The clouds are gathering at the University of Texas medical school, as its new corporate acquisition, Ronald DePinho, president of the cancer center, produces yet more bad publicity.
DePinho, the very model of the modern money man, does not see why conflict of interest should apply to him (since it would mean temporarily giving up certain income flows), or why his wife – hired on his faculty – shouldn’t get special treatment…
September 18th, 2012 at 3:41AM
Fight, flight, or collaborate? Those questions, maybe others, too, you’ll likely face when up against high-incidence/high-impact cronyism, nepotism, suck-up, or kickback. Not pretty stuff, that’s for sure.
A friend of mine, a non-prof, told me that at the XYZ organization from which he’d recently retired, few people “did their own work”, as he put it. What he meant was that covering for the incompetent and the political hacks was a primal organizational value. From time to time you’d be granted extraordinary authority and praise for work you’d done, but you’d have to be a fool to think that’d result in promotion. If you have the wrong last name–you’re not in the game.
An example from the academy. Some years ago I talked with a young woman in a professional position at a local university. When I mumbled something about rumors of irregularities in hiring there, she said forthrightly, “Oh, you mean the people who paid for their jobs?” She’d been in her job maybe a year.