From Mozart and Chopin over station loudspeakers to blue mood lighting and safety patrols, railway companies are taking proactive measures to prevent suicides, which wreak havoc on train schedules that run like clockwork.

Asahi Shinbum

She’s not the only one.

(A picture caption in today’s Daily News.)

… if you’re the New York Times editorial page, we expect better of you.

If Pakistan has a future, it is embodied in Malala Yousafzai. Yet the Taliban so feared this 14-year-old girl that they tried to assassinate her. Her supposed offense? Her want of an education and her public advocation for it.

As La Kid (UD‘s daughter, if you’re new to this site) would say, AWKward.

Here’s what you do.

You drop supposed.

You sit down and think about how confused your use of the phrase “want of an education” makes your reader. Do you mean desire for? Do you mean lack of?

You change advocation – which is certainly a word, and it means what you want it to mean, but it’s seldom used – to advocacy.

You think some more about how the way you’ve written the sentence makes it sound as though Malala is advocating for an education that’s wanting.

Local reporting of the police killing of a naked and threatening University of South Alabama student makes ye olde diffuse/defuse error. The officer did not want to diffuse – as in spread, or enlarge – the situation. The officer tried to defuse the situation.

…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm doesn’t know what to say.

George Orwell wasn’t referring to the 2012 [Cleveland] Browns when he wrote that progress is “slow and invariably painful.”

Orwell died in 1950. The Browns were good back then.

But the great writer’s words sure do apply to a franchise whose fits have far outnumbered its starts since it returned from NFL exile in 1999.

Watching the Browns’ attempts at improvement have been painful. Painful like gout, if gout also came with the flu, a bad rash and a nasty hangover.

There’s been nothing particularly not painful about it, not the turnstile of failed coaches, not the heap of discarded quarterbacks, not a soccer-crazed owner.

Which gambit? The gamut gambit?

************************

Update: The writer corrected the error.

Imagine the absurdity of a university with a serious obesity problem that pledges to promote healthier lifestyles on campus by jumping into bed with, say, Burger King. Even if every Whopper advertisement in the country were plastered with the words “Eat a Salad,” the relationship would still be inherently problematic because Burger King’s behavior is motivated not by a vested interest in collective health but by the existential corporate necessity to sell more fast food.

A University of Iowa student lays down some nice prose about his university’s deal with Anheuser-Busch.

Yes, it’s “notoriously disgraceful,” as his dean put it, that a professor at the Merchant Marine Academy made a tasteless joke about the Aurora shooter to his students – especially since he’d been sent an email informing him that one of the students in that class was the son of a man who’d been killed in the incident. The school plans to fire the guy, though this seems to me to be going a bit far.

Also disgraceful, by the way, is what the guy was doing as he made the comment. See how the article starts? See what the professors you and I pay for do in their classrooms?

After turning down the lights in his classroom at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan began showing a documentary and prepared to step out for a moment.

But first, according to an internal personnel document, he paused to make a parting joke: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room,” he is said to have remarked to his students, “run for the exit.”

That’s right, kiddies. They’re showing movies. We’re paying for them to turn off the lights, turn on a machine, and leave.

***************************

Outside the classroom, Sullivan writes about Japan.

It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls this writing style Translation from the German.

The wisdom of commenters. This one even knows how to use a semi-colon. UD bows down.

***********************

Speaking of writing, Scathing Online Schoolmarm is relieved to see wordplay starting up on the last name Peppers. It’s taken far too long. Philadelphia Inquirer:

PEEPING AT PEPPERS’ TRANSCRIPT

Alliteration is the obvious first move, though SOS also looks forward to some pun-seepage.

Pepper is of course part of a famous alliterative Mother Goose thingie:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

*********************************

Chapel’s campus posted pickled Peppers’ transcript;
A peek at pickled Peppers’ GPA took place.
It shows how Chapel Hill kept up its pecker
And won the big athletic college race.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm will let you decide.

No she won’t.

Look. If you’ve got something to say, and that something matters a lot to you, and you’re lucky enough to have what you say appear in all sorts of high-profile places, you should really go to the trouble of writing it competently.

