Ghostwriters are the Navy Seals of academia. They go in there with their special skills and materials, write an article on behalf of their employer (a pharmaceutical company), target a professor willing to put her name on the piece so that it looks like research rather than advertising, and publish it in a high-profile journal.

Like the Seals, they are too modest – and their vocation too top-secret – to take credit. They are the unsung heroes of big pharma.

Take the wonderfully named middle man Mittleman. Maclean’s can phone her all it likes, but she ain’t talkin. Her employers wouldn’t like it. Plus she’s preparing for future missions.

A former ghost spoke to a recent gathering of academics interested in the subject. She confirmed that she would

approach academics on behalf of drug companies and withhold information about her relationship with the industry. “I was asked to identify myself as a writer for the medical education company,” she says, adding that her range of involvement with a researcher could be anything from editing a manuscript, to writing the entire thing under a researcher’s byline.

Remarkably incurious, isn’t it, for Thought Leaders not to wonder why a person would beg to write their articles for them and get them placed for them and all… I guess if you think of yourself as a really important person you figure even thinking and writing are kind of beneath you… ?

It’s such a gray area. Are you kissing an ass for huge sums of money? Or are you being paid by a government for political and economic advice?

It’s the sort of ambiguity you can’t expect Harvard professors to get anywhere with.

Luckily, there’s the DOJ.

… so at business schools.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is a very wealthy man – a wealth management man. He is politically powerful. He sits at the center of New York City glamor and influence.

Like Donald Trump – a very similar man – he takes these remarkable advantages and bullies other people with them.

Unlike Donald Trump, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld has a position of influence at an American university. He sits on the CUNY board of trustees.

Trump is a free agent, if you will. He can be a braggart and a bully on his own time.

(Actually, Trump has his very own university, which he runs in his very own way. Fine.)

But having taken a position of trust at a legitimate American university, Wiesenfeld was under a serious obligation to be serious about this, to discover for himself the values of universities, as well as the public demeanor expected of someone representing universities.

Wiesenfeld’s blackballing of Tony Kushner for his critical views of Israel continues to receive big national and international attention. Wiesenfeld has not only further damaged his own reputation (he already had a bad one), but he has damaged the reputation of CUNY. The story is hot – it will go on burning through CUNY for some time.

Trustees are not supposed to bring shame to a university. They are supposed to bring money, good will, and – if you’re very lucky – good oversight.

In his latest interview about denying Kushner an honorary CUNY degree, Wiesenfeld responds to a New York Times reporter’s suggestion that more care might have been taken to ascertain Kushner’s views (at least one trustee had never heard of Kushner) with this post’s headline.

Wiesenfeld to New York Times: DROP DEAD.

Seattle-area basketball star Tony Wroten will be allowed to enter the University of Washington – but only if he passes his final semester Spanish class, the Seattle Times reported Thursday… The Seattle Times reported the Athletic Director at Garfield High School, Jim Valiere, gave Wroten and classmate Valentino Coleman ‘C’ grades in an independent study Spanish class. But the class never met, didn’t have a textbook and had no coursework...

Here’s a guy, James Hood, who taught history at Tulane for decades and decades even though… well… check it out. 1.8 for Clarity… But if Rate My Professors rated lying, he’d for sure get a 5.

He and his wife and kids moved from Louisiana to Minnesota, where they got half a million dollars of state aid because they’d been displaced by Katrina and were impoverished.

Or that’s what they told the state. Actually, Professor Hood and his wife are multimillionaires with extensive property. They’re being investigated for Medical Assistance fraud.

This doesn’t reflect well on Tulane.

… you’ve already read this sort of prose.

Students at the University of Georgia interviewed their fellow students about the university’s mandatory online alcohol education course.

The student researchers found that My Student Body, the University’s online alcohol education course that students are required to complete, is considered ineffective and may actually encourage irresponsible drinking.

