Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Not again . . . .

There seems to be a flavor of the month the past couple of years of universities covering up for grotesque behavior by prestigious professors -- in this case the dean of the USC Keck School of Medicine. It's kind of hard to believe he had time for it, given what is presumably a demanding job, but he was spending his off hours doing meth and smack with prostitutes and drug dealers. His kept woman OD'd in a hotel room, and the police happily covered it up. The university obviously found out about what was going on and let him quietly resign with an excuse that he was taking another job, but allowed him to continue to rep the school of medicine for fundraising purposes. Oh yeah -- he had been accused of sexual harassment in an earlier job at Tufts -- disposition of the case covered up --  and assaulting a colleague at a later job, outcome also kept secret.

Now, as far as I'm concerned if he was effective at his job I don't personally care what he was doing in his free time -- that's between him and his wife, mostly. However, they obviously would have responded very differently in the case of any ordinary faculty member. The knee jerk response for these big shots is that they are allowed to get away with just about anything. The ruling class within the university sticks together, even in cases where it really matters to the mission including academic fraud and sexual harassment. It just doesn't seem to change.

But really, check out the article. It's just a blockbuster investigation, great journalistic work.

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