…from Science Magazine. Excerpts:

… The end result [of Senator Charles Grassley’s investigation and proposed legislation] is expected to vastly expand the information that faculty — both basic and clinical — must report to their institutions and to NIH. And it will likely ask for more details on how institutions follow up on conflicts.

… The issue exploded in the media a year ago thanks to Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. The 75-year-old Midwesterner, a longtime fraud buster, started out investigating defense contracts. In recent years, Grassley, citing his committee’s oversight of Medicare and Medicaid, began probing conflicts of interest involving the approval of drugs such as Paxil and Vioxx.

In 2007, these probes led Grassley’s investigators to conflicts of interest at biomedical research institutions. Using a strategy that had worked well in an inquiry by the House of Representatives, they asked both companies and institutions about payments to a faculty member and looked for discrepancies. Grassley says they got leads from media reports and “whistleblowers” such as critical faculty members.

Grassley’s team made its first big splash with a front-page story in The New York Times last June. They alleged that three Harvard child psychiatrists had failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in income they received over several years from drug companies. Other psychiatrists and surgeons have since been accused of hiding similar payments, and some have been disciplined…

… No rule is universally obeyed, of course, and scientists could still hide their income. Many of those Grassley has probed allegedly were not following existing rules. The remedy for that, many observers say, is a public database of payments reported by companies — such as one that would be created by the bill introduced by Grassley and Senator Herbert Kohl (D–WI), potentially by October 2011. University officials could use the database to audit their faculty members, say AAMC and AAU, which support the bill…

… shares the results of his study on how to motivate employees to work hard.

First, a description of his method:

The study involved giving a group of students small gifts when they came to a training session, and playing music during breaks to perk up their moods. A second group of workers, a control group run for comparison purposes, received their gifts at the end of the day and heard no music.

And now the results:

What he found was that people who were naturally upbeat and positive reacted positively to the gifts and music, and their moods became more positive. However, those who were not naturally positive actually reacted negatively to the gifts and music. Brown suspects this is because the less positive individuals are skeptical and question the motives of the experimenter.

There are thus two kinds of employees:

1.) Morons. Morons tiptap along to whatever (What did the trainer choose? Say he chose this, and some subjects began screaming. This indicates their lack of natural positiveness.). This group will also droolingly accept a keychain.

2.) Others. Others display skepticism and a tendency to analyze their surroundings. These traits point to their lack of natural positiveness.

Conclusion: Non-natural positives would have to be, I guess, subjected to more aggressive motivational procedures than natural positives. They cannot even be reached until their inclination toward critical thought has been broken down.

I gotta take a break from surfing sports headlines.

And who among us couldn’t have foreseen it?

Put the two most corrupt units on campus together, and see how the magic gets made.

Devoted donors to the Fighting Illini are often thanked with prime stadium seats, first crack at tickets to bowl games or a chance to meet some of the school’s marquee players.

But a few patrons of the University of Illinois’ athletic programs also try to use the department’s prestige to give applicants they know an edge in the competitive admissions process, according to newly released campus records.

An ongoing Tribune investigation reveals an admissions system subject to outside influences. The latest internal documents reviewed by the newspaper suggest the athletic department requested special consideration for non-athletes who applied to the state’s most prestigious public university.

The campus e-mails and correspondence provided under the state’s Freedom of Information Act show that admissions officials gave special consideration to candidates with ties to athletic donors at the request of the department director and his deputies. In several cases, athletic officials sought a reconsideration of a student’s rejection, a more thorough review of an application or to hasten the review process.

In the 2008-09 application cycle, one candidate had been tagged as an automatic denial by admissions officials because of poor academic credentials, but was accepted after being recommended by the athletic department, according to a log of special requests. At least three of six students recommended by the department this year got in.

It’s just part of the all-’round beauty of bigtime university sports. We’re asked to tolerate the admission of many non-students because they can throw a ball; we sometimes forget that we’re also asked to tolerate the admission of non-students connected to the people who give money to the big sports programs.

