Nothing says finger-lickin’ dignified like having your university graduation ceremony at KFC YUM!
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And now you got some reporter complaining about Rutgers University in this here headline:
CORPORATE SALES OF STADIUM NAMING RIGHTS FURTHER SULLIES COLLEGE ATHLETICS
First off, I think we can agree that big-time college athletics has long since reached sully-saturation, so let’s lose the further.
Second, High Points Solution is an information technology firm! That’s classy! It ain’t Kentucky Fried Chicken! Rutgers should count its lucky stars.
… who cannot seem to keep their names out of the papers.
Their universities continue to praise them to the skies — see here, here, and here — and yet the New York Times and various United States senators and various university colleagues are constantly writing in very negative terms about these guys, sending them angry letters, suggesting they’re corrupt and destructive…
Biederman, Nemeroff, and Zdeblick aren’t the only controversial high-profile medical school professors in America; but no other professors have been so enduringly under attack – for conflict of interest, for suppression of negative evidence, for personal greed – by the media, professional organizations, and Congress. All three men, for years and years and years, have been accused of serious misbehavior. Their names are always in the papers, and always for the wrong reasons.
Zdeblick is -for the umpteenth time – in today’s headlines.
When does a university decide that a prominent, grants-getting, journal-editing, mover-shaker on its faculty has become so compromised that he or she should go? Emory University let Nemeroff go, but the University of Miami immediately panted after him, and has worshipfully adored him ever since… I mean, you have to wonder: Do the leaders of these universities even know they have a problem?
In the midst of Preet Bharara’s crackdown on insider trading, the future denizens of Wall Street have one burning question for the hard-driving federal prosecutor: What can we still get away with?
During his tenure as U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District, Bharara has made the rounds at the country’s best business schools, lecturing on ethics and compliance in what he calls his version of Scared Straight.
His audiences, though, are far from frightened. Instead, students invariably ask him how close they can get to the line without crossing it.
And it’s adorable! To watch Tom and Charlie consort with one another year after year despite all the conflicts and penalties and sanctions and recusals and rules and everything!!!
[Charles Nemeroff] repeatedly contacted [Thomas] Insel for help with NIH grants, including attempts to renew and relocate his work at Emory.
Plus!
At Miami, [conflict of interest will be] handled by the medical school’s dean, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, who hired Dr. Nemeroff after conferring with Dr. Insel. The dean subsequently said that he understood the concern over Dr. Nemeroff’s track record, and that he would be “scrutinizing his activities” to be sure he reports all future income from outside companies.
Dr. Goldschmidt was found last month to have underreported his income from service on the boards of two outside companies.
A fun fact about the football coach at Eastern Michigan University.
EMU is one of many pathetic Division I schools in these here United States. But even by the standards of that tawdry deluded crew, EMU stands out.
Further facts, from a long article by Pete Bigelow:
The athletic department reported $19.8 million in revenues in 2009. Of that amount, $14.9 million came from direct institutional support and $1.6 million came from student fees.
That $16.5 million represents 83.4 percent of the school’s athletic budget, the highest percentage of direct institutional support any athletic department received among the Mid-American Conference’s 13 member institutions.
Athletes make up 2.5 percent of EMU’s overall student body, but receive more than 20 percent of the university’s financial aid budget. The athletes’ share amounts to approximately $6.7 million.
NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.
We buy tickets from ourselves!
Very pomo. Très simulacral. Doesn’t do anything to hide the empty stands, however.
It helps, when trying to understand the Division I losers, to imagine the presidents of these schools as Blanche DuBois, and the big football victory that will turn it all around as Belle Reve.
David Flory, a Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor, seems also to run a pretty big-time prostitution ring. He calls the activity “a hobby,” but there’s the matter of its illegality. Details of his arrest are here.
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UPDATE:
Three limericks.
This one’s from a UD reader:
In Albuquerque, New Mex,
A professor whose hobby is sex
brought people together,
without asking whether
they’d succeeded in skirting the lex.
This one’s from another UD reader:
A physics professor named Flory
Has a website that’s ever so whore-y
He’s not in it for money
Just loves spreading honey
At least that’s his side of the story.
And one from UD:
We offer the cheap Standard Model:
She’ll coo and she’ll kiss and she’ll coddle.
But those special patrons
With extra-Large Hadrons
Can launch one of our rocket bottles.
… Marcia Angell highlights the corruption of academic psychiatry:
Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them…
[T]here are no objective signs or tests for mental illness — no lab data or MRI findings -and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that…
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Related.
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Also related. If you can read this article without wanting to vomit, you’re a better man than I am.
