… at the University of Georgia.
But don’t read it. Content yourself with this New York Times backgrounder.
God forbid UD should be accused, what with the Damon Evans thing and all, of piling on.
A business school dean can’t help but notice the scandalous business model at the for-profits.
… Annually, about 25 percent of for-profit colleges’ government-subsidized tuition revenue is spent on aggressive student recruitment programs. Taxpayers are thus financing not just educational expenditures but expensive advertising campaigns and sophisticated call centers.
The University of Phoenix spends nearly $1 billion annually on promotion. It used its federally subsidized profits to purchase naming rights to a sports stadium. Bridgepoint Education reported spending 28 percent of this year’s first-quarter revenue on promotion, compared with only 25 percent spent on instruction costs and services.
There are many lessons traditional colleges can learn from the successes of the for-profits. But imagine taxpayers’ reactions if traditional schools decided to divert a quarter of their already constrained budgets away from the classroom to carry out massive self-promotion campaigns.
The president of a teachers’ union in Canada announces that because Nipissing is going to give an honorary degree to a conservative politician, his organization will exact revenge by ruining the teaching careers of that university’s graduates.
The Lexington Herald-Leader notes that Wendell Berry has
express[ed] his displeasure when his university, the one where he both studied and taught, crawls in bed with an industry that blasts mountains apart, fills adjacent valleys with rubble and destroys or pollutes waterways in the pursuit of profit.
UK — indeed, the whole state of Kentucky — endured a few days as the butt of a national joke after the school’s trustees agreed to paste “Wildcat Coal Lodge” on an unnecessary new basketball dormitory in exchange for donation of the $7 million construction cost.
Now, we’re seeing a more serious consequence of the decision to sell the university’s soul — a severing of ties between one of Kentucky’s most esteemed men of letters and the state’s flagship institution of higher education…
He’s taken his brain and gone home. Or in search of a university.
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“A heartbreaking thing for me.” — Berry talks about his repudiation of UK.
It’s about the writer Wendell Berry, who has withdrawn, in protest, his papers from the University of Kentucky.
Sordid story out of South Korea about university corruption and one response to it: Suicide.
This particular suicide was accompanied by a long, tell-all note and is therefore receiving a lot of press coverage.
And Tom Petters gave millions to Miami University of Ohio to set up an ethics center. (Miami has returned the money. Not to Petters. He’s in prison for fifty years. To a court-appointed receiver.)
What are we to make of Merkin, Blagojevich, and Petters?
Well, read your Elmer Gantry.
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[UD thanks Daniel for correcting her on the name of the university.]
… at Health Care Renewal says most of what needs to be said about the latest university overcompensation story, this one at the University of Maryland.
Here’s the Baltimore Sun account, which includes a statement from Governor Martin O’Malley:
This is an outrageous case of excessive executive compensation in a public institution. This sort of ‘golden parachute’ has no place in the public sector.
Lucky Temple University now gets this retiree, who says he “completed the Program for Health Systems Management at Harvard University,” but I can’t find that program.
Sometimes he renders it lower case: program for health systems management.
I’m looking all over the School of Public Health at Harvard, but I can’t find it. Has it changed its name? What sort of degree was conferred? This is the closest thing I can find.
After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him.
In a statement released to the Daily Mail the professor of history at London’s Birkbeck College said that he takes “full responsibility” for what he called “foolish errors”….
UD thanks Dave for the link.
Background here.
This guy tells you why you should consider signing this petition.
(I’m signature #1089.)
Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto keens over the bloated corpse of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
The pharmaceutical industry, writes Shorter in the Wall Street Journal, “seeks the largest possible market for a given drug, and advertises huge diseases, such as major depression and schizophrenia, the scientific status of which makes insiders uneasy.”
