I mean, it was predictable that having made the incredibly stupid decision to book a vile person for a George Washington University concert, the school would have to turn around and cancel; but on the other hand, this may be the last time UD sees the name Action Bronson and the phrase Spring Fling in close proximity to one another. Like Pol Pot Tea Party or Adolf Hitler Ice Cream Social, Spring Fling with Action Bronson has an amusing ring to it. She is grateful to the GW Program Board for adding it to her little trove of linguistic treasures.

With Fran Lebowitz’s words in mind (UD, you recall, interviewed Lebowitz not long ago), let us once again, very gingerly, sidle up to the Sketchy Benefactor problem — the problem with your university taking hundreds of millions of dollars from people who… eh… meh… bleh…

Take Michael Milken. Start with him because he’s local – I mean, local to ol’ UD, because he bought her university a very beautiful building which houses a very fine school of public health, which he also bought for us.

If there is a poster boy for the redemptive powers of philanthropy, it’s Michael Milken. In 1993 the former junk bond king of Drexel Burnham Lambert emerged from a minimum security federal prison after serving 22 months of a 10-year sentence for securities fraud. He seemed a new man — partly because he had abandoned his toupee — and this revised Milken took advantage of his freedom by dedicating himself to giving back. (His finances quickly recovered after he paid the $600 million in fines and restitution; his current net worth is estimated at more than $2 billion.) In the decades since, he has donated consistently and significantly: more than $60 million to teachers and $50 million to George Washington University’s school of public health. His Prostate Cancer Foundation has raised $210 million. There is plenty of evidence that these good works are sincere. Is it also useful? Well, when news of a new SEC investigation into whether Milken’s involvement with Guggenheim Partners had violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry, Milken’s official denial in Fortune magazine read like a recap of his past 20 years of giving.

So no problem with Milken’s name being all over the GW landscape because he paid his debt to society and though in a perfect world we might prefer not to be associated with someone who had to do that in the first place, okay. But what if, while no longer flagrantly stealing, he’s still a sketchy person who when cornered on alleged continued sketchiness points directly at my university and what he gave it in order to exonerate himself?

Yes, GW’s had to deal with sketchy performers and sketchy honorary degree recipients lately; but this is small-time one-off stuff compared to (switching universities here) putting Steven Cohen or Bernard Madoff on your board of trustees or plastering sketchy names all over your most prominent buildings.

I mean… Seton Hall!

Or, staying with Catholic schools here, there’s the lawsuit against Georgetown University for failing to put a donor’s name on a building he bought just because the donor was convicted of insider trading. A long lawsuit between the guy and the university ensued, and if you go to the campus today you can take in the Scott K. Ginsburg Sport & Fitness Center — although, curiously, when you click on the Google link to an article in a university publication titled GEORGETOWN LAW CELEBRATES THE SCOTT K. GINSBURG SPORT & FITNESS CENTER, the connection times out. UD‘s gonna guess they caved, they settled with the guy, they put his name on the building and grimaced through its christening, and then they removed from sight all online references to having celebrated any of this…

Anyway, it’s an old story. Lure of lucre. Lure of respectability. UD only brings it up because of the very strange ongoing latest Caspersen story. The sketchy Caspersen family has a long and important donor relationship with Harvard, and as the alleged actions of the father and now the son tarnish the name more and more, there’s the question of how much tarnishing-by-association Harvard will tolerate. It’s not merely that the Caspersen name is prominent on campus; it’s that in virtually every news article about Andrew Caspersen’s court dates and bail amounts Harvard prominently appears.

