Here’s one. I’ll slightly modify this paragraph, from today’s Wall Street Journal:
New York prosecutors are poised to file civil fraud charges against Ernst & Young for its alleged role in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, saying the Big Four accounting firm stood by while the investment bank misled investors about its financial health, people familiar with the matter said.
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is close to filing the case, which would mark the first time a major accounting firm was targeted for its role in the financial crisis. The suit stems from transactions Lehman allegedly carried out to make its risk appear lower than it actually was.
Lehman Brothers was long one of Ernst & Young’s biggest clients, and the accounting firm earned approximately $100 million in fees for its auditing work from 2001 through 2008, say people familiar with the matter.
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Here’s my prediction:
Prosecutors are poised to file fraud charges against a group of American and Canadian university professors, saying the professors, all from medical schools, put their names on ghostwritten studies that allowed pharmaceutical companies to mislead prescribers, and other Americans, about the safety of some of the companies’ products.
The case will mark the first time university professors have been targeted for their role in the nation’s massive pharma fraud. The professors will be charged with making the risk of certain medications appear lower than it actually was.
The case of Canadian artist Bill Reid once more draws UD‘s attention to one of the animating themes of her blog: The disappearance of the human from the human realm. As Reid (who died in 1998) became more famous, he withdrew more and more from actually making anything, fobbing the sculpting onto copyists whose names never appeared on the work, and who got little money for their labors. Sometimes Reid didn’t even bother with the vision thing. He “copied designs from other sources, instructed acolytes to craft them, then signed the finished products and took the credit–and profits–for himself.”
Once he became really famous, “almost everything was carved, painted or fabricated to a significant degree by other artists and assistants.” As one observer notes — in regard to the images of artifacts in, say, the Smithsonian, that Reid would hand to some hack for sculpting, after which Reid would put his name on the sculpture — “the collector is getting something that Bill never touched.” Describing the “near-fakery” of Reid’s later work in particular, Thomas Hoving remarks, “The soul of the artist is in the finish.”
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Think of this soulless model in academic terms. Think of the ateliers of law students who write famous Harvard law school professors’ books for them. The labs of young scientists who write famous scientists’ papers for them. Think of much-in-the-news, pharma-subsidized, ghostwriting firms like Scientific Therapeutics Information Inc.
Make room in your imagination for the massive ghost-world of the modern American mind.
Consider the bizarre trajectory of brain-fame in this country, in which the farther you go, the higher you float in a spectrosphere, where, like the artist Stephen Dedalus describes in Portrait of the Artist, you waver above your handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring your fingernails. The artist, says Dedalus, is “like the God of the creation.”
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Go back to that collector. The collector “getting something Bill never touched.” What’s in it for the collector?
Well, you could flatten this out and say that the collector is only in it for the money, and Reid’s name on anything means money. But the word used here is collector, not trader. What is the collector getting by gazing at a Bill Reid fake?
Think of what Matthew Arnold says about the religion of art in secular culture:
There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Hoving, in other words, is wrong. The etherealized artist or scientist or legal theorist of our day isn’t like the God of the creation. His ghosted ambience is the strongest part of our religion today.
Who will be surprised that our Dear Thought Leaders, bearers of the illusion of an idea, come to think of themselves as divine?
What sort of self-image would you elaborate if billion-dollar companies lavished goods on you merely for your imprimatur on their claims about synthetic hormones?
In our time, the artistic soul, the intellectual spirit, bubbles up as from some Icelandic lava lake. And lo, the glory of the Lord shines round about us.
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Lords of the journals and the installations; lords too of the empty lecture halls, where – avatars of the new classroom instructor – these emanations vaporize, like some haywire balsamic reduction, all the way up to nothingness.
… American medical school professors.
Without the ghostwriters and the guest writers and the Continuing Medical Education guys and gals and the hidden investors and … I dunno… just all the folks on our med school faculties who find a way every single day to lend academic respectability to this industry, it wouldn’t get done!
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NPR asks:
Why the big jump in pharma fraud? More aggressive enforcement plays a role. But so does the dwindling pipeline of new drugs, which Public Citizen says pressures companies to “maximize sales of their existing products by any means.”
Despite the soaring penalties, the consumer group says the current system of prosecution and recovery isn’t working, because companies can take even the biggest settlements in stride. What’s needed, says Public Citizen, is more criminal prosecution — and the prospect of jail time for pharma executives.
UD‘s advice for academia’s pharmawhores: Keep at it. Look at the size of the settlements these companies can take in stride. Plenty of money here for everyone.
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“The danger to public safety and loss of state and federal dollars that comes with these violations require a more robust response,” [Sidney] Wolfe said.
Oh poo. Spare us the moralizing.
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Martha Rosenberg casts a fond eye back at the year in pills.
You and I have tracked many American fakes over the years — people running around with pretend diplomas or no diplomas — and we have been impressed by the willingness of just as many American universities to overlook their fakery. Why check credentials?
Thus Western Michigan University hired William Hamman – broad-shouldered pilot of jumbo jets, MD, AND PhD! – to direct its couldn’t-be-better-named Center of Excellence for Simulation Research.
Hamman simulated being an MD and a PhD so excellently that many other organizations – the American College of Cardiology, the American Medical Association, yadda yadda, gave Hamman high-paid gigs to do his thing, which seems to be using what he learned as a pilot on doctors… I dunno. Doesn’t matter….
