… will be tracing the infiltration of the prescription drug trade into American medical schools. We’ll follow stories about pill mills housed inside universities. We’ll note increasing numbers of people going to medical school, and choosing anesthesiology and related fields, with the express purpose of being able to write prescriptions for millions of opioids and other drugs.
A hospital affiliated with Cornell and Columbia has recently removed an anesthesiologist drug dealer from its staff of physicians (he worked with other doctors there in the business). He prescribed pills for his girlfriend, who then sold them, mainly online.
His girlfriend is a medical student. Get the picture?
It’ll become clearer (“[I]n a growing number of states, deaths from prescription drugs now exceed those from motor vehicle accidents.”) in the next few months.
… a Room.
********************************
… A TV news program wanted linen-wrapped books chopped in half to fit the shallow, faux-shelves of a political interview program.
… [T]he-book-as-relic was forecasted by marketers. Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting for JWT New York, the marketing and advertising agency, noted in her trend report for the coming year that “objectifying objects,” she said, “would be a trend to watch.”
Quoting from her report, she added: “Here’s what we said: ‘The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts — from records and books to photo albums and even cash — watch for people to fetishize the physical object. Books are being turned into decorative accessories…
*********************************************
Originally, the client asked for German philosophers, said Mr. Wine, but switched to the classics to fit her budget.
**********************************************
**********************************************
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and–Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
The Great Gatsby
There’s an old-fashioned seemliness, a southern comfort of sorts, about this story out of Virginny, where a powerful member of an appropriations committee in that state’s General Assembly “helped obtain a $500,000 budget amendment for [Old Dominion University], knowing that the university planned to hire him for the job the budget amendment was to pay for.”
Yes, buy your job! Appropriate the money and become a real live professor with it! Hell, write an email instructing an administrator at the university on how much you expect to be paid:
“Currently my part-time salary with the Newport News Public School system is around $37,000. I need at least that amount from the ODU Foundation to have a part-time salary of $75,000 per year. Of course, more than that is always appreciated.”
Standards for new professors at the University of Texas El Paso are pretty low: As this student of Fernando Parra’s says, as long as Parra doesn’t try to get the student involved in his mail fraud, bribe, obscene material transportation, and other activities, it’s fine by the student.
… the highest salaries on campus, remember that their job includes handling the press.
Verbal skills like Gene Chizik’s don’t come cheap.
… Auburn’s top-ranked football team, which is preparing to play Oregon in Glendale, Ariz., for the national title on Monday, has tumbled in the N.C.A.A.’s most important academic measurement to No. 85 from No. 4 among the 120 major college football programs.
The decline came after the university closed several academic loopholes following a New York Times article in 2006 that showed numerous football players padded their grade-point averages and remained eligible through independent-study-style courses that required little or no work.
… Among all the bowl teams this season, Auburn has the highest disparity in the graduation rates between white players (100 percent) and black players (49 percent)…
When pressed on the issue of graduating black players, [football coach Gene] Chizik said, “Those are circumstances; there’s all kinds of different things.” …
[D]onations [to university sports programs] are subject to the same tax subsidy we reserve for charitable and educational institutions like hospitals, food pantries, arts organizations and universities. When a taxpayer at the 35 percent tax rate makes a donation of $10,000, he ends up shouldering only $6,500 of the cost, since his tax bill is trimmed by $3,500. That savings to the taxpayer amounts to reduced tax collections by the Treasury. Considering that the top college athletic programs collected a total of more than a billion dollars in 2008, the revenue hit from making these gifts tax deductible is not inconsequential… With the nation facing gigantic federal deficits for years to come, isn’t it time for major college sports programs to get by without this subsidy?
Charles Clotfelter – like many wise men and women before him – takes note of the college sports tax subsidy… But, you know… Put his limp rhetorical question (isn’t it time…??) up against the strapping lads of the US Congress and tell me how likely you think it is that the subsidy will be removed.
Though that historian’s anonymous Amazon comments, viciously trashing fellow historians’ books and voluminously praising his own, look rather mild compared to this case, in which a computer science professor at the University of Washington apparently sent a series of threatening anonymous emails to his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer.
What can we learn from these two cases, one of which involves an international expert in computer technology?
Never assume anonymity.
… Tony Judt’s memoir, The Memory Chalet, for Inside Higher Education. I’ll let you know when it appears on that site.
************************
Here tis. The Three Solipsisms of Tony Judt.
The younger son of the Shah of Iran has shot himself to death. He was forty-four years old.
Pahlavi completed his undergraduate education at Princeton, where he studied music and ethnomusicology and earned a master’s in ancient Iranian studies from Columbia University. He was also working on a Ph.D. from Harvard in ancient Iranian studies and philology.
