… of a book about misleading health statistics.

Another problem — increasingly — is conflict of interest. As pharmaceutical companies fund more of their own trials, the studies may be designed to yield the sunniest results possible. Allowing a new drug to shadow-box against a placebo, for instance, promises more marketable results than pitting it against a competing drug that’s already on the market. Publicizing only surrogate outcomes without mentioning whether the patient benefits in any substantive way is another common drug company dodge. So is burying — or at least minimizing — side effects or other shortcomings…

… is that only the powerless get punished for it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a plagiarist who, as Slate‘s Timothy Noah writes, lied about what she did, has suffered nothing for her behavior; on the contrary, she continues to be honored with awards of the sort Vanderbilt’s about to give her. The only people at Vanderbilt pissed off about this are its students.

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty maintains his support for Vanderbilt’s decision to honor historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of criticism from students.

Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and well-known historian, is the recipient of the 2009 Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal and will be the keynote speaker on Senior Class Day. Goodwin was also the center of a plagiarism scandal…

In 2002, Goodwin was accused of plagiarism in two news articles. Goodwin addressed the accusations in Time Magazine, asserting the errors were unintentional. Although Goodwin provided footnotes for her sources, she attributed her failure to “provide quotation marks for phrases I had taken verbatim” to mislabeling in her notes due to the large-scale nature of her research. She also confessed to having previously reached a “private settlement” with an author of one of her sources.

Senior Meghana Bhatta, an investigative member of the honor council, said Goodwin provided a “feeble excuse that would not even stand up in a high school classroom, much less in the world of academia.”

“Vanderbilt is sending a flawed and hypocritical message to its students and to other institutions by hosting an admitted plagiarist,” Bhatta said. “I hope that the administration realizes that we risk losing credibility in the eyes of the public by demonstrating support for a woman who does not stand for the ideals of our school.”

The allegations resulted in her resignation from several positions, but she still retained the support of many scholars and readers.

“I think she has answered those accusations and she gave ample credit to a source that she used,” McCarty said. “She worked out an arrangement with that author, but she in no way attempted to present that work as her own.” [Er. Yes she did. That’s why she paid said source an ample sum of money to shut her up.]”

“I find it odd that Vanderbilt, a university that makes every freshman sign the honor code, would reward her for work that was admittedly taken without notation from other sources,” [said a student] in regard to Goodwin’s past….

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

Update: The DKG Plagiarism Archive at University Diaries. Note that she ran into exactly the same trouble at the University of Virginia. Those pesky damn students.

In the case of Todd’s university?  Not much.

And your students know it.

Excerpts from “Your Professor’s PowerPoint Presentation,” in  College Humor.

The same slide show I’ve been

using for five years.

My entire job is to click a

button a few times and read

slides written by my TA.

Copied these points directly from the book.

You won’t believe how much they pay me to provide this effort-free method of teaching….

UD thanks Jason, a reader, for sending her this.

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

UPDATE: Anger at lazy professors overusing PowerPoint has become part of campus life. Opening sentences from an editorial at the Stevens Institute of Technology:

As students, we can sometimes feel discouraged that our concerns are not being addressed. Whether we want to see better food in Pierce, more parking spaces on campus, or fewer PowerPoint presentations in class, it is easy to feel that we have no recourse in these matters…

…on this blog, because I’m about universities. But don’t lose sight of the larger sleazy picture.

… a brief engagement.

Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, earned more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from companies such as Bank of America Corp., Ciitigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that later received taxpayer funds in the economic bailout.

The hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. also paid Summers more than $5 million in salary and other compensation in the past 16 months, according to a financial disclosure form released by the White House today. Summers served as a managing director at the New York-based firm until December, according to the report.

Summers, a Treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton, spoke to Citigroup, Goldman and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. audiences twice last year. Lehman, which went bankrupt in September, paid Summers $67,500 for an engagement on July 30, the filing showed…

A man stands up to give a speech. Did he write it himself? Probably not. How original is it? Let’s figure not very. How long did he speak? Forty minutes? Probably not even that. Is he especially beautiful, compelling, charismatic?

Is the outfit paying him in a position to give a guest speaker almost $70,000?

… Ah fuck it. I’m sure the expenditure makes… made… terrific sense for Lehman. Let’s look to the future: Isn’t it a good feeling to know that the man in whom the nation has vested our economic future knows how to turn a a few words into a check for $67,500 made out to himself?

Oregon Health and Science University issued a warning Friday evening after five monkeys escaped from its Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton.

One of those monkeys was captured around 8:00 p.m.

Jim Newman with OHSU said the group of males escaped while their cages were being cleaned around 1:00 p.m.

