“Yes, it’s promotional, but it’s educational,” said Dr. Lawrence Glad, a Uniontown-area gynecologist who was hired as a speaker for three of the four drug companies last year and received $74,916, the third highest amount in southwestern Pennsylvania. “I think we have some critical skills for our patients beyond who bought my last bagel.”
Biz Journals
Although they’d have had to up that hourly rate to at least $500 to attract that faculty…
… [BP] has been “offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast” to muster a defense against inevitable litigation in the wake of the April 20 oil spill, according to a report in the Press-Register newspaper in Alabama.
At one point, BP plc “attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department” at the University of South Alabama, the report states.
The contract, obtained by the newspaper, would have barred the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scholars or even talking about it.
The department did not sign…
Scientists interviewed by the newspaper told of being offered $250 an hour…
Harvard Medical School tightened its policy on conflict of interest, banning faculty from receiving corporate gifts and meals and restricting them from speaking on behalf of companies…
Harvard University also adopted a campus-wide policy on conflict of interest, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said on its website…
The medical school was earlier stung by criticism when Senator Charles Grassley said Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman failed to disclose some payments from drug companies while he conducted research recommending their medications for treating children with mental disorders…
… emails from a number of University of Wisconsin medical school professors in response to a new policy banning them from giving promotional talks for drug companies. While not as riveting as the Mel Gibson tapes, these emails definitely have their moments.
“This is insulting,” one doctor said in an e-mail. “This is beyond ludicrous. … I have kids … and, simply put, I will no longer be able to afford to work for” UW.
The doctor, who supplemented what he described as his “sub-standard” UW pay with drug company income, said the policy was being forced on him and other physicians by “self-appointed witch-hunters” without a faculty vote.
“Do we really want to function like Cuba or Venezuela?” the doctor wrote.
UD likes this one because of the pathos of this man having kids and a substandard income as a doctor at the University of Wisconsin. How will his kids survive if he only makes… I dunno… $200,000?
The political commentary is thought-provoking too. Take a doctor’s moonlighting income away, it’s
Here’s another one.
“This is complete insanity,” wrote [one] doctor, who also works as an associate professor with the medical school. “Do we still live in a democracy?”
This is possibly a psychiatrist. This doctor shares the concern of the other one about the direction our country’s headed.
There’s an elegiac feel to the next comment.
This prohibition will effectively kill the evening dinner talk…
That’s the promo talk where pharma buys you a major dinner and talks up close and personal with you about the glories of its new, undertested, overpriced drug.
More worries about feeding children no doubt underlie the next email, in which an orthopedic surgeon complains about the policy putting a cap on what they can make in their promo talks (an exception to the no-talks thing was made for this specialty):
That exemption – which was added to the proposed policy after pressure from orthopedic surgeons – allowed those surgeons to make up to $500 an hour making presentations and teaching for device makers.
In one e-mail, a doctor objected to the $500 an hour rate, saying it was too low and “clearly ridiculous.” The doctor said it should be at least $1,000 to $2,000 an hour.
Seems a bit ungrateful to UD. They got a special exception and everything. But now that she rolls it around in her head a bit… yeah… okay… five hundred dollars an hour is clearly ridiculous. Payment should start at $2,000 an hour. No! Payment should start at $100,000 an hour.
UD is unclear why the university was so eager to keep these emails private that the local newspaper had to sue for their release.
The records recently were turned over to the Journal Sentinel in a settlement of a lawsuit the newspaper filed against the university … in December, after [it] refused to release the documents…
The [associated university] foundation [which was also sued] agreed to pay the newspaper’s attorneys’ fees of about $12,400.
Why hold them back and then undergo the embarrassment and expense of a lawsuit that any idiot could have told them they’d lose? This isn’t Cuba or Venezuela yet, buddy! We have public record laws here!
And isn’t it good for students and patients at the university to know how dedicated its medical staff is?
From its symbiotic relationship with shady online for-profit colleges [Background on the for-profit scandal here.] to its plan to make itself an online school, the University of California at Berkeley is moving smartly along the path to self-prostitution.
