From the Canadian Jewish News:

… In his keynote address [at a Yeshiva event in Montreal recently], [Richard] Joel, who has been YU president since 2003, made an appeal for greater financial support from Montrealers, as well as for them to send more of their children to YU.

He said the university spends about $2.5 to $3 million a year educating those Montrealers, but receives only about $750,000 to $850,000 in revenue in any given year from Montreal.

“The economy is awful, and we are operating in a major deficit,” he added.

Joel did not refer to the $14.5 million YU has said it lost in the fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, who was a member of its board of trustees…

I found it here.

For Souter’s departure today, much reciting of poetry, all of it written by Robert Frost. In his farewell letter to his colleagues, Souter describes the joy of his work at the court as he and his fellow justices contended over “those things that matter to decent people in civil society.”

He quotes from Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time — a poem, he writes, that expresses “the ideal of the life engaged, ‘…where love and need are one…’ … That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court…”

The poem describes the poet and his love of chopping wood. He both needs the wood for his fires, and loves in itself the act of chopping the wood:

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

These are goods in themselves, the ideal here that of the human body deeply engaged, in zenlike self-transcendence, in an act. But beyond the engrossing physical pleasure of this natural movement lies something else:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The only really meaningful act has this double aspect of vocation — a job that must be done to satisfy a human need — and avocation — a playful gratuitous act of sheer joy. Iris Murdoch calls art “close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” It’s the same idea: Souter is evoking the serious play — often, indeed, at the court, with dangerous forces — that work as a justice has represented for him. Play for mortal stakes.

In keeping with [author Mark] McGurl’s love of systems, diagrams dot The Program Era, a feature that some early reviewers have found off-putting. Charles McGrath did some eye-rolling in an early, unkind review for The New York Times in which he likened writing programs to Ponzi schemes and chastised McGurl for cluttering his prose with academic jargon — which hardly seems fair, given that The Program Era is a scholarly book, published by a university press and intended for an academic audience.

So if a book’s intended for an academic audience, it’s supposed to have prose cluttered with academic jargon?

… [A]nybody looking for a measure of [Ruth Madoff’s] integrity might do well to take a peek at her cookbook, The Great Chefs of America Cook Kosher. Published in 1996, the book lists Madoff and her friend Idee Schoenheim as executive editors. In truth, however, the work was done in its entirety by Karen MacNeil, a food expert who has been quoted as saying that Madoff “was interested in having her name on something that would allow for some sort of fun.” McNeil is listed as an editor.

In the grand scheme of things, claiming authorship of a ghost-written book is a minor offense, the kind of thing that will get one a window seat in an outer, more pleasant, circle of Hell; certainly, it pales beside the crimes of Ruth’s husband. However, a case could be made that someone who will lie about the small things may be inclined to lie about the big ones, and that someone willing to take credit for another person’s work has exploitative tendencies…

Ruth’s approach to publication has much in common with the approach of thousands of American medical school professors. They too are interested in having their name on something that would allow for some sort of fun.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

CUOMO TO SELL MERKIN’S ART

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is selling art owned by financier J. Ezra Merkin in an effort to repay his investors who lost millions in the Madoff fraud.

The sale of several Mark Rothko paintings and Alberto Giacometti sculptures belonging to Mr. Merkin and his wife will yield $191 million for investors.

Mr. Cuomo’s office arranged for the artwork to be sold to an anonymous buyer for $310 million…

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A few more details here.

UD takes this typically dull sentence from a book written by committee and full of dull sentences.

Unfortunately, the book is extremely important, making the case, as it does, that conflict of interest in academic and non-academic medicine is an immense national scandal.

This being University Diaries, UD pays attention only to that small part of the scandal that involves universities with medical schools. But there’s so much more, and this book covers it all. Dully.

Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice (note titillating title), published by National Academies Press, may be bought, downloaded, skimmed online … mainlined via hypodermic… what I mean is, there are many, many ways to read this book. Is what I’m trying to get across.

An option that doesn’t exist is reading its important and even dramatic material in a way that doesn’t make you bitter about how old you’re getting. (Though this might just be me.)

The University of Florida medical school can’t even find and retain forms it’s been sent to complete on conflict of interest.

