The Mephitic Factor is getting out of hand on the Corporation of Brown University.
When you mob a university’s boardroom with the mega-rich, you expect, especially from some of the financial biggies on it, a bit of bouncy-bouncy morality-wise. Yes, there’s a whiff of fraud here, a rumor of rule-breaking there, lawsuits trailing like wisteria everywhere… Big deal. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown, sits on the university corporation board, and we all recall her remarkably destructive activity on the compensation board of Goldman Sachs. The president of the university sets the moral tone, so okay…
But now we’re talking straightforward, high-profile illegality. Brown University board member Steven Rattner is described by New York’s attorney general as “a central player in the criminal conspiracy to use bribes and kickbacks to get $150 million in state pensions that he could invest through his company Quadrangle.”
Code Brown, as the doctors say. Things are really beginning to stink.
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UD thanks Roy for the link to the Brown Daily Herald.
November 20th, 2010 at 10:08AM
Wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out to be the tip of a very large iceberg.
November 20th, 2010 at 10:43AM
Tip of a very large… ick. Let’s retire my metaphor and use yours.
February 19th, 2011 at 6:14PM
It is comforting that someone other than the students at the Herald make noise about S Rattner blithely strolling Brown’s campus, lecturing Econ classes in December (in the midst of involking the fifth amendment and refusing to tell) of last year. Outrageous disrespect to the youth many of whom are not at Brown hoping to be investment bankers–and to us parents who strive to ‘teach our children well’. Even the SDS (who seem tame compared to the Students for a Democratic Society of my era) who hung the banner, only suggested a dialogue. As a parent of a serious Brown student, I am sicker than ‘ick at the silence on campus, and am awaiting the day, soon to come, when politicized students,layed off union nurses and teachers, and the unemployed pour into the streets, with Egypt in their memories, and with little to lose.