Once the medical establishment started buying into the idea of bipolar kids in the 1990s, the diagnosis gained unusual force. In 2000 the National Institute of Mental Health convened a roundtable of researchers in pediatric bipolar disorder and financially supported several controversial propositions, including the practice of asking bipolar adults to date the origins of their own disease. The creation of a new source of funding generated frenetic activity among university psychiatrists, and in a twinkling it created stakeholders in the diagnosis.
From an interview with Julian Young, in Figure/Ground.
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What makes a good teacher today? How do you manage to command attention in an age of interruption characterized by attention deficit and information overflow?
It is very difficult to give a general answer to this question, for teaching, like love, is an intuitive business that cannot properly be articulate[d] in rules and procedures. (That is why one should never go to a ‘teaching-improvement workshop’.) One thing to do is to stop complaining about students. Sure, they suffer from ADD but one needs to get into the habit of liking them, of not regarding them as the enemy, patients, cannon fodder, or a necessary evil. Students tend to respond well to someone they sense wishes them well. Never let students think that your real life is research – work that happens out of the classroom – try to make it the case, so far as possible, that (as in the nineteenth-century) your research and teaching are one and the same. Do not pander too much to the demand for ‘visual aids’. Do not teach in a darkened classroom and, especially, do not structure you[r] lecture around a set of ‘bullet points’ projected onto a screen. Remember that bullet points are discrete while thought is continuous so that what bullet points represent is, in fact, the death of thought…
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UD thanks Dirk for the link.
Dan Fulks answers this question, posed in the first paragraph of a Birmingham News article:
Why did the University of North Alabama board of trustees ignore its students, staff and faculty [who all voted against] by voting 6-3 this week to pursue a move from Division II to Division I?
My dear little brothers in Sport, we meet this August in retreat, to think on our misdeeds and heartily repent of them and pledge to be better men in Sports.
For, as it is said, “College Football Live is … depressing and full of tragedy.” And, as it is said, college football is “morally bankrupt.” And that’s just football.
I invite you to meet me in a verdant space, where we, together in retreat, shall think upon our misdeeds while playing golf… Where, through warm summer evenings, we shall confess our naughtiness and sip sweet liqueur… What a fellowship, what a joy divine.
And after! Ah, after! Cleansed, we shall, each of us, stand before our local scribes and try to control our ecstasy as we speak of the new men in Sports we have become.
… has been found dead in her swimming pool.
She is prominently featured on the center’s website.
Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)
It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.
The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)
Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.
The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:
Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.
The transistor reminds him of
The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.
This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.
You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.
Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.
Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:
You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.
The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.
If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to
Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.
This blog’s category, TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE, chronicles the twisted, tortuous, Catch-22ish character of university trustee appointments.
You want someone filthy rich, but you don’t want someone filthy. Someone rich as Croesus, but not a criminal.
You’re after a person who may be greedy as all get-out, but who’s also a generous philanthropist. A market predator and a shaping-young-minds idealist…
UD ain’t saying it’s impossible to find people like this. America was built by high-minded robber barons. But from pious Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin to the petty thieves of lesser schools, it’s easy to find compromised trustees.
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It’s not so easy to know what to do with them. Yeshiva held on to the Madoff/Merkin tag team until their investment strategies became an unignorable scandal. Other universities move very quickly, dumping a trustee as soon as there’s a whiff of conflict of interest or fraudulent dealing. Scroll through this category for details.
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The latest story, one UD has been following for awhile, involves veteran University of Cincinnati trustee Stanley Chesley. Here’s the background on this attorney’s astounding greed and cynicism.
The latest on Chesley has him about to be disbarred. He is an embarrassment to the political culture of Ohio, where the attorney general has just pulled him from a high-profile case; and of course he is an embarrassment to the University of Cincinnati, where he presides over the intellectual and ethical – and legal – life of the institution.
UD understands as well as universities do the process by which robber barons cleanse theirs souls – or at least brighten their images – via philanthropy. The process is not to be sneezed at, I guess. But when the delicate balance between predation and patronage is upset, universities look like asshole-enablers. U Cincinnati needs to have a little parley with the governor (who appoints their trustees) and tell him they want this guy out.
… my Garrett Park garden.
After having been away for two weeks.
1. Six rabbits — teens, toddlers — play leapfrog all over my front lawn. Nearby, lying down on a bit of green between a clump of hosta and a clump of liriope, a mother rabbit watches them.
2. In the forest behind the house, a doe leads two spotted fawns through honeysuckle bushes. The fawns trip and tremble on their long stiff legs.
3. All daylily flowers have been decapitated. Ditto hosta flowers.
4. My friend Kim has taken my suggestion and stuffed my bulls with fresh green and hay-colored sphagnum moss.
5. From the bedroom window, I watch the latest cardinal nest shimmy and shake with activity.
6. The Good Humor truck, tooting down the street, scatters the rabbits.
(I found the picture here.)
