If so, has he or she addressed the national joke issue?

The denialists at the American Psychiatric Association have begun to talk about conflict of interest.

This is a humongous job, since the APA is now and probably forever run by many conflicted psychiatrists, and since the organization doesn’t seem to understand the profession for which it stands, let alone understand why anyone would object to people skewing the results of drug tests in order to make lots of money for themselves.

“Pharma is not the evil empire,” announces a panelist at a recent APA meeting on the subject. No reasonable voice in the COI controversy, starting with Charles Grassley, claims it is. Straw Man. This person refuses to deal with the reality of the situation. He prefers constructing a straw man and then knocking it down. Next!

Next is Going Cosmic.

“Length of [hospital] stay has a lot to do with hospital reimbursement…. I would posit that that is a much greater conflict of interest…. This will affect my reimbursement, so I have a conflict of interest to get [a patient] out earlier…. Only focusing on pharma conflicts is a mistake.”

Yes, let’s not focus on pharma! It makes much more sense for us to focus on hospital stay… And COI. AND… And isn’t the biggest conflict of all the injustice of some people being able to afford psychiatrists and some not? We need to go to the roots of this social problem…

Next!

There is some promising stuff. One participant notes the greed-fueled tendency on the part of psychiatrists to prescribe the latest, most expensive drugs, even when these are unproven to be better — and may indeed, since their newness means there hasn’t been much time to test their longer term effects, be worse than older, less expensive meds. Another speaker notes ye olde skewed research results, intended to make the drug that’s making you rich look good.

But no one really says what needs to be said. No one really takes on the embarrassing fact that the APA’s incoming leader is Alan Schatzberg, so notorious a COI offender that he’s one of the main miscreants in the ongoing Grassley investigations. The silence about Schatzberg puts the whole meeting in question, makes everything seem thin and farcical and self-deluded.

Participants end with bromides about the importance of ethics courses (whether in business or med school, these are pretty much worthless), and the cultivation of “thoughtful skepticism,” whatever that means. They caution us not to ” single out for scorn” cynical researchers who sell themselves and their academic institutions to industry.

But scorn is precisely what’s needed. The APA has behaved badly for a long time, and it would continue doing so if a United States senator hadn’t decided to get furious about the profession’s self-aggrandizing exploitation of vulnerable people.

“The pharmaceutical industry makes products that help people,” insists one participant; and yet of course this is only partly true. The industry makes some products that help and others that (we eventually learn) hurt people. The industry makes many products that do nothing for people, having the same effect as placebos. The industry promotes its products with unconscionable aggression, not only via endless ads intended to make okay people think they’re fucked up, but also of course via endless come-ons to greedy psychiatrists.

Again, scorn is precisely what’s needed. It’s precisely what Grassley, in press release after press release, expresses. That’s the way you change things. You scorn and isolate greedy, cynical people. You don’t elect them president of your organization.

A professor runs a research unit of some sort that gets grants.

At some point it occurs to the professor that he or she could start a business and steer grants the business gets to the university research unit.

This is classic conflict of interest, and there’s a case of it now at the University of Missouri.

An internal audit of MU’s Research Animal Diagnostic Laboratory, known as RADIL, prompted the lab’s director, Lela Riley, to step down because of a conflict of interest.

According to a statement issued by the university, a conflict of interest arose because Riley was both the head of the research lab and the head of a “private venture company” called Impact Bio Labs LLC. The company and the lab do business together, and MU felt that management changes were necessary to absolve the conflict.

Make that resolve the conflict. Conflicts don’t need absolution.

Another article about this conflict explained it this way:

In 2005, Riley and seven RADIL faculty members formed a private venture company known as Impact Bio Labs LLC. As a private company, Impact Bio Labs has been able to secure federal grant funding for private companies and unavailable to public universities.

Again, the idea is to steer grant money that the university can’t get directly to the university because, as owner of the private business, you now control the grant and can move it around. And you’re gonna move it around to your lab, of course. Conflict of interest means you’ve really got things sewn up. You’ve got them coming and going.

