She has never studied anthropology. She has never done field work. She does not understand the people of Kansas and environs, and she never will. If you can make sense of this Kansas City Star commentary, which presents itself as a tribute to outgoing Kansas State president Jon Wefald, you’re a better man than I.

[A recently disclosed Kansas State University audit] paints Wefald, Krause and Snyder [background on these people here] as shady, clueless and drunk on power.

… My impression is that Wefald, Krause, Snyder and anyone connected to Kansas State athletics during the school’s “football powerhouse era” cashed in on the record and off. [Dump the quotation marks.]

Even Tim Weiser, who had little to do with the golden era, received a no-questions-asked $500,000 loan. Thirteen payments to Krause, Snyder, Weiser and others totaling close to $1 million cannot be accounted for or explained.

The $3 million secret buyout Krause agreed to give Ron Prince seems to be part of a pattern of financial mismanagement at K-State under Wefald’s presidency.

… “The Miracle in Manhattan” now has an enlightening postscript, “The Madoff in Manhattan.”

… My opinions of Jon Wefald and Bill Snyder have not changed. I respect them immensely. I’m astonished by their accomplishments. But I always regarded them as human and therefore flawed. Greed, arrogance and a sense of entitlement can invade their mind-set as easily as yours.  [Yeah well.  Here’s where I start getting all confused.  I don’t claim to have an unimpregnable mind-set, but – as God is my witness! – my mind-set is set at an entirely different frequency from Bernard Madoff’s…  So point one, if you’re saying any of us could do with money and power what Wefald and the others did, you can kiss my royal Irish arse.  Point two, if you retain immense respect for mad arrogant fools who steal your tax money and make your university a national joke, you are pathetic.]

… I suspect the audit would’ve remained private had Wefald and Krause not renamed Snyder as head football coach on their way out the door. Re-installing Snyder as the unofficial president of the university was/is a serious impediment to Schulz. [Let’s pause right there. Did you get that?  Did you get the point that at KSU the football coach is the real president of the university?]

… K-State’s athletic department has been completely out of control for years… [But so are you, Kansasfolk, so are you.  At least the people of Romania finally found it in themselves to get rid of the Ceausescus. And, you know, you don’t see Romanians running around today still worshipping them and finding themselves astonished by their accomplishments…]

Professors at the University of Wisconsin medical school are appalled at the voyeuristic ways of Charles Grassley.

Some of the orthopedic surgeons [who make enormous outside sums pushing medical devices] also were among the most vocal opponents to the university’s new disclosure requirements, referring to the more stringent disclosure requirements as voyeuristic.

In the past, they and other doctors who earned large sums working as consultants, speakers or from royalties could merely state that they received more than $20,000 without having to tell their patients or the university the actual amount.

It’s only appropriate that we not tell you the actual amount. Only a sicko would want to see the actual amount.

… [I protest the] feigned or real naiveté on the part of [medical] professionals who claim they are above being influenced [by industry money and gifts]. Physicians owe their patients much more than naiveté. The degree to which policy rather than personal ethics is necessary to bring an end to obvious marketing schemes is a reproach to my profession.

… Almost two-thirds [of medical school department chairs] have a personal relationship with industry as consultant, board member, paid speaker or the like. It is not unusual to see papers in major medical journals where authors disclose relationships with many, many industrial organizations.

Is anyone reassured by all this disclosing? I am not. To the contrary, I look askance at the discloser and at the substance that is being put forth. I am not surprised when paper after paper documents that when the study of a drug or device is industry supported, the result is far more likely to be positive than when the study of the same drug or device is government supported.

… My queasiness peaks when I know that the “CEO” of a large state-supported academic health center is also on the board of a certain major pharmaceutical benefits manager — which just happens to be the pharmaceutical benefits manager for that state’s employee health plan.

… Very seldom, anymore, are the trials necessary for licensing drugs or devices carried out by the manufacturer. There is an industry devoted to providing that service, the Contract Research Organizations (CROs). I have long railed against this relationship as I consider it inherently conflictual. Science is the exercise of disproving any hypothesis. The CRO is contracted in the hopes it will prove the hypothesis that a particular drug or device is an important contribution. There is no joy in Mudville when the study is negative (see the discussion above about industry-supported vs. government-supported science of this nature). CROs can be very lucrative. Many academic health centers have their own CRO, and many others wish they did. Furthermore, many an “academic physician” is employed for “translational research,” which is a euphemism for recruiting patients into trials run by CROs…

Norton Hadler, ABC News.

