Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto keens over the bloated corpse of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

The pharmaceutical industry, writes Shorter in the Wall Street Journal, “seeks the largest possible market for a given drug, and advertises huge diseases, such as major depression and schizophrenia, the scientific status of which makes insiders uneasy.”

The DSM provides pharma a market-expanding facade of empiricism. Its ever-broadening girth is a result of “increased specificity” of diagnosis within these immense major disease categories, but the specificity “is spurious. There is little risk of misdiagnosis, because the new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.” As a commenter on Shorter’s piece puts it, “We’re slicing up illnesses in small portions, we’re treating illnesses with very different names and symptoms with basically the same medications, and we’re at least partly doing this because drug companies have discovered the primary marketing mantra of differentiation. ”

Smartly tricked-out pills for your tailor-made depression; a whole other set for your very own anxiety. Yet “these indications are more marketing devices than scientific categories, because most depression entails anxiety and vice versa.”

The latest draft of the DSM fixes none of the problems with the previous DSM series, and even creates some new ones.

A new problem is the extension of “schizophrenia” to a larger population, with “psychosis risk syndrome.” Even if you aren’t floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic. Let’s say you have “disorganized speech.” This would apply to about half of my students. Pour on the Seroquel for “psychosis risk syndrome”!

DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases: turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity. [One of Shorter’s commenters calls this disgusting development “psychosprawl.”]

If there were specific treatments for these various niches, you could argue this is good diagnostics. But, as with other forms of anxiety-depression, the SSRIs [a major category of pills] are thought good for everything. Yet to market a given indication, such as social-anxiety disorder, it’s necessary to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on registration trials to convince the FDA that your agent works for this disease that previously nobody had ever heard of.

See why your placebo with strong side effects costs so much?

And we haven’t yet touched on advertising and litigation budgets.

With DSM-V, American psychiatry is … defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs.

From The Examiner:

Stephen [Colbert] made visits to a few international houses full of visitors from various countries supporting their teams. After pissing off a Swiss guy for implying that his main language was really just German, Colbert challenged him to a game of Fondue Pong, a variation of Beer Pong, but the loser had to drink a bowl of crazy hot cheese instead. At the Russia house, he played, and won, a game of table hockey. The best moment was when he was at the Irish house. He asked the crowd, “Who wants to celebrate Irish culture?” Then he proceeded to read James Joyce’s Ulysses to a miffed, befuddled audience. Boos and booze were prominent.

Hymn #272

Give Me the Libel

Calvo-Goller Version

Give me the libel, star of gladness gleaming!
To cheer my sad heart lone, reviewer-toss’d!
No storm can hide that glorious settlement beaming.
Cour de Cassation! Seek and save the lost!

Refrain

Give me the libel – holy message shining,
Thy cash shall guide me in my narrow way.
Vengeful and chilling, law and rage combining,
‘Til freedom vanish as I take my pay.

2

Give me the libel when my heart is broken
When criticism fills my soul with fear,
O precious words by precious French judge spoken:
Hold up your laws to show revenge is near.

3

Give me the libel, all my foes enlighten,
Teach them the danger when they knowledge sow.
Once I’ve destroyed them, all my gloom shall brighten,
This light alone the path of wealth can show.

From a nicely written profile of Mitchell Harris, a young English professor at Augustana College. It’s in the Augustana newspaper.

With the build of a linebacker and a hairless head perfectly formed to fit under any helmet, he appears out of place as he strolls down the English department hallway at Augustana.

His green sweater bears the Green Bay Packers logo, and with his arm bent across his large chest, at a quick glance he looks like he’s ready to burst through a defensive line with the football tucked safely away.

… Harris smiles when recalling the events surrounding his Augustana interview.

“Foolish thing I did,” Harris says. “I looked for dates of convenience and decided to interview on Friday so I could drive down Thursday.”