Newman said animal handlers had been tracking the Japanese Macaques on the Primate Research Center’s campus around SW 185th and Walker. The university decided to alert the public after the animals left the grounds of the campus and were spotted near the MAX line.

Newman said the monkeys are all about 20-35 pounds and were used as breeding animals to expand the primate population at the center.

Staff are using cages with food inside in the hopes of luring the animals inside.

According to Newman, “It is believed that the animals pose little to no threat to humans because they retreat when they are approached. However an animal that feels threatened could bite.”

The University also said the escaped monkeys haven’t been tested to see if they carry diseases that are low risk to primates but higher risk to humans.

A researcher who has written a book about the grant and fellowship review process describes how various disciplines fared on the panels she observed. Here’s English.

… Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” Perhaps because of the influence of poststructuralism in the discipline, literary scholars are particularly aware that the standards of evaluation are intersubjective, resulting from the interaction of panelists. They’re ambivalent about how successful a peer-review panel can be. Asked whether “the cream rises to the top,” they emphasize that doesn’t necessarily happen. Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.

Even if you didn’t have such relativistic views of excellence, the question of how to evaluate literary studies remains open. At one point, there was agreement on mastery of close reading, how language works. But three trends have undermined that consensus: critique of canonization and of privileging the written text; a widening of interest to include history, anthropology and the social context in which a text is written; and challenges — whether from Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism — to the whole idea of “representation.”

One result is that literature proposals don’t do as well in multidisciplinary panels. One panelist told me, “At some point, somebody said, ‘Gosh, we’re giving all the awards to historians.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not surprising.’…

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced on Wednesday that the investment assets of Harvard University had been seized in order to restore stability to the global financial system. Treasury officials reported that the total amount taken under federal control was just over $30 billion despite losses which accrued to the Harvard endowment during the ongoing financial crisis. In exchange for the seized assets, the Treasury has issued 10-year Treasury Bonds to the University maturing at a value of $36.57 billion in 2019, an annual interest rate of two percent. To magnify the benefit created by the seizure, the Fed has structured the transaction, through fractional reserve banking, to leverage the assets into over $3 trillion in bonds for sale to foreign governments that are holding U.S. dollars in reserve. “Since these bonds are backed by the Harvard name, the Chinese are going to be clamoring to reinvest their money in the United States,” said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Members of the G20 expressed relief at the news of a concrete plan to support the value of the U.S. dollar.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust expressed deep concern about the news, and warned that it will likely necessitate further staff layoffs and tuition hikes. “Professors and students will have to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The loss of endowment dividends, which contributed almost thirty-four percent of our annual budget, will force us to scale back our generous extra-curricular dining opportunities, which are currently consuming almost a quarter of the University’s gross annual revenues. In addition, we will most likely be unable to continue expansion of innovative departments like sub-Saharan social anthropology and nanophotonic synthetic bioengineering. Nonetheless, she admitted that, “Given the current economic gloom, the rate of return on these illiquid bonds will probably be much better than any other investment during the next decade.”

President Obama praised Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan. “This venerable institution of scholarship, much like the troubled financial and automotive firms, is simply too big to fail. It is for this reason that we are confident this plan is in the best interests of the American taxpayers and the stability of the world economy.” The Dow Jones Industrial average was up 372 points, or 6% on the announcement. Former Harvard University President Larry Summers was credited with having crafted the plan to prop up the faltering Treasury. “With the bravado emanating from the Chinese putting the stability of the dollar in question and Peter Schiff detailing the inevitability of a currency crisis on YouTube, it was unavoidable that we make some immediate announcement to reestablish the security and stability of Treasury Bonds. The real danger was that our intervention would be too small or too slow.”

President Obama saluted the patriotism displayed by Drew Gilpin Faust in her graceful acceptance of the U.S. Government’s plan. “Harvard’s President has shown us that we are all going to have to make certain changes in order to make a real commitment to responsibility and reaffirm the enduring promise of America.” Faust, for her part, was somewhat skeptical as to the University’s ability to oppose the government’s actions. “Last week, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying that this sort of asset seizure would probably be constitutional even if subject to strict scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment. That statement has put the kibosh on any litigation we might have pursued.”

Acting Dean Howell Jackson assured HLS students that the University’s changing financial circumstances would in no way affect the law school’s public service initiative or summer public interest funding. “Our legendary fundraising machine has been hard at work this year, and has already raised over $100 million, which will go to extending protection for LIPP, SPIF, JIFFY, PEP, and all our other public interest programs.” He also noted that, although there would be some belt-tightening in the funding for student activities, HLS students will continue to enjoy some of their traditional perks. “We will be continuing to provide morning coffee three days a week, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we will have to switch to Sanka.”

Harvard Law Record

… the University of California Riverside professor who wrote a generous blurb for Jenny’s and my book, has died.

