Word: suskind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cheating is not endemic," says Johns Hopkins Dean Sigmund Suskind. "It's epidemic. My colleagues all over agree." Yale Dean Eva Balogh describes it as "rampant." At Lehigh University, a telephone poll shows that fully 47% of the students have cheated on exams, and at the University of Southern California, the student newspaper reports that as many as 40% have resorted to plagiarism...
...cheating more prevalent than ever at the nation's 3,055 colleges and universities? There is no annual tabulation to prove it, just a feeling among many administrators. Some cite America's moral climate as a fundamental reason for the phenomenon. Laments Suskind: "Watergate and its general milieu, American preoccupation with material goods, decreasing family values-they are all part of the problem. There is a morality problem in the external world and it's hard to wall off the university...
Irving never really intended, he says, to keep the $750,000 that he extracted from his publishers. He and his collaborator Richard Suskind originally planned nothing more wicked than "a gorgeous literary caper." As the plot deepened, he saw it as "a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself." His wife Edith approved, he recalls, and so did his mistress Nina van Pallandt. "You're quite, quite mad," Nina said to Irving when he told her of the project in their Mexican hotel bedroom, "but the world is mad, so what's the bloody difference...
...Once the basic research had been done, Irving and Suskind simply sat down at a tape recorder, interviewed each other, and began spinning tales. They invented scandalous stories of how Hughes seduced his father's mistress while his father was watching, how Hughes once rescued a kleptomaniac aircraft executive from imprisonment for a theft of Oreo cookies, and how Hughes reluctantly went swimming in the nude with-of course-Ernest Hemingway. The imaginary Hughes had originally barged in on Hemingway in Sun Valley, introduced himself as a bush pilot and taken the novelist "for a spin...
...whole tour de force seems less a caper than an assault. The even more basic flaw in Irving's portrait of himself as heroic caperer is his view that the gullible deserve to be gulled. "The name of the game" is a phrase that keeps coming from Suskind, who also likes to quote W.C. Fields' untrue statement that "you can't cheat an honest man." It is one thing to offer a gold brick to a stranger, but it is quite another to sell watered stock to your neighbors. Irving based his swindle on the fact that...