You’re a smart person, so you know you have trouble writing well. You also know that the crappier your statement of your position on a subject, the more likely you are to be ignored. So you write your thing, and then you give it to a friend for editing. Right? You give it to someone who’s a good writer before you send it out to all those publications. Yes?

If you’re William Wulf, hotshot computer professor at the University of Virgina who resigned in protest during the Teresa Sullivan dust-up, I’m afraid no.  You don’t bother giving your writing to someone who can shorten it, clarify your points, take out the heavy breathing. All the things good writers know how to do and bad writers may never learn.

So here’s Wulf, reprinted in the Washington Post, explaining why he still won’t return to U Va, even though Sullivan has been reinstated. His basic point, which should have taken four paragraphs tops, is that the board remains a bunch of corporate know-nothings, and until people who understand and care about universities appear on the board, he won’t reappear at U Va. So far, of the six comments on the letter, two are about his terrible writing. Terrible writing distracts from what you want to say. It draws attention to your writing, rather than to your argument. And when your writing is this terrible, it also makes people wonder how generally cogent you are, and therefore how strong your arguments here (or anywhere else) are. See why competent writing — SOS doesn’t even say good! She just means writing that gets you there, that gets it said! — really does matter?

*************************************

Just in case you missed it, I am one of the folks that publicaly [glaring spelling error] resigned over the forced resignation of President Sullivan. I resigned because I deeply care about the University, I thought President Sullivan was doing a great job, and thus felt deeply that this action, and the way it was taken, was profoundly damaging to the University. [Commas where semi-colons should be, but this isn’t important, and SOS wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t part of a larger shitpile.]

I was frankly surprised by the magnitude of the positive faculty and media reaction to my resignation – I don’t think of myself as the “marching in the street, and placard waving” type. [Unnecessary, distracting quotation marks. Why are they there? Who is he quoting? Is marching in the street and placard waving a well-known phrase?] So, after the initial flurry of email, except for bland replies to some, I have kept pretty quiet about the whole fiasco. But now I feel I need to voice a perspective on the solution to the underlying problem.

I have been asked by President Sullivan, my Dean, and even my departmental faculty, to “un-resign” – I have said NO, and the rest of this note is to explain to all of you why, and perhaps what it means to you. It is not because I don’t love UVa, and would love to rejoin its faculty – quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I do love and respect it so much! [Vaguely messy, conversational feel to the whole thing. Which is fine. No one says you have to write with more formality than that, and this is after all a letter. But lack of parallel structure – would he or would he not love to rejoin its faculty? – as well as what’s going to be an avalanche of exclamation marks will confuse and distract the reader.]

Like most of you, I was delighted by the re-instatement of Terry Sullivan – but that, I my view, didn’t fix the underlying problem!  [typo, exclamation] As my original message noted, my wife [Relevance of wife to his expertise?] and I have extensive experience in both executive positions and board positions in industry, academia, and government – we’ve seen the executive-to-board relationship from both sides, and in multiple contexts – and my judgment is that the current BOV is incompetent to govern UVa! Let me repeat – it’s incompetent for the task of governing UVa!  [Bad writing is often hyper-emotional, insistent, vehement, compulsively redundant.  Note that he repeats in almost exactly the same words what he’s just said.  A pointless, diluting move that merely makes the reader wonder what he’s on about.]  I am more than willing to stipulate that the BOV members are smart, good and accomplished people –but to be competent on a board requires a significant understanding of the institution they are governing. That’s what is lacking!  [The editor he didn’t consult would have put a big fat red line through the last sentence.]

The present BOV appointed by the Governor is 14 lawyers or corporate executives with no experience with academic governance, one part-time medic at John-Hopkins [Don’t bother to learn how to spell the university; you wouldn’t want the reader to think you cared enough about the people and the situation to get that sort of thing straight.], and one CEO of a small university. Alas, they don’t even seem to know much about UVa! While fond of selectively quoting Jefferson out of context, they overlook the deeply philosophical fact that Mr. Jefferson’s design for UVa had *no* President or central administration – the faculty governed the University, and did so in an open collaborative way, not in secret meetings behind closed doors,with no faculty input. Total faculty control wouldn’t work for today’s larger university, BUT … the BOV’s instincts were that top-down, command and control management was “right” [More pointless quotation marks.] and so tried to impose it. Well, it’s not right for universities, especially for UVa – and in fact,the data says that it is not right for most corporations either! It certainly wasn’t right for the corporations that I ran! But my main point is that faculty involvement in university governance is central to all universities, and especially to UVa.

