How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.

This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.

… describes the way a mainly online for-profit school with high tuition, a wretched graduation rate, and no doubt richly compensated executives, got included in state scholarship legislation.

Such a great deal if you can get it. Online for-profits remain at the center of a national scandal [scroll down], in large part because they continue to receive enormous federal funds — despite the fact that they’re primarily run to rake in money for investors and administrators. Now, in addition to its federal support, Post University in Connecticut will get state support.

How did this happen?

The old-fashioned way: corruption. A person on the Post board of trustees (a paid position) is also a state legislator, and he lobbied the thing through.

See, “As originally written, the bill would have given scholarship funds only to students at state and private nonprofit institutions.” Institutions legally compelled to use most of their money for the benefit of their students. Now lucky, profit-driven Post enjoys another source of public funds.

… who cannot seem to keep their names out of the papers.

Their universities continue to praise them to the skies — see here, here, and here — and yet the New York Times and various United States senators and various university colleagues are constantly writing in very negative terms about these guys, sending them angry letters, suggesting they’re corrupt and destructive…

Biederman, Nemeroff, and Zdeblick aren’t the only controversial high-profile medical school professors in America; but no other professors have been so enduringly under attack – for conflict of interest, for suppression of negative evidence, for personal greed – by the media, professional organizations, and Congress. All three men, for years and years and years, have been accused of serious misbehavior. Their names are always in the papers, and always for the wrong reasons.

Zdeblick is -for the umpteenth time – in today’s headlines.

When does a university decide that a prominent, grants-getting, journal-editing, mover-shaker on its faculty has become so compromised that he or she should go? Emory University let Nemeroff go, but the University of Miami immediately panted after him, and has worshipfully adored him ever since… I mean, you have to wonder: Do the leaders of these universities even know they have a problem?

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.

Harvard Medical School tightened its policy on conflict of interest, banning faculty from receiving corporate gifts and meals and restricting them from speaking on behalf of companies…

Harvard University also adopted a campus-wide policy on conflict of interest, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said on its website…

The medical school was earlier stung by criticism when Senator Charles Grassley said Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman failed to disclose some payments from drug companies while he conducted research recommending their medications for treating children with mental disorders…

The Grassley Report on pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science is here.

Leadership is bogus.  You know it.  I know it.

No, no.  Not actually leading people.  Leading people is great.  Churchill, etc.  That’s great.

Teaching leadership is bogus.  It’s done in a million different ways.  Mainly it’s psychobabble for big boys in beauteous locales.

And it’s really, really, really, reallllllly lucrative.  Like, read The Economist magazine and you’ll see these two-page amazing ads for Give us thirty thousands dollars for three days in Majorca and we’ll send you back a leader … And you think huh?  What dumbshit corporation pays for that?

But okay.  I mean, Goldman Sachs makes all kinds of money, and they’re a private firm, so okay.

[Update:  Marilyn, a reader, points out that Goldman is publicly held.]

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When the federal government’s paying for it, though, it’s a little annoying, isn’t it?  Isn’t it just a slight piss-off to realize that your taxes are paying for…

Well, let’s get precise, shall we?  How much does the federal government ask us to pay in order to turn some of its higher ranking civil  servants into (drum roll) leaders?

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As always, Senator Grassley, head of the Where Do Your Taxes Go committee, has been looking into the matter. He is rather staggered by what he has found.  He has written some letters to people who run organizations that charge the federal government for leadership seminars.  He has asked them to explain their charges.  Here are some of those organizations.

The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name.  It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.

A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.

This puts those three-day Harvard alumni boat trips down the Nile to shame, kiddies.

And speaking of Harvard, let’s look at what the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government.  The school has just raised the tuition.  It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks of what must be one HELL of a leadership initiation.  Some really amazing shit must be going down, like say very ancient and secret mystical leadership rituals.  We’ll see.

The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.

Public university?  1000% greater.

Senator Grassley has some questions for the Office of Personnel Management.  He notes the expansion of online university courses of all sorts and wonders why at least some portion of OPM-sponsored leadership training couldn’t get done more cheaply that way.  (As you know, UD reviles distance education, but given the largely bogus content of leadership studies, this technology would work beautifully.)  He also, of course, wants to know, as do we all, just what these people are learning.

The IRS mailed 400 questionnaires to nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers and is reviewing an additional 13 that failed to respond, the agency said.

This is all about Senator Charles Grassley’s complaint (he’s the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee) that many extremely wealthy universities, holding billions of dollars, hoard their endowments. Since non-profits get all that money in large part because they get amazing tax breaks, they’re obliged to use it… To spend it, reasonable amounts of it, so that, for instance, students aren’t priced out of an education, or made to take on outrageous debt.

