Everyone who ever had anything to do with pill empresario Martin Shkreli is bailing bailing bailing. We don’t want your filthy money!

Leaving Hunter College and its affiliated high school (which the man himself attended) with a problem. He just gave the high school a million dollars. That’s a lot if you’re a high school. Plus they’re plastering his name all over the endowment. Some lucky scholarship student will enjoy a lifelong association (Shkreli Scholar?) with the man everyone’s calling America’s biggest asshole.

What to do?

… But there’s also this:

[A] D.C. man who received care from George Washington University Hospital in March … said he requested a copy of his electronic medical records in April. He initially received a bill for $32.32 for seven pages copied at 76 cents per page, as well as the “basic fee” of $22.88 and shipping and handling fees.

But in July, he received a second bill for $430.20 including copying fees for more than 500 pages of records.

UD will admit to failing to understand, so far, the facts of this and a related, Georgetown University, lawsuit. She can only find one article about it so far (the Washington Business Journal charged her $5,000 to copy it**), and if you read it I think you’ll agree it’s rather confusing. OTOH, whatever the details of electronic v. paper, third parties, number of pages and how you determine that, etc., etc., she will assume that the basic fact of having to pay over five hundred dollars to get your medical records is astonishing. Maybe GW’s records vendor is one of the many businesses run by Martin Shkreli.

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** Joke.

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Oh. Turns out this is old news for Shkreli Industries Incorporated. Drop in the bucket.

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Yes. HealthPort Technologies LLC. The Martin Shkreli of Medical Records.

… I mean, the many processes by which this can be done…

University-wise, there’s the whole for-profit college scam, covered extensively on this blog (category: Click-Thru U.), and still, despite a few state and federal efforts to shut it down, going strong.

Much more notoriously, there’s ye olde Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement scam, one prominent component of which involves hospital systems paying doctors immense sums to refer patients to them, and then submitting immense numbers of bogus claims based on those referrals.

The biggest penalty so far paid out by a dirty hospital system is the just-announced $118 million case against Adventist Health System, whose CEO sits on the board of trustees of Alabama’s Oakwood University, and whose business was recently named one of fifty “great health systems to know.” Oakwood is a religious school, and this CEO, Donald Jernigan, is always on about our spiritual health even as his business is screwing us six ways to Sunday.

It’s obvious where the ill-gotten gains go.

Hospital chief executives are kind of like the head football coaches of state-salaried workers: many of the highest paid public employees in Florida are executives in the health care industry. Donald Jernigan, CEO of Adventist Health System, takes home a reported $1.98 million annually for his work as head of the non-profit hospital organization which often draws down state money, as well as more than $250,000 in incentives and bonuses.

[T]he students “regret” what happened, but would not have harmed the referee unless they were told to by their coach.

This Russki says it ain’t plagiarism; it’s unscrupulous borrowing.

Explaining via Facebook in April the unattributed matches in his thesis with works of other authors, [former Duma Speaker Vladimir] Platonov used [a] euphemism, “unscrupulous borrowing,” that, he said, is not plagiarism.

This Georgian says it’s unverified content acceptance.

[Augusta Georgia Mayor Hardie] Davis admitted to accepting “content and feedback from multiple outside contributors without verifying the source of the information they provided.” Davis’ continued in the statement that he used the information from the feedback without citing who wrote the information. “I did not willfully or knowingly use someone else’s professional work as my own.”

This Italian says it’s nonfiction fiction:

[Roberto Saviano calls himself] a “non-fiction novelist,” in the tradition of Truman Capote, dealing in absolute truth but leavened with literary flourish.

…much of the nation’s press, but as you’re admiring 13 to 750 in Seconds Shkreli, remember that the University of Southern California boasts among its trustees Gilead’s John Martin, another amazingly obscene pharma babe.

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UPDATE: Matt Taibbi’s thoughts on The American Asshole.

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LOL: The Shkreli pill costs $900 in New York!

Probably costs a thousand here in UD‘s ‘thesda.

It is funny, and UD has long known that one reason many readers come back to University Diaries again and again is that this blog distills the best and only the best academic achievements of our highest-profile, most awesome scholar/athletes.

Things are hotting up on and off the field between longtime foes Texas Christian University and Baylor, with TCU’s coach boasting that his assaulting players are making far better moves than Baylor’s raping player.

[The coach’s] reference to Baylor during his press conference [about two players who allegedly beat a group of TCU students] did nothing but stoke the rivalry between the two traditional rivals who are both in the top five of this week’s Associated Press poll and are about 90 miles apart.

“… [W]e’ll find out what the facts are. It’ll all come out. I just hope when they all come out, you report it just as strongly as what you’ve done here because it’s not even close to what happened south of here.”

[The coach] was clearly referring to the Baylor situation where [player] Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a former Baylor soccer player.

The Battle of the Coaches is on! What will Baylor’s coach say in response? Stay tuned.

… is one of UD‘s favorite headlines, and the claim had at least a spliff of plausibility: Back in 2012 members of the Texas Christian University football team ran a sufficiently notorious drug market that one recruit “declin[ed] a scholarship offer because of the drug culture.”

UD looks forward to more great TCU headlines in the aftermath of the sort of incident so common on big sports campuses that eventually it won’t even be covered by journalists: A couple of football players got angry and drunk and beat the shit out of some students. Eventually all students who choose to attend big sports schools will understand and accept that getting the shit beaten out of you by football or basketball players is simply a risk you run.

