A University of Maryland economist applauds the overthrow of U Va’s fearful, incrementalist president and looks forward to the initiation of the school’s faculty into the rigors of market life.

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After all, consider what hideous shape the place is in, market-wise:

A $5 billion endowment makes it the wealthiest public university, per capita, in the United States. Over 28,000 students applied for admission last year, a record high.

You only get results like these when faculty retreat behind ivy walls and trembletrembletremble at the rigors of the marketplace…

Not only that, but its impeccably kept campus has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site!

If no one steps in to stop this process, the University of Virginia will begin to look like a smelly pirate hooker before the week is out. With new market rigors and massive onlining, however, U Va will finally be able to compete with Everest College.

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Here’s a slightly different take on the marketplace at U Va:

A university governed entirely by wealthy businesspeople steeped in a culture of corporate strategy memos will reflect the peculiar perspectives of the modern rich. The financialized American economy has made vast fortunes for gamblers with poor impulse control who mistake a lucky roll of the dice for intelligence and virtue. It’s not surprising that the same kind of fast-twitch thinking would lead a group of homogenous financial patrons talking among themselves to lose patience with a career higher education administrator who was insufficiently galvanized by the latest columns from Thomas Friedman and David Brooks.

U Va’s trustees were afraid “That the university would be forced to get by with $5 billion in the bank.” And indeed that is a sickeningly paltry sum. Harvard is on its way to forty billion. What the hell is U Va thinking? If Harvard needs an endowment larger than the GNP of most countries, so does U Va.

Quick. Online. Largely bogus course content. Incredibly high tuition paid for by someone else.

The always pretentiously named but often cheesy executive MBA degree has always been a major candidate for fraud, and I’m sure Baruch College isn’t the first to run its program fraudulently, but it’s the first to get caught changing student grades so all the money keeps coming in.

The dean in charge when the forgery was going on has flown the coop and landed in a nice job at the University of Connecticut, which must be thrilled to have hired such a great manager.

… and again and again because it happens all the time: Beware the B-School Boys. That’s a whole category of its own on this blog. And why? Because business school professors constantly run afoul of the law.

The latest finance-professor-gone-wrong is this guy, at Bocconi University. Says on his university page that he’s been “voluntarily suspended (‘How can you be voluntarily suspended?’ asked Mr UD) since November 16, 2012.” (‘Isn’t that in the future?’ asked Mr UD). He’s been way busy lying about the value of his hedge fund, destroying investors, and dealing with the Financial Services Authority.

After all, he’s an honorary doctor of laws.

And if during the proceedings he needs a character reference, he can get a fabulous one from Syracuse University, which not only conferred the degree but chose him to deliver the 2010 commencement address.

… What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough?”

William Deresiewicz, New York Times

Oh really? A professor at MIT’s business school has just been barred from the securities industry and made to pay almost five million dollars to settle a case brought against him by the SEC because of rampant lying to investors and investigators, and it has nothing to do with MIT? Come again?

“I live near Wall Street. The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification,” [Jeffrey] Sachs said. “They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30 billion a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards. ‘What do those kids have against us?’ I don’t think they were kidding except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”

Too awkward; but UD‘s long been telling you to — this blog has a category named — Beware the B-School Boys.

If Canadian business guy Ian Telfer is convicted of insider trading (he’s an object of an Ontario Securities Commission probe), it won’t be entirely wonderful for the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management to be featuring his name on every piece of silverware. It will need to consult with Seton Hall University here in the States – a school which has blasted more names off of more business school walls than any other. Experience counts.

Journals are rated on their “impact factor.” A high-impact journal is defined as one that’s quoted by many other researchers in their own later studies. That’s called citing the journal.

The higher the impact factor, the more the journal’s prestige grows.

Now two business professors say journal editors are “coercing” those who wants to publish in them, especially younger professors. For instance, your psychology journal tells Professor Smith: We’ll publish your new study, but only if you add a lot of pointless citations from our journal, in order to inflate our impact rating and help us sell advertising.

“Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection,” says the study by the College of Business Administration at the University of Alabama.

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I’m pickin’ up good citations
She’s giving me excitations
I’m pickin’ up good citations
(Oom bop, bop, good citations)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)

… which is producing the most criminalized graduating classes of MBAs in the country by far.

Unless the other schools’ grads are simply better at not getting caught.

If you’re going to take in that many fraudsters, you should at least teach them how to evade capture.

Wow! Glendening, former colleague of Mr UD’s, friend of UD‘s uncle (not too sure about the “looked like Hemingway” remark in this obituary), appointed this guy capo di tutti mortar boards.

At first, the FBI considered sending an agent to work undercover at one of the suspected hedge funds …

“We couldn’t get in. It was such a closed industry — much like an organized crime family — that it was difficult for the FBI to either introduce an undercover agent or recruit a cooperator.”

Corrupt traders relied upon secret alliances, longtime friendships and even sexual relationships.

… [Raj] Rajaratnam relied on Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey partner, and Rajiv Goel, a former managing director at Santa Clara, California-based Intel, whom he’d known for decades. All three attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

… this year were plagiarized. Applicants were asked to write on the subject of principled leadership.

Writers are falling over themselves ridiculing the two poets who’ve withdrawn from consideration for a pretty big-time poetry prize in England because the money behind the prize comes from a hedge fund.

There’s the guy in this post’s headline, for whom no contemporary Alexander Pope could be satirical enough to do justice to this absurdity.

There’s this guy in the Economist: “The poets should watch out, or they may soon have only their own words to eat.”

I mean, what’s wrong with these glorious engines of financial growth? I mean, sure, a day doesn’t go by without the SEC announcing a new case against a hedge fund… And of course

…[I]n the categories of custody and financial disclosure, …hedge fund adviser violations were about double that of other advisers. Hedge fund advisers that were examined by state regulators were cited for violations concerning their valuation of holdings, undisclosed conflicts of interest, cross-trading (not recording transactions that cancel each other out, often to hide a markup), preferential treatment, selling to nonaccredited investors, and selling unregistered securities without an appropriate exemption.

Google HEDGE FUND SCANDAL if you want to spend all day online.

To be sure, the particular hedge fund giving money to the poetry prize might be pure as the driven snow. That doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Hedge funds as such have tarnished themselves plenty in the last five or so years, and they shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t want to be associated with them…

But no, it’s ridiculous. It’s like turning down the opportunity to have Donald Trump moderate your presidential debate. Where is the author of The Dunciad when you need him? After all Trump is a perfectly respectable businessman… a glorious engine of financial growth, really… What is it with Huntsman, Perry, Paul, and Romney? Silly buggers. They should watch out.

A finance professor at Bocconi University has been suspended while authorities launch a fraud investigation into his hedge fund.