… between a local columnist’s bland recitation of the reasons why the University of Tennessee has had a fall-off in football ticket sales (the economy, bad match-ups, etc.) and some of the commenters on his story, who stress the thug problem.

I can’t name another school that has had two car loads of 8 thugs driving around town holding up convenience stores with guns and weed in the car. Can you?

Yeah, that was a bad one. But the incident was one of many incidents over the last few years involving UT players. Is it possible that there’s a tipping point, even for UT fans? Could their amazingly well-honed cognitive dissonance (There they go down the field, our fine University of Tennessee student athletes!) (The latest one is an armed robbery? Yikes.) be losing its edge?

… Hauser immediately after the sanctioning of Harvard’s Joseph Biederman, it’s time to pause and think about the striking number of very high-powered faculty there who over the last few years have been under a cloud, or disgraced or, like Hauser, forced out. What’s it mean?

Keep in mind, first, that simply by virtue of happening at Harvard, faculty news gets a lot of attention. For all we know, multiple high-ranking faculty at Clemson have been punished or forced out for research misconduct, conflict of interest and failure to report massive income, conspiracy to defraud, failure to register as a lobbyist, plagiarism, etc. But we don’t pay attention to Clemson; we pay attention to Harvard.

Still, whatever the numbers, it’s pretty amazing that during the course of this blog I’ve followed endless stories of the most high-powered professors in the world — high-powered Harvard professors — doing bad things.

Most of these stories involve what I’d call crimes of grandiosity. Not opportunity; grandiosity. You work your way to the top legitimately; then, at the top, the same cleverness and ego and competitiveness and sense of invulnerability and restless insistence on more that got you to the top tips you in the direction of recklessness.

To be sure, some of these cases are boringly about personal greed (Biederman and Shleifer in particular); but all of them involve as well a significant element of empire-building, power-mongering, and arrogance. Many involve people who, bizarrely, don’t need to break rules in order to maintain their position of prominence in the culture. They break them anyway. So say also that there’s some operation of pleasure at work here; that these particular personalities have been drawn to the rarified, high-energy setting of Harvard because there’s visceral gratification to be had by scoring repeatedly and scoring big.

Not if you’re a student. If you’re a professor.

Young, naive Panos Ipeirotis, a business school instructor, discovered that a bunch of his undergraduate business majors
(background on that burnished major here and here) had plagiarized, and he called them on it.

After announcing his intention to report the cheating to the dean unless students turned themselves in, Ipeirotis said, class became contentious and awkward, and his teaching evaluations suffered. His typical evaluation in this class, 6.0 to 6.5 out of 7.0, fell to 5.3. In his blog post, Ipeirotis wrote that Associate Dean Susan Greenbaum and the department chair “‘expressed their appreciation’ for…chasing such cases.” But his “yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year,'” he wrote.

Lesson learned:

“I doubt that I will be checking again for cheaters,” he wrote.

So far it’s just an anonymous allegation. And David Salinas, the investment banker with the summer league and many investment clients among university coaches, has – just after the SEC announced he was under investigation for a Ponzi scheme – killed himself.

The reason some [coaches] might be concerned about their financial connection to Salinas is because it’s unclear how the NCAA would view college coaches investing money with the founder of a summer basketball program that supplied recruits to several universities over the years.

The suggestion is that the coaches felt compelled to give Salinas hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his recruits.

If true, it’s another glorious chapter in the annals of amateur university athletics. And it explains why these guys demand such strikingly high salaries.

One writer sums up the situation:

The SEC will investigate the alleged Ponzi scheme, local law enforcement will investigate the death, and the NCAA will investigate why in God’s Sweet Earth an AAU curator was knowingly investing money on behalf of the coaches of some of the schools that his program was funneling players to.

Essentially, this means college sports fans will have to live with yet another interminable fall-out of yet another scandal.

Well, thankfully, we have plenty of experience doing that.

… was such a young-man-in-a-hurry that when she sat at meetings over which he presided, he was always kind of a blur, racing out of the room to talk on his cell phone, racing through the meeting…

Hirshman has lately raced himself right into a buzz saw; though, on the up side, he might make legislative history.

