← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

Yeshiva University’s Ira Rennert: Another in a Long Line of Looters.

It’s official: We can add Rennert’s name to fabled YU benefactors like Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin, and Zygi Wilf. Today the man who endowed YU’s Entrepreneurial Institute (it’s named after him), has been found guilty of looting one of his companies. But he did it in a good cause!

[The jury agreed that] Rennert [was] a willfully negligent tycoon who looted MagCorp to subsidize [his] sprawling Hamptons estate while turning a blind eye to pollution [the EPA’s suing him for the pollution; this trial verdict was just for the looting]. [The] Brooklyn-born billionaire’s Italianate home boasts a 164-seat theater, 100-car garage and 39 bathrooms, and is valued at $500 million.

What an inspiring entrepreneurial example for the eager young business students at the Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute! A junk bond campus whose business philosophy comes straight from Ira Rennert! And don’t forget – Yeshiva is a religious institution.

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

There’s Rennert Hall at Columbia University and the Rennert chair in finance and entrepreneurship at New York University. There’s also the Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute at Yeshiva University and the Rennert Mikvah, a ritual bath, at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, where he’s an honorary chairman.

Hm. Those ritual baths have been awfully pesky lately… If they’re not being overseen by someone filming naked women, they’re being named for looters…

No less a person than Jonathan Sacks, who calls himself a “moral voice for our time,” is the Rennert Professor of Judaic Thought at NYU.

UD is going to guess that it’s not going to bother the moral voice that he’s bopping along on … uh… let’s be delicate and call it breach of fiduciary duty money…

Margaret Soltan, February 27, 2015 5:14PM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=47682

One Response to “Yeshiva University’s Ira Rennert: Another in a Long Line of Looters.”

  1. University Diaries » Yeshiva University’s Ira Rennert. Says:

    […] Background here. […]

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories