Six years ago, a concerned Yeshiva University alum, Andrew Sole, wrote a letter to the president of that school calling for the resignation of the entire board of trustees, a scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Madoff-and-Merkin-led, lot.
Yeshiva’s answer to Sole (which came not, of course, from the president, who is far too busy and important to have bothered with such a triviality, but from some underling… or maybe the response was machine-generated…), Sole told a newspaper, was “scripted,” and “beyond offensive.”
And so it remains today, with Yeshiva the object of renewed contempt as stunning details of its take-down of itself via a combination of risky investments and the Madoff/Merkin tag team emerge. Sole once again calls attention to the fundamental negligence… perhaps amounting to criminality?… of the people who have now succeeded in running the school entirely into the ground (Moody’s has rated it junk); and, incredibly, true to form, Yeshiva has tried not responding at all to him, and then, under pressure from growing media attention, has denied everything. Everything’s peachy at Yeshiva! Plus the extensive report on its shameful activities is all “half-truths and inaccuracies.” Such as?
Yeshiva isn’t saying.
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Yeshiva has had to sell off some of its valuable Manhattan real estate, is trying to pare faculty by encouraging retirements, and has given up control of its Albert Einstein College of Medicine to save money. Yet it’s still at risk of running out of cash next year, Moody’s reported.
Getting rid of everyone but beloved Yeshiva trustee Zygi Wilf!
Wow, finally things get SO bad at the University of Louisville that a trustee squawks. UL is one of the very worst universities this blog has chronicled over the last few years. (See my University of Louisville posts here.) It’s sort of got everything wrong with it: gross-out athletics, of course; but mismanagement, employee crime, Medicare fraud, low graduation rates, Bobby Petrino, Marius Ratajczak, Robert Felner, outrageous dean turnover, medical school on probation, strangely generous separation agreements…
PLUS, it turns out
The University of Louisville’s program to provide continuing medical education for doctors has been placed on probation by its accrediting body less than two months after a different agency put UofL’s medical school on notice.
I say it turns out because the complaining trustee, who understandably tried to resign from this disgraceful school’s BOT but was basically forced to stay on by the governor of the state (!), said that the last straw was finding out about the latest UL unit to go on probation from the newspapers. Wouldn’t want to tell your trustees what’s going on. Not when it’s this bad. And UD‘s betting that a lot of people have a lot of money invested, as it were, in UL’s continuing to operate as – it seems to her – a kind of quasi-criminal enterprise.
Indeed, there must be a lot of raised eyebrows at UL today. You expect trustees, of all people, to just sit there.
A trustee subpoenaing his university’s students is kind of bad form; it kind of undermines the whole “university family” meme of which publicists are fond.
Of course we know a university is not a family, strictly speaking; but on the other hand there’s this idea that a university is a community, there’s a certain united feeling and history and commitment there… And that, as in families, certain things aren’t done. It’s a news story when children sue their parents; and it’s totally a news story when, angered by students calling for an investigation of a trustee’s rumored unfair labor practices, the trustee subpoenas their emails, journals, shopping lists…
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There are eight million stories in the Naked City, as they say, and the Daniel Straus saga is only one of them; but in its small way – in a way that interests University Diaries – it’s paradigmatic. Now that Straus is, uh, off the NYU law school board of trustees, it’s worth reviewing the plot elements.
The intriguing problem in regard to choosing trustees is the following:
You’re after the most staggeringly bohemoth moneybag in the world. You’re after the Mothra of money.
Some of America’s most wealthy have acccumulated their wealth in morally and legally questionable ways.
Some of these same people have rather aggressive and even imperious personalities. They were already that way when somewhat unscrupulously, perhaps, accumulating their wealth. Now that everyone treats them like Louis Seizième (pre-guillotine) they are far worse.
If you’re this kind of guy (Platonic ideal: Donald Trump) you customarily sue the shit out of anyone who dares to get in your way, and lookee here. Now it’s two of your charges, two of the law students whose welfare you’ve agreed to oversee, and they’re making noise in various ways about your labor law violations. They seem to think you’re a little soiled to be a trustee.
Unfortunately for you, you are not a Yeshiva University trustee, where being Zygmunt Wilf is not a problem. You do your subpoena, and NYU immediately decides to represent – at no cost – the students. So now you’re in the awkward position of being at very serious odds not just with the students whose welfare you oversee, but with the university that appointed you.
Something’s got to give, and that’s you.
NYU gets bad publicity; you get ridiculed (‘Mr. Straus’s lawyers accuse the union of conspiring with students to “embarrass,” “shame” and “publicly denigrate” him. You might argue that Mr. Straus has done a good job of this on his own.’).
So to repeat: The problem with recruiting trustees (people pay much more attention to the problem with recruiting the best football players, but I’d argue that they’re equally interesting problems) is that… Well, let me quote Fran Lebowitz (UD interviewed her not long ago): “You don’t earn a billion dollars. You steal it.” This is not always an accurate statement, but you get the idea. You can’t be too careful when choosing trustees.