So much money and influence… None of it having anything to do with education. I guess that’s just the way it is at the University of Illinois.

Don’t even think about Auburn.

… wear comfortable shoes.

The sharp eye and the perfect title are all yours, RJO.

UD thanks you.

… to conclude my comments on Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures. The final lecture took place on UD‘s campus, the immensely well-located George Washington University.

I found the lectures disappointing, pitched at too high a level of generality — almost at the level, at times, of platitudes. Sandel comes across as a careful, well-meaning, bland person; there’s no passion in his delivery, and no real effort to engage his audience polemically by saying things sharply, or in a way that deepens their controversial nature.

And in fact Sandel’s content is controversial, having at its core an attack on the still-dominant public policy regime in American and other governments, a regime in which the moral and spiritual questions inherent in complex and contested public issues (health care, the environment) are put aside in favor of bloodless technocratic solutions.

“The attempt to empty politics of moral controversy may seem to be a way of respecting our differences, but it is actually corrosive of democratic life.” The attempt to come up with morally neutral, cost/benefit responses to civic problems, Sandel insists, fails to solve them, because these are issues that transcend consumer preferences. Governments that treat us all simply like consumers with preferences fail to appeal to our civic instincts; yet without awakening those instincts, governments will never draw from us the sense of solidarity and urgency which alone can resolve these problems.

“Monetizing moves decisions from democratic politics to technicians… [The] spurious science of cost/benefit analysis … elevates technocratic decision making at the expense of democratic deliberation.”

[D]emocracy is about more than tweaking incentives in order to make markets work better… or maximizing GDP, or satisfying consumer preferences … [It’s] also about distributive justice; [and other values at the heart of democracy] … Why then have we drifted… away from older traditions of solidarity and civic virtue? …

Sandel concludes:

Think of the self not as a consumer but as a citizen…

[D]eliberation is about changing our ways of thinking, [not merely satisfying static desires.]… To get important things like health care for all, you need solidarity — a sense of the mutual responsibilities of citizenship… [To get environmental change, you] need to change people’s attitudes toward nature… [This is a] moral and spiritual project, not only an economic one…

On the question of distributive justice, Sandel notes the extreme income and wealth inequalities in the United States at the moment, and the attendant deterioration of public services (the very wealthy withdraw from these services socially and ultimately economically), as well as the disappearance of public places where Americans of very different backgrounds can mix as equals.

(On a parochial note, allow UD to say that the university fulfills two of Sandel’s requirements in a very important way: It provides a public space for the civic and civil deliberation that can change the way people think, or that can allow people to understand why they continue to think in the way they do; it also creates one of those public places Sandel has in mind, where economically and socially diverse people can come together and deliberate in a setting not about money, but, in this case, about quality of thought. It goes without saying that the online university can in no way be this public place.)

Sandel’s is an important argument that needs to be made as strongly as possible; yet his lectures, as I say, don’t seem adequate to the urgency of the matter.

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A final thought:

Why not talk about Michael Jackson, or Bernard Madoff, or any of the money-grotesques that the very rich, hyper-privatized, morally neutral culture Sandel evokes has spawned? Jackson in particular embodies with chilling exactitude the withdrawn, opulent, heavily drugged life which might be seen as one endpoint of the civic regression Sandel’s worried about.

Jackson had in his house an anesthetic, propofol, so powerful and dangerous it’s only used in operating rooms. It doesn’t calm you and relieve pain; it puts you into a coma. It probably killed him. How did he get it?

Well, with enough money, you can get anything. And for whatever reason, in many cases, the more money people have, the more their desire is to withdraw. From civic and social life. From life itself, I guess. At five million dollars or so of wealth you’re comfortably numb; in the Jackson stratosphere, you’re – day after day – comfortably dead.

Sandel needs to grapple with the fact that Michael Jackson is an American hero.

