The school, ranked 151 and with a 58% graduation rate, just got a gift of $12 million to build a new football training facility!
The school, ranked 151 and with a 58% graduation rate, just got a gift of $12 million to build a new football training facility!
… is a disturbing event. Universities need to be alert to the possibility of contagion.
A professor at Cal State Fullerton explains his no-laptop policy. You learn when you focus your mind. Pretty obvious.
This professor also complains about… professors.
I’ve been in meetings and watched professors do other things on their laptop, and it is distracting to me. Students are not the only ones who do it.
It’s so rude. You might at least expect professors to know better.
UD‘s buddy Bill Gleason reminds us that the business of pharmaceutical companies paying professors to write books – or to put their names on books written by ghost-writing companies – continues to thrive. (Pharma also has professors put their names on articles largely or entirely written by the same ghost-writing companies.) Like all ghostly things, this one leads a fitful existence; occasionally there’s a reported sighting. But you can’t be sure you’ve seen a ghost until you get documentation, and in this case, people have been trying to get documentation out of the American Psychiatric Association, which published the book…
On May 4, there’ll be a day-long workshop, at the University of Toronto, on the ethics of ghostwriting. David Healy will be there, along with other academics who’ve been willing to go up against powerful and rich vested interests, inside the university and out.
… has long been something like the following: Our eminent, money-generating professors will occasionally behave dishonorably – even in ways that have significant legal, not merely moral, repercussions.
We will deal with these events with Ivy gentility — we will say little or nothing, at least publicly. If we punish, we will not say publicly what that punishment was. We will never issue a public statement admitting that something bad happened on our faculty.
So, whether the event was Andrei Shleifer and Russia, or Lawrence Summers and Andrei Shleifer, or three law professors, plus a Harvard Overseer, and plagiarism, Harvard will deal with it quietly, admitting nothing, doing little (at least little that one can measure) by way of punishment.
If, as is the nature of Faustian bargains, Harvard loses a little of its soul with each of these events, well… The main thing is that Harvard can expect its faculty to be still about these things, to keep quiet, to be discreet.
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It isn’t always. It was really pissed at Summers and his, er, implausible remarks about his knowledge of his protegé Shleifer’s activities, for instance.
And now, in the notorious case of the Harvard-packed Monitor Group and its relationship to the Gaddafi regime, one Harvard faculty member has decided to say something. Directly to Drew Faust, Harvard’s president. Her reported response to him is telling.
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“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary,” said Harry Lewis, current Harvard professor and former dean, to the university’s president at a faculty meeting. “Shouldn’t Harvard acknowledge its embarrassment, and might you remind us that when we parlay our status as Harvard professors for personal profit, we can hurt both the university and all of its members? … We can’t keep having these economists go off to foreign countries and fill their pockets and create these huge embarrassments for the university.”
Here, on his blog, is his full statement.
Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her “scold in chief.”
That’s a sweet put-down, no? It implies, first, that Lewis is nothing more than a scold, and that no one, including Drew Faust, would want to join him in being a scold. A scold. Uncool. A finger pointer. A finger shaker. Some sort of uptight hyper-moralist. Because I mean there’s no clear wrongdoing here, moral ambiguity and geopolitical complexity being what it is… Remember what Benjamin Barber said: Everyone gets paid.
And after all, if the only thing you can do is scold, what’s the point? Harvard is only one small weak voice in the wilderness; it has no leverage in the larger world; it’s just a teeny overlooked little thing… When it speaks, no one listens.
Yes, yes, to be sure. Dave Zirin, writing in The Nation, is correct. But he goes on to make a mistake:
We have reached a clear public exhaustion with the injustice of it all and the steady monotony of [big-time university sports] scandals.
Calling athletes modern-day slaves, he insists that they be paid.
But Americans are neither exhausted nor outraged by this injustice. They like big-time university sports just the way they are. So do universities and the NCAA. If the situation were anything near what Zirin thinks it is, Auburn University’s doors would have been forcibly closed years ago.
AS UD got off the Farragut North metro train this morning and trudged up the perpetually non-functioning escalator, she pulled her fare card out of her jacket pocket and got ready to insert it into the exit gate.
At the exit gate, she saw something she’d never before seen in a metro station. The station manager had positioned himself inches from departing passengers and was saying to every one of them, in a very loud voice: GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! GOOD MORNING!!! THANK YOU FOR USING METRO. HAVE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY. BYE NOW. THANK YOU. MAY YOUR DAY BE BEE YOO TIFUL. THANK YOU.
UD felt vaguely threatened by the blast-effect of this good will and said nothing, as did most everyone else. But one woman met and raised the stakes. AND GOOD MORNING TO YOU! GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! Shook his hand.
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Although she thought she’d put plenty of money on her fare card earlier at Grosvenor station (after twenty-five years, UD doesn’t know the fare from Bethesda to Foggy Bottom; she just puts a bunch of dollars on the card), she was short a dollar. Off to the AddFare machine.
The AddFare machine takes only singles and fives. UD had a single, but it was so faded and thinned that the machine rejected it. She had no fives. She had tons of twenties.
No problem. She’d do the thing with change. Scrounging the bottom of her bag, she came up with all sorts of coins. But they turned out to be euros.
