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.

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

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.

Here are some recent thoughts about it, from an Esquire writer.

… American readers are more than happy to overlook a little literary fraud. Games of identity have always been a mainstay of literary experimentation, but in the past decade the games have turned sordidly mercenary. The JT LeRoy hoax, in which the author pretended to be a male “lot lizard” and confused a bunch of celebrities into being her friends, could have been a magnificent bit of modernist trickery, like the collected works of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the 1920s and ’30s who published as four different poets, all with different styles, reveling in the majestic possibilities of the unconstrained self. But the LeRoy hoax wasn’t about art in the end; it was about a little money and a little fame. James Frey still finds readers and publishers, even though he’s betrayed both. When Herman Rosenblat’s recent Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was exposed as a lie, interested parties found someone to publish the book as fiction rather than nonfiction. Our literary era has offered little in the way of insights into the workings of the human soul. It has provided, however, many great lessons in what you can get away with and still get paid.

To explain the recent explosion of cultural and financial frauds, it isn’t enough simply to blame the clever men and women who fool us and take our pride or money. Many Americans want to be fooled. This country is full of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, who took out credit cards at 22 percent interest in order to pay off the interest on their other credit cards, who believed that the stock market would expand without limit.

… Cynicism is now a legitimate virtue…

Longtime readers know that despite this blog’s endless coverage of the American university’s biggest, deepest, and most tolerated frauds — big-time athletics, and the scholarship of medical school professors — UD does not consider cynicism a legitimate virtue.

… is the lying creative writing professors do about their academic and professional backgrounds.

An intrepid professor at Cal State Long Beach, Brian Lane, discovered scads of lies in the online biographies of two of his colleagues in the film and electronic arts department. They claimed screenwriting prizes they didn’t have. Advanced degrees they didn’t have. Professional memberships they didn’t have. One claimed to be a psychologist. Lots and lots of lies.

Brian wrote to UD this morning with an update: Both professors have been fired. A third professor, vociferous in defense of these two, has apparently also been fudging credentials.

Is there more of this sort of thing in writing than in other fields? How many James Freys sit on America’s writing faculties, lying on their bios and lying in their memoirs?

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward notes many Jewish executives who’ve taken pay cuts in harsh economic times.

But not Joel. He’s rewarding himself for having kept both Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin in positions of power at his university until they were hauled off by the authorities.

Gross negligence of the sort that permanently soils a university doesn’t come cheap.

… we’re getting our education in academic medicine.

Thanks to Senator Grassley, the weird science of some university-sponsored research reveals itself, and even UD, who’s been around, finds it head-spinning.

Here, for instance, is a professor at Washington University defending his colleague, Timothy Kuklo, charged with falsification of data, forgery of documents, and other stuff:

… The inquiry also found that Kuklo falsely claimed other Army doctors helped write the study. … [A colleague said, in defense of Kuklo, that] it’s not uncommon for a researcher to sign other authors’ names to a study after getting verbal consent. It is a practice that is done, for example, when other authors are abroad and do not have easy access to fax machines.

Since Kuklo has so far refused to respond to anyone – in the press or the military – about any of this, we can’t know whether he got the four faxless horsemen’s verbal consent… Or what that consent was for. We do know that sticking lots of names on articles – names of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the project – represents one of many curious folkways of UD‘s fellow professors in med schools around the country. No doubt it’s a short jump from rounding up friends who have nothing to do with your work and pretending that they helped you with it, to just going ahead and putting their names down… forging their names… on the cover page of your study… without permission:

… [Kuklo] falsely claimed had a 92 percent success rate in healing shattered legs of wounded soldiers injured in Iraq, and Medtronic [his client, and maker of the device at the heart of the study] has supported his research, the Times reported.

Kuklo’s study was retracted in March after [the] paper’s publisher, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, received notification from Walter Reed questioning the validity of the report’s conclusions.

“It was further disclosed that much of the paper was essentially false,” the retraction read.

Additionally, four doctors listed as co-authors on the report said they had not seen the manuscript prior to publication, and their signatures were forged on the article before its submission…

But wait! They were detained abroad, bereft of faxes …

It’s not only the weird ways of research we’re learning about. It’s the yet weirder ways in which other researchers defend the research.

… are the latest schools housing professors charged with serious professional misconduct. Wash U’s faculty member faces falsification of data charges (details here, at The Periodic Table). Federal prosecutors (as I note in the post below) charge the Dartmouth professor with conflict of interest. He could go to jail.

… gets an up close and personal look in today’s Forbes, which proclaims it Scam Capital of America.

Prominent among its scams: Diploma mills.

There’s the diploma mill that sold 10,000 phony college degrees to buyers in 131 countries… The Internet diploma mill was run by Dixie and Steven Randock, both now serving three-year sentences. Degrees included those purportedly from Harvard University. The ringleaders’ partners in crime were, of course, their customers. One was a Spokane deputy federal marshal seeking a promotion who knew what he was getting–and got convicted for it.

Pharmaceutical multinationals know best. They formulate great new drugs and want nothing more than to drop them immediately

into our eager mouths. Testing and approval, a bother, may be avoided in a variety of ways, including fabricating your own scientific journal full of fake research touting the greatness of the drugs.

… Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website…

… I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher, wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus.

