… is, as you know, a category on this blog which watches the ways a university’s trustees can wreak havoc.

There’s a strictly limited number of ways, but with a really bad board of trustees, you don’t have to do too much to make a school take a tumble.

The crucial characteristic really bad boards of trustees share is cronyism. They’re all sort of buddies. With each other and with the university’s president. Culturally, they’re very similar to one another. Almost no outside voices are heard. It’s an insiders’ game.

Take scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Yeshiva University. Several on its all-male board had special financial dealings with fellow board members Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. That didn’t work out well for them, or for the school, whose Madoff-related woes aren’t over — another Yeshiva trustee and Madoff investor, Elie Wiesel, is currently threatening a high-profile lawsuit against a playwright who put him in a play she wrote about Madoff. And even without Bernie and Ezra, Yeshiva seems to have a notably conflicted board…

As does Shaw University. Shaw’s been in the news lately because its alumni association is trying to get its entire board of trustees to resign.

This is a rather dramatic gesture, but you can understand their desperation. This isn’t merely about conflict of interest (“[T]he university contracted for insurance coverage with the relative of an unnamed board member.”); it’s about institutional corruption and financial irresponsibility generally:

Citing “gross neglect,” Shaw University’s national alumni group has called for the school’s board of trustees [which includes “boxer Evander Holyfield and boxing promoter Don King”] to step down or be dismissed, an appeal addressed to multimillionaire lawyer, alumnus and board Chairman Willie Gary.

The May 14 letter from the alumni association’s president, Emily Perry, cites no specific grievance, but says: “We can no longer stand by and allow Shaw to appear to deteriorate due to poor judgment. … We have serious concerns regarding conflict of interest, fiduciary responsibilities, adverse interest and commitment.”

Shaw, the South’s oldest historically black college, has spent the last year trying to shovel its way out of debt exceeding $20 million. The May 14 letter is not the first rebuke. In March, the school’s Florida alumni group sent a letter to Shaw administrators saying it was “amazed” that giving among board members totaled only $41,089 since July, despite Gary’s pledge that each of the roughly 40 board members would chip in $50,000.

When the alumni refer, in their letter, to “continued mistrust, negative news media coverage, hostility, calls, faxes and letters,” they allude to the predictable outcome of trustees who don’t attend board meetings, who may be financially corrupt, who hand out contracts to relatives (or to themselves), who have financial dealings with other trustees, and who simply do not understand what a university is.

She doesn’t even have a job to go to. But Dr. Marilyn French Hubbard (she has no right to the Dr. title, having picked it up at a diploma mill, The American Institute of Holistic Theology) can’t seem to be there for Central Michigan University trustee meetings — and she’s vice-chair of the trustees.

And that’s just the beginning. Student editors at CMU’s paper want to know about another trustee, Gail Torreano:

Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting was the second of the last four that Trustee Gail Torreano has not attended.

Such a record is detrimental to improving Central Michigan University, especially in a time of vital transition and economic uncertainty.

As such, Torreano should respectfully consider resigning from her position on the Board.

… How can the public take Torreano seriously if she is incapable of showing up to meetings that are planned months in advance?

… With the exception of 2009, members of the board only have to attend five meetings a year, all of which are scheduled far in advance.

If she cannot come to the majority of meetings, she should not be part of the important decision-making the Trustees are responsible for.

… Aside from Torreano, the attendance at Thursday’s board meeting was fair, at best.

Trustee Marilyn French Hubbard was available via conference call.

She spoke only to give her consent when votes were taken and did not contribute at all to discussion.

Even Trustee John Hurd left a few minutes early, so only four members were physically there until the end.

And this, only days before a new president comes on board.

Why was attendance this weak for a Trustees meeting?

This is supposed to be CMU’s governing body, the people who have the last say on any major decision at the fourth largest institution of higher education in the state.

Family emergencies and other similarly important matters are excusable, but not much else.

CMU doesn’t need trustees who are absent when they are called upon. Students are expected to be responsible for themselves. The Board of Trustees should do the same.

Really, even by board of trustees standards (UD has learned, in the writing of this blog, just how low these can be), CMU’s lot is disgraceful.

Remember Yeshiva University’s late-night online erasure of the names Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin from their list of trustees?

