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The Annals of Denialism II

This is the second in a series of posts about the tendency of universities to deny things — things they’d be better off not simply denying.

Just below this post is a post about Columbia University’s decision to deal with a now-jailed professor who worked there for twenty years by telling reporters that he hasn’t been around for ten years. True, but he did work there, in an honored, high-profile position, for a long time, and it would be more seemly for Columbia at least to acknowledge that. You don’t want to be like America’s shabbiest campus, Yeshiva University, and pretend Bernard Madoff wasn’t an honored trustee on whom the university depended for financial advice. You want to be better than that.

Similarly, the University of Minnesota seems to think it’s fine to respond to reporters pestering them about a rather smelly clinical trial one of their professors ran by saying fuck you that was years ago. When you simply deny – worse, when you smear reporters for pursuing the story (the university’s communication director recently wondered in an email if a Scientific American reporter was a “wacko”) – the thing you’re denying keeps coming back to haunt you.

The trial was run by psychiatrists. Surely they’ve read Freud on the way denial works.

Here’s the most recent news report on the escalating Dan Markingson scandal.

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UD thanks Bill.

Margaret Soltan, November 24, 2013 9:45AM
Posted in: professors

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One Response to “The Annals of Denialism II”

  1. charlie Says:

    In the Markingson television investigation, inquiries were sent to the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate, asking them to review and comment on the conduct of one of their own. The apparent conflict of interest of having a researcher receiving pharma money and supplying that drug to subjects, as if this drug is an approved protocol, rather than a shot in the dark, seem apparent. The FS has done nothing, at all.

    It has become apparent that FS across the nation have become sold out assholes, far more interested in their sinecures than in their actual function, that being, the conscience of the university and nation. They’ve sat on their thumbs, while financial aide fraud and sports mania ruins their campuses. I attempted to contact one member of the FS at a local university, asking him why that body does nothing when so many of my former HS students have ruined lives because of fraudulent college loans. I got nowhere, he and his colleagues are too concerned that the money trough will be taken away. If the public got off its collective ass and began to realize the level of corruption at unis, including Minnesota, then, maybe, something would happen…

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