Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: I wouldn’t talk to an underage investigator either.

— as King Henry might have said if he’d been around today to watch the entire nation go the way of Alexandra, Virginia, where forty percent of the population is currently on antidepressants. Who told so many people that, whatever they were experiencing, they had to take pills of uncertain utility and serious side effects? Possibly for years?

Despite escalating outrage and dismay at hugely growing numbers of Americans being told they are mentally ill and must be medicated, the psychiatrists who have just completed the latest DSM (the medical and insurance establishments’ official list of mental disorders) stuffed it full of yet more ways for us to think of ourselves as mentally ill.

Inevitably, those among us even somewhat eccentric are increasingly unprotected from pharma’s it’s a mad mad mad mad world business model. Children are especially vulnerable; they must rely on the common sense and protective instincts of their parents to keep doctors like Kajoko Kifuji from laying waste to them.

We all know about the hundreds of thousands of twitchy little boys who are having ADHD meds thrown at them; we should also, as UD‘s pal Allen Frances points out, think about gifted kids, whose sometimes unusual affect also excites the madness mongers. He quotes an expert on gifted children: “When pediatric diagnoses are carelessly applied, gifted children are frequently mislabeled with ADHD, autistic, depressive, or bipolar disorders.”

It’s an old problem, one that this blog has followed with concern for many years: How do you handle it, public-relations-wise, and logistics-wise, when a politician or money man whose name you’ve plastered all over campus buildings goes to jail for corruption? Certain schools – Seton Hall, most prominently – experience this problem over and over again.

There’s an interesting sort of time-sensitive aspect to it. Most cases, to be sure, are after the fact – the name went up, the guy went to prison, the name got sandblasted. Rising action, climax, denouement. Some are before – Georgetown was going to name Douglas Ginsburg, but the SEC named him first. And a few are sort of during – Nevin Shapiro’s little student lounge plaque had just gone up when when Nevin went down.

Many and varied are the problems associated with de-naming. If, like U Miami, you’ve only done a little plaque, piece of cake. Just take it down. When we start moving in the direction of engraving, however, we’re talking big money. Sandblasting doesn’t come cheap. It’s also embarrassingly loud. You can have some guy steal into Nevin’s room at night and remove the thing; but does this guy look like the quiet sort? Why not just yell We made a terrible mistake or We consort with criminals at the top of your lungs? And try explaining to Seton Hall parents why hundreds of thousands of their tuition dollars went toward pulverizing the names of crooks from three of your buildings. So far.

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

Forget trying to see these things coming. No school – up to and including burnished ones like Brown, which will eventually have to do something about trustee Steven Cohen – is likely to scrutinize a politician or a hedgie and decide they’d rather not go there. Money is money, and you don’t want to insult a person from the money class. Word gets around. This is about cleanup.

UD has long proposed the erasure/sheeting approach. Inspired by Hasidic groups who erase images of women from photos (Hillary Clinton is the salient example here), and Muslim or Muslim-sensitive groups who sheet women in photos (Southampton University’s advertising materials are the go-to place here), UD has proposed simply adding or subtracting letters from the name.

So in the most recent case – jailed, disgraced Pennsylvania state senator Bob Mellow – you’ve got a couple of universities there with MELLOW engraved on buildings.

They could sheet/erase, by way of adding, pulling, or shifting letters. MELLOW, without too much work, could be altered to read FELLOWS, which sounds very British (Fellows of All Souls); for less money, they could go in the other direction – down-home and friendly – by dropping the M and W and putting an H at the beginning of the name: HELLO! They could be whimsical and add YELLOW to the name… Joycean, and put an S at the beginning (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”)… They could do homage to Saul Bellow by changing only one letter…

Yes, don’t they have one of their own?

In a bout of surreal postmodern self-reflexivity, the German writers of a satirical tv account of plagiarist ex-Defense Minister Von Googleberg themselves plagiarized freely from earlier political satires, including Britain’s Yes, Minister.

You can’t make this shit up.

A top rabbinic dean of Yeshiva University has warned rabbis about the dangers of reporting child sex abuse allegations to the police because it could result in a Jew being jailed with a black inmate, or as he put it, “a schvartze,” who might want to kill him.

… Yeshiva University has been embroiled in a mounting scandal following a series of reports in the Forward since December about abuse allegations against two former staff members at Yeshiva University’s high school for boys in Manhattan.

“[The] warden in the prison can kill you. They can put you in a cell together with a shvartze,” [Hershel Schachter said].”

