But you won’t believe us that ethics courses in business school are a total waste of time and money. As Orwin says:

By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.

Yet even with the latest amazing, high-profile evidence for our position, people continue to resist the idea:

A former student at Harvard Law School, [Mathew Martoma] co-wrote papers on medical ethics before seeking a business degree at Stanford University and joining a little-known Boston hedge fund. … [Martoma is] at the center of what U.S. prosecutors describe as the most-lucrative insider-trading scheme they’ve ever uncovered… [At Harvard Law School he] wrote two medical-ethics papers, one of which identifies him as a member of Harvard Law’s class of 2000 and as the former deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Office of Genome Ethics.

Martoma’s partner in crime, University of Michigan professor Sid Gilman, spent decades on safety and ethics and compliance committees.

A trustee of the University of Colorado Business School has been indicted for insider trading. Guilty or innocent, he seems already to have been scrubbed from the school’s pages.

When you’re a student reporter at the University of Pennsylvania, and when the subject is the Wharton School’s scads of insider traders, you have to do a lot of digging. There’s a history here, and it’s pretty impressive.

Another reporter goes farther back:

[L]ast week’s conviction of a prominent Wharton MBA alum [was] the biggest insider trading case since the 1989 conviction of junk bond king Michael Miliken, another Wharton grad.

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

UD thanks JND.

Wharton: Forcing Ground of the Great Insiders!

… because he has stamina and guts and epitomizes this blog category: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS. And I’ll always be able to follow his lawsuits because I don’t think they’ll ever end. Always another effort to appeal an NYU decision to deny him his MBA because while he was a student there he was found guilty of insider trading.

UD enjoys the special human interest part of Rosenthal’s story: It’s a family affair.

AWKward.

A former student of [University of Chicago Business School professor Gary] Becker’s told me that he found many of his classmates to be remarkably amoral… They perceived any failure to commit a high-benefit crime with a low expected cost as a failure to act rationally, almost a proof of stupidity. The student’s experience is consistent with the experimental findings I mentioned above [See this post’s headline.].

AWKward.

Yes, UD‘s back in one of her most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Click on it at the bottom of this post for years of stories about guys who went directly from America’s very best business schools (Wharton does our financial criminals proudest, but Harvard’s in there trying) to a life of global money mayhem. The swath of destruction they leave suggests that remarkable amorality is only Part One. There’s also a brilliant nihilistic malice in play.

Since the deeper they get into their business school curriculum, the more some students seek to reduce the earth to cinders, one might ask, as Luigi Zingales does in the pages of Bloomberg’s (whose founder makes anyone who doesn’t flaunt his rule-breaking, anti-social, privileges look stupid), whether, as he puts it, business schools “incubate” criminals.

UD wouldn’t use the word incubate. B-schools refine criminals; they take naive inchoate rapacious instincts and educate them. They also – as the Rajaratnam case confirms – bring criminals together. They provide the critical mass without which conspiracies cannot flourish.

Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”

While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.

A top partner at the firm is also representing one of the suspected leakers, James V. Mazzo, who was the chief executive officer of Advanced Medical at the time of the takeover.

What could be duller than insider trading? It’s so de rigueur even Martha Stewart does it. But universities don’t yet regard it as mainstream enough to want insider traders on their boards of trustees.

UD has said for years that with the takeover of BOTs by way high-flying business people (see the recent Unpleasantness at the Board of Visitors Club) we’re going to see more and more trustees dumped because of suspicions of or accusations of or convictions on insider trading charges.

Now three universities – UC Irvine, University of San Diego, and Chapman – need to start a Google News search on Mazzo, a trustee.

A University of Maryland economist applauds the overthrow of U Va’s fearful, incrementalist president and looks forward to the initiation of the school’s faculty into the rigors of market life.

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

After all, consider what hideous shape the place is in, market-wise:

A $5 billion endowment makes it the wealthiest public university, per capita, in the United States. Over 28,000 students applied for admission last year, a record high.

You only get results like these when faculty retreat behind ivy walls and trembletrembletremble at the rigors of the marketplace…

Not only that, but its impeccably kept campus has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site!

If no one steps in to stop this process, the University of Virginia will begin to look like a smelly pirate hooker before the week is out. With new market rigors and massive onlining, however, U Va will finally be able to compete with Everest College.

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

Here’s a slightly different take on the marketplace at U Va:

A university governed entirely by wealthy businesspeople steeped in a culture of corporate strategy memos will reflect the peculiar perspectives of the modern rich. The financialized American economy has made vast fortunes for gamblers with poor impulse control who mistake a lucky roll of the dice for intelligence and virtue. It’s not surprising that the same kind of fast-twitch thinking would lead a group of homogenous financial patrons talking among themselves to lose patience with a career higher education administrator who was insufficiently galvanized by the latest columns from Thomas Friedman and David Brooks.

U Va’s trustees were afraid “That the university would be forced to get by with $5 billion in the bank.” And indeed that is a sickeningly paltry sum. Harvard is on its way to forty billion. What the hell is U Va thinking? If Harvard needs an endowment larger than the GNP of most countries, so does U Va.

Quick. Online. Largely bogus course content. Incredibly high tuition paid for by someone else.

The always pretentiously named but often cheesy executive MBA degree has always been a major candidate for fraud, and I’m sure Baruch College isn’t the first to run its program fraudulently, but it’s the first to get caught changing student grades so all the money keeps coming in.

The dean in charge when the forgery was going on has flown the coop and landed in a nice job at the University of Connecticut, which must be thrilled to have hired such a great manager.

… and again and again because it happens all the time: Beware the B-School Boys. That’s a whole category of its own on this blog. And why? Because business school professors constantly run afoul of the law.

The latest finance-professor-gone-wrong is this guy, at Bocconi University. Says on his university page that he’s been “voluntarily suspended (‘How can you be voluntarily suspended?’ asked Mr UD) since November 16, 2012.” (‘Isn’t that in the future?’ asked Mr UD). He’s been way busy lying about the value of his hedge fund, destroying investors, and dealing with the Financial Services Authority.

After all, he’s an honorary doctor of laws.

And if during the proceedings he needs a character reference, he can get a fabulous one from Syracuse University, which not only conferred the degree but chose him to deliver the 2010 commencement address.

… What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough?”

William Deresiewicz, New York Times

“People are quite alienated from books, clicking away on their computers. They need to be reminded of the value and richness of books,” said one of the protesters at The Street Reads, a rally in Tunisia on behalf of reading books. The photograph accompanying this article warms the cockles of UD’s heart.

The protesters were enacting freedom of thought.

But there’s more to this “protest” than showcasing the importance of culture. Tunisians were once again reclaiming a public space. The first time, they reclaimed it as theirs to declare their political opinions, defying the Ministry of the Interior that stands at the entrance of the avenue, and which had set the dials of freedom of expression at close to zero. This time around they were claiming it as a space that didn’t necessarily have to be political.

Oh really? A professor at MIT’s business school has just been barred from the securities industry and made to pay almost five million dollars to settle a case brought against him by the SEC because of rampant lying to investors and investigators, and it has nothing to do with MIT? Come again?