Nothing to be done but interrupt the station manager’s greetings with her problem. She crept up to him as he buoyantly readied his shtick for the next batch of exiters. She felt oppressed by her stupidity (if she were smart, she’d use a SMART card) and guilty at interrupting his shtick…
He took one look at her woefully waving her card, opened the exit gate, and bellowed JUST GO ON THROUGH. YOU’RE FINE. GO ON THROUGH. HAVE A BLESS-ED DAY.
But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.
[T]he Sugar Bowl paid its director $645,386 in 2009, a year in which it received a $1.4 million government grant yet still lost money. [The] Orange Bowl [spent] $756,546 on travel that same year, and another $100,000 or so on postage and shipping.
… It’s a shocking tale of greed, excess and entitlement in college sports. Almost enough to give the BCS and big-time college football a bad name.
As if that was possible.
… at Fortune, whose editors explain, in reprinting an article from 1986, that “with the hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam fighting insider trading charges in a Manhattan courtroom and one of Warren Buffett’s top executives, David Sokol, resigning under suspicions about his personal trades, the lessons from the 1980s still ring true.”
… [T]he business school ethicists may be as much a part of the problem as of the solution. Their main message starts off with the reasonable exhortation that the future managers in their classes must prevent the creation of cultures of corruption at the outfits they’ll help run. Corporate cultures powerfully affect employee behavior, students rightly are told, so you mustn’t have reward systems that encourage misreporting of revenue and expenses or that promote cheating on government contracts. But in practice all this talk about how employees are creatures of their culture ends up by tacitly accepting the notion that the individual employee really can’t be held personally responsible for his actions. The result is to genuflect piously to the idea of ethics without requiring any person to be ethical.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel takes a look at an academic unit of the University of Wisconsin — the Pain and Policy Studies Group.
…[D]octors in the addiction and pain fields say the [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group pushed a pharmaceutical industry agenda not supported by rigorous science.
“They advocate for policies that benefit pharmaceutical companies and harm pain patients and the public health,” said Andrew Kolodny, an expert on opioid addiction.
… Their efforts helped create a climate that vastly expanded unproven medical use of the often abused drugs, said Kolodny, chairman of psychiatry at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York.
The group gets bundles from the relevant drug companies, though they’re a little spotty about disclosure.
Just to remind you:
… [Opioids] became so common that in 2007, 700 milligrams of morphine or its equivalent were prescribed, on average, for everyone in the country.
That’s enough to give every man, woman and child round-the-clock dosing of Vicodin for three weeks.
Unintentional overdose deaths from opioid analgesics grew from 2,901 in 1999 to 11,499 in 2007, by far eclipsing deaths from heroin and cocaine combined. Opioid deaths follow a track that is almost identical to the growth in sales of the drugs. In addition, an estimated 1.9 million people abused the drugs or had dependence problems between 2007 and 2009.
You know, Joseph Stiglitz (among others) has been warning about the effects of gross wealth disparity in the United States.
The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent… While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades — and more — has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Look at many American universities – especially their sports and medical components – to see how outrageous and growing wealth-concentration has corrupted and distorted that institution… That sad institution, to which we continue, sheep-like, to give our tax dollars because somehow, like its comrade-in-intellectuality, the NCAA, it’s non-profit… Harvard’s endowment may stand at around thirty billion dollars, its last president may have pursued a multiply-millioned hedgie career while running the place, some of its highest-profile professors may spend more time cultivating client dictators than they do teaching, but Harvard deserves the taxes of every one of those middle-class losers with their falling incomes…
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And speaking of consulting, here’s the University of Nevada and its system of med schools and hospitals on the front page of today’s New York Times. After a heart device company began paying monthly fees of $5,000 to various med school professors there, the university started using that company’s device. The hospital’s CEO didn’t know and didn’t care about this conflict of interest, although now that the federal government is investigating these matters, and, you know, right after the main faculty money-maker was “contacted by this reporter,” the faculty member told the pathetic CEO about the money (‘“We never delved into that level of the relationship,” [the CEO] said.’).
We’re talking here in particular about William Resh, who describes the $60,000 a year or so he gets from the device maker as “nominal.”
Which takes us back to Stiglitz. If you’re in the one percent, money that would look not at all bad as a yearly salary for the failing middle class is nominal, nothing, eh, fluff, nada, peanuts, funny money. I guess that’s why the CEO didn’t delve. Pocket change. Who cares.
… complete with wishful thinking …
[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.
… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:
They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.
And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:
I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”
Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.
Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.
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SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.
Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.
What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.
… With the advent of the computer and PowerPoint, we got lazy. Instead of using the slides to present visual images of what we were talking about, we used them more as notes we could share. In short, we increasingly read the bullets off the slides and forced the audience, who likely could read much faster than we could talk, to read along with us.
Most PowerPoint-assisted talks are deadly dull — particularly if they’re given by speakers who have done them so many times they seem to have forgotten what the words actually mean, and even their minds seem to wonder as they parrot back what they read on the screen.
Instead of making talks more compelling, interesting or exciting, PowerPoint often turns them into torture. I’m quite sure some of the talks I’ve seen over the years using PowerPoint would be banned by the Geneva Convention.
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More PowerPoint Pissoff: From a lawyer under pressure to use PowerPoint to train police recruits and officers.
[T]here is little to no research to show that PowerPoint aids learning, retention or application of information.
… [T]ext on a PowerPoint slide competes with and distracts from what you’re saying. But, you say, if I’m simply reading the text aloud, there’s no competition. Maybe not, but if all you’re going to do is read your PowerPoint slides aloud, save everyone time and just email the presentation to your learners.