… at Fortune, whose editors explain, in reprinting an article from 1986, that “with the hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam fighting insider trading charges in a Manhattan courtroom and one of Warren Buffett’s top executives, David Sokol, resigning under suspicions about his personal trades, the lessons from the 1980s still ring true.”

… [T]he business school ethicists may be as much a part of the problem as of the solution. Their main message starts off with the reasonable exhortation that the future managers in their classes must prevent the creation of cultures of corruption at the outfits they’ll help run. Corporate cultures powerfully affect employee behavior, students rightly are told, so you mustn’t have reward systems that encourage misreporting of revenue and expenses or that promote cheating on government contracts. But in practice all this talk about how employees are creatures of their culture ends up by tacitly accepting the notion that the individual employee really can’t be held personally responsible for his actions. The result is to genuflect piously to the idea of ethics without requiring any person to be ethical.

Professors at the University of Vermont are outraged that the president and board of trustees have just given a $320,000 salary to the recently hired dean of the business school.

$320,000 is way above average for b-school deans, and UVM has only sixty business school students.

And it goes without saying that UVM, like most universities these days, is in big financial trouble, with talk of layoffs, salary freezes, etc.

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Greed and status-mongering. The pillars of the American university.

… the Wharton School.

Look for Wharton in the wiretaps.

From a review of a new book.

… Yeshiva University professor Moses Pava reports that his business students tell him that, “corporate social responsibility is merely rhetoric designed to fool environmentalists, consumer advocates and other do-gooders.”

The B-School Boys have responded to their graduates’ arrests for insider trading, etc., by adding yet more ethics courses. Rustle up some more rhetoric! At Yeshiva, no one talked a better ethics game than Ezra Merkin and his BFF, Bernard Madoff.

The mood is upon our MBA schools once more. Happened after Enron and it’s happening again. The B-School Boys are running around like insider traders with their expert networks cut off, squawking about how many of their graduates are going to the slammer for financial sleaze. What to do? What to do?

So once again here’s this horseshit about changing the curriculum to make the guys compassionate, caring and the rest of the c‘s: We’re going to create “leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials.”

Here’s how we’ll do it: We’ll take really smart 25-year-olds who should have learned basic morality when the rest of us did – when we were five – and we’re going to put them in groups and make them work together and this will make them caring compassionate competent and characterlicious. Plus we’re going to make them take courses in which we lecture them on right and wrong and how right, even if it earns you less money, is better than wrong.

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Okay. So listen to UD on this one. It’s very late in the day, they’re entering a global capital market of a certain sort, etc., etc. There’s only one way you can get the attention of these guys. It’s cheap and it doesn’t involve messing with the curriculum. Actually it costs nothing.

Inaugurate a Guest Lecture series in which famous financial felons are whisked from prison for the day to talk to the guys. The felons get a little time off their sentences for each gig. If they turn out to be strong motivational speakers, they get lots of gigs and get lots of time taken off.

Since there will be a strong market in this activity, and since our jails are full of financial felons, MBA students have an embarrassment of riches speaker-wise. Each semester they must choose, from twenty guest felons, three talks to attend. Make it two. Make it four. But it’s a requirement. You have to go to some of these shows.

The felons do what Gore Vidal calls “a patter of penitence,” put up scary PowerPoints of them still in their gym shorts being led away in handcuffs, talk about how many people’s lives they’ve ruined, etc., etc.

If at some point in their presentation they are unable to cry – not loudly, but in a quiet manly way that the guys will relate to – the school should not ask them back. The idea is to scare the fuck out of the guys, and to appeal to what vestigial human emotions they may have left.

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As is always the case in stories like this, Harvard University is the focus. So let me address myself to that institution in particular.

If President Faust wants her MBA students to care about corporate responsibility, here’s what she does:

1. Hand a significant chunk of Harvard’s close to thirty billion dollar endowment over to global charities. If you spend it down, your own institution will look less douchey.

2. Acknowledge that your predecessor was a scandalously acquisitive capitalist who, as president, modeled that behavior for other people at the university. (“…[President] Lawrence Summers …made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks ‘too big to fail.'”) Pledge to avoid that sort of behavior at the top of the institution in the future.

… Boys.

… the shaky moral foundations of the business school.

… in the insider trading racket.

The University of Pennsylvania school is pumping out insider traders a mile a minute.