 Never take freedom for granted.

A professor runs a research unit of some sort that gets grants.

At some point it occurs to the professor that he or she could start a business and steer grants the business gets to the university research unit.

This is classic conflict of interest, and there’s a case of it now at the University of Missouri.

An internal audit of MU’s Research Animal Diagnostic Laboratory, known as RADIL, prompted the lab’s director, Lela Riley, to step down because of a conflict of interest.

According to a statement issued by the university, a conflict of interest arose because Riley was both the head of the research lab and the head of a “private venture company” called Impact Bio Labs LLC. The company and the lab do business together, and MU felt that management changes were necessary to absolve the conflict.

Make that resolve the conflict. Conflicts don’t need absolution.

Another article about this conflict explained it this way:

In 2005, Riley and seven RADIL faculty members formed a private venture company known as Impact Bio Labs LLC. As a private company, Impact Bio Labs has been able to secure federal grant funding for private companies and unavailable to public universities.

Again, the idea is to steer grant money that the university can’t get directly to the university because, as owner of the private business, you now control the grant and can move it around. And you’re gonna move it around to your lab, of course. Conflict of interest means you’ve really got things sewn up. You’ve got them coming and going.

… scores this sort of thing. If the player is still just a signee, does it count? Fewer points?

Offensive lineman Justin Cabbagestalk, who signed with the [Vanderbilt] Commodores in February, was arrested Tuesday night in his hometown of Tampa, Fla., and charged with a felony count of burglary of an unoccupied dwelling and a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief.

… is that, once you’ve done it, you lose immense amounts of credibility — not merely in terms of what you write, but in terms of what you say.

If you’re a university president who has plagiarized — plagiarized your dissertation — any public announcements you make, especially announcements having to do with academic integrity, become jokes.

So when, under the pressure of his university system’s clout admissions scandal, Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard assures a reporter that this “unfortunate incident” should in no way undermine the reputation of Illinois higher education…

His exact words were “I don’t think it creates a problem for higher education as a whole.” …

Well, lawdy. Higher education as a whole at SIU involves not merely drastic declines in the number of admitted students who decide to attend, but also a risible board of trustees, supine in regard to Poshard’s plagiarism and installed by just about the most corrupt politicians America has ever produced. It involves among the most moronic and expensive devotions to sports above academics that UD has encountered in her years of blogging on the subject. It involves constantly revolving administrative doors as one dean after another plagiarizes (after all, you’re at a place where the president himself sets the pace) or does other really stupid shit that gets him canned.

With this gorgeous backdrop, President Poshard ascends the podium and assures us that all is well.

The house was under surveillance, and he got surveilled. He loses his job at a Catholic university, and he suffers embarrassment, yes; but the prostitutes have to go to jail. Which seems unfair.

The owner of the business captures some of the unfairness:

[The owner] said that after speaking with his attorney, Thomas H. Ramsay, he concluded that he could not “afford to roll the dice at age 62” and risk greater punishment, so he accepted a plea bargain.

He said police repeatedly referred to him as the “brothel operator,” while treating Sargent “with deference.”

“If you watch the taped interview, the police are almost apologetic with this guy,” Clark said of Sargent. “They told him, ‘You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ and they agreed to contact him at his office, not his home.”

What? You mean they can’t handle the way American universities – the University of Kansas, in this case – become trampy little soap operas when recruitment season rolls around? Because they’re so so desperate to recruit one-year non-students who can throw balls that the schools’ anxieties over recruitment paralyze the campus?

The Henry guys, the two guys KU wants so bad it hurts, drive a Hummer and a Range Rover and live in opulence and really REALLY don’t want to go to class. They’d go pro and get rich right now if they could. KU means shit to them. But KU LOVES them. It’s just as excited as Alabama was when Coach Saban said Yes!! Yes, I’ll take six million dollars to coach your team! YES! We got Coach Saban!!!!

