Local attorneys review university coaches’ busy legal dockets and issue dissenting opinions.

Financial Times:

A long-delayed academic paper analysing use of multiple sclerosis drugs failed to disclose all of the authors who worked on it, sparking fresh concerns over the practice of “ghost writing” in medical journals.

Karen Facey, a researcher, was commissioned in September 2007 to prepare a paper for the British Medical Journal on the government-backed “risk sharing scheme” for MS treatment and commented on subsequent drafts, but was not cited either as an author or a contributor in the final version published last December.

The issue has come to light at a time of growing efforts by medical journals to clamp down on “ghost writing”, the process by which medical writers prepare draft papers often on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, and then find academics willing to lend credibility by adding their names to the work…

Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.

Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.

Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.

… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.

But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”

This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.

Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…

But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…

I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.

Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …

Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.

A plagiarist so vile his colleagues persisted in outing him despite their university’s attempts to shut down their complaints has now sued the people who outed him.

A 45-year-old professor at the prestigious Xi’an Jiaotong University in Northwest China’s Shaanxi province was sacked on Sunday after six of his colleagues repeatedly posted letters to the university and on the Internet exposing his academic scandals.

… “The university even questioned our motives,” said [one of the six]. “Some university leaders told us that we could share some awards with Li, if we kept quiet about the scandal. It was such a humiliation!” the 81-year-old academic was quoted by China Central Television (CCTV) as saying on Saturday.

… Using their real names, the six professors then exposed about 30 examples of Li [Liansheng] plagiarizing the work of others online, which attracted more than 60,000 comments from netizens in a single month.

… In response to the allegations, Li sued his former teachers who exposed his plagiarism on the Internet, blaming them for sabotaging his reputation, according to a July 2009 report in the Shanghai Daily.

Li’s lawyer told Xi’an Beilin district people’s court that the six senior professors used insulting phrases such as “academic thief” and “rat on campus” in their posts on a website about Li, the newspaper reported.

His counsel also demanded the six professors make a public apology and each pay compensation between 120,000 and 150,000 yuan ($17,600 to $22,000), said the report…

Madonna Constantine seems to be the model here.

Norman Schureman, a professor at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, has been shot and killed. He got into some sort of argument at a party, after which the person he argued with left and returned with a gun.

… says Hamlet, and when it comes to readying yourself to snatch a diploma mill degree at just the right moment, no one does it better than Chris Oleyte, Director of Readiness for the US Army Aviation and Missile Command.

He wanted a promotion; he needed a degree for the promotion; he bought a degree.

Of course it doesn’t matter whether the guy in charge of America’s missiles has an education! Chris knows that.

The cynic. Look at him in his photo, all wrapped up in the flag…

Six other people in charge of our weaponry bought their degrees alongside their buddy Oleyte — and UD, veteran of diploma milling, will predict here and now that they all graduated from the same post office box. Teamwork is what the army is about.

Nemazee’s Harvard pedigree, his generosity and his political hobnobbing created a facade of legitimacy that led people to overlook the possibility of deception.

One of UD‘s perennial themes. Universities routinely function as respectability cover for criminals.

… says Lady Bracknell. And the professorial ideal emerging in our own age is a curious, double-edged one.

Both edges have as their essential condition an enslavement to technology; but while one annihilates the instructor’s self, the other makes her a multitasking hypomaniac.

The hypomanic ideal is based upon imitation of the professor’s students. They are surrounded by distracting technology; she is surrounded by distracting technology. An English professor at the University of Maryland

… lets students bring laptops to her class, uses technological aids in her lectures, and has even received e-mails from students while class was taking place.

The other ideal is the online nullity, the nowhere woman who sends hundreds of faceless names a smileyface when they get an answer right.

From a conversation between two writers on the staff of the Cornell University newspaper:

… Faculty and staff ought to engage students, one on one, in a discussion that reaches far beyond careers and academics. Part of this involves the faculty realizing just how important a role they play beyond the laboratory and the lecture hall. They are mentors for all of us, and their efforts are part of a bottom-up approach to making Cornell not just a place of instruction, but a home.

… I attended a dinner late last week with the Board of Trustees where Susan Murphy gave the closing remarks. Tears came easily to her and the rest of the room — full of millionaire movers and shakers — in part for the loss of Matt, William and Bradley, but perhaps in greater part for the feeling of helplessness adults and outsiders must feel in their attempts to prevent future tragedies and ease our suffering. We, the students, know what’s up with our classmates (or at least more so), and everyone else is almost completely in the dark….

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I don’t say the following is beautifully written, but of all the stuff I’ve been reading in the last few days about suicide – in the wake of the Cornell story – it states most concisely the core facts of the phenomenon.

The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable. In this way, acts of suicide invigorate and inspire innovation and remind us all of what really matters in life.

