Yes. Good point.
But then why, in the same article that quotes this university scientist, is he described as having “published articles in nearly 500 scientific journals”?
Note: Not having published 500 scientific articles, which already strains credulity. Having published articles in 500 different journals.
It costs them a lot, but there’s one thing Duke University’s got, and that’s Homme Hellinga. A repeat fake-research offender, Hellinga should have been dumped long ago, but Duke’s still investigating claims made against him in 2004.
… Hellinga was the senior author of a celebrated Science paper in 2004, claiming his team had been the first to design and synthesize a novel enzyme, called novoTIM. It was a scientific first, but after an independent researcher was unable to replicate his results, Hellinga retracted it along with a follow-up paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Initially, he directed the blame at his student, lead author Mary Dwyer, who Duke investigated and cleared of research misconduct. Then, as his own behavior came under scrutiny from his critics, he publicly invited Duke to begin an investigation of his role in the disputed work.
Duke representatives said that the investigation is still ongoing. “It would be inappropriate for Duke to comment on any specific proceedings due to confidentiality and other restrictions,” Doug Stokke said.
Maybe Doug could comment – not specifically, but generally – on why it’s taking Duke five years and counting to check on a couple of scientific papers.
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UD thinks it’s simply because Duke loves its man. He isn’t true he beats me too what can I do? Oh my man I love him so…
And now things are even worse. Duke’s going to need another half decade before it gets back to us on Homme.
… Hellinga has [again] been under investigation for possible research misconduct, following the retraction of a Science paper on computational design of enzymes in February 2008. This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hellinga’s former postdoc Birte Höcker and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany dispute the conclusions of his studies on ligand-binding proteins, which appeared in Nature in 2003 and PNAS in 2004…
Bernard Madoff was a Yeshiva University trustee… He was treasurer … But that’s old news.
Jeffrey Cohen is an Indiana University trustee… Chair of the board’s Finance and Audit Committee… His securities fraud charge is new news.
The school hasn’t taken his name off of its website.
Neither has Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, where he’s on the Board of Advisors.
He’s got lots of university board positions, huh?
Universities love big money boys on their boards, and who can blame them?
But there’s a big risk factor.
The Indianapolis office of securities firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. is facing charges that it improperly advised more than 100 Indiana clients to invest $54.9 million in a complex securities auction that later collapsed.
As a result, the investments have been frozen, and it is unclear whether the investors will be able to recover any of their money, despite being told the investment carried little or no risk and could be redeemed within weeks.
The firm is charged with securities fraud, failing to supervise and train employees, and selling unsuitable products, according to an administrative complaint filed Thursday by the Indiana secretary of state’s office.
Of the 141 people who invested, 92 were clients of Jeffrey Cohen, managing director of the office. Cohen is also a member of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis board of advisers and a trustee for Park Tudor School.According to the complaint, Cohen said he did not receive any special training on the securities in question, had no knowledge of auction failures and did not disclose any risks because “most of the clients in the real world don’t want to hear, you know, every single risk factor.”
He could not be reached for comment at his office…
… happen. But it’s rare that universities acknowledge the event right at the top of their home page.
Switzerland’s excellent Federal Institute of Technology [ETH] announces in this forthright way the bogus results of a set of experiments that involved “the properties of reactive hydrocarbon free radicals using a technique called zero kinetic-energy photoelectron spectroscopy.” Results couldn’t be reproduced. A university committee “found identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra reported in the two papers, but it could not find a key lab notebook that should have held the raw data.”
The person overseeing experimental work in that lab has resigned from his position as head of research for the institute, though he remains a professor. He seems not to have been involved in the project at all, though he acknowledges responsibility as head of the lab.
… the University of Manchester who are checking out her comments on now-retired Professor Annmarie Surprenant (background here).
She’s been found guilty of gross misconduct. Manchester’s pharmacy school will take a massive hit to its reputation, and could lose accreditation altogether. You’re not supposed to hire and retain people like this.
There’s a rather chaotic comment thread about the events here, at the Times Higher Education. Read carefully, it gives you a sense of the woman’s ballsy, psycho, personality. [Note: That link’s not working very well at the moment. I’ll keep checking on it.]
Speaking of which, the one aspect of the affair which does surprise UD is Surprenant’s continued silence about the tragic youthful circumstances that made her the person she is today.
The definitive university precedent for this comes from Richard Berendzen, one of two recent disgraced ex-presidents at American University. Within minutes of his resignation, Berendzen issued a book about the tragic youthful circumstances that made him the person he is today. UD predicts a Surprenant memoir in the next few months titled
‘YOU’LL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIE, MARIE!’ — Surviving My Mad Mother
UD‘s already posted on the absurd over-production of lawyers in this country, a fact overlooked for so long by law schools that now even the most elite boast plenty of unemployed graduates.