Step One:
University Regent Richard Blum has an investment firm.
… Blum Capital Partners has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million—nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.
… John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, Calif., comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”…
Blum’s not talking. He’s not talking to this guy, from Sacramento News and Review, and he’s sure as hell not talking to this guy, from the Los Angeles Times.
Should an important official of what is arguably the most prestigious system of public higher education in the world also be a leading financial backer of an industry that has been coming under intense regulatory scrutiny because of persistent allegations of fraud?
Or put another way: If the chairman of the World Wildlife Fund held significant investments in, say, BP, wouldn’t people wonder exactly what he thought about how to balance environmental protection and oil industry regulation?
Step Two:
Berkeley’s not only investing public money in the for-profits; it’s modeling itself after them. Put everything online; hire whoever to teach the stuff; advertise the Berkeley brand all over town.
Its professors are rightly worried. Some of them have written a worried opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The UC Board of Regents will discuss this week a proposal by the University of California president’s office for an ambitious plan to market UC online. The proposal entertains the vision of an eventual online bachelor’s degree that could tap new students throughout the world, from “Sheboygan to Shanghai.”
In fact, the track record for online higher education is very uneven.
Uneven? UD, as readers know, is less diplomatic. She has long called online classes the poor white trash of education. If you want to know why, click on my poor white trash category.
The Berkeley professors can see what’s coming.
[T]he university runs the risk of destroying its reputation and excellence in the name of marketing a brand.
But hey. When a major big time regent has been kissing up to the for-profits for years — when, in a way, your university has become financially dependent on the kindness of the for-profits — you shouldn’t be surprised when administrators start suggesting that Berkeley should make them its model.
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UD thanks her friend – once her student – James Elias for the initial link about Berkeley’s online venture.
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Update: “[W]hat do these investments say about Blum’s vision for higher education?” asks Michael Hiltzik, author of a long article in the Los Angeles Times about University of California Regent and zealous investor in for-profit education Richard Blum.
Let’s think about that one.
Blum represents just about the most selective undergraduate institution in the world, Berkeley. Berkeley is simply the pinnacle of higher education — and it’s public. It’s one thing for small, insanely rich Princeton to offer a great education. I mean, Princeton does, it does offer this, and it deserves all the praise it gets. But Berkeley, to the enormous credit of California taxpayers, offers something similar. And it doesn’t have the legacy profile of the Ivies. It doesn’t make lots of special room for the children of the rich and well-connected. It doesn’t create the sort of culture Walter Kirn describes here.
Berkeley is, if you ask UD, inspirational. It’s probably the closest thing we have in this country to an admissions meritocracy.
What is the investment philosophy of Berkeley’s highest-profile regent? What does that philosophy tell us about what the LA Times reporter calls his vision for higher education?
Well, I’d say it’s a vision profoundly at odds with what Berkeley has long stood for. It’s elitist and cynical. Blum’s investment strategy says the following to UD:
I’m going to generate lots of money for a few of the most highly selected students in the country on the backs of millions of ordinary citizens being ripped off by substandard institutions. It’s a winner-take-all-the-education world. Let the losers pay the price.
She’s president, as the New York Times puts it this morning, “of the entire University of Michigan.” Yet in the years I’ve kept this blog, I’ve never known her to issue a direct statement, let alone appear in public… I mean, she must appear in public… convocations and all… But she’s so withdrawn that UD figures she’s either very shy or very queenly…
And frankly, given that university’s problems – many of them involving Rich Rodriguez, and therefore of her making – it comes off as regal rather than inhibited when Coleman says nothing, or appoints one of her mouthpieces, to deal with the latest accusations against him and his program.
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Now she’s getting all of this attention from the world’s newspaper of record because of her corporate directorships – the Johnson and Johnson one in particular, where, in exchange for attending a few meetings, she gets close to $250,000 a year – and yet again she makes one of her serfs do the talking.
Responding to questions on Ms. Coleman’s behalf Monday, Kelly E. Cunninghan, a spokeswoman for the university, said the president satisfies policy by disclosing her outside work.