Moreover, the current BOV clearly didn’t even investigate the issue they expressed concern about – for example on-line presence of the University (seemingly a big deal in TS’s firing), but they apparently just reacted to the hype of recent announcements by some other universities without investigating UVa’s record on the subject. Well, our involvement in digital scholarship and learning goes back at least twenty years – I know because I was a principal in getting it started! Please note in the prior sentence I said scholarship AND education. Great universities are about both – not just mass teaching! And a future great UVa must be about both! The current BOV, or at least those involved in firing Terry Sullivan, pretty clearly doesn’t understand that.

Are these uninformed folks likely to make smart future decisions for UVa? Alas, I think not! Smart and accomplished as they may be individually in other contexts, they just don’t have the knowledge base to make good decisions for UVa.

Just imagine a board imposed upon General Motors that consisted of 14 smart/accomplished academics, but with no industrial experience, one Chevy customer, and the CEO of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Would that work? No, of course not! And the converse isn’t working here either!  [Pretty well-stated, pretty strong point.  But look how he takes the air out of his tires by his goofy garrulous sentences at the end.  Just stop at store.]

What we need is a significant fraction of the BOV to be folks that deeply understand academia, and UVa in particular – I have been astounded by how shallow and un-informed the comments [verb needed here] by rector Dragas, for example.

I have a substantial list of distinguished current or former academic administrators that I know first hand, that are really bright and I would be happy to recommend them to serve on the BOV, and I’d even to be the first contact with them – but I haven’t been asked. Alas, they almost certainly didn’t make major contribution to the Governor’s campaign, so the chance of their selection under the current system are probably nil. BUT, it’s the system needs to be changed!

I am a more-than-a-tad concerned that the reinstatement of President Sullivan has taken a bit of wind out of the sails of faculty/student pressure for reform. In my view the time is not to compromise, but to stand for the principles of the University, and particularly the principle of faculty deeply involved its governance!!  [Ah.  There we go.  Double exclamation marks.  Will he go for three?]

Corporate style boards (of which both my wife and I have deep experience) are NOT the model for the BOV – nor is “damn the torpedoes” top-down executive management – and the fact that the current BOV doesn’t understand that is damning and destructive, and says a lot about the selection criteria that chose them! We MUST fix the selection criteria!  [What are you visualizing, personality-wise, for the guy at this point?  I’m seeing a guy who can’t get one thought out without bursting his appendix.]

Permit me to cycle back to my opening – I am not a “march and wave placards” type – partly because I find it intellectually repugnant, but also in no small measure because I don’t think it’s especially effective in our context. You may disagree. What I do think we need is a moderate,well-reasoned argument for why the structure of the BOV needs to be changed for the benefit of the University – and the state. But please note that I think the argument needs to be delivered to the folks that can effect that change and that the present process is a political one,and while I am not in favor of marching and placard waving, I also think our actions need to include political ones – just what those actions are should be needs to be a collective decision of the faculty, so I’ll stay silent on that for now.

But we DO need to act to fix the problem underlying President Sullivan’s firing! Will she stay long term, or would we be able to recruit a comparable replacement given the current BOV and the criteria for future BOV selections? In my view — NO! Unless there is fundamental change, UVa is on a downward spiral. It hurts me to the core! UVa has been SO special! To see it self-destruct is as painful as I can imagine.

The scandal at Ohio State further fueled perceptions of a tail-wagging-the-dog culture at major universities, where administrators look the other way as long as the golden goose athletics program is reeling in wins and dollars.

Edit this sentence.

… when you have absolutely no arguments, and cannot write, it’s better to remain silent.

… this is excellent writing.

Yes, there’s one mistake.

After getting caught on tape repeatedly using the heliport on the weekends — when it’s supposed to be closed because of noise pollution — a reporter for ABC 7 confronted the mayor, who explained…

This makes it look as though the reporter got caught, not the mayor.

