… and who can be surprised that they crop up in Michele Bachmann’s business?

[Marcus Bachmann’s] Ph.D. comes from the Union Institute, a Cincinnati-based correspondence school; in 2002, it was cited by the Ohio Board of Regents, which said, “Expectations for student scholarship at the doctoral level were not as rigorous as is common for doctoral work.”

As Politico has reported, he’s not licensed with any of the boards that certify mental-health professionals in Minnesota, one of the few states that allows unlicensed people to practice mental-health care. [Another therapist on staff has an M.A. that] comes from Argosy University, a for-profit diploma mill.

Having maintained the University of Kentucky’s beautiful sports program [scroll down], and having built Coal Lodge, now-retired President Todd takes a plush, well-deserved rest back on the UK faculty.

Todd’s new office at UK’s Advanced Science and Technology Commercialization Center will cost $143,828.

The office will be built from an existing conference room, complete with two subdivided rooms that will be a waiting area and a suite for Todd and his assistant.

Some on the faculty are angry that buildings and programs are falling apart right and left on campus while the university sends a big fat thank you to Todd. But you can’t deny that he did a great job of maintaining, and indeed deepening, the culture of the University of Kentucky.

… secretly industry-sponsored research papers in the field of medicine to secretly industry-sponsored research papers in the field of economics!

Two of UD‘s colleagues recently released a report which makes “a strong argument for shrinking the role of the Federal Housing Administration in insuring mortgages. But nowhere is it disclosed that the paper was at least partially underwritten by the private mortgage insurance giant Genworth Financial Inc., which stands to benefit from a pull back in the market by FHA.”

WHOOOOPS. One of the authors “said he didn’t realize he had failed to note Genworth’s underwriting of the paper in the credits.” Such a small thing… easy to overlook… they’re just the people paying for the work.

And here’s a funny thing for a professor to say about his research: “They are using up our time, so they make a [financial] contribution to the university.”

… about Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. He died this week.

I’ll let you know when the post is up.

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

Here it is.

Carolyn Beeler, at WHYY, makes explicit the problem with medical school professors who allow their work to be ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry:

“A medical writer might create a shell of the article that says this is the primary outcome measure, this is the population measure that’s going to be included in the study, and then create dummy tables for the results,” [Harvard’s John] Abramson said. “That is perfectly legitimate.”

The problem is when that veers into ghostwriting. Medical writers paid by drug companies have control over the data analysis and writing, not the academic whose name adds legitimacy at the top of the study, Abramson said.

“Then there’s a serious problem, because then what’s happening is that the commercial sponsor of the study is using a facade of science,” Abramson said.

Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Danny Carlat said ghostwriting might hold a special allure for companies marketing drugs to psychiatrists because there is a vast array of drugs that are of similar effectiveness.

“In a field like that, where there’s so much competition, ghostwriting becomes a very important part of the marketing machinery of any company,” Carlat said. “You want to convince psychiatrists who are reading these studies that your drug has some kind of advantage, however slight, over the competitor’s drug.”

And the allure for professors who hand their intellectual integrity over to marketing agencies?

Well, sometimes they get a cut, of course. Money’s always nice.

And it’s a quick and dirty addition to your cv. Nice raise and promotion work, if you can get it.

… might be a good name for doctorates from Bonn University. Judging by one high-profile PhD of theirs, the degree is a bit on the confectionery side.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a rising German politician, has had the doctorate revoked — more than half of it was plagiarized, which is rather a lot.

Copy, Shake, and Paste, a blog devoted to plagiarism, notes that Chatzimarkakis went on tv, before the revocation, to defend himself:

Chatzimarkakis defended himself with, among other things, the argument that the work was “intertextual” and that he was using “Oxford style” quotations, that he learned when he was at Oxford.

It’s intertextual, man. The self is an illusion. Chill.

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

As always, UD thanks Chris for alerting her to the latest naughty German.

We’re talking Australia here (the stats for the States are probably worse); and the Australian media is beginning to wonder

1. why the country hasn’t been able to come up with prescription guidelines for this runaway train; and

2. why the committee of experts charged with this task has got in-hock-to-pharma folk on it.

Of course the underlying problem is that Australia is … a little slow. How long does it take for news to get there? We’ve known for years that Joseph Biederman’s research is compromised by his own pharma affiliations, but here comes the committee to announce that they’ve been unable to decide on the Australian guidelines because

US psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, whose work is cited over 80 times in the draft guidelines, and two colleagues were sanctioned by Harvard University after allegedly failing to report more than $1.6m they received from drug firms.

Uh… ye-e-e-s-s… Biederman’s conflicts of interest and non-disclosures and, er, “strong pro-drug views” have now gotten him into formal trouble. But Harvard took its sweet time. Everybody’s been scandalized by Biederman for ages. Where were you guys?

Meanwhile, millions of children down under get diagnosed with ADHD and have to take really strong drugs… I guess… Ho hum.

Answer: Hyuk! It don’t! It’s Tennessee!

A colleague of UD‘s named Turley
Wants one boy to have many girlies.
“My thing on polygamy
Makes UD quite sick of me,
And even my wife has turned surly.”

Recipe, Article à l’indienne:

You want a class act, you way definitely want West Virginia University. The CBS News writer quoted above doesn’t even bother going back to football coach Rich Rodriguez, who brought such esteem to WVU’s sports program shortly before Heave-Ho Holgorsen came along.

