Yes, it’s come to this in Israel. Women from Hebrew University now ride buses through religious neighborhoods specifically to test whether a recent court decision that – get ready for it – women don’t, like blacks in America before Rosa Parks, have to sit at the back of the bus is actually being honored.

Internships are available for American college students:

Amy Milin, a recent Florida Atlantic University graduate, rode 60 buses during her three-month internship… “There were times a group of people crowded around me and said I don’t belong here and I’m ruining their religion,” she said.

These women are on the front lines of gender justice. That these battles have to be fought in Israel is a shondah.

Police Search for Ann Arbor Rapist as Annual Art Fair Kicks Off

And then, for $5,000 a pop, Egija Kuka sold these United States Medical Licensing Exam questions to medical students who had in the past repeatedly failed the test. Kuka promised them they’d pass this time.

“The National Board of Medical Examiners first grew suspicious of Optima University’s owners in 2008 because Kuka took the test several times and scored poorly each time.”

She wasn’t taking it; she was photographing it.

Many doctors who cheated their way through the test now stand to lose their licenses.

If you’ve read Marcia Angell on antidepressants, you’re unlikely to be surprised by a recent study suggesting that “individuals who use antidepressants are much more likely to suffer relapses of major depression than those who use no medication at all… [P]eople who have not been taking any medication are at a 25 per cent risk of relapse, compared to 42 per cent or higher for those who have taken and gone off an antidepressant.” Paul Andrews, of McMaster University, argues that “antidepressants interfere with the brain’s natural self-regulation of serotonin and other neurotransmitters, and… the brain can overcorrect once medication is suspended, triggering new depression.”

In her much-discussed New York Review of Books essay, Angell reviews the similar arguments of Robert Whitaker:

If psychoactive drugs do cause harm, as Whitaker contends, what is the mechanism? The answer, he believes, lies in their effects on neurotransmitters. It is well understood that psychoactive drugs disturb neurotransmitter function, even if that was not the cause of the illness in the first place. Whitaker describes a chain of effects. When, for example, an SSRI antidepressant like Celexa increases serotonin levels in synapses, it stimulates compensatory changes through a process called negative feedback. In response to the high levels of serotonin, the neurons that secrete it (presynaptic neurons) release less of it, and the postsynaptic neurons become desensitized to it. In effect, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects.

… With long-term use of psychoactive drugs, the result is, in the words of Steve Hyman, a former director of the NIMH and until recently provost of Harvard University, “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” As quoted by Whitaker, the brain, Hyman wrote, begins to function in a manner “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” After several weeks on psychoactive drugs, the brain’s compensatory efforts begin to fail, and side effects emerge that reflect the mechanism of action of the drugs. For example, the SSRIs may cause episodes of mania, because of the excess of serotonin. Antipsychotics cause side effects that resemble Parkinson’s disease, because of the depletion of dopamine (which is also depleted in Parkinson’s disease). As side effects emerge, they are often treated by other drugs, and many patients end up on a cocktail of psychoactive drugs prescribed for a cocktail of diagnoses. The episodes of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” and treatment with a “mood stabilizer,” such as Depokote (an anticonvulsant) plus one of the newer antipsychotic drugs. And so on.

Some patients take as many as six psychoactive drugs daily. One well- respected researcher, Nancy Andreasen, and her colleagues published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain, and that the effect is directly related to the dose and duration of treatment. As Andreasen explained to The New York Times, “The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”*

Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.

The fact that the high school football talk has gone on unfettered for the better part of six months with nary a public response/rebuke from the NCAA is unimaginable. The fact that ESPN is very publicly braying about high school prospects is unconscionable — but not nearly as unconscionable as the NCAA allowing this discussion half a year after it should’ve been shutdown to continue on.

He’s talking about the humongous new network deal between the University of Texas and ESPN. Programming will include “high school football games in the state of Texas,” which is to say that the Longhorn Network will televise “potential football recruits on a television network dedicated to a single university.” It would seem to give the University of Texas an unfair advantage.

[I]f televising potential in-state — and specifically targeted out-of-state — recruits on your own television network is not a violation, how could The Association ever again look any school in the eyes in the future and accuse them of doing something illicit in gaining an advantage in recruiting?

The writer seems shocked that the NCAA hasn’t done anything; but here’s UD‘s theory. Although it does nothing to stem big-time university sports corruption, the NCAA is the busiest organization in the world. It’s like tax season at the IRS there every single day. They have simply run out of staff.

….plays ball.

… between a local columnist’s bland recitation of the reasons why the University of Tennessee has had a fall-off in football ticket sales (the economy, bad match-ups, etc.) and some of the commenters on his story, who stress the thug problem.

I can’t name another school that has had two car loads of 8 thugs driving around town holding up convenience stores with guns and weed in the car. Can you?

Yeah, that was a bad one. But the incident was one of many incidents over the last few years involving UT players. Is it possible that there’s a tipping point, even for UT fans? Could their amazingly well-honed cognitive dissonance (There they go down the field, our fine University of Tennessee student athletes!) (The latest one is an armed robbery? Yikes.) be losing its edge?

… Hauser immediately after the sanctioning of Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, it’s time to pause and think about the striking number of very high-powered faculty there who over the last few years have been under a cloud, or disgraced or, like Hauser, forced out. What’s it mean?

Keep in mind, first, that simply by virtue of happening at Harvard, faculty news gets a lot of attention. For all we know, multiple high-ranking faculty at Clemson have been punished or forced out for research misconduct, conflict of interest and failure to report massive income, conspiracy to defraud, failure to register as a lobbyist, plagiarism, etc. But we don’t pay attention to Clemson; we pay attention to Harvard.

