Une trentaine d’étudiants ont séquestré pendant quelques heures mardi le président de l’université d’Orléans, Gérald Guillaumet, dans son bureau. Réunis en assemblée générale, étudiants et professeurs ont décidé par vote de mettre fin à cette action. Il s’agissait du second cas de séquestration d’un président d’université en deux jours, après celui lundi de Marc Gontard, président de Rennes-II. Mardi, le directeur du Crous (centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires) de Paris a également été brièvement retenu par un groupe de cinquante personnes.

They’re taking university presidents hostage in France.

My referral log tells me that many Vanderbilt people are reading UD on the insult of your university having rewarded a plagiarist with a medal and the keynote speech on Senior Class Day.

Know that you are not alone. When the University of Virginia gave her a high-profile appointment, people there were also outraged.

As Randy Newman reminds us, it’s a great big dirty world.

But it’s incredibly important to kick against that world. Keep it up.

… Art dealers should rejoice at the perfect storm on the horizon: cash-rich collectors desperate to invest devalued currency into artworks by the dead and aged, coming face-to-face with a slew of soon-to-be indicted moneybaggers, forced by either the law or necessity to sell their art collections. Like bookies in Vegas, these dealers need only match up both sides of the client equation and collect the vigorish.

What this means for the art market is simple: a steep drop in prices for the work of younger blue chip artists awash in inventory both present and future, and an expanding universe of price appreciation for the limited set of artworks created by those gone by…

Half the people asked at Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus think it would be a good idea if it split way from the flagship Carbondale campus, according to a year-long study by the SIUE Faculty Senate.

A task force formed to examine the issue of campus separation, a proposal that has previously been the subject of state legislation by Metro East lawmakers, surveyed 1,838 faculty, students and staff at SIUE, including an interview with Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift.

English professor Joel Hardman, chairman of the task force, said faculty on campus generally supported separating from Carbondale but the overall number showed thoughts were evenly split.

Vandegrift has been openly opposed to separation, as have SIU President Glenn Poshard and other top administrators of the university system.

The SIUE Faculty Senate has been critical of Poshard since allegation of plagiarism arose in 2007 about his doctoral dissertation. When the board cleared Poshard of the charges, the faculty senate called for his resignation.

The survey report also suggested other actions that could be taken instead of separation, such as changing wording on the SIU system Web site to better reflect each university’s individuality and moving the university’s system office from Carbondale to Springfield to enhance lobbying efforts and quell a perception of favoritism of SIUC.

Glenn Poshard is one of the few authentic political hacks running an American university system.

UD sympathizes with SIUE’s faculty. How would you like to live every day of your life embarrassed?

Maybe a name change is part of the solution. Southern Illinois Edwardsville In No Way Associated With Glenn Poshard.

… why not just ban the stuff? Everybody’s doing it.

“There will come a day of reckoning, when projects are due and exams are taken, and I will have virtually no sympathy for a student who I know is (not paying attention to lecture), who performs poorly. It’s his own fault,” [University of Florida professor Carl] Barfield said.

A nursing student at UF gets points for honesty.

“I’d rather be on my phone than listening to the professor.”

I mean, minus Bernie and Ezra …

…The [fraud] charge [against Merkin] highlights the dangers charities face if they overlook governance practices and conflicts of interest, like investing with businesses run by board members. Deep losses incurred by charities invested through Merkin reveal how several boards fell down on their job.

Yeshiva University invested $110 million, or 8% of its endowment, with Merkin’s Ascot Partners LP, which had the bulk of its assets invested in Madoff. Both Madoff and Merkin served on boards at the university, Merkin as chairman of the board’s investment committee.

“No member of a nonprofit board should benefit in a financial way from serving a charity,” said Marian Stern, a nonprofit consultant and adjunct assistant professor at the George Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at New York University. …

Non-profit is one of those words … It’s like Maria… the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard… all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word… non-profit…

Yet we’ll never get anywhere, mes enfants, until we take a cold eye even to that most beautiful of words. And not only when multiply-billioned megaliths like Harvard continue to present themselves as non-profit pebbles. When advocacy organizations are over-indebted to corporations, they also should receive scrutiny.

… In a letter sent today to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, based in Arlington, Virginia, [Senator Charles] Grassley asked the nonprofit group to disclose any financial backing from drug companies or from foundations created by the industry.

The Iowa Republican, in a series of hearings and investigations, has focused on financial ties between the drug industry, doctors and academic institutions. His efforts have led New York-based Pfizer Inc. to begin disclosing consulting payments to U.S. doctors, and Harvard Medical School in Boston to reexamine its conflict-of-interest policies. Now Grassley is expanding his inquiries to nonprofit groups.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry shapes the practices of nonprofit organizations which purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Officials at the National Alliance for Mental Illness didn’t return calls for comment.

