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.

Of course. It’s been burning for years. It makes the University of Georgia look like the University of Bologna. In 1088.

… people complain about how much university presidents are paid.

Before they start moaning, they should do some homework. It’s a hard job! And its responsibilities are changing all the time.

More and more university presidents, for instance, are spending more and more time as liquor salesmen.

First at the University of Minnesota, and now at the University of New Mexico, academic leaders spend a lot of time lobbying local governments on behalf of the principle that universities should fix their budgets by encouraging rich people at their sports events to tank up.

Albuquerque’s city council said no, and UNM is really pissed. Its athletics director sent an email to the rich people calling the councilmembers hypocrites, so, you know, the war’s on, and UNM’s president is gearing up to fight this to the finish in court. It’s the principle of the thing! If an American university isn’t allowed to use rich alcoholics to pay off its stadium debts, what’s next? A government ban on Four Loko?

University presidents don’t only set intellectual agendas; they set a certain tone. Imagine a university without drunk people reeling out of stadiums late at night into their cars! The next time you think of complaining about the money university presidents make, think again.

Its most illustrious alumni have written a letter calling for President Hazel O’Leary’s resignation. Even more importantly:

The authors… blasted the university for allowing its attorneys to argue in court “the emotionally bankrupt and morally egregious declaration that art created by Caucasians is of no relevance to the education of Fisk’s African American students, only art created by African Americans.”

Background here.

… some of America’s best schools of medicine in the last few years involves the painstaking, expensive training of doctors who almost immediately stop practicing and instead go for megabucks as investment managers. Why make half a million a year using the knowledge you’ve learned at Yale medical school to heal people, when you can make five million dollars a year doing trades and not get your hands dirty?

I mean, so what if you took a hotly contested seat in a Yale classroom — a seat hundreds of people actually dedicated to medicine tried to get and failed?

For instance: Chip Skowron, Yale MD and PhD, used a lot of taxpayer money to get himself all educated as a clinician/researcher and then said Fuck it. I’d rather be a hedgie.

Skowron put quite the spin on his decision in this 2003 Bloomberg article on doctors abandoning medicine for hedge funds:

Skowron said that during his residency, senior doctors complained about administrative burdens, declining pay and the strain of paying insurance premiums. “My current job allows me to look at the newest developments in oncology and to translate that into investment opportunities,” said Skowron, who manages health-care investments at Greenwich, Conn.-based FrontPoint Partners LLC, another hedge fund.

I guess I was little dim! Spent years and years in med school and grad school and it never occurred to me to discover the nature of the vocation for which I was training. Finally, in my residency, the horror of medical practice became apparent – the soullessness of paperwork, the growing impoverishment of physicians… I’ve gone from the meaninglessness, the shabbiness, of clinical medicine, to offering the world investment opportunities…

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But you know what they say: No opportunities without risks. Medicine may have its drawbacks, but so does trading.

When FrontPoint Partners came to light on Tuesday as the unnamed hedge fund that federal authorities said had traded on inside information from a French doctor, so did the name of another doctor: Chip Skowron.

FrontPoint said late Tuesday that it had placed Dr. Skowron on leave indefinitely. The firm’s announcement follows the arrest of Yves Benhamou, the French doctor accused of tipping off an unnamed fund manager about setbacks in a clinical drug trial by Human Genome Sciences.

FrontPoint, which is being spun off by Morgan Stanley, would not elaborate beyond its statement. But the firm’s announcement of Dr. Skowron’s suspension provided an obvious No. 1 guess for anyone trying to figure out the identity of that mystery portfolio manager.

In the Washington Post, Annie Lowrey takes a look at the law school scandal.

[L]aw schools … keep growing. Law schools awarded 43,588 J.D.s last year, up 11.5 percent since 2000. And the American Bar Association’s list of approved law schools now numbers 200, an increase of 9 percent in the past decade. Those newer law schools have a much shakier track record of helping new lawyers get work, but they don’t necessarily cost less than their older, more established counterparts.

… The marquee law schools will be fine. But some of the newer, lower-ranked law schools will shut down.

UD ain’t sure where Lowrey gets her confidence that bad schools will shut down. A law school shut down? UD doesn’t think so. Starting new law schools, as Lowrey points out, is a growth industry.

“We were down in the alumni section and we were watching the step show with our kids and it was great because nobody was drunk,” said Lori Stratton.

The University of Arizona experiments with a no-alcohol zone at homecoming.

… How Colleges Have Given Up On Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It (helluva subtitle) have asked UD to take a look at the book and write about it. When she receives it from them, she will do that.

… the simple gratitude of former students for professors who were memorably kind to them. In these stories, students who go on to make some money come back to the school and endow scholarships to honor the professors.

Most recently, a Chinese couple who twenty years ago studied with David Kaplan, a music professor at the University of Saskatchewan, just gave a million dollars – the largest donation in its history – to the music school.

