Galbraith’s famous observation is also true of some university presidents. Like the guy who just left Brandeis after only five years.

[W]hile faculty were subject to caps on salary increases, Lawrence’s compensation soared from about $589,000 in 2010 to $878,572 in 2013, the last year for which data is publicly available.

You do wonder about people sometimes.

“You are unlikely to bump into neighbors wandering the halls because only about a third of the owners live there at any one time,” explains the paper of record about one of several buildings in New York City full of condos purchased by shell companies and rarely lived in by human beings. “The building’s annual holiday party is a lonely affair,” not only because no one’s home, but also because a lot of the owners are, uh, not inclined to show up in public. On the advice of their lawyers.

One of these guys, Wang Wenliang, is on the board of NYU.

Walking along the beach yesterday, UD watched as a greenback of some sort floated out of the waves and stopped right at her feet.

Whoa, she said to her sister. Lookee here. Money from Mother Nature.

UD excitedly picked it up in hopes of bagging a C-Note or higher (UD‘s gratitude to MN for spitting free money out at her quickly transformed into an insistence that it be Something Big), but it was only a dollar bill.

Still, UD is reasonable enough to appreciate this striking bounty. No wonder people all over the world want to move to America.

… lay in shelves along the beach this morning. On some outcrops colonies of gulls sat, fluffing their wings but basically staying put while UD steamed along. Yesterday’s high wind was gone, and the sun shone with amazing intensity for seven in the morning. Despite the cold, I felt its heat on my shoulders.

A calm ocean and a clear sky and a world all mine had me banging on to myself about Being, Nothingness, and My Buddha Nature. Plus other stuff. I forget.

(Details here.) Fareed Zakaria’s high-profile pilfering is distinctly A-One: Atelier. If UD may plagiarize herself:

Atelier is a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors, [some of whom] appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

Michael Kinsley is the latest writer to review Zakaria’s output and conclude:

He went too far. Far too far. I would love to be able to say that Fareed is being penalized for doing what everybody does. That’s what he believes about some of these episodes, I think. But when you’re making points—one, two, three—that another writer has made, and in the exact same order, though with different exact words, you’re not just participating in a great swap meet of ideas in which nobody owns anything. You are claiming ownership of ideas that aren’t your own. That’s not a “mistake.” That’s on purpose.

The man whose name emblazons Yeshiva University’s Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute (plus there are several Yeshiva business school professors walking around with his name on their title) once again shows students at that junk bond campus how it’s done: Entrepreneurship is about finding yourself in a courtroom, accused of looting one of your firms to pay for a private residence so ostentatiously vile that a judge agrees to keep jurors from seeing it lest they become “inflamed” against the accused.

Madoff, Merkin, Wilf, and Rennert: Just a handful of Yeshiva’s remarkable cadre of entrepreneurs.

UD‘s GWU is apparently the perfect simulacrum.

Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal:

Under her watch, …university employees have stole[n], misspent or mishandled at least $7.6 million in schemes at the health science campus, the law school, the business school and the athletic department’s ticket office.

[Provost Shirley] Willihnganz also was criticized for approving about $1 million in buyouts for former high-ranking employees, some of which included agreements not to disparage the university or its leaders.

She also was forced to apologize to faculty in 2008 for failing to act against [Robert] Felner, the education dean, despite more than 30 grievances and complaints that he had intimidated, harassed, humiliated and retaliated against faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Willihnganz said at the time that she tended to dismiss the early complaints against Felner — including a no-confidence vote by faculty — because he was a “high performer” and because the complaints came from professors and staff “entrenched in their ways and resistant to change.”

She later told faculty at a meeting that she was sorry. “Mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that,” she said.

Felner was sentenced in 2010 to 63 months in federal prison for taking $2.3 million from U of L and the University of Rhode Island.

Ave atque vale!

With the help of a researcher at the National Center for Education Statistics, the [Jewish Daily] Forward identified six universities with characteristics similar to Y.U. — private, not-for-profit, four-year universities with high research activity and a student body size similar to Y.U.’s.

Among those schools, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and Brandeis universities more than doubled their endowments between 2003 and 2014. Rice University’s endowment grew by 88%.

One other school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which has struggled financially in recent years, saw its endowment grow by just 29%.

Since [Richard] Joel took over Y.U. in 2003, Y.U.’s endowment has grown by 20% overall.

Put yeshiva in my search engine to discover the myriad causes of this amazing outcome.

… often take off for a few days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. UD‘s sister swears up and down that the weather for the next few days will be mild there, so off we go.

She’ll blog from the beach, of course. She blogs from everywhere.

Not a very newsworthy story.

America’s own mani pulite moment.

… shrinking market for law students in a manner so byzantine it would take up a chapter of Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ if Hieronymus Wolf were still alive. Then, after talking to a buddy on the Georgetown University law faculty, she began to realize that the very same byzantine practice goes on there, and is in fact spreading among all but the lowest ranked law schools in America.

The lowest ranked can’t do it because it involves netting (details here) huge shoals of second-year transfer students from law schools in the abyssopelagic rather than hadalpelagic zone.

Although I guess if you’re the nadir in the States – like, for instance, Arizona Summit (someone there probably thought it’d be clever … distracting? … to name the place Summit) you can try harvesting a school of foreign fish (though given many differences among legal systems, this would be a challenge).

The small fry are starting to fight back. Not only is Arizona Summit fucking with its first-year curriculum, making it difficult both to get a good grade point average and to have taken the sorts of courses you need on your transcript to move to the second year curriculum at many schools. Also:

Arizona Summit students have to meet with a dean at Arizona Summit before they transfer and before they can get their transcripts.

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Before their transcripts are released, female Arizona Summit students have to submit to a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound.

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Just kidding.

That’s not happening yet.

A (cough) remarkably strong commitment to athletics has drawn the attention of the world to Penn State University; but the same public university system (Correction: Not the same. UD thanks a reader for pointing this out.) boasts another campus – California University of Pennsylvania (motto: Building Character) – whose long-term president (they finally dumped him after two decades, and in response he’s suing) took over that school’s football program.

Just that one guy ran the operation … And that guy was president of the whole dealie… And he turned the team into one of the winningest criminal conspiracies this side of Palermo.

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Not long ago, six of the lads got together and shouted Football Strong! after they beat some guy almost to death.

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You get a sense of the ex-president’s mentality when you read that he called the cancellation of a recent game – it seemed an appropriate gesture, given the fallout from the Football Strong! incident, and given the revelation that in the last two years not thirty, not forty, but forty-three players were in trouble with the law – “tragic.”

… ranged from leading an early morning corporate seminar on John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me” (the participants were managers who have been doing some long-term thinking about trust and organizations) to attending a GW faculty seminar on the subject of “Christian Zionists” (a term UD had not heard before). She needed to cover large swathes of DC in a hurry – she metroed, ubered, and shuttled her way up and down and all around.

Best of all, at the end of the day, a generous colleague gave her a lift right to her door.

It was cold, and intensely sunny, with no snow. It was so cold that UD wore her massive alpaca coat, which she rarely does because it feels as though you’re carrying around a massive alpaca. But the thing undeniably keeps her warm.