Category: Academic Horror Story

Starting in 2011, Carolyn Willingham, a tutor at the University of North Carolina, complained to the press about fake classes for athletes. In place of an education, she said, athletes, some of whom could barely read, were encouraged to take fake classes, such as classes that never met.

Jim Dean, executive vice chancellor and provost, responded to her charges like this:

Dean asked Willingham to provide raw test data supporting her analysis. She declined, explaining that she’d obtained the confidential information by promising the university’s Institutional Review Board not to share it with anyone. She told Dean he could obtain the data directly from the athletic department, which gathered it in the first place. He declined to do as she suggested. “If she had the proof,” Dean says, “why wouldn’t she share the proof?”

Later Dean handled Willingham’s charges like this:

Dean said of Willingham: “She’s said our students can’t read, our athletes can’t read, and that’s a lie.”

In fact, Willingham had said

18 out of the 183 special admit athletes whose records she assessed read at roughly a third-grade level. An additional 110 of the athletes, she said, read at between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. She never said that most, let alone all, of the 800 athletes at UNC are illiterate, and she said nothing at all about the other 18,000 undergraduates.

When challenged, Dean conceded he’d misspoken.

Even the reporter, apparently, finds Dean’s defense repugnant. An important detail is that Willingham, who is wealthy, did not need the job. She was free to say whatever she wanted.

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 One was that his paper had been withdrawn by the publisher due to “issues of credibility and false claims.”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.

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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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.”

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.

In an undergraduate poetry class, Joe Newbury writes,

The first assignment [was] to write a one-page description of our influences and what they meant to us. I submitted a tongue-in-cheek, but graphic and flamboyantly described list: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, [and] a woman I’d slept with who had a giant mole on her rear end.

After this, his teachers forwarded all his work to the university administration, without telling him (and later denying it). Somehow this forwarded work showed he was dangerous. Eventually a cop told him,

“I believe you are a threat to yourself and to the people around you. If the University is not going to do anything about it, I will.’ She then announced that she was contacting Social Services to have my daughter taken away.

Because of something he wrote in poetry class.

From Claudia Adkison, Emory University dean, to Charles Nemeroff, Emory University professor of psychiatry, in a 2006 memo:

I have been grateful that the reporter was not sophisticated enough to ask all the right questions.

Grateful. She was grateful. Ugh. Double ugh. Professor Nemeroff, you’ll recall, took vast sums of money to advocate the prescription of dangerous drugs to millions of people and hid this fact, even after several warnings. Dean Adkison was grateful, let me repeat, that a reporter didn’t ask “all the right questions” to expose this.

This is why New York Times reporter John Schwartz’s lack of understanding matters.

I am visiting Philadelphia. Yesterday I learned that if you want to do human subjects research at Drexel University you must:

1. Include indemnification language in the consent form. The subject must promise to not sue Drexel no matter what happens. This is a bluff: You cannot sign away your ability to sue. Of course this requirement leaves subjects more vulnerable, not less, the usual purpose of consent forms. Shades of twisted skepticism.

2. Never contact subjects via email.

3. Never advertise your research on the web.

4. Never contact subjects who have been in a previous experiment.

The Drexel IRB (Institutional Review Board) will never approve any study that involves giving any drug to a non-patient. This means the very important studies by David Healy that involved giving Prozac to ordinary (non-depressed) people — some of whom became suicidal — wouldn’t be possible.

I suppose it’s no surprise that Drexel IRB members, such as literature professors, criticize research designs. In an NPR piece, a former IRB member boasted about the accomplishments of her membership, which included correcting faulty designs. At UC Berkeley a few years ago, I submitted to the animal research IRB a proposal to test with rats a key observation behind the Shangri-La Diet: Drinking sugar water caused me to lose weight. The proposal was turned down: It couldn’t possibly be true that sugar water can cause weight loss, said the IRB. Testing this idea was a waste of time.

IRB Watch. Earlier post about IRBs.

The following letter is from a Swedish professor who was president of the European Society of Pediatric Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Background about Ranjit Chandra.

Lerum, March 16^th 2008

Dear Prof Roberts,

The correspondence/letters I have found or remembered are as follows.

