…says Palin.
… lead the headlines at Brown University, where two inexplicable things are happening. Keller remains on the faculty, and a masturbation “spree” is afoot. Ahand?
Keller, as readers of this blog know, is one of the three official biggest baddest boys of academic medicine (along with Joseph Biederman and Charles Nemeroff). All men have undergone titanic struggles with conflict of interest regs, and in the process drawn plenty of attention to their schools, as well as to the quality of their research.
The latest effort to draw attention to the Keller scandal involves the non-profit Healthy Skepticism, which has written a letter to Brown asking its assistance in getting an apparently ghostwritten Paxil article by Keller retracted. Brown has been sitting on its hands.
Which you can’t say about the people involved in what reporter Lucy Feldman describes as “College Hill’s inexplicable months-long masturbation spree.”
This bizarre story from non-bizarre eastern Ohio would appeal to Franz Kafka.
The owner of an animal farm has been found dead (we are not told how he died, and so are free to imagine his own animals attacked him), and many of his animals have escaped. Armed police are driving around in pickup trucks and shooting at “bears, lions, tigers … cheetahs… wolves, giraffes, and camels.”
On Tuesday, commuters reported spotting bears and wolves along I-70.
A surreal tale for Halloween.
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UPDATE: This gets more Kafkaesque by the moment.
The guy opened all the cages and then killed himself.
… and so are his university buddies.
A University of Pennsylvania professor died over the summer, but the university forgot to cancel his course. Students bought the books, showed up… and waited.
While waiting, they received an email from an administrator telling them their professor was dead.
They got the email while they were waiting in the classroom. Yup, they bought the books, showed up for class, and BAM, your Blackberry goes off with the news that the very guy you’re waiting for is dead and now you have the afternoon to go back to your dorm and think about your own mortality. That’s the worst part of this story — you can’t even go out and party after you get the news and be all, “Whoo-hoo class is canceled! Pack the bowl!” A guy actually died.
… Moo: the lost chapter.
Five Truman University students who thought they were going to spend the summer measuring hog odors in northern Missouri have lost their jobs because of a long running dispute between the hog farm operators, nearby residents and state politicians.
The chancellor of North Dakota’s university system could definitely express himself less windbaggedly; but that’s a small embarrassment. He has two big embarrassments to deal with, so forget the way he talks.
First big embarrassment: Turns out that if you so much as use a bathroom at ND’s Dickinson State University you’ll be enrolled as a full-time student and given all A’s.
Enrollment-technique-wise, the simplicity of physical capture is an improvement over the for-profits’ convoluted psych-ops. Just – comme disent les bouddhistes – Be Here Now.
Second big embarrassment: The president of Dickinson State is doing a Bootsie Mandel. He refuses to leave, even though the chancellor has fired him.
… where the state Medical Practice Board is holding hearings into whether the director of the student health clinic “failed to supervise a physician’s assistant who was improperly prescribing prescription opiate medications to students.”
And dat ain’t all. Try to figure this one out. They’ve had to delay the hearing because a panel member has a conflict of interest. The conflict? This person “had participated in a related hearing involving a UVM health clinic employee that the board also was investigating.”
Since when is participating in a hearing related to the hearing you’re hearing a conflict of interest? And – okay – a second UVM health clinic person is also under investigation… But wait. Actually, the board’s executive director isn’t sure whether the COI “involved the [first employee’s] case or that of a third clinic worker, whose case did not result in the filing of formal charges.”
Got that? If I’m getting the math right, we’re talking about four student health employees who have been or are being investigated: The possibly negligent doctor, a physician’s assistant, and… two others?
Developing…
UD‘s old friend Jonathan sends her this update of the University of Northern Virginia story.
In a sort of echo of American University’s Richard Berendzen, who, when president of AU, boasted, in a series of obscene phone calls, about sex slaves in his basement, the “chancellor” of “the University of Northern Virginia” (both chancellor and university are fake, making this story less thrilling than it would be if UNV were something other than a visa mill with joke accreditation) has an actual bondage and discipline dungeon in his basement.
A commenter on The Smoking Gun website says it all: “It’s good to see he’s maintaining a healthy work/life balance.”
So you just know some schlub has been sneaking up there for years because it’s the only place on campus he can smoke his cigs … And he missed all the Green Campus memos … And soon he’ll be lying in GW Hospital fighting for his life …
… by your record of embarrassing or illegal activities, read this and relax.
Mayor Marion Barry’s famous statement captures Bernard-Henri Levy’s argument here.
Among the points he makes:
[I]t would be nice to know, and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.
Who knew about the always-two-chambermaids rule?
And – Why didn’t anyone tell DSK that he was one of the most closely watched figures on the planet?
“It is expected that the birds will remain aggressive for approximately the next month,” explains Queen’s University to its students – so look out. They’re going after pedestrians.
When I read this, in a newspaper article about the Queen’s University crows, who’ve already pecked three passersby —
Queen’s faculty and staff in the three buildings backing onto the walkway have a clear view of crows swooping at their colleagues.
— I instantly pictured a (Charles Addams?) New Yorker cartoon in which faculty and staff gather in the room with the best view to watch and laugh.
At the University of Miami, they’ve long had an aggressive hawk problem, which they’ve tried to make cute by naming the area of campus where they peck you Hawk Walk. (They also issue umbrellas to walkers, because hawks – go figure – don’t get aggressive if you’re carrying an umbrella.) UD proposes CROW GO as Queen’s cute name for going the Suzanne Pleshette route.