I’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN

Here are some recent thoughts about it, from an Esquire writer.

… American readers are more than happy to overlook a little literary fraud. Games of identity have always been a mainstay of literary experimentation, but in the past decade the games have turned sordidly mercenary. The JT LeRoy hoax, in which the author pretended to be a male “lot lizard” and confused a bunch of celebrities into being her friends, could have been a magnificent bit of modernist trickery, like the collected works of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the 1920s and ’30s who published as four different poets, all with different styles, reveling in the majestic possibilities of the unconstrained self. But the LeRoy hoax wasn’t about art in the end; it was about a little money and a little fame. James Frey still finds readers and publishers, even though he’s betrayed both. When Herman Rosenblat’s recent Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was exposed as a lie, interested parties found someone to publish the book as fiction rather than nonfiction. Our literary era has offered little in the way of insights into the workings of the human soul. It has provided, however, many great lessons in what you can get away with and still get paid.

To explain the recent explosion of cultural and financial frauds, it isn’t enough simply to blame the clever men and women who fool us and take our pride or money. Many Americans want to be fooled. This country is full of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, who took out credit cards at 22 percent interest in order to pay off the interest on their other credit cards, who believed that the stock market would expand without limit.

… Cynicism is now a legitimate virtue…

Longtime readers know that despite this blog’s endless coverage of the American university’s biggest, deepest, and most tolerated frauds — big-time athletics, and the scholarship of medical school professors — UD does not consider cynicism a legitimate virtue.

Read this. And then wonder no more why newspapers are folding left and right.

Some editor at the LA Times read this, thought it was great. Believed it.

… is the lying creative writing professors do about their academic and professional backgrounds.

An intrepid professor at Cal State Long Beach, Brian Lane, discovered scads of lies in the online biographies of two of his colleagues in the film and electronic arts department. They claimed screenwriting prizes they didn’t have. Advanced degrees they didn’t have. Professional memberships they didn’t have. One claimed to be a psychologist. Lots and lots of lies.

Brian wrote to UD this morning with an update: Both professors have been fired. A third professor, vociferous in defense of these two, has apparently also been fudging credentials.

Is there more of this sort of thing in writing than in other fields? How many James Freys sit on America’s writing faculties, lying on their bios and lying in their memoirs?

BURKA MAKES WOMEN PRISONERS, SAYS PRESIDENT SARKOZY

President Sarkozy threw his weight behind attempts to bar French Muslim women from covering their faces in public, calling their full-body dress a “debasement of women”.

Mr Sarkozy made his attack on a small but growing number of fundamentalist women in a “state of the nation” speech that was the first by a French President to both houses of Parliament since 1873.

… “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the Parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home.

“The burka is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement,” he added. “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

Mr Sarkozy was adding his voice to a strong consensus that has emerged this month against women in France’s five million-strong Muslim community who wear the full or nearly-full cover of their bodies and faces…

You’ve probably already seen this.

Mississippi State University bioethicist Barton Moffatt predicts doctors who allow their names to be put on ghostwritten articles may one day find themselves being fired over the practice, adding that many in academia now see the practice as plagiarism.

[Trudo] Lemmens [a professor of medical law at the University of Toronto] says he would fail any student who handed in a ghostwritten article, adding that universities cracking down on student plagiarism need to pay closer attention to faculty, as well.

“It is clearly false representation, which is academic misconduct. If we don’t do something about it (ghostwriting), it’s hard to tell the students it is wrong.”

You do begin to wonder… I mean, what are universities afraid of? The medical faculty will poison their sherry? You’ve got all these really highly paid professors, quite a number of whom do a raft of illegal, unethical, embarrassing things… The whole conflict of interest, ghost-writing, Continuing Medical Vacation shebang…

From the same article:

To test the integrity of a [corporate-ghosted] publication called The Open Information Science Journal, Cornell University student Philip Davis and Kent Anderson of the New England Journal of Medicine, submitted a fake manuscript – generated by a computer program to be purposely nonsensical – at the end of January. The “open information” journal offered to publish the article if the pair agreed to pay an $800 publishing fee. The editor later resigned.

The ex-president of Zambia, on trial for massive financial corruption, complains about his successor, who pushed for the trial.

“The presidency in Africa is not cheap,” Mr. Chiluba said, according to a transcript [of off-the-record remarks]. “People die to secure the presidency. But here was Mr. Mwanawasa, who received it on a silver platter from my hands. He stabbed me in the back badly. I still bleed.”

It’s true. The popular film The Proposal (Les UDs saw it the other night) mentions the sainted Don DeLillo twice in its first ten minutes. UD wasn’t expecting this. It certainly got her attention.

… release of its report on  Reggie Bush.

Medical school professors at the University of Minnesota are just as eager to lose money on their personal promotion of pills and devices, and on the sale of their university affiliation for use on corporate-generated research papers, as the University of Southern California is to admit guilt in the Bush recruiting scandal.   

Thrilled at the prospect of losing football games, incurring financial and win-record penalties, and telling professors accustomed to $500,000 base salaries plus up to a million dollars a year in corporate supplements that they’ll have to make due on the $500,000, committees at both schools are working with brisk efficiency on sanctions and rule changes. 

Here’s an update on the work of the University of Minnesota conflict of interest committee:

After a year and a half of work, the University of Minnesota still does not have a new conflict of interest policy in place for its 450 faculty, 990 residents and 920 medical students.

… [S]ome are frustrated with the pace of the process, and say the university has missed an opportunity to draft a tough policy that protects patients.

Josh Lackner and two dozen others in the University of Minnesota medical community came up with 14 pages of recommendations to prevent conflict of interest at the U of M’s medical school last fall.

