… but you have to admit this is good stuff. From Washington Square News, student newspaper of New York University:

J. Ezra Merkin allegedly lost $24 million of NYU’s money by investing with Bernard Madoff. Now, according to recently released court documents, he had been warned to steer clear of Madoff in the early ’90s by a former employee but ignored the advice.

Victor Teicher, who managed Merkin’s Ariel Fund Ltd., told Merkin that he found some of Madoff’s practices to be questionable.

… “He told me sometime — perhaps it was ’92 or ’93, that he was considering investing with Bernie Madoff,” Teicher said in the Feb. 9 deposition. “He described Madoff in terms of what he was doing and the consistency of the returns, and I felt that that was just not possible.”

But Merkin continued to invest with Madoff, who pleaded guilty to stealing $65 billion and now faces up to 150 years in prison when he is sentenced in June.

… “Ezra had positioned himself in the marketplace as someone who was very knowledge about investing and researching matters,” Teicher said. “People believed that that was his specialty.”

NYU lost $24 million when it invested with Merkin’s fund after the university had directly told him not to invest with Madoff.

… “He ultimately fooled himself in the sense that by positioning himself in the marketplace as someone who does a lot of research, he actually believed it,” Teicher said.

Teicher graduated from the Stern School of Business in 1976 with a master’s of business administration in finance. He was convicted for insider trading in 1990. [Nice succinct cv there.  MBA → Insider trading… Okay….  MBA prepares you nicely for this sort of outcome, I guess, if you go by the numbers of degree recipients who, like Teicher … Anyway.   What UD really finds intriguing here are the dates of various events.  Teicher says he advised Merkin against Madoff well after his conviction.  So Merkin’s getting advice about the Ponzi mastermind of the century from someone recently convicted of insider trading.  Right?  Or am I getting this wrong?  If I’m right, Daphne Merkin needs to write another op-ed piece in the New York Times about how her brother was surrounded by criminals and had no place else to turn.]

After Madoff’s scheme fell apart, Teicher and Merkin had several e-mail and phone exchanges.

“You, however, took a brilliant career and actively, willingly, wiped your ass with it when it was obvious that you [knew what you] were doing,” Teicher said in his testimony.

In a Crimson article with suggestions for reducing the university’s budget, the writer includes this:

Harvard should cut its wasteful internal public relations division. The Harvard Gazette and the other fluff put out by the Harvard Office of Communications ought to be axed on both financial and environmental grounds. The publications and their staffs cost a few million dollars each year. Externally, they do nothing to strengthen Harvard’s brand. Internally, they are regarded as propaganda.

Certainly UD has complained for years on this blog about too much Harvard propaganda in her mailbox. But why not let some of this stuff go online?

After all, UD has a soft spot for the Gazette.

From an interview with Emily Haines, Canadian rock star.

Interviewer: In [a recent] documentary you said that you were unhappy and you weren’t sure where your life was headed. I’m sure a lot of people must have heard that and been like, “What is she talking about? She’s a rock star, how could you be unhappy? There’s no direction? What is she talking about?” What would you say to people who would react like that?

[Haines] I’d say, has nobody read Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo? [Laughs] That’s what I’d say. You should read it.

[Interviewer] What’s it about?

[Haines] It’s about this rock star who just disappears from the whole reality that he’s in because he just can’t handle it any more. And for me, it wasn’t like a particularly dramatic thing. I think I was just being honest, that the idea of what a life is supposed to be like for a successful musician is such a trap, and it’s a trick. We’re really determined as people to not have our lives be something that we’ve lost control of, and that’s the trade off, you know? Like, that’s the cost of success—that you never have time for anyone but yourself, you’re constantly exhausted, you don’t have a home, your relationships are always in shambles. Like, no fuckin’ way. I’m not doing that. So when we came off of the last run, it was like, we’d been touring for 3 years before Live It Out—you know, 300 shows a year, literally—and then 3 years after Live It Out, and then I put out a solo record, and then I did that for a year, and the day I get home and drop my bag it’s like, ‘Okay, time to write a new record.’