The DSM provides pharma a market-expanding facade of empiricism. Its ever-broadening girth is a result of “increased specificity” of diagnosis within these immense major disease categories, but the specificity “is spurious. There is little risk of misdiagnosis, because the new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.” As a commenter on Shorter’s piece puts it, “We’re slicing up illnesses in small portions, we’re treating illnesses with very different names and symptoms with basically the same medications, and we’re at least partly doing this because drug companies have discovered the primary marketing mantra of differentiation. ”
Smartly tricked-out pills for your tailor-made depression; a whole other set for your very own anxiety. Yet “these indications are more marketing devices than scientific categories, because most depression entails anxiety and vice versa.”
The latest draft of the DSM fixes none of the problems with the previous DSM series, and even creates some new ones.
A new problem is the extension of “schizophrenia” to a larger population, with “psychosis risk syndrome.” Even if you aren’t floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic. Let’s say you have “disorganized speech.” This would apply to about half of my students. Pour on the Seroquel for “psychosis risk syndrome”!
DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases: turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity. [One of Shorter’s commenters calls this disgusting development “psychosprawl.”]
If there were specific treatments for these various niches, you could argue this is good diagnostics. But, as with other forms of anxiety-depression, the SSRIs [a major category of pills] are thought good for everything. Yet to market a given indication, such as social-anxiety disorder, it’s necessary to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on registration trials to convince the FDA that your agent works for this disease that previously nobody had ever heard of.
See why your placebo with strong side effects costs so much?
And we haven’t yet touched on advertising and litigation budgets.
With DSM-V, American psychiatry is … defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs.
As details emerge of the failure of Canada’s First Nations University (background here), it’s clear that this was a textbook case of institutional failure.
Or, rather, comic book. You have to laugh at the maniacal thoroughness with which its overseers inflicted upon FNU every conceivable injury you can inflict on a university. Only the story of Yusupov’s plot against Rasputin chronicles as many wounds.
Kajoko Kifuji, a professor at Tufts, prescribed homicidal amounts of anti-psychotics to a child.
I mean, of course, she handed the prescriptions to the child’s parents – the child was only four at the time.
Kifuji had been giving her powerful drugs since she was two.
Rebecca Riley’s parents killed her (the mother has been convicted of second degree murder; the father’s trial begins soon) via doses of the multiple non-FDA-approved (for use in children) drugs Kifuji gave them.
Kifuji – who prescribed the same drugs to the parents’ other two children – based these prescriptions on what the mother told her about her children.
Kifuji testified that her diagnosis was primarily based on Carolyn Riley’s description of her daughter as aggressive and disruptive. She in 2004 prescribed Clonidine to Rebecca for ADHD; the next year, she prescribed Depakote to treat bipolar disorder.
Kifuji went on to approve a double dosage of the medication after Carolyn Riley told her that she was giving Rebecca twice the daily recommended amount.
That’s from the Tufts newspaper. Here’s Lawrence Diller with more detail:
Dr. Kifuji determined that Rebecca at age two had hyperactivity and began prescribing drugs to her at that time. Kifuji changed her diagnosis to bipolar disorder at age three. She also made the same diagnosis for Rebecca’s brother and sister who were nine and seven. All three were receiving variations of these sedating psychiatric medications. Kifuji, who was granted immunity against prosecution to gain her cooperation, testified during the trial that she relied almost exclusively on reports from Rebecca’s mother on the children’s aggressive behavior, sleep problems and history of mental illness in the family to make the diagnosis for the three children.
… [A] three year old was prescribed three psychiatric drugs for bipolar disorder…
… Joseph Biederman, head of Harvard’s Pediatric Psychopharmacology Clinic, has long espoused the bipolar diagnosis in children. He and his group have claimed the diagnosis can be made in children as young as two and should be followed by aggressive psychiatric drug interventions…
Once Kifuji’s finished with her busy court appearance schedule, she will be hiring lawyers to defend her against a malpractice suit from the estate of Rebecca Riley.
Tufts thinks she’s great. Happy to have on her board.
… a lawsuit over excessive compensation.
Next up: Mark Emmert!