… banning laptops. I link to it only because I link to all of these things.
Oh, wait. There is one wonderful moment in it. A comment from a student explaining one instance of laptop use:
I went through a history class that was just every single day death by PowerPoint. And it just, it was awful.
It’s technology v. technology: An asshole in front of the room is too lazy to teach and students are too afraid or indifferent to protest. So students find their own defensive technology in response to the situation.
The result is what UD has called the Morgue Classroom, or TPD: Total Pedagogical Death.
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By the way, some American university students have formally protested excessive or inept faculty PowerPoint use at a number of campuses.
A word of advice to David Armitage, as he begins his long journey toward titular self-acceptance.
Armitage, the Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History, has by this point received at most a bit of ribbing from friends.
But – if history is anything to go by – the opportunities for ridicule will soon become too big to fail.
UD‘s advice? A self-deprecating sense of humor’s your best bet.
UD knows nothing about Armitage. But if he’s touchy and self-important, he’s toast.
Many at the firm might wish it could go private again and recover its capitalist vim. But after a decade of huge success it is now too big to do that. It is also so dedicated to trading that it cannot go back to being a normal, boring bank. Greed and success … have already pushed Goldman Sachs into a kind of prison.
The legacy of the president of Brown University, a Goldman Sachs director for those ten years.
A local candidate for the Cape Coral city manager position has been ruled ineligible because the master’s degree he claims does not meet the requirements for the position.
… [Tom] Leipold listed a master’s degree from a college that was not accredited. That school was raided by the FBI for presenting fraudulent diplomas. A Florida statute prohibits anyone from claiming an academic degree from a school that is not properly accredited.
… The job requirements for the city manager post include a master’s degree in public administration, business administration, finance, economics or a related field. Leipold’s application lists a master’s degree in hypnotherapy, not considered a related field.
… and the company she keeps as a director of Goldman Sachs:
1.)
Raj Rajaratnam, the founder and head of the hedge fund, Galleon Group, is suspected of being tipped off about the Buffett investment by Goldman director, Rajat Gupta.
2.)
Now that Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta is under investigation for passing inside information to Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam, we might as well get to the bottom of what happened with Goldman board member Stephen Friedman during his tenure on the board of the New York Fed.
Basically what happened is that Friedman suddenly more than doubled his personal stake in Goldman in the middle of the financial crisis.
As chair of the New York Fed, Friedman wasn’t supposed to sit on Goldman’s board OR own Goldman stock, but Tim Geithner gave him a waiver to do both.
And now the question is… Did Friedman have some special inside information about the Buffett deal or Goldman Sachs’ financial strength that wasn’t in the public realm?
3.)
I dunno. Coming up. University Diaries will cover the story of the next one as soon as it breaks.
Oh. And of course there’s this:
Goldman Sachs’s CEO and other top officers are accused in a pair of shareholder lawsuits of lax oversight in deals involving risky mortage-backed securities that later went bad.
The lawsuits filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court name Lloyd Blankfein and the firm’s entire board of directors as defendants.
The suits follow civil fraud charges filed last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the same investments.
The SEC says Goldman committed fraud by failing to disclose important information about the securities that might have scared off investors.
The two suits, filed by shareholders Robert Rosinek and Morton Spiegel, accuse Blankfein and other officers of “systematic failure” over 3 1/2 years for not properly vetting 23 mortgage-linked deals at the center of the SEC suit. Those deals, called Abacus, led to $1 billion in losses.
Brown University’s president resigns from Goldman Sachs at the end of this year I think. I don’t know the exact date. And I don’t know if that means she’ll be included in this and no doubt other lawsuits against the firm.
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Simon Johnson offers a larger view of the world historical events of which Brown University is a part:
[Goldman Sachs head Lloyd] Blankfein is starting to sound – and act – a lot like Nicolas Biddle, head of the Second Bank of the United States (by far the most powerful commercial bank of the day), during his confrontation with President Andrew Jackson in the early 1830s.
When Jackson first challenged the Second Bank, many people thought his concerns about the bank’s powers were excessive. But then Biddle started to fight back, spending money freely to buy congressional affection (and even leading orators) and attempting to contract credit in order to demonstrate that Jackson was hurting America.
