… (as regular readers know, UD is fond of saying of UMDNJ that it has rolling prison admissions) scores another winner.

(Here’s a new book for UMDNJ to display in its visitors’ center. Sample sentence: The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is a microcosm for corruption in the rest of the Garden State.)

This place knows how to maintain a reputation: Keep ’em coming.

Maintain? Hell – enhance! The University of Medicine and Dentistry’s criminal class has traditionally been made up of local petty thieves who ended up on the board of trustees or whatever… This guy’s a med school professor! The crime is tax evasion on a most impressive scale, in fancy countries like Switzerland! Forget the whole Jersey backwater thing! We are moving up in the world!

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Why is this man smiling? Now we know.

I mean, we know why he was smiling. Five years in prison await.

UD hasn’t encountered many totally corrupt American universities. We’re not like Italy and Greece, where one can find schools whose main function is to transfer all available funds to the institution’s leadership. The closest we’ve come is the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and even there they’ve had to shutter much of their shake-down operation after endless unpleasantness with the FBI. (I’m of course talking here only about legitimate universities. The for-profit tax syphons are almost entirely about transfer of all possible funds to management and investors. Whole other category.)

But the University of Louisville, some of whose students and faculty, as a local reporter notes, are “reeling” from one financial or sexual scandal after another, is emerging as America’s new UMDNJ. And it might be instructive to pause at its latest scandal – high-level med school resignations in the wake of an FBI investigation into allegations that (in the words of the only worthwhile UL trustee – a man who subsequently left the board in disgust) a university vice president “owns a piece of a company getting paid by a part of the university that he controls.” It’s alleged that he and several of his UL cronies have essentially stolen around eight million dollars from the university.

No bid contracts and bogus high-paying jobs to friends and family also seem to be part of this particular scandal. But that’s the typical threesome at corrupt schools, where no one’s around to stop you from total corruption:

1. conflict of interest for personal enrichment;
2. no bid contracts to cronies (these often feature kickbacks to you);
3. the creation of pretend jobs for cronies and relatives.

At schools like UL, you don’t do just one or two of these things; you do them all.

How does a school become systemically rotten in the way UL is systemically rotten? How did things get so out of control in virtually all areas of the school’s operation? (I’m not even going to talk about UL athletics, which has been a sewer for years.)

If you ask UD, this can only happen when absolute ignorance of – maybe even contempt for – the nature of a university prevails not only in parts of the local culture (that y’all and shut ma mouth land) but in the president’s office and on the board of trustees. UMDNJ was run by brainless Jersey wise guys; UL seems to be run by corporate backslappers. Even now, with the school in absolute tatters, UL has chosen as its spokesperson a look on the sunny side nitwit who attacks the press for its negativism, denies anything’s the matter, and says stuff that’s too stupid to parse:

“I’m not willing to cross that bridge and give you any information that’s going to appease your accusations.”

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A school run – flamboyantly run – largely to make money for the people who lead it will attract unsavory people. Unsavory people want to work at places like UL, since it seems unlikely that anyone at the institution will impede their corrupt activities. This is the way that corrupt schools stay corrupt, and indeed tend to become more corrupt. They attract corrupt people.

UD predicts that UL will, under this extraordinary pressure, finally ditch its president, who has lost all vestige of institutional control. But getting rid of him will cost the school many millions of dollars, and the chance of replacing him with anyone better is small.

So… there’s always a a little bit of hell to pay when the legislature has a chance to chat one on one with the people who run perennial scandal magnets like Rutgers University.

Of course, like most seriously fucked up schools, Rutgers reflects a seriously fucked up state. This is the state that gave us the gone but not forgotten University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As one local columnist puts it:

[Stephen] Sweeney argues that scandals, including men’s former basketball coach Mike Rice penchant for hurling basketballs and epithets at players, have damaged the school’s reputation and “its ability to purse academic excellence.”

So [putting more political appointees on its board of trustees] would make sense.

Because nothing enhances a university’s academic reputation like a collection of Jersey pols.

You got your basic Scylla and Piscataway dilemma here… Jersey legislators… Jersey trustees…

Er, none; and if you want to understand what’s going on at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, at the University of Miami, or the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you could do worse – as this commenter on a recent article has it – than think in terms of criminal syndicates.

People wonder why Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor accused of sexual harassment, opted to leave UM rather than fight. Well, some reports had it that President Shalala was in a rage and would make sure he was fired.

If this is true, it would make perfect sense in the context of UM’s years of criminal scandals. We are talking, at schools like UMDNJ, Chapel Hill and UM, about scandal-fatigue, about administrations that are saying stop. No more.

