To do the useful thing,
to say the courageous thing,
to contemplate the beautiful thing:
that is enough for one man's life.
T. S. Eliot
The Justice Department and Anti-Trust Activity:
Weapons of Mass(es') Ignorance: Thumbs DOWN
Sirius and XM Radio almost went under and needed capital from a white knight before their merger was approved. Peter Schiff below references Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. The long distance wars. So now the Justice Department is looking at broadband carriers, data download quotas, and competition among the carriers themselves and other content providers (e.g., Hulu and Netflix). First of all, you have analogous considerations here as to the Sirius-XM merger: multiple modes of content delivery. Second, as usual, all the Justice Department does is introduce uncertainty into business plans, which is unproductive. The one thing we can say for sure is that whatever the Justice Department does will be too little, too late, and wrong.
Ms. Angela Corey: This Blog
Has the First Amendment Behind It
The special prosecutor in the Zimmerman/Martin case, Angela Corey, seems to have particularly thin skin--which is not good for any trial lawyer. The prosecutor's office is playing hard ball with the Zimmerman's and seems to be out for its pound of flesh; the most recent example is Mrs. Zimmerman's arrest on perjury charges. Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, a criminal law professor for decades, has been sharply critical of the prosecution's apparently intentional failure to advise the Court on the matter of Zimmerman's bloody injuries in the affidavit in support of her allegation of second-degree murder. Dershowitz notes that Corey has attempted to intimidate him by complaining to Harvard, threatening to bring him up in front of a professional board, and by threatening to sue for libel or slander.
Ms. Corey seems to be employing what I call the "Pelosi approach to prosecution", i.e., the judge has to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder before he gets to see the rest of the salient information.
My Choice for This Month's
Faces of Lawsuit Abuse Most Ridiculous Lawsuit:
Student is Dropped From Honors Class for Cheating
Talk about oxymorons: honors and cheating... This is a sore spot with me. A young man in an honors class copied off a classmate's assignment and turned it in as his own work. The school decided to throw the book at him, not only giving him an F on the assignment, but bouncing him out of the honors program. The father is trying to exploit what he sees as inconsistencies in published policies (e.g., exceptions to zero tolerance). See video below; other reports can be found here and here.
It reminds me a cheating incident in one of my classes back at UTEP, although the penalty in my case as a professor was less severe. I may have written about it in prior posts. I was teaching a database management class. Many MIS classes often have group projects and individual assignments. My syllabus had an unambiguous academic honesty policy: for individualized assignments, you had to turn in your own work, and from my standpoint, if you aided and abetted another student, you were just as culpable: I wasn't going to divine whom did what work. I think homework was 10% of the grade; I believe that I gave a half dozen or so assignments and dropped the lowest homework assignment grade in computing the grade. The point is even if you did badly on one assignment, it wasn't likely to affect the final grade.
A relational database table is like a spreadsheet where columns have specific names, e.g., CUSTOMER_ID, CUSTOMER_NAME, STREET_ADDRESS, CITY, STATE, ZIP,... You retrieve rows of data in a standard query language called SQL. For example, to obtain Texas customer name and zip code from the CUSTOMER table, you would type:
select customer_name, zip from customer where state ='TX';
If you wanted to report out all the data in CUSTOMER, you could use the wildcard character '*' instead of individual column names, e.g., select * from customer;
You could alter the appearance of the table by typing relevant column names in any desired sequence.
In the homework assignment in question on writing SQL queries, we were dealing with a 15-column table, so one of the obvious first questions I had was to write a query listing all the data in, say, table XYZ. I obviously expected them to write select * from xyz;
When I got to RA's paper, I found what seemed to be a passive aggressive, sadistic answer; the student not only decided to write out the 15 column names but did so in RANDOM order. This forced me to tediously double-check to ensure all 15 column names were there. I finished grading the answer, baffled that the student did that. A few papers later, I came upon KL's paper. Incredulously, I saw the same bizarre approach. I went back to RA's paper and put the two assignments side by side. The EXACT same random sequence of 15 names. The probability of that happening by chance is near-zero. Bingo! The rest of the assignment is word for word the same across papers.
At the beginning of next lecture, I reminded students of my academic honesty policy and said that two (unidentified) students had cheated on the assignment. In an unbelievable twist, KL incriminates herself in front of the whole class, "Is it me?" I said that I would deal with the students in question privately outside of class. She started screaming at me, "You can't do anything to me; they won't let you. I'm a straight-A student. Nobody will ever believe you!" I said, "I think this is something we need to discuss outside of class!"
At this point, KL is out of control and throwing a full-fledged temper tantrum, "NO! We're going to talk about it RIGHT NOW!" I have never seen or heard of this happening in any classroom. What am I supposed to do--call campus security? Dismiss the class? I'm leaning towards the latter when the coed sitting next to her says, "I think you should talk outside of class." KL now launches a tirade at her intervening class member. Then another student says the same thing. A third and a fourth join in. At this point, KL is intimidated by peer pressure and sits silently through the remainder of lecture, angrily glaring a hole right through me.
Things settled down and the rest of the lecture went well. I was planning on lunch with a couple of MIS faculty colleagues and had all but forgotten the kickoff of the lecture; I went down to my office to drop off my class lecture notes and text when I heard my office door slam violently behind me. It's a hostile KL staring straight at me. I insisted that she open my office door; my policy was no coed in my office with the door closed. A single white male professor and a coed? With ideological feminism run amok in academia, who is ever going to believe me if she alleges, say, a sexual impropriety?
