To that end, UD‘s University of Chicago recently assembled a faculty committee which came up with “a powerful new statement on the importance of freedom of expression on campus.” Here’s a place where you can, if you like, add your endorsement to it.

The U of C statement revisits and clarifies the nature of free thought.

Under the category democracy, this blog has covered growing numbers of hideous, farcical, tiresome, and alarming instances of speech repression on campus.

More on a depressing trend here.

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Think back, in this connection, on Carl Schorske, who has died at the age of 100.

At UC Berkeley, Schorske was regarded by colleagues as a liberal thinker and a reputed supporter of the aims of the Free Speech Movement, identifying with students’ demands for free speech and respect.

“You have to convert the poison of social discord into the sap of intellectual vitality,” Schorske said in an interview in 2000, reflecting on his time at UC Berkeley.

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UD thanks Dirk.

For Moody’s it’s tricky to rate
The train wreck that’s Alabam State.
“It should be a D
But our lowest is C.
We’ll need to revise the whole slate.”

Corrupt, mismanaged, hemorrhaging students, running through administrators a mile a minute, and getting close to being unaccredited, Alabama State University doesn’t need to do anything else to embarrass itself. But the other day, in the very first moments of his deposition in the wrongful termination trial of ASU’s trillionth football coach, trustee Herbert Young deepened the embarrassment.

Something about the way questions were put to him enraged him and he began to leave the room. Here’s a description of a court reporter’s audio recording of the incident:

Young and [Donald] Jackson [the attorney asking Young questions] begin arguing a few minutes into the deposition after Jackson tells Young not to answer questions before he completes them. Young begins to leave, and as he’s doing so, Jackson states that he wants [the] court reporter to note that Young is leaving in the middle of a deposition.

That seemingly angers Young more, who says he’s leaving “because (Jackson) is disrespectful.” He goes on to tell Jackson that he will “respect him as a man” and spells out the word respect. Jackson repeatedly asks [Young’s attorney] to “get him out of here.”

Once the situation calms for a few seconds, [the coach, Reggie Barlow,] can be heard saying: “A board member acting like that.”

Young replies: “I got something for you too!”

At that point, things get chaotic. There is clearly a physical altercation of some sort — whether it was Barlow throwing a punch or Young choking Barlow is not evident on the recording — and [Barlow’s attorney] and Jackson are left screaming at their clients and trying to separate them.

… UD watches her Black Pearl and
Black Olive pepper seeds start to take off.

(The kitchen window’s all messed up because
I compulsively spray the plants.)

I promise the quality of photography
will improve as these plants grow.

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Regular readers know that UD is
Morticia in the garden. She’s always looking
for black stuff. And this stuff is black.

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I know I’m planting them at
exactly the wrong time – it’ll
be getting cold soon. I’ll
transfer them to containers
and keep them inside (assuming
they continue thriving).

I love the way some of the
shoots come up still holding
aloft their seedpods. Victory.

This blog has dumped on WVU for its sports-nuttiness and of course for Mr Coca Cola.

But look what a modest lab there did. It uncovered the Volkswagen fuel fraud.

UD‘s off to a day boating on the Chesapeake.
She will blog about it.

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A walk around Annapolis and
the Naval Academy; a boat
trip around the Bay; lunch
back in Annapolis overlooking
the Bay. Back home now, tired.

… reminding us that sometimes universities – respectable universities – do inexplicably moronic things.

That the board of trustees at Emory University did absolutely nothing at the time is absolutely expected. You have been reading my Trustees Trashing the Place category, yes?

Details. See if you can hold your sides in.

Everyone who ever had anything to do with pill empresario Martin Shkreli is bailing bailing bailing. We don’t want your filthy money!

Leaving Hunter College and its affiliated high school (which the man himself attended) with a problem. He just gave the high school a million dollars. That’s a lot if you’re a high school. Plus they’re plastering his name all over the endowment. Some lucky scholarship student will enjoy a lifelong association (Shkreli Scholar?) with the man everyone’s calling America’s biggest asshole.

What to do?

… But there’s also this:

[A] D.C. man who received care from George Washington University Hospital in March … said he requested a copy of his electronic medical records in April. He initially received a bill for $32.32 for seven pages copied at 76 cents per page, as well as the “basic fee” of $22.88 and shipping and handling fees.

But in July, he received a second bill for $430.20 including copying fees for more than 500 pages of records.

UD will admit to failing to understand, so far, the facts of this and a related, Georgetown University, lawsuit. She can only find one article about it so far (the Washington Business Journal charged her $5,000 to copy it**), and if you read it I think you’ll agree it’s rather confusing. OTOH, whatever the details of electronic v. paper, third parties, number of pages and how you determine that, etc., etc., she will assume that the basic fact of having to pay over five hundred dollars to get your medical records is astonishing. Maybe GW’s records vendor is one of the many businesses run by Martin Shkreli.

