The people of Iran had their Green Revolution, which sought to make their country more just; now America launches our own grassroots movement for change.

Property developer Jeff Greene’s impassioned plea last week at Davos is catalyzing a movement across the United States, an upswelling of ordinary people who ask: If Jeff can do it, why can’t we?

The challenge Jeff has set:

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

Jeff, who keeps five supermansions and “flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week,” joins the storied ranks of Benjamin Edelman, Vinod Khosla, Tom Perkins, Todd Henderson, Glenn Hubbard, Frederic Mishkin, Dick Fuld, and Mike “Helicopter” Bloomberg as yet another man of conscience for America, a role model whose invention of a whole new downsized system of life sets the standard for the rest of us.

Start here. Model your wedding on Greene’s 2007 ceremony:

[The couple were married] at their 27-acre Beverly Hills canyon estate. The Los Angeles skyline glimmered as the bride appeared in a gown of hand-beaded Swarovski crystals, and four swans glided alongside her in a reflecting pool as she made her way to the French limestone gazebo, where Mr. Greene waited for her, beaming.

The 275 guests were an eclectic mix, including the director Oliver Stone; Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers owner; and the boxer Mike Tyson, who served as best man. After midnight, the guests took to the revolving dance floor installed in the 24-car garage.

You might have trouble finding Sterling. He might be hiding out.

Baby Face Emmert and t’uther boys are saddling up to ride the plains and mountains of America in search of academic fraud in our big-time athletics programs. They’ve already got no fewer than twenty schools to visit in their quest to uncover and erase any stains on the academic integrity of this country’s universities.

You’ll see some naysayers out there for sure.

… NCAA investigations won’t change anything. So long as this system continues to rest on the mind-numbingly stupid idea that education and college sports have anything to do with each other, we will be stuck in this cycle. Colleges and athletic programs will game the system; the NCAA will go scandal-hunting; wrists will be slapped; and everyone involved in the whole sham will go on lying to themselves.

UD thinks this is unfair. Nobody’s lying to himself.

I’m thinkin it’s onaccounta it’s in New York City – smack where the money is – but Columbia University sure does have one rootin-tootin, crooked-up-the-wazoo, faculty.

This 2011 post tries to gather up some of that school’s most notorious naughty boys, but CU has outdone itself since then, having most recently splashed itself all over the tabloids with the story of eminent (awed pause here), bow-tied (classy! pause here), mesothelioma researcher (grateful sanctimonious I-don’t-wanna-know-about-the-law-firms pause here) Robert Taub.

Preet Bharara just finished transacting business with Columbia’s Gregory Rorke, and now he’s had to swivel around to the school’s Milstein Family Professor (also about the Milsteins you don’t wanna know). Bharara must have a crimp in his neck.

Columbia even boasts But don’t get me started.

Rabbi Mordechai Bloi, a prominent [United Torah Judaism party] activist, made a series of implied threats against women who would involve themselves in [non-great-rabbi-guided] parties…

“Any woman who comes close to a party which is not under the guidance of the great rabbis will leave [her marriage] without her ketubah [without the money owing to her in case of divorce], and it will be forbidden to learn in her educational institutions, or to purchase any product from her, and it will be a religious obligation to remove all her children from all institutions,” Bloi said.

In addition, he was quoted as saying that any haredi woman who would run for election in a non-haredi party “will be dealt with accordingly and will pay dearly for it.”

Daddy is really pissed.

… just go to this page, and remind yourself that Sheldon Silver won the 2012 William M. Bulger (once president of the University of Massachusetts!) Excellence in State Leadership Award.

Yech.

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Oh goody. There’s a university professor involved. So far unnamed. UD‘s thinking identifying the person ain’t gonna be too hard.

[It is alleged that] Silver directed state research money to a university doctor in Manhattan, and that the doctor referred lucrative asbestos cases to Silver’s firm of Weitz & Luxenberg. The doctor is described as a “well-known expert” who “conducts mesothelioma research” and who had created a center at his university by or before 2002 related to that subject. The doctor, not named in the complaint, “has entered into an agreement with the USAO SDNY [U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York] under which he will not be prosecuted for the conduct described herein, and that obligates him to provide truthful information to and cooperate with the government.”

