Southern Illinois University’s massive Saluki Way project has mainly involved building or upgrading sports facilities, at a huge cost to students through increased fees. But the basketball team sucks, and no one goes to the shiny new stadium; the buy-out of the bad coach will cost the students even more; three of the players beat some guy up and are suspended; and, oh yeah, no one wants to go to school there.

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In a 2006 article in the campus newspaper about the Saluki Way, the reporter makes a prescient spelling error:

[SIU’s president] said he hopes current students will understand why they must pay for facilities they will not use.

“We all have a responsibility to each seceding generation,” he said.

The University of Minnesota’s drug trial problems broaden.

… bans all drug ads. Reasons here.

… hit.

But with boosters like “Papa Doc” Bob Barr in their corner, they’ll be fine.

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Update: Nice and concise: “[T]he explosion in for-profit schools over the past two decades has created an environment in which schools whose primary purpose is to make money for their stock-holders sign students up for federal student loans, then turn huge profits while giving their students such a lousy education that when they graduate they can’t get a job and end up defaulting on the loans.”

Retired from a high-profile career as an academic psychiatrist, Frances now muses on the expensive and destructive medicalization of human experience in America.

In a recent post, I noted what I called his Post-Diagnostic Regret, his almost anguished reflection on his own implication in what another writer calls psychosprawl — the legitimation of so many behaviors as signs of mental illness that thirty percent of the country is now said to be mentally ill. This is great news for the pharmaceutical industry, America’s Fraud Queen.

In this piece, in Psychiatric Times (registration), Frances turns his attention to a recent, much-reported study.

The New York Times of Dec 20,2010 carried an alarming story. It seems that during the past decade, college students have suddenly become much more mentally ill. The rate of severe psychiatric disorder among those seen in school counseling services used to be 16%– now it has reached 44%. Ten years ago, 17% received psychiatric medicine– now it is 24%.

The jump, Frances suggests, is manufactured.

First, it’s far too easy for students to ace the DSM-IV tests for mental disorders. “[T]he severity and duration requirements included in DSM-IV were set too low, particularly in the criteria sets that define the milder forms of the depressive, anxiety, and attention deficit disorders.”

Second, impressionable and sometimes insecure students see endless slick ads encouraging them to palpate, as it were, their moods. “[P]rofit motivated skewing of public information about illness is rightly prohibited virtually everywhere else in the world,” Allen notes. He reminds readers that along with lavishing us with images of our mental fragility, drug companies have long “lavished physicians with industry-sponsored conferences, free trips and meals, free samples, biased research, and co-opted thought leaders. There [is] one drug salesperson for every seven doctors– sometimes outnumbering the patients in waiting areas. Not surprisingly, diagnosis and medication sales have skyrocketed and profits have risen astronomically.”

Side effects, lifelong stigma, insurance difficulties – these are obvious calamities for the wrongly labeled. More profoundly wounding is “the way a falsely diagnosed student sees himself at a crucial moment of identity formation– the reduction in the sense of personal efficacy, resilience, and responsibility.”

In 2000, the University of Florida named Professor Dov Borovsky a Research Foundation Professor, his work on insect control making him among “the best of the best” on that faculty. He’s clearly admired, and well-compensated.

Borovsky has responded to UF’s largesse with conflict of interest and theft. He’s been arrested on grand larceny and fraud charges:

Borovsky took three separate trips to Malaysia that he reported were on behalf of the university, but were actually in connection with his work as a paid consultant, scientific adviser and shareholder in the Malaysian-based company EntoGenex International.

He got the university to pay for his airfare, although EntoGenex had already paid for it. He also denied a business interest in the company.

… West of the Moon.

From Leon Knopoff’s obituary in the LA Times:

He also gained a certain amount of fame from a 1983 report in the journal Nature with astronomer Steven Kilston that tentatively linked earthquakes to an alignment of the sun and moon on opposite sides of the Earth that tugged the opposite sides of faults in opposing directions. That article predicted a quake in November 1987 in California’s Imperial Valley and, in fact, two occurred.

Researchers still do not know what to make of that potential link.

Wired magazine interviews Allen Frances, a retired Duke University psychiatry professor, and editor of the most recent edition [2000 – it’s currently being revised for a new edition] of the profoundly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Frances has Post-Diagnostic Regret. He regrets the way his edition of the DSM has contributed to what Gary Greenberg, the article’s author, calls “absurdly high rates of diagnosis—by DSM criteria, epidemiologists have noted, a staggering 30 percent of Americans are mentally ill in any given year.” Francis regrets

having remained silent when, in the 1980s, he watched the pharmaceutical industry [America’s Fraud Queen] insinuate itself into the [American Psychiatric Association’s] training programs. [The APA produces the DSM.] (Annual drug company contributions to those programs reached as much as $3 million before the organization decided, in 2008, to phase out industry-supported education.)

The DSM’s vague and proliferating diagnoses have tended to “[create] … mental illness[es] where there previously [were] none, giving drugmakers… new target[s] for their hard sell and doctors, most of whom see it as part of their job to write prescriptions, more reason to medicate.”