…is one popular way of characterizing the NCAA/university athletic program/university athlete ménage à trois; for herself, UD has always found the simpler, less sexy, swinish squalor trope serviceable… You’ve got piggy NCAA head Mark Emmert (“In an interview on a PBS Frontline special, ‘Money and March Madness,’ a visibly agitated Emmert refused to reveal his own seven-figure salary on camera…”); piggish coaches making millions even when, as at beyond-belief-awful Syracuse football, almost no one goes to the games and team members are constantly rotated in and out of local jails; and players, sloshing in a stew of agents, boosters, bogus courses…

Whatever pigskin used to be, it’s mostly pigshit now. Universities like North Carolina Chapel Hill, which actually think they don’t stink, are intriguing to track, in a kind of let’s-watch-the-psychotics way…

We’re winners… we have a glorious proud tradition…

These people are kind of like the three Christs of Ypsilanti. Like the three Christs, they are quick to defend their delusions by accusing other schools of being deluded… Yes, we at U Miami give off some stench, but have you smelled Southern Methodist?

Well, so. What is to be done? How to clean up?

This guy thinks we should abolish the NCAA and put caps on coaches’ salaries.

Not gonna happen. Read Animal Farm. The pigs will not be amused.

… the University of Miami community seems disinclined to attend games. Pay for play, brawls, Nevin Shapiro, sanctions – it’s just decades of major gross-outs. But hark:

Now, while the sanctions may be an answer as to why attendance is so poor, that doesn’t necessarily justify it, Hurricanes fans. The Penn State Nittany Lions were hit with one of the harshest punishments in the history of college football last season, yet they still consistently put 80-90,000 people in Beaver Stadium last season. There’s no light at the end of their tunnel for the next four years, yet the faithful still showed up every home game and cheered their team on. Why couldn’t you do the same?

It’s an interesting argument. You can’t go too low for the fans at Penn State; why should Miami fans be so holier than thou?

…you’ll need to keep tuition very high too.

Thus, at the University of Hawaii, a perennial source of embarrassing stories on this blog (type hawaii in my search engine), tuition has had to double in the last five years in order to keep administration palms greased. In the last eleven years, tuition has increased by 141 percent. Without these increases, the campus cronyism that doles out huge sums to inept friends with construction companies – in the expectation, I guess, that some of that money will come right back to the dolers – would not be able to operate.

… how much are you willing to overlook?

Okay, you’re willing to overlook the fact that your lieutenant governor for years claimed a degree from a notorious diploma mill (she even used to be on the National Commission on Presidential Scholars!)… But, as UD has often told you, scummy things like diploma mill degrees – and plagiarized articles and all – can be symptoms of, er, a broader outlook on life…

And so it appears to be with the aforementioned lieutenant governor, for whom fraud turns out to be a way of doing business. She has just resigned in disgrace.

Really, if Florida had had enough self-respect to reject a diploma mill fraudster in the first place, they wouldn’t now be dealing with this much higher-level embarrassment.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Florida is way past caring about things like this.

“In Alexandria, Va., the rate of antidepressant use is the highest in the country, with a full 40 percent of residents receiving prescriptions.”

Antidepressants and antipsychotics are having a field day in America, and one can only gaze at the above statistic in admiration at the marketing techniques that have gotten pharma this far. Down the street from UD‘s ‘thesda, it won’t be long before fully half of the population has convinced itself it needs to take powerful pills, with powerful side effects, to get through life.

Given the exact same demographics here in ‘thesda (wealthy well-educated DC suburb), can UD’s neighborhood be far behind?

And what have universities to do with this?

Well, there are powerful pharma-sponsored incentives for universities to do quick sloppy work toward generating more and more pills for this amazing growth market. Their research subjects are human beings – often very vulnerable human beings – who need protection from the frightening implications of this situation.

One person who reportedly did not receive those protections was Dan Markingson, who in 2004 committed suicide while enrolled in a University of Minnesota psychiatric drug study. The details of the case are here; a much shorter summary appears as preamble to an online petition asking that a serious inquiry into research ethics at Minnesota be initiated. This seems to me a reasonable idea, and I’ve happily signed the petition.

… raising her prayer shawl.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sanctimony is under threat around the globe. With Israel’s ultra-orthodox kicked out of the government, to take one current instance, Israel’s non-ultra-orthodox population suddenly has nowhere to go for its spankings.

In other places, matters are even worse: People are getting belligerently anti-sanctimonious.

A woman attending the now-notorious Islamic Awareness event at University College London (go here for details) stood up at the end to lecture guest speaker Lawrence Krauss on the glories of sex segregation (it had just been imposed in that very lecture hall).

Professor Krauss shot back that women so viscerally offended by unthreatening male company in a public space would do well to stay home and spare others their sanctimonious conservatism.

Is sanctimony being forced into the closet?

From whence cometh our shaming if our shamers are silenced?

University Diaries introduces a new series – Sanctimony Watch – which will keep an eye on growing threats to sanctimony around the world.