It happened exactly this time last year. (If you click on the link to my blog entry, and then click on the entry’s link to Yeshiva’s list, you won’t get the blank page you got when I wrote the post — YU had so much erasure to do, I guess they figured they’d better start from scratch. You’ll get their latest list of trustees, which includes the dead Sy Syms.)

Yeshiva’s board remains secretive and conflicted, so UD‘s assuming the school is keeping their TRUSTEEDELETE software at the ready.

Meanwhile, it’s a larger problem, the business of putting Hedgie Houdini on your board.

One sees the attraction. These guys have private fortunes in the billions, and not only might they give you some, they’ll maybe work their money-making magic on you.

The downside’s equally obvious: You, a venerable university, might find yourself with a very, very, very high-profile crook on your board of trustees.

And sure: You can do what Yeshiva did. You can delete their names as soon as the shit hits the fan, and then you can declare yourself a victim. You can refuse to discuss what it means about your university that it made the century’s biggest financial crook “treasurer of the Yeshiva University Board of Trustees and chairman of the board of Sy Syms School of Business,” as Yeshiva’s student paper noted last January. You can refuse to deal with it. But fact is, Yeshiva’s reputation has been in the tank ever since.

A better approach might be to see the shitstorm coming and act in advance.

Brown University, for instance, houses Steven Cohen on its board of trustees. A jolly, happy-go-lucky guy who never goes anywhere without a security detail and almost never goes anywhere anyway (the adjective constantly affixed to his name is reclusive), Cohen’s been dealing with legal trouble for years, and lately with one thing and another it’s getting out of hand.

If you ask UD, Brown should not have let greed blind it.

Meanwhile, get ready with the TRUSTEEDELETE.

Good thing these guys aren’t in positions of responsibility at universities.

I

… Michael Gross [is] a prominent member of Britain’s Jewish community, a long-time donor to Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and a member of its international board of governors.

After seeing [a television program shaply critical of Israel] last month, Gross emailed Professor David Newman – a British-born lecturer who has emigrated to Israel – and wrote: “I saw your disgusting contribution to the Dispatches programme. I will use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out… I hope you perish.” In a second message, he said: “The sooner you are removed from BGU and the face of the earth, the better.”

[After his email produced a furor among Israeli academics, Gross said] : “I am not going to apologise to him, because he deserves what he gets.”

… In his appearance on the programme, Newman, a political geographer who is editor of the international Journal of Geopolitics, did not directly criticise Israeli policy. In fact, after seeing the programme, he said he regretted having taken part. In a column for the Jerusalem Post several days after its broadcast, he said that the programme had been very one-sided…

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II

After getting into a public squabble with a CUNY trustee at a groundbreaking event on Tuesday, City Councilman Charles Barron wants him out. According to the Daily News, the controversial Council member told an audience at Medgar Evers College (a CUNY school), “The Board of Trustees has to change… This is a racist, rednecked right-winger who’s sitting on the Board of Trustees. Make sure you write a letter and say he must be removed.”

Barron was referring to trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who called Barron a “disgrace” at the Tuesday ceremony because Barron was complaining that he wasn’t allowed to speak earlier and that he was given a seat in the audience, instead at the front with other officials. Their exchange devolved into a shouting match with Barron yelling, “You just be quiet. Ain’t nobody talking to you. Whether you like it or not, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. You sit there. You shut up!” and Wiesenfeld later calling Barron a “thug” and a “hater.” (The News points out, “Wiesenfeld was appointed to the CUNY board by Gov. George Pataki in 1999, despite allegations he referred to blacks as ‘savages’ and Hasidic Jews as ‘thieves.'”) It got so bad, “young children were escorted away” from the event.

… Yeshiva University … retained a law firm and an investment adviser to review its practices. YU has not made the firm’s findings public, but did say that as a result, the university recently hired a chief investment adviser, and implemented a conflict-of-interest policy for the investment committee. That policy is significant at YU, where [Ezra] Merkin, a money manager who ran one of the major Madoff feeder funds, managed portions of the YU endowment while serving as chair of the investment committee.

Wouldn’t want to make the findings public. That might make Yeshiva look diligent, transparent.

On the other hand, at least it’s doing something.

