University news for today: Everyone’s suing everyone.

The scandal-excised president of Penn State is suing Penn State.

The mother of the woman killed by University of Virginia student George Huguely is suing the University of Virginia.

The parents of two murdered University of Southern California students are suing the University of Southern California.

… Andrew Scull titles his latest essay in the Times Literary Supplement. It looks to be a good summary of the ongoing scandal of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but you and I can’t read it without a subscription. Here’s an excerpt (from a post about it in Commonweal):

As diagnostic criteria were loosened [in DSM III], an extraordinary expansion of the numbers of mentally sick individuals ensued. This has been particular evident among, but by no means confined to, the ranks of the young. “Juvenile biopolar disorder”, for example, increased forty-fold in just a decade, between 1994 and 2004. An autism epidemic broke out, as a formerly rare condition, seen in less than one in 500 children at the outset of the same decade, was found among one in every ninety children only ten years later. The story for hyperactivity, subsequently relabelled ADHD, is similar, with 10 per cent of male American children now taking pills daily for their “disease”. Among adults, one in every seventy-six Americans qualified for welfare payments based on mental disability by 2007.

If psychiatrists’ inability to agree among themselves on a diagnosis threatened to make them a laughing stock in the 1970s, the relabelling of a host of ordinary life events as psychiatric pathology now seems to promise more of the same. Social anxiety disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, school phobia, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders are apparently now to be joined by such things as pathological gambling, binge eating disorder, hypersexuality disorder, temper dysregulation disorder, mixed anxiety depressive disorder, minor neurocognitive disorder, and attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome.

Yet we are almost as far removed as ever from understanding the etiological roots of major psychiatric disorders, let alone these more controversial diagnoses (which many people would argue do not belong in the medical arena in the first place). That these diagnoses provide lucrative new markets for psychopharmacology’s products raises questions in many minds about whether commercial concerns are illegitimately driving the expansion of the psychiatric universe – a concern that is scarcely allayed when one recalls that the great majority of the members of the DSM task force are recipients of drug company largesse.

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New pathologies are breaking out all the time.

There’s a whole other category for Kim Kardashian.

(UD thanks David.)

UD reads these so you don’t have to.

UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”

In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…

…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…

I think he means Orafix.

Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….

Calculus formula discussing is nifty.

Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.

But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.

… this is excellent writing.

Yes, there’s one mistake.

After getting caught on tape repeatedly using the heliport on the weekends — when it’s supposed to be closed because of noise pollution — a reporter for ABC 7 confronted the mayor, who explained…

This makes it look as though the reporter got caught, not the mayor.

But otherwise this piece is terrific satire, snark, irony, sarcasm, whatever.

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And you can relax. Ira Rennert, who used to be one of Yeshiva University’s fabled trustees (that great religious institution also had Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin running the place), will continue to break the rules and use the heliport on the weekends. “Being an entitled plutocrat just isn’t what it used to be,” complains the Gothamist writer. But it is. Rennert’s holding down the fort.

… has died. His work – in particular, The Great War and Modern Memory – was lucid and accessible.

Here are some excerpts from “The X Way Out,” in his book, Class.

During one of ‘thesda’s bad snow storms a couple of years ago, Les UDs moved into a nearby hotel (no power at home) and took meals mainly at Panera (UD wanted to do room service, but Mr UD considers room service decadent). Thus UD discovered the phenomenon of café squatters, people who conduct their work day at the local coffee shop, “effectively setting up their entire office at a table: laying out their laptop, smartphone, iPad and bag, ordering a large skinny latte and then staying there for the afternoon.” As the commenter in my headline notes, it’s pretty obnoxious. And try making money when your bistro is full of people spending three dollars and then chatting on the phone with their clients for the rest of the day.

A new place, Filter, has opened in Foggy Bottom, down the street from UD‘s office, and they’re no-laptop. UD hasn’t been there yet, but she’s thinking about the irony or whatever it is of cafés beginning to look like her laptop-free classrooms… One of the commenters suggests that the squatters use public libraries instead, but this location lacks the pleasant human buzz, the soft North African music, and the aroma that squatters (and the rest of us) are after.

I’ve noticed squatters in the Starbucks at George Washington University’s library (I go there a lot to pick up lunch) – always the same people, always there, at tables bristling with computers and phones.

Hal Scott is the director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an “independent and nonpartisan 501(c )(3) research organization dedicated to improving the regulation of US capital markets.” Though tax records show he spends 30 hours a week on CCMR business – for which he is paid $342,840 annually, he is also employed as the Nomura Professor and Director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since 1975. (Scott’s Harvard income has not been disclosed, though the New York Times pegged the average full-time Harvard professor’s salary at $191,200 in 2010 — substantially less than what he earns running the CCMR.)

Scott, a crony of Jamie Dimon’s who uses those amazingly generous outside hours (what’s he give Harvard? ten? fifteen?) to fight the Volcker Rule and other attempts to regulate the banking industry, is the very model of a modern law professor.

One wild and crazy state.

… in this article about MOOCs.

… revs up for her Bloomsday readings. Here.

This blog has followed the remarkable multitasking of Harvard University’s last president (while president of Harvard, Summers did “consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors.”) Frank Rich writes:

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution …would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

But this is nothing, really. What Charles Ferguson, in his book Inside Job (based on the film) documents is the way in which

Over the past 30 years, significant portions of American academia have deteriorated into “pay to play” activities. These days, if you see a famous economics professor testify in Congress, or write an article, there is a good chance he or she is being paid by someone with a big stake in what’s being debated. Most of the time, these professors do not disclose these conflicts of interest, and most of the time their universities look the other way.

Half a dozen consulting firms, several speakers’ bureaus and various industry lobbying groups maintain large networks of academics for hire for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory debates. The principal industries involved are energy, telecommunications, healthcare, agribusiness – and, most definitely, financial services.

What tends to get attention are medical school professors’ conflicts of interest, and of course political science professors shilling for people like Gaddafi. Time to pay a little attention to econ.

… (if, like UD, you’re currently teaching a Udemy course with 548 students) column about MOOCs in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the New Yorker.

The top schools, led by Stanford, are now aggressively exploring online education, which they had previously left to the for-profits. This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly start granting degrees online to ten or a hundred times as many students; instead, they are likely to offer a second, cheaper (or even free) tier of education that will only enhance the lifelong value of their traditional, in-residence degrees.

Yeah, well, plenty of people – including this blogger – were appalled when the ninth law school in that state opened last year. Almost immediately, its president resigned because of credit card misuse.

Then there’s Irvine’s new law school, another concentration of overpaid professors and unemployed grads.

But on and on the ABA goes, accrediting everything, making the world safe for tens of thousands of useless lawyers and hundreds of professors who earn $150,000 to $350,000 a year preparing their students to be unemployed.

… just keeps it coming! Good on you! Especially for a religious school.