… Tasman et al. have produced an outstanding book in this third edition of Psychiatry. At a list price of $340 (less on discount websites), Psychiatry is not cheap, but in two volumes weighing about 7 kg, you get a lot for your money. Perhaps you would get even more with less if it were on a CD, thus making it more portable and searchable. Still, this is a fine textbook that will serve educators, at all levels, as a curriculum guide and teaching tool. For practitioners, it is a comprehensive reference that will find great use in any library.

Psychiatry takes its place in the University Diaries Textbook Hall of Fame next to The Ultimate Rule of Law (189 pages of text, $136.00), and Marxism Beyond Marxism ($140.00).

Exide, seller of fraudulent auto batteries, gave money to the University of South Florida ten years ago as part of a settlement in a case the attorney general brought against it.

The money – a bit more than two million dollars – went to a professorship in business ethics … This position would be an extremely selective, high-level appointment that would attract someone able to explain to MBA students why they shouldn’t sell fraudulent batteries.

But, in an echo of a protracted, much-discussed case at Princeton, people are now complaining that the money was not spent in the way the…  can we call it a gift? … intended.

Business professor Marvin Karlins and associate business professor Robert Welker made the allegation in a complaint filed Monday with USF’s compliance office.

“Ten years have passed, and there ain’t nobody sitting in that chair,” Karlins says. “They take $2 million, and they sit on it.”

That’s not true, according to USF administrators. They say the annual earnings from a $2 million endowment won’t cover the salary of a top scholar, who might make $200,000 a year.

So the money pays for other academic activities on both ethics and sustainability, the study of environmentally sound and socially responsible business practices.

… In their complaint, Karlins and Welker say it was “specifically ordered that the Exide money would be used to create an endowed professorship for business ethics.”

“To do otherwise is a clear breach of contract,” they say, one that could have “serious legal implications” because USF received state matching funds.

“We also find a certain irony in all this,” they said. “A corporation fined $1.25 million for unethical behavior now finds that USF is using that money unethically.”

One USF business professor accuses the accusers of being unethical because they’re actually pissed about other things, both having recently filed unrelated complaints against the university:

“[T]hey went looking for some dirt. … That’s not ethical in my opinion.”

So you have three unethicalities:

1.  The selling of fraudulent batteries.

2.  Misappropriation of funds.

3.  Vindictive whistle-blowing.

Three so far.

If this report, from a student journalist at the University of Oregon interested in greater representation of conservative views on campus is correct, it’s scandalous.

He’s in the office of a professor who disagrees with the student’s point of view on the matter. They’re talking away.

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

The screamer (again, if the account is accurate) plays directly into the hands of people who attack professors as monolithic and arrogant.

The behavior is way out of bounds, and the student deserves an apology.

“We just stood there and stared for a long
while, because what is there to say?’’

A Washington Post article quotes a
‘thesdan. She’s talking about fireflies
in her yard.

Brad Leithauser says the same thing in
“Hundreds of Fireflies” —

Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best…

The poem’s a mite precious for rough
and tumble UD, but it’s got its moments:

… three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.

I like eyes led endlessly astray.

That’s just what it was, last night, as I stood
at the bottom of my half acre wood looking up,
down, and all around at the spots on the
lawn, the trees, the sky. On my arms.

Each arhythmic light a trinket / to entice
some wayward mate. That’s good too.
Arhythmic, with trinket picking up on the
sound of arhythmic. Suggestive too of
the heart’s pulse as it watches fiery pulses
on the bushes. Night-blooming bugs.

Quite a bit of spam in Comments today, and while deleting it, I seem to have deleted some legitimate comments. If you find your comment has been deleted, it was accidental. Apologies. Feel free to post it again.

A former psychiatrist, alarmed by what the profession’s become, reviews the latest farcical use of psychiatrists in a high-profile trial, and then considers the larger situation:

… These days, psychiatric diagnoses are based on the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,’’ published by the American Psychiatric Association. This hefty volume is a main money-maker for the association, upward of a million dollars in annual sales.

… It is … tarnished by many of the specialists being paid to be involved in studies of drugs to treat the illnesses they list as their expertise. The temptation for them to find a drug that will treat a diagnosis they can specify and in which they are the expert is significant.