Basically McGinn has the misfortune of teaching at a school that can’t afford any more bad publicity. Its president is really pissed off. She didn’t sign on to be the butt of jokes, a permanent petitioner at the NCAA, a symbol of what’s worst in American universities. You come to her with some guy in philosophy who somebody says wrote some smutty remarks to a student and BOOM! That’s it. Donna’s had it. She explodes. All of her problems come from men. Men who beat up other men on the football field. Men who buy whores and cars for her athletes. Men who write smutty emails… Of course the irony is that of all the men beating up on Donna, McGinn is by far the most innocuous; in fact, he’s liable to be innocent of the charges. But McGinn has had the misfortune of being the last in line, the tipping point. Right now, Shalala is like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: You whip out a cigarette and she’ll fucking blow you away.

But can he? The problem with – call it the Squeak Assumption – is that, as economists remind us, one’s perception of one’s financial condition has everything to do with what other people in your immediate world earn.

A few years ago, several of Harvard’s money managers resigned in protest because instead of making the industry standard for their job description (with bonuses and all, around thirty million a year at that time), they were stuck (because of alumni protests about over-compensation) at around ten, fifteen million. A few years ago, a University of Chicago law professor with a household income of close to half a million dollars cried poor in the national press.

If Steven Cohen, whose personal worth is between eight and ten billion dollars, sits on your board of trustees, you, as president of Brown University, are going to be challenged to maintain your self-esteem. No one likes to be poor.

If you want to understand why the new president of Rutgers, Robert Barchi, is, like a total idiot, continuing to engage in flagrant, self-serving conflict of interest, and thereby adding one more outrageous scandal to the ten others going on at that university, you have to understand what I’m trying to tell you. You have to try to put yourself in Barchi’s shoes. In his corporate-board world, clearing one million dollars a year is the absolute minimum, the barest acceptable situation. One million dollars is in fact for Barchi squeaking by. If Barchi has to drop his corporate money-for-nothing and suddenly plummet to $800,000 a year, this is what his world will look like to him:

One walks along a very rough path of the river bank, in between clothes posts and washing lines, to reach a chaotic group of little, one-storied, one-roomed cabins. Most of them have earth floors, and working, living and sleeping all take place in the one room. In such a hole, barely six feet long and five wide, I saw two beds—and what beds and bedding!—which filled the room, except for the fireplace and doorstep. Several of these huts, as far as I could see, were completely empty, although the door was open and the inhabitants were leaning against the door posts. In front of the doors filth and garbage abounded. I could not see the pavement, but from time to time I felt it was there because my feet scraped it…

Unless you understand Barchi’s world, from Barchi’s perspective, you cannot possibly understand how he came to assume the presidency of a university barely recovering from years of financial corruption and immediately set about securing his corporate board memberships.

I suppose it’s some sort of compensation, when the story about your young, already totally blighted university presidency jumps to the New York Times, that the quality of prose being produced about the fiasco significantly improves – even to the point of poetry. Rutgers has moved from storm to storm is lovely, lilting, memorable writing; even as the article in the Times rehearses all the stupid stuff Robert Barchi has overseen in the months since he took over at Rutgers, it sweetens things somehow with this poignant formulation…

UD thinks the poetry resides in the word moved… Think of the similar E.E. Cummings line

my father moved through dooms of love

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Perhaps, as John Updike wrote, life’s a shabby subterfuge; certainly the last few years at Rutgers and the UMDNJ have been shabby in the extreme. Under its latest leader, a man who does not even understand the concept of conflict of interest, Rutgers straggles on. And the rain it raineth every day.

Context matters. If you’re the new president of a crime- and scandal-ridden university, you want to watch yourself. Given the scuzzy reputation of the joint, you want to do all you can, personally, to model a new, less scuzzy ethos.

So for instance if you’ve just taken over the notorious University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a school UD has long described as having rolling prison admissions (scroll down and enjoy), you want to set a personal example of probity and non-greed and all the things UMDNJ has never before known.

You’ve taken over America’s most financially corrupt university as part of its recent merger with Rutgers University. And oh yeah that’s another thing. If at Rutgers you’re running a national laughingstock (thanks to endless sports scandals culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit about your sadistic basketball coach — again, scroll down… forever…) and a fiscal disgrace (thanks to your bankrupting the school to pay for your sports program), you really, really, really want to set a moral example as you begin to run the school.

But hey. It’s Jersey. Whaddya expect? You expect a president who can be content with his legitimate close-to-a-million-dollars-a-year salary? It’s fucking Jersey!

“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance.