Waco Tribune-Herald.

… Four years ago, the NBA instituted a rule forbidding players to enter the draft directly out of high school. It led to the one-and-done college player — guys who put in their obligatory year of college before heading to the NBA.

Now, many college coaches are questioning whether the NBA did the right thing. While one-and-done players have certainly added excitement to college basketball, college coaches question whether academic integrity has been sacrificed.

As it stands now, college basketball players need pass only six hours during the fall semester to retain eligibility to play in the spring semester. A freshman who knows he’s not returning as a sophomore can completely blow off the spring semester.

“How are those kids getting educated?” Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel said. “They’re using college for the wrong reason. If they’re serious about getting an education, that’s a great thing. But some guys are using college just as a stopgap. In my opinion, it makes a mockery of education in college and it’s condescending on the NBA’s part.”

Two of the best players in Big 12 history were one-and-done guys. Texas forward Kevin Durant was named national player of the year in 2006-07 after averaging a Big 12-high 25.8 points and 11.1 rebounds per game. A year later, Kansas State forward Michael Beasley managed to top Durant by averaging 26.2 points and 12.4 rebounds en route to an All-America season.

After their remarkable freshman years, both players were the second overall picks in the NBA draft and became instant millionaires. But would they have even played college basketball if the NBA allowed players to enter the draft straight out of high school?

Texas coach Rick Barnes said neither Durant nor any of his players have come to school set on being a one-and-done player. [Lie.]

“I told every kid with those (NBA) aspirations to be loyal to the program and that they’d have to be a student during their second semester,” Barnes said. [Lie.] “We laid it out to them and told them they can’t leave us hanging. In the conversations we had with guys like Kevin Durant, LaMarcus Aldridge, T.J. Ford and D.J. Augustin, they didn’t know whether they’d be here one year or three years.” [Lie.]

… scores this sort of thing. If the player is still just a signee, does it count? Fewer points?

Offensive lineman Justin Cabbagestalk, who signed with the [Vanderbilt] Commodores in February, was arrested Tuesday night in his hometown of Tampa, Fla., and charged with a felony count of burglary of an unoccupied dwelling and a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief.

… is that, once you’ve done it, you lose immense amounts of credibility — not merely in terms of what you write, but in terms of what you say.

If you’re a university president who has plagiarized — plagiarized your dissertation — any public announcements you make, especially announcements having to do with academic integrity, become jokes.

So when, under the pressure of his university system’s clout admissions scandal, Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard assures a reporter that this “unfortunate incident” should in no way undermine the reputation of Illinois higher education…

His exact words were “I don’t think it creates a problem for higher education as a whole.” …

Well, lawdy. Higher education as a whole at SIU involves not merely drastic declines in the number of admitted students who decide to attend, but also a risible board of trustees, supine in regard to Poshard’s plagiarism and installed by just about the most corrupt politicians America has ever produced. It involves among the most moronic and expensive devotions to sports above academics that UD has encountered in her years of blogging on the subject. It involves constantly revolving administrative doors as one dean after another plagiarizes (after all, you’re at a place where the president himself sets the pace) or does other really stupid shit that gets him canned.

With this gorgeous backdrop, President Poshard ascends the podium and assures us that all is well.

From Haaretz:

The board of directors of the [Israeli] Mifal Hapayis national lottery made the dramatic decision Wednesday to rescind the selection committee’s choice for the 2009 Sapir Prize for literature, due to an alleged conflict of interest. The annual award is sponsored by the lottery. Alon Hilu had been selected as the winning author by the jury. The lottery board has ordered that a new prize jury repeat the selection process. The other writers in the running for the prize were Amnon Dankner, Nurith Gertz, Iris Leal and Ronit Matalon.