Who says? I mean, who says that’s enough?
The situation calls for transparency, which Michigan has, [one expert] said, and a specific policy and approval process which do not appear to exist. Ms. Coleman is required to report her outside work to a vice president, who works for her.
“Disclosure is a step down and not equal to approval,” [Thomas] Donaldson said. “I think it’s important in an instance like this where there’s a possible conflict of interest for a responsible group to say yes, to think about it, and not just have it reported to them.”
It will be interesting to know President Coleman’s response to this point as soon as she designates a courtier to speak on her behalf.
Meanwhile, the Times notes the prevailing hypocrisy:
The University of Michigan medical school became the first in the nation last month to say it would refuse any funding from drug companies for its continuing medical education classes. The decision could cost it as much as $1 million a year, but it was worth it, the medical school dean said, for education to be free from potential bias.
At the same time, Mary Sue Coleman, president of the entire University of Michigan, sits on the board of directors for the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson…
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Update: Coleman comments on the issue:
I think it’s my duty to be out there understanding what the commercial world is doing and I think if it perfectly aligns with what we do in terms of our engagement in economic development, I think it’s important. …I don’t treat patients, I’m not an MBA, I have no control over any interactions or anything…
Why does Johnson and Johnson pay President Coleman $200,000 a year to understand the commercial world? She doesn’t do anything there, as she notes. Since she’s basically there to learn, why isn’t Coleman paying Johnson and Johnson?
… is a truly ornate way of writing bribing surgeons to use what they made, but okay.
I mean I don’t really expect the Wall Street Journal to write this way, but it does, at least when covering what it seems to consider the delicate issue of bribery.
Wielding and entice skew eighteenth century to me… The salesman comes into the doctor’s office, gives him an envelope with $500,000 in it and says “Hearty thanks good sir. You do honor us by using our goods in your surgeries. Depend upon our constancy in wielding payments for your enticement.”
Doesn’t really sound like modern Chicago, where orthopedic surgeons at Rush University are in trouble because a whistle-blower has filed lawsuit.
The surgeons “knew that in order to maintain their celebrity status with [device maker] Zimmer, they would have to continue to be among Zimmer’s biggest customers, and they accomplished this goal by scheduling and billing Medicare for hundreds, if not thousands, of joint replacements surgeries annually that did not comport with the Medicare Rules and Regulations,” the complaint said.
Zimmer bribed the surgeons – the more implants they implanted, they more money Zimmer gave them – and the clever hungry lads “booked impossibly busy schedules and often left residents to perform complex procedures, but billed Medicare as if they were there.”
So – the youngsters, earning $50,000 a year or so, perform the complex procedures. The surgeons do nothing, earn millions, and on top of the millions get hundreds of thousands in bribes from Zimmer for product usage.
You can understand their thinking. Zimmer doesn’t care how well the thing’s implanted; it cares that it is implanted. So get someone, anyone, anyhow, to implant the thing for chrissake…
… no university president comes anywhere close to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson. An article in Bloomberg about presidents sitting on corporate boards reviews Jackson’s steely focus on personal enrichment.
Jackson … sits on five corporate boards, more than most college presidents, after stepping down from a sixth in April. She traveled to Milwaukee and Houston to attend shareholder meetings for International Business Machines Corp. and Marathon Oil on two successive April days.
Shareholders at IBM, Marathon Oil, FedEx Corp. and NYSE Euronext filed proxy statements this year or in 2009 questioning Jackson’s ability to juggle jobs.
“Nobody should be sitting on that many boards,” said Emil Rossi, the trustee for shares who filed a proxy statement with his son to protest Jackson’s board nomination at Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider. Of 14 candidates, Jackson placed 11th in the voting and retained her seat. While getting the fewest votes for election at Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a Newark, New Jersey-based utility, she also held her board post there.