“Through our focus groups, we found that students felt the My Student Body course was ineffective. People thought that it was a joke,” said team leader Mary-Kerstin Lindqvist, a senior public relations and fashion merchandising major. “Our most surprising finding was that some students turned it into a drinking game and did it with friends.”

How might it be improved?

After talking to students at the University and studying alcohol education programs at other colleges, [the] researchers thought a program based on personal testimonials would be more effective.

Their research suggests the University start a program similar to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s ACE IT, which combines a theatrical performance and discussions led by older students to educate new students about alcohol.

You mean you think actual physically present people would be better than an online experience??

Tony Kushner betrays some naivety about university trustees.

Because one of CUNY’s trustees dislikes what he takes to be Kushner’s stand on Israel, the university has rescinded an honorary degree it was about to confer on him. Background here.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who has well-established self-control issues, is the trustee who knocked out Kushner.

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Update: Wiesenfeld’s been having quite the purge-party.

Earlier this year, Wiesenfeld and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind tried to force Brooklyn College to fire an adjunct professor they believed held strongly anti-Israel views. The university initially fired the professor, Kristopher Peterson-Overton, but soon rehired him, saying it believed the criticism by Wiesenfeld and Hikind was politically motivated.

… graduate students and secretaries?

Aw now Bill don’t put yourself down. (Bill’s executive director of the Bowl Championship Series.) BCS makes all kinds of serious money, and goodness gracious there are entire universities impoverished and prostituted by your organization! You’re worth the attention the federal government’s giving you. You’re totally worth it. Hell, everybody’s reading that letter you got today from the Department of Justice about your anti-trust problem. Everybody’s wondering what the head of the NCAA’s gonna say in response to that letter.

You’re big news! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about the taxpayers’ money!

Two years ago, one day after its opening ceremony, I went to the Pentagon Memorial, where I sat on Leslie Whittington’s wingseat and thought about her.

I’m here again, barely able to write for the wind. But the wind stirs the ponds under the wingseats, so there’s the sound of water (if you ignore the roaring George Washington Parkway traffic), and the wind makes currents that make ripply shadows along the grounded wings.

Four red roses and a lily lie in Leslie Whittington’s pond. I’m sitting on her husband’s seat just opposite hers, looking at the flowers in the water.

Big jets about to land at Reagan keep appearing above the Pentagon’s roof, each one a shuddering reminder. A big helicopter – looks presidential – just buzzed the memorial.

At the memorial’s entrance, there’s a plaque, and under the plaque someone’s propped a photo of Lady Liberty holding aloft the bleeding head of Bin Laden. WE GOT HIM, someone has written on the bottom of the picture. 5/1/11.

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

Heat and wind and a cloudy sky. Already a tropical day. If you really want a meditative experience here, you’ll need to get the Pentagon to let you in at one AM. Otherwise it’s jets and helicopters and eight lanes of fast cars and all the daily activity of the Pentagon.

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Is there more security here than usual?

Who knows? It’s the Pentagon!

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

Everyone’s assimilating the Bin Laden news in their own way. For me, it’s definitely about this second trip to Leslie Whittington’s wingseat, and some chat with her.

But I didn’t know her – I only feel an affinity with her – and I find that talking’s difficult. The way she died makes her rather unapproachable. I can’t – I won’t – imagine that. But I can’t think of her apart from it.

This impasse makes me dull and stupid on a hot day in the middle of – let’s face it – parking lots. The long walk from the metro stop to the memorial is all about the million miles of parking that surround the Pentagon. Once you get past that, you’re in a water garden hedged with grasses and herbs. You’re in a bounded place of 184 beige hillocks and illuminated basins. Your feet crunch on the gravel as you move from bench to bench, protecting your eyes from the sun as you squint at each engraved name.

Having found Leslie Whittington, I’m struggling against many forces – my fear of reckoning with the reality of what happened to her; the crazy wind and heat of a Washington afternoon; the distractions – in order to lose myself and find her.

