… my latest Inside Higher Education column, will appear early Monday morning. I’ll link to it here.

It’s awkward. How entangled do universities want to get with businesses like Millennium?

A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating Millennium Laboratories of San Diego, a fast-growing private company selling urine drug testing services to pain clinics across the United States.

The company not only is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of health care fraud but also for intimidating former employees, one who was portrayed in a slideshow at a company meeting as a corpse in a body bag…. [It is also accused of] getting doctors to order unnecessary urine tests [– the testing, amid an epidemic of pain pill use, reveals whether patients are abusing the drugs –] and charging excessive fees to Medicare and private insurers.

I mean, nothing wrong with industry money, but you do want to keep an eye on the particular representatives from industry offering it.

Millennium sales tactics [it is alleged] included a chart showing doctors how much they could boost their own income by increasing the number of urine drug tests they ordered. For instance, a $15 payment to test for one drug could balloon to about $800,000 a year if 20 people a day were tested and each urine sample was tested for 11 drugs, the chart said.

It is a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Keep prescribing the pain pills — the medical profession almost has the entire American population on them — and then, concerned at the shocking escalation in their abuse, make your patients pay for urine tests. It’s funny to think about how America’s hundreds of thousands of pill mills will be giving the test to make sure their customers are taking their Oxy and Roxy. If you’re in the urine testing biz, like Millennium, you get them coming and going, as it were.

So, you know, a very becoming business altogether, and if you’re Duke or Washington you might want to keep an eye on the Justice Department proceedings and ask if you want to continue whitewashing the reputation of these outfits.

… who died last week, includes this poem.

Transgressions

He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in simply being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often when no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving all of it alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting his neighbors’ wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.

Well, I wrote about a cicada poem here, and the cicadas do the same thing in John Blair’s poem that they do here in Gilbert’s. They give out, says Blair, with a “warning wail” about, Gilbert says, “the brevity of life.”

Jack Gilbert is famous (among poetry types) for having had so much “greed of time, of being” that early in his career he turned his back on America, and the poetry world (in which he had already had high-profile successes), and lived pretty much alone on Greek islands. As “Trangressions” makes clear, Gilbert’s recognition of life’s brevity catalyzed a determination to be, not so much to do. He wrote some – not many – books of poems, but mainly he placed himself, open and ecstatic, in life. He lived, as it were, a microscopically intense existential ongoingness in one of the earth’s most intense settings.

Many of his poems arise from this peculiar ontological arrangement, this hyper-focused sensitivity to passing objects, moods, weather patterns. Undistracted by work, family, and social life, untethered by ideology or faith, Gilbert produced strange poems that starkly combine the two essentials of each human being’s being in the world: the physical universe, and the mind. His poems are both sharply clarified evocations of people and things in his sun-blasted environment, and insistent conversations with himself about his own motives in moving himself away from ordinary life, and the price he’s paid for that move.

Of course Gilbert would choose Greece for his slow sweet clear declension through time. Don DeLillo chose it too, for a few years, and saw the same things Gilbert did. In his novel, The Names, DeLillo described a Greek village in language that, put into short lines rather than paragraphs, could be Gilbert’s:

Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing. It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.

Realized space – that’s what the artist is after. The world’s objects and people distributed deeply and fully and feelingly so that when you look at them you see reality, you see the actual world.
In particular, you see the earth’s empty spaces inhabited, elaborated, brought to life, realized by people through use. In Greece, even nowhere is framed.

This needs to be a domestic lived reality, not the techno-phantasmagoria of the great skyscraper city. You seek elemental truths, basic daily gatherings-up, using DeLillo’s word. You want to observe this. So you could live, for instance, on the edge of a Balinese rice paddy just as easily as in a Greek village, for both give you daily and nightly visual access to the interaction of small human communities and natural beauty and bounty. Actually, Greece is better because it’s dry, without natural bounty in the way of watery Bali — you want visual access to small human communities enacting the existential drama of drawing from the earth beauty, sustenance, and meaning.

So, you’re ecstatically, aesthetically, engaged in all of this, but your consciousness – your being a person with a past, with regrets and confusions and worldly avidities – is going to bedevil you, and from the conflict between your settled engagement in a settled world and your neurotic, restless, maybe guilty self (you’re an American behaving like this, for goodness sake) will arise a poem like “Transgressions,” in which the poet talks to himself about his passion for pure being and his sense of the sinfulness of this passion.

