Over in the comments thread and in personal emails (to me and my attorney) My brother in law William Quick , an explant to Charleston, is calling me demented for my posts about South Carolina and the dreadful murders at the AME church.
I responded in the comment thread, but think the response should be more public:
Demented?? Is that a clinical diagnosis? I thought you were no longer licensed. OH, yeh you wanted the UW to end my tenure because of your diagnosis of my mental insanity. Were you licensed when you made that diagnosis?
BTW, how come you took down the “Steve Shits” website? Did your attorney tell you how to spell slander?
I DO take racism and bigotry very seriously, after all I was raised by a man and a woman who fought those wars valiantly and grew up in a pro Nazi, violently anti Semitic neighborhood. My Dad’s life was threatened and there was an effort on my life as well.
Fortunately for Stephi, by the time your wife was in school most of that had died down. I do not think she was ever stoned by the Catholic kids for killing Jesus? I was and still have the scars where my Dad sewed up my head!
I have no doubt that neither of you are racists. I do remember fondly Stephi talking about building her own house down there and your both looking forward to the new sailing waters. For that matter I suspect that even Governor Haley, despite her self-serving effort to pass as White and as Black at different times, is not a racist. Not everyne who chooses to live in a racist society is a racist.
If you have not done so, I recommend you read Nadine Gordimer. Do you know who she was? She won the Nobel Prize for writing about Jewish life under Apartheid in South Africa. Many Jews opposed the Afrikaner regime and South Afrikan Jews were prominent in the ANC. However, as a Jew, I know that most Jews in South Africa simply wanted to live a good life. Few had enough yiddishkeit, the Jewish sense of morality, to feel revulsion against their own society … much less actively resist the Apartheid regime.
Sadly the same situation exists today under the government of Netanyahu. I have liberal Israeli friends who are disgusted but as of yet, there is no leader who can bring down Israel’s own form of Apartheid.
I assume you know the sad historic role of Jews in Atlanta, their support for slavery and even worse for Jim Crow is a shanda.
As an adopted Southern Jew, where do you stand on Israeli Apartheid? Dare I ask what sand, if any, your shul has taken?
Last anecdote: have you visited Dachau? the stench of racism is hard for me to take. The camp was a short distance from downtown, The good burghers of that liberal village could the smell the stench and hear the cries, but they were in denial.
The author of this blog, Stephen M Schwartz, MD, PhD, has challenged me to respond to this most recent diatribe, and I will respond with this summary of my concerns, then sign off.
As usual, Stephen misrepresents the facts. I never called him “demented for his “posts about South Carolina and the dreadful murders at the AME church,”
but for the allegations in comments attached to one of those posts, such as his claims that I “defended, as you still do in this comment, the racism of your adopted city” nor “Including an effort to get this website taken down by my empoyer [sic]” nor “have been trying to have his amazing pictures of Buchenwald destroyed.” And the website’s name was clearly “Steve’s Hits” — if he misinterpreted that as anything else, that’s his problem.
He adds a new misrepresentation here: “you wanted the UW to end my tenure.” For the interested reader, here’s exactly what I said to the UW:
“…I personally do not think that he should be terminated, although it is perfectly clear that he needs to have extensive psychiatric care for his out-of-control behaviors on top of his underlying psychopathy (see below). I therefore specifically suggest to the UW that he be put on a mandatory medical leave of absence for extensive (probably in-patient) psychiatric care, and that he not be permitted to return to UW until/unless a neutral non-treating psychiatrist has assessed his status and reports to UW that his psychopathy has satisfactorily stabilized. 2) Dr. Schwartz’s lifelong psychopathy is clouding his judgement. His behavior has deteriorated dramatically recently. It is my opinion, based on personal observation and descriptions from his sister (my wife) and his brother, that Dr. Stephen M Schwartz has had lifelong problems with paranoia, grandiosity and honesty, most likely as a result of a narcissistic personality disorder. Dr Schwartz should be in treatment for his disorder, as he apparently has been in the past (I quote his blogpost http://handbill.us/?p=23510 “I even told Hugh about the excellent [psychiatric] help I has gotten myself”).
His thinking disorder has recently deteriorated to the point that he has lost touch with the standards that should govern the behavior of any university professor. For example, has posted at his blog what should be considered total inappropriate blogposts (about childhood prostitution) his opinion that child pageants are equivalent to child pornography and child prostitution http://handbill.us/?p=28153” In y[sic] opinion, the line between this [child pageants] and child porn is at best subtle.” After being told by another website that his graphic of child beauty contestants was inappropriate in a posting about child prostitutes (see his own comments at the blog) he promptly took down the graphic he had displayed — and replaced it with another graphic of other children. When challenged to remove this blogpost (by his brother and myself), he promptly posted another equally bizarre blog, equating childhood beauty contests to childhood pornography to childhood prostitution, and posting an e-mail from myself (despite my having requested that he not to do so). And when asked by the photographer of one of the photographs to remove the photo, he declined, and couldn’t fathom that she was really the photographer: see his comments at http://handbill.us/?p=28240”
Another excellent example of Stephen playing fast-and-loose with the facts is his totally erroneous claim on the homepage of this blog that “My wife and I fight in the courts to get these [Buchenwald photos that are part of his father’s estate]…preserved and released into the public domain” First, his wife is not named as either a plaintiff (nor as a defendant); second, he is the one who launched this litigation, unaccompanied by anyone else, against his own brother and sister as well as others; third; in his complaint to the Court, he continues to ignore the simple fact that he has sequestered a portion of the estate that he previously agreed to return.
