The New York Times Ethicist, Randy Cohen, asks whether Texas Tech was right to create a crony-mandated professorship for disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will be teaching one course for $100,000.

Well, it’s a real brain twister, but Cohen comes up with the correct answer: No.

The only argument his defenders have is that it’s valuable for students to listen to someone who’s been there, at the heart of history, etc. Cohen responds that there’s a difference between people who happen to have been around when things were happening, and scholars able to reflect on those things:

A better way of studying Gonzales’s “direct hands-on involvement” in Washington would be for him to deliver a series of public lectures that students could subsequently analyze under the tutelage of actual scholars, who would earn in a year what Gonzales would be paid for one hypothetical hour of nostalgic palaver… Tech is paying him a lot of money to do a job for which he is unsuited. It was improper for the school to offer and indecorous for Gonzales to accept.

“My spirit soon,” wrote the poet Thomas Shreve, “shall brave the billows, like a trusty bark.”

All of the trustees at the University of Illinois are now in the same bark:

The Illinois Admissions Review Commission panel recommended Thursday in its final report that all trustees should submit resignations. Gov. Pat Quinn will then choose which members of the Board of Trustees to accept.

The Commission recommended that new board members conduct a review of the University’s president, the chancellor of the Champaign campus and other university administrators.

As with Yeshiva University and Bernard Madoff, the University of South Carolina has quickly deleted the web page of its board of trustees’ vice-chairman, charged with bank fraud (specifically, a kickback scheme) and lying on his taxes. The trustee has resigned for, he says in his farewell letter, personal reasons, but these are very public reasons, aren’t they? I mean, stealing from a bank isn’t really personal.

Federal prosecutors say [Samuel] Foster, a real estate developer in York County, was retained by [Chester] Williams to help him find lending opportunities for BB&T through a program set up to spur economic development in depressed areas.

Prosecutors allege Williams began experiencing personal financial difficulties and participated in a scheme with Foster that brought both men tens of thousands of dollars.

Prosecutors said Williams increased the fees Foster received for helping him find lending opportunities, with Foster kicking some of the money back to him and keeping the rest.

In 2006, prosecutors allege, Foster should have received $210,000 in fees. But, on Williams’ authorization, Foster actually received $247,500.

Prosecutors said Foster failed to report $157,500 on his 2006 federal tax return and kicked back $47,500 to Williams.

All told, prosecutors allege Foster earned $672,500 from 2004 through 2007, failed to report $304,000 on federal tax forms and kicked back $102,500 to Williams.

UD‘s got nothing against USC’s quick deletion of Foster’s page. But the school needs to do a little better on its public statements about what’s happened. Not the vapid ‘best wishes and bye’ thing it has so far released, but something that says why he’s leaving. That tells the truth. This man was in line to become chair of the board. Rather than kiss him goodbye and pretend all’s well, USC should say something like “We were dismayed by the news of Sam Foster’s alleged bank fraud. Nothing matters more to us than the integrity of the people who oversee the university, and we will redouble our efforts to make sure that all of our trustees are beyond reproach.”

A suburban doctor who became tangled in the corruption investigation surrounding ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison for hiding $3 million in income from a tax collector.

Dr. Robert Weinstein, 64, of Northbrook was also fined $75,000 for failing to report the income. He originally claimed it was a gift but later admitted it represented the proceeds of a scheme to siphon money out of a charitable organization.

Weinstein could have been sentenced up to 37 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo took Weinstein’s age and an unspecified psychiatric condition into account in imposing his sentence. [What condition? Kleptomania? Isn’t that like giving a murderer a light sentence because he suffers from homicidal rage? Why don’t we get to know what the psychiatric condition is? Doesn’t it seem to you it’d be pretty easy for a doctor to get another doctor to make up a psychiatric condition for him? …And age? 64’s too old to risk putting him in jail for three years??]

… [Weinstein] withdrew $6 million from the Northshore Supporting Organization, a group established to raise money for the Finch College of Health Sciences-Chicago Medical School, now known as Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

The school is based in North Chicago in Lake County.

[He was] able to withdraw the money in the form of loans because [he was a trustee of both] the supporting organization [and the school].

Yes, the patented Madoff/Merkin approach to university trusteeship. Get in there, get trusted, steal.

Did the university know about his psychiatric condition when it made him a trustee?

