… Harvard had to pay to settle fraud charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of its professors; but then the University of Florida doesn’t play in Harvard’s big-money, big-influence league.

Still, $435,000 ain’t chopped liver; and thanks to the very similar criminal mischief (it also involved federal contracts) of one of its former professors, UF may well have to pay that amount to the government.

Ginther also happens to be a former math professor with a Ph. D. from Stanford University who just happened to specialize in… statistics.

I’m telling you. Life is better in Washington. In UD‘s city, if you can just keep talking for seven, eight minutes tops, you can earn twenty to forty thousand dollars!

And it gets better. You probably don’t even have to write the speech! At these rates, you can be generous with your speech writer. Show up, stand up, mouth some words somebody else wrote, grab the check.

Here, for instance, are some notes from recent DC speeches on behalf of an Iranian group.

Gen. [Anthony] Zinni’s speaker agent confirmed that Zinni was… paid his “standard speaking fee” for an eight-minute address at an MEK-related conference in January — between $20,000 and $30,000… As for whether he had any qualms about how much the speakers were compensated for addressing the groups, [John] Sano, who delivered [one conference’s] longest remarks with a 14 minute speech, paused and thought…

Yeah, there’s the whole pause and think option… which some have taken:

Despite offers of up to $40,000 for notably brief remarks, sources with knowledge of speaker negotiations said at least four invited speakers have declined this year because they had questions about the [group’s] ultimate goals…

Clear up the questions about your goals and I’d be delighted to be limo’ed to your feast, say out loud like a good boy the eight minutes’ worth of words my speech writer wrote, take a check from you for forty thousand dollars and be driven home. That’d be great.

The author of the article from which I’ve been quoting cautions the reader:

Unless a speaker has a can’t-lose stock tip, nobody is inherently worth $20,000 for a six-minute speech…

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The author of the article questions this Harvard professor, who along with Zinni and Sano has made a killing this way. She responds with some major backoffology:

“I was invited to speak at a conference on the Arab Spring and I received a speaker fee… My remarks were aimed at an Iranian American audience that was concerned about Camp Ashraf. I, too, am concerned about the ongoing humanitarian situation there. But I would not want my presence at the conference to be equated with a position on the delisting of the MEK.”

Well, instead of taking nothing for the speech (you were motivated to give it, you say, by humanitarian rather than material concerns), you took tens of thousands of dollars from the group sponsoring it. So it doesn’t really look as if you have no position on the delisting of this organization.

Delisting from what, by the way? From our country’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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Throw this professor in with the Monitor Group, Lawrence Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and the rest of the Harvard crew, and you understand why Frank Rich and UD laugh so heartily when the New York Times publishes opinion pieces by Ma Ingalls about the evils of materialism.

… (as regular readers know, UD is fond of saying of UMDNJ that it has rolling prison admissions) scores another winner.

(Here’s a new book for UMDNJ to display in its visitors’ center. Sample sentence: The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is a microcosm for corruption in the rest of the Garden State.)

This place knows how to maintain a reputation: Keep ’em coming.

Maintain? Hell – enhance! The University of Medicine and Dentistry’s criminal class has traditionally been made up of local petty thieves who ended up on the board of trustees or whatever… This guy’s a med school professor! The crime is tax evasion on a most impressive scale, in fancy countries like Switzerland! Forget the whole Jersey backwater thing! We are moving up in the world!

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Why is this man smiling? Now we know.

I mean, we know why he was smiling. Five years in prison await.

… The Faculty Lounges (as in takes it easy — because it’s tenured) wants UD to review it, so when UD gets her copy she will rouse herself from her tenured stupor, read it, and write a review of it for Inside Higher Ed.

The book’s Amazon page features several reviewers saying horrible things about tenured professors. Pretty much the nicest is “this self-obsessed caste.”

Texas has been breathing down the neck of the tenured lately. Tenure doesn’t fit the corporate model.

For my money, Richard Chait’s work on tenure is the best around (his introduction to this collection sets out the pros and cons nicely), but I’m looking forward to finding out whether Riley has stuff to add to the debate.