As for Preet Bharara, without whom this corruption-besotted blog could not function:

[N]othing about Bharara’s pedigree suggested he planned to burn down the New York State Democratic Party [UD is a deep-blue Democrat. She owns a house in New York State. But she’s got no loyalty to that state’s notoriously corrupt political establishment.]… Bharara, with two more years in office, is that particularly dangerous and rare political figure: a federal prosecutor who doesn’t give a fuck.

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Oh. Okay. Well that wasn’t any challenge at all. Taub’s name came up immediately in a Google search; but here it is all over the papers.

The state money was provided to Dr. Robert Taub [another Yeshiva University grad] for research by the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation — with some of the additional funds going for unspecified “additional benefits” to the doctor’s family, the court papers charges.

Taub, who is affiliated with Columbia University, is cooperating with the FBI, court papers revealed. Silver sponsored a May 2011 “official resolution” by the assembly honoring Taub.

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He’s a recipient of the “Collaborator Award,” which has a special ring to it now.

UD and La Kid got home after dark last night (office hours; Tabata after work). Mr UD dropped them off and began backing out of the driveway to head to Chipotle.

Suddenly, in the snowy dark, UD spotted a small living thing sitting on one of the steps to the front door. What was it?

“Look.” She prodded La Kid.

“What is it?”

“A rat? A rabbit? A cat?”

“Why doesn’t it move? We’re inches away!”

“I don’t know.”

“Go away!” shouted La Kid. We moved closer, trying to scare it. It didn’t budge, and we still couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Call Daddy! Daddy!” La Kid called. He’d already left.

“There’s too much wildlife here,” wailed UD. “What is it? Why won’t it move? MOVE,” she screamed.

Then, as the moonlight deepened, she saw an unmistakeable rabbit-shadow.

“Hop away! Hop hop hop hop away!” they yelled. The minutes ticked by, and UD and La Kid were cold. “No wonder the owls and the hawks and the foxes like it so much here,” grumbled UD. “Big open lawns full of motionless rabbits.” They edged closer, and finally the thing bounced off…

… government (“Boring is Good”).

… – ou peut-être il serait mieux de dire Université de Moncton – which is generating controversy. Apparently some people on campus think it insults the dignity of the school by featuring students (actors, maybe) kissing passionately… uh, French kissing – in the library stacks…

It’s altogether a tonguey ad – lots of tongues hanging out of the mouths of students as they gambol about or play hockey or paihrfohrmuh zair wilduh enduh crayzee Franche roque moozeekuh…

But the ad – plus this morning’s metro ride to Foggy Bottom – has UD thinking about something else entirely. She notices that in this video everyone is beautiful. Some students are insanely beautiful, and some are merely somewhat beautiful, but everyone is beautiful. On the crowded metro this morning, she took a seat and her blazingly blond daughter stood near her; and near her daughter stood a staggeringly beautiful young man, the sort of person you kind of have to look at even though it’s a little impolite. The dude was chiseled: Closely cropped black hair, long elegant face with dramatic green eyes, aquiline nose, full lips, and cleft chin… UD thought Okay, the metro is the domain of the young and restless, the super-ambitious full-bodied hot-blooded denizens of DC … But these two are exceptionally beautiful…

But then La Kid and the guy left the train (UD had already, gazing at them, melded their DNA to produce a race of amazing specimens), off to their separate jobs, and now onto the train scrambled (see post immediately below) six random dudes, a group of friends, also in their twenties… And all of them were beautiful!

So is it just me? Am I seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? Or would turning on a camera anywhere at a place like the Moncton campus produce a steady array of beauties? Have I gotten to the point in life where the mere fact of being young makes you beautiful?

This is from the comment thread of an article about some pillaging University of Michigan fraternities…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm likes very much the word “scrambles” here. It’s the kind of mistake (distruction and other mess-ups are less interesting mistakes) that makes you think about language, about why people reach for certain words when trying to express certain things.

The writer probably meant shambles – to see my place of employment in a shambles – but also somewhere in his or her head was perhaps not merely scramble (which can have meanings having to do with making quick and sometimes desperate moves, which I suppose has some mental connection to what the marauding lads did), but also scrabble (which similarly can mean panicky random movement). This person’s place of employment will have to scramble, and it will have to scrabble through a lot of trash, to fix the mess the UM group made.

Was trample in there too? Was the desire that these visitors from one of America’s most icky football schools scram in there?

Our beautiful tax-exempt universities. We so want to keep them that way. Because they use the money we give them to give seven million dollars a year to football coaches! That is beautiful. That is so… university-y…

…[I]t is certainly reasonable to ask about the size of the salaries at nonprofits that are being subsidized with our tax dollars.

