But they’re really not. Only a few Moo‘s come along in one’s lifetime.

UD has lately been enjoying Stubborn as a Mule, a first novel by Harvard law professor R.H. Fallon, Jr.

Mule goes after – among other things – the Chicago School of Economics.

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This New York Times review seems to be announcing another good academic satire, this one very topical, and also pertinent to an ongoing preoccupation of UD‘s — conflict of interest in academic science.

Tech Transfer is by Daniel Greenberg, a science journalist who for many years wrote for the New York Times.

Even at the Times he had a satirical bent; he wrote, in some of his columns, about a university unit called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds. The Center’s director, Dr. Grant Swinger, specialized in “instantly redirecting his center’s activities to whatever scientific fad was highest on legislators’ priority list. He would have been first to set up a stem-cell research institute and get the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to promise him a building.”

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The new university president in Tech Transfer quickly learns the non-negotiable demands of his faculty:

These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.

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The real center for the absorption of federal funds these days is of course the for-profit higher education industry.