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Conn Corrigan, a J-School grad writing for the New York Sun, is reporting that Madonna Constantine, she of noose-hanging incident and now-confirmed plagiarism fame, is being suspended indefinitely from Teachers College after an investigation concluded that despite her claims to the contrary, she did, in fact, plagiarize the works of two former doctoral candidates and a former colleague. Letter sent to TC faculty and obtained by the Sun after the jump.
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57 Comments
@anonymous To Ms. Constantine:
One of the most important life lessons we all have to learn as we move through life is: Move on.
When you began work at Teachers College there were many problems at Teachers College and in your department that festered long before your first day. Some were financial. Others included ideological and personality clashes among faculty and a pointless collage of courses that do not prepare students for actual work in their field. The most misleading and deceptive was the “appearance†of an enlightened, mature and evolved staff and curriculum that supposedly reflected this. The problems were several. These problems needed to be resolved from the top down. But, when school leadership and administration do not know how to resolve problems, and do not listen to what needs to be changed to the benefit of all tied to a program or school, things get uglier and can take a turn for the worst.
Perhaps the most important thing you have to share with others is that no matter how many hurdles you jump and how hard you work in any work setting, someone will always conspire against you. This may be due to jealousy, inept, incompetent leadership, a grudge at having you around, or about the game of being in an environment where the rules are constantly changing to the benefit of those who hold the power and the cards. I am sure that in your work toward your credentials that you were told indirectly if not directly that plagiarism is not allowed and could cost one one’s credibility, reputation and career. One’s hard work and sacrifice to get to a certain point could become lost and destroyed. The funny thing is that TC’s supposedly open outward message of diversity does not reflect TC’s actual nature. The old guard has the power and is intent on keeping the power it holds.
Teachers College has a casual concern for development of students into skilled, knowledgeable professionals. Its objective is to stay afloat financially, which is every schools’ objective. Your old department, the Counseling department’s main purpose and point is to be an additional source of revenue for the school. Period. Point blank. Pity for past, present and future students who do not see this at the door. It showed a “tolerance†for “diversity initiatives†provided that some money could be made from them. Again, the point was money. Revenue. You might have come to know this as the years passed and your own eyes opened.
Despite the distress and sheer aggravation in your experience at TC, there is a bright side: you no longer have to deal with the fraud, sabotage, and hypocrisy that is Teachers College. Your eyes are now open. Good for you.
@wow * no amount of talking about our feelings (or whatever the hell Kelley suggested) will change that, and the very idea is ridiculous.
@wow Anthony Kelley is an idiot. his article is such bullsh*t it’s not even funny.
so you’re saying that she plagiarized because she feels so pressured to publish? well, that’s no one’s fault but her own. there’s a reason there’s survival of the fittest. if she can’t hack it, she doesn’t deserve to have the job, and no amount of talking about our feelings or whatever the hell Kelley suggested is ridiculous.
“…we should be making special efforts to extend compassion to her and those who feel wounded as a result of her actions. We should be having community dialogues to emphasize the importance of academic honesty. At the same time, we should critique the environment of competitiveness here at Columbia that only breeds dishonesty and mistrust.”
why should we extend compassion to those who knowingly lie and cheat for personal gain? this is not okay, why pretend that it is? frankly, the only thing the “wounded” want is justice. this is not a race issue; she plagiarized, plain and simple, and she deserves to pay the consequences. and no one needs a community discussion to talk about academic honesty. it’s black & white: plagiarism is wrong, only submit your own work. students are taught about this in middle school for goodness sakes! so if you’re such an idiot that you don’t know that plagiarism is wrong, you shouldn’t have graduated high school, much less be a professor at one of the nation’s top institutions.
and we should “critique the the environment of competitiveness here at Columbia that only breeds dishonesty and mistrust”?
WTF? no we shouldn’t. if you can’t handle the competition, then why come to an Ivy League school? and competition does not breed “dishonesty and mistrust”. dishonest people breed “dishonesty and mistrust”. cheaters people breed “dishonesty and mistrust”. liars breed “dishonesty and mistrust”. and this “dishonesty and mistrust” is amplified when the one at fault is a professor, someone who should be setting an example for the students.
and amplified further when idiots like Anthony Kelley spout ludicrous comments about how we should pity the wrong-doers and advocate “black radical feminism”.
that is the last thing this country needs. at this point, people are so worried about not appearing racist towards blacks that they have begun acting racist towards whites (i am not white). she’s an idiot. if she was white, asian, pacific islander, or anything else, she’d still be an idiot. this is not a race issue, it’s simply a matter of wrong and right. she’s wrong.
