… is carrying too much weight?

… keeps a close eye on Brown’s highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, and his unlucky-in-love hedge fund, which keeps hiring people who betray the firm’s passionate commitment to the highest business ethics.

It’s hard to account for this betrayal. Six traders charged with insider trading! Freud would call it repetition compulsion. You keep falling for people who break your heart. Who knows why? I guess Steve Cohen is naive.

But Brown isn’t.

Marisa Quinn, vice president for public affairs and University relations, had not returned multiple requests for comment on the developments as of Wednesday night.

Talk to the press? Are you fucking kidding me?

… How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown, talks about how doctors diagnose personality disorders.

The most recent edition of the DSM series, DSM-IV in 1994, had a whole slew of personality disorders, including histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and so forth. The editor of DSM-IV, Allen Frances, was a psychoanalyst, and the list is a kind of last gasp. The problem is that patients who qualified for one, tended to qualify for almost all of them. The individual “disorders” were quite incapable of identifying individuals who had something psychiatrically wrong with them; the “disorders” had become labels for personality characteristics that are found in abundance in the population.

Moreover, who needed labels? Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”

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You begin to see the basis of Steven Cohen’s defense.

… you might upset the delicate balance that’s made the University of Tennessee one of America’s most pathetic sports factories.

… is currently flashing red, as trustee Steven Cohen’s firm gets official deep-shit notification from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cruddy feds. UD proposes that unlike Texas, which can’t afford it, SAC secede. SAC has 13.3 billion or so in capital. It can be another Liechtenstein.

…headlines the Brown University newspaper which, while it’s at it, reminds readers that this is really a kind of beat-goes-on story for Brown’s, uh, very interesting board of trustees:

[Steven] Cohen is not the first Corporation member to come under investigation for potentially unethical financial dealings. Former Corporation fellow Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 P’15, a former Herald editor-in-chief, was barred from the securities industry for two years in November 2010 as part of a settlement after his private investment firm, Quadrangle Group, was scrutinized for a pay-to-play pension fund scheme.

See but that one’s former… This one is like get on your pony and ride! Ride your pony! Stay in the saddle! Don’t issue any statements… Just sit there and pray Cohen dodges yet another bullet from the SEC…

Meanwhile, if I were a Brown student, I’d take a look at the rest of the trustees. If the university is comfortable with Cohen, there’s no telling what else you’re going to find, is there?

You really don’t want to know how they’re made. I mean, good ol’ Auburn’s looking for a couple of trustees at the moment — dumb as a goal post Auburn, which is about to get hit by the NCAA again — and I can tell you (if you really want to know) the mix they’re looking for. A guy, a local yokel, who played football for Auburn coupla decades ago and graduated with the sort of higher level understanding of the world you’d expect from a jock who took scads of independent studies with some of Auburn’s finest – like say Thomas Petee . Basically Auburn’s looking for two of the most feeble-minded football freaks it can find. Luckily, the school has graduated many of these, so the search will be a cinch.

You want to know how Penn State makes its sausages? Its thirty-two sausages?

Well, take long-term trustee (since 1997 – wouldn’t want any new blood) Carl Shaffer. Carl’s formal education stopped in high school. He is an impressive farmer, but there’s nothing in his description to suggest knowledge of universities. Or for that matter of public relations. Interviewed about changes to the BOT recommended in the wake of Sandusky (for instance, reducing the number of them to 21), Shaffer said

“This is our university — this university is unique in a lot of ways from other universities … I think it’s up to this board to decide how we’re going to take this university forward.”

… Shaffer said Penn State’s size and location are what make it different: “A lot of things might not fit for us,” he said.

So the same board of trustees that oversaw Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, should be left alone to work out Penn State’s problems because… we’re unique! There’s no one else like us! And how are you unique, Carl?

Well, there’s our location.

You mean you’re the only university situated in the place where you’re situated? Yes, Carl, true; but I can name, oh, hundreds of thousands of universities — all of them, really — unique by virtue of existing on terrain on which no other university exists.

And your size? Let’s see. You have a large student body scattered among many campuses throughout the state. That’s because you’re a land-grant university.

Now it’s Carnegie Mellon’s turn to do what UD calls TRUSTEE-DELETE.

Yeshiva University is the undisputed T-D standard, having – during the wee hours after two of their trustees, Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin, started attracting global attention – simply gone in and without any public comment deleted from Yeshiva’s website all mentions of their names.

Faced with a narco-dollar trafficker on their BOT, Carnegie-Mellon has behaved better than panicky, secretive YU.

Ken Walters, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh university, confirmed that [Marco Antonio] Delgado was a trustee from 2006 through mid-2012.

‘I wish it was someone else,’ he said.

They’ve trustee-deleted, but they’ve also made themselves available for public statements of regret.

