Mike Royko’s motto for the city of Chicago has become the motto of California’s public university system.

These soon-to-be pensioners at the University of California have given selflessly to the institution for decades, earning only $400,000 a year or so. As if that pay weren’t insulting enough, the system might not lift the cap on their retirement benefits.

They want UC to calculate retirement benefits as a percentage of their entire salaries, instead of the federally instituted limit of $245,000. The difference would be significant for the more than 200 UC employees who currently earn more than $245,000.

Under UC’s formula, which calculates retirement benefits on only the first $245,000 of pay, an employee earning $400,000 a year who retires after 30 years would get a $183,750 annual pension.

Lift the cap, and the pension rises to $300,000.

Can you imagine retiring on anything under two hundred thousand dollars a year? The mind boggles.

First they came for Todd Henderson; then they came for Victor Dzau; and now damned if they’re not going after the public sector.

“The best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American – their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when – like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by a nineteenth century English gentleman — there appears… a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.”

The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt

… doesn’t see that many pre-med students. Those she sees in her classes tend to be exceptional students, impressive in both the arts and sciences.

Although this blog follows with some care perennial, notorious, headline-grabbing medical school scandals – professors who put their names on pharma-subsidized, ghostwritten research papers; professors guilty of investment-related, or other forms of mercenary conflicts of interest – it has had little to say about where pre-med students go when they leave undergraduate classrooms. And that’s because the institution of the American medical school is rarely written about in the press.

One knows vaguely about our shortage of MDs. (Though if you’re UD and you live in wealthy Bethesda, Maryland, you see the opposite of this, a place as jammed with MDs as it is with lawyers.) In many places – say, Oneonta, New York, a place not far from UD‘s upstate house – you’re more likely to be treated by a DO than an MD.

The DOs, foreign doctors, American doctors with foreign degrees, physician assistants with some prescribing privileges, etc. etc., that thrive in the United States in part because of our MD-shortage are rarely the focus of major news articles; but a recent New York Times piece about how

New York State’s 16 medical schools are attacking their [largely Caribbean] competitors. They have begun an aggressive campaign to persuade the State Board of Regents to make it harder, if not impossible, for foreign schools to use New York hospitals as extensions of their own campuses.

has generated a great deal of reaction. UD will write in more detail about this after her Christmas lunch (with, among others, her niece, who’s an American-trained MD, and her niece’s husband, a Boston University medical student). Hold on.

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Hokay. Yikes. Medical education, as UD feared, is an immensely complicated, immensely contested business. UD enters the business as in a first-level dream (Last night, she and her Cambridge family watched Inception.), so be patient with her…

It’s obviously incredibly important that medical education, above all other forms of education, be excellent; and the intensity, rigor, and duration of American medical education is reassuring. But:

1. There aren’t enough doctors, or rather there aren’t enough geographically dispersed primary care doctors.

2. The medical establishment, in the form of the AMA, remains a trade-restricting force, even though few doctors actually belong to the organization.

3. There are so few American medical schools producing so few doctors (and so few doctors among this group who want to go into primary care) that a thriving secondary educational establishment has emerged over the last few decades, mainly based in the Caribbean. Here, Americans unable to gain admission to domestic med schools get their first two years of coursework, and then enter American hospital programs for their second two years of clinical work.

4. As American medical schools slowly increase their number of slots (under pressure of an impending shortage which will in a couple of decades be far worse than the shortage we now have), and as new med schools open up here, there’s suddenly competition for hospital slots from the established Caribbean schools — and the for-profit Caribbean schools have an advantage in placements because, unlike the American non-profit schools, they pay the hospitals quite a lot to take their students. Plus their graduating classes tend to be much bigger than American graduating classes.

Details here. This is the most I can write for the moment. Off to lunch. Major snowfall here.

More later.

And why not? You’d think the reporter for the Jewish Chronicle would at least think to ask the question. Everyone else is getting clawback-sued, and they didn’t – like Yeshiva – have the Madoff/Merkin Partnership on their board of trustees.

… sends her the latest Ivy League drug bust news.

A 26-year-old Cornell senior, a woman, an English major, a witty writer in the campus newspaper, and someone who, if my Googling’s right, used to be a seriously competitive doubles skater, was arrested in a sketchy part of town with enormous amounts of uncut heroin. She’d apparently been selling out of her off-campus apartment for some time. Her mottled, miserable, and frightened mug shot suggests she’s been using for some time too.

