I mean, minus Bernie and Ezra …

…The [fraud] charge [against Merkin] highlights the dangers charities face if they overlook governance practices and conflicts of interest, like investing with businesses run by board members. Deep losses incurred by charities invested through Merkin reveal how several boards fell down on their job.

Yeshiva University invested $110 million, or 8% of its endowment, with Merkin’s Ascot Partners LP, which had the bulk of its assets invested in Madoff. Both Madoff and Merkin served on boards at the university, Merkin as chairman of the board’s investment committee.

“No member of a nonprofit board should benefit in a financial way from serving a charity,” said Marian Stern, a nonprofit consultant and adjunct assistant professor at the George Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at New York University. …

Non-profit is one of those words … It’s like Maria… the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard… all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word… non-profit…

Yet we’ll never get anywhere, mes enfants, until we take a cold eye even to that most beautiful of words. And not only when multiply-billioned megaliths like Harvard continue to present themselves as non-profit pebbles. When advocacy organizations are over-indebted to corporations, they also should receive scrutiny.

… In a letter sent today to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, based in Arlington, Virginia, [Senator Charles] Grassley asked the nonprofit group to disclose any financial backing from drug companies or from foundations created by the industry.

The Iowa Republican, in a series of hearings and investigations, has focused on financial ties between the drug industry, doctors and academic institutions. His efforts have led New York-based Pfizer Inc. to begin disclosing consulting payments to U.S. doctors, and Harvard Medical School in Boston to reexamine its conflict-of-interest policies. Now Grassley is expanding his inquiries to nonprofit groups.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry shapes the practices of nonprofit organizations which purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Officials at the National Alliance for Mental Illness didn’t return calls for comment.

The group identifies itself as the largest grassroots organization in the U.S. for people with mental illness and their families. The group came under scrutiny in 1999, when the magazine Mother Jones reported that 18 drug companies gave the group $11.7 million from 1996 to mid-1999. The article reported that at one point an executive of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly & Co. worked out of the nonprofit group’s headquarters…

A writer at PsychCentral provides some detail:

… The problem with the National Alliance for Mental Illness and Mental Health America (formerly known as the National Mental Health Association), among others, is their simple lack of transparency about their funding sources. NAMI, for instance, doesn’t break out its donations by source. If it did, I suspect we’d see that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of its donations come from pharmaceutical companies, affiliated companies, or individual employees and management from within pharma. For other nonprofits, I would expect similar percentages.

The long-held secret of these national non-profits doing important advocacy and policy work in mental health is simply this — without the pharmaceutical monies they receive, they probably wouldn’t exist today. They are dependent upon them and some of them would rather you not know how dependent upon them they really are.

Does such money buy influence? Well, with NAMI, the answer appears to be an unequivocal “Yes.” NAMI has long pushed that severe mental illness — like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders — are pure neurobiological medical diseases (or as they call them, “biologically based brain disorders”).

The primary treatment method pushed by NAMI national? Medications, of course. For instance, in their consumer article about depression, 84 percent of the article is devoted to medications and only 10 percent mentions psychotherapy. ..

Nice summary of recent events in university sports.

Eva von Dassow has already made a starring appearance on this blog, complaining about the benighted University of Minnesota, where she teaches. This luminous personality is at it again in the Star Tribune, in a piece written with Timothy Brennan:

… [I]n one category, expenditures have nearly doubled over the last five years. That category is “institutional support,” which consists essentially of central administration. The 2008-09 budget plan increases expenditures for institutional support by more than $143 million, or 80 percent, over the figure for 2004-05. The spending increase in this category alone covers the amount by which the governor proposes to reduce the state’s annual appropriation to the university.

Click the second link in this post for more.

Thanks for the tip, Bill.

… tweets.

… account of a basketball game between Law Center professors and politicians.

… the heat’s broken. It’s a clear, cool day on the island.

The breeze has swept the leaves from my deck.

Along the edges of the pool, two collared doves go hoo-hoo-hoo.

… to life as we know it on many American college campuses, but at UC Santa Cruz the smoking of dope has become such a big deal that the school’s making official efforts to suppress it.

Or at least to suppress 4/20 – the annual campus pot festival, where thousands of people – many not connected to UCSC – make a bright golden haze on a meadow.