Until that day, we at University Diaries can … I don’t want to say enjoy, but there’s definitely something intriguing in the details of these incidents.

The theme of this one is familiar from the story of the University of Idaho Vandals who were caught shoplifting in the bookstore because players are

1. “visible on [security] video and identifiable” and because

2. at the time “the store was open only to members of the football team.”

Similarly, in the TCU case, not only did security cameras apparently catch every punch, one of the players left his cell phone behind. As the police examined it, it flashed the full name of the player.

What’s amazing is what goes on before university athletes go to jail.

I have seen, while serving as departmental chair and on [the University of Texas] Faculty Council executive and budget advisory committees, four presidents at UT Austin, at least as many provosts, and many faculty committees wasting time on athletics that could be better spent on academics.

Run by mad substitute football coach Norries Wilson [“Wilson … proceeded to go around the [press conference] room calling on individual reporters one at a time like a school teacher. The first person he called on worked for Penn State athletics and was simply at the press conference to record quotes, so he didn’t have a question. Later, [Norries] called on a photographer who was only filming, so she also didn’t have a question…. [A] reporter referred to the Rutgers head coach as ‘Flood.’ Wilson interrupted the question and demanded the reporter call him ‘Coach Flood.'”], Rutgers University now does little more than express for the nation the institution-wide surreality of big-time university sports (“The New Brunswick jail can probably field a terrific football team.”), exactly the way Donald Trump expresses for us the surreality of presidential campaigns.

Rutgers’ putative president wants nothing to do with an athletics program that has anyway, like so many such programs, almost fully spun off from whatever leftovers in New Brunswick people are calling a “university” (see details on the total divorce between universities and their big sports programs here), and the fall of the Rutgers second-in-command (really first, but let’s go with the fiction that presidents run sports factories) COACH Flood, leaves us with the Alexander Haig-like (“I’m in control here.”) figure of third-in-command Norries. All sportsdom this morning talks of his wacko press conference, and there’s no one left at Rutgers to send in the vaudeville hook.

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One difference between Trump and Rutgers: Trump is really rich…

Oh but Rutgers is well on its way, given all those big-time football bucks…

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds.

Frank Rich writes a grand synthesis of university-president-cum-presidential-candidate Donald Trump here. In a literate and amusing analysis of Trump’s lineage and appeal, Rich does not forget to mention his intellectual chops, a subject of abiding interest on a blog called University Diaries:

That “pledge” [not to run as a third party candidate] served Trump’s immediate goal of securing his spot on primary ballots, but come next year it will carry no more weight than a certificate from the now-defunct Trump University.

The man sitting across from me at this long white laptop-use table in the lobby of the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel has just read very carefully through the Sunday comics in USA Today, closed the paper, and announced to me and everyone else (the table is full) what I’ve put in this post’s headline. A pit of despair.

UD is currently having one of those experiences you can easily have if you live in a place like Washington DC. She left her house this Sunday afternoon because Mr UD’s holding a seminar there for a few hours; she went to the place she always goes to, this pleasant hotel with a Starbucks and free internet and comfortable seating.

What she turns out to have walked into is this year’s Small Press Expo, “North America’s premiere independent cartooning and comic arts festival. SPX brings together more than 4,000 cartoonists and comic arts enthusiasts every fall in Bethesda, Maryland.”

What this means on the ground is lots of people (average age twenty) in black tops and jeans and tattoos and heavy black glasses (it’s got me thinking of Portlandia) walking back and forth in front of me in the lobby. Some of them are sitting with me at this long white laptop table. Their sketchbooks (comic book art boards, I should say) are out and they’re all drawing cartoon panels (“Yeah that’s gonna need a darker line. That’s not gonna read.”) They often consult their smart phones (for image ideas?) and they chat among themselves. The vibe is nerdy, friendly, in-group. They talk about how bad most of the comics out there are.

“The British Dennis the Menace is terrible.”

“It’s disgusting. The kid’s just farting all the time.”

“I hate that kid. He’s the worst.”

“Remember Space Cases?”

“I remember that show.”

“There were only a few seasons.”

“When I was a kid I had a crush on Catalina.”

“I had a crush on the guy with the long hair. What was his name. Rolf.”

They discuss the most disgusting thing they’ve ever eaten.

Winner: Dog treats.

I see a lot of Rug Rats t-shirts, but also NASA and Goth and Anime and Heavy Metal. People have dyed their hair way black.

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So I’ll describe a guy who just came by and who is, I now see after spending a couple of hours here, the Ur-Cartooning and Comic Arts guy.

He is 19, 20, years old. Rotund. Pasty. Under his black baseball hat he has dyed his long hair purple and yellow. His backpack is ratty. He lumbers rather than walks, his eyes (behind big black-framed glasses) firmly down, fixed on his electronic devices. He wears jeans and a black t-shirt. He expresses to UD the following thing: I spend most of my time inside watching tv.

Here’s another guy. He wears raggedy bright green resort clothes (his fly is open) and carries a fabric bag that reads Schulz Library, Cartoon Studies.

A very excited much older guy (but dressed like everyone else) shows a friend a new comic book. “I love it – sorta like Dave Cooperish.” He wears a purple TROUBLE TOWN button.

Every single one of the skinny women all in black and all sort of pulled in on themselves who pass in front of me emanates a strong creative genius vibe.

A woman in a long shimmering red skirt wears a black top that on the front says SAME SAME and on the back BUT DIFFERENT. On her head sits a patterned red mob cap that looks homemade.

…turns 25.