Still, whatever the numbers, it’s pretty amazing that during the course of this blog I’ve followed endless stories of the most high-powered professors in the world — high-powered Harvard professors — doing bad things.

Most of these stories involve what I’d call crimes of grandiosity. Not opportunity; grandiosity. You work your way to the top legitimately; then, at the top, the same cleverness and ego and competitiveness and sense of invulnerability and restless insistence on more that got you to the top tips you in the direction of recklessness.

To be sure, some of these cases are boringly about personal greed (Biederman and Shleifer in particular); but all of them involve as well a significant element of empire-building, power-mongering, and arrogance. Many involve people who, bizarrely, don’t need to break rules in order to maintain their position of prominence in the culture. They break them anyway. So say also that there’s some operation of pleasure at work here; that these particular personalities have been drawn to the rarified, high-energy setting of Harvard because there’s visceral gratification to be had by scoring repeatedly and scoring big.

Not if you’re a student. If you’re a professor.

Young, naive Panos Ipeirotis, a business school instructor, discovered that a bunch of his undergraduate business majors
(background on that burnished major here and here) had plagiarized, and he called them on it.

After announcing his intention to report the cheating to the dean unless students turned themselves in, Ipeirotis said, class became contentious and awkward, and his teaching evaluations suffered. His typical evaluation in this class, 6.0 to 6.5 out of 7.0, fell to 5.3. In his blog post, Ipeirotis wrote that Associate Dean Susan Greenbaum and the department chair “‘expressed their appreciation’ for…chasing such cases.” But his “yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year,'” he wrote.

Lesson learned:

“I doubt that I will be checking again for cheaters,” he wrote.

So far it’s just an anonymous allegation. And David Salinas, the investment banker with the summer league and many investment clients among university coaches, has – just after the SEC announced he was under investigation for a Ponzi scheme – killed himself.

The reason some [coaches] might be concerned about their financial connection to Salinas is because it’s unclear how the NCAA would view college coaches investing money with the founder of a summer basketball program that supplied recruits to several universities over the years.

The suggestion is that the coaches felt compelled to give Salinas hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his recruits.

If true, it’s another glorious chapter in the annals of amateur university athletics. And it explains why these guys demand such strikingly high salaries.

One writer sums up the situation:

The SEC will investigate the alleged Ponzi scheme, local law enforcement will investigate the death, and the NCAA will investigate why in God’s Sweet Earth an AAU curator was knowingly investing money on behalf of the coaches of some of the schools that his program was funneling players to.

Essentially, this means college sports fans will have to live with yet another interminable fall-out of yet another scandal.

Well, thankfully, we have plenty of experience doing that.

… was such a young-man-in-a-hurry that when she sat at meetings over which he presided, he was always kind of a blur, racing out of the room to talk on his cell phone, racing through the meeting…

Hirshman has lately raced himself right into a buzz saw; though, on the up side, he might make legislative history.

He’s the new president of San Diego State University, a woeful institution very small on cash and very big on athletics. Last prez of SDSU made $300,000; the school’s board threw in an extra $100,000 for Elliot… Not really a problem; they’re just taking it out of tuition (goes up 12% this year) …

“Appalling… egregious,” say state senators, some of whom are introducing legislation placing limits on what you can make at a public institution when the entire state economy is shit.

UD‘s colleagues Anthony Yezer and Robert Van Order appear to be small players in the very large, competitive game of corporate funded and controlled research results (even corporate controlled faculty) in the contemporary American and European university.

**********************************************

Lately, some of the bigger players seem to be jostling each other out of the way for the right to pleasure the financial sector. BABY, TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO SAY AND HOW TO SAY IT. WRITE IT YOURSELF IF YOU WANT AND I’LL SIGN IT. LIE BACK AND NIBBLE MY INTELLECTUAL NEUTRALITY.

Harvard’s bipolar babe, Joseph Biederman, pitched his research center to Johnson and Johnson by writing to them that it would “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.”

Most of these chicks deny. Biederman burbles happily away and Harvard can’t get enough of it…

Sure, when he gets really out there they sanction him … But he’s still a big girl on campus… And always will be!

So here you’ve got this latest article in the New York Times about how a German bank gave a couple of universities there a lot of money and

the bank was allowed a say in the hiring of … two professors. It was also given the right to have bank employees designated as adjunct professors, allowed to grade student work. Appropriate topics for research and research strategy would be decided by a steering committee made up of two academics and two bank employees, with the managing director, a bank employee, casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie.

Deutsche Bank was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years. The agreement even specified that the laboratory would be located “in close proximity to the Deutsche Bank” headquarters in Berlin.

Finally, the whole agreement was to be secret…

At last my heart’s an open door; and my secret love’s no secret anymore!

The founder [of Korea’s Myungshin University] is the president, and his wife, a daughter and a son were employed as chairwoman of the board, president and vice president, respectively.

Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It’s really taking you places.

… describes the way a mainly online for-profit school with high tuition, a wretched graduation rate, and no doubt richly compensated executives, got included in state scholarship legislation.

Such a great deal if you can get it. Online for-profits remain at the center of a national scandal [scroll down], in large part because they continue to receive enormous federal funds — despite the fact that they’re primarily run to rake in money for investors and administrators. Now, in addition to its federal support, Post University in Connecticut will get state support.

How did this happen?

The old-fashioned way: corruption. A person on the Post board of trustees (a paid position) is also a state legislator, and he lobbied the thing through.

See, “As originally written, the bill would have given scholarship funds only to students at state and private nonprofit institutions.” Institutions legally compelled to use most of their money for the benefit of their students. Now lucky, profit-driven Post enjoys another source of public funds.