Because of this pathetic failure, the American Medical Student Association gave the school an F grade on its widely publicized national measurement of how well universities are handling conflict of interest in their med schools. The university had to plead with AMSA to change its grade to in progress,which AMSA graciously allowed.

And now a blowhard UF dean, interviewed by the student newspaper, comes out with this:

“[AMSA] is the least knowledgeable [in conflicts of interest policies],” Flynn said, referring to the fact that AMSA is an organization made up of medical students. “[No offense to them, but] they’re not even in the profession yet. We’re doing this because we feel it’s the right thing to do, not because of them.”

Yes, the wee babes of AMSA! We big boys who’ve been at the conflict of interest game for decades know how it’s played. These innocents, these hyper-moral fools, these fanatics, waltz in with their little questionnaires and think we have to notice! No offense, but they don’t know shit. We threw their presumptuous little form in the trash the minute we saw it… Now it turns out people actually pay attention to the fuckers…. We had four secretaries scrounging through garbage to find the thing! But no go. We’ve had to kiss up to the assholes…

The contest in which you are asked to write the worst possible opening sentence you can think of for a story or a novel has announced this year’s winners.

I like the three winning sentences quoted here, but none of them can touch this one, a winner from an earlier year:

The widow Hasha Brown, whose agrarian husband had died from an unfortunate accident involving a hoe, leaned on the filigree railing of her balcony, overlooking her lavish, ornate Idaho estate, her dewy breasts protruding from her Pucci-print dressing gown like subterranean tubers saturated and distended from the vernal rains.

Winner and still champeen.

Longtime readers know that UD likes to make poems out of words and phrases in newspaper articles.

Here’s one. Article first.

Quiet please — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.

Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th century which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the queen’s official Swan Marker from July 20-24.

“With the assistance of the Queen’s Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease,” Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.

The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the queen.

According to custom, Britain’s sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.

In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.

This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.

It is also an important year because Queen Elizabeth has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.

She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.

“Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience,” Buckingham Palace said.
 

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Swan Upping

Up the Thames the Marker rows,
Swans and cygnets counting.
Buckingham’s announcing
This year the sovereign follows.

Swan Warden, particular keen,
Eyes discarded tack,
And signs of dog attack,
On the mute unmarked of the queen.

Swan Uppers when medieval
Sought after fowl for feast.
Now they assess disease
On tributary travel.

They’ve put together a Facebook campaign to keep their ridiculous board of trustees from renaming one of their campuses after His Excellency Mitch Maidique, FIU’s money-grubbing, football-mad, just-retired president.

Cast your eye over UD’s Maidique posts over the last few years to get a sense of this absurd character, and then consider signing the students’ petition. My signature is Number 447.

The students worry about the cost of renaming buildings and all at a time of austerity. Which is fine. It’s a fine worry. But they should also worry about rewarding a president for having done a bad job, and about permanently embarrassing an ambitious school by plastering this guy’s image and moniker all over the place.

As we await Madoff’s sentencing today, we revisit unapologetically ill-run Yeshiva University.

[Many institutions connected to Madoff] not only need to more formally organize their investing and giving along more official corporate governance lines — Yeshiva University in particular has been cited for this type of needed reform. [T]hey may need to address their own unwitting complicity in the dissipation of the assets of Mr. Madoff’s victims.

Madoff, recall, was Yeshiva’s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an influential trustee. There’s been no public reckoning with this history on that campus, and conflict of interest remains the all-male board of trustees’ middle name.

Sure, Yeshiva lost money through Madoff. It also made plenty of money – for itself, and for its trustees. Yeshiva has said nothing by way of acknowledgement of the depth of its misdeeds.

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Update: It’s also a good day to remember this letter, written last year to the president of Yeshiva from one of its law school graduates, Andrew Sole. Here are its closing paragraphs:

[H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.

In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.

The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees. The University’s counsel, government regulators, and law enforcement will conduct their proper investigations, but the proud students, graduates, and supporters of Yeshiva University should not have to wait that long for credible and therapeutic action to be taken by this University.