… [An] Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks … served on the “honorary advisory board” of this “journal”. His take: “I don’t think it’s fair to say it was totally a marketing journal”, apparently on the grounds that it had excerpts from peer-reviewed papers. However, in his entire time on the board he never received a single paper for peer-review… . Such “throwaways” of non-peer reviewed publications and semi-marketing materials are commonplace in medicine. But wouldn’t that seem odd for an academic journal? Apparently not. Moreover, Peter Brooks had a pretty lax sense of academic ethics anyway: he admitted to having his name put on a “advertorial” for pharma within the last ten years, says The Scientist…

It is this attitude within companies like Merck and among doctors that allows scandals precisely like this to happen. While the scandals with Merck and Vioxx are particularly egregious, we know they are not isolated incidents…

In this case,
Key West

to

Washington.

She feels shaky.

Also, she’s still emotional from last night’s Sirens performance at George Washington University, which featured La Kid in

an amazing Batgirl costume which UD will show you as soon as La Kid WAKES UP and sends her a photo.

And UD ain’t getting any younger.

So she’s royally pissed that she’s got to do some focused, careful thinking this morning in putting together a post about the fake journal Merck published to pretend its new pills had objective research backing them up.

This post will also feature Doctor Marvin Konstam, pride of Tufts University…

UD feels as though a heavy fake medical journal with eerie ghostwriting in it is pressing on her heart and making it hard for her to breathe, let alone think…

But she’ll do her best. She thanks David, a reader, for alerting her to this story. After she walks her dog, she’ll do something with it.

From the News-Democrat.

Throughout East St. Louis Senior High School, Principal Ethel Shanklin has been known as “Dr. Shanklin.”

At numerous online sites connected to School District 189, Shanklin has been referred to as “Dr. Shanklin,” a reference, she says, to a doctorate in education degree or its equivalent, which she claims to have received from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in May 2007.

But no more.

At the request of the News-Democrat, District 189 Superintendent Theresa Saunders checked Shanklin’s personnel file. Saunders said to her surprise, she found no proof of a doctorate degree or its equivalent.

She said she believes that Shanklin does not hold a doctorate degree and ordered her to tell her staff that she is not doctor.

“She told the staff today,” Saunders said Wednesday.

Saunders said Shanklin also planned to tell an assembly of high school students that she would no longer refer to herself as “Dr. Shanklin.”

Shanklin said she mistakely thought that a two-year “education specialist” degree she completed at SIUE was the last step for a doctorate in education.

But Shanklin could not have received such a degree from SIUE because the university’s School of Education does not offer a doctorate in education, spokesman Greg Conroy said.

A check of the university’s computerized records showed that what Shanklin received was a two-year “education specialist” degree, which Conroy called an “advanced degree” but not a doctorate. This degree stated she majored in “education administration.”

Conroy said a person holding this degree, “should not be calling themselves a doctor.”

Shanklin said, “I don’t have a piece of paper stating that I have a doctorate,” but insisted during a telephone interview last week that what she received from SIUE allows her to refer to herself as “doctor.” She said her salary is not based on having a doctorate.

Saunders said after investigating, she believes Shanklin was confused and did not intend to deceive…

How a college grad would interpret the gift of a book of life advice written by a man who proceeded to take his own life, well, one would need a writer with Wallace’s darkly comic gifts to pen such a scene. One’s sympathies go out to the editors: how to publish a speech of 137 sentences into a book? The unfortunate solution was to place just one sentence per page, giving the book the look and feel of an oracular text: Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet or Rumi’s love poetry. Those who embraced Wallace’s phenomenal talent may find themselves wishing the Kenyon speech had been left unbound, to be folded into a future edition of his nonfiction as a three- or four-page coda. Here, when a three-word sentence—“And so on,” page 87—is forced to balance an entire page on its shoulders, the reader starts to feel sorry not only for the sentence, but—if such indulgences may be permitted—for Wallace, posthumous.

Get it? A 137-sentence college graduation speech by David Foster Wallace has been turned into a glossy fifteen dollar book by printing only one sentence – or sentence fragment – on each page.

And, you know, it’s a good speech, UD has written admiringly about it – but many of those pages express, as Wallace himself said, the self-evident.

The book’s packaged as self-help, Oprah-style. Part of its title is Living a Compassionate Life.

Live Your Best Life Now!

It might remind you of Randy Pausch, a similar phenom, though Pausch had more interesting things to say, and wrote with far more verve.

Or again it might remind you, with its page-per-sentence simplification, its big-print infantility, of Doctor Seuss.

It might remind you of

daily motivational calendars.

Half the people asked at Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus think it would be a good idea if it split way from the flagship Carbondale campus, according to a year-long study by the SIUE Faculty Senate.

A task force formed to examine the issue of campus separation, a proposal that has previously been the subject of state legislation by Metro East lawmakers, surveyed 1,838 faculty, students and staff at SIUE, including an interview with Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift.

English professor Joel Hardman, chairman of the task force, said faculty on campus generally supported separating from Carbondale but the overall number showed thoughts were evenly split.

Vandegrift has been openly opposed to separation, as have SIU President Glenn Poshard and other top administrators of the university system.

The SIUE Faculty Senate has been critical of Poshard since allegation of plagiarism arose in 2007 about his doctoral dissertation. When the board cleared Poshard of the charges, the faculty senate called for his resignation.

The survey report also suggested other actions that could be taken instead of separation, such as changing wording on the SIU system Web site to better reflect each university’s individuality and moving the university’s system office from Carbondale to Springfield to enhance lobbying efforts and quell a perception of favoritism of SIUC.

Glenn Poshard is one of the few authentic political hacks running an American university system.

UD sympathizes with SIUE’s faculty. How would you like to live every day of your life embarrassed?

Maybe a name change is part of the solution. Southern Illinois Edwardsville In No Way Associated With Glenn Poshard.