… er… awkward position on the issue of higher education.

Every now and then University Diaries looks in on Harvard professor Joseph Biederman. She’s doing it today because he’s featured in a Duff Wilson article about the over-prescription of anti-psychotic drugs in this country.

… Documents produced in recent litigation and in congressional investigations show that some leading academic doctors have worked closely with corporate benefactors to expand the use of anti-psychotics.

The most well-known is Joseph Biederman… His studies, examining the prevalence of bipolar psychological disorders in children, helped expand practice standards, leading to a 40-fold increase in such diagnoses from 1994 to 2003. [Yeah you read dat right. Forty-fold.]

… Between 2000 and 2007, he also got $1.6 million in speaking and consulting fees — some of them undisclosed to Harvard — from companies, including makers of anti-psychotic drugs prescribed for children who might have bipolar disorder, a Senate investigation found in 2008.

Johnson & Johnson gave more than $700,000 to a research center that was headed by Biederman from 2002 to 2005, records show, and some of its work supported the company’s anti-psychotic drug, Risperdal. Biederman said that the money did not influence him and that some of his work supported other drugs.

… A Harvard spokesman said [Biederman is] still under review…

Yes, take your time reviewing him. He’s only been at it for a decade or so. Take another decade. There’s so much more he can do with Harvard’s prestige backing him up.

Seth Abramson shuts down Hospital.

The last one of these UD recalls involved a faculty member somewhere (can’t find the original article) who claimed someone stole his new computer.

Before giving him another one, the university checked recent footage from a security camera near his office. It showed the professor removing the computer from his office.

Oh, and there was another one. More recent. A University of South Florida professor was filmed stealing a bicycle.

Most recently (thanks, MattF, for the link) a University of Michigan post-doc was filmed sabotaging the experimental work of another student in a cancer research lab.

This page contains two photos of him. Look carefully, so you can see him coming.

Steven Salzberg, a University of Maryland bioinformatics professor, writes with admirable frankness about the for-profits in Forbes:

… [For-profit universities] offer low-quality, almost worthless degrees. They have virtually no academic standards. They will accept anyone who can pay, and they seem to care primarily about the bottom line. They also haven’t addressed (and virtually never mention) the elephant in the room: many online students are probably cheating to pass their courses, which aren’t very demanding in the first place…

[We should] immediately stop offering government-funded student loans to FPUs. If they really have a better model for higher education, then let them prove it in the free market, without subsidies.

… in the medical profession.

… the for-profit college scandal. (Scroll down.)

… readers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log, a group blog dedicated to cognitive science.

If you’ve come here to scan UD‘s comments on the Marc Hauser story, here they are.

***************************

UD has opinions about everything else, too, so feel free to poke around.

As ever, Barmak Nassirian says it best. Here his subject is the recent exposure of systemic corruption among for-profit universities; and Jennifer Epstein, reporter for Inside Higher Ed, rightly concludes her long piece updating the for-profit story with his remark:

“If [for-profits] really wanted to seriously enforce any kind of a code of ethics, the whole business model would be upended because the business model here is consumer fraud,” he said. “The margins involved can only be produced if you can shortchange people on the substance of what you purportedly sell, which is education.”

In other words, if they stop lying to hordes of clueless applicants in order to get them to enroll in their school — at which point investors and management at the schools enrich themselves via the federal education loans that attach to said people — if they stop doing this, their very industry collapses. I’ve just described, as Nassirian says, the for-profit business model.

UD loves the way the industry has been, throughout this inevitable congressional exposure, desperately pressing every button in the populist cockpit, hoping to get enough lift not to crash. Here’s a representative of an industry trade group back in June, before the shit hit the fan:

“Elitist Wall Street stock manipulators, rather than higher education experts, have been driving hyperbolic media coverage, creating the impression that outliers are the norm, and insulting millions of hardworking students and graduates in the process. We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review.”

UD’s been covering the industry for years and she can’t tell you how much of this crap she’s read. Ooh that elitist Harvard with its elitist president — whose salary, around $800,000, compares curiously with the typical salaries of her for-profit peers — from five to ten million dollars a year…

But they’re working hard for the hardworking real people! Why can’t ordinary hardworking American ever catch a break? It’s not insulting for CEO’s to make millions of dollars at the expense of misinformed people who want to better themselves; it’s insulting for the media to cover the story.

… these farcically conflicted groups receive money from the entities they’re supposed to oversee.

Which is why accreditors accredit almost everything, corporate boards at places as outrageous as Goldman Sachs do nothing, and auditors rarely meet a Ponzi scheme putrid enough to catch their eye.