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

Oh. Okay. Here it says depression. He’s depressed! Who isn’t? What is it, twenty million Americans suffer from clinical depression? Psychiatrists are writing a new diagnostic manual, the DSM-V (and squabbling like babies over it, of course — psychiatrists are hopeless) — as soon as it’s released, it’ll turn out forty million Americans suffer from clinical depression. And because this guy has it too, and because he’s effing 64 years old, he gets to go to jail for 18 months for having stolen six million dollars … from a charity!

From the Canadian Jewish News:

… In his keynote address [at a Yeshiva event in Montreal recently], [Richard] Joel, who has been YU president since 2003, made an appeal for greater financial support from Montrealers, as well as for them to send more of their children to YU.

He said the university spends about $2.5 to $3 million a year educating those Montrealers, but receives only about $750,000 to $850,000 in revenue in any given year from Montreal.

“The economy is awful, and we are operating in a major deficit,” he added.

Joel did not refer to the $14.5 million YU has said it lost in the fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, who was a member of its board of trustees…

An Illinois state rep is

… pushing the so-called “fumigation“ [Drop so-called or drop the quotation marks.] bill that would review all appointments and hirings by the Blagojevich and Ryan administrations, promoting the development of a “model trustee” profile and training program in Illinois, [and] asking university alumni groups to get more involved in the appointment of trustees…

[H]e wants Gov. Pat Quinn to review the appointments of all the trustees appointed by Ryan or Blagojevich.

“I think there are probably some that should be dumped,” he said. “What I heard from President (B. Joseph) White last month is that individual trustees, depending on the issue, insert themselves into the decision-making capacities of the university, outside of their work as a board. I think that’s inappropriate, and I think it would be inappropriate to leave all those appointments in place without going through them with a fine-tooth comb.”

… [The representative] hasn’t given up on his goal of reinstating the statewide election of UI trustees, which was eliminated during the term of former Gov. Jim Edgar.

“I would still like to see the trustees elected,” he said. “This is a $4 billion state asset, and I think the taxpayers should have a direct role in its governance.”…

… you could possibly want: Athletic. Administrative. Money. Everything. University Diaries has to step lively to keep up with it.

Now the president of this hapless school, where faculty and students suffer constant cutbacks and compromises of quality, has taken a 35-percent bonus —$115,000 on top of his already very big salary. The trustees have decided he should be rewarded for a job well done.

William P. Tucker, an eloquent and outraged writer, asks him to refuse the bonus. Seems to think the man is greedy.

Tucker also knows there’s no way James Ammons will not take this money. I mean, he can’t. The trustees insist.

House Speaker Michael Madigan’s plan to rid state government of people hired and appointed by former Govs. Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan would include university boards of trustees.

Madigan’s office released a list of about 90 or so boards affected Thursday, and the state’s public universities were among them.

If the Chicago Democrat’s legislation is eventually approved, Gov. Pat Quinn would have 60 days to decide whether or not to keep universities’ current trustees on board or not.

The news came mostly as a surprise to university officials.

… The legislation, House Bill 4450, hasn’t yet been debated by lawmakers.

The trustee overseeing liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff’s assets sued New York financier and philanthropist J. Ezra Merkin on Thursday, seeking more than $500 million Merkin withdrew from Madoff’s investment business.

… The suit describes Merkin as a “sophisticated investor” who “knew or should have known” that Madoff’s investment firm “was predicated on fraud.”

According to Picard’s suit, Merkin and Madoff had more than a business relationship. The two were also close socially, sitting together on the Board of Trustees of Yeshiva University. That relationship should have allowed Merkin access to Madoff’s often secretive operations, the suit contends…

I knew that Yeshiva trustee thing would come back to haunt him…

Merkin is an influential figure, especially in New York, where he was prominent both on Wall Street and in social and charitable circles. While he and Madoff were still riding high, Merkin sat on the boards of such New York institutions as Carnegie Hall and the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.  [Er, I think he’s still riding high. He remains President of Fifth Avenue Synagogue.]

… Roger Williams…

All of these universities are models of insider dealing, their boards of trustees bursting with local merchants making money off of their position.

Of course, no one does it like Jersey.

A plaything of hacks, Chicago State University has apparently been kicked around one too many times for its long-suffering faculty.  They’ve only just evicted President Elnora Daniel – a party girl with a penchant for long, university-subsidized Caribbean cruises – and now the school’s hopeless board of trustees wants to unload another hack on them.

It’s not every day that a faculty pulls itself together to ask the governor to remove its entire board of trustees, and to halt the appointment of its next president, but that’s what CSU’s professors have done.

Chicago State University faculty took the unusual step Tuesday of asking Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the university’s board of trustees.

The unanimous request from the Faculty Senate, which comes days before trustees plan to announce their decision on the next university leader, also asks Quinn to stop the board from hiring a president.