An Australian professor and judge dies.

[Roddy] Meagher was … Challis lecturer in principles of equity and Roman law at the University of Sydney for many years. He wrote important books and monographs on several topics, most significantly Equity: Doctrines and Remedies with W.M.C. Gummow and J.R.F. Lehane.

He taught legions of students at the law school on Phillip Street over almost three decades, some of whom complained that he talked to a painting on the wall rather than to them. He said he was shy and did not know quite where to look, so he just looked to one side.

… He valued beauty, honesty, humour, loyalty and scholarship and was the most devoted friend imaginable. He loathed foolishness, hypocrisy and pretension…

“Ghosted” medical school professors – researchers who allow themselves to be named as authors of studies which are in fact all, or in part, written by ghost-writing agencies in the pay of drug firms promoting certain pills and devices – are a dime a dozen.

But not all ghosted – or in various other ways pharma-compromised – professors are created equal. When they come from our most respected universities – Harvard, Duke, Penn, Stanford – they lift a merely scummy underhanded practice all the way up to a national disgrace.

Professors are themselves of course reluctant to talk about the practice. In his withering response to Brown University professor Peter Kramer’s recent effort to defend antidepressants, Felix Salmon notes that Kramer

…takes care not to even mention part two of [Marcia] Angell’s two-part [New York Review of Books] series, where she talks at length about how psychiatry has been captured by drug companies, who “are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers”. (After reading Angell’s second essay, you’ll certainly wonder why Kramer doesn’t disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies.)

One of these prestigious medical centers, and the president of its university, has just hit all the papers.

[It is alleged that] five psychiatrists allowed their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by medical communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information, hired by SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline. The paper [reportedly] misrepresented information from a research study on the antidepressant drug Paxil.

The manuscript published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2001, and cited many times since, suggested that Paxil may be beneficial in the treatment of bipolar depression, without acknowledging the medical communication company’s contribution or the extent of GSK’s involvement.

If any of the claims are true, it’s a really icky case: The complainant, a University of Pennsylvania professor who, along with colleagues, was involved in the research and writing of the paper, even claims that “the ghostwriting firm, Scientific Therapeutics Information in Springfield, N.J., chose [one researcher] as the paper’s first author and that Glaxo then decided to replace him with [Charles] Nemeroff.” [Background on Nemeroff here.]

Eeny meeny miny mo, who’s the biggest pharma ho? Ghost company offers one candidate; pharma co. another… Meanwhile, where are the actual, like, professors of medicine who supposedly wrote this shit? Sitting on their asses, directing their secretaries to add another ghost-written article to their hundreds and hundreds of ghost-written or guest-written articles…

Since this scandal largely involves the University of Pennsylvania, one would expect at least a word or two from its president, Amy Gutmann – especially since she chairs President Obama’s bioethics commission. Rather than traveling to Washington and generalizing about good and evil in the world of science, Gutmann should stay home, release a statement about this situation, and investigate the troubling ethical matters in her own backyard.

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

Many more details here, including the shameful non-involvement of some authors of the study, and the undisclosed pharma affiliation of others.

Mr UD is away at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, La Kid is at her internship at Congressional Quarterly Press, and UD is at home in Garrett Park. It’s too hot to go outside. She has positioned her laptop in front of the kitchen windows because she wants to watch two yellow-shafted flickers feed their baby.

These beautiful birds look like this.

If you enlarge the image (click on it), you’ll see a bit of yellow under one of the bird’s wings. What the image doesn’t show you is the whole bird suddenly turning bright yellow when it flattens and shakes itself in the dirt while cleaning its wings.

UD can watch tons of robins and cardinals feed their babies. That’s nothing. The flickers are special.

After her dog died last year, UD cleared the fenced-in wilderness that had been his play area. She took out a lot of bushes and weeds, cut back on ivy, relocated azaleas. She created a path and threw down mulch.

In a hidden corner, she placed a black chaise.

Years of overgrowth and a surrounding of mature trees make the place very shady, a private little garden wrapped in green. As UD cuts back on it more and more, she realizes what she’s got, what she’s wrought, is a meditation space, a zen oasis.

… so with Paul’s two wine bottles, it’s the object that counts. Like it or not, human beings glom onto things. When it comes to questionable behavior, they find physical, discrete, countable things vivid and graspable.

Vast convoluted abstract bad behavior — Goldman Sachs pushing all that money around — eludes us, but the four hundred dollar haircut, the seven (I think. I’ll have to ask my staff.) houses, these we get.

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

Although the Ryan story does have an easily detectable gamey scent, its real meaning indeed lies deeper. At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson narrates:

Hedge fund billionaires make giant contributions to elite universities and get like-minded professors hired to named chairs… Together, they influence politicians, who set the economic agenda in Congress and to a great extent in the media.

… [T]he very baldness of what’s we’re seeing in this particular case is a helpful reminder of the myriad ways money buys access. It’s not just campaign contributions or even the promise of high-paying jobs to politicians who’ve left office. Money buys experts. It buys credentials like named chairs for the experts you, as a billionaire, want to be influential. And then you and your pet expert go to a nice dinner and drink $350 bottles of wine with a high-profile member of Congress and when he cites the ideas you were pushing, he’s not citing some self-interested hedge fund guy, he’s citing a University of Chicago economics professor.

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

Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr wrote The Uses of the University.

Clawson is describing the uses of the university today.