At the time Harris was filling a visiting position at his alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn., and he figured Friday would be the best day to work with his schedule. But he had forgotten the NFL had added Thursday night games that season, and this particular Thursday was the much-anticipated Dallas Cowboys versus Green Bay Packers game.

“I was kicking myself all the way to the interview,” Harris says. “I wanted to watch the game that night, but also prepare for the interview.”

Harris decided to go to a Buffalo Wild Wings to catch part of the game before heading back to his hotel to prepare for the next day’s important meeting. But when he got to the restaurant, the place was packed, so he asked a table of guys if he could join them. The three men obliged, and Harris soon discovered that they were Augustana football players.

The next day at his interview, Harris mentioned that he had met a few of the college’s football players at Buffalo Wild Wings the previous night, and [Jeffrey Miller, department chair] was impressed at how Harris was already able to bond with Augustana’s students, especially ones that didn’t frequent the Humanities building often. [Drop often. Redundant.]

… “Well, he’s motivated me to start doing more push ups to make myself not seem so insignificant when I stand next to his aura of testosterone,” English major Rob Green jokes.

“He makes Uncle Sam look like a communist. What a man.”

Fellow senior male English major Per Nestingen agrees. “Mitch Harris could walk onto any NFL team’s practice and instantly be given a starting job as an o-lineman, tight end, quarterback, or heck, even wide receiver,” he said.

… Already Miller and professor Patrick Hicks, the only other male English professor at Augustana, note Harris’ uniqueness.

“Mitch is definitely different,” Miller says. “Hicks and I like to sit around and drink tea.”

Students also echo Miller’s sentiments.

“From a male and female perspective, his presence is reassuring,” Nestingen says. “He provides a way for us to see how a bear trapped in a man’s body interprets the different gods of English. Who knows, maybe his allure and hip male perspective will help even out the ratio of men to women.” …

From Times Online:

A book dealer from Co Durham has denied theft of a Shakespeare First Folio stolen from Durham University in 1998. Raymond Scott, 53, claims that he found the 1623 book — worth up to £15 million and one of only 228 copies known — in a nightclub in Havana, Cuba.

Mr Scott, of Manor Grange, Wingate, County Durham, claimed he came across the book while visiting his fiancée Heidy Rios, a 21-year-old dancer at Havana’s Tropicana Club.

He was arrested after taking the book to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC to have it “verified”, and staff became concerned that it was the same First Folio stolen from Durham University Library in 1998.

The book, which is believed to be worth up to £15 million, has been described as one of the most important printed works in the English language…

Way to go, Folger….

I’d love to have been there to see the whole thing unfold…

Imagine the incredulous face of the librarian as it slowly dawns on her… The way she glances up at Scott and then gingerly walks out of the room with the thing, her fingers trembling. Mr Scott would you mind waiting here a moment…

Then, with her whole body shaking, alerting her colleagues who confirm its authenticity… Then rapid whispering: Whadda we do?… Whadda we do?… Call the FBI, dammit… Then giving the guy tea (Folger has a high tea) and chatting him up while the FBI gets there…

From the News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington:

A man reportedly infatuated with a 30-year-old special education teacher shot and killed the woman outside a Tacoma elementary school … this morning, police said. The gunman later was shot dead by a Pierce County sheriff’s deputy near Fredrickson.

The initial shooting occurred about 7:30 a.m. at Birney Elementary School, where the victim helped teach reading to kids with learning disabilities.

Witnesses told police the gunman… arrived at the school about two hours before the teacher and shot her when she and a female colleague later arrived…

A teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told The News Tribune the gunman had been in the victim’s master’s degree class when she was at the University of Washington-Tacoma. He had been stalking the victim, leaving roses on her car and notes.

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A story reminiscent of the Johanna Justin-Jinich killing at Wesleyan.

The excellent chancellor of the University of Maryland is too kind. Human failing, bad judgment, all very nice, but let’s call it what it was: Greed.