Finally, I too have gone to the FOI folks at UofW, as he admits that he has, and have found that he was the subject of at least two complaints. His behavior has clearly been a problem for a long time: In a letter to him way back in 1997, examples of his improper conduct that were cited were (1) screaming and yelling at staff members (2) throwing items near or in the presence of staff members (3) kicking garbage cans near or in the presence of staff members (4) belittling, insulting and being rude to staff members, often in the presence of other staff members (5) intimidating individuals and threatening their postions and (6) insulting the intelligence of individuals and calling their competence into question, often in the presences of other staff members.
To summarize: Stephen has a long history of maladaptive behavior. He has been called on the carpet for his behaviors in the past, but his psychopathy continues. This entire blog, and especially the recent focus on South Carolina (179 blogposts with mentions of the state that I count) represents an attention-seeking behavior on his part; and let the truth be damned. He still needs psychiatric care, and his recent failures to admit his fabrications provides further evidence that he is now sadly becoming demented (“driven to behave irrationally due to anger, distress, or excitement”) as well.
That’s all I have to say about this blog and its author.
Oh, and another thought: My wife and I will be going to Charleston’s Community Prayer Vigil this evening to honor the nine people who were murdered in their church earlier this week.
Good thing Bill is not licensed to practice psychiatry.
@2 Good thing he’s not your psychiatrist, too, because I’m pretty sure posting that would constitute a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality.
Sincerely, I worry about Bill’s sanity, When I have been near him and my sister he has had dreadful and frightening outbursts. His attacks on me might reflect some serious projection of problems he has. Do you remember the basis for his claiming that TA was running porn? I had posted about the girl child beauty shows. comparing the way these girls are used to prostitution. Bill rose up in defense ot the pageants It really made me wonder about him.
In my own defense,
The charges William Quick cites were withdrawn and were supposed to be kept out of the public. He found them by using a Public Disclosure Act to find dirt. Frankly, given the real story, I am pleased he did this since it removes an agreement I made not to fully revel a scandal involving the UW. .
The charges were made because I refused to perjure myself. Here is the story (Bill is free to make more RDA requests if he wnats to investigate!)
An employee of mine was severely disabled and needed wheel chair access. I assured her that the UW, under the American for Disabilities Act, would fill her needs. The UW refused.
Subsequently, in my presence, a UW Human Resources official threatened to fire my employee if she pursued her rights under the Act.The employee’s health was poor and she was told that being fired meant she would no longer be eligible for health care ..in effect a death threat! After the UW HR person left, I offered support including advising my employee to sue.
I was the only witness to this amazing exchange. When the employee, on my advice, threatened to take legal action, I was called into my chairs’s office. My chair threatened me with loss of tenure if I were to support the employee’s claim that her job had been threatened. My Chair described my behavior as “pathological honesty” and told me that such “behavior only belonged in my synagogue”.
The employee, after apologizing to me, filed these charges because she had been told by another UW official that she was going to be fired unless she charged me with sex abuse or religious bigotry. THOSE WERE THE CHARGES! Her charges were investyigated by the UW and my lab was audited.
The audit resulted in the uW paying ME several thousand dollars because of improper charges the U had made against my grants.
The investigation resulted in all charges being proven false, BUT, this time in the presence of my wife, I was called before the then Vice Provost … Steve Olswang. Agiain we discussed my refusal to perjure myself. (Dr. Olswang was an attorney used for such tasks by the UW. He was notorious for using the law to force faculty to do things outside of the Faculty Code. Olswang again threatened my tenure, saying he has “ways” of firing me. He made up charges that were not supported by the evidence and said he would use these to fire me. If I reesisted, he said he would use the “sate’s money” to bring me to court.
My wife and I informed him we were prepared to mortgage our house to fight back and hired a well known civil rights attorney. We also worked with a reporter at the Seattle Times so that the paper was prepared to leak the whole story.
The rest of the story is irrelevant but the result was letter of apology and retraction of his charges.
I would welcome any effort Bill makes to bring more of this story into the light.
My wife a
Steve,
Apologies for the anonymity just can’t be too careful when dealing with matters involving U Dub administration.
This is extremely important information.
Please crosspost to AAUP list serve. Unfortunately not everyone reads TA
Faculty need to know what goes on. Yours is but one example of the abuses out there. Trying to do the right thing and you of all people get nailed.
Please please get the message out.
Tree Sturgeon
I am not sure who “treesurgeon” is but the oddity of using a false ID makes me more than a small bit suspicious. I aasume he or she is referring to the account of my affiar with Olswang? That is in a comment. If I were to write it up for the AAUP, I would make it a post with more details.
I have no problem with that but am not sure that this appropriate for the AAUP list. Since I am certainly visiole, I suggest you contact me and tell me what you think I should do.