KL refused. She then starts shrieking at the top of her voice, "I am not a cheater!" I now see colleagues coming out of their offices and looking in the direction of my office, as I go to open up the door. I then tell her I want her to leave. She, of course, refuses.
At this point, I feel I have no choice but to abandon my office. As I join my colleagues waiting down the hall, I see my department chair, with whom I was at odds (beyond the scope of this post), heading into my office to talk to KL.
At some point the Dean of Students office gets involved, I believe at KL's initiative for her "due process" rights. Here's all you need to know about the process: the Dean of Students Office never initiated any contact with me about the salient issues in the case; I never met with anyone from that office; at no time did they personally interview me about the salient facts; they never requested a copy of materials; I was deliberately excluded from the hearings and/or briefed on what was going on; they never asked me to respond to any allegations made by KL or others during the process (in other words, it's Barack Obama's version of "fair and balanced").
There were two major interim developments:
(1) I got a bizarre phone call from the Dean of Students Office, with the Dean--whom, again, I never met in person--screaming at me I "better not do it"; I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. And then he starts this "Don't play games with me; you know exactly what you did." Oh, great; it's like being in the doghouse with a girlfriend without the fringe benefits. It was like pulling teeth, but what I eventually dragged out of him was a pure smear from KL whom claimed that I had threatened to blacklist her with prospective employers. How gullible was this piece of work in the administration? IT NEVER HAPPENED. I've never threatened anyone in my life. This corrupt administration had taken a baseless allegation at face value without even minimal due professional courtesy of first asking me whether it happened: this lady had decided, not all that surprisingly, that the best defense is a good offense, i.e., trying to make me the issue, not her conduct.
What motive did I have to threaten this lady? She had cheated, and she was appealing an open-and-shut case. In fact, I had no industry contacts (beyond the UH Research Center while I was writing my dissertation), and no former student had ever asked to use me as a reference. I never had contact with KL outside of the classroom, except for the temper tantrum I mentioned above.
Eventually I get to the bottom of the smear: it seemed that KL, before the cheating incident, had listed ME as a reference on her employment applications--without my knowledge or consent. It was insane; this was the one and only class she had with me; I don't even think we had reached midway through the course at the time. Now, of course, she was in a state of panic about what I might do or say if one of her potential employers contacted me. Eventually I got a postcard from one company, Eastman Kodak, which noted KL had listed me as a reference and asked for some brief feedback about her. I contacted the Dean of Students Office and then sent Eastman Kodak a response simply acknowledging I knew the student and had no further comments.
(2) I got some inside information about what was going on in the Dean of Students Office. I had an Indian student whom also was in another class with KL. In fact, she was heading his group project in that class. He told me that she had solicited him as a witness, figuring that he would back up her story. Her other witnesses claimed that I had told them that they could work on homework assignments together. (Absolutely false.) He started contradicting the lies, and he said that the Dean of Students had started arguing with him over what he was saying! He also told me that the Dean was starting to get exasperated with KL at times, saying, "Oh, you're guilty, you're guilty...." [I guess compelling physical proof of the assignments and a classroom confession weren't enough for him....] I thanked him for setting the record straight, and he looked at me with annoyance and said that he didn't do it for me but for the truth.
The real reason he had come to see me was that when he turned in the hearings, KL retaliated against her class project traitor by locking him out of their project. The student was hoping that I could help with this dispute, but I had zero leverage in that class. I advised him to talk to his professor.
Eventually the Dean of Students Kangaroo Court of Appeals ruled almost exactly the same argument as the plaintiff's father is quoted below, citing "evidence of confusion" about my policies and then finding in favor of KL and RA and demanding that I restore a grade of full academic merit for the assignment. (If the Dean was a tool, one might say he was that tool that spreads manure in the garden.) [Do lawyers simply engage in boilerplate defenses of dishonest people?]
Let's just say that as a libertarian, I believe in the doctrine of professor nullification when it comes to the unconscionable decisions of corrupt university administrations. To paraphrase President Andrew Jackson, "The Dean of Students has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" There is an academic equivalent to "shoot, shovel and shut up."
KL and RA promptly celebrated their empty victory by cheating on a second homework assignment together, which, of course, I rubbed in the Dean of Students' face; the students and Dean of Students once again were in a state of denial, but the evidence was compelling (the assignment included a diagram where no other student's was similar--and all their other answers were also clones of each other). As far as I'm concerned, the university administration bore equal responsibility for subsequent incidents of academic dishonesty.
Jack Berghouse and his wife filed a lawsuit last week against the school district claiming their son’s due process rights were violated. The suit said the school’s policies regarding punishment for cheating are vague and contradictory and shouldn’t be enforced.
HT The Heartland Institute Lawsuit Abuse Fortnightly
Relevant Lawsuit Abuse Links:
http://www.atra.org
http://www.alec.org
http://business.pacificresearch.org/civil-justice-and-legal-reform
http://www.calactx.com/
http://www.halt.org
http://www.iamlawsuitabuse.com
http://www.overlawyered.com
http://www.fed-soc.org
http://www.manhattan-institute.org
http://www.wlf.org
http://www.sickoflawsuits.org
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "An American Girl"
