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?

“I live near Wall Street. The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification,” [Jeffrey] Sachs said. “They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30 billion a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards. ‘What do those kids have against us?’ I don’t think they were kidding except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”

Too awkward; but UD‘s long been telling you to — this blog has a category named — Beware the B-School Boys.

If Canadian business guy Ian Telfer is convicted of insider trading (he’s an object of an Ontario Securities Commission probe), it won’t be entirely wonderful for the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management to be featuring his name on every piece of silverware. It will need to consult with Seton Hall University here in the States – a school which has blasted more names off of more business school walls than any other. Experience counts.

Journals are rated on their “impact factor.” A high-impact journal is defined as one that’s quoted by many other researchers in their own later studies. That’s called citing the journal.

The higher the impact factor, the more the journal’s prestige grows.

Now two business professors say journal editors are “coercing” those who wants to publish in them, especially younger professors. For instance, your psychology journal tells Professor Smith: We’ll publish your new study, but only if you add a lot of pointless citations from our journal, in order to inflate our impact rating and help us sell advertising.

“Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection,” says the study by the College of Business Administration at the University of Alabama.

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I’m pickin’ up good citations
She’s giving me excitations
I’m pickin’ up good citations
(Oom bop, bop, good citations)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)

… which is producing the most criminalized graduating classes of MBAs in the country by far.

Unless the other schools’ grads are simply better at not getting caught.

If you’re going to take in that many fraudsters, you should at least teach them how to evade capture.

Wow! Glendening, former colleague of Mr UD’s, friend of UD‘s uncle (not too sure about the “looked like Hemingway” remark in this obituary), appointed this guy capo di tutti mortar boards.

At first, the FBI considered sending an agent to work undercover at one of the suspected hedge funds …

“We couldn’t get in. It was such a closed industry — much like an organized crime family — that it was difficult for the FBI to either introduce an undercover agent or recruit a cooperator.”

Corrupt traders relied upon secret alliances, longtime friendships and even sexual relationships.

… [Raj] Rajaratnam relied on Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey partner, and Rajiv Goel, a former managing director at Santa Clara, California-based Intel, whom he’d known for decades. All three attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

… this year were plagiarized. Applicants were asked to write on the subject of principled leadership.

Writers are falling over themselves ridiculing the two poets who’ve withdrawn from consideration for a pretty big-time poetry prize in England because the money behind the prize comes from a hedge fund.

There’s the guy in this post’s headline, for whom no contemporary Alexander Pope could be satirical enough to do justice to this absurdity.

There’s this guy in the Economist: “The poets should watch out, or they may soon have only their own words to eat.”

I mean, what’s wrong with these glorious engines of financial growth? I mean, sure, a day doesn’t go by without the SEC announcing a new case against a hedge fund… And of course

…[I]n the categories of custody and financial disclosure, …hedge fund adviser violations were about double that of other advisers. Hedge fund advisers that were examined by state regulators were cited for violations concerning their valuation of holdings, undisclosed conflicts of interest, cross-trading (not recording transactions that cancel each other out, often to hide a markup), preferential treatment, selling to nonaccredited investors, and selling unregistered securities without an appropriate exemption.

Google HEDGE FUND SCANDAL if you want to spend all day online.

To be sure, the particular hedge fund giving money to the poetry prize might be pure as the driven snow. That doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Hedge funds as such have tarnished themselves plenty in the last five or so years, and they shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t want to be associated with them…

But no, it’s ridiculous. It’s like turning down the opportunity to have Donald Trump moderate your presidential debate. Where is the author of The Dunciad when you need him? After all Trump is a perfectly respectable businessman… a glorious engine of financial growth, really… What is it with Huntsman, Perry, Paul, and Romney? Silly buggers. They should watch out.

No, that’s not right.

UD has known for years about online Scrabble.

She has shunned it as one shuns heroin, sensing its life-sucking flow…

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

UD is an extremely good, intensely competitive Scrabble player who almost always scores well over three hundred points.

At Scrabble clubs and tournaments, experts average between 330-450 points per game… A better measure of skill is determining the “average points per turn” score. If [you] average 30 or more points per turn, not counting tile exchanges, then [you] may very well be a Scrabble expert. The very top Scrabble players average 35 or more points per turn, not counting exchanges.

UD plays very quickly, rarely waiting more than a minute to put a word down, and routinely putting a word down right away. Her impatience with opponents who actually take time to make a move, and with opponents who shuffle their tiles around on their tile holder (UD sees her words, whatever the configuration of the tiles) is notorious. In short, though UD would never win anything at a truly serious Scrabble tournament, she’s an expert.

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

So far UD‘s meaningful Scrabble life has consisted of regular matches with her similarly ferocious older sister; but Barbara lives in upstate NY and they don’t see each other too often. UD‘s last game was a few weeks ago, in ‘thesda, with Rita Kosofsky (Eve and David’s mother). Rita and UD sat side by side on Rita’s couch and played on her iPad.

Maybe it was Rita’s iPad that began the insidious process of UD‘s undoing… UD had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of Scrabble and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of its tides within her.

But now… Two words: MANUMITS. SPEEDING. Triple word score. Last night.

The game allows players to chat. After she made speeding, at the very end of a game in which UD had been down by a few points, her opponent wrote

I LOVE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS

and UD realized that in virtual opponent land (this one was from Vancouver) many serious players prefer exciting competition to simply winning (UD‘s all about winning).

That chatting is another thing. It makes UD a little nervous. How friendly should you get? These are total strangers, etc. Yet how strange can they be when they are exactly like you Scrabblewise?

WE’RE EERILY WELL-MATCHED

wrote UD toward the end of this game, during which our scores tracked one another extremely closely… Could this be my long-lost soulmate? Perhaps my life with Mr UD has been a horrible mischancing (he sucks at Scrabble) and I’m meant to be with the Vancouver person…

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

Yes, it all has to end. It must be nipped in the bud and I will try to do that.

Andrew Sullivan quotes Newt Gingrich:

“The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”

Sullivan then comments:

The CBO is just a branch of the Congress that is widely respected for its scores for legislation and refuses to build into its calculations now-discredited theories about how cutting taxes increases revenues, among other such “conservative” innovations in math. To pick on the CBO as “socialist” is to attack, as Newt has since he first appeared in politics, yet another respected institution in Washington, the better to condemn them all.

The better to condemn them all.

Newt – seriously – Newt has a certain sexiness. I know late night comedians call him the Pillsbury Doughboy, but Newt Gringrich has the sexiness of the nihilist.

The better to condemn… them all.

Newt’s appeal… Well, when I read Sullivan’s comment, I immediately thought of all the years I sat in my parents’ living room in Garrett Park (in a house almost directly across the street from the house I now live in) and listened to my aunt and my mother be nihilistic together about politics. They condemned it all – all politicians, all political institutions, all political journalists, all political movements… It was all cynical thieving crap.

They seemed happy to have this nihilistic conversation about the world again and again. There’s something thrillingly clarifying about this philosophy of life, about the rage and disdain it releases…

Yes, there’s even something sexy about it. A man walks onto a stage and snarls at all the Occupy movement people in America: “Take a bath.” “Get a job.” It’s Clint Eastwood: Make my day. And when Eastwood says that, UD says: Hold me back.

“Take a bath.” “Get a job.” People protesting inequality are … they’re stinking layabouts like … well, like most people…

Sarah Palin had a lot of sex appeal with voters; Newt does too, but his is more complex. Deeper. He is the voice of my mother and my aunt. The hope of the nihilists.

A finance professor at Bocconi University has been suspended while authorities launch a fraud investigation into his hedge fund.