There’s an old-fashioned seemliness, a southern comfort of sorts, about this story out of Virginny, where a powerful member of an appropriations committee in that state’s General Assembly “helped obtain a $500,000 budget amendment for [Old Dominion University], knowing that the university planned to hire him for the job the budget amendment was to pay for.”

Yes, buy your job! Appropriate the money and become a real live professor with it! Hell, write an email instructing an administrator at the university on how much you expect to be paid:

“Currently my part-time salary with the Newport News Public School system is around $37,000. I need at least that amount from the ODU Foundation to have a part-time salary of $75,000 per year. Of course, more than that is always appreciated.”

Standards for new professors at the University of Texas El Paso are pretty low: As this student of Fernando Parra’s says, as long as Parra doesn’t try to get the student involved in his mail fraud, bribe, obscene material transportation, and other activities, it’s fine by the student.

This one’s rather mysterious. A beloved math professor at the University of North Florida behaves so weirdly and belligerently on a plane that he’s arrested for “disorderly conduct and interfering with the operation of an aircraft.” Apparently he refused to take his seat, refused to stop talking on his cell phone, and in general frightened his fellow passengers.

How does a man whose students fall over themselves to praise his kindness get into this sort of trouble?

There are a couple of possible explanations. Alcohol’s always the first place to look, of course. Drinks too much, becomes a belligerent drunk… Is already maybe afraid of flying, and totally loses it when authorities start asking him questions.

Another possibility is that he has mild mental problems — say, Asperger’s — which he can manage, but which, under conditions of stress, come roaring out.

If this doesn’t rally the troops, nothing will.

Background.

… dot org.

… the dean of the recently opened, totally unnecessary, school of law at the University of California Irvine.

In response to the terrible crisis in that state’s public system, Erwin Chemerinsky warns darkly against

freezing or decreasing executive and faculty salaries. If the University of California is going to retain and attract high-level faculty, it must pay the same as comparable schools across the country. Over the last few weeks, I have negotiated salaries with superb professors we are attempting to recruit who are currently teaching at Harvard, Northwestern and Yale. The University of California must match their current salaries or they will not come. As much as I love living in Southern California, I could not have afforded to leave Duke University if it meant taking a substantial pay cut.

Well, let’s get to it. How much do you make? How much do your law school colleagues make? How much do they teach? How many of your graduates get jobs as lawyers (the Irvine school opened despite the fact that California has a glut of lawyers, and large numbers of unemployed law school grads)? And, uh, didn’t you tell me, when justifying your unjustifiable new school, that your faculty would be all about turning out public interest lawyers? So… hard-nosed, hyper-capitalist, private sector salaries for our faculty, but of course! And crappy non-profit positions for our idealistic students.

I mean, I ask how much you make because you say you couldn’t afford to live in California unless you earned what you earn. What do you earn?

Let’s say at Duke you earned $300,000. Are you saying that you couldn’t afford to live on less than that?

Remember the University of Chicago’s Todd Henderson. And he teaches at a private school…

Vous savez… UD‘s father, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, made a lower salary than he would have in the private sector; but he didn’t seem to mind, because he thought public service was a high calling. What happened to that whole thing?

Listen to Kristin Luker, Chemerinsky. She’s a colleague of yours at Berkeley.

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UPDATE: From the comments at TaxProf blog:

Going from US News rankings, at the top [of California’s universities] are Stanford and CalTech– both are private and so from the state’s point of view are cheap/free (never mind federal research dollars for a second). Then we get to the state university system: UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara.

Then, after all these schools, you finally get to UC Irvine. I can see the rationale for their flagship schools (and even having more than one flagship given the size of California). I can see the argument for a strong set of second-tier institutions, too.

Can anyone explain why Irvine, ranked ninth in the whole wide state, is recruiting from Harvard, Northwestern and Yale? Just what is Chemerinsky saying here? By his own argument, being world-class is expensive, and so from a return-on-taxpayer-investment perspective, Irvine shouldn’t be frozen, they should be gutted to keep the top California universities on top.

Chemerinsky is arguing against freezing or cutting the law school. What he should be defending is the law school’s existence in the first place.

… has died. Denis Dutton, a philosopher, taught for many years at Canterbury University.

UW-Madison Professor Solves Mystery of How Sea Urchins Keep Their Teeth Sharp

Wherever you are — at MIT, the University of Ottawa, the University of Connecticut, the University of Sydney, etc…

How does it feel?

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.

… gets a Friday class.

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.”