The alleged conflict of interest involved jury chairman Yossi Sarid (who also writes for Haaretz), as a result of business dealings Sarid had during the current tax year with Yedioth Books, which was Alon Hilu’s publisher. Sarid’s niece through marriage was also the editor of Hilu’s book at the publishing house. Mifal Hapayis also contends that Sarid and Hilu previously organized joint literary events. Sources at the lottery commission reported that Sarid did not fill out a disclosure form or report these ties to Hilu, and that the lottery commission administration and the other judges were unaware of them.

Ariel Hirschfeld (who also writes for Haaretz) is another member of the prize jury whose personal ties to a candidate, in this case Ronit Matalon, have been under scrutiny. Matalon’s book “The Sound of Our Steps” is in fact dedicated to Hirschfeld…

The house was under surveillance, and he got surveilled. He loses his job at a Catholic university, and he suffers embarrassment, yes; but the prostitutes have to go to jail. Which seems unfair.

The owner of the business captures some of the unfairness:

[The owner] said that after speaking with his attorney, Thomas H. Ramsay, he concluded that he could not “afford to roll the dice at age 62″ and risk greater punishment, so he accepted a plea bargain.

He said police repeatedly referred to him as the “brothel operator,” while treating Sargent “with deference.”

“If you watch the taped interview, the police are almost apologetic with this guy,” Clark said of Sargent. “They told him, ‘You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ and they agreed to contact him at his office, not his home.”

What? You mean they can’t handle the way American universities - the University of Kansas, in this case - become trampy little soap operas when recruitment season rolls around? Because they’re so so desperate to recruit one-year non-students who can throw balls that the schools’ anxieties over recruitment paralyze the campus?

The Henry guys, the two guys KU wants so bad it hurts, drive a Hummer and a Range Rover and live in opulence and really REALLY don’t want to go to class. They’d go pro and get rich right now if they could. KU means shit to them. But KU LOVES them. It’s just as excited as Alabama was when Coach Saban said Yes!! Yes, I’ll take six million dollars to coach your team! YES! We got Coach Saban!!!!

But will KU get the Henry guys? Today it looks pretty good, but yesterday… Man, yesterday I thought their father was saying something that sounded kinda negative… I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, thinking about it …

… The kids don’t want to be there. It doesn’t matter how pretty the campus is or how historic the arena or how good the team’s chance is at winning the national title.

For the participants, college hoops lost its cool points.

Pushing a Maybach, sporting the most dazzling ice and making it rain inside America’s top strip clubs long ago replaced hitting on the finest girls from Delta Sigma Theta and Xi Omega during psychology class.

You can grind your teeth and reminisce about how much better things used to be, but you’re not going to make kids (or their parents) buy into the current system. It’s a farce…

Shaddap. I LOVE these guys. Everything’s going to be GREAT. Go KU!

********************

UD thanks Dave for telling her about the events at KU.

He’s a philosophy
professor, and, in
this the age of the
faked memoir, we
need to approach
him with caution.

He has produced, at a young age, a trove of books and articles — essays, monographs, short stories, novels — much of it accomplished, as he describes it, while disablingly, suicidally, drunk. If ever there were an argument in favor of alcoholism as a career-maker, this is it.

His faculty page photograph up there has him as the classic sensitive confused infantile genius: Dressed in black, hair askew, hand in front of his face as if he’s smoking or appalled or weeping. A Kierkegaardian, a Nietzschean, he’s overwhelmed by the anguish of existence.

His just-released novel, autobiographical, displays the - again - classic mix of I’m Sorry for My Past Degeneracy and Admire the Depth of My Past Degeneracy. Apparently there will be a movie.

In a London Review of Books piece about his recent suicide attempt, he describes his thoughts at an AA meeting: “As I looked around the room I thought: yes, I am officially a loser.”

Yet who could believe this? He’s a winner, with the world at his feet, canny enough to time his shocking self-revelations with the release of his latest novel.

