For Moody’s it’s tricky to rate
The train wreck that’s Alabam State.
“It should be a D
But our lowest is C.
We’ll need to revise the whole slate.”

The now-legendary three Saudi med students who sued the University of Ottawa for $156 million dollars because it dismissed them from its neurosurgery program (poor performance, though the Saudis claim discrimination) have now had their latest appeal rejected by Ontario’s highest court. I assume there are still other places they can go to keep appealing; and I assume with each appeal they will raise their ransom demand by a few hundred million. It’s one to watch.

From William Galston’s review of Tyler Cowen’s book, Average Is Over:

There’s nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans.

Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic, but rather of an empire entering moral senescence. Nonetheless, Mr. Cowen seems untroubled by his hyperpolarized vision.

The kindest description of his stance is moral indifference: “It will become increasingly common to invoke ‘meritocracy’ as a response to income equality,” he writes, “and whether you call it an explanation, a justification, or an excuse is up to you.” While allowing that some might consider extreme socioeconomic inequality unjust, he revives the neoconservative canard that relatively well-off academics lead the charge against such inequality because they envy the status privileges of the wealthy. He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill them with justified revulsion.

Over the course of writing this blog about universities and professors, UD has encountered the neoconservative canard about envious academics again and again. A few years ago, Jonathan Chait gathered a few of many examples in a Los Angeles Times column titled Envy Them? No. Tax Them? Oh Yeah. Greg Mankiw, Chait noted, thinks that academics concerned about staggering personal wealth in the context of rising inequality are simply caught up in “the politics of envy.”

What’s depressing is that even highly credentialed conservatives such as Mankiw equate any discussion of class inequality with “envy” of the rich. The accusation is actually bizarre. Liberals want to make the rich pay higher tax rates not because they hate them. (In fact, as conservatives love to point out in other contexts, many liberals are rich.) It’s because somebody has to pay for the government, and the rich can more easily bear higher rates.

Paul Krugman echoes Chait.

To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the “politics of envy.”

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970’s have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren’t sharing in the economy’s growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there’s good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society – and more likely to be a functioning democracy – than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won’t be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let’s try to do something about the politics of greed.

Krugman and Chait were writing in 2005. That Cowen can happily continue the canard suggests that it will be very difficult to kill. You can call it a canard; you can call it bizarre; you can call it a straw man. It will keep coming at you.

What UD has tried to do in some of her writing here is, as Krugman suggests, look in a different direction: the politics of greed. She has been intrigued by this statement from Robert Hughes about the art market:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

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A certain amount of envy toward the rich is normal. It is to be expected. Indeed, that envy can be an engine, a motivator, a thing that helps our economy of entrepreneurs hum along. The politics of envy crowd, however, wants to scare us into believing that this emotion is becoming pathological, even violent, a threat to the republic. Lawrence Kudlow writes that the envious are really saying

“How dare they be successful earners and investors… Should we go out and shoot [the super-rich] for their success?”

Eric Cantor also seems to have in mind French revolutionaries using envy of the rich to trigger civil war:

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.

I believe, with Galston and Krugman, that the greater menace lies in the “moral senescence” of a country of “great extremes.” Senescence, not riots. As Robert Reich remarks, “If you give up on democracy, you are basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society Take it all… Then we are a hundred percent plutocracy.” This is why, on the subject of universities, I dwell on obscene endowments and the universities who pay each of their money managers $35 million a year to make their endowments grow toward… what? They are already in the tens of billions. The hundreds of billions? It’s why I talk about universities who honor trustees like Steven Cohen, a man with a personal fortune of nine billion dollars, and a man in constant trouble with the SEC.

The name of the firm doing the pumping for the new science building project across from UD‘s office is Putzmeister.

… nihilism. Everyone’s calling the Tea Party nihilistic. Do a TEA NIHILISM Google search and see.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm is thrilled. She loves the word, its soft insidious feel… The middle H adds a dying breath to its barely-there sound…

A beautiful mysterious letter-set, n-i-h-i-l-i-s-m. The movement of the mouth in saying the word maps the regress of nihilism itself —

A strong initial sound at the outset as if you’re headed somewhere: NEE…!

(Note: You can do it NIGHilism if you prefer.)

Then a catch of the breath on the H as you remember it’s pointless.

A final collapse into the enervated quietude of LISM..

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Europeans (Nietzsche, Dostoevsky) long ago cornered the market on nihilism. Finally America – perennially dismissed as too youthful, optimistic, and pragmatic for nihilism – gets its chance. You go, girl.

Body of article:

[One LSU student and] many of her friends skipped the game to study for midterms that started Monday.

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Well, now at least we know what the problem is.

Solution: Stop giving midterms.

