… in his position as Director of Account Services, Robert Harlan says he’s too depressed to go to jail.

His wife says his real problem is he’s too generous.

He is by nature a very generous person.

Mean judge sent him to prison anyway.

These things are pretty easy to write, and given the incredibly lucrative medicalization of normalcy at the heart of the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we’ll see more and more of this literary genre.

Or maybe less and less. It can be hard to write clearly when you’re on anti-psychotics.

Mental health clinicians should consider signing this petition. It explains why taking the fifth, if you will, would be a terrible error.

He crapped out on giving the speech, but here’s part of it.

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.

Keep the aspirational spirit flated! Two billion dollars per year per hedgie!

… and already a winner.

A pointless new law school has, within minutes, lost its new president.

[A] University audit revealed $2,235 in [personal] expenses which should have been reimbursed.

The whole point of a new public law school, you recall, was that “the school won’t fall back on taxpayers.” Whose money did the president just spend on family travel? How much will buying out his contract cost? Hiring headhunters to find a replacement?

The absolutely pointless University of Massachusetts law school: Already a class act.

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UD thanks Andre.

… involves pseudo-educational groups, so UD will cover it.

The story is both complicated and just breaking, so give me a bit.

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Jack Shafer has the best take on the thing so far.

[E]ven by the low standards of the industry, the Wall Street Journal Europe circ shenanigans seem pretty wild. According to the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal Europe had a circulation of 75,000 in 2010 of which 31,000 of which were sold at a steep discount for distribution to students, who “may or may not have read them.”

What’s the bigger scandal? That the WSJE had a pitiful circulation of 75,000 in 2010? Or that 41 percent of that circulation was ginned up in an arrangement that the Audit Bureau of Circulation deemed “legitimate”…?

Some parents of suspended University of Miami players can’t help noticing that their kids are getting hammered while their highly paid coaches remain at large. With Miami in mind, Tom McMillen, in the New York Times, is appalled that “Bloated college sports budgets, with coaches who earn millions of dollars, often more than college presidents, have created a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, with the result that colleges are losing control over their own athletic programs.”

Similarly, recent law graduates – huge swathes of them unemployed and in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars – are noticing that their law professors continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while failing to produce many employable students.

It is kind of an amazingly sweet deal for these two university employees. You hire a coach at three million dollars a year and he gets that even if his team loses every single game. He’ll get more the next year, even with total losses, because breaking his contract and finding a new coach will cost too much money. Then he’ll get even more the next year with the same win/loss record. I mean, eventually they’ll fire him, but he’ll rake it in for a long time before that happens.

The tenured law professor has it even sweeter. Over the course of five years, only half of her students, say, get jobs. She snuggles into bed at night secure in the thought of a low course load and regular salary raises despite hundreds of idle young people suffering under the weight of immense loan repayments because she and her school were unable to train them well enough to make them attractive to law firms.

You’d think a market correction would come into play in both of these arenas. If coaches are corrupt and hurt their players, or if coaches win too few games, shouldn’t their three million dollar salaries take a hit? If law professors teach at schools half of whose graduates remain unemployed for years, shouldn’t their hundred and fifty thousand dollar take home take a hit? No, you say! Silly UD! Both of these groups are eminently re-employable! Universities need to be scared, onaccounta if that law prof gets huffy enough she can just up and take a job at Cravath! NO university football or basketball coach is too corrupt or inept to fail to get another lucrative position!

Well, first off, this isn’t at all necessarily true. Things can get a little undignified even for high-profile coaches. And a law professor at a substandard school (the ABA will accredit anything) doesn’t have many options.

And second: Why would you want to tempt fate (lawsuits from UM players are going to happen, and lawsuits from unemployed law school grads are already happening) by keeping such people at your school? Wouldn’t you prefer reasonably paid, competent employees?

Revenge of the Nerd.

— or make that a Flory of emails, from friends and readers, about some fallout from David Flory’s prostitution arrest.

Apparently a former president of the University of New Mexico was a partner in Flory’s online business, and has also been arrested. Details when I get a chance to catch my breath.

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More, from local tv news.

Garcia was also vice-president of the American Political Science Association.

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This is kind of a ho-hum scandal for UNM, though. Remember Mistress Jade?

More here.

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No one human being can keep up with all the sex and sports scandals at UNM. But UD has tried. See these pages.

VERY.

[Athletic Director Mike Hamilton’s] resignation is effective on June 30, [just days before the NCAA’s infractions committee comes to pay a visit] but he will be on administrative leave beginning Monday. According to reports, he will receive a buyout of $1.335 million over the next 36 months or $445,000 per year ($37,083.33 monthly)…

Hamilton fired football coach Phil Fulmer in 2008, Bruce Pearl in March and most recently baseball coach Todd Raleigh. He hired Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, but Kiffin resigned after one season to take over the University of Southern California program, which was sanctioned by the NCAA.

