Off they go, like it or not, once they hit 65.  Them’s the rules at British universities.

Terry Eagleton, you may recall, likes it so little that he’s suing the University of Manchester for consigning his 65-year-old ass to the dustbin of history.

Now there’s Jan Åke Gustafsson, a Swedish professor recently awarded the “2009 Fernströms Great Nordic Prize, a one million kronor ($146,000) award, for ground-breaking research in the area of nuclear receptors.” Gustafsson’s mistake was turning 67, which is when you get canned if you’re Swedish.

“I can’t believe it,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

“It feels as though I still have much more to give.”

Since January of this year, Gustafsson has devoted much of his time to establishing a new, $30 million research centre in the United States at the University of Houston in Texas.

And he doesn’t expect his advancing age to be an issue for his colleagues in the United States.

“During the whole decision making process in Houston, not a single person has asked how old I am,” he told SvD.

“It’s irrelevant there. The only thing that counts is competence.”

Reason #7,641 why European universities – with one or two exceptions – will never begin to approach American.

The past recaptured.

A severed human hand has been unearthed from the garden of a Maryland home…

… The son of a previous owner of the house told police the hand was a souvenir he took home as a student at the University of Maryland’s medical school more than 50 years ago.

For years, [Charlie] Leitch has made it his morning duty to leave piles of unsalted Hoody’s peanuts at the bottom of the trees outside Corbin Hall [at the University of Montana] to feed the 12 to 16 squirrels that inhabit them. But starting last week, most of the peanuts have gone uneaten.

On Thursday morning, he only saw about four squirrels, but they weren’t regulars. They acted like they barely knew him.

“Normally I show up in the morning and, literally, there will be eight squirrels at my feet wanting peanuts,” Leitch said. “They started disappearing about the time school started, and … I showed up on Tuesday and I put out peanuts and they just didn’t come.”

Leitch has worked on campus for nearly 23 years and, while his job as an accountant for the Rural Institute has made him adept at keeping track of hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant money and following paper trails, he is at a loss to find the majority of his long-tailed charges.

“I don’t know [what happened to the squirrels], but it’s got me worried to see that many disappear, because normally at this time … not only would they be swarming on that side of the building, they would be swarming on this side of the building, too, and there aren’t any,” he said. …

La Kid and Ingrid Michaelson,
just before Michaelson’s DC
concert the other day.

Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.

UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.

The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.

UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.

For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.

Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.

… that until UD embraces an actual religion, her bible is White Noise, by Don DeLillo.

The artist who created the covers for the (not-yet released) twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the novel describes, in detail, on his blog, how he did it.

Here’s the front cover.

Great stuff.

… is the title of my latest post at Inside Higher Education. It’s about Jung’s forthcoming Red Book.

Matthew Zapruder, Los Angeles Times:

Form is the literary expression of our need to be consoled by some kind of order. This is why funerals have rituals and procedures, so we can keep it at least a little bit together in times of great grief and disruption. It is also why, right after Sept. 11 — when sitting together silently would have been too difficult and weird and sad — people read poems, more often than not ones that had meter and rhyme, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

There is a great satisfaction in hearing rhyme, either in poetry or song, and knowing the world is at least for a moment orderable, that the seemingly disconnected elements can be convincingly fitted together. But while rhyme can be funny or witty, or a lovely, even essential consolation, it is obviously not necessary for poetry: Too many great poets have written free verse for the past 150 years for that to be the case.

Indeed, nowadays there’s simply no way to rhyme and not sound a bit out of time. Our world is too wary and conscious of the different space rhyme and meter create. This doesn’t mean great formal poetry can’t be written today. But because rhyme and meter are not essential, formal poetry is by its nature a subcategory of poetry as a whole.

Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry.

When I look at the poems I wrote in my early 20s, I realize they are bad not because they are written in forms, but because they are essentially fake. Whatever moments are true and good in them exist despite the formal elements. Poems in rhyme and meter don’t suit my mind or the way it needs to move. It’s like style: It might seem cool every once in a while to wear a vintage suit, but the fact of the matter is it just doesn’t work for me.

One thing I do notice about my poems is that, though they might not have overt formal elements, there is always a rhythm that develops, subtly, in the voice of the speaker. Maybe something more like a cadence. Most poetry is “formal” in that way.

And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”

Boyce Watkins on the latest Michigan scandal.

… One can hardly blame Michigan Coach Rodriguez for pushing the players too hard, since universities make it clear that winning percentages matter far more than graduation rates. The University of Kentucky’s decision to pay nearly $30 million dollars to John Calipari, a coach known for both corruption and a lack of academic integrity, sends a message about the importance of winning games over educating athletes.

We know that corruption rolls down hills and at the bottom of this pile are the players, their families and the entire African-American community. NCAA athletes in revenue- generating sports are typically kept in special dormitories, forced to live on rigorous athletic schedules, and pushed to place football ahead of everything else. All the while, the administrators on central campus, as educated as they are, turn themselves into unenlightened blind mice when confronted with the reality of athletic exploitation.

