Shots in the Dark

The New York Post takes a shot at Teachers College—and Columbia—for their handling of the Madonna Constantine affair.

By retaining Constantine as a tenured professor, and by keeping the alleged “sanctions” applied against her secret, Teachers has demonstrated that it cares as little about its reputation as Columbia cares about its own.

Now, all the right-wingers in New York (a small but enthusiastic group) like to tee off on Columbia, which does have some nutty lefties but really just happens to be a high-profile university in a big media town. (Imagine if Harvard were in New York. Yikes.)

But the Constantine situation is tricky. If Constantine did, as I believe, fake the noose incident in order to negate anticipated accusations of plagiarism, then she has put Columbia in a very awkward position.

After all, the incident has already prompted a number of demonstrations, some involving local African-American politicians. And Columbia, which is moving to develop its land in west Harlem, can’t afford a racial controversy—something that Constantine surely knew if and when she hung a noose on her office door. If the university fired her, you can imagine what would happen—it’d be the Bonfire of the Vanities, or Tawana Brawley, all over again.

At the same time, it’s appalling that someone who has committed dozens of instances of plagiarism, sometimes stealing from her own students—and not just words, but ideas as well—should be allowed to continue teaching anywhere at Columbia.

A sad consequence of Ms. Constantine’s work on her own behalf, I suspect, is that colleges across the country may become more reluctant to hire African-American professors: Because if a blatant plagiarist can invent a race-based incident to successfully avoid being fired, then colleges may be more cautious about hiring black professors, on the grounds that if they ever need to fire the person, they won’t be able to…..

Which means really that the same people who picketed on Ms. Constantine’s behalf now ought to be picketing against her.

And which will surely make conservatives say that, well, that’s what you get when you hire someone because of his or her race, rather than on the merits.

What a tragic mess.

Here’s what I think will happen: Columbia will have to pay Ms. Constantine to make her go away. And she will take the money and run.

According to techcrunch.com, the number of Americans visiting Facebook has plateaued in recent months, and dropped by about 800,000 in January….

This would fit with my theory that Facebook has two big problems: People really don’t trust its privacy protection, especially whenever you allow another app to access your information.

And probably more important, there’s just too much crap on Facebook: Funwalls, Superwalls, Entourages, Movie quizzes, passing along karma….every time you log in, someone is (often inadvertently) asking you to join some new group. It grows tedious fast….

The Clinton campaign appears to be trying to suggest that Barack Obama is, in fact, a terrorist, by circulating a five-year-0ld picture of Obama dressed in traditional Somali garb while on a trip to Africa.

For the Clintons, the more things change, the more they stay the same…..

The Crimson reports that there’s a new gossip website at Harvard, “Gossip Geek,” though it doesn’t actually bother to link to the site, and the print version doesn’t even list the URL.

Yours truly has no such reticence. Here’s Gossip Geek.

Seems pretty tame to me, but some students apparently are up in arms, complaining about the photos posted on the site.

… acting Dean of the College David R. Pilbeam said the administration is “making efforts” to protect students from the site.

Secretary of the Administrative Board Jay L. Ellison has recommended that those affected file a police report with Harvard University Police Department in order to expedite administrative response.

“I think these [blogs] are bad, and bad for the community,” said Ellison in an e-mailed statement. “Indeed, even if what is said is true there is never enough context in these type of things to fully understand what happened.”

A police report? Harvard really wants to promote the idea that posting a photo of someone in a public place is a crime? You can hear the laughter all the way from Stanford.

That idea would have interesting implications for Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard hopes will be a huge donor one day…..

More to the point, this is one of those times when Harvard and its students want to have it both ways: The university wants its celebrity status, promotes its celebrity status, markets its celebrity status…but then, when people respond by treating Harvard and its denizens as if they are celebrities (Gossip Geek=the TMZ of Harvard), university officials say, well, we don’t want that part of celebrity….

When you are the most famous university in the world, and you spend enormous effort and money trying to achieve and retain that status—or when you attend Harvard for fundamentally that reason—you can not have it both ways.