One of UD‘s most commonly used categories on this blog is Beware the B-School Boys, in which UD attempts to help you see econ and MBA grads coming. (For details, click on the category’s name at the end of this post.) Two recent instructive cases from Harvard are worth mentioning.

Florian Homm played a little basketball for Harvard when he was an undergrad there, but his big thing was business: econ undergrad; MBA grad. He seems always to have been a cultured crook, an intellectual Bernard Madoff who, after years of hiding from the law, has lately been captured. Bernie crafted crude Ponzis; Florian engaged in portfolio pumping, which takes a finer Italian hand.

As with nutty professor Paul Frampton, the New York Times writer covering Florian’s demise cannot help getting giggly:

Given Mr. Homm’s flair for drama, it was perhaps fitting that he was arrested at the Uffizi Gallery, famous for an exquisite collection that includes works by Michelangelo, Rubens, Tintoretto and Rembrandt…

But it is unclear why Mr. Homm, who is 201 centimeters, or 6 feet 7 inches, tall and something of a celebrity in Germany, would appear in a place where there are many German tourists and he was likely to be recognized.

The seduction of beauty! From Sozzo Tegliacci to the SEC in one shattering second!

But seriously, folks; there’s something about a Harvard and high-style Euro charisma that makes investors unwary… And UD‘s a little worried that you’ll still fall for Florian in his latest iteration:

“The pursuit of happiness is not correlated with the pursuit of money,” [Homm said in a recent interview]… Mr. Homm insisted he was no longer the same person who once owned a stake in a Berlin brothel and lived in a $5 million residence on Majorca with a Russian table dancer. He said he prayed daily and was devoting his energy to charity work.

Okay so I want you to bring a smidgen of doubt to this self-description too, okay? Remember: Beware the B-School Boys.

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

Though he seems never to have taken any classes with him, Florian claims to have known and even worked with Harvard’s notorious professor Michael Porter (Porter has said he does not remember Florian). Porter’s now-bankrupt Monitor Group failed to register as a lobbying outfit, did fellatial obeisance to Muammar Gaddafi, and so on and so on. If you didn’t put your money on Florian, maybe you’re tempted to put it on Porter, who remains a Harvard professor, and is not being chased by the SEC. Maybe you’re tempted to make him your business strategy consultant.

Beware!

[Porter’s] picture of CEO-superdeciders helps justify their huge compensation and the congratulatory press coverage, and yet [it] has little foundation in fact or logic. The strategy business … lasted so long in part because it supports and advances the pretensions of the C-suite.

Porter’s strategy theory is to CEOs what ancient religions were to tribal chieftains. The ceremonies are ultimately about the divine right of the rulers to rule — a kind of covert form of political theory. [One observer says] it is “like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think that it does.” … [Monitor was] doomed from the outset. Its embarrassing debacle marked the beginning of the end of the era of business metaphysics and the exposure of the most over-valued idea on the planet: sustainable competitive advantage.

UD and Tammy were carrying too many things – purses, prayer shawls, coats – so when it came time to hold the program for the event, we leaned some of this stuff up against the Chinese Embassy’s fence.

A few minutes later, a nice man approached and explained that the fence was China, and China would prefer we not use its territory that way.

The rally’s location was politically sensitive – embassies everywhere. Sensitive embassies. Our group wasn’t very large (a hundred plus people), but we attracted scads of anxious men whispering into phones.

The Israeli embassy people were extremely friendly. “We wanted to invite you all into the embassy,” explained one of several embassy people who came to talk to us. “But we would have needed a list of names in advance for security.”

A deputy assistant whatever addressed our group. “We respect you. We respect what you are doing. We get your message loud and clear, and it is a message we will send back to Jerusalem.”

The message – in case you haven’t been following these posts – is that women should have equal rights to pray at the Western Wall.

UD ain’t much of a Jew, but when this kind and friendly group of Jews began to sing a psalm together, she was crying somewhat.

Would she have teared up if they’d been kind and friendly Anglicans singing As Pants the Hart?

Er, yes.

Anyway. It was a chilly overcast early Washington evening, and UD and Tammy put on their prayer shawls, and raised their prayer shawls, and listened to the speakers, and thought about that strange place, Israel. When, toward the end of the event, the speaker announced it was time for davening, they figured that was their signal to leave. They crossed Connecticut Avenue and had sushi and talked about God.

… goes, this afternoon, with her official photographer, Tammy Trocki, to a Women of the Wall protest at the Israeli Embassy.

UD‘s reminded of her milkfed suburban weeniness by a consideration of Anat Hoffman, the allballs leader of this group.

UD, world’s worst Jew, will feel mighty strange in a prayer shawl this afternoon, rocking Passover songs with people who actually have religious convictions. She will atone for this spectacular hypocrisy by blogging about the event.