… and an illiterate local press. What can you say?

Only that things are great: Southern University “continues to move in a positive direction.”

… you get a wonderful shot of the University of Hawaii athletic director leaning comfortably back in his office chair and wearing one of those relaxed Hawaiian shirts and drawling about how firing someone you’re paying more than your state’s governor… firing that person after only a few months… and giving that person a huge buyout to go away… and giving no reason why you’re doing all of that is utterly routine, no biggie, a real yawn. Happens every day in the business world~!

Well, number one, no, it doesn’t happen every day in the business world.

Number two, the University of Hawaii is a public, taxpayer funded, institution.

And while we’re at it, number three: The AD casually mentions that there’s no scandal here because after all the position was budgeted anyway, so why be upset that UH is paying the budgeted money for no one to do anything in the position?

I mean, let me be understood here about exactly what the AD is saying. He is saying that we quickly fired the highest-paid public employee in the state of Hawaii for reasons we’re not sharing (UD‘s been at this game long enough to know that quick secretive firings like this one almost always involve the discovery of an alcohol problem, or criminal misbehavior of some sort), and we’re going to keep paying this person as if he still worked here (I mean, he will physically be here until the end of the year; he just won’t do anything), and that’s your tax money, but nothing in this picture is amiss.

… OSU still has Gee-like Chief Financial Officer Geoff Chatas:

While traveling to an OSU fundraising event in February 2012, Chatas flew to Florida on OSU’s private jet and stayed at the five-star Ritz-Carlton Naples, which features clay tennis courts, two golf courses, stunning views of the Gulf of Mexico, a pure white sand beach and pool-side cabanas. The bill was 1,264 for two nights.

The Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where OSU spent 2,235 to accommodate Chatas in July 2011, is a five-star luxury hotel with high-end amenities including personal yoga and pilates instructors.

Chatas was a Gee hire, after all.

What’s next for Evan Dobelle? He has spent his way through the University of Hawaii, and through obscure and now much-impoverished Westfield State. Like Patricia Slade at Texas Southern University and Peter Diamandopoulos at Adelphi University, Dobelle arrives at obscure schools with his chest thrust out and starts talking about his important connections and how unless your school gives the president wads of cash for luxury goods no one will respect you.

Dobelle spent more on [a] 2008 Asia trip alone than the $92,000 that Governor Deval Patrick spent to take two dozen officials on a trade mission to Britain and Israel in 2011. But Dobelle said the only unusually expensive item was the luxury hotel bill in Bangkok, and there was a reason for it: The consultant who helped plan the trip said that Thai officials wouldn’t take Westfield State seriously if they didn’t put on a good show.

“She would say, ‘Who the f— will come and listen to Westfield State when they only have time for Cornell? You better set yourself up in a way to show a certain degree of prominence and respect to them,” recalled Dobelle. “So fine, that’s what we did.”

Verbatim out of the Slade/Diamandopoulos book of you gotta spend money on me to make money. They all peddled this line, as did way-high-living American University president Benjamin Ladner.

Todd Wallack, Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s nemesis at the Boston Globe, contributed to its detailed account of Dobelle’s doings. Wallack seems to be making a specialty of swinish academic administrators. He’ll always be able to find work. Just in the eastern seaboard area.

President Credit Swaps is once again on the move!

[W]hen the 58-year-old [Larry] Summers came to the Obama White House, he was worth $7 million; when he left at the end of 2010, he “jumped into a moneymaking spree” at a hedge fund and at Citigroup — a bank rescued by a government bailout — so he could be a gazillionaire by the time Ben Bernake retires and the job is open.

His stuffing of his pockets within hours of leaving the White House job now makes it unseemly for him to lead the Federal Reserve in enforcing the important new regulations from the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

He is an exemplar of, rather than a solution to, the obscenely lucrative revolving-door problem mocked by Mark Leibovich in his new book, “This Town.”

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Maureen Dowd, New York Times

She’s at wild and wacky (background here: scroll down) Northern Kentucky University; he’s at the University of Cincinnati. Their notorious litigation seems to be about divorce, custody, blahblah; but UD asks you to note that she has a book.

It’s a self-published Christian tract about having been abused by her litigation-mate. (NKU seems happy to let her emblazon her university webpage with this vanity project.)

Of course the person she married is contributing to the disgusting outcome about which more and more judges are complaining; but she’s got a book to promote.

This blog, written in the voice of Emory University’s president, shows you what a well-written satirical blog can do. UD selects the excerpt in her headline because over the years she’s heard variants of this statement from a host of overpaid university heads. I didn’t ask for this salary; the trustees set my salary; they insist on it…

These are people who spend their days and nights telling students to be independent thinkers, to become morally autonomous… Yet when it comes to the symbolically and practically important matter of their own compensation they’re suddenly sucklings. These tend to be same people who say ol’ T. Boone and Phil Knight insist that most of their billions go toward football, dammit, and there’s nothing we can do.

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UD thanks Carl.

Let’s sample a few paragraphs from a pretty typical recent appraisal of GSK. This is from Forbes – not exactly a business-unfriendly publication.

Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs.

