… went missing in Liverpool a few days ago. His body has now been found. Police don’t yet know how he died.

… Georgetown.

[UD thanks Jonathan.]

From a review of Big-Time Sports in American Universities, by Charles T. Clotfelter.

[Clotfelter investigates] the ways in which universities use their sports programs to court potential donors. He filed public-records requests with eight universities, asking for the names of invited guests who sat in the president’s box during home football games.

The University of Washington, to its credit, complied with this request. The University of Oregon, to its shame, demanded payment of $791.87. And the response from the University of California, Berkeley, was laugh-out-loud funny — a snooty version of: We’re not giving you the names, because we don’t want to.

UD has already examined the lucrative business of gathering corporate and government employees for a few days of leadership bullshit. It’s such an obvious scam that Senator Grassley, last year, asked a number of leadership bullshit institutes to explain why Margaret Soltan’s taxes pay for their bullshit.

More recently, a New Zealand politician has addressed himself to the very same scam: Government-sponsored, vastly expensive, leadership bullshit seminars. He wanted to know why this guy, who boasts an online PhD from California Coast University — a notorious diploma mill — is the DIRECTOR of this clever enterprise. Do the taxpayers of New Zealand have no self-respect?

[Keith Locke said] given the institute’s six-day leadership programme at Queenstown’s Millbrook Resort cost $18,285, plus $2558 in accommodation, it was time to review the course.

“There needs to be a check on public sector people using the institute, to see if there is value for money,” Locke said. “These courses are expensive. How can it be justified when three-year leadership programmes offered by the government itself through its Leadership Development Centre cost about $11,000.”

And when the Leader di Tutti Leaders has a fake degree.

To put your disappointment over the lack of the end of the world into perspective: Nothing.

By the Fugs.

… the end of the world. (Scroll up to page 131; read through page 133.)

… prison.

… from UD‘s parents’ favorite album.

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Answers to frequently asked questions.

A Guardian writer updates us on the new, improved pharmaceutical ghostwriting industry.

… Alastair Matheson is a British medical writer who has worked extensively for medical communication agencies. He dismisses the planners’ claims to having reformed as “bullshit”.

“The new guidelines work very nicely to permit the current system to continue as it has been”, he said. “The whole thing is a big lie. They are promoting a product.”

Matheson expects an article he wrote about a new cancer treatment to appear in print later this year, with an oncologist considered a “key opinion leader” (KOL) by planners listed as the author in his stead. “You’d do the same thing if you were selling cornflakes,” Matheson told me. “It’s no different.”

All the rain has made my woods and garden a rainforest. Every morning I walk around the half acre, holding a pair of scissors with which I clip back ivy and honeysuckle and even hydrangea overstepping its bounds. A bright litter of birdcalls strews the ground.

(I ripped that last sentence off from An Arundel Tomb.)

Today as I passed the small secret garden I made last year, a hidden place just big enough for a writing table and a chair, I saw something on the table. Gray, lumpy, not moving. A dead squirrel?

As I got closer, two huddled mourning doves materialized. Asleep.

It’s hard to keep a good shill down. Ignoring explicit conflict of interest policies, at least twelve hucksters who teach at Stanford University’s medical school are still at it, trading their institution’s prestige for tens of thousands of dollars from drug companies each semester.

A public interest group pointed this rule-breaking out to do-nothing Stanford, which is apparently – in response to growing press interest in the scandal – slowly beginning to discipline these people.

As long as universities consider it not quite the done thing to call its pitchmen and pitchwomen out on their sales careers, COI policies will remain a joke.

… and it’s got a pretentious French title: Tapis Roulant Hédonique

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Update: “Don’t you know who I am?”

If it’s true that DSK repeated this, it would be totally according to Jonah Lehrer’s script.

… comes to Vanderbilt.

Everyone knows about the prescription drug abuse pandemic going on in the country right now, and of course universities, full of immature people experimenting with pills and alcohol, have plenty of problems along these lines.

One high-profile overdose death – a nineteen year old at the University of Arizona, the well-connected son of the Tennessee Democratic Party chair – points to the difficulties schools face in responding to the situation. Although Wilson Forrester was such a notorious user that he’d earned the nickname Blackout Willie, no one seems to have done anything about it.

The UA Police report outlines a sad tale of people who knew the student was deep into drugs and alcohol but did little more than warn him to change.

As I say in this post’s title, the University of Arizona and the local police should in response try to bust a bit of the campus drug trade. Wouldn’t hurt if UA’s president issued some sort of statement as well.

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Update: Probably another one.

The New York Times reports.