“Seventy-eight percent [of Americans polled] believed that accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical industry influences their doctors’ prescribing habits.”
Know why it’s so many?
Because accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical industry influences doctors’ prescribing habits.
The Washington Post anticipates the establishment of a public database that will let patients look up their doctors’ industry ties.
… should really stop, writes the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Especially since the grubber in question is the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, which got a million dollars from a drug company to put UW’s good name behind the company’s synthetic testosterone.
Said testosterone is not only of uncertain benefit to men older than 45; it might actually be dangerous. But its maker, Solvay, touted it on a continuing medical education website which offered CME credit to doctors who read articles on the site about it. And, since a real live university sponsored the deal, the medicine looked legit.
Industry funding of continuing medical education should be phased out to avoid conflicts, and Congress should require full disclosure of all industry payments for continuing medical education.
Phasing out industry funding of CME means phasing out CME, at least as we’ve come to know it.
“In terms of identity, I think one has a sense of being roughly the same set of thoughts as one was yesterday. Of a continuum of observation. But you give yourself your own character by telling yourself stories, don’t you, really?”
… [Various childhood events] contributed to the framework of his writing, in which the need to understand the world is held in tension with the comic hopelessness of doing so.
… “I had a sharper sense of death in middle age than I now have. I think that’s common to all of us. When your parents die, when your father dies, when a friend or two dies, what you had known all along comes home; that this will happen to you too. When you get to be older, it is something that ceases to worry you so much somehow.”
… [W]hen we talk about the distinction between writing journalism and plays, Frayn suggests that all of it comes from the same place, from the pressing need to sense a shape and a pattern in the rush and surprise of experience.
“All journalists have to be acutely aware of that process, but we all are really. What do you tell your friends when you meet, what do you tell your wife when you get home at night? It’s all stories, something that will catch the interest.” …
UD learned this lesson rather late in life.
Well into their teens, she and her older sister, Barbara, would say the name Moise Tshombe together, the Moise very soft and then, explosively, TSHOmbe, and laugh hysterically.
But then, when La Kid was seven or so, UD encountered, in one of her books, Chrysanthemum the mouse. People make fun of Chrysanthemum’s name until one day her dance teacher, admired by all, discloses that her name is Delphinium Twinkle, and she’s proud of it. After that, people stop making fun of Chrysanthemum.
And yet… isn’t it true that even when you’ve learned this lesson, certain names and titles arise that make it difficult to contain your laughter?
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I’m not talking about grossly ridiculous names intended to make you laugh, like Incontinentia Buttocks and Biggus Dickus. I mean real names and titles.
For instance — while the name Dr. P. “Som” Somasundaran isn’t particularly funny (It’s one of many long foreign names that Americans decide they can’t handle, and so they take the first syllable and make that a nickname. The long-name-as-funny thing only works if the name is insanely long, as in the Simpsons character, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.), “Som”s title is, I think, funny. “Som” is La von Duddleson Krumb Professor, Director Langmuir Center for Colloids & Interfaces, Director National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Studies in Novel Surfactants at Columbia University.
La von Duddleson Krumb is a funny name. Go ahead and tell me it’s not.
And then there’s the insanely long tripartite title itself: Professor, Director, Director again… and then if you’re not so exhausted that you haven’t given up, you get to teeny little whimpering Columbia University at the end…
The underlying joke principle here I guess is that in going to amazing extremes to impress you with the amazingness of his titled amazingness, “Som” has accomplished the opposite of his intention.
I mean, you know she likes a good hoax if you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile and following her happy, excited coverage of hoaxes of all kinds, but mainly literary hoaxes.
There’s even a case study featuring UD in the soon-to-be-issued Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders update. Look for her under H, for hoaxophilia.
But while UD revels in the details of hoax writing and in statements from hoaxers like James Frey who’ve been found out, she’s disgusted by the thought of actually spending any time with the douchebags.
Thanks to the miracle of tv, however, we can wile away hours (use while away if you prefer) listening to hoaxers talk about what they’ve done, deny that they’ve done it, embellish their lies, etc., etc.
As I say, I can’t imagine doing this myself, but if you’re into it, you can spend a long evening with one of the most notorious hoaxers of all, Norma Khouri, who wrote a best-selling, searing memoir about her wretched life in Jordan. All of it lies.
Just get hold of Anna Broinowski’s film, Forbidden Lies. An Australian tv critic prepares us:
In addition to dozens of errors about Islam and life in Jordan, Dalia [the main wretched person] did not exist, there was no honour killing as she described, Khouri hadn’t lived in Jordan when she said she did and she hadn’t fled the country when, she says, her life became endangered for daring to tell her friend’s story.