The current conflict-of-interest investigations – including by Congress – into psychiatrists getting paid to do research that might prove the efficacy of the drugs they use to treat their patients are well documented. If a drug company can link a particular drug to a particular diagnosis, bingo – a blockbuster drug can earn over a billion dollars a year. The lucrative link between a diagnosis and a drug to treat it, when diagnosis itself is culture-bound and often subjective, pollutes the impartiality of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,’’ and opens the courtroom door to the psycho-battles that demean and confuse…

The corruption not only of examining rooms and courtrooms, but also of universities, by ghost-writers, shills, and mercenaries, emerges more and more clearly. University Diaries looks forward, as always, to chronicling it.

… is SUNY Cobleskill, a dispiriting collection of ‘sixties buildings along the road into the old but not very charming town of Cobleskill, New York. The university has a cute web page, but its drab, not too well-maintained, public high schooly architecture is a downer — especially given its backdrop, the long hills and bright fields of the leatherstocking region.

This photo has done its best to emphasize autumn leaves and a few attractive buildings, but it still gives you a sense of what I’m talking about. In decades of summer driving in the region, Les UD‘s have never thought to turn onto the campus and take a stroll.

Same deal for SUNY Albany, which we drive past when we need to go to the city, an hour’s drive from our place way up in teeny Summit. There too, at SUNY Albany, we’ve never wanted to get out of the car, though we did once drive onto campus. A current graduate student describes the problem in a recent op/ed in the Schenectady paper:

… [T]he university is physically a cold place, marked by mammoth concrete structures. Few buildings on campus are warm and inviting. Unlike some universities, after four weeks on campus, I have yet to find a place where one can sit where it is socially acceptable, if not expected, that one will say hello to the strangers at the next table. Where there are picnic tables, they seem to be placed somewhere off the podium distant from one another, leaving one to feel you are the university. [Not sure what she means by this last bit — That you alone are what’s going on?]

When chairs are placed in public areas, they tend to line the walls, facing large empty spaces instead of facing other chairs. Instead of inviting those sitting to speak to those nearby, they instead force the occupant to watch others at a distance, often enforcing a feeling of loneliness.

The other evening I found myself wandering the campus accompanied by a visiting Chinese scholar of Shakespeare (whom I know from a non-university activity), hoping to sit and watch a DVD on a laptop computer. After 45 minutes we gave up. Might I suggest a few carefully placed clusters of picnic tables up on top of the podium?

The university forces people to physically be either in or out. To leave campus is literally a half-mile walk, at which point one will find oneself on the fringes of your standard suburban sprawl with little to see. By contrast, many colleges border an area specializing in goods and services for students, including clothing, books, coffee shops and cheap restaurants. Often these become tourist destinations. Might such a zone, something similar to Ithaca’s college-town neighborhood, make a good economic development project? If successful, would it add to the richness of the Capital Region, perhaps in some way resembling Albany’s Lark Street or Jay Street in Schenectady?

Lack of what architects call density makes for non-places. Things are too big, too monumental, at SUNY Albany, and the windy spaces the monuments make between themselves sharpen the sense of nothingness. Add to this the lack of any background, any physical surrounding at all outside of sky and tree, and you get existential isolation.

Arnold Klein, a professor in UCLA’s medical school. Where is he?

I’m getting this when I search for him on the university’s faculty site:

Klaustermeyer, William B

* Medicine

Kleck, Jeffrey H

* Radiation Oncology
* Radiation Oncology

Kleerup, Eric M.D.

* Geronet
* Medicine
* Asthma and Cough Center

Klein, Marc G. Ph.D.

* Physiology

Klein, Robert M.D.

* Medicine

Klein, Stanley R M.D.

* Surgery
* Surgical Oncology
* GENERAL SURGERY

Kleinman, Leonard E …

No Arnold.

Yet the man’s all over the news, as is his academic affiliation. He’s the guy who did all kind of shit with/for Michael Jackson… … drugs… babies… stuff. Is he not on the UCLA faculty?

Delaware News Journal:

Mark Duncan, the University of Delaware football team’s top returning wide receiver, has been charged with two criminal offenses in the wake of his May 30 stabbing.

