… delivers a wonderful commentary on tonight’s Marketplace program. Subject: Why doesn’t the American Economics Association have a code of ethics? Especially given all the undisclosed corporate conflicts of interest among economists who advise the government?

An excerpt:

Long before the current financial crisis burst upon us, Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer was taken to court to face accusations of advancing his own financial interests while receiving support from U.S. taxpayers to advise Russians on the best way to develop a stock market.

Both Professor Shleifer and Harvard University agreed to settle the case with no admission of wrongdoing, but paid hefty financial penalties. The case quickly disappeared from sight.

But what could undermine our professional prestige more than suspicion of unethical behavior?

You remember Shleifer. Did Harvard ever come down hard on him!

Harvard University, Shleifer and the Justice department reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million dollars worth of damages…

[Shleifer] remains on Harvard’s faculty. However, according to the Boston Globe, he has been stripped of his honorary title of Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Economics.

Ouch! He doesn’t get to be Mr Whipple anymore!

… this one from Canada. As with Allen Frances, so with just-retired University of Laval medical school professor Fernand Turcotte:

… Fernand Turcotte had not been retired long from his job in the faculty of medicine at the University of Laval when he came to an unsettling conclusion.

“I realized that the things I had been teaching my students for 35 years were not true,” says the silver-haired former Quebec City professor.

“What I thought were the contributions of my specialty to the health and well-being of humanity in fact served to further poison people’s lives.”

Turcotte’s getting at something Donald Light has argued. Light says that (I’m quoting an Inside Higher Education piece I wrote about this last year)

the market for prescription drugs – in the United States and throughout the world – has become a lemon market, indeed “the largest and most dangerous market in lemons in modern society.”

Turcotte puts it this way:

[T]he medical industry is suffering from an “ethical bankruptcy,” in which well-meaning doctors don’t have the time to synthesize all the information coming at them from pharmaceutical companies.

Studies suggest a doctor would have to spend roughly 600 hours per month reading academic journal articles just to stay up to date with the latest findings.

“The average doctor feels guilty about falling behind on his reading, and this creates a fear of incompetence,” Turcotte says. “This makes them more welcoming of whatever suggestions, no matter how ridiculous, that come from consensus conferences.”

He charges that many of these conferences, where medical consensuses are formed, are tainted by conflicts of interest.

In some cases, papers presented at these conferences – and related articles published in leading medical journals – were found to have been written by ghostwriters paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

It all adds up to major over-prescription of needlessly expensive drugs.

Turcotte’s afraid Canada is going to look like us soon. Which would be pretty gross. He’s translating Nortin Hadler’s Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, into French as fast as he can.

… last winter.

Click on the image
for a bigger picture.

From a review of a new book.

… Yeshiva University professor Moses Pava reports that his business students tell him that, “corporate social responsibility is merely rhetoric designed to fool environmentalists, consumer advocates and other do-gooders.”

The B-School Boys have responded to their graduates’ arrests for insider trading, etc., by adding yet more ethics courses. Rustle up some more rhetoric! At Yeshiva, no one talked a better ethics game than Ezra Merkin and his BFF, Bernard Madoff.

Lalala … to be sure…

Huh? … Fuck off…

So far this is what Columbia University, and its president, have managed by way of response to the scandal of Lee Bollinger remaining on the board of the company that owns one of the most notorious for-profit universities, Kaplan. It’s the same high-handed indifference Bollinger (and, equally notoriously, Berkeley’s Richard Blum) has shown toward the hundreds of thousands of ordinary American grunts being dragged into and ripped off by the schools.

All praise, then, to the students at Columbia for raising a stink about this. They’re eloquent on the subject of Bollinger’s hypocrisy, and they’re trying hard to get him to resign from the board.

The CU Democrats’ petition says that “Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.” As of Monday night, the petition had over 580 signers, some of whom are alumni.

He’s talking about a libel trial so mad, it makes Moammar “The Umbrella” Gadhafi look sane. Details here.

An administrator at Lehigh discusses laptops in class.

“It all depends on what the teacher is trying to accomplish,” [Greg] Reihman said. “Some faculty members want increased attention in front of the room so if the presence of laptops becomes a distraction, I understand the banning of them.”

… Texas Tech, our nation’s raunchiest, most good old boy-ridden, sports factory. If you’ve got the stomach, type texas tech into my search engine and read all about it.

Or just consider the latest raunch: Upping the football coach’s salary “by $500,000 through 2015.”

The impoverished, salary-frozen faculty is upset – or at least some professors are upset…. I don’t think you get to be the national disgrace Texas Tech is without a lot of professors excited at the thought of debasing themselves for football.

You’ve got your coach – highest paid employee in the state – overseeing a football program which puts thirteen students in the hospital for days, being treated for “rhabdomyolysis, which forces muscle fibers to release into the blood stream and can cause kidney damage.” The condition was apparently brought on by punishing practice sessions. The coach didn’t come back to check on the students when the news broke — too busy recruiting.

You’ve got your athletics director playing golf with alumni in Florida. He didn’t come back either.

And you’ve got your team physician, paid $385,000 a year to take care of the students, enjoying a medical junket at a beach resort:

The meeting’s itinerary, released to the AP under the state public records law, shows participants adjourned by noon most days and didn’t have any business Jan. 26, the day the university confirmed the players were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis.

A Korean voice professor is accused of assaulting her students, demanding money from them, etc.

The case ignited when the school began an inside investigation last week upon requests from her former pupils. Her students also claimed that Kim, who has about 100 concerts and events a year, manipulated the register to cover up her absence at classes.

… sinks yet lower.

ESPN’s number one concern, it would seem, is to not make the channel look like one big UT infomercial.

… Holy Family.

[S]ophomore Matt Kravchuk can be seen in the video getting knocked down by coach John O’Connor during a January practice and then [being kicked by] him while he was down. Kravchuk filed a police report following the alleged incident.

…”Got a little (bleep) blood on you. Good,” the coach says in the video obtained by the TV station.

Amen.

… Carl Elliott, about the University of Minnesota and conflict of interest.

We’ve had one scandal after another [involving payments to U doctors by drug and device companies]. It’s depressing; nothing really has happened. At other institutions, a panel is usually appointed to look into something. Here, the PR response is, “We don’t think we’ve done anything wrong.” I have some hope things will change with the new president coming in [at the U]. But who knows?

… Ireland…

… February 2011.

I’ve said there will be more and more of these university hospital Medicare stories, until they become A Story.

Indeed I foresee (Les UD’s finally got around, last night, to watching Ed Wood — which UD laughed through and Mr UD found “depressing” — and I’m thinking here of The Amazing Criswell’s predictions.) the larger story featured in a long Page One piece in the New York Times.

This particular story, out of the SUNY system, features spine-tingling allegations from a staff doctor who also served as “quality improvement officer” for the neurosurgery department. (He works now at Boston University.)

The chair of the hospital’s neurosurgery department – who fired the whistleblower shortly after he started blowing the whistle – was himself eventually brought down by his Nazi fetish.

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Update: Note that I’ve changed Syracuse to SUNY. Syracuse sold the hospital to the SUNY system. UD thanks Mr Punch for the correction.