Posts by richard
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Reading this from a distance, it seems very odd. Not only that somone might hope that 50,000 people would take to the streets for the right to hit their kids, but I am trying to make sense of the money involved.
Looking at the Herald, they were talking about a budget of close to $450,000 -- but this is a decent fraction (a third, maybe) of what you would expect to spend running a general election campaign for a decent sized third party -- is there any evidence that the actual spend came close to the $450k they talked about?? You can buy an awful lot of buses and placards for that sort of scratch -- or were they buying TV time as well?
And, for that matter, was this chap doing it all by fronting his own money (since that is a rather large chunk of change to dropping on quixotic quest -- and for all that this guy is a "property manager" he does not seem to have either the wealth or previous appetite for public notoriety of a Bob Jones), or was he more of a front for someone else's money?
PS The website looks crap on Mac/Safari as well. Maybe only windows users want to be beat their kids?
PPS What is up with the footprint thing -- the right to give your kids a good kicking?? Maybe they need a ribbon: pink, red, black are all taken, but maybe some tasteful combination of black and blue??
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This piece by Rosemary McLeod seems very even-handed and humane.
(Although I will spoil it by adding that the inclusion of Alan Duff in the story makes me think that it is just as well Witi never became Sir Witi, so there is no opportunity for the headline "One Knight Out Stealing")
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@Tania
What I’m saying here, I think, and as I said on Beattie’s Blog, I am disinclined to join the others who have so quickly rallied to throw stones at a man who’s novel Whanau was the first ever non children’s book I read as a child. (My step-brother won it as a school prize). Here was a narrative which told my story with all it’s glory and heartache and laughter and tears and violence.
It is a real pity that this incident appears likely to tarnish Ihimaera's overall reputation.
But I think it is also true there was actually a good deal of reticence about this issue when the news first broke, and outside of a few fairly predictable commentators (Holmes, for instance) very few people engaged in public exhibitions of schadenfreude. If anything, the public reaction by the "establishment" was remarkable for its delicacy.
This would probably not have been a full-blown scandal if a) he had not accepted a $50k prize a week after the news broke (and he could have said privately to the Laureate people that perhaps they should revisit the issue in a year), b) Auckland had not conducted a risibly abbreviated "investigation" (and still shows no sign whatsoever that they "get it") c) his publisher had not harped on the "16 instances " and "0.4%" (or whatever it was) when it was far from clear that this was the full extent of the copying -- and it is now very clear than it was not -- and presumably after Ihimaera had reassured them that this was all there was d) he did not have previous lapses in this department.
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@Rich
So if you're a university lecturer, your work must be of "academic" standard? You wouldn't be allowed to write a semi-pornographic scurrilous novel, for instance?
It appears that Ihimaera himself asked the university to adjudicate this issue, and the university accepted jurisdiction -- and since he is paid to teach novel writing, the writing of his own novels is probably something his employers have a legitimate interest in.
I agree that if a chemistry lecturer was writing (say) Mills and Boon novels under a pen name, it is far from clear that any plagiarism in these would be an issue for the university. (Other than as a matter of "bringing into disrepute", if they have such a clause in their contracts.)
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Auckland Uni gets Witi's royalties and pays him a salary in return?
I have never heard of academic contracts that would garnish book royalties (although very few academic books earn enough royalties for this to be an issue). Most (all?) places in the US do require you to assign patents to the university, and will then split the resulting revenues, if any, on some designated scale. I assume New Zealand is the same.
I shouldn't think. The formula my university works (and I suspect others do the same) is that you can earn up to 10% of your salary from other income sources. Not that there is any way of verifying nor monitoring this.
I wonder, for example, about all the $$$ Dennis Dutton must have earned from Arts & Letters Daily, when most of his contribution was probably done in university time.
10% of salary sounds a little harsh -- I work in the US, and the limit is based on time. From memory, it is one day a week, but I have never gotten close to it.
I am required to fill in an annual disclosure of income from outside work, and directorships / consultancy that might amount to a conflict of interest with my academic work. Unfortunately this form is always exceedingly short :-)
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I am communicating directly with staff and students on the matter concerning Professor Witi Ihimaera which has received considerable media publicity. Much of the public comment has been ill-informed and made in ignorance of the facts. This is notwithstanding our explanations to the media of how this matter was handled and the procedures involved.
Those pesky media. Just won't listen.
On 3 November, Professor Ihimaera alerted the University to claims of plagiarism against him which were being investigated by the Listener. In accordance with the University's "Guidelines for the Conduct of Research (Part 2, Procedures for Dealing with Concerns of Misconduct in Research)" his Head of Department, Professor Tom Bishop, then conducted a preliminary assessment of the allegations. This found that a small amount of material in Professor Ihimaera's novel, The Trowenna Sea, had been published without attribution or acknowledgement. On the basis of his review of the material of concern and Professor Ihimaera's response, Professor Bishop concluded that the material had been inadvertently included in the novel without proper acknowledgement and that the instances were not sufficient to constitute misconduct as defined in these Procedures.
And at no point did the good professor think to ask (or, heaven forbid, check himself) whether the unattributed passages accounted for the full extent of the copying.
This is the part I can't understand. I have been involved with investigations of academic dishonesty (never as a potential perpetrator, I hasten to add) and I simply cannot imagine that the investigation would not include checking for extra, unattributed material. (And, no matter how smart and how diligent Jolisa might be, what are the odds that anyone would catch all the plagiarized passages while writing an article on deadline?)
It is hard not to suspect that Auckland rushed this process because they knew that the Listener was running a story on it, and if they had conducted a properly diligent investigation they could not have "exonerated" Ihimaera quickly enough to chime in with the statement from Penguin.
Ironically, in doing so -- by giving even the appearance of a rushed job -- they have probably done Ihimaera (and themselves) far more harm than if they had simply said, "We're looking into it, get back to us when we're done."
Moreover, I would give a lot to see the emails that must have flown around the Auckland campus that week, and to learn at what point the University's public affairs people because involved in the discussion of what (should be) a purely academic and dispassionate investigation.
But if this is Auckland's idea of how to "manage" a PR debacle (and that might have included some advice about whether to accept a $50k prize while you should still be at looking at least publicly contrite) it is almost as worrying a symptom of organizational malaise as the initial investigation.
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ur, 'great giant whales' eh?
He says that in Whale Rider?
I remember spotting "giant leviathan" -- I wondered at the time what a petite but perfectly formed leviathan would look like (and for all that I enjoyed the book).
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Wondered how long it would take the Great Lobachevsky to make a showing here.
Pynchon certainly knows how to write a historical novel -- perhaps The Trowenna Sea v2 will open with the lines "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." No-one would spot it, surely? (Except our resident comparatists, I guess.)
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At least he read the label (other than to check it WAS actually wine, I suppose).
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Replied to Giovanni, but accidentally did so on the other thread...
I'd buy the "exciting new development in literary technique" explanation if it had come out first, before the "dog-ate-my-homework" explanation.
On top of that (apart from the plagiarism) no-one who has read this book has found it be radically different from countless other historical novels. Thomas Pynchon it is not.