If you ask UD, this sort of ritual is less offensive than football fans getting shit-faced and trashing main street. But the whole alcohol thing – the fact that many universities are surrounded by hundreds of cheap bars, for instance – gets a rise out of no one, while people believe toking erodes the foundations of the republic.

Having said that, UD has no problem with UC Santa Cruz sending a letter to the parents of freshmen asking them to discourage their kids from taking part in 4/20. The event is a victim of its own success, drawing such crowds that the national media’s paying attention.

It’s like the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The event has gotten so big and so silly that it draws routine MSM ridicule.

Eventually a similar letter will go out to literature department chairs asking them to discourage new faculty from attending.

“We must educate those who will lead the institutions that will serve as engines of prosperity in our economy. But we must also instill in them the importance of ensuring that these engines of prosperity are engines for all,” intoned then-President Larry Summers at a Harvard religious gathering.

But Summers’ own engine rides so high… the throttle on that thing… It’s like… here’s Larry on his prosperity engine:

Why is he riding so high?

According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

So let’s say he worked 100 days total, that’s $52,000 per day.

And assuming he worked about 12 hour days, that’s $4,333 per hour.

Ride ’em, cowboy! Hell, plenty to go around! With his common touch, Summers is just the man to ensure that America’s engines of prosperity are engines for all.

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Point of Clarification: Why only one day a week?

Because he was a full-time professor at Harvard at the same time.

… before Brown University finally removes you as chair of psychiatry?

This compromised.

… Martin B. Keller, is a highly acclaimed psychiatrist and chair of the psychiatry department at Brown University who has extensive ties to the drug industry. In 1998, when the Rhode Island attorney-general’s office forced Keller to forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grant money to settle a financial fraud inquiry, it came to light that Keller had received more than half a million dollars from drug companies that year, most of it from the same firms whose drugs he had touted in journals and at medical conferences. According to the Boston Globe, Keller’s financial ties were so numerous that they prompted the National Institute of Mental Health to review its conflict-of-interest rules. The most recent publicly available data shows that as of June 2003, Keller had been consulting for at least 17 major drug firms, including Merck, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, while also working under a $25 million research grant from Wyeth-Ayerst.

But this was written in 2005. Maybe there’s more.

Anyway. Brown finally removed him. Dean Edward Wing writes:

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Steven A. Rasmussen, MD, as interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior…

UD thanks Barney for the item, which she doesn’t yet see on official Brown pages. But I guess it’ll show up here pretty soon.

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Update: Alison Bass has more information.

UD thanks Roy Poses for alerting her to the civil fraud charges brought against Ezra Merkin today.

New York’s attorney general brought civil fraud charges against hedge fund manager Ezra Merkin on Monday, saying he duped investors by secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi fraud without their permission.

… New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he ignored glaring red flags about Madoff’s investments in an effort to reap huge fees from clients.

Merkin and his Gabriel Capital Corp money management firm “betrayed hundreds of investors who entrusted him with their savings,” the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court said.

… The lawsuit also said Merkin mixed his personal funds, including his management fees from his Ascot and Gabriel funds, with the funds of his management company. Cuomo contends Merkin used management firm funds for personal use, including buying more than $91 million in art for his apartment…

That last thing… the art thing. That’s mainly a huge number of huge Rothko paintings. World dealers are salivating.

It’s unclear to UD why Sussex University without any consultation has shut down its linguistics program.

Usually UD doesn’t blog about such things, not having the time to explore in depth particular – and perhaps complicated – decisions of this sort at any given university. But in this case she makes an exception, since this seems an uncontroversially strong program in a crucial academic field.

“I already need a change of clothes.”

“It’s brutal.”

“Terrible.”

“It’s gotta go back.”

“It’s going to.  Supposed to be seventy degrees tonight.”

“Seventy!  Break out the long underwear.”

It’s Open House, and many Key West properties – glorious green islets with small pools behind ship carpenter’s cottages – are available for viewing. On Fleming and Elizabeth and Eaton, on hidden lanes like Poorhouse and Catholic and Gecko, Key West’s white eyebrow houses release their shutters and let you in. They’re on the market.

From the front hall you see clear to the blue water in the back, where cats and doves and lizards live. The massed palms and hibiscus hide the house and its water garden from view, so it is your world, your sunny windy palm-sheltered world alone.