But will KU get the Henry guys? Today it looks pretty good, but yesterday… Man, yesterday I thought their father was saying something that sounded kinda negative… I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, thinking about it …

… The kids don’t want to be there. It doesn’t matter how pretty the campus is or how historic the arena or how good the team’s chance is at winning the national title.

For the participants, college hoops lost its cool points.

Pushing a Maybach, sporting the most dazzling ice and making it rain inside America’s top strip clubs long ago replaced hitting on the finest girls from Delta Sigma Theta and Xi Omega during psychology class.

You can grind your teeth and reminisce about how much better things used to be, but you’re not going to make kids (or their parents) buy into the current system. It’s a farce…

Shaddap. I LOVE these guys. Everything’s going to be GREAT. Go KU!

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

UD thanks Dave for telling her about the events at KU.

I’m not clever enough. But the student journalists at Washington State University are.

UD thanks Dance for sending her this.

Yes. That’s it. Click on the word this. Click on it.

And enjoy.

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

PS: SOS just wrote to the editor about the misspelling in the article’s title.

Vanity Fair’s at it again.

Last month, an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin appeared; this month, it’s an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about endowment fuckup Harvard.

McPalin fans can’t complain that VF‘s a tool of liberal elites, singling out their girl for ridicule; even a glance at highlights from the Harvard article tells you that Cambridge — epicenter of the snooty left — is going to take a very big hit.

Some of this stuff you already know — I mean, if you read University Diaries you already know it — but the VF writer runs some blood through the numbers. Like frinstance you know about “the eight-figure salaries some of [the] managers were pulling down” — (That’s eight, as in thirty million dollars a year apiece … Count the zeroes… 30,000,000 … Non-profit work… Good for the conscience… And good for the pocketbook!… ) — but maybe you didn’t know about the personalities raging around the numbers:

The longtime head of Harvard Management Company, Jack Meyer, quit to start his own hedge fund in 2005 after growing fed up with criticism over the eight-figure salaries some of his managers were pulling down and with persistent meddling from top Harvard officials. Two particular annoyances were Summers, who had been questioning Meyer’s investment strategies, and Robert Rubin, a member of the Harvard Corporation, who frowned on Meyer’s aggressive strategies and wound up on the “warpath” with Meyer, as one person put it.

When Meyer left, he took much of Harvard Management Company with him — including 30 portfolio managers and traders, as well as the chief risk officer, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer. The place became “like a Ferrari without the engine,” according to a portfolio manager who arrived after Meyer left. This angered Rubin, according to someone who knows him well: “In Rubin’s opinion, Meyer crippled the institution.”

If only Summers and Rubin, with their I-know-better-than-you personalities, had let things alone! The managers would have been happy with their ever-increasing salaries (Keep in mind that they were graciously taking a cut from what they’d have gotten in the private sector, and Meyer would understandably have wanted to reward them with tens of millions more in pay every year.); one university in the United States would have gone from having the GDP of Bulgaria to, say, the GDP of … the United States? And that would have done wonders for school pride… We’re Number One!… And instead of Meyer deciding that the best thing he could do with this meddling issue was take down his entire operation and destroy a school, he’d still be sitting there, happy as a bug!

Here’s a snippet of sniping:

The Harvard endowment soared from $4.8 billion in 1990 to $36.9 billion as of June 30, 2008, and in the last half-decade or so, the men and women who run Harvard seemed to have convinced themselves that the university’s fund would grow at double-digit rates for, well, eternity. “Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” says Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967.

Dershowitz himself, though, doesn’t know much about economizing. He hires far too many people to write his books for him.

Fact is, Harvard — as I’ve suggested on this blog before — is an all ’round out of control drunk. Money and power, you know.

As with the Palin fiasco, when things come crashing down in the sober light of day, Vanity Fair moves in, with its glossy photojournalism and pesky reporters.

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UD thanks Tony.