The sin of “sloth,” “waste” — yet those were his favorite years, when he was doing “nothing important.”

Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose.

Whitman loafs and invites his own and the universal soul; but Gilbert isn’t inviting. His “transgression” resides in his greedy taking of life for himself. Lust, pride, violence, the narcissism of “feeling himself feeling.” He concludes:

This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.

Nice the way the word shiver shivers through unshriven in that unredeemed cold… But he’s feeling it… Feeling himself feeling the cold, and that’s much more important to him than any reckoning in conventional terms of his transgressions. He wants the true world, all of it, including the true world of his mind and his body and his own ways of being. These may be ugly or beautiful but it is their being existent that elates him, lends him the only redemption he really cares about. Leave all of it alone, he writes – let the world be and let myself be. Let me watch as I become part of the realized space of the globe, and let me transgress and transgress against the higher waste of a labored existence until I come to an end.

At least one pieces it together as a suicide: A medical school professor, a 53-year-old woman, is found drowned in the Baltimore Harbor six months after her longtime partner – also a Hopkins med school professor, which whom she collaborated on research – dies of a heart attack.

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

From a Baltimore Sun article about her.

Dr. O’Hearn was an overachiever from the start, according to her sister. They grew up with four brothers in Wilton, Conn., where O’Hearn was president of her 1977 class, homecoming queen and co-captain of the field hockey team at Wilton High School.

She went on to Yale University, where she sang with “perfect pitch” for the Yale Slavic Chorus and earned dual degrees in biology and Russian and Eastern European Studies in 1981. Her sister said she also studied philosophy at the university. She went on to the Johns Hopkins medical school.

… it can be a kind of a brain-twister, can’t it? If that one, who put a player with a concussion in a shed, got in trouble, shouldn’t this one, who slapped a junior coach so hard “his headset went flying,” get in trouble too? Or is a slap less serious than negligence? That shed bit? Hm. Hmm…

Even if the Big 12 isn’t interested in setting a proper example, […] then [Texas Tech] should. After all, they were quick to pass judgement on their last coach, Mike Leach, for allegedly putting a player in a shed when he had a concussion. Now they need to practice what they preach. Stay consistent. If that was enough for Leach to be canned, then this is surely enough for Tuberville to be.

Imagine yourself – or someone you know – being forty million dollars in debt. Forty million! Can you imagine that?

Well, they can at the University of Arkansas! The football coach at the University of Arkansas is forty million dollars in debt.

He’s got a really big salary from Arkansas, of course, because Arkansas can tell a winner when it sees one.

But lately he’s been doing some funny stuff with his salary in his bankruptcy proceedings.

[O]ne week before he filed for bankruptcy, Smith arranged to have 71 percent of his $850,000 salary at Arkansas deferred until after the football season – a move that has raised legal questions about whether he was trying to shield that money from his creditors.

Smith claims “on his bankruptcy filing to have a net monthly income of just $107.66.”

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

UPDATE: I should not have told Mr UD about this. He spent all of dinner anxiously figuring out how Smith can possibly be making ends meet. Numbers, numbers numbers — he was trying to do the math to make it possible for Smith to eat, commute, find shelter.

I reminded him that Smith lives in Arkansas, not Bethesda. “We pay five dollars for a loaf of Black Russian bread at Whole Foods. I’m thinking a cheap loaf of bread in Arkansas is like seventy cents.”

“Okay. Say seventy cents. And after all you don’t eat a whole loaf of bread every day… But there’s still rent! A car! Could he even afford a tv?”

“Soyez tranquille. He lives in his plush coaching quarters on campus, where you don’t have to be Jerry Sandusky to know they have showers and all. Plenty of tv screens available there too. And since he lives where he works, no need for a car!”

“Whew,” said Mr UD.

… after Michaelson’s Cork, Ireland
concert last night.

La Kid‘s the blond
on the left.

… fails to bring context to SUNY Albany student hazing and other rituals. Like Chico State and U Mass Amherst, SUNY Albany is one of America’s most violent, dangerous universities. Fights, sometimes escalating to riots, are part of the fabric of life for students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. Suspensions happen; a few fraternities get shuttered… Nothing changes. Things get worse. The administrations of these universities assume a sort of perpetual crouch, waiting in dread for the next horror.