********************************
On West Newton street, a police cruiser idled as three men from the crime scene clean up company, Aftermath Inc., went back and forth from their van into Pahlavi’s house holding plastic buckets and hoses.
Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic, launches an angry, rather incoherent attack on Duke University, a sort of I Am Charlotte Simmons without the laughs.
Though the piece begins as an attack on Duke’s reduction (as Flanagan sees it) to a distinctively money-obsessed institution (it’s no more money-obsessed than Brown, Northwestern, Boston University, and plenty of other – what do they call them? – basket schools), it quickly shifts to a merciless attack on Ms Sex Thesis herself, Karen Owen (background here and here). Flanagan calls this Duke senior (she was a senior when she researched and wrote the sex thesis; she has now graduated) “one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while,” onaccounta she got roughed up a bit, sexually and emotionally, by her research subjects, thirteen male Duke athletes, each of whom she sampled in bed and then wrote up in terms of performance.
Flanagan’s piece is an exercise in male bashing and female self-pity. It paints a world of sharp lines between rapacious men and victimized women. And it attacks Duke University as unusually – by the standards of American universities – complicit in this picture.
While UD doesn’t characterize Owen – as some commentators do – as an exemplary feminist for doing what she did (using men, rating them sexually the way men rate women sexually, etc.), neither does she regard Owen as a puling confused little drunkard, her heart broken again and again by the big bad boys. Flanagan doesn’t quote the repeated descriptions of very pleasant sex indeed in the Owen sex thesis — sex that does sometimes get a little rough, but pleasantly so – if “pleasant,” in sexual terms, means that Owen scored an orgasm. Nor does Flanagan quote several rather moving descriptions (at least UD found them so) of research subjects whose quietly intense sexual excitement in response to Owen’s beauty Owen found – as well she might – both humanly and physically gratifying.
None of this is to deny what Flanagan argues at the end of her essay – men are more powerful than women, and women ought not get drunk and stupid. It is merely to say that all the shadings of sex, the complications of compulsion and desire and delight and abasement among adults, are absent from Flanagan’s angry fleshless world.
At Dagblog, Doctor Cleveland makes some rather remarkable forecasts about big time sports at American universities.
[W]e’re getting to the point where commitment to education at public universities and commitment to football at public universities don’t coexist easily. Spending tens of millions on football (and $3-7 million just on a coach’s salary) always annoyed some professors, but not in any way that rocked the boat. But when state budget cuts lead even a great public system like the University of California to cut back its course offerings and shrink its faculty while raising the tuition to three times what it was in 2000 and then raising it again, raiding Berkeley’s academic budget for six or seven million dollars a year on top of the official athletics budget starts to be a very tough sell.
Yet Doctor Cleveland concludes that crushingly expensive, academically irrelevant, big time sports will survive nonetheless because they fit the new corporate, anti-intellectual university model. The emergent university’s indifference to the student athlete’s education is merely an intensified case of its general indifference to all of its students’ educations.
There will still be some superb colleges in this country, a few of them likely better than American universities have ever been. A select few students will continue getting fabulous educations. But that number will be smaller, and many of their peers in less privileged colleges will get very, very different educations… College football will survive the conditions that allowed it to become what it is. In the end it’s more suited for what American education is becoming than it was for what American education was in the last half of the 20th century… Big College Football is entirely unconcerned about the vast majority of its athletes who will never be able to land the only job that college has prepared them for. Students will be allowed to drop out and drift away when the program has used them up; the model is enrollment, not retention. Developing the student as a whole person is entirely out of the question. And the rewards of the students’ hard work and effort are only for the fortunate few, while everyone else (no matter how hard they have worked) is labeled a failure. And a small group of privileged people will stand to make a massive profit. There’s a reason that people who agitate for “modernizing” our colleges and universities don’t complain about big time, pro in all but name college football. It already looks exactly the way they want college to look.
The writer is describing – with meticulous exactitude – America’s burgeoning for-profit university sector. Enrollment, not retention. Etc. As public universities put themselves online and in other ways cheapen themselves in emulation of the for-profits, we will see once respectable universities become, as Doctor Cleveland anticipates, the same pointless, damaging interlude in the lives of naive people that the for-profits already are.
An interlude with football games.
This one’s rather mysterious. A beloved math professor at the University of North Florida behaves so weirdly and belligerently on a plane that he’s arrested for “disorderly conduct and interfering with the operation of an aircraft.” Apparently he refused to take his seat, refused to stop talking on his cell phone, and in general frightened his fellow passengers.
How does a man whose students fall over themselves to praise his kindness get into this sort of trouble?