Yeshiva has the opportunity to begin the healing process today by installing new fiduciaries that are untainted by scandal and embarrassment. I hope you will take this letter to heart and I wish the University the best during these incredibly trying times.

Yeshiva responded to Sole with a form letter brush-off.

And all of those men, those hands-in-each-others’-pockets men, those Madoff and Merkin men, remain on the Yeshiva University board of trustees.

… and the Inside Higher Ed piece that goes with it, not to mention the Cristina Nehring accompaniment, UD‘s moved by the love letters exchanged between Governor Sanford and Maria Belén Chapur. UD‘s moved by the explosion of passion in the life of a prominent buttoned-down public person.

Indeed the public/private life contrast has rarely displayed itself more sharply than in this tale of escape from official routine, and embrace of the strange freedom of lovers.

Here’s part of a James Merrill poem that seems to me to rise to the occasion.

It’s In Nine Sleep Valley, and it describes two lovers who’ve escaped to a cottage deep in the woods to be alone. The poet gazes at his lover, draped in a white sheet and sitting in a chair, preparing to get his hair cut by the poet.

The poet tries to interpret the lover’s smile: Is it debonair, narcissistic, enjoying the adoring attentions of the poet? Is the lover wondering more broadly what new sort of person the transforming alembic of love will make him? Is his smile an effort to stay in the vibrant eros of the moment, and keep off thoughts of death?

The poet himself, echoing Faust, indeed prays that this perfect moment of lovers’ private bliss, which he knows will wither, might somehow never end. Looking at his lover in his white sheet, he has a dark vision of a dead body, its hair grown out and tangled amid physical rot, and he knows that this “must in time be our affair.”

Or, wonders the poet, is his lover smiling as he contemplates the botched job the poet will do on his hair?

Well, the poet thinks, even if his lover is worried about his imperfections as a barber, the lover should know that even “the clumsiest love” makes the loved one beautiful.

Sit then, draped in a sheet whose snowy folds
Darken in patches as when summer comes
And sun goes round and round the melting mountain.
Smiling debonair

You maybe wait for some not seen till now
Aspect of yours to blaze from the alembic
While one of mine in robe and slippers cries
Ah stay! Thou art so fair!

Or else are smiling not to wince recalling
Locks the grave sprang open. Blind, untrimmed,
Sheeted with cold, such rot and tangle must
In time be our affair.

But should you smile as those who doubt the novice
Hands they entrust their beautiful heads to,
I want to show you how the clumsiest love
Transfigures if you let it, if you dare.

There was a day when beauty, death, and love
Were coiled together in one crowning glory.
Shears in hand, we parted the dark waves…
Look at me, dear one. There.

Toward the end of the poem, the poet wonders whether in time the lovers will “hunger for each other / When one goes north and one goes east” — and he answers himself in this way:

Enough for them was a feast
Of flaws, the molten start and glacial sleep, the parting kiss…

Centimeters deep yawns the abyss.

An awkward verse, a clumsy love, one the poet in his final lines offers the loved one as a schoolboy might offer a lover a silly flower he made out of paper:

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,
Cluster a rained-in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

… a new UD post at Inside Higher Ed will be appearing.

Subject: Letters between the governor of South Carolina and his lover.

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Update:  Read Cristina Nehring in The New Republic for an excellent accompaniment to my Inside Higher Education piece on Sanford.

Straw man plus just the sort of bland vapid reassurance you’d expect from a certain sort of doctor. This is ultimately arrogant writing that thinks you’re stupid. Don’t be taken in by it.

It’s written by the chair of the University of Minnesota psychiatry department, a locus of conflict of interest.

Let’s take a look.

Much has been written over the past few years about the relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. So I would like to disclose the following right now: I have worked with multiple companies over the years on sponsored research and as a consultant, and I continue to do so. During this time I have published a number of papers regarding this work — including some pertinent negative results concerning the drugs these companies make. [Dull but okay writing. He needs to provide at least one link to a study he’s been involved in, funded by a pertinent drug company, that arrived at seriously negative results. This is the first instance of bland reassurance in an opinion piece rife with it.]

