… their boards of trustees.

Then there’s Tel Aviv University.

Maybe Tel Aviv University figures that with a list of trustees this long, no one will notice this or that particular name.

He’s a humongous donor, a trustee, and a saintly presence at Cornell (‘”We [he and his wife] are both crazy enough to think we can make a bit of difference in this world and crazy enough to try,” he said.’), but Sanford Weill, who made the zillions he gave the university by creating a bank too big to fail, now announces we should break up the banks.

Jon Stewart’s calling Cornell’s Joe Paterno an asshole, and Matt Taibbi, who also calls him an asshole, notes that

Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.

The people interviewing him should have “beat Weill repeatedly about the neck and head with a Swingline stapler, until he screeched out a tearful apology to every last living soul on earth.”

Paterno apologized. I wonder if Weill will. Nah.

… finally steps down from the Penn State board of trustees. Steve Garban – a real throwback – quits.

America’s latest big-time embezzler embezzled for twenty years and says he felt “constant and intense guilt” about it.

But how constant and intense can anything be for twenty years straight? UD, for instance, figures she can maintain constant and intense interest in… let’s take something she’s intensely interested in, as interested as this guy, bigshot trustee of the University of Northern Iowa, was in grand theft. So we just had Bloomsday, and UD‘s a James Joyce freak and she read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club and spent time preparing all that and talking endlessly with fellow Joyce people and reading and rereading various passages from Ulysses…

Okay so I’d say UD managed to sustain constant and intense interest in Bloomsday, this summer, for around, say, two weeks… How much more difficult to sustain constant and intense guilt for twenty years over your assiduous theft of millions of dollars from innocent people!

You say guilt is different from interest?

Then let’s look at perhaps the most intensely guilt-ridden figure of our time — Franz Kafka. Kafka certainly majorly dragged his ass around Prague, but we also have it on good authority that he was fully capable of having a good time. A reviewer of Kafka’s diaries says that they fail to give the reader a sense of “the humorous and light-hearted Kafka, the man who walked around in the day and earned the respect, fondness, and love of his friends and coworkers.”

Let’s say that – we can only give a rough estimate here – Kafka spent around half of his time feeling guilt; and of the time he felt guilt, let’s say that only about a quarter of that was intense and constant.

And, you know, Kafka did something with that guilt. He wrote guilt-ridden stories like The Judgment to work through it or whatever. This guy, Mr University of Northern Iowa, felt unremitting dripdripdrip guilt over stealing from people for twenty years but not only did he not write one of those quirky weird-prairie short stories about it, he didn’t, say, turn himself in to the authorities, or stop stealing.

… but don’t forget the even more scandalous Southern Illinois University group, presided over by pitiable president-for-life Glenn Poshard. (Put his name in my search engine for years of background.) U Va’s misery will probably end today; SIU’s trustees are the gift that keeps on giving.

You can sense this student journalist trying to grapple with the Beckettian absurdity of her school’s inept president and non-functional trustees as everyone fights with everyone – in public. “It’s just plain bullshit, and he knows it. He is only trying to deflect the truth of what’s going on at that university.” That’s the recent chair of the board talking about the president of the university.

Read the whole article if you want to get the particular piquancy that is the SIU leadership at work: A combination of emotional immaturity, political hackery, and organizational cluelessness.

… sport, not to be entered into lightly, since they’ll certainly all sue.

As Virginia’s governor threatens to fire U Va’s entire board unless they resolve their now-notorious governance issues, UD reminds you of the tale of Diamandopoulos And The Eighteen Dwarves.

Many years ago little Adelphi University hired Peter Diamandopoulos as its president. He instantly set about putting business cronies on the board with whom the university, with flagrant conflict of interest, did all kinds of business. The board showed its gratitude by granting him insane salary increases and perks (a fancy Manhattan condo, etc.) and anything else he wanted. At one point he had the second-highest compensation of any American university president. Meanwhile enrollment fell by forty percent, the school’s ranking tanked, and faculty were really, really pissed – especially when certain details of the man’s, er, lifestyle were made public.