In fact, she’d been living for years in Chicago with her husband and two children. The story was broken by Malcolm Knox, literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and it won him a Walkley award. But the really big story was yet to be revealed.
Anna Broinowski’s film is an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get to the bottom of Khouri’s web of claims and counter-claims. Despite evidence that seems to prove Khouri’s deceit, she manages to worm and squirm and reshape her version of events at every turn so that it’s impossible to pin her down.
Well, what sort of hoaxer would she be if she couldn’t do that?
PowerPoint in England, from The Times:
Bertan Budak, [a student at Durham University, says]: “Lecturers are not interesting while teaching in class because they only say things rather than teaching. A lecturer spends more of lecturing time concentrating on PowerPoint presentations rather than focusing on the students.”
From the article’s comment thread:
A common tale amongst many graduates, myself included. A few weeks into the second year I realised… lectures will always be a case of reiterating bullet points on the PowerPoint presentation…
For the latter half of my uni education I, along with many of my classmates, brought in other material so we spent the time wisely, instead of listening to a balding guy repeating what was said on the screen.
… as everyone outside, and almost everyone inside, schools of education knows. This blog has followed the sickening absurdities of professional organizations like NCATE (scroll past the first post, and read the subsequent ones), designed to dismiss intelligent, independent-minded people from the profession, but there’s so much more to be said about the deadheads running the show.
Some of it gets said in the pages of the New York Times today by a variety of observers. Excerpts:
Nothing shows how downright phony the game is than the Ed.D.s — the Doctors of Education. I have seen administrators who have had trouble writing clear letters home to parents and who murdered the English language in public go about brandishing their degrees and insisting on being called “Doctor.” On the other hand, the two best principals in my high school — T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va. — never bothered to get “doctorate” degrees; in fact, one did not even have a master’s when he was first hired. Both were appointed by wise superintendents who knew natural leaders when they saw them.
The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.
[W]hat we have now [is] a charade that confuses taking mind-numbing education courses with being a “highly qualified” teacher and has ended up filling schools with tenured mediocrity the kids don’t deserve.
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This system lacks quality control and too often encourages universities to offer quick, low quality graduate programs in order to attract those teachers who may be more interested in salary bumps than professional development.
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A master’s degree in most subfields in education (especially reading — or what they like to call “literacy” — early childhood education, teaching and elementary education) adds little or nothing to students’ knowledge or practical skills.
Indeed, a master’s degree in most education subfields further stamps in the “progressive,” “child-centered,” “constructivist,” “developmentally appropriate,” postmodernist, pseudo-liberationist baloney that infects the undergraduate curriculum, and which leaves graduating ed students unprepared to provide their own students with coherent, logically sequenced instruction.
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… which knows an important trend when it sees one.
UD will let the citizens of Minnesota do the talking on the subject of their big beautiful new university football stadium and its money problems.
They express themselves on the comment thread of a recent Pioneer Press article. That’s one of the citizens up there, in my headline.
First you need to know the latest on the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium, the cost-overrun, unnecessary stadium that was going to bring in all sorts of revenue for the university.
For those who don’t click to the article, the deal is that because they can’t serve booze, the university’s not selling its luxury boxes.
You will need a few drinks after a couple seasons of watching the Gophers play football. Heck who am I kidding? You need to be smashed right now just to stand em.
[The team it’s all for, the Gophers, suck.]
Does it hurt not to drink for a couple of hours? Poor little football jocks can’t have a beer whaaaa whaaaa whaaaa.
[This guy doesn’t understand that the luxury boxes are bought by corporations plying potential clients with alcohol. No ply, no play.]
So … seats aren’t selling, the place is hemorrhaging taxpayer money and bleeding whatever educational mission might be left at the university.
It’s not so much that drunks must have their football. If it’s going to pay for itself, football must have its drunks.
Excerpts from a Minnesota Public Radio conversation about this:
Murray Sperber: The breathalyzer’s a good idea…. [The stadium will have mandatory breathalyzer tests at the gate for students who have been drunk at games before… What? Why the tests and security cameras everywhere etc. etc. if the stadium will be alcohol free? Are you really asking that question??? LOL.] I’ve been appalled by the behavior of young drunk male students… It’s dangerous… I’ve never understood why universities don’t control tailgating… It’s on their land… Part of the reason is they don’t want to piss off alumni… Many of these people tailgating and drinking are not in fact alumni; they’re local fans of the team… The schools can’t unburden themselves from bigtime university sports and the various myths that say they’re helping the university.