Two Upstate senators say they voted against each incumbent University of South Carolina trustee because of “questionable activities” allowed to occur on two of USC’s campuses.
… [The senators cited] a performance on the campus of the one-woman show, “How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days.”
“All we are asking for is balance,” [one] said.
Henry Blodget is talking about University of Southern California trustee John Martin and his… well, Blodget has already tried to supply some adjectives… personal compensation. You sense, in Blodget’s emotional but not entirely polished description of human beings who take several hundred million dollars to themselves in compensation every year a kind of verbal difficulty, an eagerness and yet an inability to capture what it means – socially, morally – for one human being to do this. Piggish is a strong precise sort of word; yet he’s matched it with an abstraction (outrageous) which does little more than amplify his initial abstraction (the condition of being unbelievable). One feels as though the phrase should substitute a more precise word for outrageous… Or maybe the phrase would be stronger if one simply dropped outrageous and ended on piggish.
Anyway. A trustee stands as a role model for students and faculty, and Martin’s cosmic greed (cosmic is good, I think… I don’t know… I’m kind of tongue-tied on this one myself) conveys the highest values of that institution of higher learning. Higher, higher, higher, until you’re pulling in, as Blodget puts it, “700 times my lowest employee.”
What’s the good of majoring in English? Reading Austen will put you on a fast track to understanding the world to come, the world, according to the hottest book out there at the moment, that we are already beginning to see emerge. The concentration of unimaginable wealth in private hands, coupled with remarkable and increasing rates of income inequality, is producing Austenland.
And – to stay with the university for a moment, since it is after all the subject of this blog – we can, relatedly, see emerging … call it The Benefactor Quandary… or call it less formally the Madoff Mess… the Milken Mess… the… Firtash Mess?
Dmitry Firtash is a tragic figure, a harmless well-meaning oligarch caught up in the cruel tides of history. After quietly amassing billions and billions of dollars for himself and his loved ones through massive corruption, he made the mistake of simply being Ukrainian… And here comes the US government after the dude because he’s a friend of the Russkies and we’re pissed with the Russkies! So now he’s been arrested and he’s gonna be extradited to New York or Washington or someplace near UD‘s house so we can make mock of him and take all his money and throw him in jail.
But meanwhile, what interests us here at University Diaries, is this:
A Ukrainian energy tycoon who has made considerable donations to the University of Cambridge has been arrested, with campaigners saying the university must review its ethical investment and donations policy as a result.
Yes, Cambridge fell for Firtash’s oily (if you will) charm and now it’s official knowledge that he’s a crook whereas when they took his many millions in donations it was only privately bruited about that he was a crook.
What to do?
The guy’s been washing his rep via big bucks to Cambridge exactly the way so many somewhat crooked one percenters do at various academic institutions – remember, Steven A. Cohen is still a trustee in good standing of Brown University – and now Cambridge looks like an enabler. This for that – twenty million dollars in exchange for we shed our sweetness and light upon you…
Expect to see more of this as our wealthy rentiers go restlessly in search of legitimacy.
… to the leadership of your university, the boys of Kappa Beta Phi.
While you’re at campus events listening to administrators intone about diversity and social justice, four of the people who run or have run your school – Fink, Langone, Lipton, and Grasso – meet in secret to say what they really think.
Oh, and if you’re a student at the University of Richmond, or Columbia University, or … UD ain’t got time this morning to study the entire membership list (though she will say that any woman who belongs to this club should see a psychiatrist pronto), but there’s a fighting chance a trustee at your university is on it… But anyway for sure if you’re at Columbia or the University of Richmond you have an opportunity to get up close and personal with the leadership of your school…
UD will admit to being fascinated by the… pincer movement by which the contemporary American university is dominated on one side by mindless reactionary jocks and on the other by mindless reactionary vampire squids. No wonder our schools have to hire increasing numbers of earnest high-minded speechmakers – the pressure at either end is killing them. (As longtime readers know, this is UD‘s theory as to why, after Larry Summers, Harvard felt compelled to hire Drew Faust, whose manner is that of Ma Ingalls, to, er, re-rhetoricize the school. UD predicts that Faust’s successor will be Garrison Keillor. It’s getting truly desperate out there.)
Enter the University of Nevada Las Vegas board of regents warily.
It is as Freud wrote of entering the darkness of the soul:
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
It is as Joyce wrote of the obstetrical theater:
Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds…
The psychoanalyst conjures what is darkest in us; the obstetrician conjures the violence of the birth trauma. Yet both are shepherds, custodians, healers …
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art…
You see the paradox…
And, in some similar sense, to enter that antechamber wherein reside the darkest, most primitive forces of the American university, and then to enter into what Blake called Mental Fight with them, is to emerge scathed. To read – to try to understand – the words and acts of the most primal energies at work in that bastion of enlightenment, the university, is to sense what Marlow must have felt in the forest of shrunken heads.
Let us then in studious quietude listen to them, the trustees of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, as they give a football coach with a 12-37 record a vast raise; as they build for a university community that does not attend football games a vast new football stadium; as they generate a $2.7 million athletics program deficit and make students and taxpayers deal with it… Let us hear their words.