Let UD shake her head a bit here, try to clear things out… Okay. A Harvard professor, attacked in the last few days as a bigot because he wrote an opinion piece in an Indian newspaper containing a variety of intensely bigoted statements, as well as outrageous policy proposals, relative to Muslims, responds that his attackers are pro-Soviet.

I understand that the guy only teaches summer school, but shouldn’t there be minimal standards – of political understanding, and of responsible public statements – for summer as well as non-summer teaching? At Harvard?

Two Harvard students have started a petition calling for Subramanian Swamy’s ouster:

“Swamy draws a lot of prestige and legitimacy from his position at Harvard,” [one of the petition-writers] said. “If the Hindu right were to come into power in India, he could very well be someone who takes up a position in government, so I think it’s important for members of this community to play a part in discrediting him and saying, ‘No, he does not represent us.’”

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As current events at the University of North Carolina demonstrate, all serious universities guard their reputations, and all know that reputation can be undone in any number of ways. Slimy big-time sports programs are the fastest route to perdition, obviously; but industry-compromised professors on your medical faculty (an ongoing news story in the United States) can move you in that direction too, as can lots of other forms of financial corruption.

The problem with professors who express disastrously illiberal views – Ward Churchill’s writings on the ‘little Eichmanns’ who died in the Twin Towers, for instance – is that these people are terrible embarrassments to liberal arts institutions. They harbor precisely the ignorant, cruel fanaticism against which the university, above all human institutions, stands. What to do?

You certainly want to do something. It’s important to say out loud, one way or another, that you’re not, for instance, University College London, which has hosted speakers who call for the killing of homosexuals.

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Unless they’re truly – like the UCL speaker – inciting violence, professors with extreme and inhumane political views shouldn’t necessarily be fired. Universities should go to great lengths to protect speech.

But these people should certainly be fought, fiercely. Petitions of the sort the Harvard students are circulating don’t, I think, need to issue in expulsion. They need to issue in exposure (and indeed the Swamy story is all over the news today). Boycotts are also fine. Encourage students not to take classes with such people. Marginalize them in every possible way. Plaster their vile writings all over campus. Hold protests.

If, after investigating what is angering students, a university indeed decides that its reputation as a place of reasoned and humane discourse is imperiled by this faculty member, the school can punish that person in a variety of ways — all the way up, on occasion, to dismissal.

… Hauser immediately after the sanctioning of Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, it’s time to pause and think about the striking number of very high-powered faculty there who over the last few years have been under a cloud, or disgraced or, like Hauser, forced out. What’s it mean?

Keep in mind, first, that simply by virtue of happening at Harvard, faculty news gets a lot of attention. For all we know, multiple high-ranking faculty at Clemson have been punished or forced out for research misconduct, conflict of interest and failure to report massive income, conspiracy to defraud, failure to register as a lobbyist, plagiarism, etc. But we don’t pay attention to Clemson; we pay attention to Harvard.

Still, whatever the numbers, it’s pretty amazing that during the course of this blog I’ve followed endless stories of the most high-powered professors in the world — high-powered Harvard professors — doing bad things.

Most of these stories involve what I’d call crimes of grandiosity. Not opportunity; grandiosity. You work your way to the top legitimately; then, at the top, the same cleverness and ego and competitiveness and sense of invulnerability and restless insistence on more that got you to the top tips you in the direction of recklessness.

To be sure, some of these cases are boringly about personal greed (Biederman and Shleifer in particular); but all of them involve as well a significant element of empire-building, power-mongering, and arrogance. Many involve people who, bizarrely, don’t need to break rules in order to maintain their position of prominence in the culture. They break them anyway. So say also that there’s some operation of pleasure at work here; that these particular personalities have been drawn to the rarified, high-energy setting of Harvard because there’s visceral gratification to be had by scoring repeatedly and scoring big.

A colleague of UD‘s named Turley
Wants one boy to have many girlies.
“My thing on polygamy
Makes UD quite sick of me,
And even my wife has turned surly.”

An Australian professor and judge dies.

