Their highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, has just been implicated in the same insider scheme I write about directly below.

Way to go, Brown! You played the angles, knowing that “[a]uthorities have investigated [Cohen] for insider trading without success for years…” You figured Eh keep him on he’s worth billions to Brown and maybe they’ll never catch up with him… You played the angles and now…

Well, now you’ve lost.

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UD thanks Roy.

Four score and seven years ago, I joined my beloved PIKE fraternity…

If you don’t find this oratory profoundly bowel-moving, you are no lover of freedom.

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UD thanks Ani for the link to the video. (Watch the second video on the page for the full monty.)

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Update: Reviews are beginning to chug in. This one notices something UD hadn’t picked up: “At one point, [the lawyer] says that the inaccurate story has spread across the entire ‘United Nations.’”

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Gawker‘s review here.

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UD has noted that the president of the University of Tennessee has held his tongue about this so far. But when the whole world is laughing at your university because it has devolved into very low farce, I think you have to come out and say something.

Until recently, the University’s directory listed Villarreal as an administrator in the Division of Biology and Medicine. In an email to The [Brown University] Herald, Mark Nickel, Brown’s interim director of news and communications, called the listing”a professional and collegial courtesy” during Villarreal’s training at Rhode Island hospital. Villarreal was not an administrator…

Brown’s corporate denialist explains that a Brown administrator was not an administrator… That, you know, Brown writes these things in its web pages out of courtesy…

There’s no setting more courteous than your university’s medical school. Courtesy listings which call people administrators when they’re not administrators, and – more commonly – professors when they’re not professors. Courtesy (aka guest) authorships on research papers. Courtesy visits from pharma reps…

I declare, it’s like the first five minutes of Gone With the Wind over there! Everybody dressed in crinoline and bowing and scraping and extending courtesies left and right…

When reality bumps up against these exquisite poses, it’s always unpleasant. Robert Villareal, recent undergrad and medical school student at Brown, has already organized an impressive criminal drug distribution network.

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And speaking of backtracking, Brown has also been having second thoughts about one of its more idiotic money-making ideas: interest-rate swaps. As one financial advisor comments:

“The basic assumptions were wrong… Under ideal circumstance they could have worked out, but what are the chances when you have a 30-year deal that everything would go exactly as predicted?”

Brown has unloaded, at a cost of five million dollars, one of the swaps; there are two others which will cost them twenty million to unload. Two of the three swaps are with Goldman Sachs, on whose board Brown’s president sat for ten years. Reporters want to talk to her, and to Goldman, about that connection, but

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

Ruth Simmons, Brown’s president since 2001, resigned from the Goldman Sachs board in February 2010 after 10 years. Calls seeking comment from her spokeswoman, Marisa Quinn, weren’t returned.

… mike your bat.

… subpoenaed, Brown University students should think about their president’s contributions to this outcome.

Last year, UD‘s friend Roy Poses looked at the big picture.

“[T]o progress to a point where the damage to the university is greater than the assets the person brings, [Stephen] Nelson said an investigation must reach ‘some threshold where enough people are sufficiently concerned.’ But that threshold is difficult to discern.

… Nelson said when a person has “a blackened or otherwise impaired public persona,” it may come time for the person to withdraw from the board in order to maintain a university’s reputation.

Brown University’s newspaper worries that its scandal-rich leadership is beginning to be a bit of a bother.

The Mephitic Factor is getting out of hand on the Corporation of Brown University.

When you mob a university’s boardroom with the mega-rich, you expect, especially from some of the financial biggies on it, a bit of bouncy-bouncy morality-wise. Yes, there’s a whiff of fraud here, a rumor of rule-breaking there, lawsuits trailing like wisteria everywhere… Big deal. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown, sits on the university corporation board, and we all recall her remarkably destructive activity on the compensation board of Goldman Sachs. The president of the university sets the moral tone, so okay…

But now we’re talking straightforward, high-profile illegality. Brown University board member Steven Rattner is described by New York’s attorney general as “a central player in the criminal conspiracy to use bribes and kickbacks to get $150 million in state pensions that he could invest through his company Quadrangle.”

Code Brown, as the doctors say. Things are really beginning to stink.

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UD thanks Roy for the link to the Brown Daily Herald.