Good Noose: Plagiarist Professor Suit Tossed

Here's some career advice for this two-bit fraud. Maybe she can sign up with Michelle Obama and lecture us all on obesity. She can be a test case on how to shed a hundred pounds and stay relevant.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean everybody's out to get you.

A controversial professor who contended Columbia's Teachers College canned her in a "frame-up" that was part of a "complex conspiracy" has lost her bid to get her job back.

The school's decision to fire Madonna Constantine -- who made headlines in 2007 when she said she found a noose hanging from her office door -- was neither "arbitrary or capricious," Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Jane Solomon found.

Constantine was fired last June, after the school's faculty advisory committee found that she had "committed plagiarism, and also that she had fabricated documents that she presented in her defense," Solomon wrote.

Constantine contended there was a "frame-up," that the committee didn't give her a fair shake, and that Teachers College president Susan Fuhrman's decision to fire her on the committee's recommendation was "arbitrary and capricious."

Solomon disagreed.

In a decision made public yesterday, she said the committee had thoroughly reviewed the case, and their report "fully supports Fuhrman's decision."

"Professor Constantine's theory of the case would require a complex conspiracy among many persons including the highest levels of the college's administration, its outside counsel, and several former students and a former faculty member," the committee had commented.

Oddly enough the "investigation" into the noose hanging is still unresolved. A shame nobody wants to come out and actually say she did it herself.