Let me free associate in response to this story.

All streets in time are visited, writes Philip Larkin in Ambulances; and so it is with universities. All in time are visited by narcotics units, because everyone knows lots of narcotics are traded and used on and off American campuses. Tips are received, and here come the authorities. Too many students die in drug overdoses, and the school, or someone, decides to call in the police. UD has covered zillions of these, and related, stories.

Most tend to go unreported unless they feature Ivy League, or near-Ivy League schools, or if they involve, as San Diego State did a couple of years ago, the arrest of so many student dealers that extensive, weaponized, often fraternity-based, conspiracies were clearly in play.

The Cornell story will get more than its share of play because it’s part of a trend, because it happened at an Ivy League school, because it involves desperate icky heroin rather than giggly collegiate marijuana, and because it involves a woman.

Most of my free associating, to be frank, has to do with this woman. In her Facebook photos, she plays up her tough girl thing — cig hangs from her mouth, she flips the bird, she features a fuck-all quotation from Hunter Thompson… I dunno. A woman like this becomes addicted to heroin and, feeling it’s impossible to stop being addicted, throws herself down one of the gorges and becomes part of the Cornell suicide story…

I wonder too about her physicality, her having been a serious athlete. I’ve read a lot of stories about college athletes and drug addiction… My friend Courtney sent me this long essay by a climber who has years of serious drug addiction behind him.

The essay ends like this:

If you’re an outdoor athlete and you’re good at it, you’re probably like I once was: a selfish, self-involved son of a bitch. It’s always more, more, more and me, me, me, and I was no different. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to do the hardest sport routes, to be the boldest on high, killer walls.

Why? Why not? I was addicted to climbing, and then to starvation, and when that wasn’t enough, I became addicted to drugs.

Maybe you see some of my method in your own madness. And perhaps your obsessions are “healthy”: wheatgrass, long runs, body sculpting, rock climbing. That’s great. But I tell you now, absent your passions you will feel the sharp scrape of withdrawal — just like any fixless junkie bug-eyed in a January alley. Reality can be reduced, at its sparest, to chemical reactions, our body craving the release of GABA, oxytocins, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. It doesn’t care about their provenance. It just doesn’t. Cut off the source—any source—and you will pay.

UD lives in the richest, most highly educated location in the world.

The most spoiled, too. Even though many of us in the Washington DC region have plenty of money, all of the Smithsonian museums — arguably the best collection of museums in the world — are free. (Just one New York museum – the Guggenheim – costs eighteen bucks. MOMA’s twenty.)

The Smithsonians, the Guggenheims — these places, like universities, are considered public goods, worthy of government support in the form of things like direct funding, or tax-deductible donations, or other goodies. (An article in the Economist magazine worries about whether the escalating commercialization of American museums will threaten the fact that they “fall under a category of non-profit organisation that is tax-exempt and that qualifies for charitable giving.”)

The Smithsonians are mostly tax-supported (though their come-and-go exhibits aren’t), and the Guggenheims much less so, but both are non-profits; and there’s a profound, delicate, and complex understanding in this country that the non-profits among us — places like museums and universities — stand above the merely material world, have to do with higher things, represent not merely monetary but civilizational values, and therefore must be especially cherished by us all. Special exceptions must be made for them; they are worthy recipients of special forms of support.

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How much of this instinct toward cherishing non-profits like universities is sentiment, and how much substance?

An important question. Yet people who defend the non-profit nature of universities tend to be merely sentimental, rather than substantive, in defending their higher, civilizational claims.

For instance, Stanley Fish, in his latest blog post, expresses fury at a recent report out of England arguing for greater privatization of universities and a greater emphasis on preparing students for a vocation. Fish rails against the report’s “relentless monetization of everything in sight… [V]alue now means return on the dollar; quality of life now means the number of cars or houses you can buy; a civilized society is a society where the material goods a society offers can be enjoyed by more people.” He continues:

The logic is the logic of privatization. Higher education is no longer conceived of as a public good — as a good the effects of which permeate society — but is rather a private benefit, and as such it should be supported by those who enjoy the benefit… [C]ivilization, as far as one can see, will have to take care of itself .