But the combination of pharma’s noncompliant corporate culture and the prevalence of corrupt business practices in China and other emerging economies could have a lethal impact on many more consumers as pharma shifts more research and development functions, manufacturing operations and marketing efforts to those growing markets.

UD will ask what she has asked on this blog before: When does a company like Glaxo get filthy enough – lethal enough – for American universities to reconsider their relationship to it? Take for instance the fact that the president of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is on Glaxo’s board of directors. Does that bother you at all? Does that bother anyone at Texas Southwestern – a school that’s had more than its share of corruption scandals in the last decade – at all? Put aside questions of reputation, questions about whether universities are something different from corporations – such questions have no relevance to Texas institutions. Rather, think of this developing story pragmatically. You have an endemically corrupt industry. Corruption is all it knows. To quote that guy in An Officer and a Gentleman, It ain’t got nowhere else to go. To quote that guy in the Frank Sinatra song, It’s gotta be it. To quote that guy in the Cage Aux Folles song, It is what it is. To quote that chick in the Barbra Streisand song, Don’t ask me not to cheat I’ve simply got to. To quote that chick in the Mitzi Gaynor song, Get the picture?

So, you know, like SAC Capital Advisors and like Goldman Sachs, GlaxoSmithKline is really really grotty. Is this – university-wise – even an issue? Even a subject? Do all the Glaxo professorships at your institution bother you maybe even slightly? Does the fact that your medical school is run by a Glaxo director stand out to you in any way as something worth thinking about?

… is currently being sued for about three times what it lost by investing in its much-honored ex-trustee Bernard Madoff’s fund.

It’s not easy to keep up with the financial and sexual scandals at Yeshiva University, so don’t try. UD will do it for you.

This bizarre institution is one of the main locations keeping this blog in business. It specializes in trustees like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, infantilizing and sexist rules for its students, conflict of interest among its post-Madoff/Merkin leaders, and decades worth of hushed-up sex scandals. And it’s all presided over by a very highly paid president who responds to most things with denial or silence.

Yeshiva is the very model of a corrupt university, and it should surprise no one that today its chancellor has had to resign in disgrace, having ordered the hushing up of extensive sexual abuse of students.

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The larger context:

In recent years traditional law prohibiting cooperation with oppressive governments was invoked by ultra Orthodox groups to forbid reporting sexual abusers to the civil authorities (as required by American law). Modern Orthodoxy followed the haredim in denying the legitimacy of non-Orthodox movements. Even at Yeshiva University, a highly respected rosh yeshiva and decisor, Rav Hershel Schachter (seen as continuing Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik’s halachic teaching in the rabbinical seminary), said publicly that the prime minister of Israel should be assassinated if he dared to give up some section of Jerusalem for the sake of a peace treaty. (He later apologized for the comment.) Recently, Rabbi Schachter was recorded warning against reporting sexual abusers to the authorities (lest they be imprisoned and exposed to harm from anti-Semites).

… West Virginia University, America’s Number One party school, where… ugh. I can’t. I’ll puke. You can read it if you want. You read it. You read it.

… “This is a university. This is a university.”

Again, as you read this update, repeat: This is a university. This is a university.

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Emory at first did nothing about complaints directed at [Charles] Nemeroff, but in the aftermath of intense political pressure from the United States Senate, and from Senator Chuck Grassley in particular, he was subsequently stripped of his department chairmanship and forbidden from accepting more drug company largess. He soon left the university. Not to worry, though; he has since resurfaced as chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami.

This is a university.

This is a university.

“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing…” You’d be surprised how many American universities are the educational equivalent of one of UD‘s favorite songs. These are truly nothing places full of fully salaried nowhere men and women. Everyone knows they should be shut down – even current and potential students. All have shrinking enrollments and massive absenteeism (professors and administrators are as absent as students). All are farcical in the way of Rube Goldberg contraptions that have blown every fuse but continue to make random movements.

Baltimore’s Coppin State is a notorious nothing; this letter writer to the Baltimore Sun says the obvious: Let it go. Public nothings are incredible wastes of money. Stop humiliating the taxpayers of Maryland.

Can this be true?

UD has ridiculed Southern Illinois University on this blog for years. Put “Poshard” in my search engine for scads of posts about the place. But she had no idea it got as bad as this…

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Well, here’s the faculty page. All boys! ‘cept fer one girl that the dean done dumped. Laura Hatcher is suing.

I must say. It takes a special commitment to femicide to sustain absolute gender purity for over half a century. I trust the department has taken advantage of this distinction to forge relationships with its brother institutions in Saudi Arabia.

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UD thanks Wendy.

It’s how things have always been done at the University of Hawaii, proud flagship of one of our most corrupt states; and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.

For background, put hawaii in my search engine if you have the stomach for it.

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“It’s a common pattern in Hawaiian political culture to announce campaigns against corruption, but the problem is so deeply rooted with high-level officials that are involved, and there are low-level scapegoats who feel the brunt of the campaign,” said Jeff Jones, an associate history professor at UNC-Greensboro …”

Whoops. No. That should be Russian political culture. Russian.