William Black investigated the savings and loan scandals in the ‘eighties. You remember those. They cost American taxpayers around $500 billion and made the Milken brothers – responsible, according to many insider accounts, for much of the fraud – incredibly rich.
Decades later, noting UCLA law school’s recent enthusiastic acceptance of millions of dollars from Lowell Milken as long as UCLA names a school after him, Black reminds us what Bernie Madoff (benefactor and high-ranking Yeshiva University trustee) and so many other criminals and accomplices know: Prestige universities are reputation colonics. They are there to clean your tushy. They are Quackser Fortunes making their fortunes in the Quackser way.
This is why Black goes on to say
“The UCLA thing … is a great demonstration of one of my family sayings: ‘It’s impossible to compete with unintentional parody.'”