Toben Nelson: Division I football games are drinking events… Alumni are a major barrier to making any serious changes to alcohol policy on campus…
“These articles contributed to widespread prescription of hormones to women who did not need them, but who were put at risk of blood clots, breast cancer, and other adverse effects,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center, a pharmaceutical industry critic.
Adriane’s pissed because Wyeth, maker of the often unnecessary and sometimes dangerous hormones in question, wrote five articles, which reached hundreds of thousands of doctors, praising its own hormones.
Great hormones, if I do say so myself…
I mean, of course Wyeth didn’t reveal in the articles that it was praising its own hormones. That’d be nuts. People would dismiss the findings as advertising rather than science. Nor did the professors of medicine Wyeth paid to put their names on the articles reveal that they didn’t write a word of them. That’d be nuts too. Their reputations as scientists of integrity would go up in smoke.
These are polite people, these ghosts, and, like Gloria Bachmann, another Wyeth ghost, they went out of their way to thank the ghostwriting firm Wyeth paid to write the articles the ghosts didn’t write. (To clarify: The distinction here is between ghosts, who simply float about, and ghostwriters, who put the ghosts’ names on things the ghostwriters have written.)
Leon Speroff, one of the ghosts, wrote the following to his ghostwriters about the article he got paid to pretend he wrote:
“You did a super job of writing this paper – succinct and makes the points very well.”
Leon’s mother taught him to say thank you when he got a gift.
Leon’s mother forgot to tell him not to steal.
James Stein, a [University of Wisconsin] cardiologist, said he was approached twice in the last week to put his name on educational material for different drug companies. He said he turned down both offers because, “frankly, it’s plagiarism.”
“If an undergraduate did this, he would be expelled,” Stein said.
When a drug company puts a doctor’s name on an article that actually was written by a professional writer, it is able to present a more biased and promotional version of an issue as though it were coming from an independent source, Stein and others say.
The company’s ultimate goal is to sell more drugs, said Steven Miles, a physician and professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
“These ghostwritten articles are advertising masquerading as scientific reviews,” he said. “It’s dishonest.”
Forgot to tell him not to lie too.
Never too late to learn. Maybe Speroff is reading this.
From UD‘s friend Bill at The Periodic Table — a link to an editorial in the Minnesota Star-Tribune excoriating the University of Minnesota for ineptitude and indifference in regard to conflict of interest among its professors.
How is it possible to assess a conflict of interest, much less manage it, if [university] officials don’t know how much money is involved?
Grassley’s letter about COI to the university was “embarrassing,” writes the Strib.
Things at UM are going to get worse before they get better. UD thinks they should start stockpiling anti-embarrassment pills.
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Oh. The quotation in my headline, taken from the Strib editorial, is from Arthur Caplan, the country’s best-known medical ethicist.
After the Pitino anomaly, things are back to normal.
He is Peter Conti-Brown of Stanford law school, and he’s being quoted in my headline by Felix Salmon, who has a blog at Reuters.
Conti-Brown provides the hard numbers:
From 2003 through 2008, Harvard’s annual budget grew an average of 7% per year, starting at $2.43 billion in 2003 and ending at $3.46 billion. Including an estimated 30% loss to the endowment in 2008, the endowment grew an average of 10.15%, from $16.24 billion to $25.59 billion. In absolute terms, while the budget grew annually at an average of $206 million, the endowment grew an annual average of $1.56 billion. More strikingly, Harvard’s payout rates during this period remained a steady 4.4%, an average of more than 5.5% less than endowment growth. Far from spending like “drunken sailors,” universities were, if anything, not spending enough.
You already know all of this if you read University Diaries from ’03 to ’08. You also know that Harvard did spend like a drunken sailor on one thing: hedge fund employee compensation. (It didn’t need to spend like a drunken sailor on President Lawrence Summers’ salary because, at the same time he was running Harvard, he was a hedge fund manager. As Frank Rich at the New York Times puts it, he was “moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.”)
Salmon concludes, as does Conti-Brown that
If these institutions aren’t going to spend the money in their [ultra-bloated] endowments on providing educational services, they should pay tax on it.
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UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room…. A commenter on the Salmon thread (all of the comments are worth a read) gets at something like this when he or she writes:
I see top universities with their massive endowments, tax free status, and generally state of the art and connected financial planning as becoming the new Church.
From the dark ages, to the middle ages and somewhat beyond the Church became an ever increasing landholder.
Yale in 2007 bought the nearby 137 acre Bayer Labs Complex which now makes it similar in size to the Vatican City.