How to convey the joy and comfort and excitement that this kinetic self-contained world makes me feel? I see myself so clearly, leaning into that chaise, typing on a keyboard on my lap and listening to the purling of water. I smell honeysuckle in the heat, and jasmine.

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Even when it’s not Open House, I’m sidetracked always, on my long daily walks, by the mysterious beauty of the half-hidden islets of Key West. Some have little lettered signs by their front doors (One Martini Two Martini Three Martini… Floor!). All have bicycles thrown against the thin white columns of the facades. Seabirds stand on the tin roofs, and potted geraniums on the porches.

On the street in front of the houses very old women on Vespas wave at you and speed by.

The heat is enormous; you feel as though you’re walking through a mobile steamroom, a sauna tricked out just for you, steady hot air pushed through to make you sweat. There’s wind, but the wind’s hot too. So you pace yourself. You have to pace yourself.

You’re carrying a citrus smoothie you bought at Help Yourself, a food market so pure, raw, natural and organic you could plotz.

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

At Help Yourself, heat-addled UD ordered not a smoothie, but a coolie. I’d like a coolie, please. I’ll have a coolie. Maybe she was thinking about how nice it would be to be cool.

The woman at the counter understood what UD meant but looked at her funny, and it came to UD that she’d not only made a mistake, but used a derogatory word for an Asian laborer.

While she waited for the salads she’d also ordered, UD looked at two articles in a natural living magazine.

One was about a 57-year-old Danish former Playboy playmate who looked 27. She’d had no surgery, she said, but attained this result through eating “raw.” UD stopped reading at the word raw.

The other article was about a woman who left her bathroom every morning in an ecstasy because her shit didn’t smell since she started eating raw.

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When she got home, UD eyed the ceiling fan hard at work in her bedroom and wondered if she could figure out a way to hang her damp bra from one of its blades.

… at our house on Capitol Hill many years ago.  I recall a calm, unpretentious man with whom it was instantly easy to chat.  I think I recall correctly his disappointment with our pathetic liquor cabinet.

Mr UD , who studied with him at the University of Chicago, admired his independence, his strong sense of individuality.  He did his own work, utterly unreliant on any form of received wisdom.

Brian Barry, who has died at 73, had a political philosophy “best … described as egalitarian liberalism – the view that, along with protecting traditional liberal freedoms, the ‘just’ state must promote economic redistribution from rich to poor and provide equality of access to public services.”

Barry was famously pugnacious in argument and uninhibited in his criticisms of those with whom he did not see eye to eye. Colleagues who bought his books would quickly pass over prefatory tributes to Gertie the cat and go to the index to discover the identities of his latest victims. Terms such as “astonishingly crass”, “obscurantist”, “cavalier” or “complete rubbish” were characteristic put-downs.

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UPDATE: Excerpts from an exclusive interview this evening with Mr UD, who worked closely with Brian Barry at the University of Chicago.

“What did he look like? Big teddy bear…

I had just finished studying John Rawls with John Rawls, at Harvard. His big book on justice had recently come out, and the course there was basically Rawls responding to his critics. It wasn’t until I took a two-semester seminar in justice with Brian at Chicago – a course that featured Brian’s critique of Rawls – that I began to understand Rawls. In other words, I didn’t get Rawls as well, studying with Rawls, as I got Rawls studying Rawls with Barry. If that makes sense…

I went to his office to introduce myself before the semester started. I was already an admirer of his work. Finding him was a little difficult, because there was a geography professor on campus also named Brian Barry, and it was Barry’s first semester, and it wasn’t entirely clear where his office was… I found him, and he was really welcoming; we had a long chat, and he ended by saying “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you!” I remember his office was very dark; he kept all the lights off…

The seminar was great. After it was over he organized an informal weekly gathering at his apartment so we could continue talking about justice. Various faculty gave papers; Brian served beer.

You know that book we have, The Incomplete Book of Failures? He introduced me to that book. He used to read out of it during class. He especially liked to read from the famous phrasebook, English As She Is Spoke.

I once bumped into him coming out of Regenstein Library. His arms were full of books — twenty of them, say. I said something like I see you’re finally reading a book or two. And he said I just finished writing a book on utilitarianism and now I have to read up on the subject to put in some footnotes.”