That hasn’t stopped any number of new law schools from opening their doors in the last few years, and UCLA professor and blogger Stephen Bainbridge proposes one particular demolition as part of a solution:
In 2006, California did not need a fifth public law school. We certainly didn’t need one in Irvine, when much of the growth in UC admissions is in places like Riverside.
Today, with state revenues having plummeted faster and further than Regent Montoya might have expected, we simply can’t afford Irvine’s law school. Odds are, with the California economy doing even worse than the nation as a whole, we have even less need for extra lawyers than we did when the [California Postsecondary Education] Commission rejected the Irvine proposal back in 2006.
I’m firmly convinced that UC Berkeley and UCLA will come out of the current troubles in excellent shape. We have great alumni whose support continues to grow despite the economy.
But I see no reason for the state to spend a dime on Irvine. Kill it now and put the money to better use, such as helping reverse some of the cuts to undergraduate education.
UD wrote the same thing a week before Bainbridge did:
UD’s angle on the new Irvine law school has nothing to do with whether its liberal dean can get a balanced faculty. UD wonders why America’s opening another law school. You want a debacle, look at the number of lawyers in this country. Many of the new graduates among them can’t find jobs. Harvard alone, which each week seems to add about ten new faculty to its law school, could train most of the nation’s attorneys.
How in the hell does this new law school justify itself?
I know a rich guy gave Irvine twenty million because he wanted the school to do this. But, you know, you’re not supposed to just lie there and do what rich people tell you. Rich people can be eccentric. This one likes the prospect of lots of unemployed California attorneys. Your university doesn’t have to agree with him, even if he’s waving money at you.
I mean, you know she likes a good hoax if you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile and following her happy, excited coverage of hoaxes of all kinds, but mainly literary hoaxes.
There’s even a case study featuring UD in the soon-to-be-issued Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders update. Look for her under H, for hoaxophilia.
But while UD revels in the details of hoax writing and in statements from hoaxers like James Frey who’ve been found out, she’s disgusted by the thought of actually spending any time with the douchebags.
Thanks to the miracle of tv, however, we can wile away hours (use while away if you prefer) listening to hoaxers talk about what they’ve done, deny that they’ve done it, embellish their lies, etc., etc.
As I say, I can’t imagine doing this myself, but if you’re into it, you can spend a long evening with one of the most notorious hoaxers of all, Norma Khouri, who wrote a best-selling, searing memoir about her wretched life in Jordan. All of it lies.
Just get hold of Anna Broinowski’s film, Forbidden Lies. An Australian tv critic prepares us:
In addition to dozens of errors about Islam and life in Jordan, Dalia [the main wretched person] did not exist, there was no honour killing as she described, Khouri hadn’t lived in Jordan when she said she did and she hadn’t fled the country when, she says, her life became endangered for daring to tell her friend’s story.
In fact, she’d been living for years in Chicago with her husband and two children. The story was broken by Malcolm Knox, literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and it won him a Walkley award. But the really big story was yet to be revealed.
Anna Broinowski’s film is an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get to the bottom of Khouri’s web of claims and counter-claims. Despite evidence that seems to prove Khouri’s deceit, she manages to worm and squirm and reshape her version of events at every turn so that it’s impossible to pin her down.
Well, what sort of hoaxer would she be if she couldn’t do that?
… as everyone outside, and almost everyone inside, schools of education knows. This blog has followed the sickening absurdities of professional organizations like NCATE (scroll past the first post, and read the subsequent ones), designed to dismiss intelligent, independent-minded people from the profession, but there’s so much more to be said about the deadheads running the show.
Some of it gets said in the pages of the New York Times today by a variety of observers. Excerpts:
Nothing shows how downright phony the game is than the Ed.D.s — the Doctors of Education. I have seen administrators who have had trouble writing clear letters home to parents and who murdered the English language in public go about brandishing their degrees and insisting on being called “Doctor.” On the other hand, the two best principals in my high school — T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va. — never bothered to get “doctorate” degrees; in fact, one did not even have a master’s when he was first hired. Both were appointed by wise superintendents who knew natural leaders when they saw them.
The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.
[W]hat we have now [is] a charade that confuses taking mind-numbing education courses with being a “highly qualified” teacher and has ended up filling schools with tenured mediocrity the kids don’t deserve.
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This system lacks quality control and too often encourages universities to offer quick, low quality graduate programs in order to attract those teachers who may be more interested in salary bumps than professional development.
