Category: Academic Horror Story

The Jenijoy La Belle Tenure Case at Caltech

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Jenijoy La Belle is a Professor of English at Caltech. Her tenure case, which started in the 1970s, is the main topic of this interview. Because of one person — Robert Huttenback — she was at first denied tenure. Amazingly, she managed to get tenure anyway. In the middle of the fight, which promised to become very embarrassing to Caltech, Huttenback became Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara.

Here is a related story from another interview:

One day on a Saturday or Sunday, I was in Baxter [Baxter Hall of Social Sciences and] picking up my mail upstairs. There was nobody else there but Huttenback and a young Turk— a young professor of economics, I guess, who is now of course a famous full professor somewhere, perhaps even retired. They were in the office that Jenijoy was going to have and next to it was the men’s toilet. And they were talking about playing a joke. The goal was to make the situation as uncomfortable—more than uncomfortable, offensive—for Jenijoy as possible. And I will not—I remember exactly what they were doing, but it is so crude that I will not tell you.

Here is one of La Belle’s comments:

In 1982, someone sent me a clipping from the Santa Barbara News and Review, from a column that sounded more like gossip than news. But it simply began: “Even in UCSB circles familiar with Chancellor Robert Huttenback’s perquisites of power, the situation has caused comment. Why do university cars and drivers transport Freda Huttenback, his better half, on personal business? Campus employees, from maintenance to clerical workers, tell us of receiving a Xeroxed map to the Huttenbacks’ home and directions to chauffeur her wherever she asks. These trips have reportedly included visits to a Ventura chiropractor. “Huttenback defends the practice by calling his wife a consultant to the university on interior design matters, saying that she occasionally needs a university car and driver for decorating business. Huttenback first denied he or his wife ever used the car for personal errands: ‘Whoever told you that must be someone I fired,’ was his reply.”

Huttenback was eventually convicted of fraud. He defends himself here.

The Corruption of Drug Trials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a clinical trial of a new antipsychotic drug done at the University of Minnesota, a man named Dan Weiss was given a choice: be hospitalized in a psych ward or, shockingly, “take part in an industry-funded study of antipsychotic drugs”. The usual choice is between hospitalization or conventional treatment. Weiss chose to be in the clinical trial. During the trial he killed himself.

An FDA investigator named Sharon Matson decided that Weiss had not been coerced into participating! During a trial, Moira Keane, the head of the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board, which of course is meant to protect human subjects, claimed the purpose of the board was not to protect human subjects. The purpose of the board, Keane said, was “to make sure that Olson and the trial sponsor had a plan to protect subjects.” This is false. IRBs sometimes measure compliance, not just plans.

After Weiss’s mom sued the University of Minnesota and lost,

The university filed a legal action against Mary, demanding that she pay the university $57,000 to cover its legal expenses. Gale Pearson, one of Mary’s attorneys, says that while such suits are technically permissible, she had never seen one filed in her previous 14 years of legal practice. The university agreed to drop the lawsuit against Mary only when she agreed not to appeal the judge’s decision.

The article by Carl Elliott about this case also contains excellent discussion of how drug companies shape clinical trials to get the results they want — and when that fails, hide the results. The effect is that new drugs are approved that are worse than the drugs they replace.

Thanks to James Andrewartha.

Academic Horror Story (Duke University)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Duke University officials have known since 2009 that there were serious problems with Anil Potti’s research — serious enough to believe it is fraudulent. Here is how one researcher put it:

The Duke investigators said their data showed that expression of a particular gene, ERCC1, correlated with response to some agents. However, the commercial microarray chip the Duke investigators said they used in their experiments does not include that gene. “I admit this is one for which I do not have a simple, charitable explanation,” [said] Dr. Baggerly.

Potti, you may remember, lied about having a Rhodes Fellowship. Duke’s first investigation found him innocent.

Later events caused Duke officials to reconsider. They are still making up their minds. This is a horror story because a clinical trial based on Potti’s research is in progress. A hundred cancer patients are getting treated according to Potti’s research — that is, according to research that is probably fraudulent. Duke has done nothing to warn the patients or stop the trial.

The whole thing reminds me of UC Berkeley researchers taking weeks to tell a woman she had a large lump in her brain. As if their legal liability were more important than her life.