He’s the new president of San Diego State University, a woeful institution very small on cash and very big on athletics. Last prez of SDSU made $300,000; the school’s board threw in an extra $100,000 for Elliot… Not really a problem; they’re just taking it out of tuition (goes up 12% this year) …

“Appalling… egregious,” say state senators, some of whom are introducing legislation placing limits on what you can make at a public institution when the entire state economy is shit.

UD‘s colleagues Anthony Yezer and Robert Van Order appear to be small players in the very large, competitive game of corporate funded and controlled research results (even corporate controlled faculty) in the contemporary American and European university.

**********************************************

Lately, some of the bigger players seem to be jostling each other out of the way for the right to pleasure the financial sector. BABY, TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO SAY AND HOW TO SAY IT. WRITE IT YOURSELF IF YOU WANT AND I’LL SIGN IT. LIE BACK AND NIBBLE MY INTELLECTUAL NEUTRALITY.

Harvard’s bipolar babe, Joseph Biederman, pitched his research center to Johnson and Johnson by writing to them that it would “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.”

Most of these chicks deny. Biederman burbles happily away and Harvard can’t get enough of it…

Sure, when he gets really out there they sanction him … But he’s still a big girl on campus… And always will be!

So here you’ve got this latest article in the New York Times about how a German bank gave a couple of universities there a lot of money and

the bank was allowed a say in the hiring of … two professors. It was also given the right to have bank employees designated as adjunct professors, allowed to grade student work. Appropriate topics for research and research strategy would be decided by a steering committee made up of two academics and two bank employees, with the managing director, a bank employee, casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie.

Deutsche Bank was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years. The agreement even specified that the laboratory would be located “in close proximity to the Deutsche Bank” headquarters in Berlin.

Finally, the whole agreement was to be secret…

At last my heart’s an open door; and my secret love’s no secret anymore!

The founder [of Korea’s Myungshin University] is the president, and his wife, a daughter and a son were employed as chairwoman of the board, president and vice president, respectively.

Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It’s really taking you places.

… describes the way a mainly online for-profit school with high tuition, a wretched graduation rate, and no doubt richly compensated executives, got included in state scholarship legislation.

Such a great deal if you can get it. Online for-profits remain at the center of a national scandal [scroll down], in large part because they continue to receive enormous federal funds — despite the fact that they’re primarily run to rake in money for investors and administrators. Now, in addition to its federal support, Post University in Connecticut will get state support.

How did this happen?

The old-fashioned way: corruption. A person on the Post board of trustees (a paid position) is also a state legislator, and he lobbied the thing through.

See, “As originally written, the bill would have given scholarship funds only to students at state and private nonprofit institutions.” Institutions legally compelled to use most of their money for the benefit of their students. Now lucky, profit-driven Post enjoys another source of public funds.

I’m on a break. I’ve been outside with my neighbors Dick Pratt and David Frevert, sawing away at a huge tree that fell with an authentically scary crash just outside my house. It barely missed the living room. Where I was standing.

La Kid, watching a film in her bedroom at the time, claims she heard nothing. The Pratts, four houses down and the owners of the woods where the tree stood, report having heard it quite clearly.

All of our work is overlooked by The Deer Who Are Always Here.

Neighbors wander by and gawk. Pick up a saw, people!

There’s sawing, and there’s dragging limbs and leaves out to the street for the town maintenance truck to haul. Lots of discussion among us as to whether this humongous amount of tree will overwhelm the town’s capacity…

Oh – I take it back. I just glanced out the window, and a woman I don’t even recognize has parked her dog in my garden and taken up the work with Dick.

I’m heading back out there now – cranberry juice for the workers, water for the dog.

The artist.

Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times, writes a nice, concise appreciation of DeLillo’s 1997 novel, Underworld.

Robert Whitaker writes the strongest response so far to Peter Kramer’s defense of antidepressants.

… returns to haunt the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Communications in Trinidad.

…contemplating koi at the
Japanese Koi Pond at the
Catoctin Animal Park —
just a hop skip and a jump
from Camp David.

