Far out.

It’s America’s worst fraternity – a distinction extremely hard to attain, given the competition.

UD loves the image of Yale’s Sean Stewart getting his degree in ethics while being an SAE man, for, as you know, UD loves hypocrisy, the cruder the better. Stewart went on to become a finance person (he’s just been charged with insider trading), and a striking number of finance people seem to go in for this moral seriousness/massive theft of funds approach to life. Michael Martoma, you may recall, was also an ethics guy in college… Bernard Madoff, come to that, was a pious Yeshiva University insider…

None of these men seems to have been able to keep his dual-track life going. Bernie kept it up, as it were, longest, but now he’s rotting in jail. Martoma will get out of jail in nine years, and I’m sure he’s working out in the gym every day in order not to rot. Stewart could go to jail for 25 years, but he’ll get less time than that. Ten years, maybe. He and his father were in on the scheme together (Bernie also made it a family affair), and they used golf code in their phone conversations about their various trades, which is so cute. Golf is this adorable subtext in many insider trading arrests – remember this guy? Does his perp walk while wearing a sweater with little vintage golfers on it! Sweet.

If you’re failing, sue.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the order of adjectives here – isn’t childish a bit weaker than ugly, kitsch, ridiculous? Those are stronger words, and I think you should build up to your stronger words to avoid a letdown at the end of a sentence. SOS might have started the list with childish and then continued by means of ascending number of syllables:

kitsch (1)
ugly (2)
ridiculous (4)

“Childish, kitsch, ugly, and rather ridiculous.” Or drop the rather. “Childish, kitsch, ugly, and ridiculous.”

The ur-text for thinking about the style and content of lists is The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.

CECILY. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Doesn’t make much sense and is, again, a bit of a letdown.

In the case of practically bankrupt Louisiana State University finding money to buy “a ‘lazy river’ on the LSU campus in the shape of the letters L-S-U,” it doesn’t really matter how the LSU Faculty Senate president organized his list – the remarkable nature of the construction certainly comes across. Students whose campus is in the tank will soon be literally in the tank, paddling while Rome burns.

… the gilt.

In the room of [Wesleyan University student] Eric Lonergan, the police found … 16 kinds of prescription drugs … including blood pressure medications, … drugs for dementia or Parkinson’s disease, and others.

… or the Wynn Resorts board?

Qasem Exirifard has been dismissed from Tehran’s Khajeh Nasir Toosi University after its academic committee, in charge of examining staff’s qualifications, deemed his voice was effeminate …

… collusion.

… the prodronal stage.

She’ll keep looking out the window.

She’ll let you know if this develops into something.

With the help of a researcher at the National Center for Education Statistics, the [Jewish Daily] Forward identified six universities with characteristics similar to Y.U. — private, not-for-profit, four-year universities with high research activity and a student body size similar to Y.U.’s.

Among those schools, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and Brandeis universities more than doubled their endowments between 2003 and 2014. Rice University’s endowment grew by 88%.

One other school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which has struggled financially in recent years, saw its endowment grow by just 29%.

Since [Richard] Joel took over Y.U. in 2003, Y.U.’s endowment has grown by 20% overall.

Put yeshiva in my search engine to discover the myriad causes of this amazing outcome.

Here’s a look at how the man who was deemed a shoe-in for the Elysée Palace, rose to almost the top, before his dramatic, disgraceful fall.

A top dean at American University Washington College of Law is venting frustration over the recent exodus of AU students to George Washington University Law School, accusing his nearby rival of engaging in poaching.

“Speaking only for myself and not in my official law school capacity, I view this practice as downright predatory,” Anthony E. Varona, AU’s associate dean for academic affairs, wrote in a recent Facebook post, which was republished at TaxProf Blog on Thursday.

GW law officials deny they’re raiding AU’s student body, but what’s not in dispute is that an unusually large number of AU students are deciding that they’d rather go to GW. In the 2013-14 academic year, 54 students left AU to enroll at GW, according to its most recent disclosure data. Those students represented well more than half of GW’s total reported transfers for that year.

Getting desperate out there.

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

“It’s pretty striking because American has much lower entrance standards than GW, but what GW is doing is essentially laundering the credentials of their [second-year] class,” Campos said. “The LSAT and the GPAs of those students don’t count against GW’s stats because transfer student stats aren’t part of the calculation of what a school’s GPA and LSAT is.”

Paul Campos sorts through the laundry.

… made up his last name.

Former Cape Cod Doctor Censured for Performing Drunken Colonoscopy