That would be UD‘s
cousin-in-law,
Andrzej Soltan,
an astronomer.

Something about
dead quasars.

… really knows how to pick ’em.

[Kenneth] Rall quietly resigned as chairman of the [University of Missouri] radiology department in December shortly before word got out that the radiology department [was] under scrutiny [for Medicare fraud].

His past was marked by trouble.

Rall was convicted of misdemeanor stealing in the 1980s for signing over Medicaid refund checks to himself while working at a Columbia radiology company. He had faced steeper felony charges, but the prosecutor lost evidence days before the trial. Rall also paid back nearly $1 million from a check-kiting scheme that used lag time between banks to inflate one account balance with non-existing funds from another account.

Rall left town in the midst of the controversy in the mid-80s but returned and went to work for the University of Missouri School of Medicine in 1998. When the school recruited him back, administrators knew about his past legal issues, spokesman Rich Gleba previously told the Tribune.

Virginia Tech has a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to enhance its football recruiting strategy by building a practice facility whose conveniences will attract the attention of our best high school players. Cutting down a rare old growth forest is a small price to pay for a shot at a national championship.

A bunch of eco freaks have some damn fool petition up about saving the trees, and if we give in to them the high schoolers will see what pussies we are and maybe not come. If our university doesn’t stand for giving all we’ve got to impress high school football players, it doesn’t stand for anything.

Maitre: Tragically, not well-connected enough.

“The oldest rule of thumb in journalism is quote the source and quote it accurately,” said Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

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de Screengrabe: Happily, very well-connected!

“…[I]t comes to a certain point in [Arnaud de Borchgrave’s] life, I believe he’s 85, and he makes a mistake, you can be sure once he’s called out on it he’s not going to do it anymore,” [said Marvin Kalb].

Ironically, [Vladimir] Medinsky’s credentials as an historian were seriously questioned when it emerged early this year that his doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Objectivity in Elucidating Russian History From the Second Half of the 15th through the 17th Centuries,” which he successfully defended in 2011, was extensively plagiarized. Medinsky has denied the charges, claiming that he simply used general phrases that happened to have been used by others, but a textual analysis posted on a Russian website for historians makes it clear that the plagiarism was substantial.

But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors. (It is common practice in Russia for officials to pay researchers to ghost-write their dissertations, so Putin and Medinsky might not have been aware of the plagiarism. But this of course puts them in even worse light.)

What? You mean thousands of people aren’t attracted to meetings featuring Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg?

Allen Frances goes on to say that “Psychiatric diagnosis has become too important to be left in the hands of a small, withering, cash-strapped, incompetent association that feels compelled to regard its bottom line as a higher priority than having a safe, scientifically sound, and widely accepted diagnostic system.”

… didn’t plagiarize after all (background here). Alex Pareene, in Salon, explains:

The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for little weekly columns that no one will ever read; he gets to pretend he is still an important journalist, and they get to be associated with a respected old man who has very powerful friends. [Arnaud] De Borchgrave is — understandably — confused as to why anyone would accuse him of plagiarism. He’s an award-winning D.C. fixture with a long and storied career, not some undergrad journalism major! Plagiarism is what unimportant people do. Friends of Marvin Kalb make minor attribution errors.

It’s exactly Roy Cohn’s explanation, in Angels in America, of why he’s not gay.

Roy Cohn: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?
Henry: No.
Roy Cohn: No. I have clout. Lots. I pick up that phone, dial 15 numbers, and guess who’s on the other end of the line? In under five minutes, Henry.
Henry: The President.
Roy Cohn: Better — his wife.
Henry: I’m impressed.
Roy Cohn: I don’t want you to be impressed, Henry — I want you to understand. This is not sophistry, and this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.

Somehow the soccer stadium has remained the last bastion of unmitigated maleness. You can behave badly and be proud of it, the way you can’t in virtually any other venue in Europe.

Analysis Terminable

My love, the dead rearise in our dreams.
Even you, ease-seeker. A summer camp,
Fifties era, background volleyball teams,
Was the setting where my sleeping headlamp
Found you. Through clear and warming August air
I watched you raise your arms and approach me
In a gesture loving and, in life, rare.