The IRS survey found that 344 institutions had an average spending target of 4.7 percent to 5 percent of their endowments each year on operations.

… Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he’s concerned that 5 percent has become a “ceiling” for colleges and that wealthier institutions should be spending more. The finance committee held hearings in 2007 on rising tuition costs and growing endowments at colleges including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, prompting the institutions to provide more financial aid.

… Forcing universities to spend more of their endowments would discourage diversified investing and push them toward more conservative portfolios, said James K. Hasson Jr., a lawyer at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Atlanta, who represents tax- exempt institutions.

“A mandate would remove flexibility and creativity from the tools available to colleges,” Hasson said. “There doesn’t seem to be a crying need for a legal mandate.”…

Right. With a mandate, Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, wouldn’t have been able to put together those clever credit default swaps.

… runs the headline at Business Week, and this one’s worth unpacking a bit.

Almost all of the colleges and universities University Diaries writes about are non-profits. They exist not to generate money for investors, but to educate people. They need enough funds, of course, to operate on as high a level as possible; but because their primary function involves a public good – enhancing the knowledge and skills of people – they receive various and significant state and federal government subsidies and tax exemptions.

Public institutions, like Berkeley, some of whose students and faculties have taken to the streets in protest against
state cutbacks (today, March 4, is a Day of Action, and a number of large rallies representing many public schools are expected), and private institutions (even insanely rich ones like Harvard), both receive all sorts of tax breaks along with government financial support.

The furloughs Mr UD and his colleagues at the University of Maryland have experienced, and the many other signs of institutional strain that this blog has noted at virtually all American universities, have of course to do with varying degrees of withdrawal of government funds from schools under the pressure of a bad economy.

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Because our taxes support non-profit universities, we have a stake in making sure these places don’t use our money to give their presidents millions of dollars, or, like Harvard, to hoard massive endowments. Likewise, we have an obligation to keep an eye on the tax-exempt NCAA and tax-exempt universities with Division I-A football and basketball programs (indeed, many people now argue that the NCAA and these sorts of campus sports programs should lose their tax exemption).

My point is that all sorts of goodies, subsidized by the American taxpayer, come to universities, and universities expect (should expect) some level of government scrutiny (think too of Senator Charles Grassley’s many letters of inquiry to universities about possible conflicts of interest in their medical schools) and citizen scrutiny because of this.

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Things start to get muddy when we turn to America’s burgeoning for-profit university industry.

For-profits aren’t bound by the non-profit ethos which says that our primary goal is to enhance the public good. For-profits are for profits. They’re doing what they do primarily to yield as much money as they can for investors. Because of this, the for-profit story, as UD has chronicled it over the course of this blog, has featured the sort of scandals you’d expect: Brazen recruitment of any student with a pulse, almost exclusively online curricula, and a practice of lying to recruits about graduation rates and job placements. One firm “paid a $6.5 million settlement in July 2007 to the California attorney general’s office, over allegedly misrepresenting graduates’ job placement rates and salaries. It also agreed to cease enrolling students in 11 programs at nine campuses.”

Now keep in mind that for-profits get massive federal support too. Typically over eighty percent of their revenue comes from you and from me.

So let’s go back to the headline on the Business Week article: Your Taxes Supporting For-Profit Firms as they Acquire Colleges.

How does that work?

Let’s start here:

A 2006 regulatory change fostered online growth and made takeovers more attractive… That year, Congress eliminated a rule prohibiting colleges that offered more than half of their courses online from receiving federal financial aid.

Well, this blog ain’t keen on online – UD calls it the poor white trash of education – but, you know, that’s just me. Congress loves it, and has made it easier for you to make an entirely online university. (I know. Diploma mills have been at this for years. Whole other subject.)

Anyway. Okay. So you can now make a really low-cost, really profitable university. Zillions of students all over the world, a few professors doing a lot of typing (How many students does each online class contain? I dunno. A thousand?), very little physical campus to maintain… You get the picture.

But – Did I say diploma mills were a whole other subject? They’re not really. You need to differentiate yourself from them, and that means real accreditation. Which is where we reenter the Business Week story:

ITT Educational Services Inc. paid $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June. In return, the company obtained an academic credential that may generate a taxpayer-funded bonanza worth as much as $1 billion.

ITT Educational, the U.S.’s third-biggest higher education company with a market value of $3.8 billion, may increase it by 26 percent, or $1 billion, within five years because of the purchase of 1,200-student Daniel Webster in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Michael Clifford, an investor in Del Mar, California, who has participated in the acquisitions of four nonprofit colleges. At least 75 percent of new revenue would come from access to the more than $100 billion a year in financial aid the U.S. hands out to college students, he said.