A University of Northern Iowa professor says she was told to alter a request for a sabbatical because the wording was too political.

Rebecca Burkhardt, a music professor who wants to write a musical about former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, included in her project description a famous Richards quote that former President George H.W. Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Burkhardt says an Iowa Board of Regents official asked that she and her research partner remove the quote before their description and dozens of others were made public last week with a regents meeting agenda.

… The researchers said they also were asked to strike: “Ann Richards was big, and so are musicals.”…

From the Yeshiva University student newspaper:

… [L]ack of communication is a systemic problem at Yeshiva. Controversy still surrounds a tenure process that deals decisions with nary an explanation, leaving talented faculty members and caring students in the dark. Sy Syms accounting majors experienced similar frustrations this year, when the school failed to communicate to its students recent changes in New York State’s CPA requirements. And the wall of secrecy surrounding our endowment has long been a problem, stinging us with failing grades in our annual Sustainability Report Card ratings and leaving us vulnerable to the likes of Bernie Madoff.

Bravo. But the real wall of secrecy Yeshiva students should be worrying about is the university’s trustees.

UD doesn’t see too many of these — American universities run by secretive, all-powerful presidents and their business cronies on the board of trustees.

At Suffolk University, the president sits in his counting house and refuses interviews, while his minions on the board, to whom he throws lucrative university contracts, give him so much salary that he’s now got the highest presidential compensation in the country.

Like their models, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the president and the chair of the board of trustees of this university live in a world of personal fantasy in which the little people love them and all of their ways.

Lately, though, Suffolk’s leaders seem headed for the same fate as the Genius of the Carpathians.

Faculty dissent is bubbling up across Suffolk University, weeks after the furor over its president’s $1.5 million compensation – more than four times the national average for top college administrators – thrust the school into the national spotlight.

More than 70 percent of the law school faculty approved a motion during Thursday’s faculty meeting raising questions about the way the university is governed. The motion, relayed to the college’s board of trustees, expressed concern that President David Sargent’s “excessive’’ compensation has demoralized students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The negative publicity over the pay package, they said, had harmed the Beacon Hill school’s reputation and its ability to raise money and attract strong applicants, criticism that the board chairman says is unfair and has dealt “a hell of a blow to Sargent.’’

Professors in Suffolk’s business school, the college of arts and sciences, and school of art and design have also begun to complain, according to several faculty members…

It is the first time in the school’s recent history that such a wide swath of the school faculty have openly questioned the way the university is run and its direction, a move one longtime professor likened to “children finally acting out, standing up to the parent.’’

… Suffolk froze faculty pay and raised student fees this year, while Sargent, who has declined multiple requests to be interviewed, continues to make more than his peers at some of the country’s more prestigious universities.

The chair of the trustees is playing the Elena role to perfection, defending his beloved, dumping on know-nothing critics…

“How many times do we have to go through this thing?… This guy is gold. He’s done everything for the school… I’d like to know how many people [He’s talking about the school’s professors.] examined this contract and are sophisticated enough to understand what’s in it.” … No written contract was presented to the board, and members were not given advance notice on the agenda… “They wanted to talk about it for 30,000 hours, but if you know Nick Macaronis, I don’t do that. I make decisions on the spot… Are you aware that I have donated a million and a half dollars to Suffolk? And this is not just pledged. Donated…’’

Sometimes nothing less than a revolution will do.

… four? It’s almost impossible to count. Here’s the trustees page for UDC. A careful reading yields four real voting trustees… though I’m not sure.

And then you go to this Washington Post article and it identifies a whole other person as chair of the board of trustees.

This Post editorial notes that ten out of the fifteen seats for trustees are empty — the City Council and the Mayor can’t agree on appointees.

Meanwhile one of our most troubled universities operates with virtually no trustee oversight.

Excluding one flight to Naples with several other trustees and administrators, [Purdue University trustee JoAnn] Brouillette’s [twelve private, university-paid] flights [since the beginning of 2008] were to and from Fort Wayne, Ind., only spending 30 minutes in the air. Out of these flights, five of them carried no other passengers.

Me go UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN!

…as Mel Brooks said; and one perennial danger for long-serving university presidents is indeed a slide toward the regal. The trustees and the alumni organization love the big guy and do his bidding … He makes far more money than the governor of his state… the president of his country… It goes to his head.

