Pharma loved Harvard because of its big ol’ name.

That has changed, as a Harvard professor who studies the interaction between industry and med school professors notes. “For a long time in medicine, not just at Harvard, but everywhere, there was a culture that said doctors were entitled to industry perks, but that culture is breaking down,” [Eric] Campbell said. “Doctors no longer assume it is their right and duty to accept these perks from industry.”

But hey. One school keeps the perk banner waving — and it’s UD‘s own GW!

“It’s just a rough environment,” said Dr. Lawrence DuBuske, [a Massachusetts] allergy specialist… “The industry wants very little to do with Massachusetts.”

DuBuske, who has been a top speaker for GSK and AstraZeneca about asthma medications, resigned from Brigham and Women’s last year, rather than give up his speaking appearances. Since then, he has landed a job at George Washington University School of Medicine and Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

… Is [UK basketball coach John] Calipari shady? No question. Everybody knows that the two college programs he coached prior to Kentucky — Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) — both had their Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA. And, yes, there are already TMZ reports that NCAA investigators are snooping around Kentucky.

Who knows what the NCAA might find.

Agents paying players?

Players with bogus SAT scores?

A university administration that admits athletes who don’t have the academic credentials or desire to be in college?

Sounds about like every other big-time program to me.

The only difference is John Calipari understands that his program is nothing more than an NBA developmental league.

He is at least honest about the dishonesty that contaminates college athletics.

I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.

The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.

As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.

She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.

The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.

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As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:

The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.

Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.

Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.

“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.

Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…

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Another account:

She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.

A Massachusetts pharmacy college instituted a ban on clothing that obscures the face, including face veils and burqas, weeks after a Muslim alumnus who is also the son of a professor was charged with plotting terror strikes.

The policy change at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services, announced in a campus-wide e-mail last month, went into effect Friday.

… The policy would effectively ban face veils, as well as burqas and niqabs, which either cloak the entire body or cover everything but the eyes…

UD hopes this is only the first American university to ban the degrading and dangerous burqa.

… to absorb into itself a law school not far removed from a diploma mill continues.

Some people in the Massachusetts government, and at the University of Massachusetts, want to expand the university to include the Southern New England School of Law, an unaccredited institution whose pass rate on the bar — around 43% — is unconscionable. No school with that low a pass rate should be in business; it’s simply stealing money from students.

Two University of Massachusetts trustees say what needs to be said in a Boston Globe opinion piece. They’re not diplomatic.

When someone offers to “donate’’ a fourth-rate, unaccredited law school to a great state university, taxpayers should guard their wallets. [Donates is in quotation marks because although backers of the idea claim it won’t cost the state anything, it will of course cost a shitload. Not merely in money; in reputation.] …[A]bsorption of Southern New England School of Law would pose significant financial challenges and prove to be an academic embarrassment to the university.

… Upgrading facilities and services to achieve American Bar Association accreditation will cost tens of millions of dollars. Even accreditation won’t guarantee quality worthy of the UMass name. The law school does not have a single distinguished faculty member. Indeed, the quality of the education is so poor that in a recent administration of the Massachusetts Bar Exam,only 6 percent of Southern New England Law School grads passed.

… It is difficult to see how we can salvage this mess and create a law school to rival Boston’s excellent private law schools… Our economy does not need more ambulance chasers educated at taxpayer expense…

… resigns.

Brandeis posts at University Diaries here.

Point Two: Nobody can hold a candle to the state of Kentucky.

Who’s gorgeouser — University of Louisville, or University of Kentucky?

Well, Louisville’s got Pitino. University of Kentucky’s got Calipari.

But UK also has Gillispie.

Don’t tell me he’s not there anymore. Every time he gets in that big ol’ Mercedes and starts weaving toward Lexington, the University of Kentucky gets a plug. Plus there’s his big ol’ lawsuit to remind us of his ol’ Kentucky home.

Gillispie [has] sued the university in federal court in Texas, alleging that the school’s athletics department owes him $6 million for firing him two years into a seven-year agreement. The university says he never signed a formal contract and the school doesn’t owe the money.

So – winner hands down – University of Kentucky!

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The New York Times elaborates:

It is an otherwise lovely state, known for the mint juleps and jaunty hats of its Derby, the bluegrass and the rolling hills, but Kentucky has an alter ego when it comes to college sports, and let’s just say that alter ego should be checking into therapy any day now.