Newark police charged Duncan with falsely reporting an incident and hindering prosecution. Duncan had gone to Christiana Hospital and told state police he was stabbed while playing basketball on campus that Saturday. Police said he later changed the story and said he was stabbed while walking on Cleveland Avenue and knew his attacker, but would not name the person. Duncan checked himself out of the hospital without being treated and a Newark police officer who had been called to the hospital convinced him to go back for treatment. Duncan later changed the story again, claiming he’d been jumped by four unknown assailants on Cleveland Avenue, according to police.

Newark police issued an arrest warrant after determining that he’d switched his story too many times…

As with Yeshiva University and Bernard Madoff, the University of South Carolina has quickly deleted the web page of its board of trustees’ vice-chairman, charged with bank fraud (specifically, a kickback scheme) and lying on his taxes. The trustee has resigned for, he says in his farewell letter, personal reasons, but these are very public reasons, aren’t they? I mean, stealing from a bank isn’t really personal.

Federal prosecutors say [Samuel] Foster, a real estate developer in York County, was retained by [Chester] Williams to help him find lending opportunities for BB&T through a program set up to spur economic development in depressed areas.

Prosecutors allege Williams began experiencing personal financial difficulties and participated in a scheme with Foster that brought both men tens of thousands of dollars.

Prosecutors said Williams increased the fees Foster received for helping him find lending opportunities, with Foster kicking some of the money back to him and keeping the rest.

In 2006, prosecutors allege, Foster should have received $210,000 in fees. But, on Williams’ authorization, Foster actually received $247,500.

Prosecutors said Foster failed to report $157,500 on his 2006 federal tax return and kicked back $47,500 to Williams.

All told, prosecutors allege Foster earned $672,500 from 2004 through 2007, failed to report $304,000 on federal tax forms and kicked back $102,500 to Williams.

UD‘s got nothing against USC’s quick deletion of Foster’s page. But the school needs to do a little better on its public statements about what’s happened. Not the vapid ‘best wishes and bye’ thing it has so far released, but something that says why he’s leaving. That tells the truth. This man was in line to become chair of the board. Rather than kiss him goodbye and pretend all’s well, USC should say something like “We were dismayed by the news of Sam Foster’s alleged bank fraud. Nothing matters more to us than the integrity of the people who oversee the university, and we will redouble our efforts to make sure that all of our trustees are beyond reproach.”

If this comment is true, all praise to the TTU law school:

[The chancellor] tried to foist the man off on the Law School. Three times he tried and three time the Law School—-both through its Dean and its Faculty (and perhaps with some help from its alums) rebuffed him. But the Law School has a bit more autonomy than does the Poly Sci Department.

Second, the ONLY good thing that can come from this bizarre appointment is that it gives the Board of Regents serious pause about continuing Hance as Chancellor…

The University of Illinois law school only had to keep unqualified students out…

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

UD thanks a reader, jbb, for the link.

Arnold Relman, in the New York Review of Books:

Nearly a half-century ago, Stanford economics professor Kenneth Arrow, later a Nobel laureate, convincingly argued that medical care cannot conform to market laws because patients are not ordinary consumers and doctors are not ordinary vendors. He said that sick or injured patients must rely on physicians in ways fundamentally different from the price-driven relation between buyers and sellers in an ordinary market. This argument implied that, contrary to the assumptions of antitrust law, market competition among physicians cannot be expected to lower medical prices. And since physicians influence decisions to use medical services far more than patients do, the volume and types of services provided to patients—and hence total health costs—need to be controlled by forces other than the market, such as professional standards and government regulation. But Arrow’s argument was largely ignored in the rush to exploit health care for commercial purposes that ensued after the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

When the organizations that set professional standards — the whorish American Psychiatric Association, for instance — are themselves market law conformists, what hope for change? That organization, speaking of excess volume and types of services, is even now revising the profession’s diagnostic manual to medicalize more and more non-medical human behaviors. There’s money in it.