There are a couple of possible explanations. Alcohol’s always the first place to look, of course. Drinks too much, becomes a belligerent drunk… Is already maybe afraid of flying, and totally loses it when authorities start asking him questions.
Another possibility is that he has mild mental problems — say, Asperger’s — which he can manage, but which, under conditions of stress, come roaring out.
… has spent much of today cleaning her house. She’s almost finished. At some point this evening, she hopes to post on the following subjects:
1. Tea. Christopher Hitchens has something to say about the subject, and it is of course a category on this blog, since UD is a mad tea drinker. She pens poems to it… New Years stir deep thoughts, and some of the deepest thoughts have to do with tea. I’ll also say a word or two about this Hitchens interview .
2. Having read Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet while I was in Cambridge and Vermont (Judt has much in common with Hitchens; maybe I can fold my Judt remarks into the tea post.), I’ll post some thoughts about that.
3. This one’s short, so I’ll just post it here:
After only a year, Yeshiva University has lost (fired?) its first chief investment officer. With an overpaid president, a board of trustees only recently boasting the Madoff/Merkin investment partnership, possible clawback action from Irving Picard, and an internecine, no comment, corporate culture, Yeshiva has a lot of problems. To lose a CIO so quickly looks like another problem.
4. Oh and you know what else? See that post a few posts under this one about whooshing up experiences? I think I had one at the New Year’s party I went to.
Nothing obviously dramatic about it, but I had a rather long conversation with a fourteen-year-old girl named Liv. Liv lives (that was fun to type) in Norway, but is immensely fluent in English; and Liv loves (that was fun too) to read novels.
“Jane Austen and the Brontes – I don’t like them.”
The outrageous confidence with which Liv said this comported strangely with her thin high little girl voice.
“Why not?”
“People don’t really change in those novels. My favorite novel is The Secret Garden. So many people change! Mary Lennox, and Colin, and Colin’s father… ”
“I love that novel too. We have a copy at our little house in the country, and I have a tradition of taking it off the shelf first thing when we get there and reading it again … I think you might be right about the Brontes — roughly speaking anyway. Austen’s another story – people change like mad in Austen. Try Pride and Prejudice.”
“They might change – but they don’t change in a big way. And in The Secret Garden, it’s not just people. It’s places! The garden is all dead, and then it’s all flowers …”
“I see what you mean…”
We went on like that at length, finessing the matter of personal and earthly transformation and its relation to literary quality, and I guess the whooshing up moment came for me when I realized I’m talking literary criticism with a fourteen-year-old from Norway and she’s making an intriguing point and we’re batting it around…!
Maybe it’s wasn’t whooshing so much as welling – a welling up of pleasure at the sight of UD as a fourteen-year-old with blond hair at a New Year’s party… Because Liv was like me at that age.
And a welling up of emotion not only at a kind of self-recognition, but at my gradual realization that I had found and was now delicately exploring real literary sensitivity in Liv, and that her forms of sensitivity were fascinating and moving.
… those of us with an interest in universities should keep this important development in mind:
It used to be that clinical trials [of new prescription drugs] were done mostly by academic researchers in universities and teaching hospitals, a system that, however imperfect, generally entailed certain minimum standards. The free market has changed all that. Today it is mainly independent contractors who recruit potential patients both in the U.S. and—increasingly—overseas. They devise the rules for the clinical trials, conduct the trials themselves, prepare reports on the results, ghostwrite technical articles for medical journals, and create promotional campaigns.
Two writers for Vanity Fair note the vanishing relevance of the university in the field of pharmaceutical trials, and the advent of the wild, wild west, east, north and south.
In theory, a federal institutional review board is supposed to assess every clinical trial, with special concern for the welfare of the human subjects, but this work … has now been outsourced to private companies and is often useless. In 2009 the Government Accountability Office conducted a sting operation, winning approval for a clinical trial involving human subjects; the institutional review board failed to discover (if it even tried) that it was dealing with “a bogus company with falsified credentials” and a fake medical device. This was in Los Angeles. If that is oversight in the U.S., imagine what it’s like in Kazakhstan or Uganda. Susan Reverby, the Wellesley historian who uncovered the U.S. government’s syphilis experiments in Guatemala during the 1940s, was asked in a recent interview to cite any ongoing experimental practices that gave her pause. “Frankly,” she said, “I am mostly worried about the drug trials that get done elsewhere now, which we have little control over.
Anecdotally, UD knows that prescription drug addiction – among family, friends, friends of friends, children of friends – has gone absolutely haywire. The statistics say the same thing. It’s hideous to anticipate an escalation of this trend.
****************************
And don’t forget.