Key to tapping that money is Webster’s regional accreditation, which is the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard University and helps students transfer course credits from one college to another. Daniel Webster’s accreditation was its “most attractive” feature to ITT, said Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington law firm that has long represented the company.

“Companies are buying accreditation,” said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who studies for-profit higher education. “You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don’t have time. They want to boost enrollment 100 percent in two years.”

Let’s look more closely at what you’re getting as a student here:

The cost of attending an ITT Technical Institute, including tuition, fees and off-campus room and board, was $26,775 in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who entered ITT’s two-year schools in 2004, 29 percent graduated. ITT derived 70 percent of its 2009 revenue from federal financial aid, according to a company filing.

Wow. Where do I sign up? You get to pay Harvard rates for flunking out of a little-known academic institution. Plus, our taxes are paying for seventy percent of the school’s revenue!

Is our government watching out for us here?

The scrutiny these new for-profits get

“doesn’t remotely satisfy the sloppiest of due-diligence requirements,” said [Barmak] Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. “There is no methodical review of who has bought the college. If the Cosa Nostra applied, you would think you’d take a look.”

But the Department of Education is on it, man!

The U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that new for-profit colleges can’t qualify for assistance for two years, Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said in a telephone interview.

Under federal regulations taking effect July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the secretary of education if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50 percent in one year.

“It’s an area that we are watching closely,” Shireman said. “It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing.”

Kind of reminds you of the SEC when it was run by Bernie Madoff, doesn’t it?

What’ll they think of next?

Harvard University is one of 40 colleges that will be audited this year as part of the Internal Revenue Service’s review of the tax-exempt status of some nonprofit organizations, the school said in bond offering documents.

… Harvard is the world’s richest college with an endowment of $26 billion as of June 30, down from a peak of $36.9 billion in 2008. An alumni group criticized pay at the school’s endowment, known as Harvard Management Co., in 2003 after the top six in- house managers earned a combined $107.5 million the prior year.

… Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has been examining finances at universities, including how much funding rich schools give to student financial aid, and drug company payments to university researchers. Grassley called the IRS probe “long overdue” when it began in 2008.

From Synapse, a University of California, San Francisco publication:

… [A]fter finishing an operation at UCSF Medical Center, a surgeon usually completes the operative report, answers questions from medical students and residents, and reviews the conduct of the procedure with nurses. What the general public is unaware of is that the surgeon then faces being besieged by sales representatives from the device and pharmaceutical industries as he or she walks through the hallways of the operating room on the way to the waiting room to talk to the patient’s family. While the sales representative’s primary role is to provide a service to other surgeons utilizing their equipment or products at a medical center, there are few restrictions on utilizing their access for sales calls.

Since their presence validates Senator Grassley’s concerns about the intrusion of corporate interests and the ethical compromises at academic medical centers, perhaps Senator Grassley will some day bring an end to the OR hallway activities at UCSF and other institutions, which may present a more pervasive concern than ghostwriting…

Coming down hard on university students who plagiarize, but letting plagiarizing professors get away with it is a well-established national scandal… International, really, as in the recent case of New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera.

When I say well-established, I mean not only multiple individual cases at our best schools, like Harvard Law; I mean the department-wide, accepted practice of plagiarism throughout many American medical schools, where a combination of courtesy authorship and ghostwriting thoroughly undermines research integrity.

By December 8, a group of our best med schools must answer a questionnaire sent to them by Senator Charles Grassley, who wants to know why some of their faculty publish

medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

It’s just like the prestigious names at law schools, except that there the articles and books are written not by drug companies and their agents at ghostwriting firms, but by teams of students who essentially write the book for the professor, who then puts his or her name on it. This practice has its own name — it’s not called ghostwriting or courtesy authorship, but rather the atelier method.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

… Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.

“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”

.. there’s some asshole of an editor who’s probably getting a cut.

None of the [scientific journal] editors reported taking action against an author for ghostwriting. Their replies to [Senator Grassley’s letter to them about it], obtained by The New York Times, varied from assurances of editorial diligence to the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One editor in chief, for example, wrote that because his journal prohibited ghostwriting, the publication did not have a specific policy on the practice.

You see how it works. It’s like — America prohibits murder, so we don’t have a specific policy on the practice. The prohibition does the trick.

“Requiring someone to write a retraction or barring them from publishing in academic journals for some period of time — that would be an effective deterrent,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who has conducted research on the effect of conflict-of-interest disclosures in medicine. … Dr. Cynthia E. Dunbar, the editor in chief of Blood, said that, in the future, the journal would consider a ban of several years for authors caught lying about ghostwriting, in addition to retracting their ghosted articles.