… Mr. Elliott grew up in a three-room apartment in a gritty Baltimore neighborhood. His father drove a truck. His mother operated a loom that produced corporate emblems.

After earning his bachelor’s degree, his family’s first college degree, from Loyola College in Baltimore, he got his master’s degree from Bowling Green State and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

After 17 years teaching at Princeton, he came to UCR for the opportunity to shape a growing campus, he said in a previous interview.

… Liam Corley, who earned his Ph.D. at UCR in 2004 under Elliott’s guidance, also remembered him fondly. Corley, an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly Pomona, is deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy.

“Emory was a selfless man,” Corley wrote in an e-mail to UCR officials after they informed him of Elliott’s death. “He was always in high demand as a mentor, teacher, speaker and scholar, but he had the generous gift of always paying attention to the person before him.”

One is Donald Roberts, her brother-in-law. This film features his voice instruction.

Another is a close friend of the family, the artist Paul Laffoley. This film features Paul explaining his work.

… is the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey. Ever since UD opened up shop, UMDNJ has been a little slice of Sicily right here in America.

When it comes to criminal proceedings, UMDNJ has a kind of rolling admissions policy — there’s always something happening. The latest is the indictment of the guy who used to run the physical plant. This guy told a local contractor that he wanted a Cadillac Deville, a deck, a sun room, and a cell phone, and that if the contractor would give these things to him, he would give the contractor millions of dollars in campus construction work.

But this is small potatoes for UMDNJ. Historically, it’s more into big potatoes, like Medicare fraud.

From Newsday:

… I’m not … sure the word obscene is a gross enough word to describe what the University of Kentucky, a taxpayer-funded institution, is offering John Calipari to become its basketball coach. According to several reports, Calipari is mulling over an 8-year, $35 million offer. That contract would make him the highest paid coach in the history of the game, surpassing Florida’s Billy Donovan, who makes $3.5 million a year.

…The state of Kentucky is in so much fiscal trouble that Gov. Steve Beshear declared in December that he planned to take a 10 percent salary cut, dropping his annual pay down to $111,945.

Calipari will make more than that much per game with an annual salary of $4.3 million. What’s more, the University’s board of trustees just approved a five percent tuition hike for undergraduates. I guess they’re going to have to get the money from somewhere, and it’s clear that this is a school and a state with priorities.

Now, I know I am going to get inundated with comments and e-mail talking about just how much money the basketball program brings into the school. My question is this: Just how much of that money goes to the English department, or engineering department or education department? …

From Temple News.

Plagiarism is never tolerated. But for poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it is always on the tip of his tongue.

“You should go steal questions from other interviews,” Goldsmith said. “I’ve got a thousand interviews online. Seriously, take the best one, and put your name on it.”

It’s not the most common advice, especially from a college professor, but in Goldsmith’s class at the University of Pennsylvania, students are directed to transcribe, plagiarize, thieve and appropriate, all in the name of learning to write.

And his works are no different.

“The old type of creativity really isn’t very interesting,” Goldsmith said. “So by being uncreative, you form a new type of creativity.”

“His approach to teaching is completely bizarre and pisses a lot of people off, including his students,” said Nick Salvatore, one of Goldsmith’s former students. “But by the end, everybody is really happy with it.”

… He’s just finished reciting a police interview and singing misunderstood lyrics at Temple University Center City campus as part of the university’s Poets & Writers series. It’s all part of the process he calls “uncreative writing.”

“If you look around at what’s held up as creative, most of the time it really isn’t,” Goldsmith said. “I don’t want to be that. I wasn’t always uncreative. I tried to be creative like everyone else. I failed. But it’s the failures that make things happen.”

And things have certainly happened.

Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry. His most recent work is unofficially titled American Trilogy. It consists of “The Weather, Traffic and Sports,” which are respective transcriptions of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game with the ads included.

Other works include a transcription of every word he spoke over the span of a week, every move he made throughout a 24-hour period and the retyping of every character from an August edition of the New York Times into a 900-page book.

… When he’s not stealing others’ words, Goldsmith works on his other projects. Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb, an online archive of all things avant-garde. He is also the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU-FM and a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.

“Look how easy it is to make a mark in literature,” Goldsmith said. “It’s a pathetic field we’re in.” …

You go, boy.

Oh how this sort of thing makes UD homesick.

Contents of gift bags at a fundraiser for the Washington Humane Society.

A card for $1,000 off a Cartier purchase of $5,000 or more, Shiseido lip gloss, gourmet tea, lotion, Luna bars, a bottle of SmartWater, dog treats, and a slew of gift cards. Guests grabbed pink-and-blue outfits printed with “I shop at Tysons Galleria” for their dogs…