1. In 1993, The European Society of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology, ESPACI) intended to publish a position paper on Cow’s milk allergy(1). In my position as secretary of ESPACI, I wrote that paper in collaboration with the authors listed. We had intense discussions on whether or not we should cite Prof Chandra, whom we all knew, but did not trust, mainly since we found his inclusion criteria and symptoms curious and not according to scientific knowledge at that time. We also opposed, since he had not performed any blinded oral provocation tests and several authors, e.g. Arne Host(2) have found that less than 50 % of those reporting symptoms at exposure had cow’s milk allergy at scheduled blinded oral provocation testing. I wrote a letter to the dean of the university of St John asking whether or not the rumors about Prof Chandra, that his nurse/secretary(?) had produced the results without the involvement of patients, were true. The reply was: ”Since the allegations against Prof. Chandra have not been proven or disproven, he is still in office”. I do not find that letter in my files.
2. In 1997 Ranjit Chandra published a 5 yrs follow up study on his cow’s milk allergic children(3). This paper included DBPCFC. Then some of my colleagues drew the conclusion that everything was in order.
3. In 1998 we published a second position paper together with the European Society on Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, ESPGAN, on cow’s milk allergy(4). At that time we accepted the Chandra paper, according to point 2.
4. In 2003 we were writing up three papers later published in PAI(5-7). These publications were based on papers read during the ESPACI/Section on Pediatrics meeting in Padua, Italy on Dietary prevention of Allergy. Since at that time I was President of ESPACI and Chairman of the Section on Pediatrics within EAACI and organizer of the meeting, I wrote (in collaboration with the speakers) paper I and II and Arne Host and Susanne Halken paper III. Since I was still skeptical of the data by Chandra, I wrote a letter on Feb 15 2003 to the dean of St John’s (enclosed), without any response. The three papers were published in 2004.
5. January 19 2006 I wrote once again to St John since I never got any response from the dean, correspondence enclosed.
6. On February 16 2006 I got a response from St John from Prof Strawbridge and responded. On February 20 2006 I got another response and again responded to Prof Strawbridge, Dean of St John, enclosed.
7. On Feb 24 I got a copy from German Friends and on March 3^rd another one from Arne Host on the (enclosed) TV series in CBC on January 29^th2006 and later

The rest you know much better than I do.

Actually, I don’t know whether my correspondence has any value on a website. But maybe you can use it for your documentation.

1. Businco L, Dreborg S, Einarsson R, Giampietro PG, Host A, Keller KM, et al. Hydrolysed cow’s milk formulae. Allergenicity and use in treatment and prevention. An ESPACI position paper. European Society of Pediatric Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 1993 Aug;4(3):101-11.
2. Host A. Cow’s milk protein allergy and intolerance in infancy. Some clinical, epidemiological and immunological aspects. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 1994;5(5 Suppl):1-36.
3. Chandra RK. Five-year follow-up of high-risk infants with family history of allergy who were exclusively breast-fed or fed partial whey hydrolysate, soy, and conventional cow’s milk formulas. J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr 1997 Apr;24(4):380-8.
4. Host A, Koletzko B, Dreborg S, Muraro A, Wahn U, Aggett P, et al. Dietary products used in infants for treatment and prevention of food allergy. Joint Statement of the European Society for Paediatric Allergology and Clinical Immunology (ESPACI) Committee on Hypoallergenic Formulas and the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) Committee on Nutrition. Arch Dis Child 1999 Jul;81(1):80-4.
5. Muraro A, Dreborg S, Halken S, Host A, Niggemann B, Aalberse R, et al. Dietary prevention of allergic diseases in infants and small children. Part III: Critical review of published peer-reviewed observational and interventional studies and final recommendations. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2004 Aug;15(4):291-307.
6. Muraro A, Dreborg S, Haken S, Host A, Niggemann B, Aalberse R, et al. Dietary prevention of allergic diseases in infants and small children. Part II. Evaluation of methods in allergy prevention studies and sensitization markers. Definitions and diagnostic criteria of allergic diseases. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2004 Jun;15(3):196-205.
7. Muraro A, Dreborg S, Halken S, Host A, Niggemann B, Aalberse R, et al. Dietary prevention of allergic diseases in infants and small children. Part I: immunologic background and criteria for hypoallergenicity. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2004 Apr;15(2):103-11.

Two years ago, a University of California Berkeley undergraduate was a subject in an MRI experiment at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center on the UC Berkeley campus. She did it for the money: It paid $200 for two two-hour sessions, during which you lie motionless inside a large loud machine. During the first session, the persons monitoring the experiment could see that something was seriously wrong: The subject had a large mass in her brain. Clearly her life was at risk. But they didn’t tell her immediately what they had seen. (Later they claimed they “couldn’t” have told her, for legal reasons. A friend of hers who was present at the experiment was threatened with serious legal action if he told her.) Instead, they sought outside opinion about what the mass was and what to do about it. A few weeks later, they told her about it. “Sometimes unusual things show up on these scans” she was told. This was incorrect: Nothing like this had happened before at UC Berkeley.

In a way, the story has a happy ending. The large mass turned out to be benign (but at the time of the experiment they had no way of knowing that). It was removed. A year and a half after the operation, there are no signs of reoccurrence.

The experimenters not only (a) withheld what might have been life-saving information, (b) they persisted in this behavior after having time to think about it; and (c) they threatened someone who wanted to do the right thing. This is no momentary lapse in judgment. The experimenters — including the professor in charge and who knows what other powerful people at UC Berkeley — actively did the wrong thing. They carefully decided not to tell her info that might have saved her life.

More. After I wrote this post, I learned that the person in charge of the Wheeler Brain Imaging Center at the time was Professor Mark D’Esposito. By email I asked him if he disputed any of the facts in this post and if the Center had done anything to keep such a thing from happening again. He didn’t reply.