… at the Alliance for Human Research Protection, who have written a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association people asking for Bonnie and Clyde to be let go.

A nonprofit group that monitors industry links to medical research called for the suspension of the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and an investigation into allegations that they threatened a researcher who criticized a study published in the journal.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection, which is often critical of industry-academic ties, made the requests in a letter it sent Wednesday to the AMA and the journal, also known as JAMA.

“We are deeply concerned about the unbecoming and unethical conduct of the editor in chief and executive deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who were reported to have used unprofessional and intimidating tactics against a conscientious academic,” the alliance wrote in a letter requesting the investigation. Many doctors and academics have criticized JAMA’s reaction to the academic, Jonathan Leo, on Internet blogs recently.

The AMA and JAMA said they were reviewing the letter and declined further comment. Jordan J. Cohen, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who is chairman of JAMA’s oversight committee, hasn’t returned telephone and email messages this week…

Perhaps Cohen hasn’t returned calls because he’s too busy dealing with his medical school being on probation.

It’s the only med school in the United States on probation.

Between the JAMA editors and the unresponsive Jordan Cohen, I’m truly beginning to wonder about this organization.

Background on the come an’ git me, coppers! editors of JAMA here.

… ass? Merkins aren’t made for that purpose.

Thus Ezra Merkin’s attempt to cover his ass in the Madoff matter by having his sister write a New York Times opinion piece minimizing his involvement was doomed to fail.

Yet the real question is how she managed to get the piece published at all. It’s rank conflict of interest, an attempt by a protective sister to twist the facts of her brother’s culpability.

Gawker and the Jewish Journal, among others, have expressed amazement at what looks to UD like simple corruption on the part of the NYT. Daphne Merkin’s a longtime contributor to the newspaper, no doubt a friend of some on the editorial board, and they’re doing a friend a favor by letting her try to influence the many lawsuits currently being filed against her brother.

It’s disillusioning for poor UD. She never thought of the New York Times as a provincial newspaper.

Boyce Watkins, in Black Athlete:

The NCAA needs to redefine its mission and be honest with the world. Right now, it is an elephant with bunny ears, swearing that it’s nothing but a harmless little rabbit. The truth is that the NCAA is exactly what it appears to be: a professional sports league. So, rather than allowing me to become the head of the NCAA, I would rather be the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, which initiated an investigation into the NCAA and began to question its non-profit status. A bureaucratic beast that has grown so deformed with contradictions needs to be deconstructed and rebuilt in a model of fairness. As it stands, the NCAA exists in stark contrast to the values most of us embrace as Americans. I’ve seen it up close over the past 15 years and it bothers the heck out of me.

That the NCAA remains non-profit is an absolute amazement. If you can believe the NCAA is a non-profit organization, you can believe anything.

… the worst university in America. Now a new book tells you why. In detail.

The Lawrence Journal-World wonders…

[Kansas University] athletic teams obviously attract many financial contributions that help support non-revenue sports, but it’s not clear exactly how much those contributions add to the academic excellence of the university or the well-being of the state. At some point, it seems that the money being spent on athletics could actually detract from a university’s academic mission.

… [T]he size of the investment [KU] and other U.S. colleges are making in athletic programs could make some observers wonder just what those schools see as their primary mission.

…writes a student on her RMP page, and I guess it’s true.

A creative writing professor at Drake University seems to have beaten up her boyfriend, and is under arrest for “domestic assault, first-degree burglary, criminal mischief and obstruction of emergency communication.”

[Anzalone] began yelling and threw a Yankee Candle at Peterson, which struck him at the base of his head. Peterson eventually went to Mercy Hospital where he was treated for minor injuries.

Anzalone allegedly followed Peterson through his house and tore a picture off of his wall and threw it down the bedroom hallway, according to the police report.

She then took his cell phone as he was trying to dial 911. Before she left, Anzalone hurled a glass vase at a double-pane window, shattering both panes, the police report said.

Peterson called police from a neighbor’s house. When police arrived, they went to Anzalone’s home and called Peterson’s phone. A phone rang on the bookshelf that showed the officer’s phone number in the caller ID, police reported.

When officers asked why Peterson’s phone was in her possession, Anzalone said that Peterson must have left the phone there the last time he visited.

… close up.

Faculty outrage over well-publicized administrative bonuses there has reached the boiling point, including some in the faculty senate calling for a vote of no confidence in Clemson president James Barker and provost Doris Helms, who saw her pay increase by 32.8 percent over the past two years.

Adding fuel to that already burning fire was news earlier this month that Barker’s son was recently hired in the Office of Marketing Services to make $51,000 and Board of Trustees vice chairman Joseph Swann’s daughter, attorney Erin Swann who works in Barker’s office, received a 24.2 percent raise. The information came out of a faculty senate meeting on Tuesday, March 10, in which Clemson French professor emeritus John Bednar brought the personnel and raise issues to the floor and issued strong condemnations of Clemson’s leadership.

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

Over the past two years, Clemson gave pay raises ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent to 99 people — only 46 of whom were faculty members; the majority of those raises went to administrators, coaches and extension employee[s]. The university also has come under fire — rightly so — for hiring the president’s son and giving a 24 percent raise to a lawyer whose father is vice chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Background, if you can stomach it, here.

Selena Roberts, SI.com.

… As Florida State’s faculty frets over looming budget cuts that could push 200 staffers out the door, [FSU president] Wetherell is throwing money at lawyers to preserve football victories.

“Florida has been very hard hit by the mortgage crisis and recession — surely that impacts on the state funding that FSU receives for education,” says Murray Sperber, a professor emeritus at Indiana, who wrote Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. “Shouldn’t the FSU president be working on solving that problem? Now, he might argue that Bowden’s victory total is what keeps legislators and taxpayers happy, and so he has to get that up front. If he is right, why call it a university, especially when you overlook egregious cheating?”…

Why call it anything? It’s nothing, really.