Founded in 1824, RPI is the nation’s oldest technological university, according to its website. Jackson earned $1.6 million from RPI in the year ended June 30, 2008, making her the highest-paid leader of a nonprofit private college in the U.S., according to the latest rankings by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jackson also reaped $982,628 in fees and other compensation such as stock awards from IBM, Public Service, New York-based NYSE Euronext and Marathon Oil in 2009, plus $403,823 from FedEx and Medtronic Inc., a Minneapolis-based medical-device maker, for their latest completed fiscal years, proxy statements show.
Faculty members said Jackson isn’t devoting enough attention to RPI’s endowment losses and credit issues. In May 2009, RPI had its debt downgraded to A3 from A2 by Moody’s Investors Service. While retaining the rating, Moody’s in March changed RPI’s outlook to “stable” from “negative.” RPI’s endowment fell 23 percent in a year, to $612.8 million on June 30, 2009, according to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, based in Washington.
“Her first priority needs to be this university,” said Jim Napolitano, a professor of physics at RPI since 1992.
… Jackson declined to be interviewed…
There’s lots of other stuff in the article about people like Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, who as a Goldman Sachs director “approved a $67.9 million bonus, still a Wall Street record, for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.” It’s worth reading in full.
The Bloomberg writer notes that corporate board sitting takes presidents away from their campus responsibilities, makes them vulnerable to lawsuits, and poses many ethical hazards. So why do presidents do it?
An expert in the field says: “Universities are feeling the pressure for fundraising, and [presidents] think creating these linkages will bring them more philanthropy, although there’s no evidence to suggest that actually happens.”
The philanthropy theory is a very nice way of trying to account for why corporate boards are so irresistable… But as this observer notes, there’s no evidence things work like that.
The simplest explanation seems to UD the best: Sitting on corporate boards is the easiest, pleasantest way in the whole wide world to scare up enormous sums of money for yourself.
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Update: Muckety provides a map.
The Grassley Report on pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science is here.
… before we look at what the University of Michigan medical school has just done, let us remind ourselves of the basic truths about Continuing Medical Education. I quote from Marcia Angell:
… In most states doctors are required to take accredited education courses, called continuing medical education (CME), and drug companies contribute roughly half the support for this education, often indirectly through private investor-owned medical-education companies whose only clients are drug companies. CME is supposed to be free of drug-company influence, but incredibly these private educators have been accredited to provide CME by the American Medical Association’s Accreditation Committee for Continuing Medical Education—a case of the fox not only guarding the chicken coop, but living inside it.
… If drug companies and medical educators were really providing education, doctors and academic institutions would pay them for their services. When you take piano lessons, you pay the teacher, not the other way around. But in this case, industry pays the academic institutions and faculty, and even the doctors who take the courses. The companies are simply buying access to medical school faculty and to doctors in training and practice.
… [T]he pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate role in graduate or post-graduate medical education. That should be the responsibility of the profession. In fact, responsibility for its own education is an essential part of the definition of a learned profession.
Simple enough? Fox, chicken coop; lessons wrong way around…
Hokay. Let’s proceed with the announcement from the University of Michigan, reported by the New York Times.
In the latest effort to break up the often cozy relationship between doctors and the medical industry, the University of Michigan Medical School has become the first to decide that it will no longer take any money from drug and device makers to pay for coursework doctors need to renew their medical licenses.
University officials voted to eliminate commercial financing, beginning next January, for postgraduate medical education, a practice that has come under increasing scrutiny from academics, medical associations, ethicists and lawmakers because of the potential to promote products over patient interests.
… [One] leading medical ethicist asserted that the prohibition did not go far enough. Dr. Bernard Lo, lead author of a 2008 Institute of Medicine report on conflicts of interest, said private doctors and academic physicians who are paid to speak for drug companies should be barred from presenting educational material at accredited conferences. “Mouthpieces for their products,” he called them.
… “Industry wouldn’t be paying billions of dollars to do this stuff if it didn’t benefit them,” [another physician said]…
So Michigan boldly leads the way. As other schools attempt to join UM, expect to hear a lot of chickens squawking.
… conflict of interest abuser chair of its department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences boasts of its “unflinching commitment to scientific integrity.”
It’s a funny world.