Oh, now we’re getting harsh. Do we really have to go there? Look how effective university conflict of interest prohibitions are! They’ve got that COI language right there in the annual report of each professor, and does it ever do the trick.

“Plus,” said UD to Mr UD at lunch just now (they had leftover Chinese food plus an egg and cheese omelet), “there are ghost letters.”

“Ghosted scientific articles, and ghosted letters?”

“Listen to this:

[Jenny] White and colleague Lisa Bero, PhD, [both] of the University of California San Francisco, found 24 articles that were produced as a result of grants that Parke-Davis gave to [ghostwriting firm] Medical Education Systems in 1996 and 1997 to draft articles and letters to the editor regarding gabapentin [Neurontin] for publication in peer reviewed journals.

So they ghostwrite articles, and they ghostwrite letters in response to the articles they themselves have ghostwritten.”

“So… say a letter to the editor criticizing a ghostwritten article that the corporate ghost who’s written the original article then ghosts a response to is itself ghostwritten,” mused Mr UD. “If you catch my drift. Then you have significant research debate in high-level journals carried on exclusively by ghosts.”

“Ghost vs. Ghost, as Mad Magazine would say… But wait. Say the entire debate is carried on by the same ghost, in order to make the thing look more legit. Like, you know how corporate-generated, pretend-grassroots campaigns feature letters with on-purpose writing mistakes to make them look real? So maybe here you’re getting a vast fake controversy about the Neurontin results — all of it generated by one ghost, back and forth, back and forth with himself — here indignant, there defensive, here threatening to sue, there threatening to cancel his subscription… ”

“Fun!”

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(UD thanks Pharma Marketing Blog
for the image.)

America’s newspaper of record, and a high-profile senator, keep up the pressure.

But still nothing. And we need, once again, to ask why that is.  Why universities refuse to do anything about professors on their faculties who ghostwrite in medical research journals.

The New York Times has published yet another, even longer, exposé of faculty who do no work on articles to which they sign their name.  The true authors of the articles are drug companies who both shape the content of the articles and place them in journals read by prescribing physicians. 

The ghost professor essentially does nothing at all.  Nothing.  That’s why she’s called a ghost. She takes money from the company in exchange for allowing it to float her name over the article.  She often has little notion of what’s in the article. 

If she took the time to look, she’d find a whitewash.  An argument for the obvious superiority of the company’s drug over all competing drugs.  She’d find not a scientific article, but a commercial.

… [M]any universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.

With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

… “How long does it have to go on before it actually is stopped? One way to stop it would be if the actual authors were punished in some way,” said Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota. “But the academics who are complicit in it all never seem to be punished at all.”

… [B]ioethicists said that medical schools must take responsibility for faculty members whose publications do not explicitly acknowledge the work of writers receiving industry support. Such subsidized articles allow pharmaceutical companies to use the imprimatur of respected academics — and by extension, the stature of their institutions — to increase sales of certain drugs, ultimately skewing patient care, they said.

… [T]he medical school of a single university, Columbia, is home to three professors who were authors of Wyeth-financed articles.

… Dr. Michelle P. Warren, [is] a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia. Her article was published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2004, when women feared that Wyeth’s brand of hormone drugs could be causing particular problems. The thesis of the article was that no one hormone therapy was safer than another.

The published article acknowledged help from four people. But it did not disclose that DesignWrite employed two of those people and the other two worked at Wyeth. Court documents show DesignWrite sent a prepublication copy to Wyeth for vetting and charged Wyeth $25,000 for the article, information not disclosed in the paper.

In a phone interview, Dr. Warren said the article was intended to clear up confusion over the risks of hormone drugs. She said she worked on the project in phone conversations and in meetings… [Way to publish scientific research, honey. Over the phone and in meetings. Hi, it’s Michelle! How much for putting my name on the article? … Sounds good. Go ahead. Presto -Warren’s 155th article this year. Raise and promotion for research productivity coming up.]

 … A new policy at Columbia took effect in January. It prohibits medical school faculty, trainees and students from being authors or co-authors of articles written by employees of commercial entities if the author’s name or Columbia title is used without substantive contribution. [Lots of wiggle room in substantive, so that’s worthless.]  The policy, which does not retroactively cover articles like Dr. Warren’s, requires any article written with a for-profit company to include full disclosure of the role of each author, as well as any other industry contribution.

But Dr. Elliott, the bioethicist, said universities should go further than mere disclosure, prohibiting faculty members from working with industry-sponsored writers. Policies asking only for disclosure “allow pharmaceutical companies to launder their marketing messages,” he said.

No, the laundry will continue to get done; the whitewashing will go on as always. A multi-billion dollar industry can afford a lot of detergent.