From New York magazine:

… Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.

Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.

That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff.

Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996, when Hermann served as vice-chairman. Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved…

Yeshiva University: Dollar for dollar, more conflict of interest than all other American universities combined. And there’s absolutely no indication that it’s operating any differently now.

Today, Emory; tomorrow, maybe you.

…Within a few months, officials plan to file civil and criminal charges against a number of surgeons who they say demanded profitable consulting agreements from device makers in exchange for using their products.

… The move against doctors is part of a diverse campaign to curb industry marketing tactics that enrich doctors but increase health care costs and sometimes endanger patients. Taken together, the new measures are likely to transform the relationship between medicine and industry.

… Also, as part of plea bargains, federal health officials are forcing a growing number of drug and device makers to post publicly all payments made to doctors who serve as consultants or speakers. Manufacturers have repeatedly used consulting payments in illegal schemes to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs or devices in inappropriate and unapproved ways, according to federal charges.

… [T]he United States attorney said officials hoped to send a strong message to doctors. “I have been shocked at what appears to be willful blindness by folks in the physician community to the criminal conduct that corrupts the patient-physician relationship,” he said.

New York Times

[Senator] Grassley, in a letter to Pfizer, wrote that he was “greatly disturbed” to read an article in The New York Times on Tuesday describing a Pfizer representative taking cellphone photographs of [Harvard] medical students last October at a campus demonstration against industry influence. “I find this troubling as I have documented several instances where pharmaceutical companies have attempted to intimidate academic critics of drugs,” he wrote.

New York Times

**************************

The curious lensman from Pfizer
Has become my new Harvard advisor.
“Promote my next pill
And you’ll be in the swill.”
To which all I can say is “Aye aye, sir!”

See the post just below this one, where the militancy that matters derives from Harvard medical school students.

Similarly, a med student at the University of Minnesota shows you, in this all-business, supremely clear opinion piece, how to eviscerate deans who can’t imagine adjusting to life without industry money.

While the militancy has to come from the students, we shouldn’t forget those other sources of moral clarity and pressure: High-profile professors unencumbered by greed, like Harvard’s Marcia Angell; and bulldogs in Congress like Charles Grassley.

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

… Harvard [received an] F grade … from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

[The last dean] was such an industry booster that he served on a pharmaceutical company board…

(One Harvard professor’s [now-required] disclosure in class listed 47 company affiliations.)…

new york times

…conflict of interest at the top of George Washington University’s medical  school can be found here, at UD‘s blogpal, Health Care Renewal.

… conflict of interest may ensue. When professors are really consultants or salespeople, or when they’re cooling their heels waiting for higher paying work, or … who knows what they’re doing on campus, but when professors aren’t really professors, conflict of interest may ensue.

Here’s an example from George Washington University.

A prominent professor in the GW School of Public Health and Health Sciences is under scrutiny this week because of allegations that he knowingly misled people about the safety of the District’s water while under contract with the city’s main water utility.

Tee Guidotti, a former professor and department chairman at SPHHS, published an article in the National Institute of Health journal in 2007 that said the extraordinarily high lead content in the D.C. water supply from 2001 to 2004 was not harmful, a statement cited locally and nationally as evidence that the city’s water supply was safe.

Last month, however, another study concluded that there is a correlation between elevated blood-lead levels in children and neighborhoods that had high lead levels in drinking water during the city’s water crisis, The Washington Post reported. The study found that hundreds of D.C. children had dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

After closer review, editors of the journal said Guidotti’s conclusions were questionable and that he may have been influenced to publish his conclusions by the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, who contracted the study.

WASA paid Guidotti and GW $750,000 over a three-year period for his work on the study, according to The Washington Post.

On Friday the Post published a front-page story about the alleged conflict of interest, highlighting e-mails Guidotti sent to colleagues prior to the journal’s publication showing he knew a key portion of the article was inaccurate, though it was published anyway…

Here’s the Washington Post story.

From a Philadelphia Inquirer profile of Senator Charles Grassley:

Jerome Kassirer, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and an expert on conflicts of interest, applauds Grassley’s efforts [to go after academic physicians guilty of conflict of interest], but wants changes that would abolish speaking fees, trips, and other payments to doctors that help drug companies promote their point of view.

“Transparency is only a partial solution to conflict of interest,” Kassirer said.

Grassley has told him he’s just getting started.

… “It is self-evidently absurd to look to a company for information about a product it makes,” Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said in a telephone interview.

“Why can’t doctors, who are among the most privileged members of society, pay for their own continuing medical education?” Angell said. “Why have they abdicated that responsibility to the companies who make drugs?”

Reuters updates us on the continuing scandal of Continuing Medical Education.

… jumps to US News and World Report.

… Republicans had also signaled that they would grill Daschle on conflict-of-interest issues, noting that the president’s choice to lead a healthcare overhaul had accepted more than $5 million in speaking and consulting fees from the healthcare industry in the past two years.

From Talking Points Memo:

Daschle’s coziness with corporate interests, many of whom will have key business before Congress and the Obama administration, could complicate the larger task of reducing the influence of the private sector in Washington.

… [T]here’s nothing explicitly nefarious about Daschle’s work on behalf of health insurers. But interests like AHIP and UnitedHealth have, by and large, stood in the way of efforts to remove our healthcare system from the grip of private interests, which many see as a prerequisite for real reform. Of course, that likely won’t happen without at least neutralizing the opposition of the private insurers — so perhaps Daschle’s ties to those insurers make him ideally suited for the role. But at the very least, it would be nice to know what kind of “policy advice” he gave his corporate clients.

Taking it to the people.

The girl can’t help it. She doesn’t understand what conflict of interest is.

Rep. Marti Coley, R-Dist. 7, has no plans to give up her $60,000 job at Chipola College, unlike fellow state legislator and Speaker of the House Ray Sansom, who resigned his post at another college amid criticism about his dual role.

The legislator said she sees no conflict in her two jobs and she’s puzzled by the air of criticism surrounding legislators who also work at Florida colleges.

Coley had worked as an adjunct professor at Chipola for two decades before taking the job she now holds there — special assistant of business and community affairs. Her pay started at $45,000 when she took the postion, but she got a 33 percent raise in July of this year, bringing her salary to $60,000.

Her job entails, among other things, fund-raising activities for the Chipola honors program and the school at large.

… As for speculation that her double service puts Chipola at special advantage come budget time in the legislature, Coley said that’s just not so.

She readily admits to advocating for the school she works for — she sees it as part of her job as a representative of the district where Chipola is located — but said her work on the school’s behalf is above-board and really begins after funding requests have made their way through a certain process.

As a legislator, she said, it would be her duty to advocate for the college, whether she was employed by Chipola or not.

“I represent nine counties, and any entity in that community is going to get 100 percent effort from me in the legislature. Even with budget cuts, we have a very large budget and that money is going somewhere,” she said. …

From Inside Higher Ed:

State Rep. Ray Sansom of Florida announced on the first day of a special legislative session Monday that he would reluctantly give up his $110,000 a year, part-time job with Northwest Florida State College, the Associated Press reported. Sansom, the majority leader in Florida’s House of Representatives, became the latest lawmaker there to generate conflict of interest accusations with jobs at colleges to which they’ve also helped direct funds. Sansom was hired by the college in November as vice president for development and planning, a newly created position that was not publicly advertised, after he helped steer $25.5 million toward Northwest Florida State College during a year when budgets were being cut across the state.

It’s Florida.

It won’t change much of anything.