At that point, people understood that Jackson was essentially right. The Second Bank had become so powerful that it could challenge elected executive authority and, if Biddle won, the consequences for democracy would be dire.
We are now in the phase when the most dangerous of our banks – and the people behind them – will go to any lengths to distort the realities and completely mislead people. The only way to deal with this is to do what Andrew Jackson would have done – attack, in no uncertain terms, misrepresentation wherever we find it.
… We should now view Goldman Sachs and our other five megabanks in the same terms that Andrew Jackson’s secretary used for the Second Bank of the United States, “Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, – the bare existence of such a power – is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.”
A student writes in the SUNY Binghamton newspaper:
WHY GO TO CLASS WHEN THE NOTES ARE ON WIKI?
Academics, you would think, are totally above copying and pasting information from a lowly source such as Wikipedia. However, when I was reviewing a professor’s PowerPoint last week prior to a quiz, I came across something shocking.
It seems that there aren’t as many checks on our educators as we would like.
I briefly thought that my professor had made a mistake, so I consulted Wikipedia to double-check the information. Lo and behold, the text on the PowerPoint slides was identical to the Wikipedia page. I was absolutely dumbfounded. How could someone who took 20 minutes during the first class to warn us of the ramifications of plagiarism actually plagiarize herself?…
It’s such a smooth transaction, and neither student nor teacher needs to move a muscle or learn anything.
The class is entirely composed of text transfer.
She transfers it to a slide; you transfer it from the slide to a paper or an exam. Then she gives you an A.
… what Paul Krugman said today.
Duflo:
What the crisis has made bluntly apparent is that all this intelligence is not employed in a particularly productive way. Admittedly, a financial sector is necessary to act as the intermediary between entrepreneurs and investors. But the sector seems to have taken a quasi-autonomous existence without close connection with the financing requirements of the real economy. Thomas Philippon calculates that the financial sector, which accounts for 8% of GDP in 2006, is probably at least 2% above the size required by this intermediation.3 Worse, the sub-prime crisis is almost certainly in part linked to the fact the needs of the financial markets (the insatiable demand from banks for the famous “mortgage backed securities”) led to excessive borrowing and a housing bubble.
Duflo got the Clark Award today.
Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times:
… Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.
So why were bankers raking it in? My take, reflecting the efforts of financial economists to make sense of the catastrophe, is that it was mainly about gambling with other people’s money. The financial industry took big, risky bets with borrowed funds — bets that paid high returns until they went bad — but was able to borrow cheaply because investors didn’t understand how fragile the industry was.
And what about the much-touted benefits of financial innovation? … [A] lot of that innovation was about creating the illusion of safety, providing investors with “false substitutes” for old-fashioned assets like bank deposits. Eventually the illusion failed — and the result was a disastrous financial crisis.
… An intriguing proposal is about to be unveiled from, of all places, the International Monetary Fund. In a leaked paper prepared for a meeting this weekend, the fund calls for a Financial Activity Tax — yes, FAT — levied on financial-industry profits and remuneration.
Such a tax, the fund argues, could “mitigate excessive risk-taking.” It could also “tend to reduce the size of the financial sector,” which the fund presents as a good thing…
University Diaries proposes CAT – a Corporate Activities Tax – to be levied on universities whose presidents and other administrators (and professors) sit on the boards of corporations like Goldman Sachs and thereby bring shame and ridicule to their schools.
Let Ruth Simmons and Mark Emmert and Phyllis Wise enrich themselves as corporate stooges. But make their universities pay a price for it.
After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him.
In a statement released to the Daily Mail the professor of history at London’s Birkbeck College said that he takes “full responsibility” for what he called “foolish errors”….
UD thanks Dave for the link.
Background here.
A guest blogger at Simon Johnson’s Baseline Scenario laments
potent credit default swaps, a key ingredient to the [economic] crisis. The existence of this $60 trillion (now $45 trillion) notional value market, protecting and connecting counterparties across the system, led to a $180 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG.
She notes that one of their champions was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers. And she reminds us that “during Larry Summers’s tenure [as president of] Harvard, certain swaps were put in place; then, according to Nina Munks of Vanity Fair, ‘for reasons no one can seem to explain, the university simply forgot to (or chose not to) cancel its swaps. The result was a $1 billion loss.’”