Yeah! The place stinks already; how ’bout bringing your own stink bombs to the game? President Barchi’s particular stink bombs are of course all about sitting on corporate boards – as the New York Times points out in this article, it’s the done thing if you’re a university president panting to make (as the title of a recent book about the practice has it) money for nothing. And Barchi adds an extra jolt of stink by sitting on the boards of companies who do business with Rutgers.

What with perennially expensive sports scandals, and a sports program that in any case is bankrupting the school, you won’t be surprised to hear that tuition at Rutgers is so high that student protests escalate by the day. It can only make things better for students to realize that instead of running the school Barchi is off to relax-and-rejuvenate corporate retreats. What better way for the president of a struggling, scandal-ridden, public university to comport himself?

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

UMDNJ’s still boasting about its state of the art anesthesiologist, Barry Ray. Ray’s the latest university physician to turn himself into a pill mill, and, what with America’s outrageous oxycodone appetite, he’ll be far from the last.

This is one university story – medical professors as drug dealers – from which you might be inclined to avert your eyes. But it’s an important, and growing, campus fact.

From a New York Times article titled In New Jersey, A Backlog of Governor’s Nominees Await Confirmation:

… About 140 of the [New Jersey] governor’s appointments remain in limbo, awaiting Senate action, and most have not been taken up in committee, the step before a full Senate vote. Dozens date back to last spring: election supervisors, department administrators and, most of all, board members of assorted colleges and agencies.

… [At] the scandal-plagued University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, installing like-minded board members was crucial to his plans for agency overhaul…

UMDNJ. The only university in America with rolling prison admissions.

In UD‘s opinion, that is.

Here you’ve got one of the many naughty people at America’s most criminalized university – the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – having his university pension taken away (he recently retired from UMDNJ) while he’s being tried for bribery.

In arguing that he shouldn’t have his pension taken away, the guy showed the judge “documentation from a psychologist that he has undergone treatment for schizoaffective disorder, major depression, a generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Four diagnoses? Four?? No wonder the judge denied the guy’s pension request! If the guy’s psychologist had merely gone to the trouble to flip through the DSM he’d have come up with at least twenty.

Even? Especially.

UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.

Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.

The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.

Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.

But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.

Canada’s Robert Fulford goes after ghostly Gloria Bachmann.

Professor Bachmann is being very quiet about all the international attention given to her ghost-writing on behalf of Wyeth pharmaceuticals. So is the university that hired her.

No surprise there. It’s the most corrupt medical school in the United States. UMDNJ. The only medical school, as UD has said more than once on this blog, with rolling prison admissions.

More glory for the state of New Jersey.

… is the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey. Ever since UD opened up shop, UMDNJ has been a little slice of Sicily right here in America.

When it comes to criminal proceedings, UMDNJ has a kind of rolling admissions policy — there’s always something happening. The latest is the indictment of the guy who used to run the physical plant. This guy told a local contractor that he wanted a Cadillac Deville, a deck, a sun room, and a cell phone, and that if the contractor would give these things to him, he would give the contractor millions of dollars in campus construction work.

But this is small potatoes for UMDNJ. Historically, it’s more into big potatoes, like Medicare fraud.

The profoundly corrupt University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (read UD‘s many posts about it here) has lost track of some mice.

The frozen remains of two lab mice infected with deadly strains of plague were lost at a bioterror research facility at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark — the same high-security lab where three infected mice went missing four years ago.

The latest incident, which led to an FBI investigation, occurred in December but was never disclosed to the public.

University officials said there was no health threat.

The remains of the dead mice were contained in a red hazardous waste bag being stored in a locked freezer, according to the researchers. But an animal care supervisor could not account for them while preparing to sterilize and incinerate them.

In September 2005, the same lab discovered three live mice infected with plague missing from multiple cages. Officials then said the animals had likely died.

University officials yesterday said they immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and state health officials in December upon learning of the missing remains, but withheld information from the public until The Star-Ledger began asking questions. They subsequently released a report about the matter in a mass e-mailing to the university community, saying they did not want employees, students and professors to read about the incident in the newspaper.

FBI officials confirmed the December incident.

“As a matter of protocol in this type of matter, the FBI was called in to investigate and we determined there was no nexus to terrorism or risk to public health,” said Bryan Travers, a spokesman for the FBI office in Newark.

The state Department of Health and Senior Services said it had also been notified of the situation, “and we are very confident that the appropriate authorities are investigating,” said spokeswoman Donna Leusner.

University officials defended their decision to keep the matter confidential.

… … Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who has been a critic of the government’s rapid expansion of bioterrorism labs, said while the likelihood is that someone made an accounting error, it was a potentially embarrassing situation for UMDNJ.