Hey wait! We didn’t say you could actually track the patients to see whether our device works. We’re going to destroy your academic career now, because we told you what to do, you knew that your job was to provide university cover for our claim that the device works, and your university needs to know that you went off half-cocked like the madman you are and actually tracked your patients to see if the device actually worked.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Daryl Fourney is in big trouble. A big powerful company is filing complaints against him with his employer, and now the New York Times has noticed. After all, a 2010 article by one Chopko totally contradicts Fourney’s findings.

In response, Dr. Fourney noted that Dr. Chopko’s positive 2010 report failed to disclose his financial ties to Vertos; Dr. Chopko, who is Vertos’s director of physician education, described the omission as a “clerical error” and said it would be rectified.

Pesky clerical error! When it comes to conflict of interest, UD, who follows the topic, can tell you that this specific little fuckup occurs with astounding frequency in the scientific literature. I’m sure it will be rectified, along with the study protocol, which will once again specify that you must under no circumstances follow up with your patients beyond the point where we tell you to stop.

Technology in the university classroom creates all these adorable cat-and-mouse games.

Which gambit? The gamut gambit?

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

Update: The writer corrected the error.

So here’s UD, for the first time in her life, in a cardiology waiting room.

Because her cholesterol is up there, and because she’s une femme d’un certain age, her doctor told her to get a stress test and a something-count (starts with a c?) and other things.

So, you know, it’s ‘thesda, so everything’s nice, pleasant building, pleasant waiting room, pleasant receptionists.

UD looks around.

The other people in this room are seriously old. One of them – thin, pale, palsied – is wearing a helmet.

A helmet! Call UD delusional, call her effing nuts, but she feels certain she is way out of the way of wearing a helmet. These people have weak hearts. UD may be proved wrong in a few moments, but she is willing to swear up and down that she’s got a strong heart.

She doesn’t belong here, id est. She’s a displaced person, id est.

So here’s Dr Sanderson, rational, forbearing, good listener. In sum, a kindly WASP. He shows up after his assistant sticks stuff all over me, etc., etc., etc.

Sanderson looks at the results of all my tests and then he looks at me.

“We’re not doing a stress test on you. It would be pointless. It’s obvious that your heart is fine.”

I knew it! Good old ticker! Tarzan chest pound here! AH EE AH EE AHHHHH EE AH EE AH.

Sanderson gives her a Go and sin somewhat less sermon, with special attention to the Mediterranean Diet, and UD leaps off the examining table and gets the hell out.

… is becoming a symbol of the American propensity to work too hard. Recall what Ted Koppel said of Russert’s sudden heart attack:

“I think we need to learn something from this. You can’t work people 20 hours a day, month after month after month after month, without some kind of consequences,” Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said on CNN Friday night. “I don’t know what it was that was wrong with Tim. I don’t know why Tim died. But all I can say is that man worked too hard.”

Johnstone, a young lawyer who reportedly worked 80 and sometimes 100-hour weeks, was found dead a few months ago at home, in the midst of long hours of working. Autopsy results are inconclusive, but a sudden heart attack is a possibility, and plenty of observers are speculating that she worked herself to death.

… because he has stamina and guts and epitomizes this blog category: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS. And I’ll always be able to follow his lawsuits because I don’t think they’ll ever end. Always another effort to appeal an NYU decision to deny him his MBA because while he was a student there he was found guilty of insider trading.

UD enjoys the special human interest part of Rosenthal’s story: It’s a family affair.

Assuming this is true (it appears in an opinion piece about how the University of Georgia newspaper should cover student alcohol arrests) it’s part of an intriguing trend at American party schools. As at the University of Iowa, another booze-soaked extravaganza with full cooperation from the administration, so now at the University of Georgia, you’ve got this rhetorical tweaking – a small line about drinking responsibly at the bottom of screaming ads for Saturday night specials; regular emails to teaching assistants discouraging them from telling students funny alcohol-related stories…

Every semester, as you gaze out your office window at the massive two-day cleanup after the last campus tailgate, every semester a vaguely coercive little note about how Oh by the way lose the When me and the lads got shitfaced bit… And God no Baudelaire wafts your way…

… Journalists are punning about a long-ago-stolen and now-recovered sculpture of Robert Frost.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”

UD has said it again and again on this blog: Go ahead and get your diploma mill degrees, but be sure not to rise too high in the world. UD has even specified how high you can rise before someone actually looks at the shit on your resume.

So. Let’s review:

Teacher, but not superintendent.

Police officer but not captain.

City council member but not mayor.

Mid-level but not chief bureaucrat.

How difficult is this to grasp? With fraudulent degrees, you’ll do fine, the two thousand dollars were well spent, but you’re going to have to spend your life under the radar. You’re not going to be able to rise. When you rise, people start paying attention.

A number of wise observers comment on the sublime and seductive FBS.

There’s some glamor. Arguably, there’s some payback. But the culture you’re inviting into your organization is problematic at best.

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

[It has] the capacity to hurt a university’s hard-earned reputation in the blink of an eye.

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

[M]ajor college football [is like] the credit-default swaps that wrecked the economy four years ago – risky and little understood investments that can blow up and hurt owners and innocent bystanders alike.

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

FBS football is like a cancer cell implanted inside an institution – innocuous at first but growing into something destructive. Schools struggle to win initially and throw money at the team, alienating faculty whose own salaries are frozen. Gradually, the university loses control of the athletic program, and student-athletes suffer.

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

“What do you think (new president) Rod Erickson is spending his time on at Penn State, any of those guys?” said John Burness, a former head of public affairs at several major universities, including Duke, where he saw a good year of work spent almost entirely dealing with the lacrosse case there.

“When you get involved in the negatives, the scandals, it’s such an enormous sinkhole of the time of the institutional leadership they almost can’t deal with anything else,” he said. “When schools start out no one is assuming there will be a problem. But there’s so much money involved in this, there are inevitably going to be problems.”

… Anything Atall.

Imagine the absurdity of a university with a serious obesity problem that pledges to promote healthier lifestyles on campus by jumping into bed with, say, Burger King. Even if every Whopper advertisement in the country were plastered with the words “Eat a Salad,” the relationship would still be inherently problematic because Burger King’s behavior is motivated not by a vested interest in collective health but by the existential corporate necessity to sell more fast food.

A University of Iowa student lays down some nice prose about his university’s deal with Anheuser-Busch.

Gayle Saunders, Ohio State University assistant vice president of media relations, wrote in an email, “This is not a University sanctioned T-shirt, and we have no knowledge of where it originated. It is unacceptable and appalling that someone would make light of a tragedy in this manner.”

If you give take-home exams, you get what you deserve, which is probably some degree of cheating. There’s no “news” in this big news story about Harvard students collaborating on a take-home exam.

Online exams, take-home exams — they’re invitations to cheat.

Professors shouldn’t give these forms of exams unless they don’t give a damn about how some students are going to write them.