UD thanks her sister
for the photo.

… this book. It shows a child’s hand grabbing a massive number of pills. [Scroll down to read some of the book.]

Your Child Does Not Have Bipolar Disorder is a richly deserved attack on one of Harvard University’s most prominent professors, Joseph Biederman, a man whose financially self-interested insistence on this serious diagnosis continues to damage and stigmatize millions of young children.

The book’s author, Stuart Kaplan, a professor at Penn State, also has a blog on which he worries, in a day-to-day way, about the psychiatric profession maintaining Buy-Bipolar Biederman’s regime. He notes that although the diagnosis is gradually (thanks to books like Kaplan’s, and to Biederman’s having been sanctioned for taking and not disclosing drug money) being discredited, the editors of the latest, in-progress DSMV are still saying things like this:

… ‘[C]lassic’ adult [bipolar disorder] clearly does present in pre-pubertal children as well as in adolescents, although it may be rare in the younger age group. Unambiguous agreement about this fact weighed heavily in the Work Group’s deliberations.

Kaplan goes to town on this:

The use of the wording “unambiguous agreement about this fact” is a coercive rhetorical device that has held sway for more than 15 years in the pediatric bipolar scientific literature. Instead of providing evidence, the Work Group attempts to persuade the reader that everyone who is smart and important knows this to be true. In truth the assertion is unfounded and has no place in sophisticated scientific discussions of bipolar disorder in children. The clause “although it may be rare in the younger age group” suggests some hesitation on the part of the Work Group in endorsing the existence of Bipolar Disorder in pre-pubertal children.

That the committee accepted as fact that bipolar disorder exists in children raises the issue of the use of the word fact in psychiatry as contrasted with its use in other sciences and in everyday conversation. The use of word “fact” in scientific papers in psychiatry is highly unusual. The use of the word in this context by the DSM-V Work Group is jarring to regular readers of the scholarly literature in psychiatry. In this scientific literature, papers end with conclusions preceded by discussions that are expected to point out the limitations of the scientific work. Conclusions are usually modest, tentative and limited. The word fact is almost never used.

Are there “facts” in psychiatry comparable to the physical constant of the speed of light in physics, the periodic table in chemistry, the function of the adrenal gland in biology, or the boiling point of water on the earth at sea level in everyday life? There may be some (e.g., need for an adequate environment for infants and children for psychological growth and development) but most so called facts in psychiatry are brief stand-ins or proxies for many inferences and theories that shift and change abruptly. For example, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in adults is based to some degree on the diagnosis of Manic Depressive Insanity first developed by Kraepelin. The veracity of his observations and theories about psychosis are part of the brew of the current diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. The diagnosis is based to limited degree on Kraepelin’s theories and a large number of other hypotheses many of which are disputable. Fact as the acceptance of some immutable truth does not enter into the discussion.

When the DSM-V Work Group refers to the unambiguous fact that the disorder exists in prepubertal children, does the Work Group have any specific age range in mind? Preschoolers? Children ages 10 years to 12 years? Children ages 6 years to 12 years? Each of these age groups has been the subject of controversy related to bipolar disorder in children, but they are lumped together without any discrimination between them. Similarly, the use of the word “rare” by the DSM-V Work Group remains inexplicably undefined. The expression “rare” has a specific meaning in medicine, referring to a prevalence of 1 or less cases per 1500. Is this what the DSM-V Work Group means? There is a startling lack of precision in the discussion of the existence of pediatric bipolar disorder in childhood by the DSM- V Work Group. Many people, myself included, believe it is closer to the truth to assume, until proven otherwise, that this prepubertal “disorder” does not exist at all.

The misdiagnosis monster lives: the stake must still be driven in to the heart of the beast.

Beast? Why the strong language?

Because the diagnosis is doing terrible things to children; and because the only people benefiting seem to be the people who sell all those pills under the child’s hand on the book’s cover.

The bipolar monster was loosed because American university professors, in cooperation with drug companies, created it. Indeed the problem that confronts us now, as Kaplan says, is how to kill it.