… is amply compensated.
He’s Number 12 on the highest paid American university presidents list. (Scroll down.)
Great work, President Joel!
… is amply compensated.
He’s Number 12 on the highest paid American university presidents list. (Scroll down.)
Great work, President Joel!
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December 6th, 2010 at 11:47AM
Before criticizing him for who was on the board of trustees during years before the year in which Joel was the 12th highest among private universities (not all universities) , you should explain what exactly it is your criticizing him for.
Is he supposed to vet the trustees based on financial dealings that plenty of others didn’t spot? If he was compensated less in years that Madoff and Merkin were on the board, would that be okay?
As it is the post is a non sequitur, and appears to be unfair to Joel because it creates an innuendo that he did something wrong or was derelict in his duties when you haven’t made out a case that he was.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:27PM
AYY: I appreciate your response.
The posts on this page will get you started on this blog’s extensive coverage of Yeshiva and the Madoff controversy. If you follow various links on that page, you will encounter a good deal of astonishment – from alumni, from institutional governance organizations – at the conflicts of interest on the board of trustees at Yeshiva. All of this happened under Joel’s watch.
A few quotations:
“[Ezra] Merkin, a money manager who ran one of the major Madoff feeder funds, managed portions of the YU endowment while serving as chair of the investment committee.”
“[Many institutions connected to Madoff] not only need to more formally organize their investing and giving along more official corporate governance lines — Yeshiva University in particular has been cited for this type of needed reform. [T]hey may need to address their own unwitting complicity in the dissipation of the assets of Mr. Madoff’s victims.”
“In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.”
“Not only was Madoff on the university’s board of trustees, but also the chairman of the board’s investment committee was hedge fund leader Ezra Merkin. Merkin invested the university’s money in his own hedge funds, which, in turn, turned over the money to Madoff.”
“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. …”
” Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.
Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. ”
What exactly am I criticizing Joel for? He oversaw – right up to the point of his arrest – the American university that harbored the biggest financial criminal of the century. Plenty of people – most prominently Harry Markopolos – had been screaming about Madoff for some time. A university maintaining Madoff in a position of profound trust might have been expected to pay a little attention.
Joel has still failed to do anything – either in terms of public statements or in terms of a serious reckoning with a board of trustees little different from the one before – about any of this. The Madoff/Yeshiva story is, in my opinion, the single most scandalous university story of our time. Its president during this sordid tale was – and remains – the handsomely compensated Joel.
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A broader discussion of the problem.
December 7th, 2010 at 11:56AM
Thanks for responding. A friendly comment: sometimes your posts are so concise that they’re enigmatic. If someone hasn’t been following the topic all the way through, it can be difficult to understand what you mean.
I looked at the posts you mentioned in your response. Still, normally the president is subordinate to the trustees. Unless Yeshiva University is different, then the blame for the conflicts of interest among trustees can’t automatically be put on the president. Also for all we know Joel might have seen the conflicts and tried to do something about it.
I’m not saying that I can show that he hasn’t been remiss in some respects. All I’m saying is that the burden is on those making the case against him, and I haven’t seen that the case against him has been made.
December 7th, 2010 at 12:19PM
AYY: You’re right that my posts sometimes forget to link to background, etc. Thanks for reminding me that I need to provide more information up front.
I’m not sure it’s right to say that university presidents are subordinate to trustees. It’s a complex relationship in terms of power, perhaps — but a president is a president, and there are buck-stops-here imperatives attached to the position. If flagrant conflict of interest is going on among your trustees, you as president have to make it your business to know that, and to do something about it. No one else can.
I also think “remiss in some respects” is much too weak a formulation. The all-male, very clubby trustees at Yeshiva, many of whom come from the world of finance, should in themselves have been a red flag for any university president committed to serious oversight of his university.
And of course the misfortune that befell Yeshiva under Joel wasn’t just any misfortune — his university alone among American universities harbored in positions of enormous prestige and responsibility both Madoff and Merkin. At the very least – to get back to the initial newspaper article – a record like Joel’s would seem to call for something rather different from a big raise.
The situation is made far worse by the fact that Yeshiva – because of money it lost due to Joel’s failure to act in regard to trustees Merkin/Madoff – has been laying off people left and right.
An altogether shameful situation.