So, you know, finally after years and years the hospital where he worked checked up on the guy:
In checking a grant proposal he wanted to submit in late spring, the [hospital] staff discovered the lack of an M.D. degree… [Nor did he have the] fellowship, doctoral degree or the 15 years of clinical experience he claimed.
Muy grande liar! I like the way he threw in a PhD. What the hell.
… has been arrested on one count of incest with his daughter; he could go to jail for four years.
UD looked him up at Rate My Professors, but he’s not listed.
She did discover, though, that Columbia University has a way low Professor Average: 2.37. That’s just about the lowest PA I’ve seen at RMP. No wonder Columbia’s president is part of the million dollar club.
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UPDATE: G., a reader, notes:
“To be fair, Columbia University has their own version of Rate My Professors (some sort of in-house website). RateMyProfessors.com does not provide an accurate rating for Columbia professors because the majority of students choose to use Columbia’s website.”
… very expensive, very board-motivated, Victor Dzau, from Cardiobrief.
Cardiobrief notes that Dzau is shy about his board membership at PepsiCo, which he doesn’t list on his faculty bio page (he lists his Genzyme board membership only).
Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo …strikes me as the most troubling of all [of his four corporate board memberships]. As a prominent and influential health care leader, how could Dzau treat a tax on soda, or a ban on vending machines in schools, or any of a multitude of other health policy issues relating to the obesity and diabetes epidemic? In addition, might Dzau’s involvement with PepsiCo (and the other companies) produce a chilling effect on the free speech and activities of Duke faculty and affiliated doctors?
Roy Poses, at Health Care Renewal, looks more deeply at the
very
very
VERY
VERY
(one very for each of his four corporate boards) busy, very overcompensated, chancellor of the Duke University Health System.
Victor Dzau’s take-home pay has inspired a Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke to stage campus protests against his latest bonuses.
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Duke’s misstep in this matter is clear. It hired a Professor of Christian Ethics who actually believes that stuff.
Compassion is always good. The professor in question is adored.
But when an alcoholic on the faculty — multiple DUIs, operating without a license, public intoxication, felonious assault on a police officer, violation of pre-trial release, failure to appear in court —melts down in front of her students, in class …
… “She wasn’t finishing her sentences,” [one] student said. “It was like she couldn’t find the right words. We asked what was wrong but she just said she wasn’t feeling very well.”
For a few minutes after watching Evans, another student said they believed she was having a stroke.
“Someone went to call 911, and everyone else just sat there really upset,” the student said. “She’s easily everyone’s favorite teacher.”
… While the class waited for the ambulance to arrive, students tried to talk to Evans.
According to the student, when asked what was wrong, Evans told students that the university had taken away her job because she had been charged with a DUI. When police came into the class, they told students to leave.
This woman – driving drunk on a suspended license, assaulting police officers – is dangerous. She should not have been in a James Madison University classroom.
A strange professor there has died.
Tom Trusky had obsessions — among them, the work of outsider artist James Charles Castle, about whom he wrote a biography. Here’s an announcement of a recent Castle retrospective. His work has become extremely pricey.
Boise State assumed Trusky – a man of exceedingly modest ways – left nothing of value. It was very wrong. He left the university a gift.
[T]he contents of his U.S. Bank safe-deposit box …left Trusky associates reeling. Named as his personal representative in his will, [his friend Cort] Conley was staggered to open the box and find a dozen books by acclaimed artist-bookmaker James Castle.
“I knew he had some of Castle’s work, but when I went through it, I was blown away by how many drawings he had,” [another friend] said. “I don’t think you can buy a Castle drawing today for less than $5,000.”
Greg Kucera, who sells Castle’s work at his Seattle gallery, says individual drawings have sold there for $5,000 to $20,000. The books in Trusky’s safe deposit box collectively contain hundreds of drawings…
His will stipulates that their recipient can never sell the books, which BSU almost lost to the Portland Art Museum by waiting until the final day to meet a legal deadline for accepting them.
Two of his students speak in the article’s comment thread.
Professor Trusky’s most valuable legacy to the university lives in the hearts and minds of his students. No one demanded more–or excited us more–in exposing us to the written word, with all its beauty and power.
My enduring image of him: seeing him careening through a turn at 10th and Grove on his bike, hands crossed behind his back.
University Diaries has been covering executive bonuses at Duke University. Earlier posts are here, here, and here.
From a comment thread about the Duke bonuses in the Duke newspaper:
Dr [Victor] Dzau is a director of four major corporations (sample Pepsi) earning more than $1 million in fees each year in addition to his Duke salary and his bonus. When you consider the boards meet regularly (usually 10 or 12 times a year) in distant cities, … this [is] an undue diversion of his attention.
The experts agree. From a recent New York Times article about university presidents and chancellors sitting on corporate boards:
Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent research firm focusing on corporate governance, [says], “it is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” [when you sit on many boards]. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.
Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards… “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”
… [There is now] a movement to limit the number of boards each president serves. In the University of California system, for example, the Board of Regents voted in January to restrict board membership for its chancellors to three.
Raymond D. Cotton, a partner at the Washington law firm Mintz Levin who specializes in presidential contracts and has represented about 250 institutions, says he recommends to universities that they write into contracts that the president can serve on a maximum of two boards.
Duke is rewarding Dzau for not being on campus.