According to the News Sentinel, Pearl is being paid $948,728, and Raleigh is owed $331,657.53 for a total of $1,280,385.53.

According to The Tennessean, Fulmer received $6 million when he was fired.

The football violations being heard by the NCAA this weekend are under Kiffin’s regime.

He also fired baseball coach Rod Delmonico and basketball coach Buzz Peterson, who received $1.39 million in 2005 when he was fired, according to the News Sentinel.

According to The Tennessean, the total cost of all of Hamilton’s firings is $9,070,385.53.

Ed Greif, a local sportswriter, does the numbers.

Tennessee: Hire guys you have to fire because they get caught breaking rules, then pay them millions and millions of buyout dollars for years. Genius.

Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books.

With long-term use of psychoactive drugs, the result is, in the words of Steve Hyman, a former director of the NIMH and until recently provost of Harvard University, “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” As quoted by Whitaker, the brain, Hyman wrote, begins to function in a manner “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” After several weeks on psychoactive drugs, the brain’s compensatory efforts begin to fail, and side effects emerge that reflect the mechanism of action of the drugs… The episodes of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” and treatment with a “mood stabilizer,” such as Depokote (an anticonvulsant) plus one of the newer antipsychotic drugs. And so on.

Some patients take as many as six psychoactive drugs daily. One well- respected researcher, Nancy Andreasen, and her colleagues published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain, and that the effect is directly related to the dose and duration of treatment. As Andreasen explained to The New York Times, “The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”

Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.

Angell’s review of three books about psychoactive drugs and depression suggests that for the most part the pills don’t work, and are (see above) positively dangerous.

And what’s this got to do with universities? High-profile professors of psychiatry all over this country, some of them paid by drug companies, legitimize the use of these pills by millions and millions of Americans, including very small children.

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UD thanks MattF for the link.

… the disgusting, injurious corruption of medical knowledge in America.

[T]he $310 billion pharmaceutical industry quietly buys … the contents of medical journals and, all too often, the trajectory of medical research itself.

[Continuing medical education courses are] pedagogic playdates [that] familiarize doctors with pharmaceutical companies’ patented products to the exclusion of cheaper and sometimes safer and more effective alternatives.

[A Canadian bioethicist says:] “Many psychiatric medications are little more than placebos, yet many clinicians have come to believe that SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a newer class of antidepressants] drugs are magic, all through the suppression of negative studies.”

[Another observer calls much of the content of our medical journals] “little better than infomercials.”

[At least] 50 …Elsevier journals appear to be Big Pharma advertisements passed off as medical publications.

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UD thanks Adam for the link.

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.

These lyrics from Empty Chairs at Empty Tables (Les Misérables) instantly formed in my mind when I read this morning about the ex-husband of Laura Blank, a woman who works at the City University of New York.

One of the sources Steven Simkin used to pay his divorce settlement was a collapsed Madoff fund (sounds like an unsuccessful soufflé).

When the couple split their assets evenly, the largest chunk of money was invested with Mr. Madoff. Mr. Simkin kept much of his funds in the Madoff account, which was held in his name. Ms. Blank, who said she had no interest in investing with Mr. Madoff, received her settlement proceeds in cash. Shortly after Mr. Madoff admitted wrongdoing in December 2008, Mr. Simkin, a lawyer at one of the country’s most powerful law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, filed court papers to drastically alter the terms of his divorce settlement. Ms. Blank, he argued in the lawsuit, should be required to turn over millions of dollars that she had received in their settlement to make up for the substantial losses he had sustained in the fraud.

The hardship claim is based on Simkin’s having moved from a 5.7 million to a $4.1 million house.

To put your disappointment over the lack of the end of the world into perspective: Nothing.

By the Fugs.

Wow. Sounds bad. And when you realize they’re incredibly highly paid and highly touted University of Minnesota professors, it sounds even worse. For Minnesota. The story’s been kicking around for years. UM’s been keeping them close anyway. The school seems to have separation issues.

He specializes in risk and uncertainty; she’s into the “cognitive processes underlying the interaction of people with complex systems.” So you put that together (Sainfort and Jacko are married) and you get two high-rollers who maybe figure they’ll give double dipping in the complex system that is a university a whirl …

Georgia Tech, where they used to teach, is going after them through the courts for the two full-time salaries they got even though they’d already taken jobs at Minnesota (where they also pulled down salaries). Plus it’s after them for fraudulent billing, theft of funds… pretty much everything determined faculty thieves can do.

Hold them close, Minnesota! Keep that half million dollar joint salary aloft! No doubt they are innocent, and will go on to great things.

Timothy Burke first talks about the London School of Economics, which awarded Gaddafi a PhD:

One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries…

What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.

He then turns to Saif Gaddafi’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Benjamin Barber:

I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down… Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.