… Massive reform is needed not only within the Michigan football program, but also within all of college sports. Congress must step in and challenge the NCAA for anti-trust violations, as well as its tax-exempt status. NCAA revenues during March madness rival that of the NFL and NBA, so it’s time to note the NCAA for what it truly is: a professional sports league that artificially restricts the wages of its employees…

… where a scientist, Malcolm Casadaban, has died after exposure to a weak strain of the plague.

University of Chicago molecular genetics professor studying the origins of harmful bacteria died last weekend after contracting an infection linked to the plague, officials said today.

University hospital officials said there “does not appear to be a threat to the public” following the death of Malcolm J. Casadaban, 60, at the campus’ Bernard Mitchell Hospital on Sept. 13.

None of the people the researcher had contact with has reported illness and symptoms typically develop within 2 to 10 days, officials said.

The researcher was studying a weakened laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis that lacked the plague bacteria’s harmful components, officials said.

… University officials said the weakened strain of the bacteria is used as a vaccine to protect against the plague.

According to university officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has approved the weakened strain for laboratory studies. It does not require special safety precautions required for work with more virulent strains, according to the release.

Once the lab strain was identified Friday, officials contacted the Chicago Department of Public Health…

The University of Montana student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, on Friday reported that two football players were involved in an assault on another student last March, and that Coach Bobby Hauck swept the incident under the rug. The alleged assault is the latest in a long series of incidents involving violent off-the-field behavior by members of the UM football team.

The Kaimin also reported that when a reporter asked for comment about the incident, Hauck said: “You’re done for the day, and you’ll be done for the season if you keep bugging me about this thing that I’ve answered four fucking times.” The two players allegedly knocked a student unconscious and kicked him in the face following an altercation at a party; they were held out of one game this season, but otherwise apparently faced no sanctions.

In a furious editorial, Kaimin sports editor Roman Stubbs called the allegations involving the two players “disturbing, sickening, alarming,” and denounced Hauck for building a “wall of silence” around the incident and refusing to take responsibility or hold anyone accountable. “A college football coach should never be blamed for isolated incidents,” Stubbs wrote. “But when accusations form a pattern, then not only do the upstanding Griz players become stigmatized, but so does this school, this city and this state. It becomes embarassing. And it falls on the commander in chief.”

UM football spokesman Dave Guffey said in an email to NewWest.Net: “We have no comment on this matter.”

A new student came up to me after yesterday’s Novels of Don DeLillo seminar.

“Can I join your class? I got thrown out of Painting because I can’t paint.”

1.)  THE MEDICAL ACADEMIC COMMUNITY: WHERE TRUTH IS AN OPTIONAL EXTRA.

How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras.

2.)  A LOSS OF THAT CERTAIN QUALITY.

Professor Larry Van Sickle, who teaches sociology [at Rollins College] … has no specific rules except that the computer just be used for note taking, but also says, “There is something to be said for person-to-person communication. The way I run my classes, discussion is important, and when a student is hiding behind a laptop, there is a loss of that certain quality of human conversation.”

… One of [the people named as an author of a published paper on a new heart device] is a true ghost author. Anthony Rickards, a cardiologist, … died before the research was conducted….

Even if you die before the research is conducted, you can ghostwrite the results!

I guess Rickards’ estate got his ghost fee.

I’m getting this from The Guardian; England too is beginning to reckon up its ghosts.

One of them – this one’s still alive – is in a spot of trouble.

One of Britain’s leading bone specialists is facing disciplinary action over accusations that he was involved in “ghost writing”.

The wider phenomenon has come to light through documents disclosed in the US courts which have revealed a culture in which doctors agree to “author” studies written by employees of drug firms. The doctors may have some input but do not have access to all the evidence from the drug trial on which the paper’s conclusions are based, the documents showed.

The General Medical Council will call Professor Richard Eastell in front of a fitness to practice committee. Eastell, a bone expert at Sheffield University, has admitted he allowed his name to go forward as first author of a study on an osteoporosis drug even though he did not have access to all the data on which the study’s conclusions were based. An employee of Proctor and Gamble, the US company making Actonel, was the only author who had all the figures…

Background on Eastell, and on Sheffield’s shameful attempt to shut up one of Eastell’s colleagues, a man with a conscience who condemned the scandal, is here.

.. there’s some asshole of an editor who’s probably getting a cut.

None of the [scientific journal] editors reported taking action against an author for ghostwriting. Their replies to [Senator Grassley’s letter to them about it], obtained by The New York Times, varied from assurances of editorial diligence to the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One editor in chief, for example, wrote that because his journal prohibited ghostwriting, the publication did not have a specific policy on the practice.

You see how it works. It’s like — America prohibits murder, so we don’t have a specific policy on the practice. The prohibition does the trick.

“Requiring someone to write a retraction or barring them from publishing in academic journals for some period of time — that would be an effective deterrent,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who has conducted research on the effect of conflict-of-interest disclosures in medicine. … Dr. Cynthia E. Dunbar, the editor in chief of Blood, said that, in the future, the journal would consider a ban of several years for authors caught lying about ghostwriting, in addition to retracting their ghosted articles.

Oh, now we’re getting harsh. Do we really have to go there? Look how effective university conflict of interest prohibitions are! They’ve got that COI language right there in the annual report of each professor, and does it ever do the trick.