… is, as regular readers know, one of the most-used categories on University Diaries. This is for a lot of reasons — trustees can do a lot to trash a university — but the biggest reason is that larcenous university presidents are unable to turn a university over on its bottom and shake out its money for themselves without the cooperation of the trustees.

Most university presidents of course have no interest in stealing the endowment. But some do.

As this New York Times article notes, the list of schools with larcenous leaders (Texas Southern, Adelphi, American, Towson — follow each of their stories by typing the school’s name into my search engine) has a new entry – Stevens Institute of Technology (I’ve already blogged about the growing scandal at Stevens here).

A New Jersey school, Stevens could get lost in the cosmic clangor of that state’s corruption. But it’s our job at UD to rescue from the general din the specific still, sad music of universities.

For instance, we’ve long attended to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey — a place UD has come to regard as a fully-developed Mafia-type operation. UMDNJ is occasionally harassed by federal investigators to be sure. But it essentially looks to me like an ongoing, pretty high-functioning criminal enterprise.

Stevens is more of a tinpot dictatorship, like Boston’s Suffolk University, where a long-running leader stuffs the trustees with absentees, cronies, and nitwits who do his bidding in return for favors.

Before we visit the NYT update on Stevens, let me distinguish between this form of trustees trashing the place, and the Harvard model, in which people who are not in fact interested in stealing the endowment nonetheless act toward it with such flagrant irresponsibility — taking insane risks with the money because they think that’s a clever way to make more money — that they also turn the university over on its bottom and shake out hundreds of millions of dollars.

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… The state attorney general has sued the institute and its president, Harold J. Raveché, accusing him of plundering the endowment and receiving $1.8 million in illegal low-interest loans for vacation homes, with half of them later forgiven.

The institute’s trustees tripled Dr. Raveché’s salary over a decade, to $1.1 million last year, higher than presidential salaries at Harvard, M.I.T. and Princeton, and, the lawsuit says, Stevens used multiple sets of books to hide its deteriorating financial condition.

[The suit names] Dr. Raveché; Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., the chairman of the institute’s board and a former Verizon president; and the Stevens trustees as defendants.

… Jack B. Siegel, a Chicago lawyer who follows nonprofit cases nationwide, called the allegations against Stevens “the case of the year” because, unlike previous campus scandals focusing on presidents’ salaries or spending, the case against Stevens outlines a sweeping list of accusations.

“You’ve got allegations involving excessive compensation, but also abuse of the endowment, keeping two sets of books, misleading the board and forgiveness of below-market-rate loans,” Mr. Siegel said. “The entire process of oversight looks tainted. You rarely see a case this extreme.”

The Internal Revenue Service has its own continuing investigation that “includes issues pertaining to defendant Raveché’s compensation,” the suit says. It also notes that Stevens paid the I.R.S. $750,000 last year in penalties and unpaid taxes for several of its spinoff technology companies.

Steve Cuff, a Stevens alumnus who founded a California technology firm and served on Stevens’s board for 10 years, said Dr. Raveché had packed it with loyalists.

“They were all beholden to him, and there were no controls on what he spent,” Mr. Cuff said. “He’d travel the world, keeping no receipts. He’d come to the West Coast, have limousines meet him, stay in five-star hotels, all under the guise of raising money. And it was very, very expensive.”

… The state’s suit says that the endowment was valued at $157.5 million in 2000, but because the institute borrowed from it repeatedly in the years since, it is now “worth less than $115 million.”

… The turmoil at Stevens can be traced to 2004, when Moody’s downgraded its bond ratings to near junk status because of operating deficits and rising debt. A faculty committee, led by Donald N. Merino, a professor of technology and engineering management, had studied the institute’s tax returns and other public financial reports, and concluded that administrative salaries were excessive and that Stevens’s finances were deteriorating.

… Among surprises in the faculty’s 2004 report was that Stevens, which provides Dr. Raveché with a brick colonial residence with a view of the Manhattan skyline, had extended him three mortgage loans totaling $1.8 million for two vacation homes, one in Mount Snow Valley, Vt., and the other near the Jersey Shore. The suit calls those loans “unlawful.”

… The state’s suit says that in 2005, two independent compensation consultants told a committee of Stevens trustees that the president’s salary was excessive. That information was withheld from the full board, according to the suit. Furthermore, it says, to justify his salary, Dr. Raveché insisted that one consultant benchmark it against the presidents of elite universities including Johns Hopkins, which has a research budget 50 times larger than Stevens’s.

The Stevens board has rejected calls by the faculty for an independent audit. On Sept. 2, [the attorney general] met with the board at the campus, outlining her accusations and offering to negotiate a settlement if Dr. Raveché and the chairman, Mr. Babbio, would step down.

Instead, the board went to court seeking, unsuccessfully, to persuade Judge Thomas P. Olivieri of New Jersey Superior Court to seal the proceedings in her lawsuit to avoid “devastating consequences” that could result from it…

These guys are hanging on for dear life! You can see the blood pooling around their fingertips! Come and get me, coppers!

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UD thanks Bill for the link.