Second in a University Diaries series featuring professors.
(First That Which Does Not Kill Me here.)
Today’s TWDNKM:
PROFESSOR OF PAIN EXCELS IN JUJITSU
At first glance, math and the martial arts do not seem to have much in common, but for Pat McDonald, professor of mathematics at New College, the similarities are obvious.
“In both cases there are fundamental skills that you need to know,” said McDonald, 45. With a firm understanding of the basics, you then “chain the fundamentals into more complex and intricate patterns in order to succeed.”
McDonald, who got his doctorate in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not just at the top of his field in mathematics. He is also a pan-American champion in Brazilian jujitsu.
He says he became interested in Brazilian jujitsu about seven years ago while working out at the fitness center in New College. “There were usually a few people in jujitsu outfits and one time I was challenged to grapple, in a submission match.”
McDonald says he thought he was doing pretty well at first.
“I dropped the guy and had a choke on him. I noticed he was changing color. I asked him if he was OK. Then the next thing, I was tired and my face was on the mat and my arm really hurt.
“I thought it was a fluke and demanded a rematch. The same thing happened, and I was hooked.”
It turned out the man he was grappling with was Derek Taaca, a world champion purple belt.
In March, McDonald won first place in the Senior Three Lightweight Brown Belt Champion in Brazilian jujitsu at the Pan-American games in Los Angeles.
McDonald had to bow out of the next competitions, including the World Championship in Brazil, because of a broken thumb and a bleeding intestine.
The internal bleeding happened while he was training.
“I had my opponent in a triangle choke,” he said. “He tried to escape by forcing his hand between my legs. I moved to relieve the pressure and his hand jammed against my abdomen. It was very painful.”
He went to the hospital, where doctors found blood in a cavity between his abdominal muscle and the small intestine. The doctors treated him with strong antibiotics and monitored the injury…
From a review of Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry, by Joel Paris:
Psychiatry’s handbook of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM ), is an obvious locus for skepticism. On the one hand, given the confusion about terminology before 1980, the DSM-III and DSM-IV at least provide a common language so that psychiatrists can better communicate with each other and with insurance companies. On the other hand, diagnostic categories are so “irredeemably fuzzy” and broadly defined that psychiatrists end up confusing “the human condition” with pathology. Consequently, prevalence rates have at times risen absurdly. Here is Paris at his best: “Perhaps the main reason for the large number of diagnoses in psychiatry is that we do not understand any of them.”
This is from an interview with Chafetz – the New York Times reporter who wrote a now much-quoted piece on the New York Syrian Jewish community – about recent events.
[The community has a] long history of having problems along these lines… [A]ll kinds of scams [go on]… I wish I could say I was surprised… Having spent some time looking into that community I truly wasn’t actually shocked… [This is a] very tightly knit community… everybody is related to everybody else… a lot of business is done on handshakes… [The] ethos is… not disconnected from the commercial traditions of the Middle East… [I assume] there are more arrests or scandals coming… that wouldn’t shock me.
Having spent 62 years being Jewish, I do not think that rabbis are ethical or moral figures in particular… [Unethical behavior among them] never surprises me…
The Newton resident — who maintains an office at the school and is present on campus at least four days a week, according to school officials — teaches no regular classes, conducts no formal medical research, does not fill out a timecard and is not up for post-tenure review for at least two more years.
Medical school officials were unable to provide any syllabus or course listing with Dr. Lazare’s name as an instructor, guest lecturer or participant.
He’s a psychiatry professor — specializing in shame and humiliation — at the University of Massachusetts medical school, and his salary is $366,000 a year.
Definitely beginning to sound like Borat.
And thank goodness a professor’s gotten involved. UD gets to cover the story!
The alleged crimes of the Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys were first reported by an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who learned of the man’s suspected involvement through her research.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes – whose contacts in Israel define her as the world’s leading authority on organ trading – says she heard reports that the suspect, 58-year-old Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, held donors at gunpoint after they changed their minds about the operation.
Such reports that she received from her sources compelled her to go to the authorities. She met with an FBI agent at a Manhattan hotel and gave him information about Rosenbaum, but she says that the Bureau acted only much later. The Berkeley scholar is said to have identified Rosenbaum to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.
The anthropologist says that the man who led her to Rosenbaum says that he initially believed Rosenbaum was a man who saved the lives of people in need. According to Scheper-Hughes, that man told her he had changed his mind after meeting some of Rosenbaum’s donors – confused and impoverished people from Eastern Europe…
One out of every five adult males in some of Moldova’s poorest villages has had his kidney removed, according to Scheper-Hughes …
**********************
I boarded a broken-down jitney
To check out a show at the Whitney.
And jumpin’ jehovah
The Salle de Moldova
Was featuring recycled kidney.
… would have to include this post from ’04, a typology of bearded professors.
Some of its descriptions jibe pretty well with this latest professor-typology, written by college students and not bad at all.
If you skim Rate My Professors, as UD occasionally does, you’ll find students all over America encountering and describing The 7 Professors You’ll Have in College.