“Maybe we’re being a little generous, but I thought about some of the other factors that were occurring,” Regent Robert Blakely said. “We’re in the process of trying to build a stadium. Having a successful football team is the biggest linchpin. Giving the football coach more of an incentive probably isn’t a bad plan.”
“I’m not enamored with the contract either,” Regent Michael Wixom said. “But I don’t want to jeopardize the momentum (Hauck) has created. [The coach’s most recent season was 7-6!] If we reject the contract, I’m afraid it will do immense harm.”
Regents directed Chancellor Dan Klaich to form a committee to look at best practices in contract negotiations with athletic coaches. However, Regent Allison Stephens said she wanted to see fair-market value and adequate compensation for coaches.
“I just fundamentally disagree that our role in fiscal management means that we have to nickle and dime and negotiate down people working in our institutions,” she said.
Some in the public, who came to support [the coach’s] contract renewal, agreed.
A $200,000 annual salary increase “is peanuts in the long run,” Rich Abajian, general manager for Findlay Toyota’s board of governors, told regents. “Football is the program that can pull you out of budget problems. … You’ve got to pay money to make money.”
It’s official.
… of the Boston Globe.
Wallack has way-doggedly gone after greed in academia and environs. When greedy academia and environs snarls back at Wallack with lawyers and public relations, Wallack just keeps going, publishing story after story until the truth is accepted by everyone except those whose livelihood depends on continuing to lie for greedy a&e.
And speaking of greed: Understanding postmodern American levels of greed is key to understanding Wallack’s latest story, about the ex-president of Brandeis University.
People are trying to explain the downfall of Virginia’s governor in terms of the insane disparity between the wealth of his fundraisers (with whom he and his wife hobnobbed) and the wealth of the guv and the missus. These two had to destroy their lives and make Virginia a laughingstock because of their need to keep up not with the Joneses but with people at the level of Jamie Dimon.
And speaking of Dimon, you cannot understand his just-announced 74% raise unless you understand that he operates within the same painful income-inequality-in-America reality. The gap between Bob McDonnell and other millionaires was as unconscionable as the gap between Jamie Dimon and other billionaires. One of these two was able to find justice legally; the other seems to have been driven to a life of crime.
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Ainsi, once you grasp the levels of greed-jockeying we are now, Year 2014, talking about, little in the story of sadly undercompensated Jehuda Reinharz will surprise you.
… Reinharz earned more than $600,000 in 2011 to serve as president emeritus, a part-time advisory role, in addition to receiving $800,000 that year in his new job for a Cleveland philanthropy.
But when you throw everything else in
… Reinharz is expected to collect roughly $8 million from Brandeis after stepping down as president…
Pretty much everyone at the school except the trustees is outraged. Because
… the school has long claimed social justice as one of its core values. Reinharz’s pay also came at a time of rising tuition and as the university was facing steep budget cuts that forced it to slash employee benefits, lay off staff members, and even explore the idea of shutting down a beloved campus museum.
In response to the outrage, Brandeis has graciously decided to
… include a faculty representative on the committee that sets executive pay …
which means that right now they’re racing desperately around the business school looking for the richest b-school professor on the faculty. Only a professor also running a hedge fund can understand executive compensation at these levels.
Like the New York Observer newspaper, Brown University must by now be well-practiced in observing its highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, as he tries to avoid going to jail.
… Nick Verbitsky, the director of To Catch a Trader, told [the New York Observer] that the FBI has confirmed they are looking at three other stock trades that Mr. Cohen could personally be charged on.
Yes, it’s quite the cat-and-trustee game. Keep your eye peeled, Brown.
… (it’s on tomorrow night) features a great photo of Brown University’s most high-profile trustee, Steven Cohen. He’s dressed up as a king who plays golf.
[The SEC’s] pursuit of [Brown University trustee Steven] Cohen has been compared to Captain Ahab’s quest to vanquish the White Whale. Preet Bharara’s investigation into insider trading in the hedge-fund industry has already led to the convictions of former Galleon Group founder [and high-profile University of Pennsylvania donor] Raj Rajaratnam and former Goldman Sachs director and McKinsey managing director Rajat Gupta. Rajaratnam is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence, and last year Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison. Bharara says the U.S. Wall Street insider trading investigation is ongoing.
It’s become quite the cat and mouse game between Brown University’s Steven Cohen and law enforcement. Does someone in Brown’s English department teach Melville? There’s a great opportunity here to spice up the Moby lecture:
So powerful and persistent a metaphor has the Ahab/whale struggle become that we encounter it in the media’s account of our trustee Steve Cohen’s white whale-esque evasion of capture (so far!) by “Ahab” Bharara …
Tomorrow night, Brown has a rare opportunity to model for its students how to become a success in life: Frontline is featuring the university’s highest-profile trustee in a special report titled To Catch a Trader. UD hears echoes of To Catch a Thief in that title, but that’s probably just her.
… but still sent up.
Brown University’s highest profile trustee sees another one of his employees go to prison. Is Brown’s Steven Cohen next? Will he preside over that university’s decision-making from prison?