But they’re really not. Only a few Moo‘s come along in one’s lifetime.
UD has lately been enjoying Stubborn as a Mule, a first novel by Harvard law professor R.H. Fallon, Jr.
Mule goes after – among other things – the Chicago School of Economics.
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This New York Times review seems to be announcing another good academic satire, this one very topical, and also pertinent to an ongoing preoccupation of UD‘s — conflict of interest in academic science.
Tech Transfer is by Daniel Greenberg, a science journalist who for many years wrote for the New York Times.
Even at the Times he had a satirical bent; he wrote, in some of his columns, about a university unit called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds. The Center’s director, Dr. Grant Swinger, specialized in “instantly redirecting his center’s activities to whatever scientific fad was highest on legislators’ priority list. He would have been first to set up a stem-cell research institute and get the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to promise him a building.”
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The new university president in Tech Transfer quickly learns the non-negotiable demands of his faculty:
These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.
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The real center for the absorption of federal funds these days is of course the for-profit higher education industry.
UCLA has been building a big conflict of interest case against one of its faculty members for some time, and today the university announces a suit against him to recover millions of dollars.
If you’re an academic physician, or any other sort of university professor using your office mainly as a place to do private business (and of course collecting your university salary on top of that), maybe you should read this.
A group of UCLA staff members entered a medical school professor’s office late at night in January 2008 to gather electronic evidence of alleged prohibited outside activities involving Dr. Robert Lufkin.
In their lawsuit, the Regents claim Lufkin owes the University for the millions of dollars that he earned while acting as a director, shareholder and consultant at outside medical and technological firms U.S. Radiology On-Call, Prohealth Advanced Imaging and Mediasmith.
For years, Lufkin had allegedly been working with these companies while failing to report his involvement and income in accordance with UC policy…
According to the Regents’ complaint submitted to the court, Lufkin had been using University resources to build a “directly competing business.”
“(Lufkin had been) siphoning away patients to the detriment of the University and generally building his own business when he owed a duty to his employer of undivided loyalty to advance his employer’s interests,” according to the Regents’ complaint…
Ali Ghalambor is an endowed chair in the Petroleum Engineering department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
He is also a globe-trotting consultant who has figured out that if you charge your travel to your university as well as to the people for whom you’re consulting, you make double what you’d have made if… if you hadn’t done that.
Ghalambor has also figured out that for high-demand oilmen, a university is really just a business address, a launching pad, an office away from the office. “Ghalambor … often conducted outside consulting or contract work during his ULL working hours and responsibilities.”
You see the synergy here between the conflict of commitment and the double dipping. He didn’t tell the university that his travel was not scholarly but commercial. So the university gave him scholarly travel funds, and of course the commercial entity involved paid his consultancy and travel expenses.
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No, it’s not earth-shattering. Ghalambor is just a guy playing the angles. What could be exploited in his work setting he exploited. What corruption was possible, he engaged in. He didn’t do anything dramatic or anything out of whack with the basic principles of corruption. He was simply corrupt in the ways available given his situation.
… [H]undreds of invoices, letters, itineraries, travel requests and expense reports… indicate… tens of thousands of dollars were paid to Ghalambor for trips ranging from Wyoming to Kazakhstan [and] that he may have double-billed the university and the institutions or businesses he visited.
ULL administrators had questioned some of Ghalambor’s travel and expenses, especially to Ghalambor’s native country Iran, at least as far back as December 2004, according to letters received by The Advocate through former and current ULL petroleum engineering department employees.
The internal audit reported that from 2006 to 2009 Ghalambor received $42,280 from ULL “while conducting activities that appear to be outside of his working hours or responsibilities.”
He also claimed $84,117 from ULL for travel expenses while accepting travel reimbursements for possibly the same expenses “from companies and organizations he provided services to as part of his outside activities,” the report states.
He also sometimes converted state-contracted airfare to first class that was reimbursed by other companies or organizations, according to the report.
Moving this money here and that money there to shift from a shabby state-contracted seat to first-class… Again, nothing outside the rule book… Plain old vanilla graft.