No Noose is Good Noose Remember the noose incident at Columbia's Teacher's College? (A noose was hung on the office doorknob of an African-American professor. Pro-forma protests followed.)

At the time, I suggested on this blog that the incident was faked.

It looks increasingly like that is the case: Columbia has found that the professor, Madonna G. Constantine, has committed multiple acts of plagiarism, and was being investigated for them at the time of the noose incident.

The college, in statements to the faculty and the news media, said an 18-month investigation into charges against the professor, Madonna G. Constantine, had determined there were “numerous instances in which she used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years.”

...The college said Dr. Constantine was being penalized, but did not say what the penalty was. A spokeswoman for the college, Marcia Horowitz, said Teachers College did not have set rules governing plagiarism or how it should be punished.

[A teaching college doesn't have rules on plagiarism and its punishment? Note to Columbia: Fix that.]

Like state senator Clay Davis on The Wire, Constantine, caught in the act, unabashedly throws down the race card.

Dr. Constantine, in an e-mail message to faculty and students on Wednesday, called the investigation “biased and flawed,” and said it was part of a “conspiracy and witch hunt by certain current and former members of the Teachers College community.”

“I am left to wonder whether a white faculty member would have been treated in such a publicly disrespectful and disparaging manner,” she wrote.

She added, “I believe that nothing that has happened to me this year is coincidental, particularly when I reflect upon the hate crime I experienced last semester involving a noose on my office door. As one of only two tenured black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted.”

It's so sick and cynical, it's almost brilliant: the same people who investigated her for academic misconduct....want to hang her!

Mr. Giacomo [Constantine's lawyer] said that despite objections and further documentation, the college did not change its position [on the plagiarism accusation]. He said he now considered it “not a stretch of the imagination” to suspect the noose was “an additional way of intimidating my client.”

When told of these comments, Ms. Horowitz, the spokeswoman for the college, said, “Accusations that the college had anything to do with hanging the noose are totally absurd and totally untrue.”

Professor Constantine does not lack for chutzpah. But has she no sense of decency?
  ¶ 7:51 AM