UD is pleased to see this language becoming boilerplate in writing about Ruth Simmons, whose approval of obscene compensation for people like Lloyd Blankfein will follow her all the days of her life. As Brown University’s new president is named, Simmons will rightly be remembered primarily in this way.
… simply can’t be kept out of the tabloids.
Of course, he’s also all over the respectable press.
Elliot Hirshman, UD‘s erstwhile, young-man-in-a-hurry, colleague – whose negotiation of a massive raise over his predecessor’s salary at a Cal State campus really pissed people off – is back in the news.
Hirshman left DC for the $400,000 a year presidency of San Diego State (whose condition at the moment UD would characterize as sports-corpse):
It was that $400,000 salary – awarded in July to the new president of San Diego State on the same day the trustees raised tuition by 12 percent – that lit a match under the already heated topic of executive pay.
California has cut about $1 billion from CSU’s budget in recent years, tuition and fees have doubled since 2007, and hundreds of instructors and courses have vanished.
Meanwhile, San Diego’s new president, Elliot Hirshman, accepted a salary that was $100,000 higher than the outgoing president, a raise of 34 percent.
Indeed, ever since July Elliot hasn’t been able to preside much over the school, his remarkable dedication to the bottom line having alienated pretty much everyone before he was able to draw one presidential breath. No fewer than three state legislators have introduced bills capping the system’s executive compensation this way and that way.
Elliot and the generous Cal State trustees have tried sitting all of this out, hoping the controversy would go away, but no such luck. The pressure has built, threatening to unseat the chair of the trustees himself, so the trustees have finally folded.
California State University trustees voted today to limit salaries for new campus presidents, and to consider economic realities before making salary offers.
The new plan, approved unanimously by the trustees in Long Beach, caps a president’s base pay at 10 percent of what the prior president earned, but allows it to be supplemented with private money.
You want that private money thing in there so that you can guarantee corporate interests an opportunity to exploit the school.
Elliot must be dreading the next round of negotiations on his salary. Surely the school doesn’t expect him to be satisfied with $400,000 next year.
… the-drunk-coach-in-the-Mercedes, should-we-have-luxury-boxes-in-the-new-stadium type stuff… But when your university lies in the very heart of what Newt Gingrich calls elitist America, you get to go big-time all the time. Did your president really sign off on Lloyd Blankfein’s sixty-eight million dollar bonus? (Yes!) And is one of your highest-profile trustees being buzzed by the SEC because so many people who worked for him have been arrested for insider trading? (Yes again!)
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UD thanks Roy.
Brown University President Ruth Simmons is a lot more tight-fisted in negotiations with the city of Providence than she was as a board member at Goldman Sachs, where she signed off on that eye-popping $68 million bonus for CEO Lloyd Blankfein in 2007.
… is the latest school compelled to press the TRUSTEE DELETE button. Anthony Chiasson, arrested for insider trading, has been dropped from Babson’s board of trustees.
The beautiful synergy between hedge fund guys and BOTs (school gets money, hedgie gets respectability) has been all screwed up by the SEC, and any university that’s gone the hedgie trustee route bigtime (I’m looking at you, Brown) should probably be engaged in… call it proactive winnowing.
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Steve Cohen is a Brown trustee.
I dunno… The trustees, most of them, are on the board of trustees because the university wants large cash gifts from them. In short, they’ve been chosen because they are rich and because the university has reason to believe (the trustee graduated from the university, say; or the trustee’s kid is a student at the university) that for sentimental reasons the trustee may choose to give some of his or her billions or millions to the university.
Hence the relationship between the university and the trustee involves the university doing anything it can to make the trustee happy.
This being the case, handing out professorships to trustees could be seen as one more happy-making gesture extended to the trustee by the university; and therefore one could argue that this compromises the intellectual integrity of the school.
But, as I say, I dunno. It’s easy to imagine a situation in which a trustee, beyond being good at generating enormous personal compensation in a business setting, also has actual academic heft, and it would be silly to deprive students of such a person…
But let’s add some complexity to the question: Should a trustee whose personal compensation has been outrageously high ($38 million over five years) (despite having run his enterprise into the ground, with hideous consequences for all tax-paying Americans) teach courses at a Jesuit university?
Okay, let’s mix things up even more. Should a Boston College trustee against whom the SEC has just filed civil fraud charges for having been a significant player in the country’s financial crisis be teaching a course at BC on the financial crisis?
“Who better?” said Mr UD just now, across the breakfast table.
“Yes,” said UD. “A kind of How I Did It.”
[S]ome [McGill University Health Centre] sources [said] that [Centre head Arthur] Porter had become an absentee executive director in the past few years as he founded a cancer centre in the Bahamas, took on his responsibilities with the Privy Council, [Security and Intelligence Review Committee] as well as a number of corporate directorships.
The chair of the [MUHC] Board of trustees is a defender of Porter and has a deft way with the press:
[David] Angus told The Gazette that the MUHC board of directors had approved of all of Porter’s duties outside the MUHC. Asked to provide documents proving this, Angus said: “Are you calling me a liar?” He then hung up the phone.
Arthur Porter will resign.
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UPDATE: Titles After Your Name smackdown!
Porter:
MA MD MBA DMRT FRCPC FACR FACRO FAAMA
Graham Burrows:
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UD thanks Adam.