This all sounds great; but what matters is what people see. When they see Fish – who last I looked boasted of driving a Jaguar convertible, and is famous for having attracted big names to Duke University’s English department by throwing huge sums of money at them and giving them little in the way of teaching responsibilities – do they see the reasonably distanced attitude toward materialism that his pro-civilization rhetoric suggests?

What do people see? Duke, and UD‘s GW, are both fine universities; but what do people see?

When you walk into the largest, most public building at George Washington University, where UD teaches, a big tv screen greets you. On it, the latest Hollywood gossip blares. It’s inescapable. The sound fills up the lobby.

So… Say you’re a taxpayer assured by Stanley Fish and others that universities are precious conservators of civilization. But your immediate experience of this university is no different from your experience in the back of a taxicab that has a tv screen staring you in the face when you enter, blaring the latest Hollywood gossip.

If universities are going to be treated as different, they need to be careful that what they present to the world differentiates itself from the world.

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The current focus on the scandal of government support for rip-off for-profit schools is drawing attention to the civilizational integrity, if you will, of the non-profits. The only argument lobbyists for the for-profits have going for them is that many non-profit universities are just as scummy as they are, and they get federal support! Why shouldn’t the for-profits?

Too true. Too true. What’s University Diaries been telling you all these years? If your non-profit university is as much of a joke as the for-profits, you should be slammed just as hard as they’re about to get slammed. If you give your president millions in compensation, graduate few students, give most of your money to athletics, hoard your endowment, stuff your boards of trustees with hedge fund managers or corrupt local merchants, put most of your courses online and make remaining on-campus courses gigantic lectures no one attends, have ghostwritten industry flacks among your researchers — If you are, in other words, a seriously anti-intellectual, seriously money-grubbing sort of jobbie, you’re doing fuck-all for civilization, and no self-respecting government should have anything to do with you.

From a New York Times article titled In New Jersey, A Backlog of Governor’s Nominees Await Confirmation:

… About 140 of the [New Jersey] governor’s appointments remain in limbo, awaiting Senate action, and most have not been taken up in committee, the step before a full Senate vote. Dozens date back to last spring: election supervisors, department administrators and, most of all, board members of assorted colleges and agencies.

… [At] the scandal-plagued University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, installing like-minded board members was crucial to his plans for agency overhaul…

UMDNJ. The only university in America with rolling prison admissions.

… UD reported – merely reported, mind you – on the director of the University of California at Davis Campus Violence Prevention Program.  My post on the subject is long gone, but it linked to an article about her probably having “inflated the number of forcible sex offenses that took place on campus in 2005, 2006 and 2007 in reports required by federal law.” As in at least doubled them. In a 1999 grant application, she said around 700 women on that campus had been attacked sexually that year.

UD well remembers the shit that got thrown at her from some of her readers for passing along the story’s claim that the woman had made up hundreds of assaults. The claim was a politically motivated attack on Jennifer Beeman, and on women generally…

Beeman – who got her ass out of Davis as soon as the university realized what she was doing with the numbers – has now been arrested for embezzlement.

… Beeman embezzled between $2,000 and $13,000 by asking for travel reimbursements and mileage to attend meetings that didn’t occur…

UC Davis returned more than $100,000 to the U.S. Department of Justice after determining that unallowable expenses had been charged to a violence prevention grant Beeman administered, the university announced Thursday…

… Beeman will be arraigned on Jan. 7 on one count of embezzlement of public funds by a public official, three counts of misuse of funds by a public official, four counts of false accounting, and one count of fraudulently altering an account. All the charges carry potential jail terms.

… is amply compensated.

He’s Number 12 on the highest paid American university presidents list. (Scroll down.)

Great work, President Joel!

Not only that, but Dzau sits on a shitload of corporate boards, which pay him hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The dude is raking it in.

Which bothers a few divinity school types at Duke, who note that

the university paid the bonuses even as it was cutting jobs and eliminating raises for most other workers.

… In recent years, Duke has frozen pay and eliminated jobs in an attempt to pare its annual operating budget by $100 million.

Nearly 400 workers have accepted buyout offers since early 2009. Their jobs were then eliminated.

“During a time when the administration is saying we all needed to tighten our belts and make sacrifices…as it turns out, some of the folks who lost money for Duke [she’s talking about investment managers, who also got bonuses] were giving themselves bonuses,” said Amy Laura Hall, a tenured professor of Christian ethics. “I think that’s obscene.” …

Some of Hall’s students have taken to the quads dressed in Depression era gear and selling apples: “With all the cuts we have around here and all the bonuses we have to give to the big guys, we need to raise all the money we can.”

