“People are quite alienated from books, clicking away on their computers. They need to be reminded of the value and richness of books,” said one of the protesters at The Street Reads, a rally in Tunisia on behalf of reading books. The photograph accompanying this article warms the cockles of UD’s heart.

The protesters were enacting freedom of thought.

But there’s more to this “protest” than showcasing the importance of culture. Tunisians were once again reclaiming a public space. The first time, they reclaimed it as theirs to declare their political opinions, defying the Ministry of the Interior that stands at the entrance of the avenue, and which had set the dials of freedom of expression at close to zero. This time around they were claiming it as a space that didn’t necessarily have to be political.

Happy face research articles get published; sad face perish. “Positive studies are exciting and potentially groundbreaking. Negative studies are not particularly exciting,” and tend not to get published in the scientific journals, a pediatrics professor explains in an editorial in one such journal.

Indeed, it’s difficult to get hold of the results of studies showing that this or that drug or class of drugs has no effect on a condition:

Current U.S. law requires that investigators submit a summary of the results of drug trials on ClinicalTrials.gov, a national registry of clinical studies. But often, researchers don’t submit their results, and the information is never published on the government website…

After all, the drug market has hundreds of millions of anti-depressant pills to sell, and, if you’re a researcher, you have a career to make.

Things only begin to get real when someone actually makes an effort to do a meta-analysis.

A Forbes writer looks at educational priorities in Florida.

[The University of Florida’s] budget has suffered a 30 percent cutback over the last six years while [President Bernie] Machen and his cronies fiddled. At the same time, Machen threw two big thumbs up to UF’s athletic department when it received a $2 million increase from last year, for a total budget of $99 million, according to The Gainesville Sun.

That’s correct: dismantling the computer and information science department will save the university $1.7 million, while the athletic department receives an additional $2 million.

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the corrupting effect of big pharma money in the American university, especially in the hard to define and hard to diagnose area of depression. I’ve talked about the mindless defensiveness on the part of some academics to growing evidence of the largely placebo effect of anti-depressant pills for millions of people who take them.

But I’ve never seen anything like what some Israeli academics are doing with these pills when a rabbi brings to their office a haredi Jew who does not conform to haredi culture.

[Professor Omer Bonne sanctions] prescribing antidepressant pills from the SSRI family (most commonly used for the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders and some personality disorders ) for yeshiva students who masturbate excessively, or have sexual relations with other men, yet do not suffer from depression.

Bonne justified the use of these pills by pointing out that their side effects reduce sexual urges; he argued that such medication preempts possible destructive conflicts between the men and their surroundings, and the pills might also preempt conditions of depression.

A prominent psychiatrist cited in the report justified the use of lithium – medication ordinarily used for bipolar disorders – in certain cases where a man or woman suddenly decides to stop observing religious commandments, or to break up the family unit. The psychiatrist said that in some cases, such behavior derives from conditions such as mania.

Bonne and other psychiatrists confirmed that some of the patients come to clinics accompanied by rabbis or various “supervisors” associated with yeshivas. Sometimes, the religious pupils’ families are not notified of these visits. The psychiatrists confirmed that the rabbis or supervisors are on hand when patients are examined.

This article, in Haaretz, is difficult to read. It evokes the world of 1984, and Brave New World, in which closed and repressive cultures enforce conformity with chemicals. A senior psychiatrist interviewed for the article says: “I am stunned that people do that.”

… can be found here (you need to register for the course). It’s about Sylvia Plath’s poem, The Moon and the Yew Tree. I wrote about it earlier on this blog, here.

In the Vancouver Weekly, a writer reviews a new film about the burqa.

Oh really? A professor at MIT’s business school has just been barred from the securities industry and made to pay almost five million dollars to settle a case brought against him by the SEC because of rampant lying to investors and investigators, and it has nothing to do with MIT? Come again?

… (pronounced strip-tease) is a dance out of Germany. The steps are easy, and indeed the dance is popular all over Europe:

1. Plagiarize your thesis.

2. Be found to have plagiarized your thesis.

3. Be stripped of your thesis.

The latest high-profile strip-theses has been performed by (performed on?) Margarita Mathiopoulos, who

joins the ranks of German political figures to be stripped of their doctorates for cheating in their theses – a group infamously led by former Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg whose disgrace led to his resignation.

