… is the title of UD‘s latest Inside Higher Education post at her other campus, University Diaries II. It’s about the most recent plagiarism scandal.
… is the title of UD‘s latest Inside Higher Education post at her other campus, University Diaries II. It’s about the most recent plagiarism scandal.
UD has already noted the cynicism of Penn State appointing the CEO of Merck – a particularly repellent pharma outfit – to head their scandal review committee.
Snigdha Prakash – in a Slate article titled Why is Kenneth Frazier Leading the Investigation at Penn State? – goes into greater detail as to why Penn State, facing significant vulnerability to lawsuits, finds Frazier attractive:
A Penn State alum and Harvard-trained lawyer, Frazier is best known for his phenomenal success in defending a sordid chapter in Merck’s recent past—its years-long silence about the safety problems of the popular painkiller Vioxx.
… Tens of thousands of former Vioxx users sued Merck after it withdrew the drug, alleging Vioxx had caused them to suffer heart attacks and strokes. Frazier, then the company’s general counsel, declared Merck had done nothing wrong and refused to settle. “We’ll fight every case,” he declared, and hired top-flight law firms in several East Coast cities, in the South, in Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as a prominent New York firm to coordinate the overall strategy. It took three years and $2 billion in legal expenses for Frazier’s hard-nosed tactics to pay off. Merck settled in late 2007 for a relative pittance, resolving some 50,000 Vioxx cases for just under $5 billion. It was a far cry from the $25 billion to $50 billion in liability that analysts had predicted when Merck withdrew the drug.
—————–
UD thanks Carl.
[T]he mountain Krzyzewski just climbed is a pile of dirt that has been heaped for many years on the top of a sinkhole. And that sinkhole is giving way… [I]t happens amid frantic N.C.A.A. reform efforts attempting to stave off the demise of the whole system.
… Nipissing.
Since the middle of September New Haven police have cited 70 Quinnipiac students for urinating in public, significantly more than any other local college.
[S]ome [McGill University Health Centre] sources [said] that [Centre head Arthur] Porter had become an absentee executive director in the past few years as he founded a cancer centre in the Bahamas, took on his responsibilities with the Privy Council, [Security and Intelligence Review Committee] as well as a number of corporate directorships.
The chair of the [MUHC] Board of trustees is a defender of Porter and has a deft way with the press:
[David] Angus told The Gazette that the MUHC board of directors had approved of all of Porter’s duties outside the MUHC. Asked to provide documents proving this, Angus said: “Are you calling me a liar?” He then hung up the phone.
Arthur Porter will resign.
*************************************
UPDATE: Titles After Your Name smackdown!
Porter:
MA MD MBA DMRT FRCPC FACR FACRO FAAMA
Graham Burrows:
*************************
UD thanks Adam.
Conflict of interest, which is all over the Penn State fiasco, is…
Oh, I dunno. Coin of the realm. Everywhere. Universities try to deal with it by constantly tweaking their COI language in yearly faculty declaration forms, etc. Sterner rhetoric. More paragraphs to read before you sign. But there’s nothing they can do. COI. It’s a way of life.
So frinstance take this guy in England. He advises the government on health issues, and is very influential, but he’s always making the papers because of his generous pharma friends.
Questions over Professor Strang’s links come just months after he was criticised for failing to disclose ties to drug companies when applying for a government project.
… It is the second time in a year that Professor Strang’s pharmaceutical links have been questioned. In July, The Independent revealed how Professor Strang had failed to disclose links with drug companies that sell tranquilisers such as Valium before conducting a DH review into the same drugs. His report is guiding government policy in this area.
… in the Wall Street Journal.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote that it is only necessary for a man to think one thought all the way through to the end. If only Heidegger, an enthusiastic Nazi, had taken his own advice.
Still, the quote says something about the German intellectual temperament, inclined to grind away at a single complex idea profoundly and often beautifully, year after year. Kant, Beethoven, Einstein, Porsche.
The Stuttgart-based sports car company has been unpuzzling the 911 idea for decades, and just when you think the rear-engine sport coupe can’t get any better, it does. It also tends to get more expensive, so if you’ve been longing for a new 911, brace yourself. The Carrera S I drove around the Black Forest in late October had a base price of $97,350… Philosophy majors need not apply.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks this would have had more impact if the author had not hidden behind Heidegger and had instead begun with something like
The German leader Adolph Hitler once wrote that he had no use for knights; he needed revolutionaries.
