From The Wall Street Journal:
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said she is taking an indefinite leave of absence because of pneumonia, as she faces growing pressure over revelations that she sold her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s books to the University of Maryland Medical System while she sat on its board of directors.
. . . .
Ms. Pugh, a Democrat elected in 2016, made the announcement hours after Republican Gov. Larry Hogan called for the state prosecutor to investigate the medical system’s purchase of 100,000 “Healthy Holly” books for $500,000 since 2011. Ms. Pugh previously said she returned $100,000 to the system, one of the state’s largest private employers.
“These are deeply disturbing allegations,” Mr. Hogan wrote in the letter to State Prosecutor Emmet Davitt. “I am particularly concerned about the UMMS sale because it has significant continuing ties with the State and receives very substantial public funding.”
. . . .
“The people of Baltimore are facing too many serious challenges, as it is, to also [have] to deal with such brazen, cartoonish corruption from their chief executive,” he tweeted.
Ms. Pugh said last week that the deal with the medical system had been a mistake. “I am deeply sorry for the lack of confidence or disappointment which this initiative may have caused Baltimore city residents, friends and colleagues,” she said at a news conference Thursday, after being released from the hospital where she was treated for pneumonia. Her office’s statement on Monday said Ms. Pugh has been battling pneumonia for the past few weeks.
Ms. Pugh resigned from the University of Maryland Medical System board last month, after the Baltimore Sun published an article exposing the deal.
On Monday the Sun reported that health provider Kaiser Permanente also bought Ms. Pugh’s books, and that some were purchased during a period when the company successfully sought a contract to provide health benefits to Baltimore city employees.
A spokesman for Kaiser told The Wall Street Journal it has purchased 20,000 copies of the “Healthy Holly” books for $114,000 since 2015, delivering them to back-to-school fairs, elementary schools, day-care centers and religious institutions. It said it bought them from Healthy Holly, LLC.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
Apparently a significant problem is that nobody can find most of the 100,000 books involved.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-healthy-holly-accounting-20190325-story.html
Ouch, were they even printed?
sold her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s books to the University of Maryland Medical System while she sat on its board of directors.
Hmm. In college I had a teacher who made us buy a book he wrote, for the class. I always wondered if that was ethical or not. He did claim to be one of the few people in the world who practiced his particular specialty, but still … At least it was only $10. And he didn’t “update” the text to keep us from selling it back to the bookstore if we wanted to.
If ’twas graft, it was honest graft.
I guess it depends on when you went to school, but frankly $10 strikes me as little more than the cost of printing up a bound copy of the class notes. I had to do that for many classes in addition to buying whatever books were required.
As far as “Professors force their captive audience to buy their books” scandals, that one strikes me as pretty mild.
This was back when textbook prices were already exorbitant, and the practice of “updating” a textbook was in full swing. The updates were very minor, but the existence of a new edition was enough to block a student from getting money back on the old one. I think there was a recycling bin near the cashier counter in the bookstore …
I asked someone at the time how a professor could brag with a straight face about selling his books, if the bulk of the people buying the books were students he’d compelled to buy it? Where is the satisfaction in that?
“Those professors just get their satisfaction in a different way than the rest of us do,” I was told.
I guess so. And $10 or not, it’s still a shady practice to make readers buy your books. I can’t help but compare the professor’s practice with that of another teacher I had later. She is a novelist, and she taught a couple of fiction writing classes. At the end of the semester she mentioned she still had copies of one of her fantasy novels. She’d already told us her books were sold at the Stars My Destination bookstore, but as the store was moving to Evanston, did we want to conveniently buy anything of hers now?
We eagerly accepted her offer. We paid her cover price. It was $3.95, but I think she knocked off the .95 cents. We’d learned about the business side of writing then, including how royalties worked. It seemed fair to us that she would get the $3 rather than the .95 cents or less that her publisher would send her in a royalty check.
The novelist’s approach seems like the right way to ask students to buy your book.
The official reason she took leave is illness. Been all over the local news. The timing, of course, is very interesting.
It’s inappropriate conflict of interest, but each book cost $5.70, which at least is not gouging.
She made hay while the sun shined and is now hiding from the rains …
Funny how often we’re seeing this sort of thing, though I am amused at how most of them react when caught out. 😉