For the Record: Signatories to “University of Minnesota research lapses show self-reform is failing," Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 18, 2016

Professor Carl Elliott has kindly provided me a copy of his article (with professor Matt Lamkin, U Tulsa Law School) which appeared in the Star-Tribune recently. 

Another year, another day, another damning indictment of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry. If anyone was surprised by last week’s blistering assessment of psychiatric research at the university (“New lapses in U psych studies,” Feb. 12), they probably weren’t paying attention to the previous five. Those reviews found evidence of coerced study recruitment, troubling conflicts of interest, shoddy scientific review, deep mistrust of U leaders, and a climate of fear and intimidation in the Psychiatry Department. The difference with this latest review is that it comes nearly a year after U leaders solemnly promised the people of Minnesota that they were finally going to clean up the mess. 

For more than a decade, U leaders brushed aside revelations that their Psychiatry Department was mistreating vulnerable patients, including Dan Markingson, a mentally ill young man under a civil commitment order who killed himself while in a U drug study. Last year, the state’s legislative auditor released a scathing report that not only confirmed these research abuses, but laid bare the U’s strategy for avoiding responsibility for its misdeeds. U leaders “have made misleading statements about previous reviews and been consistently unwilling to discuss or even acknowledge that serious ethical issues and conflicts are involved,” the legislative auditor wrote. “This insular and inaccurate response has seriously harmed the University of Minnesota’s credibility and reputation.”

This latest debacle shows the administration falling back on the same old playbook. When Jan Dugas, the external consultant hired by the U, reported alarming problems in Psychiatry Department studies, the acting department chair responded, “This is nothing new; it happens all over the university.” On two occasions, Dugas said, she was intimidated and “verbally abused” by department faculty members. The director of the Human Research Protection Program refused to let Dugas see study records.

When Dugas uncovered more than 40 “critical or major” safety problems, legal violations and incidents of unethical conduct in just three weeks, officials abruptly pulled the plug on her investigation, saying it was no longer necessary. Leaders of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute told her “not to write a report” of her findings. When she was finally allowed to produce a report, she was told that no one else would be allowed to see it. U officials kept the report on ice for more than a month, stonewalling open-records requests while they prepared to spin its findings (now conveniently relabeled “allegations”). It is not clear when the report would have been released had it not been leaked to the news media last week. At that point, U President Eric Kaler explained: “We wanted to clarify the record before we released the report.”

It is understandable why U leaders did not want anyone to see the report. Research in the Psychiatry Department is portrayed as a dangerous, disorganized mess: unlicensed study personnel operating MRI and TMS machines; children approached for research studies without the permission of their parents; urine specimens collected from patients in fast-food restaurants and coffee shops.

Last summer, only two months after U leaders announced a reform plan they called “Markingson’s legacy,” a faculty member in the Psychiatry Department was found to have forged federal research documents. Now we learn that research personnel admitted to altering study documents when they prepared for audits. “We go behind the scenes and fix things up,” one interviewee said. “What people don’t know won’t hurt them.”

The response of U leaders has been utterly predictable. Just as before, they have disputed the consultant’s findings, minimized the significance of the report, and cloaked their response in a bureaucratic fog of euphemism and circumlocution. But no amount of double talk can hide the report’s main conclusion: “Practices in the Department of Psychiatry demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge about how to conduct clinical research and an intentional lack of adherence to requirements.”

This latest fiasco makes clear that the pathology at the University of Minnesota lies not just in the Department of Psychiatry, but in an administration whose overriding goal is to avoid accountability. The Board of Regents has responded to this latest scandal exactly as it has responded to all of the others — with a shrug. The U’s dysfunctional culture can’t be reformed by the same people who created and sustained it over so many years. The question now is: when will the Legislature bring the U’s leadership to heel?

Matt Lamkin is a professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law. Carl Elliott is a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. The views expressed here are their own. This article was submitted on behalf of a group of 83 University of Minnesota alumni and scholars in health law, bioethics, psychiatry and medicine.

Signatories to “University of Minnesota research lapses show self-reform is failing,” Minneapolis Star Trib... by MarkingsonCase

For the Record: Chad Hartman talks with Former Gov Arne Carlson on WCCO. Carlson is critical of the U of M President & Regents.

The original posting - see above - contains about twice the material where Governor Carlson was interviewed.

The full link to the above page is here.  

The video below contains only the relevant discussion between Carlson and Hartman:

For the Record: Latest report documenting noncompliance in psychiatric clinical research at the University of Minnesota

Selected Examples:

See below for further examples.  Appendix B is missing but I am trying to locate it. 

  UMinnesotaAssesmentReport 12-31-2015

Tone Deaf at the U of M?

Rising Temperature

As a result of all this, we now have a reading of the American political temperature.  What we've learned is that it's burning a lot hotter at the grass roots than either party's leadership seems capable of understanding.

The Talk of the Town at p. 35 of the February 8, 2016 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

I'm not going to tell [my children] that college will eventually become affordable without a political revolution to change this ghastly situation. . . . I'm not because it's delusional to believe otherwise.

Letter to the Editor in the February 5, 2016 issue of the Star Tribune.

The high tuition high financial aid experiment has failed a vast  majority of students and their parents.  In 2014 65% of U of M graduates had student debt.  The median debt was $24,728.  Then there is the unconscionable economic burden placed on students in the professional schools.  In 2014 88% of the graduates from the U of M professional schools had student loan debt.  The median debt was $152,793.  See pp. 15, 21 of the October 2015 Minnesota Higher Education Report on Cumulative Student Loan Debt in Minnesota.

Tone deaf remarks about student loan debt ("less than a new car") by the U of M president and the 2014 chair of the Board of Regents demonstrate a failure to acknowledge the overall cost of a college education and a remarkable lack of empathy for the students and parents struggling to pay that cost. 

The senior administrators and the Regents responsible for a decade of skyrocketing tuition in 2002--2012 never had to deal with that financial burden when they were starting their careers and their families after graduation.  How much different would their lives have been if they had been shackled by student debt?

Just as the Wall Street bankers created a housing bubble using other people's money, the senior administrators and the Regents at the U of M have created a higher education bubble using both student loan debt and institutional debt.  When this budget balloon bursts, the senior administrators and the Regents will walk away unscathed just as the investment bankers did.  The students (and their parents) will suffer harm from the student loan debt that inflated the balloon.  They will be shackled with that debt for many years (or even decades for many students in the professional schools).  And the citizens of Minnesota will pick up the tab for the huge institutional debt.   


Michael W. McNabb

University of Minnesota B.A. 1971; J.D. 1974

University of Minnesota Alumni Association life member