Ian Hacking discusses the perennially expanding petals of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The latest revision of the DSM is now out, it’s published, it’s a done deal, so instead of people trying to change it or delegitimize it, you’ve got people reviewing it.

Like Hacking. Hacking’s philosophical, logic-based approach considers the DSM a bureaucratically useful fiction: We couldn’t have paid mental health treatment without it. But as “a representation of the nature or reality of the varieties of mental illness,” the DSM is a total failure. Its classificatory system assumes an object with a genealogy and a reasonably stable real-world character. Yet any given mental disorder lacks originary biomarkers as much as it lacks existential discreteness. Thus Hacking makes much of the DSM‘s recourse to the NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) category:

An entry [will] begin with a generic disorder, pass to various species and subspecies, and finally to NOS. Thus in DSM-IV, genus: ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’. Eight species: e.g. Schizophrenia. Five subspecies: e.g. Catatonic Type (295.20). After the first seven species with their subspecies, we come to the eighth: Psychotic Disorder, NOS (298.9). Some 32 generic disorders end with a species NOS, where patients are judged to fall under the generic heading but not under any of the specific headings… DSM-5 does its best to drop NOS, but often ends up with a mess. Thus we now have ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders’ with a structure pretty different from that of DSM-IV. There is now a species ‘Catatonia’, with two subspecies, ‘Catatonia Associated with Another Mental Disorder (Catatonia Specifier)’ (289.89), and ‘Catatonic Disorder due to Another Medical Condition’ (293.89). The generic entry ends with a noncoded ‘Unspecified Catatonia’. This applies when we cannot make out the underlying condition, or the ‘full criteria are not met’, or if we simply lack information. Then we read ‘coding note: Code first 781.89 … followed by 293.89 unspecified catatonia’, which sounds very much like NOS.

Everything sort of gutters into anything, in other words. “If,” says Hacking, “I started trying to explain the new categories under schizophrenia, I would get lost in the forest. Indeed, in reading these sections I felt unable to see the tree – schizophrenia – for all the branches that were on display.”

The DSM embodies a strange procedure whereby, as Rilke writes in his fifth Duino Elegy:

the pure too-little

is changed incomprehensibly -, altered

into that empty too-much.

A supremely ironic, supremely self-consuming artifact, then, the DSM elaborates a thing to extinction. The book turns out to be a seek and destroy mission; only billable codes are left standing. Hacking rightly describes this take on the DSM as “a far more radical criticism of it than [NIH director Thomas] Insel’s claim that the book lacks ‘validity’. I am saying it is founded on a wrong appreciation of the nature of things.”

With a full blank slate as background, as it were, research has been easy to corrupt. “[U]niversity research departments and learned journals are [often] funded by those who stand to profit – literally – from their presumed objectivity,” writes Will Self in his review of the DSM.

For the last two days, UD has been here, helping her aunt settle in. While not quite as opulent as a football facility at the University of Oregon, it’s certainly beautiful and peaceful and full of kind people.

The landscaping is terrific.

All the butterflies are out.
(UD‘s sister took this picture.)

Yesterday afternoon, the director of life enhancement stopped UD while UD was wheeling her aunt around the campus and escorted UD and her aunt to a little concert in a nearby building. A quartet of scruffy amusing fiftyish guys with guitars and drums led the way-oldies in a singalong. UD‘s aunt tapped her toes a bit, and UD belted out Those Were the Days My Friend plus the Beatles and Elvis.

Even the audience members who happened to be awake had very weak voices, so it fell to ol’ UD plus the staff, which circulated among the residents grabbing their hands and swinging them up and down to the beat, to carry off the singalong. It fell to UD and the staff to do the life, never mind the life enhancement.

As in those Roethke lines —

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling…

— UD felt herself a ridiculous impertinent envoy from life, self-deputized to make everyone care whether they lived or died.

Nike University’s new facility: The reviews are in!

On Andrew Sullivan’s site, an echt-bloggische exchange. Sullivan and his readers have been making fun of sexually suggestive names (inspired by A. Weiner). One of his readers writes to complain:

As someone with an unusual last name in which teenagers and adolescents can find a sexual reference if they try hard enough, I can assure you that all those “Dicks” and “Weiners” out there have heard the same jokes over and over. How about moving along?

Sullivan responds:

You think I have my own blog so I can “move along” when talking about funny names?

… Anthony Tommasini, New York Times music critic, because he writes really well. His review of Bayreuth’s recent train wreck of a Ring Cycle is a thing of beauty. Excerpts:

When Frank Castorf, the avant-garde German director responsible for this confounding concept, took the stage with his production team, almost the entire audience, it seemed, erupted with loud, prolonged boos. It went on for nearly 10 minutes, by my watch, because Mr. Castorf, 62, who has been running the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) of Berlin since 1992, stood steadfast onstage, his arms folded stiffly. He sometimes jabbed a finger at the audience, essentially defying the crowd to keep it coming.

… Mr. Castorf presents the “Ring” as a metaphorical story of the global quest for oil, with the resulting era of war, oppression, corporate greed and environmental destruction. But Mr. Castorf did not follow through with this theme very consistently.

In the first act of “Siegfried,”which opened on Monday, Mr. Castorf and the set designer, Aleksandar Denic, playfully evoke the battle over energy that was a major component of the cold war. The setting is supposed to show the forest dwelling where Mime, the Nibelung dwarf, has raised the orphaned Siegfried into brawny young manhood. Here Mime’s home is a trailer-park campsite in front of a stunning scenic riff on Mount Rushmore: The faces of the American presidents have been replaced by Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. But often the oil quest imagery just seems slapped on, literally: for no clear reasons, singers smear one another with crude oil.

… [N]ear the end of “Siegfried” …(you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semiautomatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music, the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

… [One] crucial scene … begins at the Marxist Mount Rushmore, then moves to an almost-reproduction of the Alexanderplatz, the Socialist-era transit hub and shopping center in Berlin.

[At another point, a singer] scurried up a stairway to consult a hairy-chested man, who wheels a baby carriage down the stairs, spilling its contents — potatoes — everywhere. At least they looked like potatoes. If you are expecting me to explain this (or Wotan’s being orally serviced — one Rhinemaiden sucking oil off the finger of another as they look longingly into each other’s eyes), I am sorry to disappoint you…

This oil business reminds me of another avant-garde effort, in the pages of Vogue.

When UD saw that name in the news this morning, it stirred a memory… She’d written about Evan Dobelle years ago on this blog…

So she checked her archives, and there it was – Dobelle was busy being fired, back in ’04, from the presidency of the University of Hawaii. He was accused of excessive personal spending.

The University of Hawaii is among this country’s very worst university systems, so Dobelle was moving into a laughable mess when he took that job. On the other hand, he does seem to have spent lavishly, with little in the way of results.

Dobelle, who jumps from job to job with suspicious rapidity, is, à ce moment-là, president of one Westfield State University, where damned if he isn’t facing exactly the same charges.

She’s got the fiction part down.

Well, the local media’s got hold of the Charles Bennett story, and people in South Carolina think it’s a bit odd that after Bennett was booted out of Northwestern University for stealing grant funds (background here), the University of South Carolina turned around and picked him right up, giving him an endowed chair and a salary of close to $300,000. Crime pays.

USC’s spokesman came out with the brilliant response I quote in my title. The school can’t comment on any phenomenon that doesn’t involve USC. The allegations are a matter of public record, everyone’s commenting on them, but USC has a policy of not commenting on anything in the world that happens that doesn’t involve USC.

I guess the principle extends to hiring at USC too — since whatever Bennett did in Chicago doesn’t involve USC, he’s in. When Bennett steals USC grant money, then USC will review his position… Because then it will involve USC…

[Harvard University professor Lawrence Summers] consults not only for hedge fund DE Shaw but for venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, asset-management and advisory firm Alliance Partners, stock-exchange operator Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., and for financial services firm Citigroup. He also has a healthy income from speaking — more than $100,000 earlier this year, for example, for a single speech to a conference organized by Drobny Global Advisors.