… and the news that does get out from this corrupt regime — so corrupt that the people laboring under it are in full revolt– is available to us only by uncertain internet outlets like anonymous blogs.

This blog, emanating from what the intelligentsia has renamed Texas Antediluvian and Mediocre University, seems to UD one of the more reliable sources of information about America’s most nakedly politicized campus.

Even as Rod Blagojevich-stuffed boards of trustees and administrations in Illinois falter, Rick Perry-stuffed places like A&M thrive, modeling the carefree, sporty, hack-run campus that has been the hallmark of higher education in Texas for so long.

What’s been dubbed the
white revolution in College
Station features white
ribbons and pieces of
paper hung from trees
in front of houses around
the university —

— symbolizing, say professors,
students, and alumni, the
gutting of any form of higher
level thought.

But if you go here, you’ll find the best summary yet of this season in university sports.

Biggest scum schools this year:

University of Alabama
University of Kentucky
University of Memphis
University of Southern California

A recent Columbia University grad is confused:

… In [Columbia University] student housing, where I lived for four years, the water in the showers was either scorching or glacial but rarely tolerable. Infestations might be part of New York’s charm, but our cockroach and mice roommates were amazingly abundant. I sometimes awoke at 4 a.m. to find my roommate chasing mice. He was more successful than our traps at catching the little guys.

At the library, I might wait 20 minutes to print something out. During finals time, it might be an hour to get a nook at a desk in which to study.

I’m not sure where the money is going…

Hint: Check out your president’s salary.

… Canes Times (Complete Coverage of the Miami Hurricanes). I hope you also enjoy my recent posts on Jurgen Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf.

He led a life of intense activism and intense meditation.

Throughout, he worried about humanity’s desire and capacity for freedom. Here’s a good interview with him.

When Mr UD was working for the United Nations in East Timor, he got to know, a bit, Dahrendorf’s daughter Nicola, who was also working there.

From this interview: “[A]s Director of the London School of Economics, [I] have always regarded it as my job to protect academics from the obsession with realities, even the obsession with funds. That is to say, if you do administer, if you are in charge of an academic institution, you really have to see to it that those who are there as academics can do their job. So you have to relieve them of some of the burden of living in the real world.”

But here it is, in South Dakota. Bravo.

Austin Kaus, The Daily Republic:

A state senator says that if the Board of Regents doesn’t take care of a potential conflict of interest involving the president of South Dakota State University, the Legislature will.

Sen. Frank Kloucek, DScotland, a family farmer, said he is concerned about SDSU President David Chicoine’s appointment to the board of directors of the Monsanto Company, which produces crop seeds, herbicides and pesticides. For his role on the board, Kloucek said Chicoine will receive nearly $400,000, an amount that surpasses Chicoine’s salary as SDSU president by $80,000.

Kloucek said he wouldn’t object to Chicoine’s dual roles if the money from Monsanto went to the university. Chicoine’s private acceptance of the money, however, “leaves a foul taste in the mouth.”

“It’s just totally inappropriate to give that money to an individual rather than to the university for research,” Kloucek said. “It appears pretty clear-cut that they’re trying to buy influence at the university by buying influence with the president.”

In a letter that appears on Page 4 of today’s Daily Republic, Kloucek calls upon the state Board of Regents to resolve the issue.

“If the board does not act,” Kloucek wrote, “this issue will be presented to the South Dakota Legislature for a more permanent solution that will address it fairly and reasonably.”

In a telephone interview Thursday, Kloucek clarified, saying he and other legislators already are at work drafting potential legislation to deal with the issue.

“There will be at least one bill,” Kloucek said. “I just think it’s better … to make it clear the we’re not in that kind of game at South Dakota.”

The appointment of Chicoine to the Monsanto board negatively affects the credibility of the university, Kloucek said, since crop research reports from SDSU could easily be assumed as skewed.