But otherwise this piece is terrific satire, snark, irony, sarcasm, whatever.

**************************

And you can relax. Ira Rennert, who used to be one of Yeshiva University’s fabled trustees (that great religious institution also had Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin running the place), will continue to break the rules and use the heliport on the weekends. “Being an entitled plutocrat just isn’t what it used to be,” complains the Gothamist writer. But it is. Rennert’s holding down the fort.

Laced with a deadly zinc phosphide, wildlife officials predict the rats will die after consuming it while burrowed underground.

Scary wildlife officials.

When UD was a tyke, her mother, who bred dogs, took her to many dog shows up and down the east coast. Once, while her mother was gazing at handlers running English Cocker Spaniels round and round and round, UD wandered away and got lost. (What’s the definition of trauma if you grew up in Bethesda, Maryland? Getting lost at a dog show.)

The one thing UD took away from all those shows was a phrase she heard over and over again at them: CLEAN-UP CREW, RING ONE. Or two or whatever. UD seems to have been impressed that a group of people existed whose function was to rush about cleaning up dog shit.

With the soon to be infamous “muppet” letter published in today’s New York Times, corporate clean-up crews are pressing pooper scoopers into service all over the country. Let’s see if we can help them. Here’s the mess in the ring. Here’s what Brown University’s president, until very recently a highly paid member of the Goldman Sachs board of trustees, was in with.

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence. [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Nice bit of humor there.]

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. [He’d actually have done better not to list the particular accomplishments – it edges toward boasting, and humility is the idea here.] [Update: See? A lot of people are having fun with this.]

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

Hokay, so what’s corporate clean-up going to do?

Oh, you know.

So do I.

First, it’s going to impugn the guy. Secret resentments; he was close to retirement; he was increasingly irrelevant and he knew it so he thought he’d take a last potshot. (Damn! Traitors everywhere.)

And – if that’s how he feels, why did he stay so long? Cashing in baby, cashing in, just like everyone else! Do you know how much money he made last year? Twenty, fifty mil, maybe? If he’s so pure, we await his return of the cash…

Stuff like that.

And anyway! Muppets is a term of endearment.

***************************

Notice that one thing his conscience couldn’t take anymore was looking college students in the eye and telling them Goldman was a good place to work when he knew they weren’t exactly going to be turned into model citizens.

Well, he can stop worrying about that. These students come from universities whose boards of trustees and presidents have been in bed with Goldman and Goldman veterans for a long time. So…

Muppets of Barnard College! I give you your president, Debora Spar, Goldman Sachs board of trustees! Goldman will be giving her around $500,000 a year to do … pretty much what Brown University’s Ruth Simmons did. Pretty much nothing. Pretty much rubber stamp hundreds of millions in compensation each year for Goldman executives.

See, she’s a muppet too.

****************************************

Update: Live-blogging the Muppet Show:

TO SAVE GOLDMAN SACHS, LLOYD BLANKFEIN MUST GO

shouts a headline that just appeared at Forbes.

B-b-but…! What happens to Barnard College in that case? The reason its president got on the Goldman board is that Blankfein’s wife – until recently herself a member of Barnard’s board – seems to have put her there.   This is from 2011:

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s wife, Laura, is a Barnard College alumna and is listed on the school’s website as a member of the board of trustees. She has resigned that post, Stephen Cohen, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, said today. The Lloyd & Laura Blankfein Foundation donated $50,000 to Barnard College in fiscal 2010, which ended Jan. 31, 2010, and $25,000 in the previous year, according to the nonprofit’s federal tax filings.

You put me on the Barnard BOT; I put you on the Goldman BOT. And look at those numbers, will you? Blankfein’s been making around fifty million dollars in compensation each year for many years. Can you believe he and his wife were willing to part with – let’s do the math – $75,000 for Barnard?  Who said greed?  Shut up about greed!

*************************

Favorite headline so far:

Goldman Sachs Exec Suddenly Realizes His Company Is Evil, Quits in NYT Op-Ed

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G is for Goldman, it’s good enough for me!

Be proud, Barnard muppets, of your very own Cookie Monster!

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

**********************************

We promise it’ll never happen again: Andy Borowitz writes a Lloyd Blankfein response.

At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.