[UT football player Austin] Johnson, who was charged for public intoxication and disorderly conduct [Sunday], apparently was trying to pick a fight and was also “hitting parked cars.” Johnson told Knoxville police that he was drunk.
There’s something sad about the futility there – Johnson couldn’t find a person to fight, so he started hitting huge pieces of metal instead.
A group of the chronic fatigued
Have whipped up a bit of intrigue:
“If you’re otherwise skilled
You will have to be killed.
Researchers must stay in our league.”
First on the west coast, and now on the east, the feds are fucking up the perfect entrepreneurial synergy of cutting edge educational technology and a vast sellers’ market.
Unaccredited for-profit universities take in tons of foreign students, give them a visa, set up bogus online courses for them, and send them on their merry way hither and yon throughout these vast United States.
Yes – it’s yet another in the long list of distance ed’s advantages over inconvenient old-fashioned face to face university teaching: You can come over here from, say, India, grab your visa documentation at the office park with I’m a University scrawled on a piece of paper in Tower B, Suite 630 East, and then get to the job in Akron you were going to in the first place! Does any other technology allow you to do this? No – only online.
Naturally the feds are on to this, so they’ve got this rule:
[F]oreign students must be physically present on campus and can take no more than a single course per semester online.
But how rule-bound, in general, are these institutions? (Some in Congress want the government to come up with a “list of warning signs for colleges breaking visa rule[s].” Based on the Tri-Valley University story, UD proposes this handy rule of thumb: If the university president’s private residence is larger than the entire campus, consider this a warning sign.) Can we trust them to follow this online rule?
Well, let’s look at how they’re doing in terms of accreditation rules. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Northern Virginia University:
[UNV is accredited by the] American University Accreditation Council, which is not recognized by the Department of Education. The address listed as the council’s headquarters is an auto-body repair shop owned by the chairman of Northern Virginia’s board. A caller to the number listed on the accreditor’s Web site was greeted with the following message Thursday evening: “This is D’Angelo, so get at me back.”
Yes, the flourishing visa mills of America are getting at us back.
Forty years ago, when most clinical research took place in academic settings, the main dangers to research subjects came in service to genuine scientific aims. A large regulatory apparatus was developed to protect human subjects from the ambitions of overweening academic researchers. In the early 1990s, however, pharmaceutical companies realized that it was faster and less expensive to conduct trials in the private sector, where the driving force is not knowledge, but profit. And the regulatory apparatus designed for the old era has proved woefully inadequate for the new one.
UD‘s friend Carl Elliott, in today’s New York Times, warns about the disintegration of legitimate research, and the harm that can come – under a new commercial regime – to human subjects.
… UD‘s friend Jonathan Leo has a new article out about the pharma-sponsored ghostwriting of seemingly neutral scientific articles. It’s a model of lucidity, first defining “ghostwriting,” then clarifying all the ways in which it’s a deceptive and destructive practice, and finally proposing new rules for the submission of medical research papers.
The article appears in a subscription-only journal; but here are some excepts.
Transparent and honest authorship would seem to be a bare minimum standard for professors publishing medical research.
Indeed, imagine how your colleagues in any other field would respond if they found out that you didn’t write the articles listed under your name on your cv… That the articles were in fact written by a ghostwriting firm being paid by a corporation – the way, for instance, the makers of Paxil are accused of paying a firm $120,000 to ghostwrite a book representing itself as objective but in fact constituting an extended advertisement for Paxil. “Ghostwriting,” Leo points out, “is performed by writers who have undisclosed conflict-of-interest and are paid well by pharmaceutical companies to ensure that the manuscripts contain the chosen marketing messages.” Only in the American medical school would discovering this deception occasion no response.
While the average reader likely interprets ‘editorial assistance’ as help with grammar or improvements to the overall readability of the article, in reality such ‘assistants’ make major contributions to papers, and would commonsensically be considered as co-authors.
It’s common in corporate ghostwritten articles not to mention the ghostwriter(s) at all, or to hide a thank you in a small note at the end of the piece. And, as Leo points out, it’s just as common to characterize their contribution as purely ‘editorial assistance,’ when it’s often far more substantive than that.
A few journals have instituted ghostwriting-resistant policies, among them Neurology:
[Its editors] require that any paid medical writer be included in the author byline accompanied by full disclosure.
Let UD shake her head a bit here, try to clear things out… Okay. A Harvard professor, attacked in the last few days as a bigot because he wrote an opinion piece in an Indian newspaper containing a variety of intensely bigoted statements, as well as outrageous policy proposals, relative to Muslims, responds that his attackers are pro-Soviet.
I understand that the guy only teaches summer school, but shouldn’t there be minimal standards – of political understanding, and of responsible public statements – for summer as well as non-summer teaching? At Harvard?
Two Harvard students have started a petition calling for Subramanian Swamy’s ouster:
“Swamy draws a lot of prestige and legitimacy from his position at Harvard,” [one of the petition-writers] said. “If the Hindu right were to come into power in India, he could very well be someone who takes up a position in government, so I think it’s important for members of this community to play a part in discrediting him and saying, ‘No, he does not represent us.’”
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As current events at the University of North Carolina demonstrate, all serious universities guard their reputations, and all know that reputation can be undone in any number of ways. Slimy big-time sports programs are the fastest route to perdition, obviously; but industry-compromised professors on your medical faculty (an ongoing news story in the United States) can move you in that direction too, as can lots of other forms of financial corruption.
The problem with professors who express disastrously illiberal views – Ward Churchill’s writings on the ‘little Eichmanns’ who died in the Twin Towers, for instance – is that these people are terrible embarrassments to liberal arts institutions. They harbor precisely the ignorant, cruel fanaticism against which the university, above all human institutions, stands. What to do?
