… the amazing greed, hypocrisy and incompetence of Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel. The financial and moral ruination of that university at his and his friends’ hands (these include the current board of trustees and some former trustees, like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), its reduction to a Moody’s basket case, represents one of the most stunning university stories of the decade. Berger has been right on top of it throughout.

This is a university that has named one of its campuses after the Wilfs. Its Entrepreneurial Institute bears the storied name of Ira Rennert.

The latest dispatch from Berger captures two out of three Joel attributes: greed and hypocrisy.

As his college’s finances continued to crumble last year, Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel publicly took a pay cut. Then months later, he privately pocketed a deferred compensation payment of $1.6 million.

That payout took Joel’s total compensation for 2014 to $2.8 million, among the highest packages for college presidents nationwide.

… In the year that Joel received the $1.6 million payment, Y.U. ran an operating deficit of $150 million, according to recently released tax records.

That same year, Y.U.’s endowment fell by $90 million, the school was forced to sell $72.5 million in real estate, and Y.U. entered into negotiations to spin off its prestigious but money-losing medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The investor ratings service Moody’s demoted Y.U.’s debt rating to junk status in January 2014 and it has not been raised since.

When you think of the various sorts of noise students and faculty are making at universities across America lately, it’s staggering to consider the almost-total silence at Yeshiva, where people who care about things like spirituality, ethics, and the value of serious study have allowed themselves to be ruled by cynical hedgies for years and years. UD feels confident Yeshiva’s next president (Joel retires soon, with full honors) will maintain its legacy of robbing the school’s mouse-like professors and students.