I mean, the dean of the UM law school ran the place. So… what was it John Kenneth Galbraith said about corporate compensation? “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

State university system officials have asked the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Law to return $60,000 in unauthorized compensation and have referred questionable payments totaling $410,000, which were revealed by a state legislative audit, to the attorney general’s office for review.

Chancellor William E. Kirwan revealed those actions and apologized for the audit’s findings at a hearing Thursday before the House subcommittee on education and economic development. He pinned responsibility for the $410,000 in payments on the recipient, former law dean Karen Rothenberg, and on David J. Ramsay, departing president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore…

Yes, Ramsay, like SUNY Binghamton’s Lois DeFleur, is getting his ass out of there toot sweet. “Rothenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday. The university said Ramsay will not be granting any interviews.” Legislators “could recommend withholding some of UMB’s $182 million budget, pending action on the audit items.” They’re waiting to see whether Rothenberg will cough up the $60,000 — first installment toward an ultimate payback of all the hundreds of thousands.

Details here. “[W]hen a highly paid employee of a state university receives an extra 350 large in a single year, and nobody tells the legislature, shouldn’t a state university president expect a report like this to follow?”

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Update: Financial details on the scandal here. Here’s the heart of it:

Rothenberg’s base compensation is listed in university records as being the following: 8/2003: $288,925; 8/2004: $304,161; 8/2005: $327,246; 8/2006: $365,000; 7/2007: $408,450; 7/2008: $485,778; 9/2009: $485,778.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Median Salaries of College Administrators By Job Category and Type of Institution 2008-09. For law deans, the median salary reported is $266,895.

Rothenberg’s base salary, already above the 2008-09 median in 2003, increased 68% in the next 6 years. It increased 33% in just the two years between 2006 and 2008 (so much for the argument that the whopping additional payment in 2007 that was disguised as a sabbatical payment was somehow necessary as a retention bonus).

Her current reported salary ($485,778) nearly doubles the national average for the position. It is 2.33 times the salary earned by the next highest paid tenured faculty member at the law school (which is $208,055). It is 4.4 times the salary earned by new faculty members at the law school ($110,000).

Rothenberg never earned a salary greater than $200,000 at UMD before being named the interim dean. She never had a minute of administrative experience as a dean or an associate dean at any law school before her appointment. She never appeared as a finalist in any dean search at any other law school in the U.S. during her tenure. She left the UMD deanship without another administrative position anywhere to go to. And yet, in just 7 years of being the dean, she earned more than $2.5 million dollars, not including the extra sabbatical and research grant payments questioned in the audit, and not including the value of expense accounts and benefits….

[These numbers] are completely off the charts — they are wholly outside and beyond any standard industry practice or customary compensation policy at American law schools.

Longtime readers know I’ve only used my UD OFFICIALLY EMBARRASSED TO BE A WOMAN headline once before. I can’t even remember what the earlier case was about.

But I tell you. If this be a woman… If this Karin Calvo-Goller be a woman… you can include me out!

From the Times Higher Education:

The editor of a leading international law journal is to stand trial in a French court after he refused to pull an academic book review to which the author took exception.

Joseph Weiler, editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL), is due to face a Paris criminal tribunal in June after refusing to remove the critical review from a website associated with the journal, www.globallawbooks.org.

Karin Calvo-Goller, senior lecturer at the Academic Centre of Law and Business in Israel, and author of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court (2006), sued for libel after claiming that the review could damage her career.

In an editorial in the current issue of the EJIL, Professor Weiler, European Union Jean Monnet professor of law at the New York University School of Law, sets out the background to the case and appeals for assistance from readers, warning of grave ramifications if he loses…

Here’s what you can do. Weiler writes this in an editorial in the latest issue of European Journal of International Law:

a. You may send an indication of indignation/support by email attachment to the following email address [email protected] Kindly write, if possible, on a letterhead indicating your affiliation and attach such letters to the email. Such letters may be printed and presented eventually to the Court. Please do not write directly to Dr Calvo-Goller, or otherwise harass or interfere in any way whatsoever with her right to seek remedies available to her under French law.