Delgado “gave the school $250,000 to establish the Marco Delgado Fellowship for the Advancement of Hispanics in Public Policy and Management.” They’re going to have to decide what to do about that.

Universities, UD has noted on this blog, are reputation-launderers. It’s not surprising that a money-launderer would be attracted to them.

A former portfolio manager at Steve Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund told the FBI that he gave his boss tips based on inside information.

Bloomberg Business Week updates us on Brown University trustee Steve Cohen, truly The Most Interesting Man in the World — at least to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What will Brown do? Although Cohen’s not yet been charged with anything, the SEC and FBI seem awfully interested in exploring possibilities along those lines…

In the case of the also-problematic Steven Rattner, Brown seems quietly to have evicted him from the board after a certain critical mass of fines and bans and suits was reached.

With one thing and another, Brown University’s managers are becoming experienced hands in trustee-management (know when to hold ‘em; know when to fold ‘em) and, like Yeshiva University (home of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), could probably start offering seminars.

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Some people seem to think this whole thing is one big joke.

Sometimes ol’ UD just has to laugh. The email postmortem on The Dragas Rebellion at the University of Virginia confirms her hapless, incredibly expensive hiring of Hill+Knowlton Strategies to write the shit she wanted to put (under other peoples’ names) in newspapers and student blogs about how pathetic UVa’s president was.

If UD‘s laughing at this dupe (recall that UVa only avoided paying the firm’s obscene bill – over $200,000 for… what? – by getting some rich guy on the board of visitors to pony it up), imagine how the guided communications consultant is splitting its sides.

… their boards of trustees.

Then there’s Tel Aviv University.

Maybe Tel Aviv University figures that with a list of trustees this long, no one will notice this or that particular name.

He’s a humongous donor, a trustee, and a saintly presence at Cornell (‘”We [he and his wife] are both crazy enough to think we can make a bit of difference in this world and crazy enough to try,” he said.’), but Sanford Weill, who made the zillions he gave the university by creating a bank too big to fail, now announces we should break up the banks.

Jon Stewart’s calling Cornell’s Joe Paterno an asshole, and Matt Taibbi, who also calls him an asshole, notes that

Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.

The people interviewing him should have “beat Weill repeatedly about the neck and head with a Swingline stapler, until he screeched out a tearful apology to every last living soul on earth.”

Paterno apologized. I wonder if Weill will. Nah.

… finally steps down from the Penn State board of trustees. Steve Garban – a real throwback – quits.

America’s latest big-time embezzler embezzled for twenty years and says he felt “constant and intense guilt” about it.

But how constant and intense can anything be for twenty years straight? UD, for instance, figures she can maintain constant and intense interest in… let’s take something she’s intensely interested in, as interested as this guy, bigshot trustee of the University of Northern Iowa, was in grand theft. So we just had Bloomsday, and UD‘s a James Joyce freak and she read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club and spent time preparing all that and talking endlessly with fellow Joyce people and reading and rereading various passages from Ulysses…

Okay so I’d say UD managed to sustain constant and intense interest in Bloomsday, this summer, for around, say, two weeks… How much more difficult to sustain constant and intense guilt for twenty years over your assiduous theft of millions of dollars from innocent people!

You say guilt is different from interest?

Then let’s look at perhaps the most intensely guilt-ridden figure of our time — Franz Kafka. Kafka certainly majorly dragged his ass around Prague, but we also have it on good authority that he was fully capable of having a good time. A reviewer of Kafka’s diaries says that they fail to give the reader a sense of “the humorous and light-hearted Kafka, the man who walked around in the day and earned the respect, fondness, and love of his friends and coworkers.”

Let’s say that – we can only give a rough estimate here – Kafka spent around half of his time feeling guilt; and of the time he felt guilt, let’s say that only about a quarter of that was intense and constant.

And, you know, Kafka did something with that guilt. He wrote guilt-ridden stories like The Judgment to work through it or whatever. This guy, Mr University of Northern Iowa, felt unremitting dripdripdrip guilt over stealing from people for twenty years but not only did he not write one of those quirky weird-prairie short stories about it, he didn’t, say, turn himself in to the authorities, or stop stealing.

… but don’t forget the even more scandalous Southern Illinois University group, presided over by pitiable president-for-life Glenn Poshard. (Put his name in my search engine for years of background.) U Va’s misery will probably end today; SIU’s trustees are the gift that keeps on giving.

You can sense this student journalist trying to grapple with the Beckettian absurdity of her school’s inept president and non-functional trustees as everyone fights with everyone – in public. “It’s just plain bullshit, and he knows it. He is only trying to deflect the truth of what’s going on at that university.” That’s the recent chair of the board talking about the president of the university.

Read the whole article if you want to get the particular piquancy that is the SIU leadership at work: A combination of emotional immaturity, political hackery, and organizational cluelessness.