@Anonymous Who cares – did anyone actually read the stuff she published anyway?
@son of BC '83 haha, probably not
@bah Judging from this thread, it doesn’t look like there’ll be mass protests in this case. Maybe 3 people will go on hunger strike.
@disagreed i think the black student union/spartacist league/MEALAC etc would’ve held protests. the typical crowd, you know?
@clg i saw right through this corrupt woman from day one. thank god columbia finally came to its senses and got rid of her!
@Columbia always had its sense, I think–they were waiting for summer to roll around to finally do this. That way they can avoid the mass protests.
@Anonymous Despite the focus on race, this is not about race. It is about plagiarism. Two noted historians were found to be plagiarists:
Doris Kearns Goodwin & Stephen Ambrose. Both are White. Goodwin denied it http://www.slate.com/?id=2061056 and Ambrose apologized and tried to explain it away. This goes on more than people realize with noted authors. Remember Frey and his book “A Million Little Pieces?” Race is a distraction in this case.
http://www.slate.com/?id=2060618
@so? neither attempted to rig a crime and pretend to be the victim afterward
@Columbian Anyone else notice a sea change in the tenor of comments around here whenever non-affiliates post?
@Remember that a lot of us are home for the summer, so we don’t get the little crown next to our post even if we normally would during the school year.
@Columbian #2 I agree. It’s bizarre. Though I’m sure many of these people are students posting from home, I sense that a larger proportion than usual are non-Columbians.
@come on I personally don’t agree with the angle that Anthony Kelly takes on issues of race and view his pieces to be intellectually uninteresting (although I don’t like dissing on people in anonymous forums), but are you really going to tell me that Christien Tompkins “one-dimensional” columns on race are not thought-provoking? As a white person, I have really looked forward to reading his work even when I do not agree with all of his conclusions. What is wrong with a person of color writing about issues of race which are taboo to discuss openly but condition social relationships both at Columbia and our society?
@plop Academia is a bastion of privilege for minorities and this woman simply took those privileges too far. Good riddance.
@Aristophanes Ward Churchill…Madonna Constantine… tin demagogues, hollow candy bunnies, small minded individuals who turned their own little corner of acceptable hate into a bully pulpit in a classroom. Sad people who ran out of original things to say and, since they couldn’t wait for Chomsky’s next book, had to steal the work of others.
Good riddance.
@we care about this because it is justice. Simple, sweet justice.
After being caught doing something illegal, she could have fessed up, or at least fought it quietly. But she didn’t.
She injected false claims of racism in an attempt to avoid the consequences. This, truly, is despicable. There are real people who have legitimate issues with discrimination and racism, and for Constantine to cry wolf like this, it does not help the future credibility of those with real issues.
@hmm Not quite sure why so many people give a shit about this (unless you feel affirmative action was the reason you got rejected from Yale).
@because we’re undergrads. and we like to think our opinions matter.
@Anonymous sorry, cml can only be an imposter. tis i the true, original, the one and only bbsl…
@Anonymous What bothers me is the fact that this twit seems to have gotten away with the noose ruse (which she undoubtedly perpetrated upon herself as an evasive maneuver) without question. Couldn’t somebody ask her to willingly submit to a polygraph to gauge her credibility on the supposed event???
@Hmm Could this be CML? He’s the original Big Bad Seattle Lad.
@Wondering Is it just me or does she bear a striking resemblance to Rev. Al Sharpton? :lol:
@rod I’d wager a year’s pay that she hung the noose herself. It’s way obvious that this woman has no character.
@Interloper She DID get, I hope, what she deserves. Nothing lower than a thief.
@Just wondering... maybe the noose was left by one of the hard-working writers whose work she ripped off
@Ellis She got cought now let her pay the price. Im glad she is on her way out. No matter what her color a cheat is still a cheat. Put her out on her ear she earned this one.
@Don Imus So this woman’s out of a job?
What color is she? Black?
Well, there you go.
@!!!!! Down with the Spec! Viva el Participante! Constantine was fired because she is black! Would a white professor be suspended after ripping off two students? Do I detect a hate crime?
Rabblerabblerabble.
@Ellis You’re a fool! This is not a “Hate crime”. The stupid bitch got cought stealing intelectual property. At the very least it’s Justice. Now she can be publicly and nationaly humiliated in the court of public opinion.
@wow you don’t understand sarcasm and you can’t spell “caught.” Are you cc ’11?