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

Update: Recall Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books:

Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often uncertain, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones. Diagnostic criteria are pretty much the exclusive province of the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the product of a panel of psychiatrists, most of whom, as I mentioned earlier, had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. [Christopher] Lane, a research professor of literature at Northwestern University, traces the evolution of the DSM from its modest beginnings in 1952 as a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I) to its current 943-page incarnation (the revised version of DSM-IV) as the undisputed “bible” of psychiatry—the standard reference for courts, prisons, schools, insurance companies, emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, and medical facilities of all kinds.

Given its importance, you might think that the DSM represents the authoritative distillation of a large body of scientific evidence. But Lane, using unpublished records from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association and interviews with the principals, shows that it is instead the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. What the DSM lacks is evidence. Lane quotes one contributor to the DSM-III task force:

There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest.

Lane uses shyness as his case study of disease-mongering in psychiatry. Shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as “social phobia” in DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become “social anxiety disorder,” now said to be extremely common. According to Lane, GlaxoSmithKline, hoping to boost sales for its antidepressant, Paxil, decided to promote social anxiety disorder as “a severe medical condition.” In 1999, the company received FDA approval to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. It launched an extensive media campaign to do it, including posters in bus shelters across the country showing forlorn individuals and the words “Imagine being allergic to people…,” and sales soared. Barry Brand, Paxil’s product director, was quoted as saying, “Every marketer’s dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That’s what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder.”

Some of the biggest blockbusters are psychoactive drugs. The theory that psychiatric conditions stem from a biochemical imbalance is used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory has yet to be proved. Children are particularly vulnerable targets. What parents dare say “No” when a physician says their difficult child is sick and recommends drug treatment? We are now in the midst of an apparent epidemic of bipolar disease in children (which seems to be replacing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder as the most publicized condition in childhood), with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis between 1994 and 2003.[18] These children are often treated with multiple drugs off-label, many of which, whatever their other properties, are sedating, and nearly all of which have potentially serious side effects.

Alberto Gonzales, thoroughly disgraced Attorney General, will get $100,000 for teaching one course at Texas Tech.

No one who reads this blog will be surprised that, having exhausted efforts to find a higher paying job, a once-well-known person rigs a do-nothing deal at a university for a pretty fair sum. Even Michael Jackson’s doctors will eventually be taken up by some university to teach Medicine in the Age of Celebrity. Compared to the crumb bums who land on campuses after no one else will employ them, Gonzales is a saint.

Still, people outside Texas Tech are pretty outraged. There’s this guy, and there’s this guy, both of whom recount the new political science professor’s many outrageous misdeeds as Bush’s lackey at Justice.

Both writers also make much of Texas Tech having not long ago hired the psychotic Bobby Knight late in his psychotic career.

First guy: “The disgraced former official finally landed a job outside of government—he resigned in 2007 — and now (for one year anyway) will teach political science – ‘contemporary issues in the executive branch’ – at a school most recently known for hosting basketball coach Bobby Knight.”

Second guy: “Chancellor Hance’s unilateral hire constitutes academic welfare for a government wash-out. It is even more brazen than Texas Tech’s decision, in 2001, to sign Bobby Knight as its basketball coach, six months after he was fired from Indiana University for ‘uncivil, defiant, and unacceptable behavior.’ Before his invitation to lead the Red Raiders, Knight had repeatedly abused players, fans, and furniture, but, unlike Gonzales, the temperamental coach did not do violence to the authority and impartiality of American jurisprudence.”

See how sports decisions can play into your university’s academic reputation? The point both guys are making about Texas Tech as a university is clear: The place is clueless, cynical, and desperate enough to do just about anything.

Emory and the Boys

The critical writing of Doug
Gets firmly swept under the rug,
While the lucrative quackery
Of Charles and Zachary
Acts on it like some kind of drug.

Continuing Medical Education, a great American tradition described here, is under attack by the government, and by universities.

Daniel Carlat’s on the case; he’s reproduced on his blog an ad — no, not an ad! A call to arms! — running in medical journals and magazines that alerts fellow Americans to the chilling effect of efforts to transform CME from free vacations paid for by drug firms that want you to prescribe their pills and use their devices, to evidence-based, serious seminars run by independent scientists. (Here’s another description of the ad.)

If CME junkets, which after all make everyone happy — the doctor who gets a free vacation, the salesperson who gets a captive audience — are undermined, the very foundations of this nation will begin to tremble.