Shouldn’t Republicans or Democrats or somebody be outraged that “between 2001 and 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid,” and that “like any government revenue stream, the one flowing to the bowl committees is guarded by an army of high-paid lobbyists?”

From a review in the Boston Globe of Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, by Mark Yost.

From Hassan Nemazee’s website cv:

– Member of the Visiting Committee of the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University 1998 – 2005

– Member of Visiting Committee on University Resources, Harvard University 1986-2002

– Member of the Middle East Center Advisory Council at Harvard University 1990 – 1994

– Member of the International Affairs Planning Committee, Harvard University 1990-1995

– In 1996 was named a John Harvard Fellow

– Taught seminars at Harvard and also in Japan and Korea in conjunction with Harvard University.

Nemazee will go to prison for twenty years or so because of his Madoff-style fraud.

In addition to seeking to force Nemazee to forfeit $292 million, the indictment seeks his interest in five pieces of real estate, 16 corporate entities and one hedge fund, 14 securities accounts, 32 bank accounts, a 2008 Maserati Quattroporte, and a 2007 Cessna airplane.

“For more than ten years, Hassan Nemazee projected the illusion of wealth, stealing more than $290 million so that he could lead a lavish lifestyle and play the part of heavyweight political fundraiser,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said last week.

“Today’s indictment exposes the brazenness of Nemazee’s schemes and marks the end of his decade of deception.”

The man is virtually a creation of Harvard university:

Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken [oil company, with which Nemazee is connected] received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the nation. Robert G. Stone, Jr., a figure with ties to US intelligence and to the Bushes, was head of the Harvard board of overseers that approved financial strategies. Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. (Prior to going to work for Nemazee and Quasha, Terry McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging that company’s own Enron-like accounting. Both Quasha and Nemazee, like Bush, have Harvard degrees, and both have sat on prestigious Harvard committees in recent years.)

Madoff and Merkin got respectability cover from Yeshiva University; Nemazee got that and more from Harvard.

UD awaits details of Nemazee’s financial relationship with Harvard University.

She also awaits Harvard’s public reckoning with its extensive institutional support of one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.

Eleanor Salotto disappeared over a month ago. It looks as though her body has been found (by a group of men out fishing) in the James River.

Sweet Briar’s president, who has a blog, has been writing about her. There’s also been a Facebook page.

She was chair of the English department.

… Fabriqué en France.

A French mystery writer is being sued for defamation by the owners of the well-known Parisian fabric store where she set her latest crime novel.

Lalie Walker’s psychological thrillers are often set around Paris, and her latest, Aux Malheurs des Dames, is no exception.

… [T]he book takes place at Marché St. Pierre, a 60-year-old landmark store in the Montmartre district of Paris known for its extensive selection of fabrics and low prices.

… The corporation that owns the store, Village d’Orsel, is suing for two million euros ($2.7 million Cdn), according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

“No one can have anything to do with or talk about the Marché Saint Pierre without the authorization of the owner and the director,” Robert Gabby, the store’s director…

CBC News

One of the writers whose work Gerald Posner plagiarized showed up in the audience of a talk Posner recently gave at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.

The plagiaree is not happy about having been plagiarized, and told Posner about it, as you can see in this film clip of the event.

If everyone Posner has plagiarized had showed up, they’d have had to turn away the rest of the audience. But it was apparently just this guy. And the guy’s wife:

[A]fter the reading, [the plagiaree’s wife] asked Posner[:] “Are we still going out for a drink to discuss this?” Posner exploded. His plastic face turned red: “Yeah, I’m a thieving cocksucker.” “Yes, you are a thieving cocksucker,” [she] replied. And then an elderly lady came running towards them: “This is a botanical garden. It’s a peaceful place. Can you please take it some place else?”

Hillary Reinsberg, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, reminds us that you can be highly selected, and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still get a cheesy education.

Huffington Post:

The lights go dim, eyes begin to shut and the room gets quiet. Sorry kids, if you’re looking for a story about the bedroom, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Welcome to a college lecture hall in 2010.

Too many classes begin the same way: with an often cheesy PowerPoint presentation. The professor hooks up a projector to a computer and spends ninety minutes clicking through a series of slides. In order to best see the projection, the lights are usually dimmed or shut off entirely. Blinds are closed to trap out the sunlight, making the room feel like a claustrophobic cave.

And on a Monday afternoon in a beautiful old lecture hall, I feel like I’m being pitched a product in a cheesy office sitcom. Oh, and the dark room makes me sleepy. Get me out of here!

… [P]rofessors should think of the future of the students they should hope to inspire. A generation of students accustomed to lackluster and lazy slides on a projector will enter the workforce with the idea that this is a good way to do things…

The only way these professors are going to change (it’s not a matter of their learning that what they’re doing is cheesy; they already know that) is for all of us to keep complaining. Loudly.