And this was Florida-LSU! This is a huge rivalry game that holds major SEC implications each season.

I guess HDTV and air conditioning wins out but that just makes me sad.

Words of wisdom from a colleague of UD‘s.

… territory.

… fewer than ten thousand students that concentrates the mind. The town of Princeton seems sort of amazed, in an ongoing way, about its university’s remarkable tax exempt wealth, and it’s clearly on a campaign to chip away at it.

The latest thing is that a judge has refused Princeton University’s request to throw out a case against it brought by residents and the town in which they claim that a number of buildings on campus should not be tax exempt since they’re non-educational.

Another, broader, charge in the case argues that

the University is not qualified for the tax exemption because it in fact makes money and distributes profits, especially proceeds from patents registered by the University.

Princeton is now lawyering up to defend its exemptions.

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

Princeton’s got the same problem Harvard (well on its way to a forty billion dollar endowment) does; maybe their lawyers can work together. As one observer points out:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

The trick is that this hedge fund can’t remit earnings to investors, and has to keep them in the company’s account, renaming these retained earnings as an “endowment”. So how do the insiders extract value from this business? One way is by giving themselves cushy jobs that pay a ton of dough. Those who manage Harvard’s money are well-paid. The prior investment head, Jack Meyer, left after criticism of a compensation plan that paid some investment management professionals more than $35 million each in a single year...

When tax-advantaged non-profits start to accumulate billions of dollars of cash through investment gains, and the insiders seem to be doing very well, it creates legitimate pressure for some legal changes. There is a broad range of alternatives: capital gains taxes on investment income, directly taxing the endowment, placing limitations on employee compensation, and forcing the distribution of a fixed percentage of the endowment are all obvious choices. Sanctimonious talk about “the mission of the university” is not likely to stop this …

Actually, I think sanctimonious talk, done well, can probably hold the line for a school. UD has always privately felt that the switchover from Lawrence Summers to Drew Faust as Harvard’s president had in part to do with the, uh, incompatibility of Summers and sanctimony.

… League of Denial.

… It’s easy to sit back and pontificate about why so many players are violent, both on and off the field, or how they ended up with ruined lives. We often blamed the players themselves. “They were irresponsible men, or had bad agents, girlfriends, wives who took advantage of them,” we explained. We blamed everything but the game itself for so many ruined lives and serious psychological problems.

… We have all made a very comfortable living off the game and the backs of men like Harry Carson, Tony Dorsett and Junior Seau.

Whoa, look out. The budgets of many universities rest on the recruitment and use of young men as football players.

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Found it here.

Professors Robert Dworkin (University of Rochester) and Dennis Turk (University of Washington) are feeling no pain!

Read their hilarious emails about how they’re making tens of thousands of dollars off of pharma – which wants to listen in on American professors conversing about new developments along the Oxycontin line (We Americans ♥♥ LOVE♥♥ our Oxycontin. Just look at any town in West Virginia. Eli Lilly’s got us eating out of its hand!).

’20k [to attend a meeting] is small change, and they can justify it easily if they want to be at the table,’ Dworkin wrote to Turk in July 2003, after an Eli Lilly representative bridled at the price.

Dworkin’s absolutely right. Once you’ve got a national (soon to be international!) epidemic going, you’re talking real money. Dworkin knows Lilly routinely pays billions in fines every year for illegal this and that, and it really don’t make no never mind since when your profits are zillions you can laugh at billions. So this Lilly asshole has the gall to bridle at paying twenty thou to sit in a room for twenty minutes? UD finds it amazing the Dworkin/Turk gang isn’t demanding twenty million per meeting.

Possibly Dworkin and Turk are low-balling because they’re professors and not businesspeople and there’s a learning curve for them. This might be helpful for context:

[There’s a new rule,] unveiled by the S.E.C. … requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages… [Yet C.E.O. compensation continues, and almost certainly will continue, to rise.] Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As [one expert] told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.”

If Dworkin and Turk find themselves at all hesitant, they can tape this article to their refrigerators and reread it just before talking price with Lilly.

… Alabama State University.

Yes, I know the state in general is stupid and corrupt; but ASU’s a whole other category, and especially states like Alabama can’t afford to keep running – with taxpayer money – any institution this corrupt and destructive. The agencies that continue to accredit ASU are simply whores.

That ASU is a deadhead is known and documented; that it’s run by thieves is equally notorious.

Americans seem to have trouble with the idea that universities, like businesses and states, can fail. Failed states; shuttered businesses; closed universities. Bad enough ASU educates no one; it also steals everyone’s money. Time for Alabama to show some guts.

A graduate student at UD‘s school – George Washington University – kills his best friend in a drunken rampage.