@Me again *resident
@... I still don’t think Anthony is to blame. If his stuff is really that far beyond the norm, blame the moronic editors at Spectator for allowing it in the paper.
@Well Anthony is still an idiot, but I agree that the opinion editor who gave him a column in the first place is just as guilty. The same goes for whoever hired Chrietien Tompkins. Maybe their hiring was meant to rebut the idiotic claims of the Blue and White two years ago that the Spec is a racist institution. It’s good to have columnists with a full range of ideological views. For instance, we had a conservative (albeit not crazy conservative) in Chris Kulawik, and a redident crazy leftist in David Judd. It would be nice to have a black columnist who is not completely one-dimensional like Kelley or Tompkins and doesn’t sound off on race or racial issues all the time; seriously, that’s all those two ever wrote about.
@Point of fact didn’t Anthony once write about the joys of under-performing and Columbia’s unhealthy obsession with, you know, quality?
He’s ridiculous (though I like Christien)
@what? Had no one read that column before? Calling Kelley dumb is soooo January!
@praise the lord amen
@here we go affirmative action at its best. no way she’d have that position otherwise, and it’s incredible how long it’s taken for TC to make this decision – any other prof would have been gone long ago
@... http://www.wikicu.com/Special:Contributions/GSstudent
@... Leave Anthony the fuck alone. I’m tired of people coming on here to bash him just because he brave enough to write what he believes in. If you don’t like what he has to say, write a letter to the editor of Spectator. Anonymously calling him “dumb” and “batshit” on a blog comment thread accomplishes nothing.
@umm I’m sorry but Anthony is batshit. So is Cristein Tompkins but Anthony verges on the comical. Did you read some of the other shit he wrote? Anyone who precedes a paragraph with “Personally, as an advocate of black radical feminism” is pretty batshit.
@alum Seconded. Anthony is definitely batshit. Christien Tompkins ranks up there with him.
@also recent alum Bravery has has nothing to do with it. This is plainly stupidity and delusion.
@batshit? After reading that article, it’s clear that a bat’s colon contains more properly functioning brain cells than the author’s head. Please, leave give batshit the dignity it deserves.
@Agreed, but this is the bwog. Everybody’s been called batshit or some derivative at some point by some of the many classy readers of this publication. I’ve been called batshit by people I don’t know. To be fair, I’ve probably called people batshit too. I’m just nicer about it.
@yay there is justice in the world. Can’t wait till they throw her in jail for noosing her own office. Who could believe someone else hung did it? Hell, it’d take a titanium noose to support her weight.
@Structural Racism I win again!
@Anonymous Everything is racism!
@Makes me Want this kid suspended indefinitely too:
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/29730
“Imagine a forum in which Professor Constantine and her accusers engage in the life-sustaining practice of dialogue, actively listening to each other’s concerns and extending heart-felt compassion in understanding each other’s pain. Imagine the reconciliation that could arise from such a space. Imagine the impact such a forum would have on our community. Instead of just giving lip-service to the idea of dialogue, we would be demonstrating its importance and effectiveness, even when it is difficult and uncomfortable. Imagine an end to the lies. Imagine embracing truth. Imagine healing.”
@Anonymous Yes, yes, Anthony Kelley is dumb and batshit.
@francesca white that is sappy and ridiculous. this chick below me can defend her boyfriend all she wants, but the truth is that its childish sentimentality does not even help her case. what would this bleeding heart columbia kid say about all the TC students under similar and worse conditions who fucking manned up and delivered their own work, for better or worse. his vapid lingo typical of a gender studies major (i.e. dialogue, conversation…this means nothing) is an insult to all the WOMEN who worked harder and received no special recognition aside from their hard-earned degrees. There’s two sides to every story–it’s easy to play pussy and emote for the down-and-out but the bottom line is that real students did real original work that would be cheapened by her membership in the class. like a virgin, Madonna deserved to get fucked.
god i’m good.
@Jeff “his vapid lingo typical of a gender studies major (i.e. dialogue, conversation…this means nothing)”
god you’re a lonely bitch.
@Anonymous I love those first few sentences: “In fact, no one aside from Teachers College Professor Madonna Constantine will ever know whether or not she actually committed plagiarism.”
People don’t know shit for 100% sure! Yo, somebody just owned the entire American justice system!
@hmmm actually, it would be a pretty entertaining monologue. i think it is a good idea.
@Anonymous Agreed with above. Her histrionics, outright lies and strawman nonsense will not be missed.
@Thank God Good riddance.