This sort of contribution.

You’re missing a lot if you don’t occasionally troll Rate My Professors.

Syracuse University is the latest institution pushing the bogus tenure criterion of “publicly engaged scholarship.” Faculty there should resist with all the self-respect they can muster.

Known also as “scholarship in action,” this bureaucratic move shifts us philosophically from I think; therefore, I am to I act; therefore, I think. Since it cannot clarify the line between thinking and doing, this politically motivated criterion makes the university safe for people who believe that community organizing represents intellectual productivity. Physically moving around talking to people (reciting your poetry, knocking on doors to get out the vote, teaching) has nothing to do with sustained mental reflection and its results: books, essays.

A Syracuse professor of political science notes that because this confusion lies inherent in what is essentially a social rather than intellectual gesture, the university’s official language proposed for the criterion is gobbeldy-gook:

[N]o one is quite sure what [Scholarship in Action] means. A University Senate committee spent two years trying to discern its meaning and came away uncertain. The current language to be added to the tenure criteria reads: “Scholarship in Action is not a traditional model of community service, but a robust framework behind public scholarship, which can take a variety of forms but engages a deliberative intellectual foundation.” I wish I knew what that meant.

Indeed the Senate committee should be ashamed of itself for producing the sort of meaningless verbiage any professor would slash through if she read it from a student.

The pathetic language gives the game away. The activity in question does not exist as a category, but rather an emotion, a hearty group grope into the heart of intellectual seriousness.

Every day in every way, as the dissenting professor points out, Syracuse University has been getting better and better. Don’t let it go all dumb on you.

… describes the University of Maryland faculty’s recent rejection of a rather too-harsh post-tenure review proposal.

Mr UD, a department representative to the UM faculty senate, was very much involved in the thing.

Mr UD and his sister own acres of snaily fields near Rezekne, Latvia.

It’s the site of the house where their father grew up, and, post-Communism, they were able to recover it for the family.

UD‘s never been there, but Mr UD has gone a couple of times, and has described to her its many snails.

I bring this up because there’s a story out of Yale involving similar efforts to recover stolen property. This is from the Yale Daily News:

Yale filed suit Monday against Pierre Konowaloff, who claims to be the rightful owner of Vincent van Gogh’s renowned 1888 painting “The Night Café,” which is housed in the Yale University Art Gallery.

According to the suit, filed in the United States District Court in Connecticut, Konowaloff claims to be the heir of Ivan Morozov, a Russian aristocrat who owned the painting in 1918. Last July, Konowaloff’s attorney sent a letter to Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, threatening legal action, according to the suit. Yale will fight to keep the painting, Reynolds told the News on Tuesday night.

“It’s been in our collection for 50 years,” he said. “There is no wrong to be addressed.”

In December 1918, Vladimir Lenin… nationalized most private property, including Morozov’s art collection. His seized collection included “The Night Café.”

To raise money, the Soviets sold the painting to a German art museum in 1933, which then sold it to the Knoedler Gallery in New York City.

Stephen Clark 1903, who began to collect art after serving in the army during World War I, purchased “The Night Café” from the Knoedler Gallery in 1933 or 1934, according to the suit.

When Clark died in 1960, he bequeathed the painting to the University. Yale added the painting to its permanent collection in 1961 and hung it for public view in the gallery, garnering widespread media coverage about the donation.

Konowaloff contends that the Soviet nationalization of property was illegal and, therefore, the painting should be returned to him, Morozov’s rightful heir…

Yes, a mite more valuable than an abandoned snail farm in Latvia…

Len Homer lives across the hall, a warm and friendly man. I Googled him.

Here’s a 2008 piece about Len in Baltimore’s Style Magazine:

Birthday wake

Friday, June 20

The streets of Federal Hill were the backdrop for a “funeral” procession to celebrate (or grieve) the 70th birthday of neighborhood resident Len Homer. Ensconsed [That should be ensconced.] in a leopard-print lined coffin, Homer was paraded from his home through the streets to a big bash of a party at Junior’s Wine Bar. There, a New Orleans-style band kicked the party into high gear as guests nibbled Big Easy-style dishes from chef Mike Russell. On hand were lots of Len’s friends from the neighborhood like Patrick Sutton, Sheryl Segal, Dick Leech and Steve Ward; Camilla Carr handled MC duties in announcing the winners of the “best epitaph” contest. We stayed throughout the evening, since our seats at a table out on the sidewalk were the perfect vantage point for the festivities.

From the Columbus Ohio Dispatch.

A seemingly routine request by Miami University to purchase $167,000 worth of office chairs turned into a spirited exchange yesterday that ended with a rare rejection by the state Controlling Board, a legislative spending oversight panel.

In a bipartisan 6-1 vote, lawmakers slammed the door after realizing that Miami officials decided to purchase the most expensive office chairs available — the Aeron stretched-fabric brand. Of the 333 chairs purchased, 245 of them designated for staff and faculty offices cost $522 apiece. Chairs for conference rooms ranged from $397 to $446 each.

As members including Sen. Ray Miller, D-Columbus, grilled university architect Robert Keller about the purchase, lawmakers said they were not satisfied with the responses.

“They didn’t give a solid explanation as to why” they purchased the most expensive chairs, said Sen. Mark Wagoner, R-Toledo. “In a difficult financial environment, we have to be fiscally responsible.”

APG Office Furnishings of Cincinnati is providing the chairs and gave the university three options for chair styles. Two other options offered staff and faculty office chairs for $458 and $365.

Rep. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, voted to reject the request but first reminded his colleagues that they were sitting in $2,000 high-back leather chairs.