America’s struggling pharmaceutical industry finally gets the spokesman it needs! Bravo, John LaMattina, for having the guts to go up against the power of Marcia Angell and tell it like it is!

Anxious editorial in the Duke University newspaper about the fiasco at the University of North Carolina.

Duke is absolutely right to be anxious.

The only weak part of the editorial is its repeated insistence that the leaders of UNC must have been shocked to discover widespread academic/athletic fraud. No way.

… about suicide among professors.

Also: A reporter at George Washington University’s paper has been interviewing her about her MOOC. She’ll link to that piece as well.

In response to Junior Seau’s suicide, America speaks. A football player is just like a police officer or a soldier.

… are just beginning to be rounded up. Stay tuned.

In her years of following plagiarism stories, UD has seldom come across a plagiarist who did it just that one time. Virtually all of them, once one case comes to light, turn out to have done it for ages. You can bet on it.

So when the story about the Director of Education for the entire Toronto District School Board having plagiarized appeared a couple of days ago, UD sat tight and waited while reporters found all his other plagiarized material.

Now that they’ve done that, UD will post on the story. Let’s see… It’s always icky when a high-level academic type, an example to many students, turns out to be a serial plagiarist. The character of this guy’s plagiarism is particularly disgusting: For instance, he lifted someone else’s story about talking to her child after the Sandy Hook massacre and pretended he was talking to his child…

Will he be fired? I think yes.

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UPDATE: Off he goes.

… is out front on the latest Yeshiva University scandal – a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse. And the cover-up continues.

[A Yeshiva alumnus] said he was dismayed when [the Yeshiva-appointed investigator] told him that her report might be delivered to the Y.U. board orally rather than in writing. He said he was even more alarmed when [she] said that unlike the [Penn State] Freeh report, which was disseminated publicly the same day it was presented to the board, she “could not say whether… the board would release the report to the public.”

[The alumnus] sent a letter, signed by 18 Y.U. high school alumni [the abuse took place at Yeshiva’s high school], to the chairman of the university’s board on January 3, asking that the investigation follow the blueprint laid out by the Freeh report. By January 8, the chairman, Henry Kressel, a managing director at a private equity firm in Manhattan, had not responded.

When a reporter from the Forward called Kressel on January 7 and identified himself, Kressel cut off the call. Kressel’s assistant later directed the Forward to Y.U.’s press office. (Y.U.’s press office did not respond to several questions, including a request to know who on the board is overseeing the investigation and when the board might decide to make the report public.)

Other high-ranking Y.U. officials declined to speak to the Forward. Reached at his New York home, David S. Gottesman, a billionaire investor and a Y.U. chairman emeritus, said: “I don’t talk to reporters. I never have.” Another chairman emeritus, Ronald P. Stanton, who made his fortune in agrochemicals, said, “I have no comment, sorry.”

… Seymour also declined to respond in regard to whether any member of her investigation team has any past or present ties to Y.U….

Yes, Yeshiva, following its long-established M.O. (denydenydenydenydeny), is covering itself in glory once again.

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Brava to this Yeshiva professor who takes advantage of her tenure (keep this in mind when considering the benefits of tenure) to go after Yeshiva. I’m sure Yeshiva will punish her in other ways; but they can’t fire her.

We now can see that there is a paradigm of institutional cover-up, and have named institutions that stand in that line: the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations, Penn State, Syracuse University, the Citadel, Poly Prep Country Day School, the Horace Mann School, and now my own employer, Yeshiva University, among many others too numerous to name. At the same time, the paradigm is crumbling before our very eyes. No institution can expect to protect its secrets of abuse and assault any longer.

Board members of a fraternity with a chapter at the University of Florida don’t understand why that university made life so difficult for the boys that the frat’s national reps had to shut the chapter down. I mean, yes, theft; yes, hazing; yes, underage drinking…

But when you understand, for instance, the reason for the theft, it doesn’t look so bad.

[T]wo of its members were arrested and charged with theft in March after getting caught walking out of a local home improvement store with nearly $600 worth of plastic sheeting to be used for a pool party at the chapter’s house.

Boys are going to need plastic sheeting for pool parties, and it’s just sitting right there in the store.

I thought of doing this; I’m glad someone got there before I did.

… continue…

Yet another arsenal hauled onto an American university campus. Last one of these we looked at was courtesy of an eighteen year old woman who drove to Elon College to I guess uh talk – with a little backup – to her boyfriend. Now here’s a guy at North Carolina State – he works in the vet school – who’s got all kinds of shit, some of it loaded, on campus. Let’s see…

Authorities said O’Connell, a necropsy medical support technician at the College of Veterinary Medicine, consented to the police search Friday of his employee locker, where police found an unloaded Colt Delta Elite 10mm handgun and a loaded Taurus .357 Magnum revolver.

A subsequent search of a locked cabinet in O’Connell’s office turned up two axes and a dagger, and police searching his truck found a new Colt AR-15 rifle that was still in the box.

Poor baby is going through a divorce. Y’all understand.

It took over five years, but after tons of investigations and charges and repayments, the husband/wife team of Jacko and Sainfort at the University of Minnesota (also, at the same time, drawing money from, Georgia Tech) is taking its leave of that school.

To this day, UD has no idea why Minnesota held onto these extremely highly compensated people for so long. UM knew within minutes of recruiting them that they were naughty.

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UD thanks Bill.

… and found his own work. Under that person’s name.

That person is Dongqing Li, at the University of Waterloo. Li has now been found guilty of plagiarism and will suffer the hideous consequence of four months without pay. Let that be a warning to any other evil-doer!

Recall this long 2009 New York Magazine article, which notes that

Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva [University’s] investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot [Merkin’s fund], which Ezra passed along to [Bernard] Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.

Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.

That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff. Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996 … Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved.

Whatever fudging there’d been in the disclosures, Ezra did well for Yeshiva—in fourteen years, the fund grew 9 percent a year, even after subtracting losses for Madoff and expenses. And he did well for himself; certainly, he made at least $10 million from Yeshiva over his tenure.

Which is to say that if you are going to have your hedgie trustees (and eventually all your trustees will be hedgies) invest for you – in their funds – you want to be very careful not to do a Yeshiva. Already Brown University has had to let one way big money trustee go, and now there’s the awkward matter of Steven A. Cohen himself on its board. So first of all you need to weigh, er, reputational issues against growing your endowment.

And then there’s Dartmouth’s ongoing problem.

In February 2012, a group sent an anonymous letter to the office of the New Hampshire attorney general. “Who really runs Dartmouth College and for whose benefit?” the letter asked. “For years, Dartmouth has been run by and has paid sky-high fees to a group of investment manager trustees, all Dartmouth graduates, who have then recycled some portion of the fees” back to the college “as generous ‘donations,’ ” often getting a building named for them in the process.

Teehee. They get these huge fees for doing something with the school’s money, and then they graciously give back some of the money the school gave them and call this money a donation.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …