Wherever you are — at MIT, the University of Ottawa, the University of Connecticut, the University of Sydney, etc…

How does it feel?

… of non-compliance.

… [M]ore than a dozen of the school’s doctors were paid speakers in apparent violation of [Stanford’s conflict of interest] policy.

… Dr. Alan Yeung, vice chairman of Stanford’s department of medicine and chief of cardiovascular medicine, who was paid $53,000 from Eli Lilly & Co. since 2009. In an e-mail, Yeung said he quit speaking for the company this fall.

“I take full responsibility for this error,” he said. “Even though I felt that these activities are worthwhile educational endeavors, the perceived monetary conflict may be too great.”

Child psychiatrist Hans Steiner was paid $109,000 by Lilly to deliver talks about a drug for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In an e-mail, Steiner said he spoke in “very rural and other impoverished settings which only have limited access to experts like me.”…

Those poor schlubs! You would deny them experts like me!

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The Stanford University Motto:

Adipiscitor pecuniam medicam cum ex digitis mortuis nostris revulseris.

(You’ll get our drug money when you pry it from our cold dead fingers.)

Here’s one. I’ll slightly modify this paragraph, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

New York prosecutors are poised to file civil fraud charges against Ernst & Young for its alleged role in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, saying the Big Four accounting firm stood by while the investment bank misled investors about its financial health, people familiar with the matter said.

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is close to filing the case, which would mark the first time a major accounting firm was targeted for its role in the financial crisis. The suit stems from transactions Lehman allegedly carried out to make its risk appear lower than it actually was.

Lehman Brothers was long one of Ernst & Young’s biggest clients, and the accounting firm earned approximately $100 million in fees for its auditing work from 2001 through 2008, say people familiar with the matter.

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Here’s my prediction:

Prosecutors are poised to file fraud charges against a group of American and Canadian university professors, saying the professors, all from medical schools, put their names on ghostwritten studies that allowed pharmaceutical companies to mislead prescribers, and other Americans, about the safety of some of the companies’ products.

The case will mark the first time university professors have been targeted for their role in the nation’s massive pharma fraud. The professors will be charged with making the risk of certain medications appear lower than it actually was.

The University of Massachusetts system has attracted a lot of attention on this blog lately — whoring after bone marrow, whoring after Adderall, upsetting the neighbors, adding – at a time of low employment for new lawyers, and in a state with plenty of law schools – an unimpressive new law school…

Some of these things are typical university events (the drugs; annoying the neighbors) some are weird (the marrow) and some are bafflingly self-destructive (the law school). When you put them all together, they suggest a system adrift.

A reader, Jeremy, sends UD this article from today’s Boston Globe about the “oversubscribed classes and faculty shortage” on the Amherst campus. They’ve gone seriously adjunct and way-seriously online. “Only half of UMass Amherst students graduate in four years, and 66 percent do so in six years.” We know that the online course completion rate is much lower than the in-class, so these numbers will almost certainly rise. A sociology professor summarizes: “The expectation has cheapened.’’

Students are sitting in dorm rooms teaching themselves by watching movies with their professors in them.

Eventually the state of Massachusetts will see the light. It will shut down the physical U Mass campus and put the whole thing online.

The University Child Development School, a private elementary school, sits directly across the street from Jiggles.

Like the one about a benighted congregation that hires as pastor some Elmer Gantry who shows up and looks presentable.

There was Rafer Byrdsong, liar, bigamist, what have you.

Now there’s Rev. Drumheller, fraudster, child murderer, all-’round degenerate.

Both men boast diploma mill degrees. No one ever checks.

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UD thanks her sister for the link to the Drumheller story.

The case of Canadian artist Bill Reid once more draws UD‘s attention to one of the animating themes of her blog: The disappearance of the human from the human realm. As Reid (who died in 1998) became more famous, he withdrew more and more from actually making anything, fobbing the sculpting onto copyists whose names never appeared on the work, and who got little money for their labors. Sometimes Reid didn’t even bother with the vision thing. He “copied designs from other sources, instructed acolytes to craft them, then signed the finished products and took the credit–and profits–for himself.”

Once he became really famous, “almost everything was carved, painted or fabricated to a significant degree by other artists and assistants.” As one observer notes — in regard to the images of artifacts in, say, the Smithsonian, that Reid would hand to some hack for sculpting, after which Reid would put his name on the sculpture — “the collector is getting something that Bill never touched.” Describing the “near-fakery” of Reid’s later work in particular, Thomas Hoving remarks, “The soul of the artist is in the finish.”

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Think of this soulless model in academic terms. Think of the ateliers of law students who write famous Harvard law school professors’ books for them. The labs of young scientists who write famous scientists’ papers for them. Think of much-in-the-news, pharma-subsidized, ghostwriting firms like Scientific Therapeutics Information Inc.

Make room in your imagination for the massive ghost-world of the modern American mind.

Consider the bizarre trajectory of brain-fame in this country, in which the farther you go, the higher you float in a spectrosphere, where, like the artist Stephen Dedalus describes in Portrait of the Artist, you waver above your handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring your fingernails. The artist, says Dedalus, is “like the God of the creation.”

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Go back to that collector. The collector “getting something Bill never touched.” What’s in it for the collector?

Well, you could flatten this out and say that the collector is only in it for the money, and Reid’s name on anything means money. But the word used here is collector, not trader. What is the collector getting by gazing at a Bill Reid fake?