As Greenberg notes, “[F]or all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering.”

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After years of reading, thinking, and writing about the university on this blog, UD has concluded that no division of the modern American university has more potential to do harm to the social fabric than academic psychiatry. The most brutal sports program, the most cynical MBA program – these don’t begin to approach the power to harm that organized, respected, and, in some cases, morally compromised diagnosticians have.

… fees go?

UD‘s friend David Ridpath, along with Matthew Denhart, asks Ohio University students how much they pay in mandatory student fees; he asks them if they know how much of that money goes to athletics; and he asks them how many campus sports events they attend.

They know the answer to the third question — they attend very few, if any — but they’re wobbly on the others.

“On average, how many Ohio University intercollegiate athletic events do you attend per year?” In exchange for receiving student fee money, Ohio’s athletics department allows students to attend home games for free. The average response was 5.8 events attended per year; the median was two, and 35% of respondents reported they attend none. USA TODAY, in a figure cited in the survey’s case study, reported in September that Ohio is allocating $765 of each full-time student’s general fees for the 2010-11 school year to athletics… The survey also asked respondents to rate “how important a factor was Ohio University’s intercollegiate athletics reputation in influencing your decision to enroll at this institution.” More than 78% of the respondents said it was either “unimportant” (24.8%) or “extremely unimportant” (53.7%).

A study much like this one took place at the University of Toledo and had similar results.

Conclusion: Keep ’em ignorant. As long as they don’t know how much they pay in fees, where the fees go, that the fees primarily support athletic events they don’t attend, and that most of the things universities say by way of defending high sports fees are bullshit, all will be well.

Jed Perl considers the ironies of postmodern appropriation art.

[T]he Andy Warhol Foundation [has refused] to authenticate a silkscreen self-portrait that Warhol instructed somebody else to make. Warhol had signed the painting and authorized its inclusion in his first catalogue raisonné, where it was even reproduced on the cover. I am not sure that anybody has actually said that this silkscreen is in fact a plagiary, but the Foundation will not say that it is real, either. …Warhol wasn’t even present; the artist spoke to the fabricator on the phone, to specify the red that he wanted.

Reminds me of Bill Reid.

Perl distinguishes between being influenced by a precursor, and simply appropriating the precursor (in the case of Warhol and Reid, the precursor is yourself):

[S]usceptibility, the sense of emotional connectedness, is what influence is all about as it unfolds in Western art, in the work of Michelangelo, Poussin, Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, and countless others. The chill of appropriation, with its emphasis on impersonality and anonymity, suggests not the great tradition but the academic tradition, a calculation about the past rather than an engagement with the past.

The appropriated piece can stage a statement or two — Everything is mass produced, including art. Individuality is a myth. — but cannot express feeling or craft.

This is a tricky sort of plagiarism charge.

The allegation [is] that [the novel] Gold Mountain Blues, written in Chinese [and in the process of being translated into English and published in Canada], plagiarizes the works of well-known Chinese Canadian authors who write in English, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee and Paul Yee.

… The key blogger leading the attacks, known as “Changjiang,” and identified on his site as Robert Luo, alleges that Zhang [Ling] has been playing the margins: taking advantage of the fact that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, and Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.

The plagiarism obviously can’t involve verbatim lifting.

[The] website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of [Denise] Chong’s book — her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues. … [Another book] opens with a powerful narrative of a male Chinese immigrant who finds himself in peril in the western Canadian wilds of the 19th Century, is rescued and brought back to a native camp, falls in love with a native woman, lives with her, and then abandons her to marry a Chinese wife. Later, he learns that his abandoned lover bore him a son. A very similar set of circumstances occurs to a Chinese man in Gold Mountain Blues.

Penguin has held up publication until the controversy is resolved.

Years ago, UD snorkeled off the Cairns coast.

Cyclone update.

Yeah. And?

… brings its best minds to bear on the most important problem in the world:

How can we continue tailgating jest the way we like it?

Recall that in recent years at the University of Georgia (Our Library: Your Pissoir) the drunken mayhem, and the filth left behind on campus after the mayhem, has gotten to to the point where the administration has begun to notice. Given how much money the school makes on tailgaters, it needs to strike a delicate balance between encouraging alcoholics to play on campus, and keeping library personnel, the day after, from finding oceans of piss in the entryways.

Here are some thoughts about the problem, from a comment thread to this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Squirrels are amazing. Yesterday, I threw a large number of nuts out on my deck for them. I don’t like squirrels, and I would not do this in temperate weather, but I’ve taken pity on them with all this snow.

In minutes, they’d organized an entire social, economic, and spiritual system around the manna. A production line of squirrels captured, gnawed, whittled, and then sped off with each pecan. At the bottom of the deck, squirrels with ribbons in their hair danced around a branch on which they’d drawn a crude image of a pecan. Directly against my sliding glass doors, a neat line of squirrels bowed and scraped in gestures of propitiation.

Today it’s flat-out war. Among themselves, as to which forms of propitiation are truly genuine and effective, and with other groups of squirrels, attracted to the bounty.