According to a Senate report released in December, Gilead knew pricing Sovaldi at $75,000 per patient for a 12-month course would restrict patient access by 24% of US payers, and yet it still ended up seeking $84,000 for it. The company priced Harvoni at an even higher $94,500, such that last year barely 2% of the eligible [hepatitis C virus] patients in the US were treated with the drugs.
Sure, that’s much more than one-tenth of one percent.
Nonetheless. Get the picture? Only a small number of rich people get to be cured.
Gilead is so depraved that the Massachusetts Attorney General is stepping in (though she probably can’t do much about it). Yet the story hasn’t even gotten much press, because as Americans we’re so used to homicidal greed.
****************
Sanders owns this reality. He’s running with it. He’s running on it.
****************
The letter from the AG went out to Gilead CEO John Martin, a man who has brought his depravity to the board of trustees at the University of Chicago.
****************
The lovely larger picture.
****************
Never before has Norman Mailer’s immortal statement felt so true: The shits are killing us.
[T]here is nothing funny about playing [University of Massachusetts] home games in sprawling but nearly vacant Gillette Stadium …
Au contraire, the situation at U Mass, with its new law school (LOLOLOLOL) and way gussied up football program and ongoing tradition of student rioting, etc., etc., is hilarious.
Those who criticized the [football program’s] upgrade were ridiculed in 2011 as small-minded, anti-football or lacking in school spirit. Nearly five years later, everything they warned about has come true: low attendance, a nomadic existence that includes games at a cavernous stadium too distant for students to attend, spiraling costs…
A university composed of nomads wandering to cavernous stadiums. That’s funny.
As another uncertain offseason begins … the questions about the expanded, much more expensive UMass football program continue to be less about where they should play FBS football, but why.
Why? Let me help you with that one. I quote an earlier University Diaries post:
U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead?
You wouldn’t want the mobs going after the (shudder) professors, would you? Who’d teach the courses?
University Diaries has followed the very strange public university system of Massachusetts for quite some time. Virtually all of its campuses clamor for attention. There’s the pointless bankrupting football program, the drunk and violent students… and, of course, the spanking new law school.
Yes. Law school. New law school. In the current climate for lawyers, U Mass opened, just a few years ago, a new law school.
Everyone with half a brain tried shouting it down, but up it went, with all sorts of cretinous promises (“the state would even earn a profit as enrollment was projected to more than double by 2017″). Its first president was quickly fired for financial malfeasance. It’s almost four million dollars in debt, and it’s shrinking its enrollment. Plus it’s not yet accredited.
UD is speechless.
***********
UD thanks Andre.
… just go to this page, and remind yourself that Sheldon Silver won the 2012 William M. Bulger (once president of the University of Massachusetts!) Excellence in State Leadership Award.
Yech.
********************
Oh goody. There’s a university professor involved. So far unnamed. UD‘s thinking identifying the person ain’t gonna be too hard.
[It is alleged that] Silver directed state research money to a university doctor in Manhattan, and that the doctor referred lucrative asbestos cases to Silver’s firm of Weitz & Luxenberg. The doctor is described as a “well-known expert” who “conducts mesothelioma research” and who had created a center at his university by or before 2002 related to that subject. The doctor, not named in the complaint, “has entered into an agreement with the USAO SDNY [U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York] under which he will not be prosecuted for the conduct described herein, and that obligates him to provide truthful information to and cooperate with the government.”
As for Preet Bharara, without whom this corruption-besotted blog could not function:
[N]othing about Bharara’s pedigree suggested he planned to burn down the New York State Democratic Party [UD is a deep-blue Democrat. She owns a house in New York State. But she’s got no loyalty to that state’s notoriously corrupt political establishment.]… Bharara, with two more years in office, is that particularly dangerous and rare political figure: a federal prosecutor who doesn’t give a fuck.
***********************
Oh. Okay. Well that wasn’t any challenge at all. Taub’s name came up immediately in a Google search; but here it is all over the papers.
The state money was provided to Dr. Robert Taub [another Yeshiva University grad] for research by the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation — with some of the additional funds going for unspecified “additional benefits” to the doctor’s family, the court papers charges.
Taub, who is affiliated with Columbia University, is cooperating with the FBI, court papers revealed. Silver sponsored a May 2011 “official resolution” by the assembly honoring Taub.
**********************
He’s a recipient of the “Collaborator Award,” which has a special ring to it now.
Two things you can be sure of when you teach online via a campus platform:
1. Your university is watching.
2. There’s a written record of everything you say.
All sorts of eyes are peering into your online course: Your students, naturally; but also university administrators, on-campus tech people, the for-profit firm your school has probably hired to manage various course functions, etc. This is not a … freedom-rich environment. Not for blowing off the course and giving everyone an A, and not for sexual harassment.
MIT has removed the lectures of a retired faculty member from a popular online learning platform after determining that he had sexually harassed a woman on the Internet, the school’s News Office announced Monday.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology began investigating the matter after a learner on the platform MITx filed a complaint against Walter Lewin in October. According to the MIT News Office website, the alleged victim said the harassment began when she was a learner in one of Lewin’s online courses.
During the investigation, MIT also looked at additional interactions between Lewin and other online learners.
UD is guessing that the actual harassment occurred outside of the course’s comment threads; she’s guessing that some relatively light, slightly off-color badinage happened in those threads, and that the badinage at some point moved onto gchat or email exchanges… Though it’s always possible Lewin was stupid enough to put harassing words into the course interactions proper…
But anyway. Get a load of the picture the Globe ran with the piece!