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A master’s degree in most subfields in education (especially reading — or what they like to call “literacy” — early childhood education, teaching and elementary education) adds little or nothing to students’ knowledge or practical skills.
Indeed, a master’s degree in most education subfields further stamps in the “progressive,” “child-centered,” “constructivist,” “developmentally appropriate,” postmodernist, pseudo-liberationist baloney that infects the undergraduate curriculum, and which leaves graduating ed students unprepared to provide their own students with coherent, logically sequenced instruction.
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It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be.
If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans with a diploma mill degree or other form of faked credentials… if you’re actively impersonating someone with legitimate credentials… you know what you need to do: Keep your head down, do the best job you can without any training, and hope no one notices your fraudulence.
But if you’re one of the Americans who has hired one of these birds — if you’re someone like Gerald Weiss, a doctor specializing in pain management who never checked his nurse’s credentials, and who was recently shocked to discover that Betty Lichtenstein used his prescription slips to maintain her pain meds addiction — you’re either a fool or something darker.
Weiss’s nurse — a total fake — was found out when a patient complained to the authorities about some botched and painful needlework she endured from addled pretend Betty. (Did the patient complain to Weiss? If not, why not?)
So – Weiss has a nurse with no credentials. She’s a nurse-impersonator. She’s so incompetent patients complain to the authorities. She steals his prescription pads and forges his name so she can steal 96 Oxycodone pills.
Let Weiss here stand for all the police departments, school systems, national security agencies, and, yes, sometimes universities, that can’t be bothered to check simple online registries or transcripts in order to protect the health and welfare of other people.
Weiss’s negligence is so extreme – comically extreme – that you wonder whether he and Nurse Betty are in cahoots.
“Uh… Canada?” said Mr. UD as he gazed at a hazy August morning at the beach.
“Try Bogus Hormonal Receptor Paper,” said UD.
The University of Manitoba has sanctioned a former researcher after an internal investigation concluded he faked data and made up experiments that led to a seemingly groundbreaking study published in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals.
The news that disgraced U of M plant science researcher Fawzi Razem committed the biggest sin in science comes eight months after the journal Nature retracted what was once considered a breakthrough study.
Razem, working in the lab of Prof. Robert Hill, claimed to have discovered a receptor for the major hormone linked to a plant’s response to environmental stress. The receptor that has eluded scientists for two decades was identified in an article and featured in the editor’s summary in the January 2006 edition of Nature, one of the world’s most renowned international science journals.
The receptor was long sought after, as it could help plants better adapt to cold or drought.
Concerns about the research emerged last summer when a team of researchers from New Zealand couldn’t replicate Razem’s work — a red flag that there could be serious problems with the original findings…
Winnipeg Free Press
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Toward the end of the article, a UM ethics professor says,”universities should rely on government, not corporations, to fund independent research.” That is, this sort of thing – not just (sometimes related) conflict of interest, a big story here in the States – will happen when you have professors competing for corporate dollars…
From a newspaper article excerpted in University Diaries, July 16, 2007:
Teachers, students and administrators tampered with a private college’s computer system to change grades and create fake degrees for money, prosecutors charged Monday. Among the fake degrees given were those for physicians’ assistants, they said.
The 10 defendants created or altered records for at least 50 people since January , charging fees of $3,000 to $25,000 for better or deleted grades and for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.
Those indicted include Touro College’s former director of admissions, the former director of the school’s computer center, three former Touro students and three public school teachers, Manhattan prosecutors said.
“One dangerous thing they did was give degrees to physicians’ assistants,” Morgenthau said.
Records found in the home of Andrique Baron, a former admissions director at Touro’s campus in Manhattan, showed he was running the scheme as early as 2003 and possibly earlier, Morgenthau said.
“We don’t know how many hundreds, maybe thousands, were involved,” the district attorney said.
Baron’s main accomplice was Michael Cherner, former director of the computer center at the school’s Brooklyn campus, Morgenthau said.
Baron, 34, and Cherner, 50, also took bribes to create master’s degree transcripts for three city schoolteachers who never attended Touro, said the district attorney.
Money was collected from the teachers by a bagman identified in Baron’s cell phone by the nickname Jimmy Bag, the district attorney said.
… Baron spent the cash on two luxury cars, high-end audio equipment and huge flat-screen television sets in almost every room in his home, Morgenthau said.
Six of the 10 defendants were arrested at various times from March to July on charges of computer trespass, computer tampering and falsifying business records. Baron, Cherner and the bag man also were charged with bribe receiving. All the charges are punishable by up to four years in prison.
Four of the 10 defendants are at large.
