What Margaret Soltan said about #Markingson

What would Dr. Freud say?

Margaret Soltan, a George Washington University English professor, writes on her most excellent blog, University Diaries:

Just below this post is a post about Columbia University’s decision to deal with a now-jailed professor who worked there for twenty years by telling reporters that he hasn’t been around for ten years. True, but he did work there, in an honored, high-profile position, for a long time, and it would be more seemly for Columbia at least to acknowledge that. You don’t want to be like America’s shabbiest campus, Yeshiva University, and pretend Bernard Madoff wasn’t an honored trustee on whom the university depended for financial advice. You want to be better than that.

Similarly, the University of Minnesota seems to think it’s fine to respond to reporters pestering them about a rather smelly clinical trial one of their professors ran by saying fuck you that was years ago. When you simply deny – worse, when you smear reporters for pursuing the story (the university’s communication director recently wondered in an email if a Scientific American reporter was a “wacko”) – the thing you’re denying keeps coming back to haunt you. 

The trial was run by psychiatrists. Surely they’ve read Freud on the way denial works.

Here’s the most recent news report on the escalating Dan Markingson scandal.

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Margaret's question immediately reminded me of this cartoon:

You see, Doctor, I am a University of Minnesota administrator,

and I have a problem with denial...