Way serious drug business going on at the University of Alabama. Guns, wads of cash, impressive array of substances.

One of these lads is only 21. Wow.

The Grade Change form UD uses at George Washington University is a small white piece of paper on which you’re given one line to explain why you’ve changed a student’s grade (I know not what others may do, but as for me, these forms are almost always about changing an Incomplete to a grade after a late paper or something has been submitted).

NYU’s business school must have had to use teeny weeny writing to fit in its reason for changing Rosenthal’s grade in his Professional Responsibility course to an F:

In February 2007, three months after completing his course work at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Ayal Rosenthal pleaded guilty to charges that he leaked to his brother secret tips that he learned at his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Rosenthal never told the school about the investigation of him or his guilty plea, even while serving as a teaching assistant in a professional responsibility course…

NYU didn’t merely change Rosenthal’s grade; it rescinded his MBA degree. Rosenthal sued to get the degree back and the judge laughed him out of court.

… are beginning to ban laptops.

Reasons?

“… [M]isuse and lack of courtesy. But the biggest reason is that it’s a liability for professors to allow students to use these electronic devices in the classroom.”

…“Laptops have become barriers that interrupt dialogue between the students and the teacher … and education is a dialogue.”

… how medical school professors become corrupted.

Universities could easily clean up the [conflict of interest] problem, simply by banning or capping industry payments to faculty members, but that is unlikely to happen. Not just because academic physicians would object, but also because many high-level university administrators have lucrative corporate relationships of their own. (For instance, the president of the University of Michigan sits on the Board of Directors of Johnson & Johnson, while the president of Brown University sat on the boards of Pfizer and Goldman Sachs.) As universities have come to look more like businesses, competing for funding and prestige in a consumer marketplace, industry relationships have become a lucrative perk of many university jobs.

*****************************

UD thanks Bill for the link.

Several questions garnered loud applause, including that of senior political science major Avrell Stokes, who said that it is his understanding that athletics received the cut it did ($137,000), because a deeper cut would have meant athletics being lowered a division.

“What I would like to know is who made the decision to cut education rather than to go down a division in athletics and why?” asked Stokes, as his fellow students clapped.

University of Southern Mississippi students confront hapless administrators at an open meeting. They got the same bullshit answer to this question that administrators always give: Big-time sports make universities ever so much better!

Oh, and about the plane the university leases:

Saunders explained that the reason for the plane is to maximize administrative time.

Administrators for USM are simply jetting about all over the country all the time! They have to! And a limo to a distant private airport, flying for a hundred miles, putting down in another nowheresville airport, getting limo’ed from there to somewhere… You’d be amazed how much time this saves.

This University of North Carolina professor is certainly correct about her school; it cares far more for lower-ranked coaches than it does for philosophy professors… Yet she adds:

“It is what it is. It gives you an idea of where society places its value.”

Both of which are curious things to say. It is what it is — meaning nothing to be done… I wonder if she takes the same approach to her work in economics… unemployment rates, gross wealth disparities… they are what they are…

And then… way to blame it on society! As you may know, UD asks her students to avoid, in their papers, any generalizations about ‘society,’ because they almost always sound dumb…

In this case, for instance, society does not pay assistant university coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does. Many universities do not pay their coaches in the way UNC pays its coaches. As Balaban points out in her initial comment, UNC could give a shit about the life of the mind. Its resources go to athletics, and, with this latest scandal, to athletics-related public relations and litigation.

“I would not think there is not a single professor at Harvard who is not ambitious, in the sense of intellectually ambitious,” [says Harvard] Psychology Department Chair Susan Carey.

UD just whispered these words to Mr UD as he fell asleep.

Mr UD insists that UD vote, even in the primaries, so after she taught her classes he picked her up at Grosvenor Metro and they drove to Holy Cross Elementary School (they usually vote at UD‘s elementary school, Garrett Park, but the main building’s being demolished and a new building’s going up).

As they walked from the car to the polling place, UD read, loudly, in the voice of Major “King” Kong, instructions on how to vote.

The instructions were in the booklet Mr UD had just handed her. He’d written UD‘s Polish name –Madzia – on the top of the first page of the booklet.