… know everything, and those who know nothing and want to know nothing. Those who know everything are a small group of insiders extremely close to the president and the coach and local politicians. They do the president’s bidding. Those who know nothing and want to know nothing have a spotty attendance record at trustee meetings (why go?) but get a huge kick out of being able to say they’re a university trustee.
Auburn University’s board of trustees is instructive. For decades, ex-trustee Bobby Lowder basically ran the school – academics (intellectual inquiry at Auburn centers around figuring out how professors can help athletes cheat without the athletes getting caught) and sports. A power-obsessed, corrupt mover and shaker, Lowder typifies the broad-shouldered bullies who can intimidate and take over boards of trustees.
When the shit hits the fan at universities, unseemly blame-tossing almost always breaks out on BOTs — between members who’ve been meaningless muckety mucks, and the power boys. Recall the panic in AU Park when its president turned out to be robbing the school blind. In that case it was William Jacobs, strapping head of the BOT, who withheld information and shooed trustees away from his endless shoveling of money to Benjamin Ladner. When the American University story broke, the know-nothings moaned that they’d been blindsided.
Same thing at Pederasty State.
The trustees dislike how a few board members appeared to have been notified that charges against Curley and Schultz were imminent while the vast majority of trustees were left in the dark until Saturday.
Yes, and that’s in a big old article all about how we’re supposed to pity and admire the principled trustees… the good trustees, who got all beat up by the big boys…
No. When these things happen, the entire board of trustees has got to go. They are trustees, kids. The university is in their trust. They either didn’t do anything, or they worked as hard as all the other Paterno-tools to cover up things.
University trustees are, in UD‘s experience, either a nothingness or an embarrassment. Or both.
… when dealing with moneybags hanging around your university in search of respectability. You need to do some vetting before you take their money. You may not be aware of this, but some of the ways people accumulate large personal fortunes are illegal.
Yeshiva University’s distinguished trustees (Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin) are again in the news as yet a third Yeshiva trustee (Moshael Straus) succeeds in wresting some of his stolen cash from Merkin. It’s a convoluted big-time New York City crime story, and Yeshiva probably would have preferred not to feature in it.
In a dissenting opinion, Cravath Swaine & Moore lawyer Rory O. Millson, the member of the arbitration panel chosen by Merkin, found that Straus, a member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees, lied to the arbitrators, including about his knowledge of Madoff acting as a manager for Ascot. He noted that Ascot was referred to as “Bernie” at Yeshiva and that Straus invested in Ascot shortly after joining the university’s board in 1999.
Huh? Don’t try to figure it out. Just a lot of university trustees in each others’ pockets. What’s the point of being a trustee if you don’t get inside access to elite money managers like Bernie and Ezra?
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Well, but now it doesn’t look pretty. It didn’t look pretty when Yeshiva had to do a lot of rapid trustee-erasure, in the wee hours after Madoff and Merkin first got in trouble; and it still doesn’t look pretty with Yeshiva’s name dragged through the long aftermath.
And speaking of long aftermaths — the London School of Economics continues to struggle, not just with its Libyan connections (scroll down), but, more recently, with one of its honorary fellows, Victor Dahdaleh.
On Monday, Mr. Dahdaleh voluntarily surrendered to police in London. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office alleges he paid bribes to officials of a smelting company in Bahrain for contracts with U.S. aluminium giant Alcoa Inc. The deals involved large supplies of alumina, a raw material used to make aluminium, shipped to Bahrain from Australia.
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(Dahdaleh also has long ties to McGill University, but
“I know very little about him,” said a school official who did not want to be named.
Nice try.)
Or should I say Très SEC… Brown University’s bouquet has been very Securities and Exchange Commission lately, with the distinctive aroma of federal investigation wafting in particular from the school’s board of trustees. Steven Rattner (after his, er, troubles he seems to have left the board), Steven A. Cohen (a current trustee)… And of course from the school’s president, a loyal Goldman Sachs trustee during the wonder years.
Cohen, a perennial SEC object of interest, has yet again been informed that his firm is under investigation for insider trading… Leaving Brown University with a venerable intellectual dilemma: Hold onto him because some day he’ll give us a slice of his fortune? Drop him before he dries up and goes the route of Rajaratnam?
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UD thanks Roy.
UD cannot improve on this comment in response to the latest from America’s most hick-laden university, Central Arkansas.
People like [University of Miami president Donna] Shalala ... are the system. They have cross-contaminated school standing with NCAA hypocrisy. They are one and the same. Shalala maintains a watchdog role in the NCAA.
… Was this decades-long culture of institutional malfeasance [at the University of Miami] so rooted it ignored [warnings about Nevin Shapiro]? Was the lack of institutional control at the very heart of the institution?
… was such a young-man-in-a-hurry that when she sat at meetings over which he presided, he was always kind of a blur, racing out of the room to talk on his cell phone, racing through the meeting…
Hirshman has lately raced himself right into a buzz saw; though, on the up side, he might make legislative history.
He’s the new president of San Diego State University, a woeful institution very small on cash and very big on athletics. Last prez of SDSU made $300,000; the school’s board threw in an extra $100,000 for Elliot… Not really a problem; they’re just taking it out of tuition (goes up 12% this year) …
“Appalling… egregious,” say state senators, some of whom are introducing legislation placing limits on what you can make at a public institution when the entire state economy is shit.
You really gotta start with the basics when you’re talkin’ Texan.