… What a filthy business. And it’s not going to change.

Details.

Because it’s not going to change — I mean, the journals aren’t going to do anything about it, just as universities aren’t going to do anything about conflict of interest — we need to think about ways of protecting ourselves from the many bogus, corporate-run studies that inspire doctors to prescribe dangerous drugs.

Remember that the assault comes from more than these sources. In bogus, corporate-run Continuing Education events, in direct payments in exchange for prescription, in the training of a drug sales force made up of medical school professors, in countless ways, we’re cultivating a generation of compromised practitioners who hurt us and our children with the meds that enrich the practitioners.

Don’t forget the crucial adjunct to these practices: Constant frightening television advertisements.

What can we do?

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Beats me. They’ve got all the money. And they’re fucking geniuses.

From The Journal, Queen’s University:

… Wayne Cox, a political studies professor [at Queen’s University in Ontario], said he thinks technology in the classroom can turn students into a passive audience.

“Professors become dependent upon technology and I would argue that that is a bad thing,” he said. “My teaching philosophy is to try to engage the students as much as I possibly can.”

Last year, Cox tried an experiment in his class, POLS261, Introduction to International Politics.

“I banned all laptops in Dunning and made my students a deal,” he said. “I would put all my energy into the lecture if they didn’t bring their laptops to class.”

Cox said he received positive feedback from his students on his actions.

“Students wanted to come to class,” he said. “It was a resounding success and students found it refreshing.” …

… a passage that captures my thoughts about The Blount Punch perfectly.

… I’m not thinking about the taunting that set him off, Blount’s own actions or the season-long suspension. What bugs me is our whole disingenuous reaction. Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

The writer is David Fleming, for ESPN.

… from Eric Alterman, in The Nation:

[If Harvard] allows its faculty to be corrupted by greed and payola, then society suffers as well.

… In 2008 Harvard earned an F from the American Medical Student Association for its lax conflict-of-interest standards on accepting Big Pharma cash…

[New York Times reporter Duff Wilson] tells me that “we [still] haven’t got to the bottom of the amount of influence drug companies and other special interests have on medical education or continuing medical education. As we reported, Harvard Medical’s dean wants to increase, not decrease, the school’s connections with industry.”

A graduate student, Annie Le, has been missing since Tuesday.

lie.

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

Update: Wilson’s site now says it’s down due to extremely high traffic (the earlier lie was that it was under maintenance). Ain’t that the truth.

A law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul has been charged with tax evasion between the years 2004 and 2007.

… Between 1991 and 2003, she filed only one tax return, in 1997, within the required time. Magee, who has been employed by Hamline for 17 years, told an investigator “she teaches classes on race and religion and is not familiar with tax law,” the complaint states…

… Or not.

Athletics director overrules code of conduct, clears Mbakwe for practice.

Star basketball transfer accused of felony assault received permission to practice in the preseason.

These are headlines in today’s University of Minnesota newspaper (UD thanks Bill).

This is the article’s first paragraph:

Months after junior basketball transfer Trevor Mbakwe was charged with felony assault of a woman in Miami, University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi gave him permission to practice with the team.

The decision announced Tuesday lifts the automatic suspension enforced by the University’s student-athlete code of conduct.

From the New York Times:

Washington Monthly has recently released its new college ranking. It’s based on several factors, one of which is a comparison between a college’s graduation rate and the makeup of its student body.

… Toward the bottom of the ranking, the University of Louisville has an expected graduation rate of 59 percent and an actual rate of 44 percent.

PROFESSOR TO STUDY RISKY BEHAVIOR WITH SCIENCE GRANT

Its sports program is a national disgrace (here’s one of many cheating scandals).

But you begin to understand how Auburn maintains its brainless belligerent ways when you look at its board of trustees.

Must say, it’s a new one on UD, but when she thinks about it, it makes perfect sense: Make your trustees Auburn football players.

Plus keep the girls out: Auburn’s board of trustees has got two women, twelve men. Half of the Auburn student body’s female, but you wouldn’t want the board to reflect that in any way. And girls don’t get football.

From the Opelika-Auburn News:

Auburn University is an academic institution first. Granted, athletics create plenty of spirit and excitement — and generates millions in revenue — but schools are just that. Schools.

News of Randy Campbell’s appointment to the university’s board of trustees comes with a mixed bag of feelings. Campbell was obviously a leader on the football field, quarterbacking the Tigers to the 1983 SEC championship and working as signal-caller …

Like any other academic institution, Auburn University is a business that sells education. [Amazing sentence, no? Amazing definition of a university — a business that sells education.]

With business brains and a dedicated love for Auburn, Campbell is a fine choice to replace outgoing Paul Spina as the trustee for District 6. But of 12 trustees on the board, discounting Gov. Bob Riley who serves as chairman, three played football at Auburn.

That’s one-fourth…

Yes, perception does matter, and Auburn’s gotten a lot of bad publicity because its trustees have been jocks and its presidents castrati.

So how does Auburn respond to the problem?

By appointing another football player to the board.

As we follow, on University Diaries, in the months to come, the clown school that Auburn’s become, keep these facts in mind.

Yale Daily News:

… SMART Boards, which connect to regular computers and allow users to edit documents on the larger screen with stylus-type markers, came to Yale about four years ago as a high-tech alternative to chalkboards. There are currently about a dozen of the machines, which cost about $12,000 each, scattered in classrooms across Central Campus.

… Pedro Monroy, who oversees classroom media services at Yale, [said] that he does not get many requests from professors asking that SMART Boards be added to their classrooms across campus.

That’s an unfortunate commentary for a technology in which Yale has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars.

… [T]echnology is often a tough sell at Yale; [the university] stopped holding general lessons for faculty across the University before SMART Boards even came to campus because of lack of interest…

… Anne Fadiman, Yale’s Francis writer-in-residence and adjunct English professor, [is] content to teach with just chalk and a blackboard and a dozen students gathered around a table.

Asked why she doesn’t use a SMART Board, Fadiman replied in an e-mail message, “They’re too smart for me.”

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Who sent this Onion report on classroom technology use to UD? She can’t remember. Anyway.

… the University of Manchester who are checking out her comments on now-retired Professor Annmarie Surprenant (background here).

She’s been found guilty of gross misconduct. Manchester’s pharmacy school will take a massive hit to its reputation, and could lose accreditation altogether. You’re not supposed to hire and retain people like this.

There’s a rather chaotic comment thread about the events here, at the Times Higher Education. Read carefully, it gives you a sense of the woman’s ballsy, psycho, personality. [Note: That link’s not working very well at the moment. I’ll keep checking on it.]

Speaking of which, the one aspect of the affair which does surprise UD is Surprenant’s continued silence about the tragic youthful circumstances that made her the person she is today.

The definitive university precedent for this comes from Richard Berendzen, one of two recent disgraced ex-presidents at American University. Within minutes of his resignation, Berendzen issued a book about the tragic youthful circumstances that made him the person he is today. UD predicts a Surprenant memoir in the next few months titled

‘YOU’LL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIE, MARIE!’ — Surviving My Mad Mother

FAMU football fans shouldn’t be afraid to come to home games in the wake of a campus shooting that injured three people after Saturday night’s game, said FAMU Police Chief Calvin Ross.

“People should be alert but certainly not fearful to the point that they avoid games,” Ross said Sunday in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat. “This is at best isolated. The involved parties had no affiliation with FAMU except for the victims.”