You certainly want to do something. It’s important to say out loud, one way or another, that you’re not, for instance, University College London, which has hosted speakers who call for the killing of homosexuals.
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Unless they’re truly – like the UCL speaker – inciting violence, professors with extreme and inhumane political views shouldn’t necessarily be fired. Universities should go to great lengths to protect speech.
But these people should certainly be fought, fiercely. Petitions of the sort the Harvard students are circulating don’t, I think, need to issue in expulsion. They need to issue in exposure (and indeed the Swamy story is all over the news today). Boycotts are also fine. Encourage students not to take classes with such people. Marginalize them in every possible way. Plaster their vile writings all over campus. Hold protests.
If, after investigating what is angering students, a university indeed decides that its reputation as a place of reasoned and humane discourse is imperiled by this faculty member, the school can punish that person in a variety of ways — all the way up, on occasion, to dismissal.
UD didn’t think Chicago State University, with its long history of negligence, corruption, and graduation rates barely above ten percent, had any more surprises in store for her (she’s chronicled its disgraceful ways for years on this blog), but now there’s this:
Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed “for poor scholarship,” but records obtained by [the Chicago Tribune] show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as zero. Meanwhile, President Wayne Watson was touting increased retention and graduation rates as evidence that the institution was improving after years marked by widespread financial mismanagement, scathing audits and a failure to graduate students.
Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.
… seems to have scared the University of North Carolina into doing something about its rancid football program. They’ve fired the coach.
… part of the curriculum at pharmacology schools:
Budding pharmacists are taught in school to look for signs of pain pill abuse. They know they deal with a lot more criminals than pharmacists 10 or 20 years ago.
“It definitely is addressed more than it used to be,” said 29-year-old Vanita Spagnolo, a second-year University of Florida School of Pharmacology student who works in retail and hospital pharmacies.
… mike your bat.
A state Board of Education member resigned last week amid a Purdue University investigation into whether she plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation… [P]ortions of the doctoral dissertation turned in by [Gwendolyn Griffith] Adell to Purdue in 2004 are nearly identical to information in a 1999 dissertation submitted by a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.
Now if they can remove her influence from the charter school she’s got hold of…
… and Greenway University, begun with such promise, is one of those flowers.
Hoping to follow in the footsteps of all-things-doobie Oaksterdam, Greenway opened in Denver only to close, rapidly, after state officials perused its application documents.
When asked, “Has any principal owner(s), officer(s), or any person in a management capacity: Ever been convicted of or pled to a felony or are charges pending?” [Gus] Escamilla answered, “No.”
… 7NEWS obtained court documents from California, where in 2000, Escamilla pled guilty to felony grand theft by embezzlement.
“We were aware of the prior conviction, but we also were under the impression that they were expunged,” said Escamilla. [Excellent use of the royal/papal/Ubu “we.”]
… Marc Kent was listed as a chancellor at Greenway, but the application did not disclose the fact that Kent plead guilty to mail fraud in federal court.
… picture? Two specters and four forensically indistinguishable white males?
But Arkansas State University Mountain Home has deeper, uh, institutional presentation problems than this.
I mean, let’s just say that ASUMH really doesn’t want to be audited.
But – whoops. A disgruntled ex-employee went ahead and talked to the authorities and ASUMH got audited. What have them boys been up to?
Well now, take this John Gresham. His position at ASUMH is Husband of the Director of Development. In that capacity, he got to build – no bids were taken – “the Thompson-Martin Gate and McClure Gate at the college for a total cost of $218,623.” Plus his wife – her position at ASUMH is Wife of the Owner of GRR Land Company LLC – uses the time and resources of ASUMH to run his business:
Four personal file documents found on an Office of Development laptop related to her husband’s business. They included a loan document, a steel building proposal, a steel building purchase order and a flyer for commercial marketing, according to the report. A fifth personal document, a rental property advertising narrative, was found on a stand-alone computer assigned to Gresham.
What’s a university for, anyway? The money and the equipment are just sitting there.
And then there’s them magic pens the Wife of the Owner bought.
Gin-soaked University of South Carolina has a competition going between its football players and their coaches to see who can show up drunk in public more often.
So far quarterback Stephen Garcia dominates, not only numerically (five suspensions), but … how to say… The guy’s got a sense of irony:
Starting quarterback Stephen Garcia has been suspended five times in his career. Most recently Garcia was suspended on April 6 after an incident at a life skills seminar.
Sense of irony, sense of humor… It takes a sense of something to show up drunk at a life skills seminar.
Garcia’s main competition comes from his coach, G.A. Mangus, who earns upwards of $150,000 a year — though even by USC standards, he must be said to be earning it in a rather odd way…
Two officers said they were driving down Main Street in Greenville [in the wee small hours of the morning] when they saw Mangus urinating on the sidewalk curb and roadway outside the Carolina Ale House.
The officers said they got out to speak with Mangus about what he was doing. Police said there was a large wet area close to where he was standing.
“He was intoxicated, was not cooperative,” said Greenvillle police spokesman Jason Rampey. “He could not provide answers the officers were looking for to questions like, was he with someone, how he got there and how he was getting home.”
Police said Mangus was unsteady on his feet and had a strong odor of alcohol. Police said his eyes appeared to be dilated and glazed over. Police said when they questioned Mangus about his actions, his speech was slurred.
Garcia’s got Mangus on sheer numbers; but only Mangus has whipped out his dick and made his own pool. Extra points.
The Government’s “independent” adviser on mass tranquiliser addiction has received research funding from a drug company which manufacturers two commonly prescribed tranquilisers.
Professor John Strang, head of the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, and author of a government report on the prescription of potent psychiatric sedatives, did not declare he received the money from the pharmaceutical firm …