An Illinois state rep is

… pushing the so-called “fumigation“ [Drop so-called or drop the quotation marks.] bill that would review all appointments and hirings by the Blagojevich and Ryan administrations, promoting the development of a “model trustee” profile and training program in Illinois, [and] asking university alumni groups to get more involved in the appointment of trustees…

[H]e wants Gov. Pat Quinn to review the appointments of all the trustees appointed by Ryan or Blagojevich.

“I think there are probably some that should be dumped,” he said. “What I heard from President (B. Joseph) White last month is that individual trustees, depending on the issue, insert themselves into the decision-making capacities of the university, outside of their work as a board. I think that’s inappropriate, and I think it would be inappropriate to leave all those appointments in place without going through them with a fine-tooth comb.”

… [The representative] hasn’t given up on his goal of reinstating the statewide election of UI trustees, which was eliminated during the term of former Gov. Jim Edgar.

“I would still like to see the trustees elected,” he said. “This is a $4 billion state asset, and I think the taxpayers should have a direct role in its governance.”…

The Polish capital joins in the worldwide tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The place to go is the Warsaw University Library which, together with the Irish Embassy, is organizing the event. The programme includes a lecture on Joyce’s civic imagination, a recital of traditional Irish songs used in the writer’s books (by Fran O’Rourke of University College, Dublin) and a multi-media show by Emilia Gowin-Pacuła Leopold Bloom’s Phantasmagories.

The show combines photographs from the Bloomsday celebration in Dublin in 2004 with a selection of quotations from Ulysses, in English and Polish.

The first Polish translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Maciej Slomczynski, was published in 1969.

… I’ve spent the last six years of my life at Florida State University, first pursuing my master’s and now my doctorate in English literature. The English Department enrolls more than 20,000 students each year, teaching every university student — regardless of major — how to write and think critically. We’re the biggest department in the College of Arts & Sciences, with 1,600 majors, so if you want a marker for how healthy FSU is, the English Department is a good place to start.

Over the past three years, the Legislature has slashed some $80 million from Florida State’s budget, cuts that translate to — among other things — one of the worst faculty-to-student ratios in the nation. Only 48 faculty work to support those 1,600 majors, to say nothing of enrollees from other departments. FSU is expected to cut $56 million this year.

… Already, graduate students teach nearly 75 percent of classes at FSU. This previously silent labor force recently unionized in an attempt to protect our rights during these difficult times.

Why? At an average salary of around $11,000 per year (one of the nation’s lowest), without health care, graduate students teach packed classrooms and lecture halls full of undergraduate majors and nonmajors. What would Mom and Dad think if they knew that their son or daughter had never taken a class from an actual faculty member until they were seniors? But that’s the reality…

Bernard L. Fulton started his teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in his native Boone County, W.Va.

… Fulton … was still talking schools recently when he ate lunch with [the] Greenhill [School’s]headmaster. He built his reputation in Dallas, where, starting with a vision and a three-room building, he founded the Greenhill School in 1950.

Mr. Fulton, 99, died Sunday … at his Dallas home.

… Greenhill headmaster Scott Griggs said Mr. Fulton’s life mission was to create great educational opportunities for children.

“I had lunch with him two weeks ago, and he spent an hour and a half talking about schools, education, public schools and our challenges we have today,” Mr. Griggs said. “At the age of 99, he was still thinking about what we could do to improve upon education.”

Mr. Fulton was 8 when his father died of blood poisoning, a complication of a compound fracture he received in a railroad accident at his Boone County lumber company. The boy helped his mother raise his three younger siblings.

Mr. Fulton, a high school running back, declined football scholarships to Notre Dame and Princeton to attend Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., which was closer to his family…

Hope he lets us sit up front!

After a reported 21 arrests over the past four years, the University of Florida’s football team has been invited to get a new perspective on the cops through volunteer ride-alongs. The school’s University Athletic Association and the Gainesville (Fla.) Police Department have teamed up to show Gators football players what the other side of law enforcement is like, UF’s Independent Florida Alligator reports.

Players are invited to ride alongside officers on the night shift (5 p.m. to 4 a.m.), Gainesville Police Department spokesman Mike Schiubola told the newspaper …

… government troops attack universities.

There are reports that a number of Iranian professors have resigned in protest against government brutality against students.

The University of Florida medical school received an F … on a scorecard designed to measure ethical policies on professors’ relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, the Pew Prescription Project announced Tuesday.