The creepingly kinglike president of North Dakota State has just resigned, announcing that it’s “not fun” to have his expensive travel and house and everything criticized all the time. If he wants his wife on the booster club payroll and if he wants a personal bodyguard who’s captain of the campus police force, it’s his business.

NDSU’s president has been pressured out just in time. You want to keep an eye on the regal slide and interrupt it, as they have in Fargo, at mid-slide. Otherwise you’re on your way here.

From Corporate Board Member:

Are the board members of nonprofits that put money into the vaporized funds of Bernard Madoff legally vulnerable for the losses? Possibly. Some individual donors may go after the trustees if charities they supported invested that money in a Madoff fund. So might the attorneys general of states where the nonprofits are based.

… Directors of nonprofits are legally shielded from monetary liability unless they engage in criminal acts or are grossly negligent or reckless. “You’re not liable for bad judgment; you’re not liable for mistakes; you’re not liable if things just don’t go well,” says Jack B. Siegel, head of Charity Governance Consulting LLC, a Chicago outfit that advises nonprofits on governance issues. Still, the dollar amount that Madoff made off with has invited new consideration of what constitutes gross negligence or recklessness. “My personal view is that this is an area of the law that’s going to be tested heavily as you see more and more nonprofits suffer significant losses in their investment portfolios,” says Keith Freid, a senior vice president with American International Group, a leading underwriter of directors’ and officers’ liability insurance for nonprofit organizations. Donors who see that universities invested their donations badly rather than using the money in the way they intended, for instance, might sue the college trustees for legal redress.

… Directors of nonprofits who have business relationships with the outfits—or “wear more than one hat,” as Steven Scholes, a partner with the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, puts it—face the greatest risk of being accused of breaching a fiduciary duty. Both Madoff and hedge fund manager J. Ezra Merkin, for example, were members of the board of trustees of Yeshiva University in New York City, which lost a $14.5 million investment with Madoff, along with some $95.5 million in phantom profits. Merkin was chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee and managed a portion of the school’s money, apparently by simply turning it over to Madoff…

Meyers’ resignation in February 2008 shocked the campus community. She had been president of Webster for 14 years. Her immediate disappearance from campus fueled questions about the circumstances around her departure. But she later told the [St. Louis] Post-Dispatch that she was just so emotional about retiring from being a university president, a position she held for so long.

Women! Just can’t handle it, I guess. Good thing there aren’t too many of them in executive positions.

Here’s the background on Meyers:

Richard Meyers, the former president of Webster University, didn’t leave empty handed after unexpectedly resigning in February 2008. Along with one year’s pay of almost $700,000, he is also receiving more than $700,000 in deferred compensation, according to the latest 990 tax document.

Meyers was the highest paid university executive in the St. Louis area. His salary for 2008 was $696,713, a large increase from his 2007 salary of $572,875. In comparison, the provost of St. Louis University had a salary of $246,000 in 2008 and the chancellor of Washington University made $539,250 in the same year.

The Journal was unable to reach the Board of Trustees for a comment about Meyers’ compensation before going to print.

“When one compares other places, his salary was outrageous,” said Donna Campbell, professor in the department of multidisciplinary studies and onetime member of the salary and fringe benefits committee. “It is unfortunate that the Board of Trustees approved such a large increase.”

… Along with Meyers’ salary and deferred compensation, there are still unanswered questions about his expenses. According to a Journal review of the last nine years of tax documents, Meyers claimed more expenses than most St. Louis-area university leaders combined.

The Board of Trustees Audit Committee and an independent accounting firm, BKD LLP, audited Meyers’ expense claims in 2005. Both found he had claimed some personal expenses as business expenses during 2004 and 2005, according to WU’s 990 tax filing for 2005.

WU officials and the chair of the audit committee, Michael DeHaven, would not disclose how much money was declared personal expenses by the independent audit or whether it has been repaid. In an April interview with The Journal, DeHaven said anything that had to do with expenses and compensation was a “personnel-related matter” and could not be discussed.