A loser? Consider this:

On 200 mg a day of baclofen, in an important meeting with several associate deans of my college and three new department chairs (I was made chair of my philosophy department just a few weeks before I tried to commit suicide), I fell asleep with my head on the conference room table and, for 40 minutes, everyone was too embarrassed to wake me. Somnolence is the most obvious and inconvenient side effect of baclofen. I reduced my dosage to 100 mg a day, and started taking it only at bedtime. A few days later, a colleague asked if I had changed my medicine. ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Why do you ask?’ She is German, an analytic philosopher, and therefore very direct: ‘You are drooling less than you were.’

There’s quite a bit to be said about this paragraph, even if we don’t comment on the sequence of events by which shortly after you’re made chair of a department you try to kill yourself.

The main thing to be said is Wow. Universities.

Very few places of work feature people who make someone who drools head of their enterprise.

A troubled person, this person, a new department chair, sleeps through his first meeting with the deans.

He sleeps for forty minutes. The deans are embarrassed but polite, and no one disturbs him.

Wow. Universities.

From CBS Sports:

… [College coaches and administrators tend to be] contemptuously dismissive … of everyone outside their industry as a general rule of behavior.

Or maybe you didn’t catch the Columbus Dispatch series on the systematic and deliberate misuse of the Buckley Amendment, which was designed to shield student report cards and transcripts but has now been extended by many schools to include gambling, accepted payoffs, cheating, cashing on an athlete’s notoriety, recruiting violations, academic fraud, rule-breaking boosters and even sexual abuse.

Or maybe you missed the news from so many schools where athletes promised scholarships have them taken away just because the coach recruited someone better.

Or Nick Saban getting a contract extension at Alabama that has no buyout clause, meaning that he can leave whenever he wants without any penalty whatsoever. Or San Diego State trying to figure out how to stiff the fired Chuck Long out of money they contractually owe him.

Ahh, the inspiration value of commitment … just makes you swell up with pride, doesn’t it?

This is all part and parcel of the wonderful world of college football, where emperors, dictators and, yes, even the Russian Presidium marvel at the powers granted to any even moderately successful program. The influence the industry wields without any mind to sensible oversight, or even any oversight at all, is breath-taking.

… [This is college] athletics’ essential stance to the outside world — one hand outstretched to hold the cash, one hand held aloft with the middle finger prominent. …

I’m not clever enough. But the student journalists at Washington State University are.

UD thanks Dance for sending her this.

Yes. That’s it. Click on the word this. Click on it.

And enjoy.

****************

PS: SOS just wrote to the editor about the misspelling in the article’s title.

… [T]here is a fine line between strong support and simply giving [football coach Nick] Saban absolute power. This is still the University of Alabama, right? This is not the University of Nick Saban.

What you have now is a scared straight school president and a spineless Board of Trustees, particularly when it concerns Saban.

… [A]t some point this summer, the university will proudly announce that Nick Saban, who is about to begin the third year of an eight-year, $32 million contract (running through 2014), and has absolutely no buyout penalty for leaving at anytime, has been extended until the end of mankind.

Vanity Fair’s at it again.

Last month, an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin appeared; this month, it’s an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about endowment fuckup Harvard.

McPalin fans can’t complain that VF’s a tool of liberal elites, singling out their girl for ridicule; even a glance at highlights from the Harvard article tells you that Cambridge — epicenter of the snooty left — is going to take a very big hit.

Some of this stuff you already know — I mean, if you read University Diaries you already know it — but the VF writer runs some blood through the numbers. Like frinstance you know about “the eight-figure salaries some of [the] managers were pulling down” — (That’s eight, as in thirty million dollars a year apiece … Count the zeroes… 30,000,000 … Non-profit work… Good for the conscience… And good for the pocketbook!… ) — but maybe you didn’t know about the personalities raging around the numbers:

The longtime head of Harvard Management Company, Jack Meyer, quit to start his own hedge fund in 2005 after growing fed up with criticism over the eight-figure salaries some of his managers were pulling down and with persistent meddling from top Harvard officials. Two particular annoyances were Summers, who had been questioning Meyer’s investment strategies, and Robert Rubin, a member of the Harvard Corporation, who frowned on Meyer’s aggressive strategies and wound up on the “warpath” with Meyer, as one person put it.