… The Gainesville school flunked because it refused to provide information, according to the 2009 American Medical Student Association PharmFree Scorecard. UF spokeswoman Melanie Fridl Ross said Tuesday, “We aren’t sure what happened with respect to the AMSA survey, but . . . shortly after being named interim dean of the College of Medicine last June, Dr. Michael L. Good appointed a task force to review and update the existing policies . . . on industry conflicts of interest and industry-academic relations . . . “

They can’t even find the survey.

This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.

The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words

the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak

have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:

I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.

What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?

My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we

embraced and said goodnight.

Find out here.

One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year.  The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:

A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.

The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.

Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.

… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…

Photo from Tehran University blogger.

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Shirin Behzadi, 45, university professor, on Enghelab Square yesterday morning: “It’s very surprising that the whole world is silent now. I don’t understand why the international community just ignores what’s happening right now in Tehran. Why don’t they react and help hopeless Iranians? I’m quite confused why even the United States has not paid enough attention to the obvious vote fraud in Iran. I’m now thinking maybe the world’s big powers like Ahmadinejad. We are losing our semi-democracy in Iran. We had a very poor democracy and now we are losing everything we had. Why doesn’t the UN help Iranians? Everybody in the world is just concerned about the nuclear issue in Iran. Why is the world silent now when Iran is in turmoil and enduring a semi-coup?”

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Andrew Sullivan is following events with great care and thoroughness.

… Tenured Radical and Carlat Psychiatry,  two spectacular blogs.   Well-written, socially committed, human, humane.  All that a blog should be.

Now that you’re here, feel free to look around at other UD posts.

A Canadian academic was puzzled:

I  recently looked at the c.v. of a distinguished professor of medicine and saw that he had authored (most usually had co-authored) about 800 articles in peer-reviewed journals, an average of nearly 30 per year over his career. His publication rate has accelerated over the years, reaching 40 articles per year in the past decade. How can a scientist author and publish 40 articles in a year? Year after year? In my fields (Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy, Sociology), five peer-reviewed articles in a year is a lot, and most researchers would be happy to write one truly good article each year.

Rather than conclude the obvious — these guys are fucking geniuses — and go back to his low-paid slow-lane job, Sergio Sismondo decided to investigate.

Turns out they’re not writing the articles!

…[D]rug companies and their agents produce a significant percentage of the manuscripts on major current drugs. These manuscripts are then “authored” by academic researchers, whose contribution ranges from having supplied some of the patients for a clinical trial, to editing the manuscript, to simply signing off on the final draft. The companies then submit these manuscripts to medical journals, where they fare quite well and are published. The published articles contribute to accepted scientific opinions, but the circumstances of their production remain largely invisible. When the articles are useful, the marketing departments of the drug companies involved will buy thousands of reprints, which sales representatives (reps) can give to physicians. I call this whole process the “ghost management” of pharmaceutical research and publication.

[Ghost authors] are unlikely to make major contributions to the analysis or writing of an article. They are shown well-crafted manuscripts that have been reviewed by many scientists, writers, and marketers. They are not given access to the data. They are asked their views on very specific points. They are given short deadlines. Thus, authors of industry manuscripts are largely sidelined from the process of analyzing, writing, and publishing research.

About half of what you read about the drug you’re thinking of taking was written by a public relations firm.

[I]t appears that roughly 40 per cent of medical journal articles on major in-patent drugs are parts of individual publication plans on the drugs… [P]harmaceutical companies have complete control over roughly half of all clinical trial data…

A philosopher, Sismundo grapples with the ethics of simulacral science:

The pharmaceutical industry … has developed a [new] form of plagiarism, involving only willing participants. Moreover, it has created new reasons for concern: the hiding of interests that drive research and publication and the possible harm to patients that this may create. When sales reps bring reprints of articles to the offices of physicians, prescribing nurses, hospital staff in charge of formularies, and other drug gatekeepers, those articles may look like independent confirmation of the reps’ pitches. Plagiarizing [ghost authors] lend their good names to the pitches.

On the up side, there’s the rich abundance of scientific output with which, as modern consumers, we are blessed:

Another much-discussed issue in the ethics of publishing is over-publication. We are buried in masses of literature, making it difficult to find what is valuable. Publication hides as much as it reveals. Every year, library budgets increase at well above the overall rate of inflation. This is caused in part by publishers increasing the prices of journals, and in part by the increasing number of journals. The ghost management of pharmaceutical research and publication plays a role within the medical sciences, as industry planners calculate how many new articles bearing key messages they need to affect perceptions and sway those who prescribe drugs.

