Sweet review of what sounds like a sweet book of reminiscences about time spent at Oxford University.
From the review:
…This idea of a university as a community of civilized and civilizing discourse has been exported all over the English-speaking world, almost by osmosis. It has only occasionally been spun into words—by educators such as, in the 19th century, John Henry Newman, the Catholic convert who became a cardinal and is shortly to become a saint, and, in the 20th century, Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago.
But the book goes on to note how uncivilized Oxford’s culture could be, too.
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Great cover, by the way.
Goes as well with this blog’s
color scheme as that blue rat.
“This is THE week,” says Syd, our landlord. “Every school in America is closed. It’s wild around here. Get ready to stand in lines.”
… Rehoboth Beach dispatches
from UD, here’s a glamour
shot of La Kid, taken
last June on the beach.
As always, blogging
continues apace,
whatever my location.
From a newspaper article excerpted in University Diaries, July 16, 2007:
Teachers, students and administrators tampered with a private college’s computer system to change grades and create fake degrees for money, prosecutors charged Monday. Among the fake degrees given were those for physicians’ assistants, they said.
The 10 defendants created or altered records for at least 50 people since January , charging fees of $3,000 to $25,000 for better or deleted grades and for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.
Those indicted include Touro College’s former director of admissions, the former director of the school’s computer center, three former Touro students and three public school teachers, Manhattan prosecutors said.
“One dangerous thing they did was give degrees to physicians’ assistants,” Morgenthau said.
Records found in the home of Andrique Baron, a former admissions director at Touro’s campus in Manhattan, showed he was running the scheme as early as 2003 and possibly earlier, Morgenthau said.
“We don’t know how many hundreds, maybe thousands, were involved,” the district attorney said.
Baron’s main accomplice was Michael Cherner, former director of the computer center at the school’s Brooklyn campus, Morgenthau said.
Baron, 34, and Cherner, 50, also took bribes to create master’s degree transcripts for three city schoolteachers who never attended Touro, said the district attorney.
Money was collected from the teachers by a bagman identified in Baron’s cell phone by the nickname Jimmy Bag, the district attorney said.
… Baron spent the cash on two luxury cars, high-end audio equipment and huge flat-screen television sets in almost every room in his home, Morgenthau said.
Six of the 10 defendants were arrested at various times from March to July on charges of computer trespass, computer tampering and falsifying business records. Baron, Cherner and the bag man also were charged with bribe receiving. All the charges are punishable by up to four years in prison.
Four of the 10 defendants are at large.
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New York Post, yesterday:
A second Touro College computer honcho is going to prison for running his office as a literal diploma mill — pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from students seeking better transcripts, glowing letters of recommendation and in a few cases completely fabricated degrees.
“This was a horrendous betrayal of trust,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber told the crook, Andrique Baron, 36, of Elmont, L.I., before sentencing him this afternoon to serve between 2 2/3 and 8 years prison.
Baron was the former director of admissions for Touro’s School of Career and Applied Studies on West 23rd St.
For at least four years, he and his co-defendant — Mikhail “Michael” Cherner, the former computer director at the Kings Highway, Brooklyn, campus — took money from a dozen students, who were also charged, in a “Sawbucks-for-Sheepskins” scandal that became public two years ago.
Some of Cherner and Baron’s “customers” merely changed “F’s” to “A’s” on their transcripts.
Three teachers paid $3,000 each to buy the Masters degree required to teach special ed.
A Queens man bought a bogus psychology masters, while a Brooklyn woman bought her bachelors without taking a single class, and a fake letter of recommendation to law school went for $50,000.
When the scandal broke, prosecutors said they feared the pair had sold doctored degrees to as many as 50 people — including some for physicians assistants and physical therapists.
The Board of Ed, which issues licenses in these fields, had to sift through the credentials of thousands of Touro alumni to be sure there were no bogus teachers, therapists or medical personnel working in the city, said prosecutor Jonathan Lenzner.