Highlights:
At first, you might think it’s funny that Prof. Leung pronounces the number seven “ceiling” or that Dr. Kolodjzieg wrote “Operation for to having a midterm” on the syllabus …
He pronounces “Darfur” with an “African” accent and is repulsed by the current lack of student activism. You’re repulsed by the fact that he is bald on top, but still insists on harnessing his last few strands of hair into a ponytail…
[T]he fake laugh [is] the major tool that [will] get you through his lectures. Each class session brings you another lesson in faking laughter …
[S]he wants you to know that she is most definitely the best source of knowledge in her particular field and many adjacent fields … [Enjoy her] hilarious anecdote about going to a dinner party at Gore Vidal’s house …
UD thanks Dave for the link.
Ah men.
A former [University of North Dakota] hockey player and a current one were arrested about 3 a.m. Tuesday after a campus officer saw the men throwing cups, plates, a kitchen table and a lawnmower onto a Grand Forks street, UND Police Lt. Dan Lund said.
Joe Finley, 22, and Matt Frattin, 21, are both charged with disorderly conduct. In addition, Frattin faces a fleeing charge and Finley faces a charge of giving false information to officers. All the charges are misdemeanors.
Lund said Finley and Frattin were throwing objects from a residential garage on the 400 block of North Columbia Road, where one of the two men lives.
“It was their own property, so there was nobody’s property that was damaged other than their own,” Lund said. “They said they just kind of routinely destroy each other’s stuff.”
LONG ARM OF THE LAW FINDS
HOLLOW LEG OF THE LAWLESS
Officers located dangerous drugs in the prosthetic leg of an arrested subject.
Daily Sentinel, Nacogdoches.
… to an important lawsuit that’s brewing between the NCAA and a group of former university athletes. Kevin Arnowitz explains:
The debate over whether college athletes should have their images used by the NCAA for commercial purposes has been percolating for years. With the emergence of the video game industry, commemorative championship-season DVD and other merch, the NCAA profits greatly from the likeness of amateur athletes.
Yesterday, one such athlete — former UCLA basketball standout Ed O’Bannon, along with thousands of other former college athletes — filed a class action lawsuit against the NCAA in federal district court.
A loss could cost the NCAA hundreds of millions; such an outcome would also probably mean a radically new relationship between players and the organization, with student players routinely given more legal heft in their dealings with the NCAA.
O’Bannon, whose professional basketball career didn’t pan out, is rather eloquent:
Every student-athlete – past, present and future – wishes to get paid when they’re in school. Let’s be honest about that…
My biggest thing right now is, once we leave the university and are done playing in the NCAA, one would think we’d be able to leave with our likeness. But we aren’t able to. If you don’t take your likeness with you, you should at least be compensated for every dime that is made off your name or likeness…
The NCAA has been doing people wrong for a long time. It’s about time something changes…
God put me on this earth to do something. And it obviously wasn’t to play NBA basketball, which I thought it was. I thought I was born to play the sport. I thought born to be a hall-of-fame ballplayer. But that didn’t happen….
Arnowitz ends with the following thought for the day:
I also wonder if an ancillary benefit of the suit might be broadening the conversation toward the universities themselves. It’s hard to voice this opinion without coming across as priggish — particularly when you write about basketball for a living — but is it possible that quasi-professional sports maintain too prominent a place at public universities?
If merely voicing the opinion makes you priggish, what does that make UD?
*************************
Update: Roundup of some of the bigger pending lawsuits against the NCAA.
The reopening of Keats’ house in London, and the release soon of a film about his love affair with Fanny Braun, has UD reopening a poem of his that she’s always found difficult.
*********************
Ode on Melancholy
No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
**************************************
Three stanzas, three sentences, in praise of sadness. An ode, after all, a song of praise, directed to you, emphatically, from its first lines: NO. Don’t go killing yourself.
Fine, you are experiencing deep sorrow, yes; but suicide, or doping yourself into a living suicide, so that you don’t feel anything anymore, and therefore have rid yourself of the depression that seems to be killing you — this can’t be the answer. Don’t drown your soul’s anguish. That anguish is in fact wakeful; and you ought to attend to that wakefulness, and see what it’s about.
When depression descends, when it hits out of nowhere, and hits hard, go with it. As Charles Wright puts it in one of UD‘s favorite poems, let what’s taking you take you. Glut thy sorrow on a morning rose… on the wealth of globèd peonies. Go to the natural world with it, and feel grief fully as it deepens, with wistfulness and poignancy, the beauty of the world. Or if those soft emotions – wistfulness and all that – go by the wayside, and your sorrow explodes into rage, go there too. Let it rave; feed deep on it.
Sorrow lives with, lives in, beauty. Death is the mother of beauty, writes Wallace Stevens. And Keats: “In the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Our brevity, the brevity of the world, the brevity of love — these brevities give beauty to our moments. To experience our lives with the depth and often harsh clarity of this awareness is the only way to experience our lives fully, strongly: “whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape.” This is, among other things, a sexual poem. It evokes sensual power, the strength to
…tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
After all, Marvell also writes, in To His Coy Mistress:
The grave’s a fine and private place
But none I think do there embrace.