Entertaining his old friend on the board, John Silber, over dinner and drinks ended up costing Adelphi $546. Dr. Silber was president and is now chancellor of Boston University.

The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer is The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

… Among Dr. Diamandopoulos’s expenses highlighted by Amy Gladstein, a lawyer for the Coalition to Save Adelphi, was a $579 pen he ordered for Ernesta Procope to celebrate her election as board chairwoman.

There was also the $82,314 Mercedes that Adelphi provided to Dr. Diamandopoulos.

Those were the good old days! Silber also showed his gratitude: When Adelphi finally dumped Diamandopoulos, Silber gave him a philosophy professorship at Boston University.

Okay, so the Virginia story isn’t about excessive compensation and conflict of interest; but behind all of Diamandopoulos’s money-mongering was his impatience to revolutionize Adelphi and make it a model of go-go corporate activity — exactly the motive of Helen Dragas and various hedgies on the board at U Va, for whom Teresa Sullivan was too academic, too incrementalist…

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Anyway. If the governor dumps the board (it’s unlikely to happen – the board is likely to reappoint Sullivan), expect the board to sue to regain their seats. Adelphi’s, with much huffing and puffing, did: “We will go to the ends of the earth to rectify this gross injustice,” wrote Ernesta with her Amazing Pen.

That suit went nowhere, but the one demanding money back from Diamandopoulos and the dwarves did quite well, netting millions from them. Heigh ho.

Aggressive, acquisitive, not terribly moral, hyper-rich people will always want to be associated with universities, and will often pay immense sums for the association. Universities – meditative, morally serious, non-materialistic – stand for everything these people are not.

Some super-wealthy want a trusteeship for cover. For Bernard Madoff to sit on a Yeshiva University board – as he did – was obviously a great coup for him, a great whitewashing.

But most of the venture capitalists panting to be trustees have more complex motives. Certainly some see it as an opportunity to make yet more money by getting the university to invest in their companies. More broadly, some know that they’ll make a useful set of social and business connections in this way.

And of course it’s good for the ego. Being a university trustee has a high hoity-toity factor; it impresses people.

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The contemporary American university is well within its rights to trade on its symbolic capital in exchange for real capital. If Steven A. Cohen desperately wants, along with his eight billion dollars, to be a Brown University trustee, let him for God’s sake. Are you an idiot?

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And what are the deeper motives here? What precisely is that symbolic capital which can be worth so much in sheer dollars to the university?

A lot of people yearn to be perceived not merely as smart, but as cultured. The contemporary art market would collapse if it had to rely on people actually understanding and liking particular pieces or traditions of art.

Art and culture acquisitions are quick ways of making oneself aesthetically and intellectually superior, and this is important to many people, since it seems to be the case that the more material goods you acquire, the more anxious you become not to be perceived as motivated by material gain.

It’s an odd paradox – the more sixty million dollar yearly bonuses Lloyd Blankfein gets, the more antsy Lloyd Blankfein becomes not to be perceived as greedy.

Offsetting that remarkable level of personal greed is not easy, however, and something like a university trusteeship says two important things at once: I’m not spending all of my time as a vampire squid. And I have a soul; it’s not all about money for me.

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There are exceptions to this craving for university capital. Donald Trump is a true blue American vulgarian. But as a general rule, the finer the university, the higher the price it can place on its capacity to shed non-materialism upon the materialistic.

Hence the University of Chicago acted rationally when it made Rajat Gupta a trustee. I guess appointing Steve Stevanovich was also rational. But after awhile, as Yeshiva University learned, a critical mass problem may develop. After awhile, you take on one too many suspected insider traders or whatever, and your university’s reputation begins to suffer.

Your reputation is the source of your symbolic capital. Fuck it up, and Steve Cohen isn’t buying.

