One of the high points of UD‘s writing life was being published, about twenty years ago, in Richard Poirier’s journal, Raritan. She had long admired Poirier’s essays on literature — his independent spirit, his beautiful writing style — and was thrilled when he put her in Raritan.

Poirier has died, age 83, from a fall.

This charming tribute to him — “”He was a wonderful man. He was fantastic, rambunctious, beefy with energy.” — comes from the poet Frederick Seidel, Poirier’s longtime friend. (Have I posted on Seidel on this blog? I think I have. I’ll check.) (I have. But this reminds me that I’ve meant to write about his poetry. I’ll do that. Maybe today.)

I was surprised to read that his father was a fisherman. I’d have guessed diplomat, lawyer.

PowerPoint Confidential, a new University Diaries feature, quotes university students on their experience of PowerPoint in the classroom. Here’s a PPC from an Indian student:

I’m a student at one of the most prestigious technology institutes in my country, and yet, in my 3 years of study, I’ve never come across an interesting PowerPoint presentation. All of my professors, with only one rare exception, try to cram as much text as possible into as few slides as possible.

Here’s another, from the same comment thread:

The worst Powerpoint presentation I ever sat through was in my second year at University. It was about the theory of Fascism and lasted two hours without a break. Plus, it had over 70 slides. Each slide was packed with information and it was impossible to keep up. I have never been so bored or learnt less.

Both remarks come from a comment thread for a BBC News PowerPoint retrospective: Twenty-five years of PowerPoint. The article itself is a pithy summary of everything that’s wrong with PowerPoint: too much information, too many slides, too much text, very little eye contact. People aren’t designed to read and listen at the same time, the author notes. He concludes that the whole thing tends to create a lazy, disengaged, slide-dependent speaker.

Do we really want to read the three hundred page transcript from “an October 2008 hearing in Indianapolis, attended by [Florida State University] President T.K. Wetherell, at which FSU and NCAA officials discussed the case involving 61 student-athletes who cheated, many in an online music class.“?

Some judge just ruled that the NCAA’s decision to hide the transcript from us is “clearly contrary to the broad interpretation given to the definition of public records in Florida courts and legislative language.”

So now UD will have to read – at least skim — at least read other writers’ excerpts from — a conversation about an instance of academic fraud so enormous that FSU has had to “vacate … 14 football victories from the 2006 and 2007 seasons and two national championships in men’s track and field.” Wetherell’s a clueless, sports-mad fool; the NCAA … well, you know.

It seems to UD that Florida has grotesquely overbroad notions of what’s in the public record. It’s in no one’s interest to have to read these men. I say keep it sealed.

… but pretty much everyone else is cool with the latest alcohol promotion campaign in America, timed to coincide with the beginning of the academic year. Supermarkets near football schools now stock Bud Light cans with each school’s team colors on them.

“Show your true colors with Bud Light,” the company says, according to copies of internal marketing materials obtained by colleges. “This year, only Bud Light is delivering superior drinkability in 12-ounce cans that were made for gameday.”

Sure, there’s a little controversy. There’s a little embarrassment among some administrators at so … vivid a demonstration of the college football / alcohol synergy … I mean, campuses are even as we speak preparing to hit incoming students up with mandatory online you shouldn’t drink so much classes, and with stern admonitions about the unacceptability of wall-to-wall booze on campus; and yet here’s school pride stamped on case after case of beer lining the walls of the local supermarket. Funny.

The single big ick is John Calipari, but UD ain’t gonna sully her pages with his latest thing.

What interests her is that a sports columnist writing about Calipari commits two little icks in a row.

Let’s take a look.

Now that Calipari has raised his hind leg and defacated all over the basketball program by causing Memphis to now have the unique distinction of having its Final Four appearance tossed in the trash — all before scampering off to Kentucky — what do Memphis fans and university backers think of him now?

Hm. Now that I look at it again, there are any number of icks in this sentence. But … When’s the last time your dog raised his hind leg to shit? Plus … If you can’t spell defecate, you should write shit, because that’s easier to spell.

“Call it weed, Mother. Or call it pot.”

Okay, weed. Pot. I don’t smoke it.

Nor do I light cigarettes.

Or farts.

Since I never cook, I do not light my oven.

I used to light candles, but now I’m afraid.

