And this is just one case among many. Instead of sending fraudsters and insider traders and extortionists etc. to jail, their lawyers increasingly argue, sentence them to lecture in business schools.

Can you see where my mind’s going on this? We’ve got an economic crisis in this country (and in Canada, where Professors-to-be Drabinsky and Gottlieb live), and our universities are way stressed out. We’ve also got an ever-growing cadre of sophisticated businesspeople suddenly faced with a prison-or-community-service dilemma.

Hire them! Hire them all! They know a lot, and many of them are colorful characters who’d make good lecturers. And they don’t cost anything.

Take Ezra Merkin. Why shouldn’t Yeshiva University take him back? He was a trustee there for years; now he can be a lecturer.

Austerity measure bonus: Yeshiva probably still has stationery with his name on it.

Business school professors are expensive. If there were, say, a lottery system in which universities could bid on an active list of HAAs (House Arrest Adjuncts), some universities might be able to suspend their regular faculty altogether.

… with years of insider trading in front of him. Carrying on the family tradition of thievery while working toward his MBA at NYU, his life was shattered when the SEC got wind of what he, his father, and his brothers were doing, and put them all in jail. At the tender age of 26, Ayal Rosenthal had to go to prison.

NYU decided to revoke his degree onaccounta they didn’t want to be known as the school that made Ayal Rosenthal what he is today.

Rosenthal is suing the university. He wants his degree back.

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

It’s an interesting moral question. Should you be denied an education merely because you’re a precocious criminal? Universities don’t typically revoke the degrees of people who commit crimes after they’ve graduated. Do you think Wharton will revoke Rajiv Goel’s degree? Scads of insider traders and associated miscreants graduated from Harvard. Have you heard about any of them getting their degrees revoked?

Just because this guy was so smart he broke the law before he graduated, he has to suffer?

UD always says – UD has a specific category called – BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS. Finally she can mix up that gender thing.

Mary Tripsas is a Harvard business school professor who also writes for the New York Times. Against all conflict of interest policies at the Times, she let 3-M pay all her expenses for a trip to their headquarters. Then she went home and wrote this remarkably ass-kissing piece featuring the company. Cheap, free publicity for them; plus the NYT gets to look like the paid agent of a corporation.

… is a tag UD‘s used so much on this blog that she’s decided to make it a Category.

She’s about to use it again.

She’s always warning universities about their business school faculty. Her experience of this group, as she’s come to know it from keeping this her blog, convinces her that though to be sure most of its members are decent and upright, a disproportionate number of them (disproportionate to other faculty, that is) gets in serious financial and legal trouble. UD’s followed any number of stories of B-school professors – and B-school alumni – whose side or primary businesses become quite the embarrassment for their universities.

Take Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania. One of its most beloved grads, Raj Rajarantnam, has just been arrested in “a $20 million insider trading scheme by federal prosecutors.” He and five others are charged with “using insider information in 2008 and 2009 to trade in shares of companies including Google Inc., Polycom Inc., Hilton Hotels Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., according the complaints filed in Manhattan federal court today.”

It’s awkward for U Penn. Not only do various fellowships and scholarships have his name on them; Wharton’s admiration of him in alumni publications now scans a bit ironic:

… Managing General Partner of the Galleon Group, Mr. Rajaratnam notes that Wharton was “an important credential” when he founded the company more than a decade ago. He also recognizes the School for helping him to land his first job in financial services, and for the skills he has used to succeed since then.

His experiences at Wharton continue to shape his life—in particular, through the relationships he formed. Having recently celebrated his 25th reunion, he says, “my classmates are among my closest friends and colleagues. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t interact with Wharton alumni.”

For Mr. Rajaratnam, he wished to give something back to “the institution that was so important to me personally and professionally.” In so doing, he is helping to create a community on campus that reflects the global business environment Wharton students are trained to lead.

To be sure, Wharton gave him a credential… Which must have made it easier to do what he is accused of having done. And as for the global business environment, if the charges are true, he has certainly done a number on it.

Ah men.

A former [University of North Dakota] hockey player and a current one were arrested about 3 a.m. Tuesday after a campus officer saw the men throwing cups, plates, a kitchen table and a lawnmower onto a Grand Forks street, UND Police Lt. Dan Lund said.

Joe Finley, 22, and Matt Frattin, 21, are both charged with disorderly conduct. In addition, Frattin faces a fleeing charge and Finley faces a charge of giving false information to officers. All the charges are misdemeanors.

Lund said Finley and Frattin were throwing objects from a residential garage on the 400 block of North Columbia Road, where one of the two men lives.

“It was their own property, so there was nobody’s property that was damaged other than their own,” Lund said. “They said they just kind of routinely destroy each other’s stuff.”

The news out of the
University of Wisconsin
River Falls is all about
the Oreo Cows.

The Hudson Star-Observer
dutifully interviews Professor
Gary Onan (with
whom you can study Swine
Production) on the grass
versus cornfed experiment
he’s conducting with them,
but you and I know that
these cows are really
about just being incredibly
beautiful.

Who cares whether
they develop high
marbling in the muscle.
Who cares whether
they like feed more
than grass. These
cows exist to be
adored.

UD likes macho men.

She can’t help it. She was socialized into it by a sexist society and now it’s too late. Hope perhaps lies in future generations.

When pertinent, UD likes to point out on this blog instances of her attraction to academic rogues, rascals, rakes and randies, pre-impotence Hemingways swaggering the quad…

Today she likes the Harvard professor featured in this Crimson story, a med school guy going after Grassley and the other “quasi-religious” pharmascolds who worry about conflict of interest.

He argues that “physicians should be free to determine on their own if [an industry] gift is a bribe.”

How exactly would this work?

“This gift is a bribe. Great. I can use the money.”

No, no. And here’s where UD begins to pant a bit. “If people do bad things,” says her man, “shoot them.”

I also like how he describes the current turmoil over the issue: “Now there’s some skin in the game.” Meaning now doctors are getting pissed because the rules are changing and they’re losing money. Life’s a rugby match, baby, and Grassley’s pissing off the other side and he better look out!

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

One editorial thing. The Crimson reporter notes that many other medical faculty believe “academic medicine has long suffered from ethical breeches.”

I think this would be trousers made with no leather products.

… it’s also at the heart of protecting yourself from Ponzi schemes.

SOS talks about it all the time.

What is it?

The control of your emotions.

One person who worked with Markopolos on a risk-management committee in the early part of this decade said he was not surprised that he remained focused on Madoff for so long.

“His background is one of risk management and mathematics,” said Mark Williams, professor of finance and economics at Boston University. “It’s about when you see an error, correcting it. … Madoff was breaking the normal equation…. From a pure academic standpoint, Harry was trying to break that and prove that something is wrong here.”

Markopolos. You know.

Many people were fooled, but not Harry Markopolos, the 52-year-old former financial executive who [has] been onto Madoff since 1996.