————

** Joke.

————-

Oh. Turns out this is old news for Shkreli Industries Incorporated. Drop in the bucket.

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Yes. HealthPort Technologies LLC. The Martin Shkreli of Medical Records.

… I mean, the many processes by which this can be done…

University-wise, there’s the whole for-profit college scam, covered extensively on this blog (category: Click-Thru U.), and still, despite a few state and federal efforts to shut it down, going strong.

Much more notoriously, there’s ye olde Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement scam, one prominent component of which involves hospital systems paying doctors immense sums to refer patients to them, and then submitting immense numbers of bogus claims based on those referrals.

The biggest penalty so far paid out by a dirty hospital system is the just-announced $118 million case against Adventist Health System, whose CEO sits on the board of trustees of Alabama’s Oakwood University, and whose business was recently named one of fifty “great health systems to know.” Oakwood is a religious school, and this CEO, Donald Jernigan, is always on about our spiritual health even as his business is screwing us six ways to Sunday.

It’s obvious where the ill-gotten gains go.

Hospital chief executives are kind of like the head football coaches of state-salaried workers: many of the highest paid public employees in Florida are executives in the health care industry. Donald Jernigan, CEO of Adventist Health System, takes home a reported $1.98 million annually for his work as head of the non-profit hospital organization which often draws down state money, as well as more than $250,000 in incentives and bonuses.

[T]he students “regret” what happened, but would not have harmed the referee unless they were told to by their coach.

This Russki says it ain’t plagiarism; it’s unscrupulous borrowing.

Explaining via Facebook in April the unattributed matches in his thesis with works of other authors, [former Duma Speaker Vladimir] Platonov used [a] euphemism, “unscrupulous borrowing,” that, he said, is not plagiarism.

This Georgian says it’s unverified content acceptance.

[Augusta Georgia Mayor Hardie] Davis admitted to accepting “content and feedback from multiple outside contributors without verifying the source of the information they provided.” Davis’ continued in the statement that he used the information from the feedback without citing who wrote the information. “I did not willfully or knowingly use someone else’s professional work as my own.”

This Italian says it’s nonfiction fiction:

[Roberto Saviano calls himself] a “non-fiction novelist,” in the tradition of Truman Capote, dealing in absolute truth but leavened with literary flourish.

…much of the nation’s press, but as you’re admiring 13 to 750 in Seconds Shkreli, remember that the University of Southern California boasts among its trustees Gilead’s John Martin, another amazingly obscene pharma babe.

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UPDATE: Matt Taibbi’s thoughts on The American Asshole.

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LOL: The Shkreli pill costs $900 in New York!

Probably costs a thousand here in UD‘s ‘thesda.

It is funny, and UD has long known that one reason many readers come back to University Diaries again and again is that this blog distills the best and only the best academic achievements of our highest-profile, most awesome scholar/athletes.

Things are hotting up on and off the field between longtime foes Texas Christian University and Baylor, with TCU’s coach boasting that his assaulting players are making far better moves than Baylor’s raping player.

[The coach’s] reference to Baylor during his press conference [about two players who allegedly beat a group of TCU students] did nothing but stoke the rivalry between the two traditional rivals who are both in the top five of this week’s Associated Press poll and are about 90 miles apart.

“… [W]e’ll find out what the facts are. It’ll all come out. I just hope when they all come out, you report it just as strongly as what you’ve done here because it’s not even close to what happened south of here.”

[The coach] was clearly referring to the Baylor situation where [player] Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a former Baylor soccer player.

The Battle of the Coaches is on! What will Baylor’s coach say in response? Stay tuned.

… is one of UD‘s favorite headlines, and the claim had at least a spliff of plausibility: Back in 2012 members of the Texas Christian University football team ran a sufficiently notorious drug market that one recruit “declin[ed] a scholarship offer because of the drug culture.”

UD looks forward to more great TCU headlines in the aftermath of the sort of incident so common on big sports campuses that eventually it won’t even be covered by journalists: A couple of football players got angry and drunk and beat the shit out of some students. Eventually all students who choose to attend big sports schools will understand and accept that getting the shit beaten out of you by football or basketball players is simply a risk you run.

Until that day, we at University Diaries can … I don’t want to say enjoy, but there’s definitely something intriguing in the details of these incidents.

The theme of this one is familiar from the story of the University of Idaho Vandals who were caught shoplifting in the bookstore because players are

1. “visible on [security] video and identifiable” and because

2. at the time “the store was open only to members of the football team.”

Similarly, in the TCU case, not only did security cameras apparently catch every punch, one of the players left his cell phone behind. As the police examined it, it flashed the full name of the player.