The wind suddenly blows the yellow water lily out of the water. It scuds along the gravel. I go after it, pick it up, and float it back on the pond. The simple business of realigning it with the roses does the trick. I sit back down on her husband’s bench and reflect.

At three AM, Les UDs were shocked from sleep by a big explosion.

“I’ve never heard anything like that before,” said UD. “Sounds as though it might be coming from the train tracks.”

Her first thought was a blast of (possibly dangerous) materials on a boxcar.

“Isn’t it raining?” said Mr UD. “Maybe it was lightning?”

“Don’t think so. It’s not raining very hard. And that just sounded like an explosion, not lightning. Maybe a house exploded? I’d go outside and look around, but if there’s been a release of chemicals… Let’s listen for sirens.”

Sirens started up in two minutes. Les UDs went back to sleep.

This morning’s newspaper reports that a house exploded.

Right next to Garrett Park.

Two people were seriously burned overnight after a large explosion destroyed a Rockville area home and threw the pair into the backyard …

Damaged adjacent houses too.

To have grown up here in Washington DC is to have known the children of spies and scientists and satellite image readers and war strategists. Abstract, abstracted people, symbolic analysts, silent about the precise nature of their work. “My former wives,” writes Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, “had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world – a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community.” Some of my friends’ parents commuted to Fort Dietrich to study military applications of poison. Others – like UD‘s father – drove to the National Institutes of Health to fight President Nixon’s war on cancer.

To have come back here to Washington after graduate school, to have spent my working life at four-blocks-from-the-White-House George Washington University, is to have made a lateral move, to have remained in a world of CIA recruiters and lobbyists and speech writers. White Noise takes place on a college campus, arguably the white-noisiest of wealthy, high-tech American locales, and indeed even an urban campus like GW is very white-noisy. Things tend to be smooth and hushed and abstract — the carpeted, geometric mid-rises, the light-jazz-and-laptops cafes, the calm precise Reagan-bound jets.

To have watched my students rush the White House at midnight on Sunday and raggedly sing The Star Spangled Banner was to have witnessed a breach in the white noise protocol. They were the first to arrive, my students, their dorms just down the block from Lafayette Park. They raced along the darkness of Eighteenth Street, shouting to one another, pumping their fists, conjuring flags from somewhere. From the fog of final exams they were lifted, by Osama’s demise, into a collective clarity having to do with justice.

Strange to think that my students were too young, in 2001, to understand what I understood, to do what I did. I lay down on my basement floor and I said out loud to myself Nothing to do but be brave. Because no one knew how much more punishment we were in for. Someone was trying to bomb us back to the Stone Age. (“They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. This is heaven and hell, a sense of armed martyrdom as the surpassing drama of human experience,” wrote DeLillo in an essay published a few months after 9/11.) My students were too young to marvel at the unity Americans felt and expressed, all of us having been hit so hard. We didn’t know how to respond in the immediate aftermath, but we knew we loved this country, and we all wanted to say that. We wanted to be clear about this love, its particularities. DeLillo praised “the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York.”

They were too young, my students, but they took it in, just the way we did. And when Sunday’s story broke, there was a lot of emotion to let out.

Under the hum of white noise beats a perfectly functioning human heart. Even in the fog of Foggy Bottom.

Dave Cooper, in the Huffington Post, reports on the latest idiocy out of the University of Kentucky:

[A] new proposal by the [University of Kentucky] Athletics Department to spend over $6 million on a new football stadium scoreboard — replacing an existing scoreboard that is only 12 years old — has UK faculty seeing red. … Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart stated the stadium’s current video boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country.”

… [T]he UK Faculty Senate voted unanimously to “strongly oppose” the stadium scoreboard proposal. The UK faculty representative on the Board, finance professor Joe Peek stated “The university’s current classrooms don’t provide the kind of sophisticated educational experience that students have come to expect across the country.”