That’s a nice gentlemanly way to put it. A member of America’s most homicidal university fraternity (its body count puts even FAMU’s Merry Manslaughterers to shame) fails, in his comment in this post’s headline, to register the difference between bad things happening to you (adversity) and bad people killing you (murder, manslaughter, via hazing). Maybe this …. I dunno… call it moral aphasia… accounts for the fact that despite the truckload of bodies Sigma Alpha Epsilon has racked up, its members continue to perceive it as a fashioner of gentlemen… They’re constantly using the word gentlemen in talking about the place…
UD‘s take on this is what you’d expect. She understands that men in certain sorts of groups will always want to torture and kill each other. She fails to see why this activity should take place at universities, on campus or off. Attaching the word “gentlemen” to this activity has a nice rough irony to it, and UD is alive to this fun use of language. But it doesn’t really take you very far, again, in the direction of universities.
******************
Now, as universities become desperate about declining enrollments and that big ol’ loan to pay back on the new stadium, they will certainly be tempted, like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to specialize in admitting all the violent gentlemen no other university wants. Big ol’ gangs of them, year after year, to bond and riot and haze. Like Zoo Mass (update on its AMAZING football team, football conference, game attendance, and stadium choices, here), these schools will get a reputation, and all the gentlemen in the vicinity will make a point of attending them.
In the not too distant future, Richie Incognito will be the president of a university.
*****************
But back to Sigma whatever. Talk about adversity. Even a bank as astoundingly scummy as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase finds this frat too scummy to do business with.
Early this month, JPMorgan Chase stopped managing an investment account for a prominent client: the charitable foundation of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest fraternities.
The bank was concerned about SAE’s bad publicity, according to Anthony Alberico, a JPMorgan vice president who dealt with the foundation. SAE has had 10 deaths linked to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other fraternity.
“If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” said Bradley Cohen, SAE’s national president. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”
Well. There’s always Goldman Sachs.
… is sort of like being Oscar Pistorius’s defense lawyer over and over again. For years, Blaguszewski’s role as spokesperson for the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been to, uh, yes, acknowledge that some of the lads at the school are a mite violent. They riot; they throw beer cans at the police; they assault and batter with dangerous weapons; they pick spectacular fights.
And they have for years; vicious drunken rioting is a long tradition at the school, and things are getting worse. The latest riot – today’s riot – has so far produced 46 arrests.
And poor Ed Blaguszewski keeps getting wheeled out to say the school is appalled at these bad apples but most of the students are great and hey I’ll bet a bunch of the troublemakers aren’t even really U Mass students …
**************
UPDATE: There’s Got to Be a Morning After…
Arrests are now up to 73.
Collecting bottles and cans around the scene of the mayhem Saturday night, Amherst resident Raul Colon told the Gazette that the day’s events looked like “a revolution, like in the countries that have revolutions between the students and the government.”
And there’s this intriguing tidbit about what you pay for in Pennsylvania when your taxes pay for public universities:
Other colleges across the country have gone on high alert around St. Patrick’s Day to deal with alcohol-fueled students. At Penn State, the school paid licensed liquor establishments to stay closed this month during the unofficial drinking holiday known as State Patty’s Day for the second year in a row.
Your higher education taxes at work!
Well, at Penn State they’ve been paying for (cough) all manner of things for a couple of years now.
But in the world of big-time sports, who listens to them? What do you think this is, an institution of higher learning?
UD has told you about U Mass (gruesome posts aplenty here), so you aren’t surprised that this absurdity has now fired at great expense their new coach, and will soon hire at great expense another new coach. No one comes to the games, so it’s not clear to whom this activity has any relevance.
Oh yeah. U Mass professors. And I guess students.
… Cloverfield.
Under the leadership of free spending Evan Dobelle, Westfield State University has taken on the feel of a horror film. Every day brings new financial and legal disaster. Most recently, the state of Massachusetts, displeased with Dobelle’s apparent misuse of public money, has frozen much of the school’s funding.
All of this because – with full knowledge of his scandalous behavior at his previous employer, the University of Hawaii – Westfield went ahead and hired this man.
I
Doldrums
From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.
Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.
Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.
UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.
Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.
********************************
II
An Update
** UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.
** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.
Saturday, 11 January
651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local
5:15–6:30 p.m.
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.
Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.
** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.
… but their tendency toward insularity and self-regard is easy to satirize. By definition, they must be small lest admission cease to be an honor; but this very smallness – and the always somewhat obscure (and to some extent corruptible) business of how one gets in – represents a danger.
Todd Wallack, an enterprising Boston Globe reporter, broke the story of Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s apparent fake credentials, as well as her very real obscene salary and perks as head of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She handles a tiny staff and budget and makes more than most university presidents.
Now the Massachusetts attorney general is looking into the matter (a law firm is already on the case), and of course I’ve already talked about the hydra-headed nature of almost all organizations — even small ones. So we can expect a Berlowitz blow-out pretty soon, in which rumors about her bullying of staff, use of a limo for the short trip between the AAAS and her apartment, etc., etc., are confirmed…
Looking ahead, we can also see that the AAAS will go from invisible (Les UD’s own a house fifty yards from the AAAS and knew virtually nothing about it) to notorious in the public eye. Notorious and ridiculous.
… the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The university has closed down and asked students and anyone else on campus to shelter in place.
… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.
Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.
6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.
So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!
OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!
Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”
General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.
***************
UD thanks Andre.
An ABC news pundit just summed up the problem that’s kept the Republicans down in this election. And we can quote it here at University Diaries because it’s a university reference.
UD will cop to being extremely excited to hear, just now, that Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts. UD has been a big supporter of Warren from the start, and it’s been a close race throughout. Big sigh.