Rare because direct, without subtlety,
Nothing to interpret or erase
With universal solvent intellect.

Don’t you see why you put me in that place?
He was there … My poor son… His summer wrecked…

My love, your voice still rises in my ear;
Still misses, with analytic skill,
The obvious, preanalytical embrace.

… when you have absolutely no arguments, and cannot write, it’s better to remain silent.

… and again and again because it happens all the time: Beware the B-School Boys. That’s a whole category of its own on this blog. And why? Because business school professors constantly run afoul of the law.

The latest finance-professor-gone-wrong is this guy, at Bocconi University. Says on his university page that he’s been “voluntarily suspended (‘How can you be voluntarily suspended?’ asked Mr UD) since November 16, 2012.” (‘Isn’t that in the future?’ asked Mr UD). He’s been way busy lying about the value of his hedge fund, destroying investors, and dealing with the Financial Services Authority.

UD‘s summer begins; ‘thesdan days are hot, with evening thunderstorms. Here’s this moment’s weather report:

Flash flooding is occurring or is imminent in your area. Immediately go to higher ground if quickly rising water is about to impact your location. If you are in a vehicle, drive away from flooded areas. If on foot, do not attempt to walk through flood waters.

Rumble rumble rumble. Big time thunder.

At the end of a long, busy day, UD‘s been at the baby grand (backdrop for my Faculty Project lectures), playing Little Prelude BWV 938 in E minor. You know the one! Mr UD was on the couch reading and, as almost always happens when I play Bach, he’s now out like a light.

Only a few spotlights are on in our house; and despite Garrett Park having installed tons of forest green old-timey street lamps, things out there are very dark. UD‘s town is a well-established arboretum, with enormous trees everywhere. Not much light, not much sky.

But UD leaves for the beach soon (blogging of course continues apace), where for a change she’ll get nothing but sky and water and a bit of boardwalk. She’s got a date there with the supermoon (June 4) and the transit of Venus (June 5). Later in the summer, at her little house in upstate New York, she’ll lean back in butterfly chairs at night looking for perseids.

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

UD‘s neighbor Tamara
was over yesterday afternoon
to take UD’s photo.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
interviewed her about her MOOC,
and wants to run a picture
with the article.

Here it is.

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

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

More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

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

The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

… to follow UD‘s career as a reporter for the Garrett Park Bugle, here’s her latest.

… set the pace here** – and as for bohemoth endowment losses based on interest-rate swaps, no one will ever outpace Harvard’s Larry Summers .

But Dartmouth is certainly doing its bit, with “the investment of $550 million in interest-rate swaps with now-defunct Lehman Brothers that [a faculty and alumni group] says are now worth $250 million.”

A lot of people at Dartmouth are unhappy about university trustees who are also money managers, and they’ve written a letter about it to the governor and attorney general of New Hampshire.

The letter calls for an investigation into money managers who have invested the Hanover, N.H.-based college’s assets while members of the investment committee… The letter accuses the money managers of “enriching themselves” through private equity, venture capital and hedge fund investments made by the endowment.

——————————————

**

In an official letter distributed to alumni, students, faculty, and administration, Yeshiva University President Richard Joel stated that Merkin, who was Chairman of the University Investment Committee, managing its endowment of almost $1.8 billion (as of about 2 years ago), had invested about $112 million in his own hedge fund, Ascot Partners, which was almost solely invested with the [Bernard] Madoff fund. In actuality, it was an initial investment of $14 million that became falsely inflated to $112 million over time. As such, Merkin collected an initial fee of one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers on whose Board of Trustees he sat. He collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone. In fourteen years, the fund grew 9 percent a year, even after subtracting losses for Madoff and expenses. He made at least $10 million from Yeshiva over his tenure. Although Joel implicitly acknowledged that the university’s charter lacked a conflict of interest restriction on the management of school funds, Merkin resigned from all of his positions at Yeshiva that day.