Q: What is the overarching theme in all of your books, and philosophy about life?

A: Happiness. I can define it in a thousand different ways. I knew if I could talk about happiness, then everything else would fall into place. When I tried to write about this 10 years ago, publishers turned me down. I was so ahead of my time.

Students at China’s Tsinghua University are upset that a campus building has been named after a commercial donor, Jeanswest.

At least they’re not the University of Louisville.

[M]edical societies and doctors with financial ties to Sanofi served as components of a coordinated public relations strategy to use FDA’s citizen petition process to prevent or delay generic alternatives to its blockbuster drug Lovenox from coming on the market… Every day that pharmaceutical companies successfully delay safe and effective generic alternatives to their brand name drugs by attempting to manipulate the citizen petition process is another day that Americans pay more for their drugs.

PharmaLive quotes a letter from the Senate Finance Committee to the FDA, asking that agency if it would please make an effort to find out whether people like Duke University professor Victor Tapson are in the pay of pharma (Sanofi seems to have given him almost $300,000) before taking into consideration their representations seemingly on behalf of the industry. (Tapson apparently did not disclose, in his representations, that Sanofi was paying him.)

Here’s a letter Tapson sent to the FDA under the non-generic gravitas of the Duke University name. (I found the letter via Paul Thacker at POGO.) I gather Duke is fine with being officially enlisted in efforts to restrict generic drugs in the United States.

There is no God but Tressel, and he’s about to be pummeled by a schismatic.

It’s unclear whether Dylan Boyd Devault sold hydrocodone to people at the University of Tennessee, but it stands to reason that he did. He’s been arrested in a drug sweep.

… the University of Wisconsin and its big money man.

… goal!

Why bother writing a new column every year? Go green. Recycle.

Take back your cash
Take back your slots
What made you think
That I’m so easily bought?
Take back the books
The Ayns and the Rands
I may be poor
But I’m not one of your brands.

Sadder but wiser: Online stinks and everyone knows it.

Online and cheating. They go together like a wink and a smile.

Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.

A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.

Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.

In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”

You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?

Shakes you up.

… that UD spends her Augusts in Upstate New York, where Les UDs have a little house up on a hill in a town called Summit. Down the hill is Lutheranville, “once called Tar Hollow due to a tarring and feathering incident.”

If you followed my series on guns at Inside Higher Education, you may recall that UD shot off her first rifle just down the hill from her house, courtesy of a neighbor who likes guns.

Every year, in preparation for rural life, UD checks out regional news articles.

Here are a couple.

The Korean university has already had a lot of untimely deaths this year, and now a visiting professor, Christopher Surridge, has died. Only 46 years old, he collapsed at a train station in Korea. Some of his colleagues made a memorial YouTube. Here’s another YouTube – a talk he gave about PLoS-ONE.

… after all.