A recent Pioneer Press report noted I have received less money from industry in the last year. Why? Because nothing is more important to me than the reputation of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and I am concerned that the media portrayal of all physician-industry relationships as bad could affect public perception. [This is just weird. Wacky. Where’s the logic? We need hard numbers first of all — the sort of thing notoriously missing from conflict of interest forms psychiatry professors give their universities — if, of course, they give their universities the forms at all. Quite a number of them don’t seem to bother with the paperwork. Many of those who do fudge the numbers like hell. This writer needs to talk to us about that… But as to the logic: Why should his caring so much about his school’s rep mean he’s received less money? And I mean — we need to know if it’s five or five thousand or five hundred thousand less, don’t we? And here comes the straw man: Absolutely no one believes, argues, or writes that all of these relationships are bad. Set up a straw man and knock him down. How powerful.]

What the media stories do not mention are the advances that have been made because of these relationships, which are managed carefully by institutions such as the University of Minnesota, where the Institutional Review Board approves all studies for human subjects and the Sponsored Projects Administration negotiates all contracts with industry. [He thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he know that you know that things aren’t managed carefully at all? That this is an ongoing national scandal? You know what he’s doing? He’s saying There there little woman. There there little man. It’s all fine. You don’t need to understand — you don’t have the capacity to understand — the details and complexities here. Trust me.]

Physician-researchers need to partner with industry to develop new treatments. It is the system we have in place. The National Institutes of Mental Health do not fund development of new compounds in psychiatry; their focus is on funding basic science and mechanisms of action after approval. [Sure. True. No one has a problem with this. Get to the point.]

When it comes to clinical research to improve and develop medicines and bring them to market, it is industry that funds that work. And the research to develop new drugs is very expensive, costing $800 million and even up to $1 billion to get a drug discovered and available for patients. [How much improved are the improved meds you’re talking about? Isn’t one of the big points here that professors with financial interests in new, more expensive, but by no means better pills, are pushing those, thereby contributing to the health costs crisis? When do you plan to say something about this?]

When I consider the field of psychiatry, the advances made because of new medicines — studied in research institutions and developed by pharmaceutical companies — have been enormous and life-changing. Before we had effective medications, one out of two hospital beds was taken by a mentally ill patient. We no longer warehouse psychotic patients and drug them with opiates to “manage” them. Now, we have better ways. Better medications. [Who says? Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I’m not aware of studies showing that many, many psychiatric meds are no more effective than placebos?]

Because of the partnerships between physicians and industry and the medications that have resulted from these relationships, many psychiatric patients were able to leave institutions. Now, because of the advances in psychiatric medicine, patients in our department — who are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and friends — can be treated as outpatients. Many have jobs, support families and contribute to society. [Bland, bland, prose to match Dr. Pangloss’s happyface. At this point in reading, you should be telling this writer to eat shit.]

Are the psychiatric drugs we have now perfect? No. All drugs have side effects, and the drugs I prescribe my patients are no different. [Why don’t you talk not merely about side effects but effectiveness? Relative effectiveness of new, expensive and old, inexpensive? Why don’t you talk about all the people who shouldn’t be taking these strong-side-effect, expensive drugs in the first place? About the fact that the pills are being over-prescribed unconscionably by you and your colleagues? Where is all that?] The leading edge of our research now focuses on predicting which medications, which compounds, will be effective for our patients. The goal remains to help people live independently, or with the fewest restraints on their freedom. In our department, we develop programs that integrate efficacious medications with effective psychosocial treatments. [Gag me. You’re letting Mister Doctor use pompous big words — efficacious?? — and how’s that different from effective?? Oh. It ain’t — you’re letting him do that in order to make you think he’s a big ol’ authority and all that you shouldn’t question. Tell him one more time to eat shit.] There are always new discoveries to be made, and it is truly unfortunate that the public is hearing only one side of the story from the media.

Do physician-industry relationships need to be managed? Absolutely. Has the increased scrutiny in the past couple of years resulted in constructive changes? Yes. But the answer is not to break these ties completely. My patients of the future are counting on them. [Pompous, self-righteous, self-serving. Why did the paper publish it? Because of who the writer is. But the writer is lazy and cynical and he thinks you’re stupid.]

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SOS thanks a reader for emailing this article to her.