University Diaries

‘The story follows Paul Frampton, a divorced theoretical particle physicist, who meets Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. Milani’s pictures on the site show a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with a supposedly natural DDD breast size…’

Margaret Soltan — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:59:25 +0000

More great PR for professors coming up.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Margaret Soltan — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:38:56 +0000

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LOST MONEY
SELLING BEER TO COLLEGE KIDS

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UD thanks Dave.

Ooh, let’s be quick on this one…

Margaret Soltan — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:16:07 +0000

… and just post a link before we even really read the thing!

Okay right so we fund research - we here being the federal government, being our taxes – and these three NYU medical researchers give the results to China in exchange for money.

Details here.

“The letter may indicate that either the SEC or the U.S. attorney is preparing to sue or indict Cohen, said lawyers who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the case.”

Margaret Soltan — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:14:31 +0000

Now’s the time for Brown University to inaugurate a Steven A. Cohen Legal Defense fund, as the federal government begins to look as though it might move against that university’s most high-profile trustee.

True, for now Cohen has not been charged; and for now his personal fortune is close to ten billion dollars. But he may be charged; and already he has what Bloomberg News calls “fleeing clients” costs. Just in case things do go south for him, this would be a fitting continuation of the support of the hedge fund manager that the Brown Corporation has thus far maintained.

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At least he’s in good company.

By seeking Mr. Cohen’s testimony, federal prosecutors could be trying to get him lie before the grand jury, legal experts say. This way, they could try to charge him with perjury instead of insider trading, which was a similar tack that the government took in its criminal case against the media personality Martha Stewart.

“Some people have called for the removal of the (usually purely formal) power to name professors, which dates back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the head of state.”

Margaret Soltan — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:23:15 +0000

Er, yes. And this is why: Say your president really doesn’t like homosexuals. Really doesn’t want to appoint them professors. Your university puts a gay man up for an appointment and the president says fuck that. And if the guy doesn’t like what I’ve done, he can take me to court.

This is not very becoming. You should probably be able to do something about it, so that your country, the Czech Republic, does not become a laughingstock. Much as we all respect the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it’s probably time to review your laws dating back to it.

‘[S]etting a threshold for a diagnosis can be somewhat arbitrary. “At a certain point, you can say everybody’s sick,” [Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School] said. “The question is, where do you draw the line.”‘

Margaret Soltan — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:34:42 +0000

Kessler famously argues that about half of us are mentally ill; really though, he adds, thresholds being what they are, we’re all mentally ill. The only question is where you draw the line.

But there’s no question any more, is there? Kessler’s being faux-naif. The line – given the arbitrariness of science in the matter – the line lies in commerce. At what point does the pharma market become saturated with requests for psychotropics? At what point does demand exceed supply? Look there for the line.

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Demand is huge. All praise to the DSM for holding up its end.

Happily, supply is also robust. Holding up very well indeed.

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Half of us mentally ill? Markets don’t do things by halves.

We’re well on our way to one hundred percent.

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Think like a Buddhist:

Where you do you draw the line?

There is no line.

The curse of living in one of America’s Right-Not-To-Think States…

Margaret Soltan — Sun, 19 May 2013 17:15:38 +0000

… like New Mexico, is that you’ve got to read shit like this.

Most people just lie there and read it and try not to feel so defiled by its stupid lies that they want to jump off a cliff (there are amazing cliffs in New Mexico). Others can’t help taking the words in and responding to them, as these two New Mexico State University students did.

Although their effort to introduce reason, decency and (you gotta be kidding) intellect to the state – and, more specifically, to the chair of the NMSU board of regents – is the very definition of noble futility, along the lines of, say, the Warsaw Uprising, they are to be admired for the effort. Attention, as they say, must be paid.

[The chair's letter] is a strangely defensive account of the glories of our sports program and why it deserves the funding it currently receives, including a controversial $4.1 million annual transfer out of the academic fund.

The Cheney letter may have largely been prompted by the “firestorm” created when then-presidential candidate Garrey Carruthers stated that dropping football to a lower division or even eliminating it entirely were options on the table.

Carruthers nearly immediately retracted that statement, but Cheney seems to still feel the need to rally against the critics. “Like it or not,” the chairman of the board tells us, “we must live in the reality that is collegiate sports today.” We have to keep doing what we’re doing, because everyone else is doing it. We have to pay our football coach more than the entire philosophy department combined, because that’s just the reality of the market…

… [It is impossible to] justify the robbing of academic funds to cover the athletic program’s debts at a time when professorships are being reduced and money for research and public service continues to decrease. The Aggie-pride factor doesn’t take away from the fact that many student-athletes leave NMSU with a subpar education and a host of physical and financial problems. Wins don’t justify the overblown importance of big-time sports on college campuses. Instead of blindly going along with the “reality that is collegiate sports today” — the reality of the NCAA’s perverted money-making machine, of rape cover-ups, of steroid abuse — why don’t we put our foot down, be different, recognize that they’re just games and act accordingly? Why not do groundbreaking work to redefine the role of collegiate athletics rather than just trying to keep up with the big schools?

Bravo. You lose.

The Ballad of Brigham Brig

Margaret Soltan — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:11:35 +0000

This too I know–and wise it were
If each could know the same–
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
___
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed and cries to Time.
___
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.

With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

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Who knows if this brave prisoner’s plea will meet with justice?

I fear not!

“During a decade when enrollment dropped by 3 percent, Coppin added 20 new degree programs and boosted faculty positions by 49 percent and administrative positions by 92 percent. Coppin’s professors have a significantly larger course load than other USM universities but produce by far the lowest average credit hours — essentially, faculty are teaching courses that few students want to take.”

Margaret Soltan — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:52:33 +0000

“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing…” You’d be surprised how many American universities are the educational equivalent of one of UD‘s favorite songs. These are truly nothing places full of fully salaried nowhere men and women. Everyone knows they should be shut down – even current and potential students. All have shrinking enrollments and massive absenteeism (professors and administrators are as absent as students). All are farcical in the way of Rube Goldberg contraptions that have blown every fuse but continue to make random movements.

Baltimore’s Coppin State is a notorious nothing; this letter writer to the Baltimore Sun says the obvious: Let it go. Public nothings are incredible wastes of money. Stop humiliating the taxpayers of Maryland.

Don’t forget: Biederman is still at Harvard, and Schatzberg is still at Stanford.

Margaret Soltan — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:20:25 +0000

[Joseph] Biederman, along with Charles Nemeroff, who was then at Emory University, and Alan Schatzberg of Stanford (the 116th President of the American Psychiatric Association) are in many ways poster boys for [pharma corruption]. Ironically, it was Schatzberg, during his presidency in 2009, who responded vehemently to Allen Frances’s criticisms of the DSM 5 task force by pointing to the $10,000 in royalties Frances was still receiving from DSM IV. Apparently, the $4.8 million in stock options Schatzberg had in a drug development company, or the fat fees he received from such companies as Pfizer, had no similar distorting effect on his judgment — just as the $960,000 Charles Nemeroff received from GlaxoSmithKline (while reporting only $35,000 to his university) had no influence on him. And just as the millions of dollars that Biederman and his associates at Harvard received for creating a new diagnosis and a massive new market for antidepressants and second-generation antipsychotics among young children (drugs associated with massive weight gain, metabolic disorders, diabetes, and premature death) had nothing to do with their behavior!

Nemeroff is now at the University of Miami, but that’s not a scandal because Miami isn’t a respectable university. The scandal lies at respectable places like Stanford and Harvard, which will “turn a blind eye to ethical failings if the money on offer is sufficiently tempting.”