… now has hold of the Nemeroff story. Let’s see how it does by it. This is an enormous event in the university’s life, going to core issues of the institution’s moral integrity.
The journalists should certainly interview as many professors as they can in the department Nemeroff chaired, psychiatry and behavioral sciences. They need to ask these people why none of them ever expressed any reservations about a chair whose behavior was a well-established scandal. Perhaps their silence means that they, taking their cue from their leader, also make conflict of interest the basis of their professional lives. If the behavior’s endemic in the department, the journalists need to ask the administration why the university’s conflict of interest procedures are total shit.
Of course, precisely because of their passivity or implication in this business, few psychiatry professors will want to talk to the paper. That unwillingness will – in the absence of comment – be a story in itself. Maybe the journalists need to go outside the department and determine the general reputation of Nemeroff’s department at Emory.
The student journalists should also of course grill the administrators who’ve for so long enabled Nemeroff’s thievery. The newspaper needs to go beyond merely quoting ass-saving blahblah. It needs to hit hard. Rhetorically, its best move, thinks UD, will be to remind the administrators that students pay a hell of a lot to underwrite the massive salaries of people like Nemeroff, and these revelations make students and their parents out to be idiots. Perhaps a refund is in order, etc.
The university, and the disgraced department, will do everything they can, in other words, to blow off the students. The students need to understand the dimensions of the story, its terrible insult to their school’s reputation, and the injury they and their fellow students have suffered, and will for some time continue to suffer, because of it. Nemeroff is the dominant figure in a national scandal that will soon shake up universities, the field of psychiatry, and the National Institutes of Health. Put aside considerations of the public good for a moment, and realize this: Emory’s newspaper sits at the epicenter of a big national story. This is a very rare opportunity for it.
October 4th, 2008 at 2:55AM
I don’t know quite what to say; I mean, I’m conflicted. You’re not wrong, of course. Your moral compass is right on, I can’t deny it. But, when you assert that the son of a bitch’s colleagues need to be called to account, I wince.* I don’t think that they deserve some sort of pass even if no actual wrong-doing sticks to them. But since this is all about 1 total douchebag who couldn’t even be reined in by his school’s administration, how much could his departmental colleagues be expected to do? (Then again, if it looks like he’s about to Abramoff, his colleagues are probably going to get religion and candidly unburden themselves.)
*In the interest of full disclosure, as a good trade unionist, I’ve pushed my colleagues to do the right thing and been called a bully for it.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:14AM
I take your point, Jack. But it seems likely to me that this isn’t about one total douchebag, since single-issue douchebags seldom get as far for as long a time as Nemeroff did. No – there have to have been people in the administration, and probably in his and other departments, who agreed with his worldview.
And that’s also important. The behavior represents a principled worldview. If Nemeroff ever speaks honestly — and I assure you he never will — he’ll say what others like him say. They are on the side of the right, and they represent principled rebels against a corrupt system.
That corrupt system is the university, which with its pathetically outmoded ethos keeps university professors from being as rich as corporate executives. Nemeroff, Schatzberg, and others see themselves as on the cutting edge of needed university reform.
I don’t know why people are surprised at these attitudes. The same people who’ve been screaming for years that universities need to model themselves on businesses — be led by CEO’s rather than academics, etc., etc. — are the same people who are shocked, shocked, that universities spawn Nemeroffs…
When a university’s ethos changes in this way, whole departments change. And the change obviously starts with departments of greatest interest to corporations.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:48AM
I think I go along with Jack. A department can be destroyed and students damaged when the administration and faculty members outside the department refuse to act, even when confronted with documented proof of long-term, systematic malfeasance. I’ve been there. If we had known what damage would result, we would have kept our mouth shut.