Lackner, a recent med school graduate, doesn’t see many of those suggestions in a draft document being used by med school leaders to create a new conflict of interest policy.

… Allan Coukel, director of the Pew Prescription Project, a Boston-based group that monitors conflict of interest policies at the nation’s medical schools, has followed the U’s effort to rewrite its policy. Coukel thought early on the U was headed in the right direction.

“It looks like at one stage they were considering policies that really would have put them in the first rank nationally,” Coukel said. “And now they’re circulating a document that we can say is a modest advance, but they’ve squandered a chance to be a national leader.”

… Some say it’s simply taken too long for the med school’s leadership to come up with a new document. At one point, the document was expected to be ready by April.

… words in English.

UD tried to write a limerick using all of the words beginning with one or another letter of the alphabet.  The best she could do was this.  She uses the words starting with L.  But she wasn’t able to use all of them. 

Here’s the L list:

Lagniappe
Lagoon
Languor
Lassitude
Leisure
Lilt
Lissome
Lithe
Luxuriant

And here’s her limerick.

At leisure within his lagoon

Gauguin spent luxuriant noons.

The Tahitians were lithe

And his languor so blithe

That he slept til the rise of the moon.

It’s Jersey.

Crime pays.

She has never studied anthropology. She has never done field work. She does not understand the people of Kansas and environs, and she never will. If you can make sense of this Kansas City Star commentary, which presents itself as a tribute to outgoing Kansas State president Jon Wefald, you’re a better man than I.

[A recently disclosed Kansas State University audit] paints Wefald, Krause and Snyder [background on these people here] as shady, clueless and drunk on power.

… My impression is that Wefald, Krause, Snyder and anyone connected to Kansas State athletics during the school’s “football powerhouse era” cashed in on the record and off. [Dump the quotation marks.]

Even Tim Weiser, who had little to do with the golden era, received a no-questions-asked $500,000 loan. Thirteen payments to Krause, Snyder, Weiser and others totaling close to $1 million cannot be accounted for or explained.

The $3 million secret buyout Krause agreed to give Ron Prince seems to be part of a pattern of financial mismanagement at K-State under Wefald’s presidency.

… “The Miracle in Manhattan” now has an enlightening postscript, “The Madoff in Manhattan.”

… My opinions of Jon Wefald and Bill Snyder have not changed. I respect them immensely. I’m astonished by their accomplishments. But I always regarded them as human and therefore flawed. Greed, arrogance and a sense of entitlement can invade their mind-set as easily as yours.  [Yeah well.  Here’s where I start getting all confused.  I don’t claim to have an unimpregnable mind-set, but – as God is my witness! – my mind-set is set at an entirely different frequency from Bernard Madoff’s…  So point one, if you’re saying any of us could do with money and power what Wefald and the others did, you can kiss my royal Irish arse.  Point two, if you retain immense respect for mad arrogant fools who steal your tax money and make your university a national joke, you are pathetic.]

… I suspect the audit would’ve remained private had Wefald and Krause not renamed Snyder as head football coach on their way out the door. Re-installing Snyder as the unofficial president of the university was/is a serious impediment to Schulz. [Let’s pause right there. Did you get that?  Did you get the point that at KSU the football coach is the real president of the university?]

… K-State’s athletic department has been completely out of control for years… [But so are you, Kansasfolk, so are you.  At least the people of Romania finally found it in themselves to get rid of the Ceausescus. And, you know, you don’t see Romanians running around today still worshipping them and finding themselves astonished by their accomplishments…]

Professors at the University of Wisconsin medical school are appalled at the voyeuristic ways of Charles Grassley.

Some of the orthopedic surgeons [who make enormous outside sums pushing medical devices] also were among the most vocal opponents to the university’s new disclosure requirements, referring to the more stringent disclosure requirements as voyeuristic.

In the past, they and other doctors who earned large sums working as consultants, speakers or from royalties could merely state that they received more than $20,000 without having to tell their patients or the university the actual amount.

It’s only appropriate that we not tell you the actual amount. Only a sicko would want to see the actual amount.

… [I protest the] feigned or real naiveté on the part of [medical] professionals who claim they are above being influenced [by industry money and gifts]. Physicians owe their patients much more than naiveté. The degree to which policy rather than personal ethics is necessary to bring an end to obvious marketing schemes is a reproach to my profession.

… Almost two-thirds [of medical school department chairs] have a personal relationship with industry as consultant, board member, paid speaker or the like. It is not unusual to see papers in major medical journals where authors disclose relationships with many, many industrial organizations.

Is anyone reassured by all this disclosing? I am not. To the contrary, I look askance at the discloser and at the substance that is being put forth. I am not surprised when paper after paper documents that when the study of a drug or device is industry supported, the result is far more likely to be positive than when the study of the same drug or device is government supported.

… My queasiness peaks when I know that the “CEO” of a large state-supported academic health center is also on the board of a certain major pharmaceutical benefits manager — which just happens to be the pharmaceutical benefits manager for that state’s employee health plan.

… Very seldom, anymore, are the trials necessary for licensing drugs or devices carried out by the manufacturer. There is an industry devoted to providing that service, the Contract Research Organizations (CROs). I have long railed against this relationship as I consider it inherently conflictual. Science is the exercise of disproving any hypothesis. The CRO is contracted in the hopes it will prove the hypothesis that a particular drug or device is an important contribution. There is no joy in Mudville when the study is negative (see the discussion above about industry-supported vs. government-supported science of this nature). CROs can be very lucrative. Many academic health centers have their own CRO, and many others wish they did. Furthermore, many an “academic physician” is employed for “translational research,” which is a euphemism for recruiting patients into trials run by CROs…

Norton Hadler, ABC News.