“Eventually we have to ask if professors such as Dean Hubbard do the things that they are exposed to be doing in the film, do we want such people to be the deans of our business school, where we teach 21st-century ethics and responsibility courses?” Yu asked.
“No one is holy here,” she added. “We have to think whom do we want [at Columbia], not just bend to authority because people happen to be the dean.”
A grad student at Columbia University, a member of the Student Affairs Committee of the Faculty Senate, reviews the Business School dean’s performance in Inside Job. She doesn’t like it.
This was the first question my American Literature students asked me as we arranged ourselves in a tight circle outside yesterday.
Outside? UD doesn’t do outside! Teaching outside is a waste of time! Too many distractions! (GW ain’t Kenyon.) No one can hear anything! I’ve tried it before!
But it’s the end of the semester; it was a spectacularly beautiful day; and my students, who charm me right down to the ground, were insistent. They pointed out that we were discussing one of Annie Dillard’s nature essays (we trashed her), and it was all too inescapably appropriate for us to talk about her while staining our slacks with grass.
And so we sat in the mild sunlight, surrounded by flowering cherry trees and daffodil beds. A few yards away, a student from my DeLillo course gently played a guitar.
Everyone heard everyone else perfectly, and we had a terrific discussion in which almost every member of the seminar (there are fifteen students in it) took part…
But first they wanted to express their anger at the now-famous Fox News headline: GW SUICIDE TRAGICALLY COINCIDES WITH OBAMA SPEECH.
Fox has taken the story down, but as The Daily What says: Fox News: Just like the Onion, minus the kidding.
(click photo for bigger view)
One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
We all know the drill, the way students can get through four years of college without doing or learning much of anything. There’s good old PowerPoint in the classroom, of course, keeping them absent forever. Lots of things to say in favor of technology (laptops in class) in this regard.
But there are also certain majors — the ones the big-time athletes get directed toward — that create perfect non-learning conditions. Business, as this New York Times piece suggests, is among the best. Moronic group projects galore, almost no writing required… And, above all, no body of knowledge. What is business? I mean, as an academic subject? What is journalism? If there’s no body of knowledge, there’s nothing to teach. What you teach is a way of doing stuff, a way of being with other people doing that stuff. These are vocational majors, not academic majors.
Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, … is a dogged critic of traditional business programs. He says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.
But they’re getting prepared for the job market!
And what about employers? What do they want?
According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.
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UD thanks Dirk for the link.
… Poul Thorsen, once an autism researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, is currently under indictment here in the States for theft. We’re trying to extradite him.
While a visiting scientist at the CDC a few years back, Thorsen scored some big CDC grants, for research to be carried out in Denmark. When he got back to Denmark, he “submitted false invoices for research expenses and had Aarhus University, where he held a faculty position, transfer the funds to his personal account at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta, prosecutors said.”
He used the money for cars, a house, and a motorcycle.
Thorsen no longer teaches at Aarhus; if you Google Thorsen and Aarhus, you get a statement about him from the Managing Director of the university which notes that although Poulsen continues to act as if he’s still on the Aarhus faculty, he most certainly is not.
The university also notes in this letter that Poulsen took a full-time position at Emory (Emory! Emory? Wake up! Get this guy’s mug off your website!) while still employed full-time by Aarhus.
Conflict of interest at universities is one of those things. It’s what Samuel Beckett called a tragicomedy.
Universities make a big fuss about COIs paperworkwise, and hotairwise, but at any given time significant numbers of faculty members in med and business schools and economics departments are way out of compliance with COI and disclosure policies. They’re consulting here, they’re consulting there, they’re consulting everywhere.
Their model, their king, their god, their guru, their gold standard, is the last president of Harvard. As Frank Rich notes:
[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
If it’s good enough for the president of Harvard, it’s good enough for me!
These guys are very competitive. As long as they’re not making the five million or so Summers made from his one-day-a-week consulting job, they’re going to keep at it.