b. It would be particularly helpful to have letters from other Editors and Book Review Editors of legal and non-legal academic Journals concerned by these events. Kindly pass on this Editorial to any such Editor with whom you are familiar and encourage him or her to communicate their reaction to the same email address. It would be especially helpful to receive such letters from Editors of French academic journals and from French academic authors, scholars and intellectuals.

c. Finally, it will be helpful if you can send us scanned or digital copies of book reviews (make sure to include a precise bibliographical reference) which are as critical or more so than the book review written by Professor Weigend – so as to illustrate that his review is mainstream and unexceptional. You may use the same email address [email protected]

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UD thanks James for the link.

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UPDATE: Turns out UD‘s already used the officially embarrassed bit twice on this blog. Scroll down.

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SECOND UPDATE: Mr UD, who shared this officially embarrassed story with his evening seminar, links UD to a comment on the blog austro-athenian empire:

Given that Calvo-Goller’s actions threaten to injure her reputation by making her look like an idiot and a fascistic jerk, I am hereby charging her with criminal libel against herself.

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ANOTHER UPDATE.

From a comment at Leiter Reports:

[I]t seems to me that this reckless and wildly uncollegial action has done significant harm to academia as a whole. As a profession, it seems that we should consider how to respond to such actions, as they are likely to become more common rather than less given the international nature of the web, and the state of various national laws on libel. I personally think it would be a mistake to simply hope that the various courts of the various governments would sort this all out in a rational manner.

Here’s some important legal detail from another comment:

[F]rom what I gather via various legal websites the court will first have to decide whether the claims made in the book review are libelous – that is, whether they “constitute an attack on the plaintiff’s honor and reputation”. I would be stupefied if the court declared that the reviewer’s claims were libelous; especially since the Cour de Cassation, the highest French judicial instance, has explicitly declared that claims made in polemical or argumentative contexts (including, I gather, academic contexts) are not libelous, even when they are “exaggerate”. (I of course do not mean to suggest that the reviewer’s claims were exaggerate). Moreover, the already overburdened French judges have no interest in encouraging every disgruntled academic to go to trial because of a non-glowing book review.

If, however, the court deems the claims libelous, the burden of proof falls on the defendant, who must either provide evidence that the libelous claims are true, or provide evidence that they were made in good faith. In the latter case, the evidence provided by the plaintiff must show that the author of the claims was sincere, wanted to inform rather than harm the plaintiff, and did some serious research to substantiate his or her claims.

If the court declares the defendant innocent, it may in addition charge the plaintiff with abuse of process, if it considers that there was no reasonable ground for legal action. In such a case the plaintiff has to give reparation to the defendant and pay a fine up to 3,000 Euros. This is apparently a routine way for the French courts to counterbalance the quasi-absence of “sanity check” … between libel complaints and trials.

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If UD may make a prediction:

The financial aspects of this situation will become clearer and clearer to this woman. As they do, she will think better of her lawsuit and drop the thing.

Sam Thomas, a history professor at UAH, where Amy Bishop taught (he, like a number of people on that campus, knew her to be violently unstable before she began shooting), corrects one of the several destructive misintepretations of this event:

…[B]y linking Amy Bishop’s insanity to workplace frustration, [people] are implicitly pathologizing all women. If the shooting were simply an extreme reaction to a common frustration (as opposed to the most deadly spasm of violence from a severely unbalanced individual), the logical conclusion is that all women are capable of (or even prone to) this kind of violence. Given that, why in God’s name would I ever hire so unbalanced a creature as a woman?

… about the survivors of the Huntsville shootings.

Stephanie Monticciolo, the department staff assistant, has had her condition upgraded to good.

Although Joseph Leahy, a professor, is still in critical condition, he seems to be improving.

From al.com:

… Leahy’s family has set up a blog to keep friends and family updated. He also has a head wound and had reconstructive surgery Wednesday morning to make repairs to his cheek and jaw.

