…his noble defense lawyer.

Baruch Weiss’s “purpose in life is to undo injustice … [T]here is something almost superhuman” about [his] drive to do the right thing.”

Weiss worked unceasingly for another persecuted martyr, Sholom Rubashkin, and UD feels sure he will offer the same moral indignation at injustice to Martin Shkreli.

… Spender.

Maybe
I fucked up on
Those leftover debts
Funny
But here’s that rainy day

Funny how fraud becomes
A cold rainy day
Funny
That rainy day is here

… is that if any particular hedgie pisses you off, for any reason at all, you stand a fair chance of nailing him on securities fraud. That’s why if you’re a hedgie you should keep your head down and not piss too many people off the way Martin Shkreli did with that price hike on that drug. Because all the annoyed SEC had to do was run its eyes lightly over his financial past in order to arrest him, just now, at his New York digs.

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

It wouldn’t be University Diaries without anagrams. Try your hand. Here are my first attempts. I imagine it as an abbreviated conversation between an onlooker and Shkreli as he’s loaded into the police van.

[M A R T I N S H K R E L I]

HI MISTER! LARKN’?

“MA! TELL R SHRINK!”

UD hasn’t encountered many totally corrupt American universities. We’re not like Italy and Greece, where one can find schools whose main function is to transfer all available funds to the institution’s leadership. The closest we’ve come is the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and even there they’ve had to shutter much of their shake-down operation after endless unpleasantness with the FBI. (I’m of course talking here only about legitimate universities. The for-profit tax syphons are almost entirely about transfer of all possible funds to management and investors. Whole other category.)

But the University of Louisville, some of whose students and faculty, as a local reporter notes, are “reeling” from one financial or sexual scandal after another, is emerging as America’s new UMDNJ. And it might be instructive to pause at its latest scandal – high-level med school resignations in the wake of an FBI investigation into allegations that (in the words of the only worthwhile UL trustee – a man who subsequently left the board in disgust) a university vice president “owns a piece of a company getting paid by a part of the university that he controls.” It’s alleged that he and several of his UL cronies have essentially stolen around eight million dollars from the university.

No bid contracts and bogus high-paying jobs to friends and family also seem to be part of this particular scandal. But that’s the typical threesome at corrupt schools, where no one’s around to stop you from total corruption:

1. conflict of interest for personal enrichment;
2. no bid contracts to cronies (these often feature kickbacks to you);
3. the creation of pretend jobs for cronies and relatives.

At schools like UL, you don’t do just one or two of these things; you do them all.

How does a school become systemically rotten in the way UL is systemically rotten? How did things get so out of control in virtually all areas of the school’s operation? (I’m not even going to talk about UL athletics, which has been a sewer for years.)

If you ask UD, this can only happen when absolute ignorance of – maybe even contempt for – the nature of a university prevails not only in parts of the local culture (that y’all and shut ma mouth land) but in the president’s office and on the board of trustees. UMDNJ was run by brainless Jersey wise guys; UL seems to be run by corporate backslappers. Even now, with the school in absolute tatters, UL has chosen as its spokesperson a look on the sunny side nitwit who attacks the press for its negativism, denies anything’s the matter, and says stuff that’s too stupid to parse:

“I’m not willing to cross that bridge and give you any information that’s going to appease your accusations.”

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

A school run – flamboyantly run – largely to make money for the people who lead it will attract unsavory people. Unsavory people want to work at places like UL, since it seems unlikely that anyone at the institution will impede their corrupt activities. This is the way that corrupt schools stay corrupt, and indeed tend to become more corrupt. They attract corrupt people.

UD predicts that UL will, under this extraordinary pressure, finally ditch its president, who has lost all vestige of institutional control. But getting rid of him will cost the school many millions of dollars, and the chance of replacing him with anyone better is small.

… was a popular feature on
the late lamented Andrew
Sullivan site. Here’s the
view from UD‘s new office.

“Of course there’s income inequality,” says John Griswold, executive director of the Commonfund Institute, the research arm of Commonfund, which manages college endowments. “To say that a small number of wealthier colleges should try to solve that is utter nonsense.”

UD loves the let-them-eat-cakery of this statement about American universities with endowments in the tens of billions of dollars. First there’s the languid of course. Of course some universities are richer than half of the world’s economies. Routine stuff. Totally unremarkable. Only an idiot would want to make something of the disparity among college endowments that these numbers represent.

And then there’s the even better, second part of Griswold’s statement, in which he violently disparages a claim that no one has made. No one says that Harvard should “solve” endowment inequality. What people say is that Harvard should stop hoarding so much of its money. What people say is that Harvard graduates should consider directing their donations to needier causes. What people say is that Harvard should give its students a serious break on tuition and other costs. What people say is that if Harvard doesn’t act more responsibly in regard to its unconscionable accumulated wealth, there should start to be tax implications.