Why UC Berkeley is Investigating Peter Duesberg

Seth Roberts14 Comments

In November, UC Berkeley launched an investigation of Professor Peter Duesberg for misconduct associated with a paper of his retracted from Medical Hypotheses. According to the letter sent Duesberg informing him of the investigation, there were two allegations. One was that his paper had been withdrawn by the publisher due to “issues of credibility and false claims.” The other was that “you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your co-authors.” Duesberg tried to learn more about what he was accused of, without success. Finally the university sent him the letters of complaint that led to the investigation. Here they are.

  

The first letter is incredibly vague. The “issues of credibility and false claims” aren’t spelled out and it is unclear why the University of California should care that “Bruce Rasnick failed to declare his conflict of interest.” The idea that publishing a dissenting paper about AIDS is an “attempt to discredit the academic community” is worthy of Orwell.

The second letter has several strange features. First, it contradicts itself. It says:

[Statement 1] Until recently, he [Rasnick] worked as a researcher for a company, the Dr Rath Health Foundation Canada [owned by Mattias Rath] [Statement 2] [Rasnick’s] former (and possibly current) employer, Mattias Rath.

Statement 1 says Rasnick no longer works for Rath. Statement 2 says he might still work for Rath.

Second, its logic is outside the way conflict of interest is normally understood. Because you used to work for someone that might benefit from your paper, you now have a conflict of interest? This makes no sense.

Finally, there is the weird idea that because something is “possible” — Mattias Rath is “possibly” Rasnick’s current employer — it deserves a misconduct investigation. It’s possible that a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn tomorrow.

In spite of all this, UC Berkeley administrators allowed themselves to be used to punish dissent.

Academic Horror Story (UC Berkeley – 2)

Seth Roberts32 Comments

Peter Duesberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, has been accused of misconduct for writing a paper espousing an unpopular idea (that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS) — and the university administration is taking this seriously! Here is the letter Duesberg received.

This is major-league harassment, similar to the human-subjects complaint against Michael Bailey. And it’s Berkeley’s second Academic Horror Story. Previously, Berkeley administrators carefully delayed an experimental subject from learning she had a big lump in her brain.

More “ You can be as nasty as you like” (John Cleese on extremism, via Marginal Revolution).
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Academic Horror Story (Harvard University)

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Are the heads of large companies worse than the rest of us? Aaron Swartz said as much when, in a discussion of Ken Auletta’s Googled, he called them “sociopaths”. Nicholson Baker seemed to have had similar thoughts when he said about the same book that “what Auletta mainly does is talk shop with C.E.O.’s, and that is the great strength of the book.”

Lawrence Summers, now in the Obama administration, was head of Harvard University, one of the world’s most powerful companies, from 2001 to 2006. Everyone knows about Summers’ repeated tendency to do the incredibly-inappropriate thing. A generous interpretation of those incidents is that Summers had lived a sheltered life. I believe they were signs of something much worse — signs of pathology — based on what he did to one of Harvard’s best employees:

Back in 2002, a new employee of Harvard University’s endowment manager named Iris Mack wrote a letter to the school’s president, Lawrence Summers, that would ultimately get her fired.

In the letter, dated May 12 of that year, Mack told Summers that she was “deeply troubled and surprised” by things she had seen in her new job as a quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Co.

She would go on to say, in later e-mails and conversations, that she felt the endowment was taking on too much risk in derivatives investments, and that she suspected some of her colleagues were engaging in insider trading, according to a separate letter written by her lawyer that summarized the correspondence.

On July 2 Mack was fired. But six years later, the kinds of investments she allegedly warned about did blow up on Harvard. The endowment plunged 22 percent last summer, in part due to the collapse of the credit markets. . . .

Mack, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard, had been with Harvard Management for just four months when she approached Summers. She asked him to keep her communications confidential, or risk making her life “a living hell.”

But on July 1, Mack was called into a meeting by her boss, Jack Meyer, then the head of Harvard Management.

The next day Meyer fired her, according to the letter from her attorney, Jonathan Margolis, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. Meyer told Mack that she was fired for making “baseless allegations against HMC to individuals outside of HMC,” according to the Margolis letter.