When Meyer left, he took much of Harvard Management Company with him — including 30 portfolio managers and traders, as well as the chief risk officer, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer. The place became “like a Ferrari without the engine,” according to a portfolio manager who arrived after Meyer left. This angered Rubin, according to someone who knows him well: “In Rubin’s opinion, Meyer crippled the institution.”

If only Summers and Rubin, with their I-know-better-than-you personalities, had let things alone! The managers would have been happy with their ever-increasing salaries (Keep in mind that they were graciously taking a cut from what they’d have gotten in the private sector, and Meyer would understandably have wanted to reward them with tens of millions more in pay every year.); one university in the United States would have gone from having the GDP of Bulgaria to, say, the GDP of … the United States? And that would have done wonders for school pride… We’re Number One!… And instead of Meyer deciding that the best thing he could do with this meddling issue was take down his entire operation and destroy a school, he’d still be sitting there, happy as a bug!

Here’s a snippet of sniping:

The Harvard endowment soared from $4.8 billion in 1990 to $36.9 billion as of June 30, 2008, and in the last half-decade or so, the men and women who run Harvard seemed to have convinced themselves that the university’s fund would grow at double-digit rates for, well, eternity. “Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” says Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967.

Dershowitz himself, though, doesn’t know much about economizing. He hires far too many people to write his books for him.

Fact is, Harvard — as I’ve suggested on this blog before — is an all ’round out of control drunk. Money and power, you know.

As with the Palin fiasco, when things come crashing down in the sober light of day, Vanity Fair moves in, with its glossy photojournalism and pesky reporters.

***********************

UD thanks Tony.

… and using eternal vigilance against people on its faculty who criticize the drug industry and faculty conflict of interest related to it.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest scandal out of this most pharmaloving campus:

Emory University has been accused repeatedly over the last year of looking the other way while one of its prominent physicians built extremely close ties to the pharmaceutical industry and — critics charge — failed to adequately report those ties as required by university and federal regulations.

But what if you are an Emory professor who happens to differ with the pharmaceutical industry? Then, it appears, Emory watches you closely — and if you are a blogger, the university can tell you that you must remove the Emory name from your Web site. That’s why a recent post on the J. Douglas Bremner’s blog Before You Take That Pill is called “I Am Removing the Name of My University From This Blog.” Bremner is professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory and as his blog title suggests (as does his book with the same name), he is an avid critic of the pharmaceutical industry.

In the post, he notes that he was recently ordered to remove the Emory name both by the interim chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and by the medical school’s executive associate dean for faculty affairs. In the letters, which he provided to Inside Higher Ed, they tell Bremner to remove Emory’s name, logo and letterhead from his blog because none of them can be used for “non-Emory business.” He was also told to report on when he had removed Emory from his blog.

The letters cite complaints that the university received about a blog post Bremner made in January in which he criticized the eviction of a man with bipolar disorder who was being forced out of his apartment for smoking. Bremner made his point in the form of a mock letter “To Whom It May Concern” giving his blessing for the man to continue to smoke. According to Bremner’s Emory superiors, complaints they received suggested that he was making “clinical recommendations for a patient you do not know and have never examined,” and these postings made them feel the need to tell him to stop using the Emory name.

… Bremner’s fans have noted with alarm his need to remove Emory’s name from the blog and they have been e-mailing about the situation, noting, for example, that Emory isn’t bothered by Charles Nemeroff, the professor at the center of the conflict of interest dispute, appearing with his Emory identification at events not related to the university (and sponsored by a pharmaceutical company) — but clamps down on a blogger who criticizes the industry.

… [The head of the AAUP] said that it was wrong and a violation of academic freedom for Emory to tell a faculty blogger not to use the university’s name in his identification or elsewhere on his blog.

“What they absolutely cannot do is say that he cannot identify himself as an Emory faculty member,” he said…

Ready, aim, FIRE?