The group identifies itself as the largest grassroots organization in the U.S. for people with mental illness and their families. The group came under scrutiny in 1999, when the magazine Mother Jones reported that 18 drug companies gave the group $11.7 million from 1996 to mid-1999. The article reported that at one point an executive of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly & Co. worked out of the nonprofit group’s headquarters…

A writer at PsychCentral provides some detail:

… The problem with the National Alliance for Mental Illness and Mental Health America (formerly known as the National Mental Health Association), among others, is their simple lack of transparency about their funding sources. NAMI, for instance, doesn’t break out its donations by source. If it did, I suspect we’d see that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of its donations come from pharmaceutical companies, affiliated companies, or individual employees and management from within pharma. For other nonprofits, I would expect similar percentages.

The long-held secret of these national non-profits doing important advocacy and policy work in mental health is simply this — without the pharmaceutical monies they receive, they probably wouldn’t exist today. They are dependent upon them and some of them would rather you not know how dependent upon them they really are.

Does such money buy influence? Well, with NAMI, the answer appears to be an unequivocal “Yes.” NAMI has long pushed that severe mental illness — like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders — are pure neurobiological medical diseases (or as they call them, “biologically based brain disorders”).

The primary treatment method pushed by NAMI national? Medications, of course. For instance, in their consumer article about depression, 84 percent of the article is devoted to medications and only 10 percent mentions psychotherapy. ..

Nice summary of recent events in university sports.

Eva von Dassow has already made a starring appearance on this blog, complaining about the benighted University of Minnesota, where she teaches. This luminous personality is at it again in the Star Tribune, in a piece written with Timothy Brennan:

… [I]n one category, expenditures have nearly doubled over the last five years. That category is “institutional support,” which consists essentially of central administration. The 2008-09 budget plan increases expenditures for institutional support by more than $143 million, or 80 percent, over the figure for 2004-05. The spending increase in this category alone covers the amount by which the governor proposes to reduce the state’s annual appropriation to the university.

Click the second link in this post for more.

Thanks for the tip, Bill.

… tweets.

… account of a basketball game between Law Center professors and politicians.

… the heat’s broken. It’s a clear, cool day on the island.

The breeze has swept the leaves from my deck.

Along the edges of the pool, two collared doves go hoo-hoo-hoo.

… to life as we know it on many American college campuses, but at UC Santa Cruz the smoking of dope has become such a big deal that the school’s making official efforts to suppress it.

Or at least to suppress 4/20 – the annual campus pot festival, where thousands of people – many not connected to UCSC – make a bright golden haze on a meadow.

If you ask UD, this sort of ritual is less offensive than football fans getting shit-faced and trashing main street. But the whole alcohol thing – the fact that many universities are surrounded by hundreds of cheap bars, for instance – gets a rise out of no one, while people believe toking erodes the foundations of the republic.

Having said that, UD has no problem with UC Santa Cruz sending a letter to the parents of freshmen asking them to discourage their kids from taking part in 4/20. The event is a victim of its own success, drawing such crowds that the national media’s paying attention.

It’s like the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The event has gotten so big and so silly that it draws routine MSM ridicule.

Eventually a similar letter will go out to literature department chairs asking them to discourage new faculty from attending.

“We must educate those who will lead the institutions that will serve as engines of prosperity in our economy. But we must also instill in them the importance of ensuring that these engines of prosperity are engines for all,” intoned then-President Larry Summers at a Harvard religious gathering.

But Summers’ own engine rides so high… the throttle on that thing… It’s like… here’s Larry on his prosperity engine:

Why is he riding so high?

According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

So let’s say he worked 100 days total, that’s $52,000 per day.

And assuming he worked about 12 hour days, that’s $4,333 per hour.

Ride ’em, cowboy! Hell, plenty to go around! With his common touch, Summers is just the man to ensure that America’s engines of prosperity are engines for all.

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Point of Clarification: Why only one day a week?

Because he was a full-time professor at Harvard at the same time.

… before Brown University finally removes you as chair of psychiatry?

This compromised.

… Martin B. Keller, is a highly acclaimed psychiatrist and chair of the psychiatry department at Brown University who has extensive ties to the drug industry. In 1998, when the Rhode Island attorney-general’s office forced Keller to forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grant money to settle a financial fraud inquiry, it came to light that Keller had received more than half a million dollars from drug companies that year, most of it from the same firms whose drugs he had touted in journals and at medical conferences. According to the Boston Globe, Keller’s financial ties were so numerous that they prompted the National Institute of Mental Health to review its conflict-of-interest rules. The most recent publicly available data shows that as of June 2003, Keller had been consulting for at least 17 major drug firms, including Merck, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, while also working under a $25 million research grant from Wyeth-Ayerst.

But this was written in 2005. Maybe there’s more.

Anyway. Brown finally removed him. Dean Edward Wing writes:

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Steven A. Rasmussen, MD, as interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior…

UD thanks Barney for the item, which she doesn’t yet see on official Brown pages. But I guess it’ll show up here pretty soon.

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Update: Alison Bass has more information.