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.

Most uncivil behavior from a founder of “one of Singapore’s most established civil-society groups.”

Vivienne Wee has been found guilty of stealing her grant. She got almost a million dollars to work on a website, but secretly transferred the money from the original contractor to a bogus outfit run by her family.

The ICAC, Hong Kong’s anti-graft body, accused the pair of conspiring to hide from City U, and that she had a conflict of interest with the company that was the actual service provider of the IT contract.

The IT contract was for a website and intranet project headed by Wee. It was won by the company Sparkland. But the job was actually done by Locus Interactive, run by Wee’s sister-in-law, Ng Ngar-Sheung.

Both the owner of Sparkland and Ng were also found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. The owner of Sparkland had transferred the university’s payment to Locus, and received a cut of the fees.

Alison Bass writes:

… [O]ne of the members of the DSM-V task force is Catherine Lord, a professor at the University of Michigan, who gets big royalties from a diagnostic test she helped develop (known as ADOS) that is used to diagnose autistic spectrum disorders in children. As it turns out, the subcategories for the ADOS test fit very neatly into the new criteria proposed for the autistic spectrum disorders in the DSM-V.

Now, according to an APA disclosure report I found online, Lord has agreed not to accept more than $10,000 from “industry sources” each year from the time the DSM-V is approved until its publication (the report says that will be in 2012, but recently the APA agreed to delayed publication of a new DSM until 2013).

What I want to know is: does this agreement include all the royalties Lord currently receives from the ADOS diagnostic test and the expensive bucket of toys that come with it? And if so, what happens after the DSM-V is published when all those royalties start flooding back in?

More importantly, should Lord have been allowed to sit on the DSM-TV task force in the first place and influence major policy changes in psychiatric diagnoses that will affect millions of vulnerable children? I think not.

… you know you’re a for-profit.

That’s what the guy who runs Phoenix University made last year. And who cares? He can give himself whatever he wants, even if graduation and student loan repayment and job placement rates are shit. Even if his entire industry is under major legal and federal government scrutiny for squalid recruitment practices and false claims.

In January 2009, a commenter at Insider Higher Ed – the thread is in response to an interview with Harold Shapiro, once president of Princeton and now chair of DeVry, another for-profit outfit – wrote this about horrid snooty non-profit universities and refreshingly egalitarian for-profits:

Consideration for and impeccable service to the customer is gradually becoming the market’s expectation in higher education. [H]igher education’s customers are losing their tolerance for prissy Mandarins.

And, you know, you hear this rhetoric a lot among the for-profits… Those non-profit snobs… Yet doesn’t $6.5 mil sound way more Mandarin than the few hundred thou Harvard’s Drew Faust takes in? Especially considering that she’s not too above it all to make sure she graduates almost every one of the people who pay her university’s tuition?

I mean we are not kidding around here! When Kaplan’s last CEO resigned in 2008, he “receive[d] his base salary, which was not disclosed, and incentives, in addition to $46 million related to the Kaplan stock option plan. Honoring the noncompete clause of his contract will net [him] an additional $30 million by November 2011.”

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Anyway. As with the pharmaceutical industry, when it’s all about money, unsavory things can happen. Unattractive compromises tend to get made. Here are two recent examples.

UD‘s friend Jonathan sends her this Barron’s piece (scroll down) about the Washington Post’s relationship to Kaplan.

Even more striking, Stephen Burd at New America Foundation just went after the Chronicle of Higher Education for soft-pedaling its coverage of the for-profits, from some of whom it receives not only significant advertising revenue, but also conference sponsorship.

Burt tells his reader stuff about the for-profits that the Chronicle fails to mention.

… the thumb of Pharma.

Allen Frances (background here) continues to warn us. No one’s listening.

… This wholesale medical imperialization of normality could potentially create tens of millions of innocent bystanders who would be mislabeled as having a mental disorder. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day — despite the lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses.

… This is a societal issue that transcends psychiatry. It is not too late to save normality from DSM-V if the greater public interest is factored into the necessary risk/benefit analyses.

… who a few months ago wrote an excoriation of Brown’s president for the disrepute she brought to the school through her seat on the board of Goldman Sachs. (UD featured his opinion piece here.) Liebling wrote with the confidence, clarity, and ethical maturity most writers twice his age (nineteen) lack.

Liebling wrote to UD today, linking her to a New York Times article about the controversy at Brown. An excerpt from the article:

For Dr. Simmons, the controversy is not going away …quietly. Even though she said last month that she had decided not to stand for re-election to the board at the annual shareholders meeting later this year, some of her critics say she never should have taken the job at Goldman to begin with — and that she certainly should not have accepted so much money.

How much money?

A spot on a board, particularly at a moneymaker like Goldman, used to be considered a plum job. The demands were relatively modest compared with the rewards. Dr. Simmons, for instance, was paid $323,539 last year for her work on the board, and will soon leave her position at Goldman with stock that is currently worth about $4.3 million. That was on top of her salary at Brown, which was $576,000 this year.

Less of a plum now, what with all the public attention …

But anyway – here’s what’s wonderful:

Simon Liebling, a sophomore from Highland Park, N.J., got tongues wagging on College Hill when he criticized Dr. Simmons in The Daily Herald.

“Most people agreed with my basic point that this brought shame on the university,” Mr. Liebling, 19, said during an interview in a coffee shop at the center of campus. “It has been taken by most people to be outrageous.”

Bravo, Liebling.

From the New York Times:

… [Medical residency programs] where fewer graduates passed tests from the American Board of Internal Medicine — “one indicator of program quality” — were also more likely to accept the [financial] assistance [of drug companies for things like meals, office supplies, and drug samples].