But of course… utter nonsense! It’s the Lady Augusta Bracknell school of public utterance.

LOUISVILLE U

folks you’ve heard of scandalous schools
history is full of scandalous schools
but you ain’t heard nothing til
you’ve heard about louisville

it’s a place that’s crawling with thieves
has a board that trustees try to leave
till you’ve seen dorm rooms rockin’ with whores
you ain’t even darkened their doors

they call the campus louisville u
what a fucked up campus can do!
it’s the lowest graduatingest, med school on probationest
school the world ever knew

the ed school dean’s in the pen
med’care fraud hits again
pitino petrino mcgee
sexy sexy whooooeeeeee!

they keep their audits on the down low
about their bank accounts nobody knows
secret foundations funnel the cash
the u of lou has made itself absolute hash

lots of low-lifes among their teams’ lads
and even the president’s paid to be bad
so here’s my warning to you
keep away from louisville u

… has just been sued by Irving Picard – the guy in charge of returning swindled money to Bernie Madoff victims – for very large sums of said money.

Here’s the list:

Hebrew University of Jerusalem ($36 million)
Ben Gurion University of the Negev ($18 million)
Weizmann Institute ($13 million)
Bar Ilan University ($10 million)
Tel Aviv University ($6.5 million)
Technion Israel Institute of Technology

The universities’ response is, as you might expect, we didn’t know, we already spent it, fuck off.

But bulldog Picard, who has, since 2008, clawed back impressive amounts of Madoff’s billions, can be expected to sue hard, citing “unjust enrichment” laws (and after all, don’t most Israelis – most people – consider it axiomatic that art stolen during the Holocaust, for instance, has to be returned even if a particular owner is ignorant of the original theft? — “Holocaust-looted art bears a ‘mark of Cain’ which, under international law, infects all transactions relating to it, including transfers to third parties.”).

Picard also points out that the now-defunct charitable group that gave the Madoff money to these institutions (Picard is also suing this group) had financial as well as charitable motives:

Picard’s complaint in the court claims that the Horowitz Association did not transfer these huge sums only as a donation to encourage research in Israel; it chose to act as an investor with economic interests, and made receiving the money contingent on the provision of proceeds through royalties.

Picard notes that several other institutional beneficiaries of Madoff – Hadassah, for instance – immediately returned their Madoff money on learning that they harbored it.

By refusing to take the moral and respectable path, the [universities] associate themselves with the thief – Madoff – and not the victims.

Will the universities decide to settle some amount or other on the victims, in order to make this embarrassing lawsuit go away?

Taub still draws a $300,000 salary but the cutbacks mean he’s “been fired from 75%” of his job, he says in an affidavit.

A Columbia University professor – Sheldon Silver’s BFF – keeps his job.

University coaches have now determined the precise series of plays that will put them in good football position. You start conventionally, coaching your scholar/athletes in aggression and speed.

Gradually, though, you start phoning it in, creating panic among the trustees as the team loses a game here and a game there.

When it becomes clear that the team might not make some playoff, the trustees begin pissing their pants. Despite the fact that they owe you millions and millions on your contract, they tell you to walk away.

Bloodied but unbowed, “proud of all we did here,” you graciously withdraw.

The endgame’s the most fun of all. Your staff of financial advisers and attorneys now milks the clock on your contract, threatening lawsuits, threatening to disclose things about the program that would cost it more than Jerry Sandusky’s Penn State if they were known, threatening, threatening, threatening. So the university trustees, who were figuring maybe they could (with their own advisory team) stiff you here and there on a payout/settlement and halt the bankrupting of the school, totally cave and give you a huge fortune.

You take all the money (if this series of plays has been performed at a very high level, you’re trailing tens of millions of additional dollars from previous firings) and spend the rest of your life working on your chip shot.

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

Let’s have no resentment of this free market course of affairs. You’re a student bartending in a bad neighborhood late at night to pay your tuition, and taking an overload of courses during the day to graduate faster and more cheaply, and it turns out that one of the main things your grueling and dangerous labor pays for is a deadbeat coach. But your university is run by rational people who have the best interests of people like you in mind!

Changing coaches has minimal, if any, impact on team success. Among the worst teams …those that changed coaches won about the same amount over five years as those that didn’t. For mediocre teams, those that changed coaches actually fared worse.

A president who drives your university into junk status and gives Bernard Madoff an honorary degree doesn’t come cheap.

… to which UD was able to contribute.

Details here.

And her remembrance of Eve’s brother.

*************
UD thanks Stephen.

… hope.

(So far, only one source – International Business Times – is printing the photograph. I assume it’s authentic, but that could change.)

Beautiful front porch, wake unto me,
Look how you’ve beautified old USC.
Major corruption since 2010
And now a lawsuit from Sarkisian.

Beautiful front porch, how you do shine!
Making me proud of this great school of mine.
Millions for coaches, nothing for me
Beautiful front porch of old USC.