MinnPost.com discusses a recent study of American universities which concludes, among other things, that

Universities [don’t] tap their endowments for more cash in tough times, even though their rules [allow] bigger withdrawals.

“One reason to have an endowment is to smooth over the shocks,” [one of the authors] said. “It’s a rainy-day fund so that when things go bad, they can dip into those reserves. What we found is they deviate from their own policy.”

Among the reasons for this behavior: Endowment managers who are more concerned about the “prestige” of building the endowment’s value and “implicit contracts” with donors to maintain the size of the endowment.

“What our paper shows is that universities are behaving in a way to grow the endowment rather than using it to support the activities of the university,” [he] said. “The point is that if you think endowments exist to smooth over the shocks in bad times, they’re not doing that. … They’re maintaining the value of the endowment for its own sake.”

UD wrote about endowment hoarding here. She featured this Peter Conti-Brown paper and wrote:

UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment [of some universities] has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room….

… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.

To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.

Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.

Many of the schools under review have already haughtily dismissed the entire report.

Some of the largest colleges of education in Texas offer poorly designed programs that leave prospective teachers unprepared for the job, according to a new report that suggests more rigorous and meaningful coursework.

The two-year study from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., slams eight of the largest education schools, including the University of Houston’s, for seriously shortchanging aspiring teachers, particularly with inadequate math and reading instruction.

“The most consistent feature of teacher education in Texas is a lack of consistency,” according to the 500-page report, which is being officially released today. “Rather than consensus there is inter-institutional confusion as to what it means to fully prepare a teacher for the classroom.”

Some programs, for example, require aspiring middle school science teachers to take one biology course while others mandate as many as nine, according the report. At the same time, the report said, some classes and assignments don’t seem relevant or tough enough.

Texas Wesleyan University, for example, allows students to take a class called Local Spring Flora to satisfy a science requirement…

A Berkeley professor speaks up at an open meeting about funding.

A math professor at the same meeting does the numbers:

Professors and community members debated the role of athletics on campus after Calvin Moore, chair of the task force and professor emeritus of mathematics, presented preliminary suggestions for how the department can remedy its financial instability.

Though department officials said last semester that the cost to campus – which totaled about $13.7 million last year – would be significantly lower this year, Moore said the cost will be the same if not more.

Part of the campus support the department received last fiscal year came in the form of a $5.8 million loan from funds at the discretion of Nathan Brostrom, former vice chancellor of administration.

Though Brostrom and Laura Hazlett, associate director for the athletic department’s business office, have said the loan will eventually be paid back, Moore said he doubted any money would ever come back from intercollegiate athletics.

“This is sunken money from the campus, and it’s not going to come back in our lifetime,” he said.

Sunken money’s a nice phrase.

… [W]hy did [Stephen Ambrose] lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.

Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon…

[There is] a horrifying mismatch between Wall Street’s vast power over the economy and its utter lack of conscience. Although Goldman [Sachs] has long been the most prestigious firm on the Street and therefore nominally the heir to the [J.P.] Morgan lineage [of social responsibility], it has never matured into that older role. It couldn’t really afford any sense of noblesse oblige about the American economy. On the contrary: Goldman’s corporate ethos is clearly more that of a predator than a protector. Indeed, Goldman became known as the savviest and most prestigious firm on the street in part because it had no scruples about simultaneously betting against products it was selling. One reason for Goldman’s success was that as a firm it developed a sharper and more pervasive hedge-fund mentality before the other investment banks did.

Utter lack of conscience. No scruples. Predator.

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… The broader public and political resentment, as one crisis manager put it, grows out of the sense that Goldman Sachs not only hasn’t “shared the pain” experienced by the rest of America, but has “profited from it.”

… The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the guest of honor at a private Park Avenue cocktail soiree for wealthy Obama supporters this month, surely wasn’t pleased when it was reported that a Goldman Sachs partner was present…

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Update: Other people – academics and non-academics – with Goldman Sachs problems:

Republican frontrunner Meg Whitman tried again to put her previous relationship with the bank behind her, telling the Associated Press she regrets taking part in a now-banned stock sale practice involving the company and that she left its board after 15 months because she “wasn’t a good fit.”

But her remarks only provided ammunition to political foes seeking to remind voters that Whitman, a former Goldman Sachs board member, has a past with the investment firm now under scrutiny for its role in the national financial crisis.

… She sat on Goldman’s board from October 2001 to December 2002, a job that paid the equivalent of $475,000 in cash and stock options.