UD will be sending an executive bonus donation to Duke this evening, and she encourages you to do the same. At a time of real fiscal distress, Duke remains foursquare in its defense of its executive reward system. Its executives themselves are equally remarkable for their fidelity, through thick and thin, to the principle of unlimited personal enrichment.

Worldwide, happiness equates very strongly with equality — mostly status equality, but the countries that have a very short ladder between the richest and the poorest people are a lot happier than those where a few people make a lot of money and a few people don’t make much money. In Denmark, a CEO only makes about three times as much as an average worker, whereas here in the U.S., you can have a CEO making many thousands of times as much as an average worker.

The author of a new book about the happiest places in the world helps us put the resurgent insider trading scandal in the United States in context.

The reason UD goes after universities like Brown and Harvard and Chicago, whose boards of trustees include increasing numbers of the morally shady hyper-rich (boards of trustees have always included small-time crooked cronies — we’re not talking about that), is that of all cultural locations, universities are supposed to be serious places, engaged in serious thought about how to live. Trustees run universities; they set all sorts of crucial policies; they sign off on all sorts of crucial decisions. Symbolically, these people embody and articulate the foundational values of their academic institutions. They’re trustees, after all, people to whom students and faculty entrust the ethical and intellectual, as well as financial, welfare of the institution.

Remember the law professor at the University of Chicago who got into all sorts of trouble and enraged thousands of people because, with a household income of around $450,000, he complained about his deep unhappiness in the current economy, under a President who might increase taxes on some of that money?

If that guy had been located anywhere outside of a university, no one would have batted an eyelash at his sense of entitlement, his refusal to take even a hint of a civic attitude toward his wealth and good fortune. In every place in this country except universities (okay; maybe churches), people positively applaud amoral acquisitiveness. Greed is good, yadda yadda…

So it’s always something of a shock to realize that a university like Harvard until recently paid each of its top investment people 35 million dollars a year, and that it hoarded unto itself a 35 billion dollar endowment.

I mean! No one’s asking for universities to be shabby thready head in the clouds sorts of places; but really…

Blinded by the billion dollar blizzards swirling around hedge fund managers, universities have been piling their boards higher and deeper with these people. Of course the universities know they’re taking a risk by elevating possibly insider-trading hedgies to positions of immense trust. Will the hedgies have time to give the school a one hundred million dollar gift before they have to go to prison? How much damage to the reputation of the school will its high-profile association with financial criminals generate?

Well, we’re about to find out.

Meanwhile, universities might take a deep breath, shake themselves off, and ask whether putting their presidents on the boards of places like Goldman Sachs, investing in firms like Steve Rattner’s, and handing the fortunes of the institution over to money-obsessed cheats is, in the long run, a wise policy.

Yesterday it was Steve Rattner… Today, another member of your university’s corporation is in the news.

All eyes are on Brown trustee Steven A. Cohen.

Plus:

The [FBI] investigation is said to look into a broad range of firms, from hedge funds to Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs is where, for ten years, Brown University President and corporation member Ruth Simmons sat on the board of trustees.

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Update: Says here Brown has invested in Rattner’s firm.

If you’re a just-hired university president, you want to go easy on the confidentiality agreements. As the new leader of Virginia Commonwealth University is discovering, it makes people wonder what you’re hiding.

Remember the brief tenure of Brian Johnson at Maryland’s Montgomery College?

Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.

… round-up gets going, check your university’s trustees, its Outstanding Alumni Award winners… Check the names on your most prominent buildings, because some of those donors might be going to jail…

Matt Taibbi gets at the heart of insider culture:

The other crimes on Wall Street have been so pervasive and so massive in scope in the past decade or so that good old-fashioned insider trading — hedge funds and other gamblers robbing the great mass of uninformed investors by acting on exclusive intelligence not available to the rest of us — seems almost quaint.

… However there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy.

For sure some of the robbers have turned some of their loot over to their beloved alma maters – rather in the way Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin cut Yeshiva University into some of their winnings.

UD gets a nice warm feeling as she anticipates knowing which campuses have the most insider traders in the most prominent positions.