“This research must not be tainted in any way, shape or form and this certainly taints that research,” Kloucek said. “It … jeopardizes the integrity because it makes it look like we’re in the hip pocket of Monsanto.”

Until the session begins, Kloucek said he’ll be taking input from other South Dakota residents on potential solutions to a problem that he said “smacks very hard of … conflict of interest.”

“It’s a tough issue, but I just think it’s wrong and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure to correct it in one shape, way or form,” Kloucek said.

We’re not in that kind of game at South Dakota.

Kiss the man.

… And… uh… where’s the response from the president? This story has been kicking around for weeks. If there’s no problem with what he’s doing, why isn’t he defending himself?

… this morning. They didn’t like the sound quality on my lecture, and want me to do it again.

Later.

… that Les UDs have a little country house with big Catskill views near Cooperstown, New York.

They own this
house, its twenty
acres and its
pond, because
this man —

— Wojciech Fangor,
lived up there
and asked his
friend, Jerzy
Soltan, to buy
some land
adjacent to his.

Fangor has been back in Poland for years (he said he got tired of spending most of his time chopping wood for the winter). Mr UD visited with him not long ago.

Fangor, among others, is featured in a new documentary about Polish poster art. The film’s producer is an art professor at Oregon State.

He looks a little gruff, doesn’t he? He’s enormous — very much over six feet — with a barrel chest and an insanely deep voice and the big rough hands of an outdoorsman who can build anything. But he’s sweet and affectionate and hilarious. He adopted every stray cat in Schoharie County and let them crawl all over him.

… talks about universities.

“Ahmadinejad has taken revenge on the students of Iran during these violent days. The regime’s aim is to damage universities, since they are the first base of change, movement and protest.”

… some of his thoughts about religious tolerance and the state.

Every religion is originally a ‘worldview’ or, in Rawls’s terminology, a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ also in the sense that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Religion must renounce this claim to structure life in a comprehensive way that also includes the community once the life of religious groups becomes differentiated from that of the larger political community within pluralistic societies. …

For the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right. The validity of the ethos on this assumption depends on the truth of the worldview in which it is embedded. The exclusive validity claims of the underlying worldviews are accordingly bound up with different ethical existential orientations and competing forms of life. As soon as one’s conception of the good life is shaped by religious notions of salvation or metaphysical conceptions of the good, a divine perspective (or a ‘view from nowhere’) opens up from which (or where) other ways of life appear not only different but mistaken. When an alien ethos is not merely evaluated in relative terms, but is judged in terms of truth and falsity, the demand to show every citizen equal respect regardless of his ethical self-understanding and his way of life represents an imposition….

[T]he spread of religious tolerance, which we have already identified as a pacemaker for the emergence of democracies, has also become a stimulus and model for the introduction of further cultural rights within constitutional states.

Between Naturalism and Religion

From the obituary in the Tallahassee Democrat:

A devoted Marxist, Hodges was an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man. At FSU, he inspired a cadre of students who formed FSU’s controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter in the late 1960s.

Many were students in a short-lived interdepartmental program Hodges created called social philosophy, which taught “anarchism, Maoism, Trotskyism, anything except capitalism,” said former FSU activist, … Jack Lieberman.

“He was keenly aware what he was doing would not meet the approval of the administration,” said Lieberman, now a Miami businessman. “But it was some of the best studies of my life and I learned a lot.”

Hodges was infamously cantankerous. Before his 2003 retirement, he lived more than 20 years in the Miccosukee Land Co-Op, where “He was not much involved in the community because he was not interested in anyone telling him what to do,” said Mitchell.

Hodges never learned to use a computer, imposing constantly on the philosophy department secretaries. He spent six years as chair of the philosophy department, until colleagues voted him out for spending the department’s entire travel budget on one of his research trips.

… “He could be a pain in the butt, no question about that,” said longtime FSU philosophy professor Russell Dancy.

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward notes many Jewish executives who’ve taken pay cuts in harsh economic times.

But not Joel. He’s rewarding himself for having kept both Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin in positions of power at his university until they were hauled off by the authorities.

Gross negligence of the sort that permanently soils a university doesn’t come cheap.