As international attention pivots to scandalous, junk-status Yeshiva University, UD wants to acknowledge those people – like Andrew Sole – whose concern for the institution as a university rather than a tit for hedgies on the board of trustees prompted them to act on behalf of YU. She wants to acknowledge the three faculty members who, in 2012, wrote an anonymous letter to the campus newspaper (anonymity being required in the corrupt setting of this rapidly dissolving university) voicing their despair at the baffling failure of the university’s endowment — baffling because the cronies on the board of trustees who were high-risk-betting all of the university’s money away were far too arrogant to tell anyone about it. Why weren’t there conflict rules? Why wasn’t someone supervising the trustees and the money managers? Does it bother anyone that, with the exception of storied Yeshiva trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, pretty much the same people whose staggering financial irresponsibility destroyed the school are still on the board?
There’s a pathos, two years later, to reading these faculty members trying to figure out what’s going on:
No one is speaking about what caused the terrible drain on the endowment and when it will stop. In short, there is no transparency… Yeshiva needs to figure out why the endowment is performing so much poorer than the endowment of every other comparable institution in the nation and fix that problem. We do not know what the problem is or how to fix it – but we see that no one else is discussing what really is the problem, in part because of the utter lack of transparency in YU’s finances.
Well, that’s over. Now the whole world is watching as the story of how a school destroys itself through greed, secrecy, and cronyism, plays out in the national and international press. As the Yeshiva University story escalates, this blog will continue to note the people who warned the school that it was killing itself.