UD didn’t think Chicago State University, with its long history of negligence, corruption, and graduation rates barely above ten percent, had any more surprises in store for her (she’s chronicled its disgraceful ways for years on this blog), but now there’s this:

Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed “for poor scholarship,” but records obtained by [the Chicago Tribune] show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as zero. Meanwhile, President Wayne Watson was touting increased retention and graduation rates as evidence that the institution was improving after years marked by widespread financial mismanagement, scathing audits and a failure to graduate students.

Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.

… seems to have scared the University of North Carolina into doing something about its rancid football program. They’ve fired the coach.

… part of the curriculum at pharmacology schools:

Budding pharmacists are taught in school to look for signs of pain pill abuse. They know they deal with a lot more criminals than pharmacists 10 or 20 years ago.

“It definitely is addressed more than it used to be,” said 29-year-old Vanita Spagnolo, a second-year University of Florida School of Pharmacology student who works in retail and hospital pharmacies.

… mike your bat.

A state Board of Education member resigned last week amid a Purdue University investigation into whether she plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation… [P]ortions of the doctoral dissertation turned in by [Gwendolyn Griffith] Adell to Purdue in 2004 are nearly identical to information in a 1999 dissertation submitted by a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

Now if they can remove her influence from the charter school she’s got hold of…

… and Greenway University, begun with such promise, is one of those flowers.

Hoping to follow in the footsteps of all-things-doobie Oaksterdam, Greenway opened in Denver only to close, rapidly, after state officials perused its application documents.

When asked, “Has any principal owner(s), officer(s), or any person in a management capacity: Ever been convicted of or pled to a felony or are charges pending?” [Gus] Escamilla answered, “No.”

… 7NEWS obtained court documents from California, where in 2000, Escamilla pled guilty to felony grand theft by embezzlement.

“We were aware of the prior conviction, but we also were under the impression that they were expunged,” said Escamilla. [Excellent use of the royal/papal/Ubu “we.”]

… Marc Kent was listed as a chancellor at Greenway, but the application did not disclose the fact that Kent plead guilty to mail fraud in federal court.

… picture? Two specters and four forensically indistinguishable white males?

But Arkansas State University Mountain Home has deeper, uh, institutional presentation problems than this.

I mean, let’s just say that ASUMH really doesn’t want to be audited.

But – whoops. A disgruntled ex-employee went ahead and talked to the authorities and ASUMH got audited. What have them boys been up to?

Well now, take this John Gresham. His position at ASUMH is Husband of the Director of Development. In that capacity, he got to build – no bids were taken – “the Thompson-Martin Gate and McClure Gate at the college for a total cost of $218,623.” Plus his wife – her position at ASUMH is Wife of the Owner of GRR Land Company LLC – uses the time and resources of ASUMH to run his business:

Four personal file documents found on an Office of Development laptop related to her husband’s business. They included a loan document, a steel building proposal, a steel building purchase order and a flyer for commercial marketing, according to the report. A fifth personal document, a rental property advertising narrative, was found on a stand-alone computer assigned to Gresham.

What’s a university for, anyway? The money and the equipment are just sitting there.

And then there’s them magic pens the Wife of the Owner bought.

Gin-soaked University of South Carolina has a competition going between its football players and their coaches to see who can show up drunk in public more often.

So far quarterback Stephen Garcia dominates, not only numerically (five suspensions), but … how to say… The guy’s got a sense of irony:

Starting quarterback Stephen Garcia has been suspended five times in his career. Most recently Garcia was suspended on April 6 after an incident at a life skills seminar.

Sense of irony, sense of humor… It takes a sense of something to show up drunk at a life skills seminar.

Garcia’s main competition comes from his coach, G.A. Mangus, who earns upwards of $150,000 a year — though even by USC standards, he must be said to be earning it in a rather odd way…

Two officers said they were driving down Main Street in Greenville [in the wee small hours of the morning] when they saw Mangus urinating on the sidewalk curb and roadway outside the Carolina Ale House.

The officers said they got out to speak with Mangus about what he was doing. Police said there was a large wet area close to where he was standing.

“He was intoxicated, was not cooperative,” said Greenvillle police spokesman Jason Rampey. “He could not provide answers the officers were looking for to questions like, was he with someone, how he got there and how he was getting home.”