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New York Post, yesterday:
A second Touro College computer honcho is going to prison for running his office as a literal diploma mill — pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from students seeking better transcripts, glowing letters of recommendation and in a few cases completely fabricated degrees.
“This was a horrendous betrayal of trust,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber told the crook, Andrique Baron, 36, of Elmont, L.I., before sentencing him this afternoon to serve between 2 2/3 and 8 years prison.
Baron was the former director of admissions for Touro’s School of Career and Applied Studies on West 23rd St.
For at least four years, he and his co-defendant — Mikhail “Michael” Cherner, the former computer director at the Kings Highway, Brooklyn, campus — took money from a dozen students, who were also charged, in a “Sawbucks-for-Sheepskins” scandal that became public two years ago.
Some of Cherner and Baron’s “customers” merely changed “F’s” to “A’s” on their transcripts.
Three teachers paid $3,000 each to buy the Masters degree required to teach special ed.
A Queens man bought a bogus psychology masters, while a Brooklyn woman bought her bachelors without taking a single class, and a fake letter of recommendation to law school went for $50,000.
When the scandal broke, prosecutors said they feared the pair had sold doctored degrees to as many as 50 people — including some for physicians assistants and physical therapists.
The Board of Ed, which issues licenses in these fields, had to sift through the credentials of thousands of Touro alumni to be sure there were no bogus teachers, therapists or medical personnel working in the city, said prosecutor Jonathan Lenzner.
The horrible publicity affected everything from accreditation to admissions to the ability to get bank loans, said Frank Snitow, a lawyer for the college, which has 17,000 students internationally. [They seem to have dumped the Career and Applied Studies name. UD can’t find it on their website.]
Baron apologized in court, peevishly — bemoaning he didn’t get a “second chance” — before being led out in cuffs.
And who among us couldn’t have foreseen it?
Put the two most corrupt units on campus together, and see how the magic gets made.
Devoted donors to the Fighting Illini are often thanked with prime stadium seats, first crack at tickets to bowl games or a chance to meet some of the school’s marquee players.
But a few patrons of the University of Illinois’ athletic programs also try to use the department’s prestige to give applicants they know an edge in the competitive admissions process, according to newly released campus records.
An ongoing Tribune investigation reveals an admissions system subject to outside influences. The latest internal documents reviewed by the newspaper suggest the athletic department requested special consideration for non-athletes who applied to the state’s most prestigious public university.
The campus e-mails and correspondence provided under the state’s Freedom of Information Act show that admissions officials gave special consideration to candidates with ties to athletic donors at the request of the department director and his deputies. In several cases, athletic officials sought a reconsideration of a student’s rejection, a more thorough review of an application or to hasten the review process.
In the 2008-09 application cycle, one candidate had been tagged as an automatic denial by admissions officials because of poor academic credentials, but was accepted after being recommended by the athletic department, according to a log of special requests. At least three of six students recommended by the department this year got in.
It’s just part of the all-’round beauty of bigtime university sports. We’re asked to tolerate the admission of many non-students because they can throw a ball; we sometimes forget that we’re also asked to tolerate the admission of non-students connected to the people who give money to the big sports programs.
So much money and influence… None of it having anything to do with education. I guess that’s just the way it is at the University of Illinois.
Don’t even think about Auburn.
… is that, once you’ve done it, you lose immense amounts of credibility — not merely in terms of what you write, but in terms of what you say.
If you’re a university president who has plagiarized — plagiarized your dissertation — any public announcements you make, especially announcements having to do with academic integrity, become jokes.
So when, under the pressure of his university system’s clout admissions scandal, Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard assures a reporter that this “unfortunate incident” should in no way undermine the reputation of Illinois higher education…
His exact words were “I don’t think it creates a problem for higher education as a whole.” …
Well, lawdy. Higher education as a whole at SIU involves not merely drastic declines in the number of admitted students who decide to attend, but also a risible board of trustees, supine in regard to Poshard’s plagiarism and installed by just about the most corrupt politicians America has ever produced. It involves among the most moronic and expensive devotions to sports above academics that UD has encountered in her years of blogging on the subject. It involves constantly revolving administrative doors as one dean after another plagiarizes (after all, you’re at a place where the president himself sets the pace) or does other really stupid shit that gets him canned.
With this gorgeous backdrop, President Poshard ascends the podium and assures us that all is well.
Straw man plus just the sort of bland vapid reassurance you’d expect from a certain sort of doctor. This is ultimately arrogant writing that thinks you’re stupid. Don’t be taken in by it.
It’s written by the chair of the University of Minnesota psychiatry department, a locus of conflict of interest.
Let’s take a look.