… designed to rope naive people in to taking over-priced courses at lousy schools. If you like the idea of subsidizing for-profit colleges as they engage in their scandalous recruiting practices, read no further.

The rest of us should find it pretty heartening that a bill just introduced in Congress “would prohibit colleges of all kinds from using dollars from federal student assistance programs, including the GI Bill, to pay for advertising and recruiting.”

A sponsor of the bill, Tom Harkin, “emphasized the proposal would leave schools free to advertise — just from a separate pot of money that hasn’t come from taxpayers.”

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And, you know, we’ve been lectured endlessly by the for-profits about letting markets work… So I guess they’re okay with this? Free market, that’s what they’re about, not like the wimpy non-profits! One look at for-profit management compensation will tell you the free market’s working just fine for them. The prez of Harvard makes like, what, around a million dollars. It’s typical for heads of for-profit colleges to make ten million or more. Some of them make much more.

But no – they’re pissed about the legislation! Not only should practically all of their revenue come from the government (not much of a free market model when you think about it, huh?), but they should be free to do fuck-all with our money.

I woke up with O Bid Your Faithful Ariel Fly singing in my head. As I got ready to leave for campus, I tried singing a bit of it, but I find it pretty unsingable (listen to the YouTube I just linked to and you’ll see why).

Thinking about Thomas Linley, its composer, always depresses me a bit – he was only twenty-two when he died, in a boating accident.

Admittedly this happened over two hundred years ago, but it still saddens me as I try to sing the thing. As I try to sing the thing, I tell myself that I should really try hard to sing it, I shouldn’t stop singing when the notes go hurling themselves into the ether, because Linley deserves it, it’s an homage to him, a remembrance… But I really cannot sing this song.

This afternoon, on campus, I joined my daughter outside for a chat; and as I approached her, I saw that she was reading The Tempest, which struck me as an odd coincidence, since I’d been thinking about – and singing about – Ariel on and off all day.

Did I eerily intuit what La Kid would be reading? Did I foresee Ariel?

Then I remembered that the last email I read before I went to bed last night was from Ariel Feldman, a student in my American Poetry course. It was Feldman, not Soltan, who’d played with my head, threading Ariels through my subconscious until when morning broke I was singing Linley.

Millburn Police arrested two Kean University students who said they were playing a scavenger hunt game that involved taking as many house number signs from Short Hills as possible.

… is now up, here. And my latest Udemy Faculty Project lecture on poetry is here.

…football fuckupery. Of course you expect benighted places like Southern Illinois Carbondale to screw themselves permanently via sports spending; but Berkeley?

Yes. In the midst of hideous budget cutting from the state, Berkeley now admits its absurd projections for private donations to its expensive football stadium renovation have fallen way short.

The nearly half-billion-dollar Cal athletic project encompasses a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium that opens Sept. 1 and $153 million for a new multisport training facility. That’s far more than Stanford University spent building a new stadium in 2006.

In public pitches for the project starting in 2006, university officials talked about raising hundreds of millions through an “Endowment Seating Program” that was to endow all 29 of Cal’s varsity sports and more yet by selling naming rights to various components of the stadium… But the economic downturn hindered sales and by November 2010, [the athletic director] had posted online a letter to fans saying she was “heartbroken that the program’s intentions will, in all likelihood, not be fully realized.”

So now UC, its leaders having fallen for typical wish-fulfillment athletic accounting, will stick it to the students, upping tuition and fees and degrading the quality of education in tons of other ways so that a chunk of the little money they’ve got from the state goes to upgrade a football stadium.

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UD thanks Andre.

… in which two students were killed, there’s been another robbery of students. As the suspect fled, campus security officers wounded him, and he’s now in custody.

Plagiarism’s always funnier when moralizing scolds do it, and the joke doesn’t get any better than career copyist Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. His barking denunciations – via a radio show – of our degeneracy turn out, some of them, to have been lifted from other writers.

Usually a man of many words, Land has responded to the revelation of his immorality very very pithily.

“I apologize. And we’re going to move on.”

Nothing to see here! Move along!

But some are calling for his resignation. They seem to be embarrassed.