Thanks to “the surge,” the Iraq war has become almost a non-issue in this presidential campaign. We’ve been told so often that “the surge is working” that we’ve all pretty much come to believe it, and the ramifications have been significant: If the surge weren’t working, one has to think that John McCain, its greatest defender outside the White House, would not be his party’s imminent nominee.

But two pieces of journalism—one interesting, one important—suggest it’s time for us to reconsider the success of the surge.

In Slate, Michael Kinsley argues that the surge was presented to the American people as a way to bring soldiers home, and by that standard—George Bush’s standard—it’s a failure.

President Bush laid down the standard of success when he announced the surge more than a year ago: “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.”

…Lately, though, Gen. Petraeus has come up with another zenlike idea: He calls it a “pause.” And the administration has signed on, meaning that the total number of American troops in Iraq will remain at 130,000 for an undetermined period.

In other words, the president has played us all for suckers.

In Rolling Stone, an Arabic-speaking correspondent named Nir Rosen writes an enlightening story, “The Myth of the Surge,” explaining that the surge essentially means we are arming both sides of the divided country, the Sunnis and the Shiites, thereby laying the foundation for the civil war that we’re trying to avoid.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government.

Even before the Americans leave, these militias are taking justice into their own hands—and we’re giving them the weapons and the money to do it.

The article also prints one of the most depressing photos I’ve seen in some time: two grinning American soldiers, standing next to a beheaded Iraqi, propped upright, whose head they’ve plopped back on his neck.

We all know that there are tens of thousands of physically wounded Americans coming back from this war. If we included mental health issues in the roster of the wounded, how large would that number grow to be?

The Crimson may joke, but it sounds like the presence of Vivid Entertainment actresses (i.e., porn stars) Monique Alexander and Savanna Sampson certainly made it sex week for some Yale guys….

Here is Savanna Sampson speaking on opera—”so overwhelming and so big”—she actually sounds pretty smart!

The Columbia Spectator has Madonna Constantine’s statement:

Dear Teachers College Community:

I am outraged by the President’s memo that summarized the outcomes of a “neutral” investigation that I used the work of others without appropriate attribution. The premature, vindictive, and mean-spirited action taken by the administration to release a statement to the faculty regarding the results of this biased and flawed investigation reflects not only a profound lack of sensitivity and due process, but it also may have sufficiently “poisoned the well” for any fair and objective review of the matter.

Wow—that is clever. The first investigation was so flawed that it actually makes any further investigation impossible. That’s pretty much the definition of two birds with one stone right there.

IvyGate’s take on this is pretty funny:

Now, we love damning the man as much as the next 20-something pipsqueak, but when Columbia takes a fine-toothed comb to your oeuvre and finds five years’ worth of academic dishonesty? Might be time to cut your losses, maybe update your resume and check out the listings on monster.com.

The only difference is that Madonna Constantine isn’t a twenty-something pipsqueak, but a tenured African-American woman who may have invented a horrific racial incident in order to portray herself, in her words, as the victim of a “witch-hunt.”

The New York Sun reports that a colleague and a student of Madonna Constantine’s have written letters supporting her against the accusation that she is a multiple plagiarist.

(And—and this has gotten little attention—she allegedly ripped off her own students.)

“These accusations are not believable,” Ms. [Barbara] Wallace wrote. “I absolutely believe this is just an attempt to besmear her name and reputation.”

Ms. Wallace noted in her letter that she is the only other black female professor with tenure at the school.

The injection of race is predictable, heartbreaking, and entirely unnecessary. Because of course, accusations of plagiarism, a crime that has nothing to do with race, don’t have to be taken on faith; people can look at the evidence and decide for themselves.

I suspect that for legal reasons Columbia can’t release its report on Madonna Constantine—but she could release it herself. (Don’t hold your breath.)

“The truth is that I am not a liar, nor am I a cheater,” Ms. Constantine wrote in a two-page statement released yesterday that accused the president of Teachers College, Susan Fuhrman, of “blackmail and intimidation.“

Release the report, Professor Constantine….