When it’s cold out and I’m in the mood, I light a fire in my hearth.

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Far as UD can tell, from her admittedly limited ‘thesdan perspective, she and Mr UD are about the only people of any age anywhere in the region who do not sometimes take a hit. UD hasn’t gone out and interviewed people, but that’s kind of how it looks.

So she figures this guy is probably telling the truth when he says his step-father — a law professor at Suffolk University — smokes pot with him. This guy deals the drug, and he has brought to his anxious upscale neighborhood some of the gun play disagreements among dealers can sometimes prompt. So he’s in court, and he has been talking about his family life. Of course, he could be lying. But his account has the homely feel of the truth.

Jonathon Cook, 20, said his stepfather, Suffolk University law professor Timothy Wilton, helped him build a place to grow marijuana in exchange for some of the profits and also smoked it in the house, according to a police report.

He said that his mother, Kathy Jo Cook — the former president of the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts — also knew about the drug activity and frequently complained that her husband’s smoking left the house smelling like marijuana, authorities said. … Authorities said they found a small smoking pipe in a dresser drawer in the parents’ bedroom, a scale and several baggies in the bedroom and another pipe in a closet in an office only they use… After his arrest, Cook told police his parents knew that he was selling drugs out of their home, and that his stepfather built a “grow closet” for marijuana plants. They agreed to split the proceeds of sales from the plants, Cook said.

Cook also said his stepfather bought marijuana from him, occasionally stole it from him and “constantly smoked marijuana,” according to the police report.

“He said that Mr. Wilton walks around the house smoking marijuana and his mother gets upset at him because the house smells like marijuana,” police wrote in the report…

If it’s true, it’s no one’s business. On the other hand, you shouldn’t tell lies.

They’re hip, they’re hot, and, after years in the shadows, they’re coming to a university near you.

They’re the new wave in academia, and they’re blowing all the old ways of being a professor out of the water.

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Move over, Guest Lecturer; make room for Ghost Lecturer.

Visiting Professor? Visitant Professor!

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It’s the Prime of Miss Jean Spooky. It’s Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Mr Blips. It’s Goodbye Mr Spock, Hello Mr Spook.

It’s Ghoul School, and it’s just in time for Halloween.

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Ghost professors we’ve always had with us, but they’ve mainly haunted Europe, where the halls of derelict public campuses echo with the spirits of absentee lecturers, and the Middle East, where veiled specters flit from room to room.

It’s only lately, with the rise of medical school ghostwriters, PowerPoint zombies, and the daemons of distance learning, that America has come to know its own faculty phantasms. These are the professors who take advantage of new technologies and corporate simulations of scholarship to enter into a liminal realm where one is at once disembodied and salaried, silent and published, vanished and teaching.

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To be sure, a few naysayers have crawled out of the woodwork.

They even have a rallying cry, something Frederic Chopin once said:

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Excerpts from the comment thread of a New York Times article about ghostwriting among medical school professors.

Launch budgets can easily exceed $300 to $500 million. Madison Avenue firms write the ghost articles, drug reps target regional physician ‘opinion leaders’ who are compensated in creative ways to put their names on the articles. Later the drug reps coordinate numerous speaking opportunities for the ‘opinion leaders.’ A single rep might in a two to three day event usher the ‘opinion leader’ through 10 or so physician offices to speak directly to the ‘script writers’ in the rep’s territory. During the evening hours the ‘opinion leader’ addresses large gatherings of ‘script writers’ at dinners.

The really interesting thing is that the ‘opinion leader’ generally reads from a pre-written script and a deck of PowerPoint slides with which he has almost no familiarity. It is supposed to be his research. I have literally witnessed ‘opinion leaders’ read directly from the slides prepared in advance by the drug maker, then not be able to answer reasonable questions based on what he has read.

What is most striking is that no one in the audience seems to be shaken by this.

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Most physicians are barely literate and could not write a grammatical paragraph if their lives depended on it. As one friend of mine has said, “If you take out the writers, the medical literature would be gibberish.”

They also don’t have the time to do much writing. Medical writers are just writers — much like corporate or political speechwriters — who help the author get the words on the paper.

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Regardless of their technical brilliance, many medical and scientific professionals are poor writers. They need help to write well-organized, comprehensible journal articles.