Hard to keep up.

Lawdy!

An economics professor writing in the New York Times notes the following scandalous fact.

The American Economic Association [has no] official ethics code. Sadly, some of its members seem to be in dire need of one.

See for yourself. “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s new documentary on the financial crisis, includes revealing interviews with several academic economists whose public statements appear to have been rather closely aligned with their private bank accounts.

No doubt the AEA will object that it’s a purely scholarly organization, thinking thoughts about markets all the day. Tra la.

In a story over-invested with irony, a new financial research center at the University of Chicago which studies how to “measure, price, and hedge risk” may have disastrously failed in its own founding act of risk assessment.

Its donor, University of Chicago trustee Steven Stevanovich, allegedly made some of his immense fortune rather in the way Ezra Merkin made his — feeding funds to someone who turned out to be a Ponzi schemer. He’s being sued for 3.2 billion in clawback litigation arising from the Tom Petters scandal.

Stevanovich can’t be reached, and the University of Chicago is making no comment.

The Grade Change form UD uses at George Washington University is a small white piece of paper on which you’re given one line to explain why you’ve changed a student’s grade (I know not what others may do, but as for me, these forms are almost always about changing an Incomplete to a grade after a late paper or something has been submitted).

NYU’s business school must have had to use teeny weeny writing to fit in its reason for changing Rosenthal’s grade in his Professional Responsibility course to an F:

In February 2007, three months after completing his course work at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Ayal Rosenthal pleaded guilty to charges that he leaked to his brother secret tips that he learned at his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Rosenthal never told the school about the investigation of him or his guilty plea, even while serving as a teaching assistant in a professional responsibility course…

NYU didn’t merely change Rosenthal’s grade; it rescinded his MBA degree. Rosenthal sued to get the degree back and the judge laughed him out of court.

Here’s another one. Business students at NYU love to hear him lecture on bankruptcy, but he may also know a lot about fraud.

This blog even has a category for it.

Beware the B-School Boys.

This is the third story along these lines that UD has covered. A business school professor offers his students an investment opportunity. The fools give him their their money, which he is now accused of having stolen.

“Being a college professor, I know it’s stupid now, but I didn’t even think about it being a scam. I thought, ‘This is just incredible,’” said Turnage.

Aaron Turnage, a Clayton State student, got taken by Stephen Williams, his business school professor. Williams also reportedly stole from his students when he taught at Georgia State.

Williams discovered something that Bernard Madoff and countless others have also discovered: A university affiliation (Madoff was a Yeshiva University trustee) is the most powerful character-colonic known to humankind.

Beware.

It’s a category on University Diaries. See it? And that’s because over the years UD has covered so many stories of generous MBA guys getting their names on university buildings, and then, when it turned out the money was a small part of an empire of stolen goods, getting their names sandblasted off the buildings, that she decided to collect all of the stories under one heading.

And here’s yet another one.

Ten years ago, the University of Michigan inaugurated Sam Wyly Hall. At the ceremony, the business school dean kvelled about “what the University of Michigan helped [Wyly] to do.”

Well, what Wyly and his brother have done – let’s see if we can be exact about this – what they’ve done, see, is “illegally trad[e] millions of securities of public companies while they sat on the company boards. The SEC complaint accuses the two of using a system of offshore trusts and subsidiaries to hide their interests, selling more than $750 million in stock over a 13-year period. The complaint charges that they used inside information about the pending sale of [one of their companies] to reap more than $31.7 million in profit…”

So… sandblast the whole name off? Expensive. Embarrassing. UD has a better idea. Just change one letter.

WILY HALL

This short paragraph from a Wall Street Journal profile of one of the world’s worst financial criminals allows UD to say to you once again (she says it all the time, most recently in this discussion of Amy Bishop) that being highly intelligent and getting a great university education has little – sometimes nothing – to do with morality.

Clifford Orwin, a professor of political philosophy, makes the point:

[G]ive me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.

This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.

Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.

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.

Stanley Fish overstates the case, but he gets at it too:

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. [Humane] texts [are] concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

One of the corollaries of these truths is that business schools waste all sorts of money and generate all sorts of cynicism among their students by adding ethics courses to their curricula.

Business school catalogues should title these courses what they are: sops.

SOP 101
ADVANCED SOP
STUDIES IN SOP
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOP
ADVANCED INDEPENDENT STUDY: SOP