… Whitman told the Associated Press Tuesday that she stepped down from the board position because it “wasn’t a good fit.” …

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A top prospect for the Supreme Court was a paid member of an advisory panel for the embattled investment firm Goldman Sachs, federal financial disclosures show.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to the financial disclosures she filed when President Obama appointed her last year to her current post. Kagan served on the Goldman panel from 2005 through 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, and received a $10,000 stipend for her service in 2008, her disclosure forms show.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

The advisory panel met once a year to discuss public policy issues and was not involved in any investment decisions, Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

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Are we beginning to get a sense of this amazing gig? I mean, Kagan’s?

She goes to New York City once a

year to DISCUSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

public policy. Just sit there, baby! Maybe you let everybody else do the talking… How many people are on the committee? Maybe you say five things… Then you take a train back to Cambridge and wait for your ten thousand dollar check.

President Obama has stressed that he wants the next Supreme Court justice to be able to relate to ordinary Americans. Looks like Kagan has aced that one.

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Ruth Simmons’ fellow academic board member, Bill George, is a business professor at Harvard (though he lives in Minnesota). He hasn’t said anything about recent Goldman Sachs events. Here’s something he said shortly before the shit hit the fan.

Leadership starts with gaining alignment with the mission and values of the organization: What are we about? What do we believe as a group? Goldman Sachs, where I serve on the board, has achieved solid alignment around its mission: “The clients’ interests always come first.”

Nell Minow, the editor and chair of the Corporate Library, has been disappointed by aspects of the reporting.

“I have not seen one story that mentions the role of the board of directors — or even their names — or looks into their involvement,” Minow said. “I think that is a major oversight.”

If Minow visited this blog even occasionally, she’d see plenty of coverage of one particular Goldman Sachs board scandal: The presence on it of the president of one of America’s most high-profile universities.

Here is a rare example of absolutely empty writing.

The quality of writing, the writing style, the structure, is fine. The piece begins, develops, ends. It moves from point to point using transitional phrases. It closes with concern and hope.

But it has nothing to do with reality. It is an argument about the future that at no point touches on any possible future. And the writer must know that.

SOS applauds the fortitude that allowed this editorial writer to get up out of bed and type out these paragraphs.

Up at seven, I looked out the back
windows and saw a long gray fox
walking across the grass. It moved
from the woods to a stand of honey-
suckles, probably looking for rabbits.

There are rabbits everywhere.

… has been ruled a suicide.

Background here.

You probably already know that, in response to an Iranian cleric’s assertion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, Jennifer McCreight, a Purdue University student, organized tens of thousands of women yesterday to bare or semi-bare their breasts at the same exact moment to see what would happen.

The Boobquake Facebook page announces the results.

Nada.

Still…

Obviously this study had its flaws. We didn’t have a large sample size, and we didn’t have a control planet where women were only wearing burkas. We didn’t have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what’s the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?). Maybe women did dress immodestly, but we didn’t lead men astray enough. [The cleric says there’s a causal connection between inflamed men and plate tectonics.] Maybe God really was pissed, but he couldn’t increase earthquakes for us because that would provide proof for his existence (or maybe it’s his existence that’s the problem).

I’ve added a new link — to Simon Johnson’s blog, The Baseline Scenario. For all your Goldman Sachs needs.

His apartment mates found Owen Thomas unresponsive yesterday afternoon. No cause of death has been announced, though police say it wasn’t homicide.

His coach made a statement: “We want to make sure his roommates are OK. We’re going to pay particular attention to them because they stumbled upon him. It’s a delicate situation but right now our whole team is an emotional mess.”

The most likely reasons are an undetected health problem (weak heart, for instance), alcohol poisoning, or suicide.

… The new policy benefits all students, not just those taking laptop notes. Countless numbers of people know how distracting it is to see other peoples’ laptop activities. Whether people are playing games, chatting on Facebook or reading gossip sites, it attracts the attention of those behind and next to them. Losing access to the Internet not only keeps the attention of those who would be surfing, but also those who are distracted by their neighbors.

… Some students feel that they have a right to do as they wish during class – and as long as they sit near the back of a lecture hall, how will the professor notice what they’re really doing? Simply put, goofing around during class is disrespectful to professors. For an expensive education time in the classroom should not be squandered. If you really can’t live without the Internet for an hour, don’t bother to go to class.

… [B]anning the Internet during class time reduces the amount [should be number] of distractions and helps students concentrate…

The editors of the Indiana University newspaper argue that professors should have the ability to cut off students’ internet access during class. They quote the dean of the University of Chicago Law School:

[S]tudents and faculty [need to be] focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner.

La Kid (blond hair, glasses, pink
headband) joins the rest of the
Sirens to celebrate their victory in the
George Washington University Battle
of the A Cappella Groups.

Click on the photo for a larger image.