And then onto the thing about the German intellectual temperament, etc.
Also: SOS thinks the writer should have put the price of the car in his first paragraph. Maybe something like
Hitler’s ideas cost the world dearly, and the new Porsche Carrera S will definitely set its purchasers back too — to the tune of $97,530.
… of Diaspora, a social network site, has died at the age of 22.
No cause of death has yet been given. When it happens suddenly, and that young, one has to suspect suicide.
Les UDs stopped for dinner last night, on their way back to ‘thesda, in a Denny’s outside Harrisonburg Virginia. The place was jammed with families. Fathers wore baseball caps. One guy’s t-shirt said DRINKIN’ BEERS & SHOOTIN’ DEERS. THAT’S HOW I ROLL. A woman ate mayonnaise from a spoon.
Les UDs liked the room’s vibe. Happy excited families. Two solicitous teenage sons chatted with the mayonnaise woman. Everybody knew everybody. As people entered to take a table, they shook hands and joshed with already-seated neighbors.
Our server treated us lovingly, attentively. When she realized we like to make jokes, she laughed along. She brought our food quickly and checked back with us three times to make sure everything – especially Mr UD’s steak – was okay. The manager came by. Everything ok for you folks? My club sandwich had too much mayonnaise but I said everything was fine, and it was, even with the extra mayo. It was quite fine.
… how to maintain gender segregation.
… the core values of a university.”
As the nation slips into post-Happy Valley tristesse, people like the ex-president of the University of Michigan begin to tell the truth about big-time university football. Turns out football isn’t the university’s front porch. It’s the shower stalls out back. Plus, as this guy notes, big-time football is in fact an aggressor against the university, a predatory embodiment of anti-university attitudes and behaviors: Groupthink, authoritarianism, fanaticism, secrecy, brawn over brain.
As we slip, too, back into business as usual at university sports programs – the coach arrested for his third DUI and afterwards put right back to work coaching; a player only dismissed from a team after his fourth arrest – it’s good to recall that this campus activity is structurally corrupt, subject at all times to sex scandals, money scandals, crime scandals. When you consider all the elements in play in football – recruitment, staff salaries, tailgating, alcohol, the absurdity of the NCAA, academic cheating, a culture of secrecy, etc. – you know that Shalala’s Miami and Spanier’s Penn St. are chapters in a never-ending story.
… the Threshold is UD‘s title for the massive, ever more massive, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, with its infinitely embellished mental debility stories, in one of which you’re sure to find your sad, anxious, confused, discontented self.
By the simple expedient of having lowered the threshold for clinical disorders to include pretty much anything you’re experiencing right now, the editors of the upcoming DSM have broadened their market share to Everybody. Somewhere inside the Thousand and One Nights of the American Psychiatric Association lies a take-this-pill tale tailored to you, and to all of your children.
With this latest DSM, there’s absolutely no reason for you to put off spending the rest of your life taking psychotropic drugs.
… will be the way it’s unlatching the experts. Already the experts are swarming out of their pens and telling anyone who’ll listen that the way to avoid child rape in your university’s showers is through ethics training.
[One expert] compared the current Penn State situation to the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Neither university officials nor church officials are required to undergo ethics training that would prepare them to deal with conflicting allegiances and moral dilemmas involved in their work, he said.
The most enthusiastic champion of mandatory ethics training in our time was of course Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who is as we speak on his way to ten years in jail for corruption. Blagojevich required this training for every state employee, including professors at places like Northern Illinois University. A person at Western Illinois University testified to the effectiveness of the program here. She pointed out (as have zillions of others who’ve testified about similar programs) that the insultingly stupid nature of the tests and presentations drives people into frenzies of cheating in order to avoid the experience. (Read the comments after the post, too.)
I mean, look at the absurdity of this expert’s comment. Who needs mandatory ethics training? Priests. Priests!
Most people are not enmeshed in closed authoritarian worlds which may force them to mess with their conscience for the sake of a higher good. If you do happen to be in such a world, an online exam or a staged psychodrama won’t be much of a force against it.
Most big-time college football programs are operated by state-funded institutions of higher learning with a few notable exceptions, such as Stanford and Notre Dame. One would think that those who rail against big government would cry out for dismantling these publicly-funded entertainments.
… [Penn State] is a great university that, like many others, had been led away from its essential mission decades ago and now finally may have been shaken into taking action.
Roger Abrams