You might say Harvard’s too rich and prestigious to care. You might be right. But remember that Harvard is under constant pressure from the government and the media and even from within to account in some way for its immense accumulated wealth. Fighting an ongoing battle against releasing a nickel of its money (this cartoon is out of date; the endowment’s now worth way more than 35 billion) is not made easier by one story after another about sketchy rich people who have helped put Harvard way over the top. In the case of Caspersen’s father, for instance, if it turns out that he did in fact evade taxes on a large scale (this has not been proved; he was under investigation by the IRS at the time of his death), Americans might actually stop and ask themselves why they are both giving huge tax breaks to Harvard University and tolerating donors who are tax evaders. Is zat how Harvard got so rich that the fact of its richness has now become a national controversy? Through ripping us off via tax breaks and then ripping us off again via tax evasions?

Hell’s Grannies.

USA.

… UD‘s university now struggles with whether it made the right decision in spending tuition money to give this guy a stage, so he can sing this.

No, I mean the university promises that this guy promises not to sing that song at the Spring Fling.

“We hope students will continue to discuss Mr. Bronson and the entirety of his work and decide for themselves whether it has merit,” the organization wrote.

Because once you really open yourself to the guy’s oeuvre…

But I mean the program board has already decided his work has merit, yes? An aesthetic decision has been made by UD’s university, and that decision is that this guy and his music are meritorious.

Welcome, spring!

Clawbacks, UD has come to know, ‘ardly hever ‘appen (to quote Eliza Doolittle), but it’s fun to watch universities who could have danced all night with Bernard Madoff (Yeshiva U.) or Finn Caspersen (Harvard) studiously avoid looking at their dance card when the financial shit hits the fan.

Caspersen, who a few years ago committed suicide with the feds on his tail, was able to afford the largest contribution in the history of Harvard Law School by allegedly hiding in Liechtenstein a hundred million or so of the tax dollars he owed us.

As American taxpayers, we’re able to help struggling non-profits in not one but two ways: tax exemption and tax evasion. What a good feeling.

It’s even better to know that the next generation of Harvard-affiliated Caspersens features a son just arrested at LaGuardia Airport (Caspersens really don’t like facing up to consequences) for defrauding investors (including charities) of $95 million through fake investments.

Madoff’s father was also a white-collar criminal. These father and son white collar criminal stories are always touching. They always make UD think of those wonderful Philippe Patek watch ads.

A wee bird cam’ to his platform, he warbled sweet and early
And aye the o’ercam’ o’ his sang: They’re votin’ for Ol’ Bernie.
And when they heard the wee bird sing, applause cam’ thunderin’ cheerly
They took their bonnets aff their heids, and whistled for Ol’ Bernie.

.. Heidi/Ho dispute raging between our next presidents. There’s nothing like men for a catfight, and these two cats…!

Already dark rumors begin to surface of rad-rectitudinous Ted having strayed… And if you think UD is not champing at the bit to watch the Ted Cruz version of this, you have not been reading this blog with care. Dear Lord, bring it on.

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

And don’t forget to bring guns!

Well, yes, there was a seven-foot high screen keeping me and my sisters away from the men… But if it weren’t there, our London School of Economics brothers would rape and ravish us and that wouldn’t be lovely, would it? I mean, for us. For the sisters hidden behind the curtain. That wouldn’t be lovely.

I thought it was a very tasteful way of keeping them from raping us. I so look forward to next year’s dinner. Maybe place the curtain a tad higher and put more layers of clothing on us.

A model for so many other All-Male Sex Cult Universities up and down this great land. 

This blog tries to chronicle life at these locales.  It’s a big job.

Rob Ford, 1969 -2016

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

Yet weep not:

What though the sea with waves continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all…
Nor is the earth the lesse or loseth aught,
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought…
For there is nothing lost, but may be found, if sought…

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

Do not allow yourself with grief to slump…
The blesséd tide hath brought us Donald Trump.

… which is a start, but the story of Missouri State University’s long-term lies about its finances should be on the front page of the New York Times.

What seems a quiet story about a provincial public campus having lied to the state, the NCAA and its own university community about how much money it’s losing to sports, and about how it’s making up the difference by soaking students, is in fact not merely a national scandal in itself, but a story powerfully symbolic of the pourriture (for this degree of degeneracy, only the French word will do) big-time sports has brought to so many of America’s universities.