… [Interviewer] Why did you choose Buenos Aires as the place to kind of escape to?

[Haines] Because nobody knew us. I didn’t know a single person. I didn’t know anything about it except things that intrigued me historically, and architecturally. But more importantly, I was just looking for a room that had a piano, and it was literally like a search engine thing, like, ‘PIANO, ROOM, CITY, RENT’.

From the obituary of Princeton engineering professor Norman Sollenberger:

… Sollenberger was a fine teacher who deeply cared for his students, according to colleagues. He once devoted many hours to ensuring a young civil engineering student from Hong Kong, a rarity in the 1950s, would graduate. That engineer, Gordon Y.S. Wu, went on to help found a major Hong Kong-based construction firm. When he returned to Princeton years later to announce a record-breaking $100 million gift to the University, the first person Wu asked to visit was Sollenberger.

Feral rabbits have been the bane of the University of Victoria for years, but now the problem is moving off campus.

No one knows when the first rabbit appeared on campus, but an estimated 1,500 of them currently call it home.

The university has come under pressure to cull the animals by angry neighbours but how that might be accomplished is fuelling a raging debate.

Proponents of the doomsday approach have taken a shine to something called the Rodenator.

The device, according to its U.S. manufacturer, “delivers a precisely measured mixture of propane and oxygen into the tunnel or burrow of invasive pests. This mixture is then detonated by the operator, causing an instantaneous underground shock wave of concussive force that eliminates the pests and in some (species specific) cases collapses some of the existing tunnel structure thus preventing immediate reinfestation.”

Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates are not wild about that option, and university officials have said they plan to try non-lethal approaches first.

Local veterinarian Nick Shaw has offered to perform vasectomies on the rabbits, but he says even that won’t solve all of the bunny problems…

CBC

Vermont’s attorney general has had enough of “direct cash payments to doctors and nurses and others in Vermont who are prescribing the [cash paying] companies’ drugs.”

The AG is “is shocked that the industry spends so much money on marketing in a state of 600,000 residents… ‘If we’re seeing millions of dollars in cash payments here, then what happens in New York State or California or Florida?’ he said. ‘We’re talking about incredibly large amounts of money.'”

All so your four-year-old can get the most expensive anti-psychotic.

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

Ken Libertoff, who works for a Vermont mental health advocacy group, says it’s time to “shine sunlight on an old Vermont basement.”

A proposed law would, among other things, make the names of practitioners accepting major goodies from drug firms public.

The president of the Vermont Senate extends the basement metaphor: “I think we will look back at this era of drugging our kids as a dark moment in medical treatment.”

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

In a comment Eliot Spitzer should have thought of, a Vermont psychiatrist who gets money from pharma to prescribe the latest pills says:

It’s a financial interaction between two parties. … And frankly, I don’t think it is anyone else’s business.

… updates us on the good ol’ boys and their tricks at Northwest Florida State College.

Quick version: Same old same old. Public universities as ATMs for politicians, businessmen, and on-campus cronies of same.

Only new thing is these boys are going to jail.

UD also thanks Dennis for this update.

Some UD background here.

An editorial in the University of Kansas newspaper:

The Olympic Village project is simply the latest in a long line of building projects that have dramatically changed the face of athletics at the University in the past six years…

… Athletics must strike a balance among providing reasonable facilities for its athletes, accommodating spectators and appealing to donors and recruits. But most importantly, it must contribute to the overall success of the University, which is ultimately measured in terms of academics. Keeping in mind the terms and constraints of the relationship of Athletics to the University, it is disconcerting to see the construction of yet another huge and costly athletics facility while the rest of the University literally crumbles around it. Deferred maintenance costs for older parts of campus have plagued the University for a decade and detrimentally affected academics. Now, with a full-blown recession, large budget cuts are projected for the next two years, and maintenance will no doubt be deferred once again, not to mention faculty layoffs and deep cuts in student services…

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

Oh: And here’s a nice companion piece.