[Roddy] Meagher was … Challis lecturer in principles of equity and Roman law at the University of Sydney for many years. He wrote important books and monographs on several topics, most significantly Equity: Doctrines and Remedies with W.M.C. Gummow and J.R.F. Lehane.

He taught legions of students at the law school on Phillip Street over almost three decades, some of whom complained that he talked to a painting on the wall rather than to them. He said he was shy and did not know quite where to look, so he just looked to one side.

… He valued beauty, honesty, humour, loyalty and scholarship and was the most devoted friend imaginable. He loathed foolishness, hypocrisy and pretension…

… can be ugly. Some of these details may be difficult for more sensitive viewers.

But if you’re not that sensitive, read on.

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UD‘s alma mater, by the way, is getting quite the gold-plated reputation.

Remember M. Todd Henderson?

And in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow immortalized Allan Bloom:

[Nobody had ever questioned Ravelstein’s] need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in — or to have it served… [At Lucas-Carton restauarant we were] attended by no fewer than four waiters. The sommelier, wearing his badge of office on a chain of keys, supervised the filling of the glasses. For each course there was an appropriate wine, while other waiters working like acrobats reset the china and the silver.

What Harvard expert have the Australians been relying on to set their ADHD diagnosis / Ritalin use national standards?

WHOOPS. Monsieur Multiple Sanctions himself, Joseph Biederman.

Now what to do?

Nothing. In fact the committee has all this time just been sitting around waiting for the results of Harvard’s investigation into You mean I was supposed to tell you that the firms who make the drugs I research give me millions of dollars? Biederman.

And meanwhile the Australian committee had to toss its chair because “his ties with pharmaceutical companies that produce ADHD drugs were exposed.”

Yes indeed. Fellow psychiatrists rely on Biederman for more than his research results. There’s an entire ethos to be emulated here. After all, he’s the leader in the field.

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Will this committee assemble itself and get serious about protecting the health of young Australians?

I’d say the outlook is grim. There they sit, the provincials, waiting for big fancy Americans at Harvard to tell them what to do. Tsk.

Professor Edward Larkin of the University of New Hampshire likes to drive around town on his motorcycle and expose himself to young girls.

Realizing that this behavior constitutes a “major public relations problem for the university,” UNH has, since Larkin’s arrest and conviction for indecent exposure, tried to fire him.

Now an arbitrator has said that it can’t, because cock-flashing, while unpleasant, isn’t a firing offense.

“At the UW… Greenberg gave an annual lecture to students titled Ethical Issues in Forensic Psychology.”

A sickening tale of intellectual and institutional credulity, or laziness, or just plain corruption. No telling how many lives were ruined.

It’s a story made for the New York Post, so UD will defer to their writers throughout her coverage of the Flory/Garcia story.

… about a high-profile University of Melbourne professor of psychiatry accused of … well, you know the list from our homegrown … troubled professors of psychiatry:

… over-medication of drugs, consultations of 30 seconds and a conflict of interest involving pharmaceutical companies…

Curious, too, because you just know, from looking at his cv, that this guy is the real thing. Start with his acronyms:

AO, KCSJ, BSc, MB, ChB, DPM, MD, FRANZCP, FRCPsych, MRACMA, Dip.M.Htlh.Sc (Clinical Hypnosis), FAChAM.

Do you have that many acronyms? UD has… let’s see… BA, MA, PhD, CIA (can’t talk about that), NSA (ditto) NS (Navy Seals, can’t talk about that), MY (Mother of the Year)… That’s seven after-the-name acronyms. Graham here has… I’m counting twelve, but I’m thinking we could break down Dip.M.Htlh.C into two probably… So make it thirteen.

Then (stand back): There’s this:

He has published more than 650 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author or editor of more than 95 books, including the Handbook of Anxiety Disorders and the Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry and has contributed chapters to approximately 190 other scientific books. He serves on the editorial boards of 30 international and Australian journals.

Consultations of 30 seconds! His patients should be honored to get five seconds! Do they have any idea who they’re dealing with??