Chicago State faculty and students have argued they were excluded from the presidential search process and have criticized the two finalists as local political insiders. On Friday, 13 of the 15 members of the campus’ search advisory committee resigned in protest.

The finalists are Carol Adams, secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Wayne Watson, the retiring chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.

[From earlier news coverage: “Donald Pettis, president of Chicago State’s alumni association and an advisory committee member, said that only one of the 14 committee members voted for Adams. None voted for Watson…”]

Rev. Leon Finney, the Chicago State board chairman, did not respond to a request for comment…

Yeah, why comment. Really, why bother. Who cares.

Official statement from the University of New Mexico board of trustees in response to the faculty no-confidence vote in regard to President David Schmidly.

We admit we were all bit piddly
When we voted to hire Dave Schmidly.
But who knew that he’d stink?
He looks good when you drink.
And now it’s too late to do diddly.

This university’s highly paid president maintained the financial criminal of the century and his victim supplier in positions of enormous campus power and influence. The school lost tens of millions of endowment funds to these men.

The president continues to oversee a board of trustees bursting with conflicts of interest. UD expects at least one more member of that board to be dragged into the Madoff debacle. Yet despite calls from outraged alumni to dissolve the board, the president has done nothing.

Now, finally, faced with the loss of its financial base and any integrity it might have had after being run into the ground by its beloved Madoff and Merkin, Yeshiva’s president acts. He fires sixty innocent people.

The guilty parties – the president and his board of trustees – remain in place.

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

UD thanks Tzvee for the link.

From the excellent student newspaper at benighted Southern Illinois University:

… Reports from The Associated Press this week link trustee Frank William Bonan II to $30,000 his father and uncle donated to Blagojevich in November, a month after he was appointed to the board.

Those donations came during a one-day fundraising trip by Blagojevich to Mount Vernon, which netted him $42,000. Of that money, $30,000 came from Market Street Bancshares Inc. and its managers, J. Hunt Bonan and F.William Bonan I.

Records from the State Board of Elections show Blagojevich was the beneficiary of about $25,000 in donations from at least two other trustees between 2005 and 2008.

[The chairman of the board], who was appointed in 2004, contributed $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2005 and 2006. Tedrick also contributed another $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2002 and 2003.

Trustee John Simmons, a 2004 appointee who is an attorney from Alton, and his wife, Jayne, contributed three $5,000 donations between 2006 and 2008 for a total of $15,000….

The comments on the article suggest that, uh, everybody’s pretty disgusted with this disgusting board.

SIU had better watch it. Corruption levels like these … I mean… look at what’s going on in Greece. People can get really angry after enough of this.

UD‘s been calling for the dismantling of the pilfering, conflicted board of trustees at Yeshiva University since the Madoff thing broke. Nobody listens to her because she’s just a girl. Just a blogger. Everybody listened to Stephen Trachtenberg, who’s a guy, plus a paid Yeshiva consultant, and not only did Trachtenberg think everyone should leave the board alone, he dismissed all criticism of the Yeshiva boys as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

So, you know. Fine. UD‘s used to this sort of thing. On to the next subject. You don’t change intimate homosocial subcultures just like that…

But maybe there’s hope.

Normally, activist hedge fund managers try to shake up boards of companies they’ve invested in. But one fund manager is seeking to oust the directors of his alma mater over the Bernard L. Madoff scandal.

Andrew Sole of Esopus Creek Advisers called for the removal of Yeshiva University’s board, after the school’s endowment lost millions of dollars because of its investments in Mr. Madoff’s firm, The New York Post reported, citing correspondence between the hedge fund manager and the school.

Yeshiva’s endowment, which has fallen to $1.2 billion from as high as $1.8 billion, suffered because the school had invested with J. Ezra Merkin, a fund manager who has emerged as one of the main feeders into Mr. Madoff’s investment firm. Both Mr. Merkin and Mr. Madoff were Yeshiva directors, but have since resigned their positions.

Mr. Sole is demanding the replacement of the rest of the board, according to a letter obtained by The Post. But when the school’s president responded to Mr. Sole by saying Yeshiva’s counsel was looking into the matter, the hedge funder responded that the university was resorting to an “ostrich defense.”

Actually, the original article about this in the NY Post quotes a far stronger response on Sole’s part. Yeshiva’s letter to him is, Sole wrote, “scripted” and “beyond offensive.”

And the letter’s not from Yeshiva’s president. He’s far too busy to respond to so trivial a concern. He gave the job to an assistant.