The horrible publicity affected everything from accreditation to admissions to the ability to get bank loans, said Frank Snitow, a lawyer for the college, which has 17,000 students internationally. [They seem to have dumped the Career and Applied Studies name. UD can’t find it on their website.]
Baron apologized in court, peevishly — bemoaning he didn’t get a “second chance” — before being led out in cuffs.
… the anal fixates at Harvard University.
… That Harvard’s endowment exists to advance education and research is not what an observer would infer from the institution’s behavior. Instead, Harvard appears to have decided to put financial dominance ahead of the current needs of students, families, and citizens — even while the institution remains almost unfathomably wealthy. Taxpayers, who help to support this nonprofit, have reason to ask whether this is the best choice.
Harvard has options, even if its financial gurus find many of them unattractive. The institution’s academic leaders need to remind them that endowment investment and spending decisions must be guided by the twin goals of furthering education and research, not winning the hedge fund Olympics.
And if Harvard’s gurus found it acceptable to follow an investment strategy that could, and did, lose close to 25 percent in a year, then they should certainly deem spending a few tenths of a percent more to hold harmless the operating budget acceptable, too…
Time to remind you of this editorial
cartoon from a few years ago:
Another entry in UD‘s series, That Which Does Not Kill Me.
At 5-feet-0 and 107 pounds, Melina Bell looks more like, say, a college philosophy professor than a champion bodybuilder.
As it happens, she’s both. And to prove it, Bell just won a major bodybuilding title to go along with the several scholarly papers she has written on the philosophy of women’s bodybuilding.
An assistant professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University, Bell just won both the Open Lightweight and Open Overall titles at the 30th Annual IART (International Association of Resistance Trainers) Hercules Bodybuilding Championships Pro-Qualifier. This qualified her as a WNBF (World Natural Bodybuilding Federation) pro bodybuilder…
After finishing second in her first two regional contests, Bell asked the judges what she needed to improve on for the next contest. “They told me certain areas to work on with my physique. So I worked on those areas and made great progress. Then after the third contest, again coming in second, I asked the judges for more input, and they said ‘You should really consider putting some pads in your top to give yourself a more feminine figure. And have someone help you with your hair as we really don’t like the way you’ve done it.’”…
[She has been invited to] write an essay on gender norms and women’s bodybuilding, titled “Is Women’s Bodybuilding Unfeminine?,” for the forthcoming book Strength and Philosophy…
… has more details of the Continuing Medical Education hearing at the Senate. (UD live blogged part of it here.) Some morsels from Carlat:
[One CME defender] conflated two issues: the remarkable advances in medicine over the past few decades and industry funding of CME. The two are not related. We’ve had advances in medicine because of great science and appropriate interactions between doctors and industry–bona fide relationships based on developing products and conducting clinical trials. None of these relationships would be threatened in any way by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act or by the IOM’s proposal to greatly scale back industry funding of CME.
My favorite moment of the hearing was when Senator Al Franken directly confronted [this speaker], saying (again, I’m paraphrasing): “You seem to draw a lot of conclusions from anecdotes of people who have benefited from modern medicine. Medicine is a lot better now than when we were kids, but that doesn’t mean that industry should fund CME.”
[The] comments [from the CME accrediting organization spokesperson] were disappointing in the extreme. He repeated a single refrain, saying, in essence: “There is no problem with bias in CME. We are doing our job well. ACCME is the firewall between promotion and education.” C’mon … You know what’s going on. You’ve seen the many, many letters of complaint reporting biased programs. In fact, you reprimanded one company for bias within the last few months–I know, because the reprimand was based on my letter. It only took you about two years to issue your decision. I won’t mention the specifics in this blog because I promised you I wouldn’t.
Four Kentucky State University football players are facing charges of robbery and now their coach says he’s been fired without cause.
21-year-old Cordell Key, 23-year-old Jemario Dorsey, 19-year-old Jerrel Noland and 21-year-old Nathaniel Mills of Louisville were all arrested.