Naturally, an important element of the SUNY Albany mix is a huge expenditure of funds on sports. Without it, Albany wouldn’t be able to attract all those applicants who want to come to SUNY to watch games and get drunk and beat up people.

… proceeds briskly.

In light of a student drinking death and other hideous things (background here), the school’s president has just shut down all fraternities and sororities. No Greek life of any kind is permitted. Greek buildings must cover up the letters on their facades.

Addressing a gathering of the Greek community in the Bell Memorial Union Auditorium, he said students don’t get a “free pass” for allowing a brother to drink 21 shots on his 21st birthday, and “pass out in his vomit.”

… Zingg told the Greeks they will not be able to recruit or have socials until the spring semester, at which time a re-education and reinstatement program will be developed.

Having read the sorry history of this shit-faced school, UD isn’t hopeful about the re-education bit. She believes, as she wrote in the background post she linked to in her first paragraph, that all current Chico State students must be told to leave. All must transfer. A new class of students will then be admitted to a campus with permanently shut down fraternities and sororities.

These can be twisted, inept, inventive, off the charts; but the classic university fraud – UD has no idea why, but she’s been covering university frauds for a long time – involves the director of an engineering-related program, a guy, who creates a fake company and gives his grant money from the federal government to that company and then uses it to buy a condo on a golf course and a Lexus and a whole lotta other shit.

Not that I want to beat up on my already unranked institution, but George Washington University experienced exactly such a fraud just a few years ago.

Since these always go according to a rather strict formula, you’d figure schools would have guards posted at the doors of their directors of engineering programs, but I guess this is not considered good form. In any case, it keeps happening, with Morgan State University the latest case.

A full-time engineering professor at Morgan State University was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday in an alleged scheme to defraud the National Science Foundation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding.

Manoj Kumar Jha, 45, who oversees the university’s transportation engineering graduate program, according to the university’s website, allegedly fabricated an elaborate research proposal on behalf of a private company he founded and then applied for funding through the NSF’s Small Business Technology Transfer program, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office…. Jha received $200,000 to conduct the research but instead allegedly made personal mortgage and credit card payments, paid his wife $11,000 for work she didn’t do and wrote himself a $6,000 check, prosecutors said.

Jha, who is also the founding director of Morgan State’s Center of Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research, also applied for $500,000 more for the project but did not receive it, prosecutors said.

And what a tangled web we weave!

In March 2011, Jha allegedly sent back faked time sheets for a purported research scientist as well as a copy of a faked expenditure ledger “in which he allegedly entered fictitious research expenses in order to conceal the fact that NSF funds had been converted to Jha’s personal use,” prosecutors said.

(This just in – via Wendy, a reader.)

UD‘s university must now lie – at least for a while – – in the unranked sweat of an enseamed bed. That is, because George Washington University for years misrepresented the class rank of entering students, it is being punished to the nth degree by US News and World Report.

George Washington University on Wednesday lost its U.S. News and World Report ranking as one of the top national universities because the school revealed it had erroneously reported data on incoming students for more than a decade.

The private university held the coveted 51st ranking on the “Best Colleges” listing of the top 200 national universities. But U.S. News said the use of incorrect data in the September publication made the school’s rank higher than it would have been.

U.S. News said the school will have an “unranked” status until the publication of its 2014 edition of “Best Colleges” and until the school confirms the accuracy of its data.

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

NOTE TO THE MEDIA:

As a professor at George
Washington University, I
am available to be
interviewed about how

traumatic this is.

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

Sing it with me:

So yank me and wank me,
Spank me, unrank me,
I’m yours ‘til I die,
So in love,
So in love
So in love with you, my love, am I.

Eric, a reader, points UD in the direction of a wonderful piece of writing.

… this is about, right? Seems the Hardin County (Texas) GOP treasurer wants to secede from us maggots – them’s the word he used – what done elected Barack Hussein Obama. The Hardin County GOP seems to have rustled itself up a new treasurer real quick.

Morrison was recently “chosen by former State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy to help screen Texas public school textbooks,” but look on the bright side. He can’t do any more damage than has already been done to Texas public school students.

Commentary is a propaganda sheet, directed, as degenerate movements often are, by a beneficiary of nepotism, in order to advance a moribund ideology and the interests of one faction in a foreign country. It’s an almost text-book case of intellectual decline and fall.