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When a professor is handed a manuscript and they make a few phone calls or minor corrections, they have not met the standard of ownership. Placement of their name on the paper, and in some of these papers as the only name, is claiming property rights that have not been earned and is a form of plagiarism. It is up to their university to enforce the rules on academic misconduct and take appropriate action. If a few full Professors were stripped of their tenure, you would see this malignant process grind to a quick halt.

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That this could be considered acceptable and even the norm in academic medicine is an indication of the depth of corruption of the medical schools in the U.S.

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From the Associated Press:

Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline used a sophisticated ghostwriting program to promote its antidepressant Paxil, allowing doctors to take credit for medical journal articles mainly written by company consultants, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

… Known as the CASPPER program, the paper explains how the company can help physicians with everything from “developing a topic,” to “submitting the manuscript for publication.”

The document was uncovered by the Baum Hedlund PC law firm of Los Angeles, which is representing hundreds of former Paxil users in personal injury and wrongful death suits against GlaxoSmithKline. The firm alleges the company downplayed several risks connected with its drug, including increased suicidal behavior and birth defects.

… According to ghostwriting expert Dr. Leemon McHenry, Glaxo’s program was unusually intertwined with its internal sales and marketing department.

“We know that GSK has engaged in ghostwriting for many years,” said McHenry, who works as a research consultant for Baum Hedlund. “But to create an internal ghostwriting program and have the gall to name it after a cartoon ghost demonstrates their juvenile attitude and careless disregard for patients.”…

What an irritable, judgmental remark on the part of McHenry. The man has no sense of humor.

Is Arnold Klein — Michael Jackson BFF, probably father of two of his kids, supplier of calming agents to Jackson, and soon to be arrested — is Arnold Klein a professor at UCLA?

He’s not listed on the medical faculty page, and yet as recently as last June the UCLA Newsroom cited a magazine article that quotes him, and the school identified him as a “UCLA clinical professor of dermatology.”

Indeed, he shows up on a directory page.

Most surprisingly, given how much in the headlines he’s been lately, Klein’s mentioned not at all on the dermatology department’s professors-in-the-news page, which contents itself with cellulite and athlete’s foot updates.

Its campus bat house has collapsed under the weight of its own urine, and now thousands of bats are flying about everywhere. Those that died in the collapse are being eaten by hawks.

Yummy! And just in time for new student week.

America’s newspaper of record, and a high-profile senator, keep up the pressure.

But still nothing. And we need, once again, to ask why that is.  Why universities refuse to do anything about professors on their faculties who ghostwrite in medical research journals.

The New York Times has published yet another, even longer, exposé of faculty who do no work on articles to which they sign their name.  The true authors of the articles are drug companies who both shape the content of the articles and place them in journals read by prescribing physicians. 

The ghost professor essentially does nothing at all.  Nothing.  That’s why she’s called a ghost. She takes money from the company in exchange for allowing it to float her name over the article.  She often has little notion of what’s in the article. 

If she took the time to look, she’d find a whitewash.  An argument for the obvious superiority of the company’s drug over all competing drugs.  She’d find not a scientific article, but a commercial.

… [M]any universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.

With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

… “How long does it have to go on before it actually is stopped? One way to stop it would be if the actual authors were punished in some way,” said Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota. “But the academics who are complicit in it all never seem to be punished at all.”

… [B]ioethicists said that medical schools must take responsibility for faculty members whose publications do not explicitly acknowledge the work of writers receiving industry support. Such subsidized articles allow pharmaceutical companies to use the imprimatur of respected academics — and by extension, the stature of their institutions — to increase sales of certain drugs, ultimately skewing patient care, they said.

… [T]he medical school of a single university, Columbia, is home to three professors who were authors of Wyeth-financed articles.

… Dr. Michelle P. Warren, [is] a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia. Her article was published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2004, when women feared that Wyeth’s brand of hormone drugs could be causing particular problems. The thesis of the article was that no one hormone therapy was safer than another.

The published article acknowledged help from four people. But it did not disclose that DesignWrite employed two of those people and the other two worked at Wyeth. Court documents show DesignWrite sent a prepublication copy to Wyeth for vetting and charged Wyeth $25,000 for the article, information not disclosed in the paper.