… and related matters.

The Obama administration’s bank- rescue efforts will probably fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, isn’t large enough to recapitalize the banking system, and the administration hasn’t been direct in addressing that shortfall, he said. Stiglitz said there are conflicts of interest at the White House because some of Obama’s advisers have close ties to Wall Street.

“We don’t have enough money, they don’t want to go back to Congress, and they don’t want to do it in an open way and they don’t want to get control” of the banks, a set of constraints that will guarantee failure, Stiglitz said.

… Stiglitz was also concerned about the links between White House advisers and Wall Street. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. paid National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, a managing director of the firm, more than $5 million in salary and other compensation in the 16 months before he joined the administration. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

“America has had a revolving door. People go from Wall Street to Treasury and back to Wall Street,” he said. “Even if there is no quid pro quo, that is not the issue. The issue is the mindset.”…

Maybe if Wall Street gives him five million dollars Stiglitz will stop saying these things.

… says get rid of tenure.

And maybe it’s not fair to judge his argument, since he’s written a piece in response to a Washington Post request that he contribute to a breezy, seasonal forum on “spring cleaning.” Still… Let’s take a look. UD comments here and there in blue.

I’m a tenured professor. But I’d get rid of tenure. [At first glance, a pithy, hard-hitting opening. Yet if Fukuyama’s opposed to tenure, he’s always free to turn it down, as a number of professors in this country have done. They negotiate various forms of non-tenured contracts with their institutions. It can be done — perhaps not at all schools, but at many. So from the outset, Fukuyama looks cowardly or hypocritical. If tenure should be abolished, be an example.]

Tenure was created to protect academic freedom after a series of 19th-century cases when university donors or legislators tried to remove professors whose views they disliked. One famous instance in the late 1800s involved progressive movement leader Richard Ely, whose critics accused him of socialism and tried to remove him as an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold. [As with his first point, his second has an internal unsteadiness to it. Fukuyama both concedes the link between tenure and intellectual freedom, and attacks tenure as the cause of intellectual sclerosis. Presumably, with the abolition of tenure a host of intellectual freedom problems will arise. Why should we get rid of one flawed system in order to introduce another?]

The system also hamstrings younger untenured professors, making them fearful of taking intellectual risks and causing them to write in jargon aimed only at those in their narrow subdiscipline: Thus in economics, people have “utility functions” instead of needs and wants. [Wow. Try being an English professor. Utility functions sounds like a breath of fresh air… But put that aside. Fukuyama is about to defend think tanks as a model of non-tenuring intellectual institutions, but almost all think tanks are ideologically driven in a very obvious way, so I don’t see how they would respond to this problem. And as for the problem itself: The numbers don’t lie. Most universities tenure most of the people who come up for it. At some universities, the figure is almost one hundred percent. Junior faculty should check the figures, calm down, and write what they want to write….  And really – on the matter of jargon –  let us recall Ecclesiastes:  Of the making of much jargon there is no end. I doubt people write this way because they’re afraid they won’t get tenure.  I think they write this way because most conform, and this is the way many other people are writing.  Professors who use jargon don’t suddenly become fresh and pellucid after they get tenure.  As Fukuyama points out, tenure has always been about protecting the intellectual freedom of the few people who don’t conform.

If you want to know where jargon starts, read the post just below this one, which excerpts Walter Kirn.]