In blog updates, the family has described how Leahy is able to respond to commands. Nurses have created a yes/no board. Doctors are trying to wean Leahy off the ventilator.

Leahy is a microbiologist who teaches many of the UAH nursing students, and some of his former students have been his caregivers in the intensive care unit.

Leahy’s sister posted, “At one point Joe shared with a colleague that he wanted to give all of his students the best education possible because ‘one never knows if one of your former students will some day be taking care of you.’ Eerily prescient but a grace-filled moment as well.”

A student there describes the view from the last row of a classroom.

… Through the course of a 75 minute class, I observed what was on [their laptop] screens: One person on Blackboard.com, four people taking notes in Word documents, three people viewing the professor’s PowerPoint presentation; four people on Wikipedia.com, seven people on Facebook.com and eight people checking their e-mail. There was also one guy who played games for literally the entire class period. In fact, it could be that most students were actually on Facebook, and I just didn’t see because I was so distracted by the laser shooting around this guy’s screen.

As I continued to be distracted by the browsing all around me, I noticed students visiting other notable Web sites and programs. These included: Gmail, Google.com, the Bloomingdale’s Web site (such cute boots this season!), iChat, PerezHilton.com, Google Calendar, CNN.com, SI.com (oh, Sports Illustrated…), YouTube.com (including a trailer of the upcoming “Toy Story 3;” did you see it? It looks so good!), online versions of sudoku and solitaire, Verizon.com and various blogs.

One kid in the second row was even checking his bank account…

… has been murdered by her mother.

Marissa Pagli’s father is campus maintenance supervisor; she grew up on campus, and still lived there in staff housing with her parents.

She was on the

volleyball team.

University of Mississippi athletics is looking for a new mascot. A local writer recommends William Faulkner.

… I first wrote that Faulkner should be Ole Miss’ mascot in November of 2006. …Faulkner went to Ole Miss as a student, the university owns his home, Rowan Oak, and his Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner played quarterback in high school, and, most importantly, the alums I’ve heard from all love the idea. It’s impossible to do better than Faulkner.

… Faulkner was a literary rebel, a man who refused to follow contemporary ideas of what a story should look like, and, as a result, millions of people know the state of Mississippi through his words. Are you telling me that a Faulkner mascot, a student dressed up in a tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, a mustache, and a cane,* wouldn’t immediately become the most iconic mascot in the South? Maybe the entire country?

What’s more, Faulkner actually encourages football fans to read — and if you read message boards, the e-mails I get, or even the comments after these articles, who could be against that?…

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* And a drink.

[Jimmy Anderson Sr.] called his son “a very docile guy, a little too docile.’’

Yes. This rings true to my sense of him, as I follow the Amy Bishop story. While everyone describes Amy – all her life – as verbally and physically aggressive, as sure of, and loud about, her political and social views in public settings, her husband consistently emerges as her worshipful wimp, her useful tool, as Prufrock says of himself. Anderson’s an attendant lord to Amy’s archbishop.

Watch for Anderson’s father to make his implicit attacks on his son’s mad mate more explicit as time goes on; but don’t expect Bishop’s enabler – and in some cases probably her co-conspirator – to change, unless it’s in the direction of yet greater appreciation of her genius.

From the New York Times:

… [Medical residency programs] where fewer graduates passed tests from the American Board of Internal Medicine — “one indicator of program quality” — were also more likely to accept the [financial] assistance [of drug companies for things like meals, office supplies, and drug samples].

… “As the pass rates went down,” [one observer] said of the new doctors’ test scores, “the odds of accepting pharmaceutical support went up.”

… Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University, said his organization’s internal medicine residency program decided about five years ago to stop accepting food or financial support from industry.

“I spend a fair amount of my budget feeding my residents,” Dr. Blaser said, “but then they can learn in a way that is not unduly influenced by who is feeding them.”…

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Wear it proudly.

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UD thanks Brad.