… has been arrested for forgery of a prescription drug. Oxycontin, of course.
Bradley H. Jack was at Lehman Brothers before it went bankrupt; he left in 2005 with an $80 million severance. He owns the most expensive house in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Guess you can’t call it hillbilly heroin anymore.
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“Had Brad Jack worked for a culture that supported rather than culled illness, maybe we would not be reading today’s headlines [about his drugs arrest].”
Boo hoo. A new form of sympathy for our times. Vicky Ward argues that Bradley Jack’s fate had nothing to do with Jack’s own ability to discern that his bottomless greed kept him working at greedy evil sicko Lehman Brothers. Noooo. Lehman Brothers was supposed to be Ben & Jerry’s – a soft, supportive environment – and its failure to be this put Jack in jail.
A law professor uses one of UD‘s favorite university-sports adjectives (she’s probably used sordid almost as much as squalid in writing about big-time football and basketball) to describe Rich Rodriguez’s contract dealings with the University of West Virginia. (Background – including his subsequent experience at the University of Michigan – here. Scroll down.) But he does more than that. He proves that what sports boosters always say is true: Sports contribute a huge amount to the university.
Bambauer said the heated dispute [between Rodriguez and UWV] worked “wonderfully well” for his Contracts B class, a second semester contract law class he was teaching in the winter and spring of 2008.
“It was a nice teaching moment because it showed that you threaten a lot and then, eventually, the parties sit down and negotiate. This is the norm.”
Yes. That is the norm in the big bad world, and it’s the norm in our big sports universities. They’re every bit as sordid as the big bad world.
As Philip Larkin would say, useful to get that learnt.
Response to the Disciplinary Committee
Say Biederman, Wilens, and Spencer:
“Ah hell, we just do what we can, sir.
You can’t avoid sleaze
When you’ve got our disease:
The absence of all moral sensors.”
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(UD thanks B. for the link.)
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Update:
“You could have made more nice statements about the drug.’’
More on the culture of academic psychiatry in the United States.
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Lest we forget.
… Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.
… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.
This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.
And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?
Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.
Let’s take a look.
He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.
“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”
And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.
Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:
Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.
Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.
But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.
There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.
At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.
This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.
Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)
A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.
The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).
NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…
Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.
Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”
Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.
When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.
… the filthiest of all the Bowls, the very deepest bowel of the Bowls (scroll down for BCS details), has sent a letter out to a bunch of politicians. Over the past few years, the Fiesta people have given these politicians free game tickets.
The letter asks the politicians why they – the Fiesta people – did that.
You read that right. It’s a letter that says you tell us why we bribed you. Turns out it wasn’t a tax exempt sort of thing to do! Who knew? … But … well … maybe it was a tax exempt sort of thing to do only we’re too stupid to figure out how it was tax exempt. Will you tell us?…
Or… maybe if we write this letter to you we’ll transfer the guilt to you! You took the money after all! It wasn’t me, Mom! It was him!
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Answers to the Fiesta letter are starting to trickle in, and so far it doesn’t look good.
Senator Rich Crandall:
“I don’t have to prove to you it was a benefit. …Your board and directors said it was a benefit… You need to go back to them and ask them how they felt it was a benefit. I don’t have to justify anything to you.”
Senate President Russell Pearce:
The request is “outrageous.”
Looks like the Fiesta guys might have to go back to the drawing board and figure out all by themselves why they’re a tax-exempt organization. For some reason, the beneficiaries of their payoffs aren’t cooperating.
As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.
Are there scoffers? Naysayers?
[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.
This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!
Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.
… deer who live in the woods behind our house, I cannot resist scenes like this one. Two beautiful fawns, leaping about only a few feet from our deck.
I watched them just now – eight o’clock on a still-light summer evening.
Fireflies made a golden corona around them, and they moved to the music of the wood thrush.
Caroline Wallis is only fourteen years old, but she’s already figured out that, above all else, plagiarism is an act of profound contempt for your audience.
She goes to a middle school for promising writers in Manhattan, and her principal gave her class a graduation speech mainly written by David Foster Wallace.
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UD thanks David for the link.
… (which unfortunately also taught accounting to Gary Foster). It’s by Dave Matter, in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune:
Over the last five years, the Big East school has used more than $115 million to cover its athletic department’s spending. That’s almost twice as much as any other major conference athletic department received from its university coffers. And here’s where it gets ugly: State funding cuts have forced Rutgers to withhold $30 million in scheduled raises for its employees.
… Rutgers … is coming off a 4-8 football season and has the Big East’s highest-paid coach in Greg Schiano. At just over $2 million a year, he makes more than any public employee in the state of New Jersey…
The ex-head of the University of Alberta med school started the fad: When caught plagiarizing, say you did it because you were trying to inspire people.
Now the plagiarizing Wolcott Connecticut superintendent of schools has jumped on the inspirational bandwagon. Like the Alberta guy, he plagiarized a speech he gave to graduating students, sending them off to the future with soaring stolen words. “All I was trying to do was inspire,” he explained.
Professor Edward Larkin of the University of New Hampshire likes to drive around town on his motorcycle and expose himself to young girls.
Realizing that this behavior constitutes a “major public relations problem for the university,” UNH has, since Larkin’s arrest and conviction for indecent exposure, tried to fire him.
Now an arbitrator has said that it can’t, because cock-flashing, while unpleasant, isn’t a firing offense.
… but it’s uglier when the funds are meant to help minority students; and it’s even uglier than that when the embezzlers are the leadership of a university.