In a phone interview, Dr. Warren said the article was intended to clear up confusion over the risks of hormone drugs. She said she worked on the project in phone conversations and in meetings… [Way to publish scientific research, honey. Over the phone and in meetings. Hi, it’s Michelle! How much for putting my name on the article? … Sounds good. Go ahead. Presto -Warren’s 155th article this year. Raise and promotion for research productivity coming up.]

 … A new policy at Columbia took effect in January. It prohibits medical school faculty, trainees and students from being authors or co-authors of articles written by employees of commercial entities if the author’s name or Columbia title is used without substantive contribution. [Lots of wiggle room in substantive, so that’s worthless.]  The policy, which does not retroactively cover articles like Dr. Warren’s, requires any article written with a for-profit company to include full disclosure of the role of each author, as well as any other industry contribution.

But Dr. Elliott, the bioethicist, said universities should go further than mere disclosure, prohibiting faculty members from working with industry-sponsored writers. Policies asking only for disclosure “allow pharmaceutical companies to launder their marketing messages,” he said.

No, the laundry will continue to get done; the whitewashing will go on as always. A multi-billion dollar industry can afford a lot of detergent.

An Oregonian editorial about ghostwritten medical articles evokes the university subculture that produces professors with no compunction about taking money in exchange for having their names put on studies written not by them, but by corporations selling pills.

There’s seldom any indication that these ghosts have read the articles they’re pretending – in exchange for money from the pharmaceutical company – to have written.

The practice is widespread and will, UD predicts, never really end. An entire subsidiary industry — the businesses that actually write the ghostwritten article and then chase down corrupt professors to pretend authorship — has evolved to serve pharma’s need to give new drugs the appearance of scientific legitimacy. As long as journals play along, how will we ever be able to stop it?

A commenter on the editorial writes:

It is certainly unethical to add your name to a ghost written paper. Unfortunately, it really isn’t that rare – especially in these sorts of fields – to have everyone on the research team, from the post-docs to the Principal Investigator to all put their names on a paper, even though it would be physically impossible for all of them to have actually contributed to the writing (and implausible for them to have personally contributed to the research). So you often end up having a dozen or more authors and vitaes with a couple of hundred publications.

I recall that when I was a grad student I questioned my advisor adding his name to my paper. I got the response that I was lucky he was allowing me to keep my name on it. I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

Get the picture?

The Oregonian editorial adds:

A pharmaceutical company pays a writer to write a report touting a drug’s benefits, with the author “TBD” (to be decided). Then the company shops for a prestigious researcher to sign off on it and pump up the findings with institutional credibility. The results, published in a respected medical journal, often are widely disseminated in newspapers, magazines and medical blogs. If the news reverberates long enough in this echo chamber, the drug’s supposed benefits can become conventional wisdom.

… “This is actually putting your name on something without any firsthand knowledge about it,” explains Dr. Susan Tolle, director of Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Ethics in Health Care.

The good news, Tolle says, is that this practice is being cleaned up. OHSU and other research institutions have cracked down on it. The bad news is that it continues to infect the journal literature that is still in circulation and has entered the mainstream of medical lore.

Prestigious researchers who loan their names — for a fee — to drug companies for such articles not only wind up duping patients but also other doctors and ultimately cast doubt on reports that are perfectly legitimate…

The editors call for an end to the practice, but again UD asks: How? The drug companies won’t end it — especially given the noises people are making lately about ending direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs — and the journals are always going to be amiable dunces who understand where their advertising revenue comes from.

That leaves the universities whose halls the ghosts haunt. The universities who boast of professors who flit from industry-compromised continuing medical education outings, to undisclosed hawking of pills and devices, to the prostitution of their integrity in industry-compromised research journals.

We know from the farce of campus conflict of interest management that universities too will do nothing. How, precisely, can they crack down? Has any ghost lost her job? Suffered any penalty? Even been acknowledged – after her exposure in the press – as a ghost by her university?

That leaves the consumer.

Feeling her way alone, in the dark.

From today’s The Tennessean:

A new study just released by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy shows 90% of bank notes from 18 cities have traces of cocaine on them.

DC topped the list of cities where the testing took place with ninety five percent of the sampled bills testing positive. The study indicates a 20% rise in the amount of cocaine on DC’s money over the past two years.

