Virginia State, where only a few months ago two students were hazed to death, should definitely come with a warning. At a recent event celebrating its athletic conference, its football team beat an opposing quarterback so badly the game that had been scheduled for the [ ]

‘[Edward] Wasserman stressed that a hyperlink doesn’t turn lifted text into original work.’

Duh. But young-man-in-a-hurry Ross Barkan thought he’d give plagiarism via hyperlink a try. It worked for awhile. Eventually some of the writers whose words he lifted got pissed and called him on it. He’s been fired.

‘[The 14 year old’s] charges include…

… aggravated assault with a firearm, disrupting public schools, receiving stolen property, possession of a handgun by someone under 18 and possession of a gun in a school safety zone.’ They grow up so fast!

‘[P]ublic attention has finally moved the psychiatric profession to take steps to address deprescribing.’

Deprescribing. A new word, and not a pretty one; but we can expect to see it a lot as the 17 percent of Americans on antidepressants begin to wonder why it’s so hard to get off of them.

Jason Arday has been found dead.

The New York Times. When I read this observation the other day, it seemed correct. “[Jason] Arday is a serial fabulist who seems quite unwell.”

‘[At] the very moment transparency is called for, the very faculty directory on which Jason Arday was a member has disappeared. As the world tries to make sense of what happened inside the [Cambridge University] Faculty of Education, one of the most basic pieces of information about the school – who actually works there – is suddenly no longer publicly accessible.’

True, true. Access has been denied. But we do know antediluvian Islamist Farah Ahmed works there, and her personal page still allows us access. What about the rest of the Arday/Ahmed/etcetc crew? What else ya got?

Come to my poetry lectures this October.

‘[T]elehealth sites are similar to “pill mills,” where the prescribers generate prescriptions if there is any conceivable reason to do so. “If you can just go to a website and get the drug you’re seeking after a cursory asynchronous questionnaire, it commercializes medicine in a way that’s a little bit dangerous.’

In the dear dead days beyond recall of this blog, we covered paltry neighborhood pill mills as we traced America’s addictions from sea to shining sea. Now, along with education and religion, Mother’s Little Helpers (see pharmed-up poster girl Lindsay Clancy) are going online, so you don’t have to wait all day in squalid parking [ ]