In one padded cell, you could put Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, blithely humming away despite the complete shambles he left at his last college, Memphis, and the one before that, Massachusetts, two Final Fours that supposedly didn’t happen…

Meanwhile, Calipari’s predecessor, Billy Gillispie, was arrested early Thursday and charged with driving while intoxicated.

And all of that looked positively sane compared with Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s calling an impromptu news conference Wednesday about his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal to lambaste the news media for covering his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal…

The Newton resident — who maintains an office at the school and is present on campus at least four days a week, according to school officials — teaches no regular classes, conducts no formal medical research, does not fill out a timecard and is not up for post-tenure review for at least two more years.

Medical school officials were unable to provide any syllabus or course listing with Dr. Lazare’s name as an instructor, guest lecturer or participant.

He’s a psychiatry professor — specializing in shame and humiliation — at the University of Massachusetts medical school, and his salary is $366,000 a year.

I

Early studies of Non-Specific Characterological Assholism (N-S CA), originally denominated the AH-Factor, focused on its chromosomal provenance. Later studies have tended to examine particular sociocultural applications, as in the question posed here: How long, and to what effect, do specific instances of N-S CA linger? If, for example, a subject is a notorious asshole in 2014, will he suffer measurable consequences roughly a decade later?

II

A recent tenure denial at Harvard University offers a suggestive case.

In 2014 Benjamin Edelman, an untenured Harvard prof

 ordered take-out from Sichuan Garden, a family-run restaurant in Brookline…

[Edelman] also has a consulting business, for which Bloomberg Business reports [he] charges clients $800 an hour.

The food cost $4 more than he had calculated, because prices on the website had not been updated. The professor complained in an email. Ran Duan, whose family owns the restaurant, apologized and ultimately offered to return $4.

Edelman wrote back,

I suggest that Sichuan Garden refund me three times the amount of the overcharge. The tripling reflects the approach provided under the Massachusetts consumer protection statute, MGL 93a… I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected and to provide refunds to all…

Widely reported at the time, the incident generated strikingly negative attention, and two limericks.

III

Professor Edelman, in suing Harvard for the tenure denial, identifies as root cause the 2014 incident.

In a civil lawsuit against Harvard filed Tuesday in the Suffolk County Superior Court, Edelman alleges that the 2014 email correspondence — for which he later apologized at the Business School’s request — resurfaced when he was being evaluated for tenure, among other concerns of misconduct…

Edelman said he believes the negative publicity from the Sichuan Garden incident was a key reason for his tenure denial, adding there is “some fundamental truth to the centrality of that media disaster.”

“Had it not been for those stupid restaurant emails, I would have been just fine,” he said.

IV CONCLUSION

Evidence here points to the possibility that, in particular institutional settings, and under particular rule-bound circumstances, fulminating N-S CA may indeed impede personal advancement over the course of a lifetime. These results however are very preliminary and somewhat vitiated by their association with Harvard, unusually sensitive to being perceived as full of assholes.

I mean, the latest anxious freshman eighteen year old preparing to mass kill if he failed to get into a frat made a point of leaving gun-unfriendly Boston (where he went to a real expensive private school) and coming to Highpoint University in North Carolina because, he explained to the authorities, it’s easier to get guns in that state. Acquaintances from the private school recall his obsession with guns and mass killing; he clearly made a logical decision to move to a place where – unlike Massachusetts – that would be easy. Crazed reject loner mass killers like the guy down the street at the University of North Carolina Charlotte last April just seem drawn to North Carolina, whose state motto appears on this shirt…

woke up still wondering how you could

have it in your soul to shoot up a school

this world disgusts me more and more every day

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Almost-daily massacres make precocious poets. This verse (well, a tweet turned into verse by UD) is by a high school friend of one of the injured students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

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Putting together the information that’s emerging, it starts to look like this (though again I’m guessing): The guy was a student at the school as recently as this semester, but he withdrew. If a mental health episode prompted the withdrawal, his attack on a classroom full of students (randomly chosen, one assumes) fits the classic angry white male American workplace/school massacre model. Resentment and paranoia engulfed him; if he could no longer be a functional human being/student, he would destroy people who could be.

All of this would make the attack a variant of the Elliot Rodger massacre. In 2014, Rodger, the same age as the latest shooter (22), killed six people near UC Santa Barbara.