Kaplan… was singled out by the two former international students for his effort to help them navigate a new university, a new city and a new culture.

… “David Kaplan took them under his wing and gave them all kinds of encouragement and made sure they succeeded,” said current music department head Gerald Langner.

… Also a former student of Kaplan’s, Langner knows why Xu and Chen remembered their professor 20 after they left the U of S.

“Kaplan has inspired so many students,” Langner said. “He’s one of the best instructors I’ve ever had, period. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be in music right now.”

This method of a university getting money seems much more attractive to UD than the school, in a quid pro quo, putting its absolutely richest hedge fund guy on the board of trustees.

UD acknowledges that if the hedgie approach works, the university gets not one million but one billion. Yes. She can’t deny this. Game, set, and match. But…

Like hedge funds themselves, it’s very risky.

Very.

University Diaries brings you another instance of the amazing diversity of college experience, here distilled on one page of the Yale Daily News.

Starting from the top, there’s the announcement of a concert of sacred music. (That particular banner ad might not appear when you open the page. It alternates with others.)

Directly beneath, taking up the rest of the page, there’s a paean to FOUR LOKO, “a cup of coffee with three beers” which tastes like shit and produces, one student says, an “I don’t remember what the fuck happened kind of drunk.”

These two headlines, from the New York Times and The Gothamist, give you a sense of how the mainstream and non-mainstream press are framing this one, an expansion of the Cecilia Chang story [earlier charges against her here].

As the dean of the Institute of Asian Studies at St. John’s, Ms. Chang had the authority to grant 15 scholarships a year. The recipients, most of whom were from overseas, were told they had to work 20 hours a week under her supervision.

The students thought they would be doing work related to the university. Instead, according to the prosecutors, she forced them to perform menial tasks at her home in Jamaica Estates, Queens.

She’s been charged with forced labor and bribery. On top of embezzling.

Slave does seem a bit over the top, though it’s possible yet more lurid coercions and uses could emerge…

St John’s, a Catholic institution, does need to do some thinking. Its 2008 Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award winner is on trial for fraud and bribery; one of its vice-presidents turns out to be – allegedly – quite a monster. She did her thing for years, unimpeded.

Asleep at the wheel is the phrase that comes to mind.

Virtually all good universities generate opinion pieces like this one, by Eve Samborn at Washington University. She begins:

During a class discussion a few weeks ago about existentialist philosophy, my professor informed our class that in the 1950s, every college student in America was reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

She goes on to worry that no comparable figure exists today – a global intellectual posing challenging existential questions, questions discussed inside and outside of the classroom by many students. “[O]ur generation has no revolutionary philosopher to tear down our previously held core beliefs. [O]ur campus shows little interest in finding such a figure.”

One irony here is that her campus enjoyed for many years the presence of William Gass, a remarkable novelist/philosopher (he’s emeritus now) who brilliantly posed the sorts of questions Samborn has in mind. In a 2005 interview, he recalls his teaching days:

[T]hat was one of the nice things about teaching. You get to assign books you love. It’s hard to beat, that kind of life. You’re reading philosophers who are just incredible—they may be creeps [laughs], but it’s wonderful stuff. It’s helpful to you. You learn. It forces you to pay attention to the texts in a way that I think is helpful… Thoreau, for example, … uses the word “margins.” He says, “In my life I like to have wide margins.” Then there’s a sentence about enjoying the sunshine, and meditating, and so forth. Well, he takes all the sounds in the word “margin,” and they just dominate the words that follow. This whole description—from the ms to the ns. And I’m just thinking, My God!, you know. And so: Life is justified.

Gass complains, in the same interview, that philosophy as a discipline has changed in ways that make existential inquiry rare:

In philosophy, there’s been a big shift. Philosophers say that it’s because that’s the way philosophy should be going. But I think it’s because that’s where the money is. Our philosophy department was pretty strong, what was called PNP—philosophy, neurophysiology, psychology. Working again on all kinds of things that interested biologists: artificial intelligence, genetics. And there’s been a shift, generally, in that direction.

UD, at Northwestern in the late ‘seventies, studied Rilke (a big favorite with Gass) with Erich Heller and Sartre with James Edie, and she recalls exactly the sort of intellectual buzz Samborn’s talking about. I’m not sure UD had any very well-formulated core beliefs (the phrase is Samborn’s) but encountering (in Lionel Trilling’s anthology, Literary Criticism) Susan Sontag’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s disdain for core beliefs excited her.

Maybe most people in college are careerists; but Samborn speaks for many when she laments the absence of something she’s right to want and expect in college: An atmosphere of sustained and excited and subversive discourse about foundational human questions (And so: Life is justified.). She worries about “what kind of educated people we will become if we have not given sufficient thought to the world.”