To take the path sick sorrow took is to take the only path that matters — the path of the fully lived life, which tastes the sadness of her might.
Apparently the C-Span coverage of the final event of the Institute for Civic Studies at Tufts (Mr UD‘s one of the organizers) will not be live today, as I thought. It will be broadcast some time in August. I’ll let you know.
A 2007 article in the New York Times last year takes us inside America’s Syrian Jewish community:
… At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current chief rabbi [This man, the current chief rabbi, was arrested today, along with other rabbis from the same community, for money laundering. “[T]he rings were led by rabbis who used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to ‘wash’ money they understood came from illegal activities.”], received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.
“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”
… In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. In addition, all prospective brides and grooms must take marital purity classes…
… Syrian Jews have always regarded advanced secular education with something like suspicion. Not only does it promote outside values, it also distracts a boy from his proper role as an apprentice in the family business.
… SY females are expected to stay home, rear children…
… [Israeli] Rabbi Ovadia Yosef … has found financial backers for his theocratic Shas Party. Jakie Kassin claims, in fact, that the party’s seed money was raised in his living room in Deal, N.J., in the early ’80s. [Shas shares the enlightened attitudes toward higher education we see in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn.]
… For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.
Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison…
… Solomon Dwek, … universally known as “the rabbi’s son,” is … the scion of a prestigious clan. His father is a highly regarded spiritual leader in the SY summer enclave in Deal, N.J. Solomon, still in his early 30s, made a name for himself as a high-stakes real estate developer in Monmouth County, N.J. Then, one memorable day in April 2006, according to an F.B.I. statement filed in federal court, he rolled up to the window of a PNC Bank branch in Eatontown, N.J., deposited a personal check for $25.2 million and later wired out by telephone $22.8 million against it. After the check bounced, Dwek was arrested by the F.B.I. for bank fraud. [Dwek is now the man of the hour — the cooperating witness who has brought down the leading rabbis of the community. They did the perp walk today because of Solomon Dwek…. But Dwek’s family doesn’t have any gentile characteristics, so I’m sure the community will forgive him.]
… Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those who remain within its confines. As for those who could not or would not fit in, well, every fight for survival has its collateral damage. [The New York Times reporter really nailed it. Successful, thriving, secure, and sweet, the Syrian enclave has today really done itself proud… The reporter seems to have missed an earlier article in the NYT about the same community, whose writer who found things less sweet: “Although it is made up of ordinary city streets, the area has something of the flavor of a gated development in Los Angeles, with vehicles bearing the insignia of private security companies on patrol. The reporter was stopped on the street by two men in a car belonging to a company called City Investigations Security…”]
“People have to make a choice,” Jakie Kassin told me. “Sure, it’s rough sometimes. But I’ll tell you something — we should be an example to others. We’re building the No. 1 Jewish community on planet Earth, right here in Brooklyn.”
A recent issue of Nature attempts to summarize the latest embarrassment from America’s psychiatrists — their revision of what everyone calls their bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
This bound bohemoth – its anal insistence on stuffing everything in the world into itself stronger proof of mental disorder than most of the diagnostic descriptions within it – has always attracted ridicule and condemnation, and the next edition will attract even more.
Because this time around the anal fixates of the APA are adding secrecy, hyperactivity, and self-delusion to their practices.
[C]ritics have alleged that the process has been too secretive, and that working groups have been pushed to meet an unrealistic 2012 publication date. Some, including the architects behind the last two editions of the DSM, also complain that project leaders are pushing for the premature inclusion of changes meant to incorporate recent genetic and neurobiological advances, before they are ready for the clinic.
The problem facing the revision
committees is that the manual
is not a bible; it has become a
tower of babel. Picture the
situation in this way and it
begins to make sense:
See how there isn’t any foundation,
and how you’ve got a lot of frenetic
people running around trying to
decide what to do? Only they
can’t decide what to do, because
they’re not living, as Madonna sings,
in a material world:
Rather than relying strictly on categorical diagnoses — one either has depression or does not, for example — they have pushed to add ‘dimensional’ criteria to ascertain to what extent a person is depressed. Such criteria could also address similarities among different disorders, reflecting, for example, neuroimaging studies that suggest multiple anxiety disorders can affect the same region of the brain.
… [A]larmed critics … say the science behind such dimensional assessments is not yet ready to be incorporated into clinical assessments. In March, Duke University psychologist and epidemiologist Jane Costello resigned from the working group on child and adolescent disorders … Adding these assessments would require a great deal of extra research, she says, at a time when working groups were already behind schedule for their 2012 publication deadline. “There just hasn’t been time to do this in an organized way,” she says. “This is a huge job.”
Yes, real science does take time, but psychiatry has never let empirical unreadiness impede it, and the drug companies are getting impatient.
The latest revisions come as financial ties between prominent psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies are being closely scrutinized. A 2006 analysis of potential conflicts of interest among those who participated in the last revision showed that 56% of panel members had financial links to the pharmaceutical industry.
Chop-chop!