… “As the pass rates went down,” [one observer] said of the new doctors’ test scores, “the odds of accepting pharmaceutical support went up.”

… Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University, said his organization’s internal medicine residency program decided about five years ago to stop accepting food or financial support from industry.

“I spend a fair amount of my budget feeding my residents,” Dr. Blaser said, “but then they can learn in a way that is not unduly influenced by who is feeding them.”…

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Wear it proudly.

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UD thanks Brad.

… has been on top of the Why the Hell is Ruth Simmons on the Goldman Sachs Board? story; but there’s also a very strong-minded Brown student who’s been after her. And of course UD‘s had her own wee say on the matter.

Now that Simmons has quit the board, Volokh Conspiracy wraps things up.

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UD thanks Brad for the link.

A medical faculty is a dicey thing. Among this cohort of professors at your university, you’ve always got lurking a few ghosted writers, courtesy authors, research fakers, plagiarists, etc.

But your biggest problem these days, what with the money to be made from selling drugs for pharmaceutical companies, comes from corporate shills using their university affiliation to look respectable.

Take Leslie Baumann, pride of the University of Miami. Leslie’s in trouble with the FDA.

… [T]he Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on one of the most widely quoted cosmetic doctors, sending shudders through the ranks of opinion leaders in fashion publishing and vanity medicine.

The F.D.A. recently sent a warning letter to Dr. Leslie Baumann, a well-known dermatologist and clinical researcher in Miami Beach, citing the doctor for expressing premature enthusiasm in the media about Dysport, an injectable antiwrinkle drug the agency had not yet approved.

Dr. Baumann’s comments in the media in 2007 violated restrictions on drug promotion, according to the letter; the agency asked Dr. Baumann to explain how she intended to prevent similar violations in the future.

Under the Obama administration, the F.D.A. has stepped up scrutiny of drug advertising, dispatching many warning letters about misleading commercials and online marketing efforts. But this is believed to be the first time the agency has warned an individual investigator — a medical researcher who oversees a clinical trial — for apparently promoting an unapproved drug.

… Federal rules bar drug makers and investigators on their clinical trials from promoting a drug before the agency has approved the product. Dr. Baumann violated the restrictions, the F.D.A. letter said, because she was an investigator on a clinical trial for Dysport and promoted it well before the drug’s approval in April.

“Early data shows it may last longer and kick in faster than Botox,” Dr. Baumann told the fashion magazine Allure in 2007. She made similar comments that same year to Elle magazine and during an appearance on the “Today” show on NBC in January 2009.

… Dr. Baumann, a former professor of dermatology at the University of Miami medical school …

Former? Why is she still listed as a faculty member? And don’t you think she should update her Amazon.com bibliography?

… When companies seek to work with university faculty, …it is generally on the basis of the faculty’s expertise in particular areas of research relevant to the company’s activities. It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology….

The American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Washington wonders what, besides greed and cynicism, puts their provost on Nike’s board.

The man who until recently managed Wesleyan’s investments wrote this to his wife in an email when he still worked at Wesleyan.

He was excited about the extra money he was about to make (Wesleyan paid him $500,000 or so, sickeningly low when you consider that his peers at Harvard until recently got thirty million dollars a year) from — just like Phyllis Wise and Mark Emmert at board-seat-crazy University of Washington — sitting on a bunch of corporate boards.

This guy, Tom Kannam, also opened up tons of new businesses while working for Wesleyan (he billed Wesleyan, according to a lawsuit the college has filed against him, for travel and other stuff associated with these ventures), and generally seems to have regarded his Wesleyan job as a kind of stupid side gig he held onto because it gave him access to information and connections that moved his real money-making activities along.

The Kannam family emails Wesleyan’s gotten hold of and presented in its suit are wondrous to behold. When Kannan tells his wife that Wesleyan has just updated its conflict of interest policy and that the policy looks really serious, she responds: Oucheroo.

A little New Year’s prognostication from Arnold Relman, who’s talking about escalating conflicts of interest at American medical schools — as in professors who have divided loyalties between corporate profits and scientific integrity.

The New York Times reports a little action on this front, with a couple of Harvard-affiliated research hospitals tightening their corporate board policies:

… Senior officials at the two hospitals, Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals in Boston, must limit their pay for serving as outside directors to what the policy calls “a level befitting an academic role” — no more than $5,000 a day for actual work for the board. Some had been receiving more than $200,000 a year. Also, they may no longer accept stock.

… Partners HealthCare is also forbidding speaker’s fees from drug companies for any employee, including nearly 8,000 with Harvard faculty appointments. Some other medical schools have taken similar actions in prohibiting faculty members from being paid by drug companies to speak about their products.

… Stock and options were banned because they tie the director’s fortunes to company profits…

… is at it again, giving the local newspaper such a runaround on their conflict of interest policy deliberations that the paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has sued.

The University of Wisconsin’s medical school and its supporting foundation are violating the state’s public records law by refusing to release faculty comments about a proposed conflict-of-interest policy, according to a lawsuit filed Friday.

The suit was filed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and reporter John Fauber, who has written extensively about the relationships between drug companies, medical-device makers, doctors and medical schools. It seeks a court order to make the comments public.

… UW’s medical school and its doctors have been the subject of a yearlong series of stories in the Journal Sentinel.

… Critics believe the money drug and medical-device companies pay to doctors and medical schools leads to higher health care costs, in part by increasing the use of expensive brand-name drugs as well as more so-called off-label use, when a drug or device is used for a purpose not approved by the FDA…