Inside the booklet were mock ballots on which he’d carefully marked every person UD was to vote for. Aside from Barbara Mikulski and Chris Van Hollen, UD recognized no name in the booklet. (Check out picture # 5 on Van Hollen’s website. That’s my neighbor, John Wilpers; his daughter Terry is just about my oldest friend. I wrote about John here.) As is always the case when Mr UD forces her to vote in primaries, she simply does what she is told.

There were very few people in the polling place, most of them fellow Garrett Parkers. UD was handed a computer card and escorted to a little booth, where she quickly touch-screened all the names Mr UD told her to enter. The whole thing took twenty seconds.

Mr UD took forever. “I was rereading my ballot,” he said, “to make sure everything was right.”

On the way back to the car, UD railed – again loudly – about the travesty of making Americans vote at a religious school.

LAST TIME I LOOKED THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ANYBODY HERE HEARD OF SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE? ANYBODY? ON OUR WAY INTO THE BUILDING WE WALKED DIRECTLY UNDER AN ENORMOUS CROSS. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT HAS NO EFFECT ON PEOPLE? LAST TIME I LOOKED…

The Major Kong thing, the loud railing church and state thing — These are the ways UD makes unpalatable events palatable.

***************************************

Update:

LOOOOOK!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Phil.

It’s a remarkable new model whose time has come. Have physicians pay for their own education.

After all, homeless people have to pay back the government loans they take out in order to attend for-profit universities. Now some people are saying it’s time for doctors to pay for their Continuing Medical Education courses.

The way it goes now is like this: The doctor gets an invitation from a drug company to have dinner, paid for by the company, at the Palm Restaurant. At the Palm, the doctor joins a table of happy people who drink wine and eat steak and listen to a salesperson from the drug company talk about an expensive new pill. At the end of the meal, deeply satisfied with the dinner and very grateful to the drug company, the doctor decides he’ll start prescribing the new pill tomorrow.

His night at the Palm has earned him four CME credits.

“[D]octors often pay little or nothing for the instruction because many of the companies that offer it are partly funded by makers of drugs and medical devices,” explains the Boston Globe in an article about a Harvard professor who’s starting a CME company without big pharma money.

Critics say the reliance on industry funding allows drug and device companies to influence what is taught, potentially misleading physicians about the best treatments for patients and pushing up spending on prescription drugs. They note that many other professionals pay for their own continuing education.

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Don DeLillo’s Players.

From the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

… its interest in luxury suites at University of Louisville football and basketball games onaccounta people were really pissed when they realized Dismas is a tax-funded non-profit charity sort of thing.

At first its CEO — who makes a humongous, totally corporate salary, so what’s the big deal with the luxury suites? — refused to give up his babies and said he had nothing to apologize for. Then I don’t know. Something happened. The IRS noticed the news stories about it maybe. I don’t know. Suddenly Dismas is all weepy and apologetic.

The UL athletic director agreed to release Dismas from its luxury suite contracts, but said this is “somewhat of a hardship” for the school.

You said it. They’ve got quite a few unrented luxury suites for both basketball and football and I don’t know how that has happened. Sports is a religion down there, etc., and watching the games from a luxury suite must be like worshipping at St Peter’s Basilica. You’d think they’d be clawing each other for the privilege. Anyway, I’m sure the university is making up the shortfall by destroying educational opportunities for its students.

It’s worth remembering that the University of North Carolina was not founded to field a football team; it was created to educate the sons – and much later the daughters – of the people of North Carolina…

… reports that University Diaries is blocked in China.

UD checked it out.

… [The ban on] WordPress in China could have been lifted had [the company] agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about [WordPress] users.

… Unlike other [internet] giants, WordPress took a more ethical stand[,] refusing to comply with the Chinese diktats[,] and WP blogs therefore still remain blocked in China. The situation is likely to stay the same forever unless China relaxes their censorship laws which again sounds like a remote possibility.

However:

… RSS feeds [allow you to] read any blog using a web based feed … even if the main WordPress site is blocked.

In case of WordPress blogs, you can append the string “.nyud.net” to the blog URL and it should open just fine. For instance, if the main blog is located at labnol.wordpress.com, you can access a mirror image of this site from labnol.wordpress.com.nyud.net.

Note that at the top of this page there’s a Subscribe to UD’s Feeds feature. That should work.