Before I quote from the two stories – one local, one Associated Press – let me direct you to various posts on this blog starting in 2010, when a baffled UD (numbers not being her strong point) wrote to an economist on MSU’s faculty – Reed Olsen – who has been insisting on the financial corruption of his university for the last fifteen years, during which he has been ignored and reviled.

So here’s Olsen pointing out that MSU’s new stupid unaffordable basketball arena was not in the black (as the school was thrilled to announce), but deeply in the red. Among the tricks MSU played, Olsen singled out this one:

They [are] hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena [is] losing about 2 M.

In ’01, with the money hemorrhage on full boil, boosters proposed that “the accounting of the [new] arena be combined with Hammons Student Center and Plaster Sports Complex,” which would make things look ever so much better. But

Former State Auditor Susan Montee last year specifically warned against mixing the finances of JQH Arena with other university sports facilities.

“In that way, it would not be transparent and nobody would be able to tell,” she said then.

Fuck transparency! says desperate, desperately stupid Missouri State, which, it now turns out, has been for years sending bogus athletic spending numbers to the NCAA.

This is from the brief AP report:

[A] multimillion dollar discrepancy [between what MSU says it’s spending on sports and what it’s really spending] stems from sports-related expenses, mostly facilities and administrative support, that Missouri State didn’t include in the athletics department budget. For a decade, the university also left out those costs and related sources of revenue, such as various student fees, when filing annual reports with the NCAA.

And here’s the headline on the more detailed local report:

$16 million? Try $25 million: New Report Reveals True Scope of MSU Athletics Spending

If MSU hadn’t systematically shut down Reed Olsen year after year, this wouldn’t have been much of a revelation.

Anyway. Let’s look a bit closer.

In the reports [to the NCAA] covering the fiscal years from 2005 to 2013, the only facilities costs MSU reported to the NCAA were lease payments for baseball at Hammons Field, which averaged a little less than $200,000 a year.

For 2014, the university reported $0 — an error, according to [University president Clif] Smart, who said the baseball lease, about $210,000, was mistakenly lumped into the “other expenses” category on the report.

And:

Prior to the report for the 2015 fiscal year, the information reported to the NCAA was taken primarily from the athletics department’s operating budget, which does not include administrative support offered by other university departments, or — most significantly — the millions of dollars the university spends each year on bond payments, maintenance and utilities for athletics facilities.

Anyway. Ahem! Today is a new day:

[T]he new report from MSU makes clear just how much of the bill is being subsidized by students and the university. Of the $25.2 million spent last year, $15.9 million came from student fees and university general revenue.

The president of this quintessentially provincial, regional school, puts it all in perspective:

“The kind of university we see ourselves as plays Division I sports — we’re not Division II, we’re not a regional school.”

… through her wild garden/forest
turned up this honeycomb

at the foot of the tree where
last year at this time
she suddenly heard the thundering
sound of thousands of swarming
bees.

Louisville Recruits Got Stacks of $500 at Hooker Parties

… but what they need to remember is that you’re never going to professionalize this country’s institutions of higher education until you hire, pay well, and retain people like John Blake.

UNC felt forced by the NCAA to fire Blake as its defensive coach simply because he tried to bring the ethos of the NFL to the school (if you want to be competitive, your coaches need to be getting money incentives from agents in exchange for putting them in touch with your players). Because of that decision, University of North Carolina football now looks like a rank amateur in the big-boy high-stakes world of university sports.

(Much more broadly and notoriously, of course, UNC couldn’t even run the bogus players’ curriculum all other seriously sporty universities have figured out to how run.)

The NFL, perceiving Blake’s talent, has now brought him in as defensive line coach for the Buffalo Bills. Blake tried to introduce professional standards to UNC, but UNC wimped out. Their loss. His gain.

Fish Test Positive for Cocaine and Cocktail of 80 Other Drugs.