Think of what Matthew Arnold says about the religion of art in secular culture:

There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Hoving, in other words, is wrong. The etherealized artist or scientist or legal theorist of our day isn’t like the God of the creation. His ghosted ambience is the strongest part of our religion today.

Who will be surprised that our Dear Thought Leaders, bearers of the illusion of an idea, come to think of themselves as divine?

What sort of self-image would you elaborate if billion-dollar companies lavished goods on you merely for your imprimatur on their claims about synthetic hormones?

In our time, the artistic soul, the intellectual spirit, bubbles up as from some Icelandic lava lake. And lo, the glory of the Lord shines round about us.

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Lords of the journals and the installations; lords too of the empty lecture halls, where – avatars of the new classroom instructor – these emanations vaporize, like some haywire balsamic reduction, all the way up to nothingness.

… American medical school professors.

Without the ghostwriters and the guest writers and the Continuing Medical Education guys and gals and the hidden investors and … I dunno… just all the folks on our med school faculties who find a way every single day to lend academic respectability to this industry, it wouldn’t get done!

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NPR asks:

Why the big jump in pharma fraud? More aggressive enforcement plays a role. But so does the dwindling pipeline of new drugs, which Public Citizen says pressures companies to “maximize sales of their existing products by any means.”

Despite the soaring penalties, the consumer group says the current system of prosecution and recovery isn’t working, because companies can take even the biggest settlements in stride. What’s needed, says Public Citizen, is more criminal prosecution — and the prospect of jail time for pharma executives.

UD‘s advice for academia’s pharmawhores: Keep at it. Look at the size of the settlements these companies can take in stride. Plenty of money here for everyone.

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“The danger to public safety and loss of state and federal dollars that comes with these violations require a more robust response,” [Sidney] Wolfe said.

Oh poo. Spare us the moralizing.

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Martha Rosenberg casts a fond eye back at the year in pills.

A being has the same,” writes Emily Dickinson in The Bone that Has No Marrow.

Bones in need of marrow need people willing to be bone marrow donors; non-profit institutions like university hospitals are among the beings who have obligations to handle the pulling in of donors in a seemly and humane way.

After all, they’re non-profits, dedicated to education and healing. Right?

That perennial class act, the University of Massachusetts, burnishes its reputation once again:

… UMass Memorial Health Care Inc.’s use of pricey models in short skirts and spike heels to entice people to sign up for its bone marrow registry, while allegedly misleading consumers about the cost of testing, has drawn scrutiny of the hospital chain from authorities in New Hampshire.

Condemning the practice as a scam involving “suspect marketing and billing practices,’’ New Hampshire Attorney General Michael A. Delany yesterday announced a major probe of shopping-mall bone marrow donor recruitment drives by UMass Memorial and its subsidiary, the Caitlin Raymond International Registry.

James T. Boffetti, New Hampshire senior assistant attorney general, said in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon that his office will investigate potential criminal violations of New Hampshire’s Consumer Protection Act as part of a joint probe with the state’s Insurance Department.

Caitlin Raymond staff and the models from a Boston agency, which charged UMass Memorial between $40,000 and $50,000 a week for about a year and a half, told potential donors that the DNA test required to join the registry did not cost anything, Boffetti said.

However, UMass Memorial billed the potential donors’ insurance companies as much as $4,300 per test, far more than the roughly $100 charged by most labs, according to Boffetti.

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A new fighting song for U Mass.

We whore for bone marrow
Through malls broad and narrow…

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UD thanks Dennis.

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Not that I want to pile on, but really.

… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.

And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.

Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:

For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.

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Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.

They went into it together, like the buddies they are, all of them getting their pretend degrees so that they could get raises.

Then the shit hit the fan.

And now they’re suing together for “extreme emotional distress.”

Good luck, lads.

Yale Daily News:

[Yale] School of Medicine professor Kimberly Yonkers [denied having ghostwritten an article about the anti-depressant drug Paxil. She] claimed she edited the writing company’s draft substantially.

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From an earlier Yale Daily News article:

The [litigation-related] documents related to Yonkers’ study include the cover page of the first draft the medical publishing company Scientific Therapeutics Information produced showing favorable results of the drug, [investigator Paul] Thacker said. The draft’s cover lists the Scientific Therapeutics Information writers who prepared the document as well as Yonkers, but the published study does not credit the Scientific Therapeutics Information writers who drafted the report for their contribution, nor does it refer to their company.

… the shaky moral foundations of the business school.

… gets a Friday class.

3. College presidents who sit on corporate boards have faced criticism and even lawsuits when things go wrong. Some have decided it’s not worth the hassle. Match the college leader with the board from which he or she resigned:

A. Erroll B. Davis Jr., then-chancellor of the University System of Georgia

B. Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown U.

C. E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State U.

D. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

a. Stepped down last year from the board of Massey Energy Company, owner the West Virginia mine where 29 miners died in April.

b. Resigned board position at BP five days before the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April.

c. Left the board of Goldman Sachs in March, a month before the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company with fraud for its role in the subprime-mortgage crisis.

d. Left the board of NYSE Euronext in April, but is paid more than $1-million annually for service on five other boards, in addition to an academic salary of $1.6-million.

Yeah, that last one’s Shirley Ann Jackson – everyone knows that. Too easy.

But with today’s news out of Goldman Sachs, it’s a good moment to honor the many years of loyal service the president of Brown University (she’s c.) gave the Goldman Sachs compensation committee.