Between the fiscal years of 2000 and 2008, Meyers claimed a total of $675,611 in expenses, according to WU’s tax documents. That is an average of more than $75,000 per year. At least a small portion of these expenses, however, were personal expenses that Meyers should not have claimed, according to an audit report listed in WU’s 2005 990 filing.

Meyers, contacted in April 2009 when The Journal began working on this story, would not comment on the money in question, saying it is a matter for the Board of Trustees.

… In October 2005, WU’s Audit Committee authorized an independent tax review of the expenses in question. The accounting firm that conducted the review, BKD, had been used by WU in the past for yearly audits and financial advice, DeHaven said.

After this review, the Board of Trustees required Meyers to repay, with interest, all of the expenses determined to have been personal. As of April 14, 2006, Meyers had still not repaid any of the money, according a report included in WU’s 2005 990 tax filing.

It is unknown if the money has been repaid because Meyers, DeHaven and Chancellor Neil George would not comment.

You just know that girl hasn’t repaid it. She’s too emotional to repay it.

Anyway. She’s gone to a far, far better place.

She is now the president of Fielding Graduate University, an online-based distance learning university based in Santa Barbara, Calif.

… from the president of the University of California system in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The interviewer asks serious questions about his compensation, and he tries to turn them into jokes. Not a very clever move when your system’s in financial crisis.

[Q]:: What do you think of the idea that no administrator at a state university needs to earn more than the president of the United States, $400,000?

[A]:: Will you throw in Air Force One and the White House?

An excellent question. A serious question. Why do presidents at state — or for that matter private — universities earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the country’s president? Clearly university presidents do far less, have far less onerous responsibilities, etc.

The answer is that boards of trustees, usually composed of corporate players with millions of dollars in annual compensation, consider half a million dollars in salary peanuts. They think of their university’s president as shockingly impoverished. That’s what you get when your trustees no longer have anything to do with public service, with education as such, and everything to do with the acquisition of personal wealth.

California’s president might have mused on this transformation of the university into a money-making machine for coaches and presidents, but he decided to do a borscht-belt shtick instead.

Some people feel you could close the U.C. budget gap by cutting administrative salaries, including your own.

The stories of my compensation are greatly exaggerated.

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When you began your job last year, your annual compensation was reportedly $828,000.

It actually was $600,000 until I cut my pay by $60,000. So my salary is $540,000, but it gets amplified because people say, “You have a pension plan.”

Well, yes, that’s what people say because he does, and it’s part of his compensation package. As is free housing, transportation, and lots of other stuff that make the half million plus in salary unjustifiable, especially while terrible cutbacks go on all over campus.

UD‘s chronicled a thousand clowns like Mark Yudof at the heads of American universities. Their bouncy personalities play well among potential donors, but they fall down badly when it’s time to get serious.

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Update:

Tweets.

Its sports program is a national disgrace (here’s one of many cheating scandals).

But you begin to understand how Auburn maintains its brainless belligerent ways when you look at its board of trustees.

Must say, it’s a new one on UD, but when she thinks about it, it makes perfect sense: Make your trustees Auburn football players.

Plus keep the girls out: Auburn’s board of trustees has got two women, twelve men. Half of the Auburn student body’s female, but you wouldn’t want the board to reflect that in any way. And girls don’t get football.

From the Opelika-Auburn News:

Auburn University is an academic institution first. Granted, athletics create plenty of spirit and excitement — and generates millions in revenue — but schools are just that. Schools.

News of Randy Campbell’s appointment to the university’s board of trustees comes with a mixed bag of feelings. Campbell was obviously a leader on the football field, quarterbacking the Tigers to the 1983 SEC championship and working as signal-caller …

Like any other academic institution, Auburn University is a business that sells education. [Amazing sentence, no? Amazing definition of a university — a business that sells education.]

With business brains and a dedicated love for Auburn, Campbell is a fine choice to replace outgoing Paul Spina as the trustee for District 6. But of 12 trustees on the board, discounting Gov. Bob Riley who serves as chairman, three played football at Auburn.

That’s one-fourth…

Yes, perception does matter, and Auburn’s gotten a lot of bad publicity because its trustees have been jocks and its presidents castrati.

So how does Auburn respond to the problem?

By appointing another football player to the board.

As we follow, on University Diaries, in the months to come, the clown school that Auburn’s become, keep these facts in mind.