That is a busy schedule for a full-time faculty member who, like other professors, is allowed only a day a week for consulting — and Summers also chairs the advisory board of the Minerva Project, an online university startup, and holds an administrative role as Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

This is the same Lawrence Summers who told Professor Cornel West to stop spending so much time on his outside activities and get back to his scholarship — because more was expected of a University Professor.

Harry Lewis, Huffington Post.

… Grambling State University?

“The athletics department runs at a $1 million-plus deficit on an annual basis. In the past we’ve taken those funds from the academic side and directed it toward athletics. This year (2012-13), we had to take it from auxiliary services — that’s student dining, the bookstore and dorms. We can’t do that again.”

Let’s sample a few paragraphs from a pretty typical recent appraisal of GSK. This is from Forbes – not exactly a business-unfriendly publication.

Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs.

But the combination of pharma’s noncompliant corporate culture and the prevalence of corrupt business practices in China and other emerging economies could have a lethal impact on many more consumers as pharma shifts more research and development functions, manufacturing operations and marketing efforts to those growing markets.

UD will ask what she has asked on this blog before: When does a company like Glaxo get filthy enough – lethal enough – for American universities to reconsider their relationship to it? Take for instance the fact that the president of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is on Glaxo’s board of directors. Does that bother you at all? Does that bother anyone at Texas Southwestern – a school that’s had more than its share of corruption scandals in the last decade – at all? Put aside questions of reputation, questions about whether universities are something different from corporations – such questions have no relevance to Texas institutions. Rather, think of this developing story pragmatically. You have an endemically corrupt industry. Corruption is all it knows. To quote that guy in An Officer and a Gentleman, It ain’t got nowhere else to go. To quote that guy in the Frank Sinatra song, It’s gotta be it. To quote that guy in the Cage Aux Folles song, It is what it is. To quote that chick in the Barbra Streisand song, Don’t ask me not to cheat I’ve simply got to. To quote that chick in the Mitzi Gaynor song, Get the picture?

So, you know, like SAC Capital Advisors and like Goldman Sachs, GlaxoSmithKline is really really grotty. Is this – university-wise – even an issue? Even a subject? Do all the Glaxo professorships at your institution bother you maybe even slightly? Does the fact that your medical school is run by a Glaxo director stand out to you in any way as something worth thinking about?

… are taking their money and leaving them uneducated and unemployable. Chile’s totally filthy for-profit university sector has now been outed; and though I’m sure – as with all diploma mills – the owners will lie low for a bit and come back again filthier than ever, the forced resignation of Chile’s justice minister is certainly good news.

The resignation of Teodoro Ribera on Monday was the latest in an unfolding saga that has prompted massive street demonstrations, criminal investigations and the jailing of a dean suspected of money laundering and a former government official accused of selling university accreditations.

Same deal as in the States: Pay bribes to get your website accredited as a school and instantly start stashing away state cash. If you have a physical campus:

[Structure] deals with property developers who … build the educational institutions then rent them back to the university. The monthly rent – often paid to members of the same university management team – [is] used to strip money from the institution.

And – hey look! It’s the guys who own the University of Phoenix!

Further revelations … led the Chilean government to announce on Tuesday an investigation into possible violations of regulations by two more universities including UNIACC University, owned by Apollo Global, which according to the company website is “a $1bn joint venture formed in 2007, 80.1% owned by Apollo Group Inc and 19.9% owned by a private equity firm, the Carlyle Group”.

… my readers, who regularly send me items of interest on which they think this blog should comment? University Diaries couldn’t do its thing without all of you linking UD to university stuff.

Just in the last couple of days, readers sent me this facility-porn from the University of Oregon; an instance of jesuitical reasoning in the Georgetown University newspaper; strong commentary and – in the comments on the commentary – strong debate on the just-released MIT report in the Aaron Swartz case; and details on growing civil resistance against threats to privacy at Penn State.

As the new academic year begins, UD will – with your help – continue covering and commenting on university stories like these.

… Jones, on the subject of perks for university administrators. As always, she will link to the piece when it comes out.

Ovidius Ovidius
With rector insidious
Ovidius, Constanta campus!