The players were arrested at a restaurant near the UK campus after allegedly trying to steal the restaurant’s tip jar.
Meanwhile, Fred Farrier, the head coach at the Frankfort University says he was fired over the weekend.
But because they named themselves The Airborne Toxic Event, the central plot element in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I’ve sort of kept up with them anyway.
When I phone-interviewed Mikel Jollett of the L.A.-based indie-pop-rock band the Airborne Toxic Event, it surprised me when he said:
“We wanted a name that was a big fuck-you to names,” he said of the Don DeLillo-novel-inspired band name. “People say, ‘It really turned me off when I first heard that name.’ And I say, ‘Good, I’m glad.'”
… Jollett’s a smart dude. He’s an aspiring fiction writer and has written stuff for Filter magazine and the L.A. Times. He was mid-novel when he felt called to become a rockstar.
“I came to this crossroads. I had to decide whether to finish my novel or play music,” he said. “I had a literary agent and I was getting published and I had a column at NPR and my writing was going really well. It [had taken] years to get to that point. But then I was like, ‘I’m gonna start a band.'”
That was in 2006 and the ATE has since released a multi-hit record and are touring extensively around the world (“there’s definitely a lot of globetrotting going on,” Jollett said). He continues to make progress with his novel, though — an excerpt was recently published in McSweeney’s.
“You know that Bukowski poem, ‘How To Be A Great Writer‘?** ‘If you want to be a great writer, first of all you have to fuck a great deal of women,'” Jollett quoted. “I don’t think that’s true, actually. I doubt Steinbeck fucked that many women.”
Not knowing exactly how many women Steinbeck laid pipe to, Jollett continued, citing his interesting upbringing as being something of, but not completely, an inspiration for his music and writing.
“My parents had a healthy disrespect for all things conventional. They met in a commune, and I was born on that commune. They were kinda hippies, like starcrossed lovers. You know how the ’60s produced all these odd couplings? That was one of them,” he said….
I know, I know. A very weirdly written article. SOS can’t even figure out how to fix it…. Is the writer high?
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** Pot-banging piece of crap. But don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself.
When UD looks out her back
windows at her overgrown forest,
it’s all about birds. They’re everywhere.
Just now, UD saw a female red
cockaded woodpecker on top of
her garden fence.
UD thanks a reader for alerting her to the latest Grassley letter, this one sent to the Naval Medical Center, just a hop, skip, and a jump from UD‘s house.
Once again, Senator Grassley wants to know about any “failure to report outside income by a physician at your institution.”
How do you think he’ll do? He’s sent out dozens of these letters, and so far he’s batting a thousand. Let’s keep backing a winner.
A paper reporting the creation of sperm-like cells from human embryonic stem cells has been retracted by the editor of the journal Stem Cells and Development. The work had garnered headlines worldwide after being published three weeks ago …
The journal’s editor-in-chief Graham Parker says he took the radical step on 27 July because two paragraphs in the introduction of the paper, entitled ‘In Vitro Derivation of Human Sperm from Embryonic Stem Cells’, had been plagiarised from a 2007 review published in another journal, Biology of Reproduction.
He had been alerted to the plagiarism on 10 July — three days after the article had been published online — by the editors of Biology of Reproduction. Parker says that the corresponding author, Karim Nayernia of the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, UK, and the University of Newcastle, had failed to provide convincing evidence that the two paragraphs had been included in the submitted version of the manuscript by mistake…
Nature News
… a scholar of Russia whose glorious prose style and deep aesthetic, social, and historical understandings created essays like this one — it introduces his edition of the Edmund Wilson / Vladimir Nabokov letters — has died.
A couple of excerpts:
While some in the West could mourn for Nicholas and Alexandra and romanticize all Russian émigrés as genteel aristocrats who had lost their fortunes, and others could acclaim Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as “the first truly human culture” and a triumph of true Marxist socialism, there was simply no place in the Western view of Russia and Russians for a liberal faction that was opposed both to tsarist regime before the Revolution (and had, in fact, brought about its downfall), and to the theocratic police state founded by Lenin.