… Chemists at George Washington University confirm the accuracy of the test results, indicating the highest cocaine levels were detected on five, ten and twenty dollar bills.

Doctor Akos Vertes and his assistant Peter Nemes tested bills Monday evening using a technique recently discovered at Purdue University, “We apply high voltage. This high voltage drives the liquid to the tip of the paper… this gives off ions and these ions are characteristic of the chemicals that were on the paper.”

Former Mayor Marion Barry has a theory on why more cocaine is on DC money these days, “From what I can gather from the study, Washington is no different than other large cities but it means a shift in drug use.”

Barry thinks tough times might be driving cocaine use but others say it could be the result of contaminated bills mixing with regular currency inside ATMs.

UD‘s head is spinning. Help her out on this one.

No problem with her colleagues in Chemistry zapping coked up Jacksons. Someone’s gotta do it, and the English department lacks the lab and expertise. Plus it’s always interesting, as on annual Share Your Research Day, to find out what other professors are doing.

But Marion Barry? Has he really gone from the nation’s most notorious crack user to someone who gathers this and gathers that about our drug problem?

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Update: Apparently Barry has. Vertes reproduces the local news segment about his cocaine work.

Today is Bad Poetry Day, an important, neglected, American holiday on which for just one day out of the year we face up to the fact that most poetry is terrible and demoralizing.

The much-touted National Poetry Month tries to make us believe that our poetry strengthens us as a nation, but in our hearts we know most American verse is demoralizing. Not merely because it’s so bad, but because we’ve got to walk around pretending it’s good.

Let us, on this day, begin by revisiting something UD wrote some time back about National Poetry Month:

“…[T]aste occasionally dies,” writes Brian Phillips, surveying our mobbed up, wheezy poetry scene. “The capabilities of taste are not present to the same degree in every art audience; they will sometimes, with regard to one medium or another, seem to weaken, to shrivel away.” And when they do, “a kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes…. [T]he loss of a sense of a shared standard of value has left readers of poetry somewhat numbed in their own preferences. There is something oddly anonymous and neutral in the expressions of enthusiasm one encounters for contemporary poetry, in book-jacket blurbs, for instance; one often feels as though it is the system of poetry itself, or some aspect of the poetry culture, that is being approved of, and not any poet or poem. … [T]aste [has] dissolved until we find ourselves unable to form intuitive aesthetic judgments, unable to know the ground on which such judgments could legitimately be formed, and thus adrift in an indifference that we ritualistically pretend is something else.”

That something else is the neutral enthusiasm for verse as a sunbeam in this dark world of ours.

Phillips continues: “The problem for American poetry is really a problem of taste, the way in which the power of intuitive judgment, and the kind of aesthetic experience it makes possible, is really what is felt to have been lost. … We are living among the consequences, in other words, of what has been a profound weakening over the last two hundred years of the objective capability of taste. … There is now virtually no sense among poetry readers of a fixed and commonly accessible standard of aesthetic value, either as a set of widely accepted critical principles or as a sense functioning intuitively among readers.”

The public thing, the NPM thing, the thing about how we have to get more people to read poetry, degrades the artform, which will always be of interest to few readers. “James Longenbach,” Phillips notes, ”has written that poetry’s expanding audience ‘has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness.’ And Richard Howard has urged that the only way to ’save’ poetry is to restore it ‘to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that characterizes our only authentic pleasures.’”

Real critics of poetry, like William Logan and August Kleinzahler, whip up national furies against themselves because they refuse the robotic smiling indifference Phillips describes and instead take poetry with the seriousness the form deserves. For them, every day is bad poetry day. If you read them, you will begin to understand the elements of bad poetry. Here are some of them:

emotionality / sentimentality / over-sincerity / cloying sweetness

the opposite of this also creates bad poetry: faking emotions

pretentiousness, vanity: revelling in your depression, your passion, whatever

a desperate desire to be original that makes you cutesy, weird, obtuse, unserious

formlessness — the poem is, for instance, merely disconnected fragments

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Feel free to add to this list. And to the next list: Elements of good poetry:

language mastery – linguistic brilliance, beauty of expression

rewarding complexity – complexity adequate to the complexity of life, not complexity for its own sake

formal control – an understanding of the history of poetic forms, and an ability to work within, or depart intelligently from, that history