Writers are falling over themselves ridiculing the two poets who’ve withdrawn from consideration for a pretty big-time poetry prize in England because the money behind the prize comes from a hedge fund.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

After Sussex, [Raj Rajaratnam] decided to get an M.B.A. at Wharton. Of the 600-odd students there, 20 were South Asian. That’s where the Galleon network began. His roommate ended up being head of investor relations at Galleon; another classmate later oversaw Asia for Galleon. Altogether, four people from his class ended up working for him.

UD thanks David.

In the grand tradition of Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, another tough guy – the House Majority Leader, for chrissake – has cantered (might as well keep playing with his name) away from a public speech because protests were planned.

Eric Cantor claims Wharton (Wharton! He was among friends! One of whom, angry at the protestors – but why not be angry at his hero for backing down? – hung a sign out of a Wharton window for the protestors to see: GET IN OUR BRACKET.) told him it’d be a nice civilized talk open only to the amazingly well off, or at least people guaranteed to agree with Cantor’s take on the whole 1% / 99% thing… Wharton says au contraire – “there [has] been no change in the attendance policy.”

The Wharton speaker series is typically open to the general public, and that is how the event with Majority Leader Cantor was billed.

A number of amusing things were said along the way to this latest retreat coming from the God forbid unseemly envy of the successful should tear this country apart crowd. One student remarked, “I think it’s a little too much to bring the protest to a college campus.” Of all the places for a protest!

Another Wharton student sweetly said: “I definitely understand the anger. …But they have to realize that corporate greed is not taught at school. If you spend time at this school, never is greed, unfairness, and immoral behavior ever taught or propagated.”

Then how did so many of your only recently greatly celebrated alumni (start with Raj Rajaratnam) learn it? This student should glance over the Wharton rap sheet. Short version: It’s long.

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Update: Note to Cantor: Here’s how it’s done.

Almost 60 years ago, the Bell Telephone Company launched a program to address rising concerns about the education of its managers. W.D. Gillen, president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, felt that many of these managers would eventually rise to positions in which they’d need a broader point-of-view…

To that end, Gillen established the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, a 10-month immersion program that amounted to a complete liberal arts education. The program required more reading than the average graduate student had to complete in a similar time frame. They also visited museums and art galleries, attended orchestral concerts, and listened to guest lecturers. The program’s capstone came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to Ulysses.

Sadly, the program didn’t last past 1960. Multiple assessments found the executives to be more confident and intellectually engaged, but also less interested in putting the company’s performance ahead of their family and community commitments.

… B-School Boys.

The trajectory from faculty to fatcat is often impressive and inspiring. To come up with original ideas that make you and other people rich can be very cool. Here a Nobel Prize recipient, William Sharpe, thanks Barr Rosenberg, once a Berkeley professor, now a financial titan, for his pioneering work in computer-based trading. Berkeley’s business school boasts of its graduates’ internships with the outfit that bears his name.

Barr has now been barred from the securities business.

[I]n late June 2009 a [Barr Rosenberg] employee discovered an error in the code of a complex automated optimization model that caused $217 million in losses in about 600 client portfolios. After the employee discussed his finding with Rosenberg and other employees, the SEC claims Rosenberg directed them to keep quiet about the error and not to inform anyone else about it.

Rosenberg also directed that the error not be corrected at the time.

… It is a hard fall for Rosenberg, a supremely wealthy man and widely respected academic, who pioneered the use of quantitative techniques to implement investment strategies for decades.

His clients lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Barr will pay a $2.5 million fine.

… law school graduates!

As long as there’s a Goldman Sachs, all is not lost.

First up and then out of the Anglican Church, Jonathan Kirkpatrick turned to one of New Zealand’s universities, where, as head of this outfit, he got away with $666,000 until he got caught.

Court documents showed the large scale of the fraud, which stretched back to 2002 soon after Kirkpatrick got the job…

He resigned from his role as chief executive of AUT’s business innovation centre after large sums of money were discovered missing from research and development funds last week.

… Kirkpatrick was a Reverend and Priest in Charge at St Alban’s Church in Balmoral, in central Auckland, where his assistant priest was Reverend Philip Sallis, who is also the Pro Vice Chancellor of AUT.

In the midst of Preet Bharara’s crackdown on insider trading, the future denizens of Wall Street have one burning question for the hard-driving federal prosecutor: What can we still get away with?

During his tenure as U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District, Bharara has made the rounds at the country’s best business schools, lecturing on ethics and compliance in what he calls his version of Scared Straight.

His audiences, though, are far from frightened. Instead, students invariably ask him how close they can get to the line without crossing it.

… (pronounced embolize), is UD‘s term for the tendency of some MBA programs to lie about their job placement numbers.

An ethics complaint made to [the University of Florida] alleged that Warrington College of Business Administration officials manipulated data on the [2009] job placement of program graduates.

A higher percentage of graduates were reported as being employed in order to maintain the program’s ranking in U.S. News’ annual guide to graduate schools…

The school admits the numbers were madly inflated, but denies lying. It was just “inexperience” or something.

Fudging is very much the way at UF. Take this statement from the Distance Learning page on the business school’s website:

Studies have shown that there is no significant difference in the learning outcomes experienced by students in a traditional classroom versus those in a distance learning situation.

Footnote? Wanna source that? Why not?

In an article titled The Default Major: Skating Through B-School, the New York Times describes the shoddiness of most business majors, and then quotes Henry Mintzberg of McGill University.

[A] dogged critic of traditional business programs, [Mintzberg] … says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.

The story goes on to note that “Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.”

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Yet, as Louis Menand points out, “The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business.”

… [S]tudents majoring in liberal-arts fields — sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities — do better on [a college learning assessment exam], and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though… Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in [business]. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

Already back in ’09, Jon Stewart was seriously discouraged about the nation’s anti-MBA-grad defense capability. The MBA brigade, equipped by Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, and Northwestern with the latest weaponry, launches wave after wave of attacks, year after year, against American suckers like you and me who haven’t learned high-level market-craft. There’s really nothing we can do.

It’s gotten so bad lately, with all the MBA insider traders, that some of their degree-granting institutions have begun to issue public statements.

“These are serious allegations, which if proved true are of great concern to me as a teacher, as a dean, and as someone who is dedicated to restoring people’s trust in business leaders,” said [the dean of the Harvard business school] “We try to do all we can at HBS to convey the importance of integrity and accountability to our students and will keep striving to do more.”

Yadda yadda. He’s talking about yet another insider trader his school trained.

[D]uring his first year at Harvard, [Samir] Barai would have taken the required course ”Decision Making and Ethical Values,” that had been put into HBS’ curriculum eight years earlier. The module offered students an ethical framework to use as a guide for making decisions and using sound judgment… The lessons from that class, including several case studies on ethics, must have eluded him.

One indignant B-school professor, reflecting on all the criminal cases, complains,”People assume that you’re somehow flawed if you go to business school.”

One thing Harvard’s new ethics-oriented dean might do is ask himself what his own professors are modeling for their students. Harvard’s business school, after all, spawned the notorious Monitor Group.

Born in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, Rajaratnam was educated there at St. Thomas’ Preparatory School before leaving for England, where he studied engineering at the University of Sussex. He came to the U.S. to get his master’s of business administration, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1983.

Two of his Wharton classmates — Anil Kumar, who became a partner at McKinsey & Co., and Rajiv Goel, who was a managing director at Intel — testified against him at the trial, telling jurors how their relationships began at the school and how they turned to crime. Both pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors.

Found guilty on all counts today.

… so at business schools.