Police said Mangus was unsteady on his feet and had a strong odor of alcohol. Police said his eyes appeared to be dilated and glazed over. Police said when they questioned Mangus about his actions, his speech was slurred.

Garcia’s got Mangus on sheer numbers; but only Mangus has whipped out his dick and made his own pool. Extra points.

The Government’s “independent” adviser on mass tranquiliser addiction has received research funding from a drug company which manufacturers two commonly prescribed tranquilisers.

Professor John Strang, head of the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, and author of a government report on the prescription of potent psychiatric sedatives, did not declare he received the money from the pharmaceutical firm …

The Independent

… has been announced.

The winning sentence:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Other goodies:

The victim was a short man, with a face full of contradictions: amalgam, composite, dental porcelain, with both precious and non-precious metals all competing for space in a mouth that was open, bloody, terrifying, gaping, exposing a clean set of asymptomatic impacted wisdom teeth, but clearly the object of some very comprehensive dental care, thought Dirk Graply, world-famous womanizer, tough guy, detective, and former dentist.

As the young officer studied the oak door, he was reminded of his girlfriend — for she was also slightly unhinged, occasionally sticky, and responded well to being stripped and given a light oiling.

Convinced that the fabled Lost Treasure of Eggsbury was concealed within the statue of the beloved Sister Mary Francis in the village square, Professor Smithee would steal away in the darkest hour of each night to try to silently chip away at her impervious granite vestments – a vain and fruitless nightly exercise, he well knew, but it was a hard habit to break.

Like a bird gliding over the surface of a Wyoming river rippled by a gentle Spring breeze, his hand passed over her stretch marks.

… worked out,” writes George Orwell, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, about the employees of an advertising agency.

The Independent’s Johan Hari, about to be stripped of the writing prize that bears Orwell’s name, has his own cynical code, its writerly implications described by Guy Walters, who notes

… the 42 quotes in his ‘interview’ with Malalai Joya that Hari lifted from her ghosted autobiography; the 545 words plagiarised from the Daily Mail that Hari inserted into the mouth of his interviewee Ann Leslie; the lies about his Sky appearance with Richard Littlejohn; his fabrications and distortions of quotes in his prize-winning piece on Dubai; the startling familiarity of quotes in his interview with George Michael; his copy-pasting in his interview with Antonio Negri; his outrageously fabricated quotes for his piece on the Central African Republic; his quotes pinched from the New Yorker for his interview with Hugo Chavez; his alleged posting of unpleasant and defamatory comments online under the name of David Rose; his invention of names for interviewees whose quotes he had taken from Der Spiegel …

Beyond the plagiarism, UD has been struck by Hari’s lazy writing, the sort of writing a “tired hack …mechanically repeating … familiar phrases” produces. What would Orwell make, for instance, of Hari’s pointless attack on Prince Philip for having had the gall to turn ninety? Start with his pointlessly contemptuous and juvenile title:

SPARE ME THE FAWNING OVER ‘PRINCE’ PHILIP

No one fawned. The event barely registered.

And the marks around ‘prince’! Wow!

In the piece itself, a way-random series of hits on a man Hari ends by praising, Hari calls the monarchy “a snobbery-soaked institution” – precisely the sort of verbal political hackery Orwell hated.

… to the controversy over the cover of Steve Reich’s 9/11 cd.

At Inside Higher Education.

No. It wasn’t. A heroin addict about to graduate from pharmacy school at Oregon State University has been arrested for dealing.

Drugs fuck up a lot of people, but not this guy. Although addicted, he was a terrific, stand-out senior, ready to put on a white coat and play Mr. Roxicet’s Neighborhood.

UD has written before on this blog about medical and pharmacy and nursing students who get these degrees for the express purpose of giving their distribution business legitimacy. Obviously there’s little a university can do by way of screening for these people… but I’m reminded of something Russell Brand said in an essay he wrote about his friend Amy Winehouse:

All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

I’ve seen the toxic air of elsewhere plenty of times among people I know. Also, sometimes, among students. I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring it, deciding it means something besides addiction, or just allowing myself to be pointlessly annoyed by it.

But university programs graduating people who will have access to lots of drugs have much larger detection problems.

UD don’t even blink at this shit no more.

Not so much good ol’ universities like Tennessee with almost fully criminalized sports teams… Not that, onaccounta she done read about that for five, ten years goin’ on now… No, UD don’t even blink at the way the local rags report this shit.

I mean, look at it from the rags’ POV. Every year, all year, including the summer, they know they’re going to have to report constant devilry on the part of their local gods, like say the football players at the University of Tennessee. Scary stuff – driving around dead drunk, beating people on the streets of Knoxville, taking part in armed robberies …

So – in order to hold fast the faith of the people, there’s a formula their scribes use for every incident. UD will cite this article – one of thousands of clones – to clarify.

1.) First they remind the people that it’s been eons since they had to put the last player in jail. I mean, really, to be fair, the team’s been clean for an incredible stretch. (“[T]he football team’s arrest record remained clean for nearly five months…”)

2.) Then the assistant director of fuckups gets on the horn and tells the scribes the school is vaguely aware that something vague has happened and they’re looking into I guess or they sure will soon as they know something but it’s real early days and let’s be fair. (“We’re aware of an incident…”)

3.) Now, without giving any detail about the incident, you go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the position the guy played, the effect on game strategy of possibly losing this guy to suspension or jail or whatever, etc. (“The position is one of the Vols’ biggest concerns…”)

4.) Next, testimonials. (“He made a mistake but he was not causing trouble.”)

5.) Wrapping up, another reminder of the amazing crime-free stretch. (“UT coach Derek Dooley’s continued efforts to clean up the program’s run of recent off-field troubles and change the culture appeared to have paid off, as the Vols were nearly through the entire summer without any incidents.” Have you ever tried to get through an entire summer without getting arrested?)

6.) And finally: The players’ court date is checked against the team’s practice schedule. (“His court date is scheduled for Aug. 4, the Vols’ third day of preseason practice.”)

… and since he’s a feisty fellow, ever ready to defend his position, UD sees a promising future for him.

He’s entirely unfazed that the editors of America’s three major medical journals found a recent study he published (it argues that the FDA’s product reviews stifle the medical device industry) scientifically shoddy and rife with conflict of interest. A congressional committee report summarizes:

“After reviewing the paper, the editors of the three premier peer-reviewed medical journals concluded that the study would not be fit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.” Dr. [Gregory] Curfman concluded that “it is not really a study at all.” Dr. [Rita] Redberg found “several serious methodological issues with the Makower report that render its findings scientifically invalid.” Dr. [Howard] Bauchner determined that “[g]iven the extent of these limitations, the inferences and conclusions that can reliably drawn from this report are limited.” Finally, all three editors identified significant conflict of interest concerns with the report.

The objections to the study were similar to reactions by Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the Center for Devices & Radiological Health, who lambasted the study when it was released in December. Shuren told MassDevice that the study was “horrible.”

“That’s well below the quality level of a good study,” Shuren told us at the time. He pointed out that lower response rates would magnify the opinions of people unhappy with the process. He added that a sufficient response rate would have been 35 to 40 percent. “We want to have good data.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune provides more conflict of interest details:

Dr. Curfman writes that he was surprised Makower did not disclose his financial ties to the device industry since they “clearly constitute a significant conflict of interest.” Further, he states, “this isn’t a study as all. This is an opinion piece that is dressed up to look like a research study.” The authors had a specific agenda from the outset, he continues, and “they conducted their work in a biased manner.” The CHI report “advocates a potentially dangerous position — that regulation stifles innovation, he says, and “do a serious disservice to medicine and the health of the public.”

Now on to Dr. Redberg, who says there are “serious methodological issues” with Makower’s report, claiming a selection bias among the companies that responded to his inquiry. She goes on to claim the authors, funders and survey respondents may have a conflict of interest because their “livelihood depends on fast approval of medical devices.”

She also quibbles with the report’s conclusion that FDA regs are driving med-tech companies abroad. This argument is flawed, Redberg writes, because approving unsafe devices “actually hurts the economy by allowing limited health care dollars to be spent on expensive devices that do not help patients” [which leads] to higher health care costs that may result in economic difficulties and possible bankruptcies of small businesses.

Stanford is a hotbed of professor-entrepreneurs for whom fast approval is of course the name of the game. Note to Congress: Shut up and get out of the way. Note to Stanford: Terrific research program you’ve got going there.