Thoughtful, well-written, even well-titled article about a case of plagiarism at Connecticut College. A popular and high-profile senior, chosen to deliver one of the commencement addresses last year, was found to have plagiarized much of it.
His last name is St. John, and the student journalist writing the piece titles it The Revelation of St. John. Nice.
UD‘s covered quite a few commencement speech plagiarism stories. People really seem to panic when contemplating how to deliver tired truisms in a new way.
… St. John gave his speech alongside Class President Nick Downing, President Lee Higdon and the keynote speaker, philosopher Martha Nussbaum. St. John’s speech was by far the most well-received of Commencement – more relatable and persuasive than even Nussbaum’s.
“The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities, and hang on,” he told the crowd on Tempel Green. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, you must rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony.
“Imagine getting caught with your optimism hanging out in today’s day and age. It feels so risky.”
… In November, according to Vice President of College Relations Patricia Carey, a member of the Administration received an anonymous note suggesting that St. John’s speech was plagiarized. Upon closer inspection, they found that extensive passages and many phrases were not St. John’s but writer Barbara Kingsolver’s, from her 2008 commencement address to Duke University. Roughly a third of his speech, including the most noteworthy lines and general theme, clearly derive from Kingsolver’s writing. Her speech became the skeleton for his.
Kingsolver’s address, entitled “How to be Hopeful,” is one of Education Portal’s 10 Famous and Noteworthy College Commencement Speeches, listed alongside speeches by Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart and Steve Jobs. It has been reprinted on various websites in its entirety.
“The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on,” her address said. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children’s only shot. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky.”
From an article in Slate about laptops in university classrooms:
… George Mason Law professor Michael Krauss has been banning laptops for five or six years now.
The way his first-year law-school classes are taught, Krauss said, is by asking questions for the students to answer in discussion. Distractions and the Internet aren’t Krauss’ concern in banning laptops; the reason for the ban is that laptops have “become a substitute for thinking.” The material in a law class requires a lot of thought to help understand concepts, and students who type verbatim what is said in class into their notes aren’t giving themselves any time to absorb and analyze.
… Tablets like the iPad will only make it harder for students to pay attention in class and for schools to ban the device. Since the iPad can be used to read textbooks, professors might be unsure which students are goofing off and which are legitimately studying. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to mind. In the fall, the school is going to give each new incoming student a MacBook and an iPad. How distracted will those students be?…
… The board at Goldman has seen its constitution change in light of the financial crisis, with Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, standing down, and Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey who is becoming entwined in the Galleon hedge fund scandal, resigning.
… The change in constitution of the board could help Goldman deal with some of its issues head on…
So Gupta left because he’s about to be accused of insider trading. And Simmons? The writer for CNN Money doesn’t really say why she’s leaving, though she seems to think Goldman will be better able to deal with its issues “head on” without Simmons.
And why is that?
Because Simmons is incompetent as a director of a complex financial organization. She seems to be good at being a university president. She should probably have stuck to that. But now, after a decade at Goldman Sachs, she’s in deep doo-doo.
UCLA has been building a big conflict of interest case against one of its faculty members for some time, and today the university announces a suit against him to recover millions of dollars.
If you’re an academic physician, or any other sort of university professor using your office mainly as a place to do private business (and of course collecting your university salary on top of that), maybe you should read this.
A group of UCLA staff members entered a medical school professor’s office late at night in January 2008 to gather electronic evidence of alleged prohibited outside activities involving Dr. Robert Lufkin.
In their lawsuit, the Regents claim Lufkin owes the University for the millions of dollars that he earned while acting as a director, shareholder and consultant at outside medical and technological firms U.S. Radiology On-Call, Prohealth Advanced Imaging and Mediasmith.
For years, Lufkin had allegedly been working with these companies while failing to report his involvement and income in accordance with UC policy…
According to the Regents’ complaint submitted to the court, Lufkin had been using University resources to build a “directly competing business.”
“(Lufkin had been) siphoning away patients to the detriment of the University and generally building his own business when he owed a duty to his employer of undivided loyalty to advance his employer’s interests,” according to the Regents’ complaint…