[T]he Athens Special Affairs Unit carried out an inspection in the Development Grants Account of the National Technical University of Athens and found that during the years 2002-2013, the university submitted false income declarations and as a result it failed to pay 20,796,216 euros in tax returns.

… now coaching Greece’s Panathinkaikos basketball team, finds his level.

Panathinkaikos owner Dimitrios Giannakopoulos is known for his temper, and was once fined $150,000 in 2015 for threatening to kill officials and their families following a EuroLeague win over CSKA Moscow.  

It’s not the sort of location you want to visit often; but it’s important to remind ourselves of the bizarre fate of the academy’s iconic homeland.

Most recently, the Athens Bar Association released the following desperate statement:

“The prevalence of lawlessness in [our universities], due largely to the total indifference of the state, not only humiliates and devalues public higher education in our country,” but is an affront to the state itself …

Because of the country’s absurd asylum law, under which police can’t enter universities, campuses have become graffiti-ridden organized crime hotspots. “[D]elirious or half-dead addicts” abound. Violent anarchism against professors and students is also a biggie:

On Wednesday morning, professors and students of the School of Philosophy gathered at the entrance of the campus in order to prevent [anarchists] from entering the premises. Nevertheless, the anarchists entered forcefully and took over classroom 516 again, just as they had done the previous two Wednesdays.

Greek universities have been sordid and comatose for many years. Soon they’ll just be dead.

What a remarkable story is the ransacking of Greek universities! On one side, civilization; on the other barbarism:

Vandals Ransack University Campus in Thessaloniki

The Greek university literally sinks under the weight of its defacement, as in this photograph of the National Technical University of Athens.

Perhaps most remarkable about this story is the fact that no one covers it. Why isn’t there a front-page story about the sordid erasure of thought – in Greece of all places – in the New York Times magazine?

When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.

Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.

Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.

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James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.

I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.

Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:

Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…

At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.

The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.

More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.

UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.

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.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …

They don’t seem to embezzle any more than employees in other settings, but it’s our job here at University Diaries to cover acts of embezzlement at universities egregious enough to make the evening news.

There are some countries – Greece comes shriekingly to mind – where being a university president seems to mean little more than taking the money the government gave you to run the place.

UD‘s not sure how corrupt Hong Kong is along these lines, but the University of Hong Kong certainly let its chief of surgery steal a lot of money before someone decided to try to make him stop. Before being found guilty of misconduct and false accounting, John Wong Kin-ling had quite a run.

Uh, let’s see… He was close to the university’s dean of medicine, from whom he apparently learned his trade:

… Lam Shiu-kum … fell heavily from grace in September 2009 when he was jailed for 25 months for pocketing HK$3.8 million in donations meant for medical research ….

Probably got a few pointers from that guy… Then…

Problems about accounting have dogged Wong for a while, and certainly since 2007. That was when he was accused of using donations – believed to be from James Tien Pei-Chun’s family and meant for research – to purchase a Lexus car, though he returned the vehicle to the school.

One insider told The Standard’s sister publication East Week: “Doctors would open different accounts to manage income, but there was no monitoring.”

Another source claims Wong once admitted that he had traveled first class to meetings overseas.

… [T]he four charges he faces – and has denied – in District Court are a tangle that involve a former assistant jailed for embezzlement, a private surgical training center, his driver-cum- helper, taxation authorities and others.

The former executive officer is June Chan Sau-hung, jailed for 22 months in 2010 for embezzling HK$3 million from the training center. She has been testifying for the prosecution against Wong.

… [Charges] include not notifying the police of Chan’s embezzlement. Wong said he had felt sorry for Chan as she was struggling with family responsibilities and wanted to help her repay the money she had taken.

It’s also alleged Wong directed HK$730,000 from the account of the training center – Unisurgical, in which he’s a director and shareholder – to pay his own helper-cum-driver for five years.

Wong said that although his driver was hired as a domestic helper he also picked up guests the university had invited to forums from the airport and their hotels. So he had the [training center] pay half of the salary.

And travel expenses incurred by Wong, it’s alleged, were handled in a way to deprive the Inland Revenue Department of some HK$120,000. But Wong said secretaries and other staff had handled such matters.

Funny money stuff at universities is usually some sad assistant to some sad assistant grabbing ten thou from the kitty and blowing it at Walmart’s. You’ve got to get to the higher managerial levels (see American University president Benjamin Ladner) for the good stories.

In an excellent article, Takis Pappas talks about the failed state of Greece.

Longtime readers know that, since the founding of this blog, UD has singled out the Greek university system as the very worst in Europe. Current events in Greece clarify the larger context of this scandal.

… has long been an object of fascination for University Diaries.

It’s hard to think of a writer who could do justice to it. Emmanouela Seiradaki tries.

… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.

To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.

Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.

… is that of Greece. The system there isn’t merely corrupt; it’s quite violent. It has long been an object of contempt on this blog. [The link is to a search on UD of the word “Greece.” It will take you to some relevant and some irrelevant posts. Scroll through.]

As the EU and IMF prepare to bail out the country, an article in the Wall Street Journal explains why it’s money down the drain. The country is profoundly corrupt, and more money will no doubt make it more corrupt.

An update on a recent enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:

The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.

The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.

There are two models for this.

One, typified by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is a comprehensive institution, almost entirely devoted to extortion of private and public funds. Other examples of the-university-as-criminal-conspiracy are Asia University (currently available for purchase at seven billion won) and Panteion University in Greece.

The other model involves top-down, restricted theft, as in the recent case of Hungary’s National Defense University. Here the extortion seems to have been performed by the rector, on his own initiative.

The rector of the Zrinyi Miklós National Defense University – Hungary’s higher education facility for military personnel – was placed on remand last Thursday on suspicion of abuse of office. János Szabó had to be wrestled to the ground by National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) officers while attempting to resist arrest the previous Tuesday.

Szabó had allegedly told the Hungarian arm of the German parcel carrier DHL that it was the subject of an investigation over personnel transporting drugs and arms. He is alleged to have offered to use his influence to have the probe stopped, in exchange for DHL signing a contract with a security firm nominated by Szabó.

Scrappy Hungarians! Can you imagine an American university president wrestled to the ground while resisting arrest? You know they’d go quietly.

… Yiannis Panousis, a prominent criminologist at the University of Athens … was hospitalized in February after being set upon during a lecture by extremists with iron bars and sledgehammers.

It’s business as usual in the Greek university system, where a law keeping police off of university campuses has made them ground zero for assholes who throttle people trying to give lectures…

Anastassios Manthos, rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, who was knocked unconscious in a similar campus raid last year, said things had gotten worse. “The violence in universities, and in Greek society in general, is explosive and unprecedented,” he said.

Not business as usual. Worse.

…[T]here is a general climate of fear in universities…

One campus has decided to do something:

[T]he Athens Law School on Tuesday took a bold step toward restricting access to its campus, approving a program to issue identity cards for students and to place guards at its gates.