What? Why? Next you’ll ask why Harvard University is sitting on a 32.7 billion dollar endowment. Point One: None of your business. Point Two: It’s a goddamn nonprofit, that’s why! Don’t you know a nonprofit when you see one?

We get very competent people to serve as Cabinet secretaries for $200,000 a year. Suppose there were a cap on the pay at any organization with nonprofit status at $400,000 a year. After all, if an organization can’t find someone to work for it at twice the pay of a Cabinet secretary, then maybe it isn’t the sort of organization that taxpayers should be subsidizing.

The nonprofits will scream bloody murder if any measure like this is even considered. Undoubtedly, many of the nonprofits committed to reducing inequality and poverty will be yelling loudest.

Point Three: You sound like a socialist.

[A]s an out-of-state transfer student [at Louisiana State University], I was not quite ready for the insanity that ensued during football season. I was shocked at the number of students I saw around me that were consistently vomiting, and I had never seen so many students be carried out on stretchers before.

Yet these are precisely the students who eventually turn into the university’s most generous alumni.

One way for universities to save money while retaining loyal alumni would be to forgo the costly football thing altogether and simply, at the Welcome New Students party, spike the punch with Ipecac.

Then, after students have puked their guts out, beat them up.

Or he will be soon. UD has been waiting with bated breath for Arthur Porter – former head of the McGill University hospitals – to be extradited back to Canada (he’s been in a Panamanian prison for a year or so) to face corruption charges. His wife has already pled guilty to money laundering; he faces charges of having drummed up the money (22.5 million!!) via bribes from the company he chose to build a new hospital for the university.

Porter’s a real character; he has much to teach us about the varieties of responses available to people accused of massive corruption.

He has, for instance, claimed to be on the very brink of death from cancer for about three years. And he’s a doctor! He should know!

UD knows there’s more where that came from.

Background on Porter? Type arthur porter in my search engine.

So UNC has hired Gene Chizik as defensive coordinator for its football team.

… Selena Roberts, a former writer for The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, reported that Auburn [University] committed several NCAA violations under Chizik’s watch.

Several former Tigers players told Roberts, among other things, that during Chizik’s tenure Auburn changed grades to keep players eligible, and that the school offered thousands of dollars in effort to keep potential NFL draft picks from leaving school.

UNC: Clean as a whistle going forward!

“Houellebecq’s treatment of Islam is now far more nuanced, even admiring,” writes Robert Zaretsky in a Foreign Policy essay about contemporary France.

Six paragraphs later, he writes: “Houellebecq’s perspective has grown more nuanced, even admiring.”

It’s not a big deal that Zaretsky didn’t catch it, but where are FP’s editors?

Well, hold on there.

In a wonderful account of Michel Houellebecq’s now-notorious novel, Submission, Adam Gopnik talks also about Éric Zemmour, author of Le Suicide Français, the much-read attack on the contemporary liberal democratic state (“The tenets of [Zemmour’s] faith,” writes Gopnik, “are simple: liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and international finance are the source of all evil. Liberal capitalism is a conspiracy against folk authenticity on behalf of the ‘internationalists,’ the rootless cosmopolitans. The nation is everything, and internationalism is its nemesis. The bankers cosset us with narcotics of their civilization even as they strip us of our culture.”). One of Zemmour’s claims is up there in this post’s headline: Our universities are playpens for the rich.

UD would like to suggest that Gopnik is broadly correct about the historical trend: Our large and often impressive public universities (the University of California system, the University of Texas, the University of Maryland, and others) continue to be powerful engines of social mobility. But many of our best private universities remain to a notable extent wealthy enclaves (so much so in some cases that national attention has been drawn to them), and many of our worst universities are middle class and poor enclaves.

You don’t help the working poor by spawning hundreds of trashy online for-profit schools; you don’t boost the middle class by shunting them into pointless party schools.

At the other end, the weird vacant surfer guy some newspapers have dubbed “the Princeton killer” “went to Buckley School in New York, then moved on to Deerfield Academy and then [one presumes as a legacy admit] Princeton in 2003. But it took Mr. Gilbert two extra years to graduate from college. And since 2009, his friends said, he led a fairly aimless life that involved surfing, yoga, many hours spent at the gym and parties.”

Read all about it.