Sunday, February 25, 2007

Birmingham [UK] University Administrators prove themselves to be dolts

Proving, yet again, that you can have a Ph.D. and be a complete dolt [to put it kindly], Birmingham University in Britain has let stand a Ph.D. thesis that has been described - by a reviewer selected by the university itself as blighted by "inaccuracies", "contradictions" and "omissions", and by a "naive" and "sloppy" use of sources.

The Times [of London] Higher Education Supplement reports that Birmingham University has refused to withdraw its imprimatur from a "flawed" PhD thesis that argues that a prominent survivor of Hitler's death camps could have been a Nazi collaborator.

According to the THES:
The thesis, by Charlotte Exon, examines the life and work of Austrian rconductor Rudolph Schwarz, who survived three Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Belsen. After the war, he established a successful career in music in Britain.

Dr Exon poses a hypothesis that Mr Schwarz was a Nazi "sympathiser" or "collaborator" who became "Hitler's willing victim".
[....]
After undertaking a review in the "broadest possible terms" without "forensic scrutiny", the reviewer found that Dr Exon "seems to have simplified or debased her argument by ignoring certain crucial details".

He identified "sloppiness" and "naivete" in the use of primary source material and highlighted "inaccuracies, contradictions and ambiguities".

Simply put, as I told the THES, The university administrators "look like fools."

I guess that the since the reviewer found no evidence of "deliberate mendacity" the University decided to let the thesis stand.

This is complete idiocy. It essentially suggests that a thesis by the likes of a David Irving would be rejected -- because, thanks to the evidence uncovered for my trial, one can easily prove his deliberate mendacity and suppression, manipulation, invention, and distortion of evidence, -- but a thesis by someone who read the so-called "research" [or, better put, "disresearch"] by Irving and his cohorts would be accepted.

Once again university administrators have shown themselves to be lacking an essential part of their autonomy: a backbone.... and maybe a brain.

These administrators make the ones at MIT -- who supported the visit of the so-called rabbis from Neturei Karta as a legitimate "Jewish view" -- look good....

For MIT that less than "half a consolation."

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