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Columbia University has its share of non-disclosing and possibly conflicted professors, but, as the title of this post indicates, it has lax COI policies.
Two of its COI-challenged professors have starring roles in the documentary film The Inside Job, however, and seeing as how the film won an Oscar and all, a lot of people have watched it, and Columbia, says one administrator, is embarrassed. So on Friday the faculty senate’s going to gather and watch the film (the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, will be there to answer questions afterwards). And almost certainly Columbia will, shortly after that, alter its COI policies.
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UD thanks Roy for the link.
Michele Dufault, an astronomy and physics major at Yale, has been killed in a freak accident that occurred while she was using the university’s spinning lathe. Apparently her hair got caught in the machine and it pulled her in.
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A dangerous machine. This person survived because people around him turned off the machine. Was Dufault alone in the shop?
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The Yale Daily News has details.
From comments on the YDN story:
This young woman encouraged me not to give up on an astrophys course we took together, helped me as a bewildered freshman through problem sets, sent me emails to check up on how I liked this or that course, all because of her passion for what she studied and her generous nature.
… today, my post about him one year ago.
With the second case of apparent plagiarism on the part of a German politician noted for sticking DR. in front of all mentions of her name, we have to ask whether this behavior is general over there. When will one of the DR.s blurt out, in a moment of frustration, Everyone does it ?
In the aftermath of four student suicides, and, most recently, a professor’s suicide, at the extremely competitive Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, students and faculty are calling for changes. In particular, they want the punitive fee system (you pay a lot more if your GPA starts slipping) ended.
[T]hose who failed to get a grade point average better than 3.0 out of the total 4.3 faced up to 6 million won ($5,520) in fees from the second semester. For international students, the system was implemented from their third semester.
Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.
The school’s president isn’t handling things well – he seemed at one point to be accepting this and other reforms aimed at cooling the competitive intensity, but has changed his mind.
Meanwhile, John Rodgers, an English language teacher in Seoul, reviews the startlingly high suicide incidence in Korea generally, and suggests that the country take advantage of the attention being paid to the deaths at KAIST to begin reckoning with aspects of the culture that contribute to the problem.
The shades are gathering.
Ghostwriting businesses that serve as go-betweens for drug companies and university thought leaders, writing articles and books that promote the drug company’s pills, and then putting the thought leaders’ names on the articles and books in order to make the publications look legitimate, live a fitful existence. They flicker in and out of public awareness.
Mainly they’re hidden, minor divisions of a pharmaceutical industry in no hurry to disclose a strikingly deceptive – and destructive – form of self-promotion.
But it’s kind of a problem for the ghostwriting firms themselves: You want the world to know about you and your work, but you … don’t want the world to know about you and your work.
The schizy quality of the biz was captured rather beautifully this week by Ed Silverman of Pharmalot, who noticed that one ghosting company had suddenly taken down a website page showing all the scientific books they’ve produced. One of these books was featured in a recent New York Times story about ghostwriting.
Silverman called the head of the company to ask about the elusive webpage.
“Thanks for the inquiry,” he responded abruptly, “but we don’t display that kind of stuff on our web site.” We replied by noting that the info had been there previously, but then we heard a loud… click. Perhaps, he realized that listing the book as a portfolio product does not easily square with the [American Psychiatric Association] position [the APA published the book] that ghostwriting did not take place. And taking down the product portfolio might also make it more difficult to scrutinize other [ghosted] work. Given how fast he hung up, though, one might have thought we uttered the magic word: “Boo!”
Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica.
[Somehow from Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without [his personal] synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.
Aubade.
Professor Rappaport (UD‘s father was born Herbert Rapoport – could UD be related to this dude?) offers some wild and crazy extra credit.
Kind of a mild version of that Northwestern University professor’s session with the device.
Rappaport’s Rate My Professors page is a trip. You have to go the extra mile to get a 4.3 Easiness rating.