Mack writes to Summers, alerting him to behavior by her co-workers that she believed could (and eventually did) have a very bad effect on Harvard. Fearing loss of her job, she asks him to keep her warning confidential. Summers fails to honor her request. What distinguishes this particular horrible behavior from more conventional examples of horrible behavior by incredibly powerful people is that Summers’ action did him no good. He didn’t backstab Mack to get to the top. He was at the top. He didn’t exploit Mack. He didn’t cheat Mack. This is coming across a courageous decent far-seeing person, much less powerful than you, who is trying to help you and all the people in your care . . . and giving that person a good hard kick. For no reason. There is something very wrong with Lawrence Summers.

Frontline’s recent show The Warning tells how Brooksley Born, when she was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1996-1999), did her best to protect the rest of us from exactly what Mack warned about. Summers told her, according to a third party, “you’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II. I have 13 bankers in my office that have informed me of this. Stop. Right away.”

Academic Horror Story (Stanford University)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From the Washington Post:

At the open house, a STEP [Stanford Teacher Education Program] instructor asked [Michelle Kerr] if she planned to accept the offer of admission [to Stanford’s School of Education]. Anyone else would have said yes. But Kerr, who calls herself “fatally truthful,” said the tuition would be difficult to afford and admitted she was philosophically out of sync with the program. . . .

[Professor of Education Rachel Lotan, the director of STEP,] called Kerr in for a 45-minute session on her doubts about the STEP policy orientation. Wouldn’t she be more comfortable elsewhere? Even when university ombudsman David Arnot Rasch assured Kerr the offer of admission was binding, Lotan couldn’t let it go. According to Kerr, Lotan looked for legal grounds to keep Kerr out, something Kerr said she discovered when another official mistakenly sent her an email that was meant just for Lotan.

“I really can’t believe this response,” the official said of Kerr’s decision to accept admission and decline another meeting with Lotan. “Are you forwarding her response to the lawyer?”

Kerr called Lotan “a ruthless political animal who believes she was protecting her program from enemy infiltration.” During a second meeting with Kerr, Lotan said that she asked a lawyer about the possibility of rescinding Kerr’s admission. The lawyer had told her that was untenable. “Unfortunately,” said Lotan.

After Kerr became a student at Stanford, Lotan tried to get her in trouble at her internship school. In an official letter to Kerr, Lotan complained “you raised your voice.”

More about this.

Academic Horror Story (Reed College)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Reed College, my alma mater, gets some very bad publicity. An extremely smart student named Chris Langan chose Reed over the University of Chicago, which thirty years later he calls “a huge mistake.” While he was at Reed, his mom failed to fill out a form to renew his scholarship. Here’s what Langan told Gladwell:

At some point, it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it’s all gone, so I’m afraid you don’t have a scholarship anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit about their students. There was no counseling, mo mentoring, nothing.

Losing his scholarship did Langan enormous damage. He never finished college. According to Gladwell, Langan is wrong.

Langan talks about dealing with Reed . . . as if [it] were some kind of vast and unyielding government bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. [No examples given.] . . . Would [the physicist Robert] Oppenheimer [supposedly more persuasive than Langan] have lost his scholarship at Reed? . . . Of course not.

That is the myth of the small liberal arts college, yes. But how true is the myth — at least in the case of Reed?

About seven years ago, I returned to Reed to give a talk. I had some spare time so I decided to visit Reed’s best-known course, a survey of Western Civilization that is required of all freshman and sophomores. I hadn’t had to take it because I entered Reed as a junior. I wondered what it was about. I found it. The large lecture hall was almost empty. Maybe there were 15 students; the enrollment must have been about 400. A young professor was giving a staggeringly boring lecture about some Greek classic.

Later I asked a Reed student why attendance was so low. She said that in the very beginning, fall semester (it was now spring semester), attendance was high but the students quickly realized the lectures weren’t helpful and stopped coming. The lecturer, I realized, didn’t care about the students. He didn’t have tenure and was trying to impress an older professor I’d seen in the audience who might influence whether he got tenure.

I’ve told Reed professors this story. They did not explain why a required course, really the required course, supposedly the centerpiece of a Reed education, was/is so poorly taught.

I think Langan’s story and the Western Civ story are two examples of how most colleges, including small liberal arts colleges, are not run for the benefit of students. I imagine the Reed professors I spoke to understood this; but it was unspeakable. I think the result is a power-law distribution of damage: A large fraction of students suffer small bad things (such as a lecture that’s a waste of time and tuition) and a small fraction of students (such as Langan) suffer nightmarishly-bad treatment.

For Whom Do Colleges Exist?

The !Golden Rule and Reed College.