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In the case of the University of Virginia, the problem seems not so much lawsuits and questionable business practices as the decision to put trustees with no discernible sense of the nature of universities in positions of great power. Fiascos of the sort U Va is dealing with will eventually happen when you give your entire board of trustees over to the corporate world.

Thus did a handful of wealthy and well-connected individuals who have no recognized credentials or expertise in the field of higher education, including two members of the Board of Visitors (namely, the rector, a real-estate developer appointed by Gov. Tim Kaine, and the ex-vice rector, a venture capitalist appointed by Gov. Bob McDonnell), privately persuade themselves that a revolution was on the horizon and that this revolution — the arrival, trajectory and outcome of which are, to say the least, uncertain — necessitated destabilization of one of the world’s great public research universities and the public and private humiliation of UVa’s first woman president, the internationally esteemed scholar and public higher education leader, Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan.

Jeffrey Rossman, The Daily Progress

A nice take on the Charlottesville shabbiness in Slate.

In the [outraged] aftermath [of the firing], the board, led by Dragas — which I swear is the name of a teacher of the Dark Arts in Harry Potter 8 — was obscure, shifty, and defiant in the face of questions about what had led to the surprise firing. Dragas published a statement that was as serpentine as Mr. Jefferson’s famous walls. It alternated between jargon, ass-covering, self-congratulation, and faux sympathy. She answered none of the pertinent questions related to Sullivan’s ouster while declaring that any turmoil over how she had been fired stemmed from the board’s excessive attachment to the “truth.” A later statement from Dragas outlined some of the challenges the university faces but never addressed the central point: where Sullivan fell short.

Governor Vaginal Probe has taken a good look up the privates of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors and he doesn’t like what he sees. He has now released a letter in which he pledges to fire the lot of them if they don’t resolve things on Tuesday, when they’re meeting to consider reappointing Teresa Sullivan president.

… has stepped down. That was quick.

According to my calculations, the University of Virginia is effectively without a president. Conditions are ripe for a real coup – maybe Jock McKernan, who not only has an absolutely fabulous first name which will erase all memories of someone having appointed a matronly woman president (details here), but who combines the two qualities – dynamic business sense and enthusiasm for online education – so important to the board of visitors. McKernan is chair of the board at the notorious Education Management Corporation. And EMC is largely owned by Goldman Sachs.

He’s a twofer.

… to reconsider their having fired President Teresa Sullivan (UD predicts that they will reappoint her), UD asks you to consider this angle of the scandal:

It’s also hard to ignore the role of gender in these events. I have briefly met, or at least been in the same room with, both Sullivan and her predecessor, John Casteen… Casteen is the picture of a classic university president in appearance and affect, a tall white man of distinguished age who spoke with total confidence and authority, verging on arrogance. Sullivan was more of a listener, offering constructive commentary while letting others have their say. She is also a matronly woman of 62 who doesn’t evoke simple-minded visions of “bold leadership” in the management-consulting, advertisement vein.

All true, and indeed throughout these events UD has thought about the likelihood that the absence of lean mean chiseling at the top has been driving the hedgies bonkers. The interim replacement these people chose, the head of the biz school, looks just like Robert Rubin.

What they forgot, for all their expensive public relations advice, was that this sort of move can backfire very very badly.

Two words: Susan Boyle.

… an island, why can’t he buy a university?

They’re both clinically dead.

Trustees of the University of Virginia were mad to save university money by putting courses online and all, but when it came to their own personal grooming needs, no cost was too high. They cain’t talk good, so they were arranging to pay for ten A-FUCKING-MAZING hours (Each hour costs – what? – a thousand dollars? UD knows this is nothing by corporate lawyer standards… But think of it this way – Michael Jackson’s doctor – the one who’s in jail – was also paid around a thousand dollars an hour.) of speech therapy.

The University of Virginia visitors are truly visitors from another planet. Most people would be so staggered by that rate that the whole point of the exercise would be lost. They’d stand there mute, their mouth hanging open.