Just before driving to [a] sorority house, Rodger uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, in which he outlined details of his upcoming attack and his motives. He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him and that he envied sexually active men and wanted to punish them for being sexually active.

Maybe today’s maniac has made this be about sexual envy; maybe it’s just about, as I said, homicidal envy of other peoples’ ability to be functional human beings.

T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.

T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.

More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.

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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.

KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.

Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.

So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.

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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…

UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.

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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.

The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.

Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.

Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.

KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?

[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.

There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.

But wait, that’s not the best part.

Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.

If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.

Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.

“It’s going to continue to drain money from the core mission of the university. And there’s no end in sight. How many years do we do this?” keens a University of Massachusetts professor as the school’s ignorant padded armies clash by night…

It’s gotten quite lyrical, this national chorus of professors lamenting the tragic infinitude of university football — or, as the latest installment in Bloomberg’s series on the subject has it, “Football is Forever.” The author of the series points out that

Once a school fields a top-division football team, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the commitment.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on would be the more modern, tragicomic, version of this classic truth: The morally and financially rancid circus of big-time university football (toss in basketball, of course) cannot be dismantled. Eight times a year an addled elephant will be made to balance on its back legs in front of four rich drunks in the luxury suites and forty poor drunks in the bleachers, plus there’s the police and the littering tailgaters and the clean-up crew and that’s all folks. That’s the show. It struts its stuff forever and forever, signifying nothing, but royally fucking over your university.

One downside of making lots of money as a doc is all those strictly – really! strictly! – non-profit organizations demanding you take more and more absolutely positively necessary certification exams which strangely enough cost you a fortune and if you don’t pay up we’ll put a thingie on your record that says you aren’t certified which is like ooh scary gonna hurt your career…

All Strictly Non-Profit, let us reiterate! Ignore the “multimillion dollar apartments which offer owners chauffeur driven late model BMWs” the American Board of Internal Medicine has gifted to itself out of your fees!

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Yes, the ever-chiseling ABIM is an organization always able to come up with another crisis in patient care that cries out for another expensive set of certifying exams.

The ABIM has gotten so disgusting, however, that this dude has formed a breakaway certifying organization that charges hugely less and is drawing so many grossed-out docs away from the BMW organization that the BMW organization is now going Uh haha just kidding we’re going to… uh… pull back on some of these tests and … uh… maybe look at what we’re charging… and I mean hold on cuz we’re on it we promise…

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Sadly, the doc-chiseling starts well before ABIM has a chance to start threatening you with anemic certification. There’s the notorious Step 2 Clinical Skills exam, about which more and more med students are making a fuss.

Hundreds of medical students at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University are joining a nationwide campaign to eliminate a standardized licensing test they say is redundant and a financial burden.

Students say that the test – the Step 2 Clinical Skills exam, which measures bedside manner and real-world problem-solving while students interact with people acting as patients – should be replaced with an alternative exam that the nation’s medical schools could administer free.

The Step 2 exam is expensive: There is a $1,275 registration fee, and because the test is offered in just five cities, students often have to bear the cost of travel and lodging.

… “There have to be better and more efficient ways to test students,” said James S. Gessner, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. “There is absolutely no reason to bring students to five testing centers at a huge cost when the material can be administered on-site at schools.”

Yeah, but if they did that, the organization behind the test would be out $36 million a year.

A local commentator in Oklahoma says there’s almost nothing in that state “to cheer for.” He says that by almost any quality of life standard Oklahoma looks terrible.

Instead of asking what in l’esprit d’Oklahome might account for this outcome, the writer proceeds to thank the state’s lucky stars for its football teams.

OU and OSU football have become sources of state pride at a time you can scarcely find them anywhere else.

But… Shouldn’t the guy be asking how it was that Oklahoma got stuck with 70,000 square miles of meh plus two university football teams?

Ask any chancellor, elected official or traveling businessperson and they’ll tell you — nothing has a bigger impact on the perception of universities or the states in which they educate than their sports teams. In Oklahoma, that means their football teams.

The general perception of Oklahoma, for reasons the writer lists (terrible schools, horrible health indicators, over-full prisons… he didn’t have time to mention stuff like the fact that the state’s senior senator showed climate change is a hoax by bringing a snowball to the senate chamber), is bad. If football teams had the biggest impact imaginable on the public perception of a state, Oklahoma would be right up there with Massachusetts and its… university football teams?

I mean I dunno. Some problems with logic here.