Much has been written over the past few years about the relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. So I would like to disclose the following right now: I have worked with multiple companies over the years on sponsored research and as a consultant, and I continue to do so. During this time I have published a number of papers regarding this work — including some pertinent negative results concerning the drugs these companies make. [Dull but okay writing. He needs to provide at least one link to a study he’s been involved in, funded by a pertinent drug company, that arrived at seriously negative results. This is the first instance of bland reassurance in an opinion piece rife with it.]
A recent Pioneer Press report noted I have received less money from industry in the last year. Why? Because nothing is more important to me than the reputation of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and I am concerned that the media portrayal of all physician-industry relationships as bad could affect public perception. [This is just weird. Wacky. Where’s the logic? We need hard numbers first of all — the sort of thing notoriously missing from conflict of interest forms psychiatry professors give their universities — if, of course, they give their universities the forms at all. Quite a number of them don’t seem to bother with the paperwork. Many of those who do fudge the numbers like hell. This writer needs to talk to us about that… But as to the logic: Why should his caring so much about his school’s rep mean he’s received less money? And I mean — we need to know if it’s five or five thousand or five hundred thousand less, don’t we? And here comes the straw man: Absolutely no one believes, argues, or writes that all of these relationships are bad. Set up a straw man and knock him down. How powerful.]
What the media stories do not mention are the advances that have been made because of these relationships, which are managed carefully by institutions such as the University of Minnesota, where the Institutional Review Board approves all studies for human subjects and the Sponsored Projects Administration negotiates all contracts with industry. [He thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he know that you know that things aren’t managed carefully at all? That this is an ongoing national scandal? You know what he’s doing? He’s saying There there little woman. There there little man. It’s all fine. You don’t need to understand — you don’t have the capacity to understand — the details and complexities here. Trust me.]
Physician-researchers need to partner with industry to develop new treatments. It is the system we have in place. The National Institutes of Mental Health do not fund development of new compounds in psychiatry; their focus is on funding basic science and mechanisms of action after approval. [Sure. True. No one has a problem with this. Get to the point.]
When it comes to clinical research to improve and develop medicines and bring them to market, it is industry that funds that work. And the research to develop new drugs is very expensive, costing $800 million and even up to $1 billion to get a drug discovered and available for patients. [How much improved are the improved meds you’re talking about? Isn’t one of the big points here that professors with financial interests in new, more expensive, but by no means better pills, are pushing those, thereby contributing to the health costs crisis? When do you plan to say something about this?]
When I consider the field of psychiatry, the advances made because of new medicines — studied in research institutions and developed by pharmaceutical companies — have been enormous and life-changing. Before we had effective medications, one out of two hospital beds was taken by a mentally ill patient. We no longer warehouse psychotic patients and drug them with opiates to “manage” them. Now, we have better ways. Better medications. [Who says? Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I’m not aware of studies showing that many, many psychiatric meds are no more effective than placebos?]
Because of the partnerships between physicians and industry and the medications that have resulted from these relationships, many psychiatric patients were able to leave institutions. Now, because of the advances in psychiatric medicine, patients in our department — who are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and friends — can be treated as outpatients. Many have jobs, support families and contribute to society. [Bland, bland, prose to match Dr. Pangloss’s happyface. At this point in reading, you should be telling this writer to eat shit.]
Are the psychiatric drugs we have now perfect? No. All drugs have side effects, and the drugs I prescribe my patients are no different. [Why don’t you talk not merely about side effects but effectiveness? Relative effectiveness of new, expensive and old, inexpensive? Why don’t you talk about all the people who shouldn’t be taking these strong-side-effect, expensive drugs in the first place? About the fact that the pills are being over-prescribed unconscionably by you and your colleagues? Where is all that?] The leading edge of our research now focuses on predicting which medications, which compounds, will be effective for our patients. The goal remains to help people live independently, or with the fewest restraints on their freedom. In our department, we develop programs that integrate efficacious medications with effective psychosocial treatments. [Gag me. You’re letting Mister Doctor use pompous big words — efficacious?? — and how’s that different from effective?? Oh. It ain’t — you’re letting him do that in order to make you think he’s a big ol’ authority and all that you shouldn’t question. Tell him one more time to eat shit.] There are always new discoveries to be made, and it is truly unfortunate that the public is hearing only one side of the story from the media.
Do physician-industry relationships need to be managed? Absolutely. Has the increased scrutiny in the past couple of years resulted in constructive changes? Yes. But the answer is not to break these ties completely. My patients of the future are counting on them. [Pompous, self-righteous, self-serving. Why did the paper publish it? Because of who the writer is. But the writer is lazy and cynical and he thinks you’re stupid.]
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SOS thanks a reader for emailing this article to her.