In yet another sign of what Marcia Angell describes as “the widespread corruption of the medical profession by industry money,” a Columbia University study reveals that

Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year…

Researchers followed the disclosure activities of a group of MDs and PhDs who were paid a million dollars or more by orthopedic device companies in 2007. Most of these people failed to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in the journals that published their articles.

And, as Angell points out, the journals get money from the companies too, in the form of advertisements, so they’re not about to actually enforce their disclosure policy…

Everybody’s getting paid, see. Professors at medical schools are getting paid. Journals are getting paid.

Some in this group might be getting paid twice, as it were. Ghostwriters, possibly hired by the same companies paying their consultancy fees, could be writing their articles for them…

Quelle postmodern! Simulacral research (ghost-written, guest-written), simulacral disclosure, simulacral journals…

Mr UD was reading through
the 1958 edition of Godel’s
Proof — a book he inherited
from his father — when
this letter fell out of it.

(Click on the pages for
readable images.)

****************

It was from a P. McCleary, in the school of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was written to Karol’s father, Jerzy Soltan, an architect who taught at Harvard.

The letter wasn’t dated, but its paper was very weathered. Its subject – beauty – is close to UD‘s heart. She’s teaching a course about it this semester at George Washington University.

McCleary sent a book along with the letter, A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy. We easily found this book, with McCleary’s underlinings in it, in our library at home (despite UD‘s math phobia, she has read it). We’re not sure how the letter ended up in Godel’s Proof.

UD quickly discovered that P. McCleary is Peter McCleary, a professor of architecture at Penn, and she wrote to him asking if she could post his letter.

He said sure, and gave me some background on it. He thinks it must have been written “on a bus in the Andes” in the early seventies. He and Jerzy “would discuss his mentor, Le Corbusier, and my mentor (from 1965), Le Ricolais – and often our mentors’ guiding principles. It was probably in that context” that the letter was written.

McCleary’s letter, and Hardy, bring to mind the famous lines from Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats:

poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Pure, creative, non-utilitarian mathematics, what Hardy calls beautiful mathematics, is like poetry: A discovered pattern, a hidden truth revealed, a new, unexpected, elegant, vivid and vivifying thing. When the pure mathematician discovers something new, the earth says something it didn’t say before: it is given, as Auden says, a mouth.

Architecture (McCleary cites Palladio and Alberti) is that peculiar art that sometimes combines Hardy’s abstract aesthetics with the grounded, practical, embodied world.

UD‘s grateful to McCleary for taking out his pen on the bus in the Andes. She’s grateful for a number of reasons, but this is perhaps the strongest: He returned her to this remarkable bit of prose from Hardy. Hardy wrote A Mathematician’s Apology toward the end of his life, and in this passage he reflects on his existence:

I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’ It is to them I owe an unusually late maturity: I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford. Since then I have suffered from that steady deterioration which is the common fate of elderly men and particularly of elderly mathematicians. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

It is plain now that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. It is very difficult to be dispassionate, but I count it a ‘success’. I have had more reward and not less than was due to a man of my particular grade of ability…

My choice was right, then, if what I wanted was a reasonably comfortable and happy life. But solicitors and stockbrokers and bookmakers often lead comfortable and happy lives, and it is very difficult to see how the world is the richer for their existence. Is there any sense in which I can claim that my life has been less futile than theirs? It seems to me again that there is only one possible answer: yes, perhaps, but, if so, for one reason only.

I have never done anything ‘useful.’ No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.

The case for my life, then, or for that of anyone else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

***************************

I’ve put McCleary’s letter back inside the pages of Hardy’s Apology, where it belongs.

***************************

UPDATE: Maurice, a reader, emails UD:

“Little did Hardy suspect that his branch of mathematics (Number Theory) would become the basis for security on the Internet.”

UD loves ironies like this.

Maurice links her to this page.

[T]oday’s Internet commerce makes heavy use of encryption techniques that depend upon results in number theory, a branch of mathematics that until relatively recently was thought of as strictly “pure mathematics,” with no real-world applications. In his book A Mathematician’s Apology, the famous British number theorist G. H. Hardy declared “The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless’.” Yet it is mathematics developed by those very mathematicians, along with Hardy himself, that keeps today’s Internet transactions secure.