Some of your med school colleagues routinely list three, four, five hundred publications on their cvs. And all you can do is gaze in wonderment at these superior creatures.
You owe it to yourself to learn about the massive ghost and guest (also known as honorary) writing industry in this country. Drudges – drawn from pharma-controlled ghostwriting companies or from underlings in the lab – do most or all of the writing for these creatures.
It’s quite the scam. And it ain’t going anywhere.
More than 600 biomedical journals have adopted guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, but previous research has found that the prevalence of honorary authors in articles is as high as 39 percent and the use of ghost authors as high as 11 percent.
… has been eyeing with interest the story of a University of Connecticut student robbed at gunpoint inside a campus building.
It’s really rare for people with guns to rob people inside of academic buildings. UD‘s been blogging about universities for years, and she can’t recall a case.
The student has now admitted making it up.
Duh. But Canada has these confidentiality rules that protect even professors who have been found guilty of extensive research fraud. The executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (I quote him in my headline) is calling for more transparency.
Especially in this case – where a professor simply made up scads of published studies – students, professors, and the public need to know who he/she is, so they can protect themselves. Since we’re also not told what field the pretender is in, we have to assume the worst. You need to be able to see people like this coming.
UD has already examined the lucrative business of gathering corporate and government employees for a few days of leadership bullshit. It’s such an obvious scam that Senator Grassley, last year, asked a number of leadership bullshit institutes to explain why Margaret Soltan’s taxes pay for their bullshit.
More recently, a New Zealand politician has addressed himself to the very same scam: Government-sponsored, vastly expensive, leadership bullshit seminars. He wanted to know why this guy, who boasts an online PhD from California Coast University — a notorious diploma mill — is the DIRECTOR of this clever enterprise. Do the taxpayers of New Zealand have no self-respect?
[Keith Locke said] given the institute’s six-day leadership programme at Queenstown’s Millbrook Resort cost $18,285, plus $2558 in accommodation, it was time to review the course.
“There needs to be a check on public sector people using the institute, to see if there is value for money,” Locke said. “These courses are expensive. How can it be justified when three-year leadership programmes offered by the government itself through its Leadership Development Centre cost about $11,000.”
And when the Leader di Tutti Leaders has a fake degree.
Paul Campos, in The New Republic, shaves so many points off of official law school job placement figures that by the end of his essay he’s whittled the business of legal employment to practically nothing.
After revising the bogus reassuring numbers down and down and then down again, Campos concludes with a cui bono.
Yet even this does not exhaust the dire news for those about to enter the legal profession. Some schools have adopted the practice of placing their graduates in temporary positions, which, whatever the rationale, has the benefit of helping to inflate their employment numbers…
Nor have we considered how the “lucky” winners in the big law lottery often accept jobs that make them miserable, featuring insane hours and unfulfilling work, but which these graduates conclude they must take in order to pay their often astronomical educational debt (adjusted for inflation, public law school tuition has quintupled, and private law school tuition has nearly tripled, since the mid-1980s). If you’re a law professor and you want to get depressed, try to figure out how many of your recent graduates have real legal jobs that pay enough to justify the tuition that funds your salary, and also involve doing the kind of work they wanted to do when they went to law school.
All of this suggests the extent to which prospective law students need more and better information. Of course, such information will make law school look like a far worse investment than it does at present. Still, if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.
Humanities professors might not graduate many gainfully employed humanities professors, but few humanities professors receive between $150,000 and $300,000 in compensation each year.
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Update: Two of my readers (see comment thread) have pointed out that my original attempt to come up with a reasonably plausible figure for law school professor compensation seemed inflated. In response to their comments, I’ve done some more poking around in the statistics. I now offer (see above) what seems to me a reasonable compensation range.
A hoax is brewing around the wildly popular book Three Cups of Tea, and the charitable activities of its author.
60 Minutes tomorrow will claim that Greg Mortenson fabricated stories in his books, has not built many of the schools he claims to have built, and has enriched himself on his charity’s earnings.
Nobody was terribly skeptical about this at the time — except for the local paper and a few bloggers. I mean, sure, seven hundred women … Sounds about right …
But then lots of money started disappearing from her office too, and the university decided to investigate.
Beeman has now pleaded no contest to embezzlement and falsifying accounts. She was accused of a bunch of other felonies too, but she cut a deal. She might go to jail, or she might get probation. Plus restitution.
As for her incredibly cynical and destructive play with crime statistics — She’ll suffer no consequences for that.
A review in Slate of the collapsing market in law degrees makes the opening of new law schools at UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts (and they’re not the only ones) all the more disgusting. All of these schools come equipped with the standard current law school package of extremely highly paid professors and under-employed, debt-ridden students.
Law school professors are beginning to look très Marie Antoinette.
Some people have called for the ABA, which accredits anything with a pulse, to be replaced by an actual accrediting agency. That would certainly be a good start.
An English professor, writing in the Times Union, chronicles SUNY Albany’s intellectual disintegration, and, in the process, comes up with a fitting new motto for the school (see my title).
UD has only one editorial suggestion:
EDUCATING DRUNK, UNCRITICAL HALF-LITERATES BY DESIGN
So this Korean academic just got out of jail for embezzlement, and for forgery of a Yale doctorate. Here’s what she says about the doctorate in her just-published memoir:
In her book, she admits that someone else wrote the thesis for her, but says she never had any doubt about the authenticity of the degree. Yale confirmed the diploma was a forgery in 2007.
“Though I neither got the degree through hard work nor wrote the thesis by myself, I paid tuitions, submitted papers, finished a thesis defense in front of three Yale professors, not to mention that I passed graduation tests,” she writes.
I’m having some trouble unpacking this re: authenticity.