With the revelations of performance enhancing drug use in football and baseball and even the move by the genteel Professional Golf Association to test for drugs we have begun a new investigative series to determine how pervasive this problem has become in American society. Today we examine higher education and the scandal of Scholarship Enhancing Drugs or Vita-mens.
Take the case of assistant professor Jason L. who teaches at West Midwest University: “ I knew to get a tenure track job in the humanities would be tough and at some point I started cutting corners. Throwing papers down the stairs is where I began, but eventually I went on the juice.” To produce articles at a rapid-fire rate she went on a designer scholar drug known in academic circles as “the Plato.”
The Plato and the Newton have been traced back to a business in the Philadelphia area called Philly Drugs Incorporated or PhDInc. They are under federal investigation at this time. No one from PhdInc would comment on rumors that they are exclusively in the business of producing what academics are increasingly asking for in the corners of the faculty lounge.
As in sports, some aging stars turn to this unethical assistance because they are obsessed with pushing their careers into Hall-of-Fame heights. Such is the case with Dana Gooden, the former Rasputin Chair of Biochemistry at Pacific Ivy. Haggard now, and looking far older than her 61 years, she has shocked the higher education community with the revelations in her new memoir, Doping My Way Through the Ivory Tower. “I became obsessed with beating Professor Bacon’s record for grant dollars. Younger colleagues began to attract more funding than my lab and so I turned to both the Plato and the Newton.“ She did close the grant gap, but an asterisk has been prominently placed on the door to her lab.
Throughout higher education there is fear of a loss of credibility and a concern about who will be held accountable. Deans and provosts are being called before grand juries and asked what they knew and when they knew it. Professor Gooden’s dean has responded to her memoir with a public statement: “I should have been more suspicious and certainly, when safety goggles appeared too small for her head, that was a potent sign."
These stories can turn tragic. The scholars’ drugs have side effects akin to ‘roid rage called “Bloom-ing”. In most cases the loss of emotional control results in fits of anger, a sense of persecution, and a certain faith in the decline of Western Civilization. The most destructive version is colloquially dubbed “going Nietzsche.”
In sports, a definite trickle-down effect took place as college athletes witnessed the spread of Human Growth Hormone, Steroids and their ilk in professional athletics, so too on the academic side. Brett S., now a senior at a prestigious university in the South has known the ups and downs of Scholarship Enhancing Drugs. “Oh, man, I started on the memory enhancers, Elephant pills we called them.” Brett had an adequate first year of college, but he decided that he needed the Dean’s List. “I went from an intellectual weakling who barely knew who Hegel was to offering verbatim quotes from Ulysses in class.” After three terms he peaked and has been clean so far this year. “I’ll never forget that first surge of being able to remember what I read…it was like having a superpower.”
Until a Vita-men testing regimen is put in place it seems unlikely that many offenders, student or professor are likely to be caught or deterred. With no system in place we could not estimate how wide-spread this problem is in America’s colleges and universities. One clue comes from a former employee of PhDInc, Dr. Fu Koh who worked in the historical division, “I don’t really want to go on record here, but let’s just say that some these folks are wearing out the elbows of their tweed jackets awfully fast.”