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Wilson’s assertion in his reply to Nakobov’s critique of his portrait of Lenin that he had steered clear of official biographies and had based his view on “family memoirs, Trotsky’s writings, Lenin’s own works, and the memoirs of people like Gorky and Clara Zetkin,” who were all “trying to tell the truth,” makes one think of a historian of Christianity who is sure that his account is factual because all his information comes straight from the Vatican.
… of the Senate hearing on Continuing Medical Education. It should be starting about now…
Oh. Here it is!
Senator Kohl, specs low on nose, summarizes the problem — “Crux of today’s hearing… Do they instead market the industry’s latest products? Greater transparency, stronger firewalls, need to be considered… I’m disappointed that the AMA has not yet updated their ethical guidelines on this… “
Martinez: “Accounts of ethical lapses on the part of some doctors and pharmaceutical companies are troubling… Sometimes the line between promotion and education can be blurred… ”
Franken: “How are patients affected by COI? … Unlimited and far from impartial interactions between industry and providers… This often has a negative influence on outcomes… Drives up prices to patients… Medical schools are over-reliant on industry funds… CME is another example of the same thing… ”
HHS/Inspector General guy: A little stiff, nervous. “An honest tale speaks best being plainly told – Shakespeare.” As opposed to glitzy biased CME tales. Wants full prohibition of industry support of CME. Wants firewalls – money yes, but independent grant organizations to disperse the money. Or doctors can pay for their own education. This might make for higher quality if they’re doing the paying. Growing concern about the quality of CME — shift cost to physicians.
Steven Nissen: “CME has grown into an enormous industry with extraordinary influence on the practice of medicine… CME has become an insidious vehicle for the aggressive promotion of drugs and devices. This now dominates the education of physicians. Marketing cleverly disguised as education…. With a wink and a nod the communication company selects speakers they know will please the industry. I can almost always guess who the speakers will be… Who is guarding the integrity of the process? I’ve written to the CME certifying agency with many complaints about bias – my letters were never even acknowledged.”
Next speaker: “It is impossible to find any aspect of medicine in which industry does not have significant control… Industry funding creates bias… Need to be free of industry influence… Stronger measures are required… Current situation unacceptable.”
Jack Rusley, med student, AMSA: He’s wearing his white doctor suit! “Medical research must serve the public and not physician lifestyles… Why do students care so much about these issues? … Not yet tinged with the streak of cynicism… My computer’s shutting down… Sorry… I’ll continue speaking off the cuff… Med students used to be docile in regard to authority… Not anymore… After pressure from Senator Grassley, the press, and students, Harvard has reviewed its COI policy and now has a passing grade on the AMSA scorecard.”
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Question session. Martinez, a lawyer, is shocked because continuing ed in the law is not sponsored by any industry. No money involved.
The bias was so terrible at a recent CME session Nissen wandered into that “I had to walk out.”
Another speaker: “Physicians are accruing the education capital here — They should pay for it themselves.”
Franken asks about the accreditation organization for CME. Nissen: “I can assure you that a considerable amount of CME … is marketing. It is not restricted in any way. It is highly biased. We therefore need a new system of certification. We need this organization to go away altogether. There’s no will to police this.”
[I’m sure I’m getting some names wrong, etc. Will correct later. This is live-blogging.]
Franken: “Is there anything good to say about CME, besides better hotels and shrimp?”
Nissen: “There are a few good CMEs. But most are subtly or not so subtly organized to get people to buy a product.”
Another speaker: “CME hugely drives high costs in health care in this country. We spend ninety billion dollars a year more than we should be spending. This machine for getting doctors to prescribe the most expensive medications is one of the big reasons for the problem…. It drives me crazy to hear all this talk that we can’t afford health care reform! We can. We need to make these changes.”
Enough. The second panel’s here. They’re the pro-COI guys. I’ll let one of their fans live-blog that.