Herpes, HIV, rabies and influenza are a few of the diseases scientists at a laboratory in Fairbanks pin down by examining tens of thousands of specimens each year.

The work of the Alaska State Public Health Virology Laboratory helps the state track the spread of diseases, including the H1N1 influenza virus, also known as swine flu.

This year, the laboratory received new digs and new equipment. The $32 million facility has been in use for months but is being formally dedicated today.

It’s the most modern laboratory in Alaska, lab manager Terry Schmidt said.

And the timing of the new building couldn’t be better. The World Health Organization last week declared H1N1 influenza the first global epidemic in 41 years.

The building is on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus behind the Museum of the North. At 29,000 square feet, it is about twice the size of the old laboratory, Schmidt said.

… Virus-inspired metal art hangs in a hallway, and a sculpture has been commissioned.

… about a local instance of the national scandal involving university presidents and corporate boards.

He says it pretty well, too. But of course Scathing Online Schoolmarm awards a demerit here and there…

One of the major reasons for paying a university president in South Dakota a $320,000 salary is because it takes a lot of money to hire a great talent with the right skills, credentials and experience to serve as president. [Avoid the wordiness, the use of “is,” and the repetition of president by rewriting in a more direct and simple way: We pay the president of South Dakota State University a lot of money — $320,000 a year — because we want a talented person with the right credentials.]

If the state paid a salary of [drop a salary of] less than $50,000, you’d expect that [drop that] a person of great stature and ability with full-time responsibilities would [drop would and write to] need to seek other income sources [Double dash after sources — He’s about to introduce a strong point. Give it some drama.] such as an additional salary of $195,000 plus a one-time stock-option payoff of almost $200,000 to sit on the board of directors of a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. But that’s not the case. [But that’s not the case is confusing. What does the writer mean? Rewrite.]

Monsanto’s gain is South Dakota State University’s loss. This $400,000 payoff creates a perceived conflict of interest not only for the university president but also for the quality of the research results coming from SDSU.

How are the results of research investments at SDSU to be taken seriously when one of Monsanto’s competitors can point to the university president’s $400,000 purse from the corporation and declare the research is skewed? If the perception is tainted, why would benefactors invest in the research services of SDSU or any other South Dakota university if it appears our university presidents can be bought and it becomes tolerated? [Drop and it becomes tolerated. Bought‘s your strong word.] What message does this send to students and parents faced with ever increasing tuition and fee increases? What message does this send to our SDSU research teams?

Personally, I like SDSU President David Chicoine and consider him a good friend. [Drop personally.] I strongly supported and campaigned for him to come to SDSU [Drop strongly.]. When he was hired, I felt SDSU had made a major leap forward in its growth as a prestigious institution. [had grown in prestige. Always try to tighten.]

The job is full time, requiring the full devotion of talents and energies of the president. [The job requires the president’s full time and energy.]  If a $320,000 salary isn’t enough to keep Chicoine on the job at SDSU, it should be negotiated so that we can retain a great talent whose full-time energies are devoted to SDSU. [This is the kicker. If SOS had been writing this, she’d have made this the first sentence. I like its threat to throw the guy out. That’s exactly what a politician should say.]

If Chicoine has spare time [Drop spare.] to promote the interests of [Drop the interests of.] a multinational corporation, he should refuse the pay other than to cover his expenses for travel, food and lodging. Service to academia should not appear as an opportunity to cut a fat hog at the expense of the university’s future. [SOS LOVES cut a fat hog! As a ‘thesdan, she doesn’t encounter phrases like cut a fat hog on a daily basis… In fact she’s never heard cut a fat hog… It’s the very opposite of a cliché– bright, new, and prompting pellucid images of bestial greed.  Bravo.]

As a leading national land-grant research university known for its excellent nonbiased research, we [Demerit goes here.  Are WE a land-grant university?] must do all we can to keep SDSU’s credibility intact. What message does this send to other university presidents? What message are we sending to corporate America?

We should not turn this debate into nitpicking about conflicts of interest. If Chicoine received a salary of $1,000 a year to sit on Monsanto’s board, there probably would be no discussion. That clearly is not the case here.

The state Board of Regents needs to resolve this matter immediately. If the board does not act, this issue will be presented to the South Dakota Legislature for a more permanent solution that will address it fairly and reasonably.  [Drop the address it fairly hoohah and end with the threat to can his ass.]