Over the next hundred years, I see rich universities hoarding and growing their endowments and then splurging occasionally to buy up properties.
Are there any countervailing forces that will prevent Yale from owning one quarter of Connecticut 100 years from now?
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What if there were a car, the ultimate luxury car, called The Harvard Endowment? What would it look like?
Like this, I guess.

They took that Veyron and rammed it right into a wall.
If our top universities are going to become the new church, they’re going to have to manage their endowments better.
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But hey. Speaking of what you’ve got and how you should spend it… Allow UD, on this her birthday, a moment of payout.
The lesson of the crashed roadster is more than clear to me: Appreciate your assets, and be wise with them.
I’ve got a blog that a lot of smart, witty, and humane people read. It’s the most liquid asset in the world this thing, allowing me immense purchase on pleasure and understanding.
It even, amazingly, lets me do, in a small way, what I said from the start, in my blog’s tagline, I wanted to do: change things.
For this, I thank you.
University of Manchester professor Annmarie Surprenant, who seems not to read her students’ exams before grading them (background here), has issued a statement in response to press reports about this behavior, now under investigation by her university.
Here tis.
I am quite politically incorrect, outspoken and have never adhered to the oft-repeated and probably excellent advice to ‘watch your back’, because I believe watching one’s back will never move us forward.
This makes me an easy target for a certain type of person. Half-truths, false accusations and malicious gossip readily ruin one’s reputation in the eyes of that certain type of person. But in the end it is your work that stands.
No student has ever been inaccurately or unfairly graded by me, and that stands. [Every exam paper has been double-graded and] diligently and accurately annotated and marked.
While not as bad as Columbia University’s Madonna Constantine, whose corner cutting involved plagiarizing her students’ work, or Bonnie Ashley, Annmarie Surprenant’s statement is quite, quite bad. SOS will now tell you why.
When you’ve been accused of something so bad that it makes the papers, you have a couple of choices. If you’re guilty, and you probably are, you can confess to the behavior, or something short of the behavior but bad nonetheless, and offer a reason or two maybe… The most important thing, though, after acknowledging some fault and expressing willingness to cooperate with investigators, is to shut up.
Bonnie and Madonna, as you see if you’ve clicked on their names, gassed on and on and on. Wrote volumes.
Why shouldn’t you pen your confessions at this point?
Well, because you got into the deep shit you’re in because you’re kind of an idiot, kind of an unpleasant whacked out individual. Specifically, what got you into trouble is a sense of your exemption from the rules other people follow, coupled with a pinch of paranoia. THE MORE YOU WRITE, THE MORE EVERYONE WILL SEE THIS. Your prose will give you away. You’re the sort of person who should never be allowed to testify on your own behalf. The best thing for you to do is shut up.
Annmarie begins her statement with a big fat pat on the back for being so great. She is bold, bold, free as the wind, standing firm at the fierce crosswinds of human progress. And we all know that in repressive countries like England people who go against convention are beaten down. The world is full of evil envious gossipers who will try to destroy your work by destroying you….
Yet Annmarie herself almost destroyed her life’s work a few years ago, by repeatedly lying on grant applications about having earned an MD.
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Surprenant ends with a belligerent insistence on her total innocence.
Like the other two writers I’ve mentioned, Surprenant has broken the cardinal SOS rule to control your emotions. Especially when you’ve been accused of something, you’ve got to stay cool. Why? Because we all learn, from dealing with children, that the guiltier you are of something, the louder your insistence that you’re not guilty is likely to be.
And again – most damning of all – what’s lacking in this statement is any expression of willingness — you could even make it eagerness — to cooperate with investigators.
I’m distressed by the accusation that I’ve been negligent in my grading. I look forward to working with the university investigating committee.
Something like that. Short, calm. Acknowledge you’re upset, by all means. That’s honest. But then stop talking about how you feel and get down to business. Don’t tell me you’re being pilloried for being such a gifted person.
It bothers SOS when writers work hard on their articles or papers and blow off their headline.
Your headline is like a hostess welcoming you into her restaurant. (La Kid’s hostessing this summer at a local ‘thesdan eatery, so SOS has that on her mind.) Does she make you feel welcome? Do you positively want to go in ?
So here’s an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer’s headline for his Pitino piece:
SEX IN A RESTAURANT, A JOB IN JEOPARDY
Dullsville. Spice it up.
SEX AT A TABLE, FUTURE UNSTABLE
SEX AT A DIVE, WILL HE SURVIVE?
SEX ON A PLATE, PITINOGATE
SEX AND GRUB, THERE’S THE RUB
SEX IN TRATTORIA, SIC TRANSIT GLORIA