These problems are made worse by a federal employment law that bars universities from instituting mandatory retirement. Deans and provosts can’t remove elderly professors who take up slots that could fund two or three younger colleagues. Two developments are about to exacerbate this problem: a decline in university enrollments as the baby echo generation passes through college, reducing overall demand for professors; and the financial crisis, which has decimated professors’ retirement savings, giving them incentive to hold on to their sinecures even longer. [Actually, there are many things that universities can do to deal with this admittedly significant problem. Buy-outs, offers of gradually reduced teaching and hence gradually reduced salary …]

Things don’t have to be this way. Academic freedom can thrive in think tanks and research institutes. [Let me say again what I say above. Think of almost any think tank – Brookings, Heritage, CATO. They’re wonderful places for strengthening the visibility of liberal or conservative or libertarian thought, but they lack the non-ideological atmosphere of universities. And yes, UD‘s aware that some university departments are themselves very ideological. But that’s not a permanent, definitive characteristic of them, and things can and do change.] U.S.-style tenure doesn’t exist in Britain or Australia. [I’d hesitate to point to Britain’s faltering university system as a model.] Japan grants tenure but forces professors to retire at a relatively early age (60 at Tokyo University). [Is Fukuyama endorsing state-mandated retirement? Seems out of step with his other political positions.]

The freedom guaranteed by tenure is precious. But it’s time to abolish this institution before it becomes too costly, both financially and intellectually.

… We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors — the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts — we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

… I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up… [Many professors] seemed to favor [opportunists] over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism…

Walter Kirn recalls his undergraduate years at Princeton.

… on our way back from breakfast at Blue Heaven, we watched a gardener lop an enormous seed pod off an Alexander palm. It landed on the sidewalk with a thud.

“May we have that?” UD asked, because when you live in Key West you’re constantly picking up and taking home greenery that’s been hacked from the trees by gardeners. You let it age a bit and then you slice it with a knife, sniff it, pull it apart…

“Sure!” she said. “You’ll make my job easier.”

It was heavy and strange and looked vaguely like corn. I’ve been gazing at it all day on my bureau.

We decided to take its picture in our sunken garden, which is shady and full of orchids. Cats often visit, so the cushions on the chairs around this table have fleas. Or so UD‘s sister claims.

Breakfast this morning with mucho
poultry at Blue Heaven.

House with pink door, Elizabeth Street.

Dick Cunningham and UD are like that. They met on a Wind and Wine Sunset Cruise, and hit it off right away, both of them able to talk endlessly about university and professional football.

Dick shares UD‘s disgust with what football’s become. “My day… Things were much better… I was playing with Jack Kemp…”

“Also O.J. Simpson, hon,” said his wife.

“He was nice then.”

As you already know if you clicked on his name and checked his Wikipedia page, Dick was a linebacker with the Buffalo Bills and other teams. Dick wears an enormous Bills ring on his finger, and the right sleeve of his shirt says Buffalo Bills Alumni Weekend.

We got a terrific sunset — clear golden orb squashing itself down into the water like an orange being pressed — and what with the wine and gentle wind and holiday mood all around, this was an insanely congenial outing. Dick even seemed to enjoy it when I told him his theory about the decline of football (something about chemicals in the American food supply) was full of shit.

… from UD‘s old friend, Steve Elkin.

“I was his thesis student and his research assistant.

Beer, as Harvey Mansfield once put it, was ‘manly.’ He was virile looking, with a red Guards mustache, a lionesque face and a strongly built body. He also had a boxer’s nose.

I first met him at a reception for new graduate students. He was dressed in an English cut pin-striped suit and leaning on a cane.

I asked whether he had hurt himself.

Yes, he said, taking a sip of sherry; he’d been sky-diving.

What else. He was a gentleman — courteous and forthright. Intellectually, he had the gift of being able to combine acute historical analysis, theoretical propositions in comparative politics, and political theory. Indeed, he was the master of combining these things, and in doing so defined the study of British politics for half a century.

He also wrote a first-class book on the American political order, showing the roots of American thought and practice in early modern and medieval arguments.”

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

This Harvard Gazette article, which shows you what Beer looked like at ninety, quotes him saying something wonderful:

Beer summarized his intellectual odyssey in a few brief, thought-provoking words: “In my case, it’s been a journey from the land of reason to the land of imagination. I believe that thought advances through metaphor rather than through precept. I really believe that metaphors – those corny expressions, almost a kind of street poetry – tell you more about the future than the think tanks do.”