Here are excerpts from conversations between US senators and a representative of the accreditors who accredit all those for-profit colleges you’ve been reading about. (Lynn O’Shaughnessy, CBS: “Until the industry is cleaned up — if it ever is — I’d stay away from these schools. You can start by avoiding any school that advertises on television.”)

“Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren’t rigorous enough?”

“I believe the standards themselves are rigorous…”

I’m sure they are, honey, I’m sure they are. But you are not a standards-writing organization. You are an accrediting organization.

… “If your process doesn’t detect readily apparent fraud, who is protecting students and taxpayers?… We rely on accreditation.”

Mr. McComis replied that it that was up to state and federal regulators, “the other parts of the triad,” to root out fraud.

“Accreditation is designed to evaluate the quality of education, not to detect fraud,” he said, adding, “Certainly, if we find fraud in the process, we’re going to act on it.”

“But your on-site evaluations didn’t detect it,” Senator Harkin said. “It seems like you accept the schools’ word on what they’re doing.”

Quality involves not merely how well taught courses are (and there’s reams of evidence that many courses are taught poorly at these schools); quality involves institutional controls, hiring and recruiting practices, etc. — Things accreditors are supposed to review and approve.

Mr. Harkin said he planned to “look into” the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it “seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict.”

That plan has implications for nonprofit colleges as well, since all accreditors are financed by the institutions they accredit…

Yes. Which is why vanishingly few schools fail to be accredited. They may get warnings, yadda yadda. But everyone outside of obvious diploma mills (and they’re still fooling lots of people by using their own bogus accrediting jobbies) gets to operate.

… the ever-quotable Barmak Nassirian speaks.

… “This is now a sector in which the vast majority of participants are actually engaged in what I view as counterfeiting of degrees and consumer fraud,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Consumer fraud defined as over-advertised, over-promised, overcharged and under-delivered.

“For a group that reports to be market-based,” he went on to a room of education insiders at the New America Foundation, “what is a better measure of market failure than apparently nobody but the idiot federal government puts their money into these institutions? That is the single best indication that the product has no intrinsic value. People who spend their own money don’t spend it there.” …

… about a remarkable diploma mill, fake credentials, and ghostwriting scandal there.

A prominent businessperson in China has done it all: Bought a bogus degree, claimed legitimate degrees he didn’t earn, and farmed his autobiography out to a ghostwriter.

Of course plenty of people put their names on autobiographies they haven’t written, but this guy didn’t even bother reading the thing. Plus he gave the ghost all the bogus university degree stuff, which the ghost duly wrote down…

So now the guy blames the ghostwriter for the false information and sues the researcher who revealed the diploma mill and the fake credentials…

In short, a prince of a guy.

… and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

John Smalls, the guy in charge of finance at South Carolina State University, a public institution, says the school “can definitely account” for it… The 25 million dollars from a federal grant (the entire grant was 50 million) they got over a decade ago to start a transportation research center (nothing’s been done). “The problem is how much detail do you want to see.”‘

How much detail do I, the American taxpayer, want to see?

Well, let’s do it this way. This

is an enormous pile of money.
Imagine, John, that this pile of
money is the 25 million dollars
I and my fellow Americans gave
your school.

I want you to take every single
bill in this pile, hold it aloft, and
say out loud what you did with it.

UD thanks Corey, a reader, for sending her this important article from a writer we’ve already seen at University Diaries — Sergio Sismondo. With Mathieu Doucet, Sismondo broadens his attack on the repellent and dangerous practice of ghostwriting among university professors of medicine.

Here’s their abstract:

Link to the full article.

This one in Canada. All because agencies tasked with defending the welfare of children can’t be bothered to check the legitimacy of professional degrees.

From the Toronto Star:

… [Gregory] Carter has been charged by Durham Regional Police with fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice…

Andrea Maenza, a spokesperson for Durham [Children’s Aid Society], says that the agency ended its relationship with Carter in early 2009 when it learned that “he did his Ph.D. but the school was bogus.” [Weird formulation. Should be “He didn’t do his PhD. because the school is bogus.”]

Carter says he has a doctorate from Pacific Western University, which was investigated by the U.S. government in 2004 and found to be a diploma mill.

“We accepted his community reputation. In retrospect, we should have questioned it,” Maenza says, noting that Carter was called a “doctor” by lawyers and judges and relied upon in cases as an expert witness. [Everybody called him a doctor. That was good enough for us.]

He did more than 300 assessments for the agency, which has already conducted a preliminary review into them…

Meanwhile, the case against Steven Feldman (scroll down) proceeds.