[Harvard University professor Lawrence Summers] consults not only for hedge fund DE Shaw but for venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, asset-management and advisory firm Alliance Partners, stock-exchange operator Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., and for financial services firm Citigroup. He also has a healthy income from speaking — more than $100,000 earlier this year, for example, for a single speech to a conference organized by Drobny Global Advisors.

That is a busy schedule for a full-time faculty member who, like other professors, is allowed only a day a week for consulting — and Summers also chairs the advisory board of the Minerva Project, an online university startup, and holds an administrative role as Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

This is the same Lawrence Summers who told Professor Cornel West to stop spending so much time on his outside activities and get back to his scholarship — because more was expected of a University Professor.

Harry Lewis, Huffington Post.

… Grambling State University?

“The athletics department runs at a $1 million-plus deficit on an annual basis. In the past we’ve taken those funds from the academic side and directed it toward athletics. This year (2012-13), we had to take it from auxiliary services — that’s student dining, the bookstore and dorms. We can’t do that again.”

Let’s sample a few paragraphs from a pretty typical recent appraisal of GSK. This is from Forbes – not exactly a business-unfriendly publication.

Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs.

But the combination of pharma’s noncompliant corporate culture and the prevalence of corrupt business practices in China and other emerging economies could have a lethal impact on many more consumers as pharma shifts more research and development functions, manufacturing operations and marketing efforts to those growing markets.

UD will ask what she has asked on this blog before: When does a company like Glaxo get filthy enough – lethal enough – for American universities to reconsider their relationship to it? Take for instance the fact that the president of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is on Glaxo’s board of directors. Does that bother you at all? Does that bother anyone at Texas Southwestern – a school that’s had more than its share of corruption scandals in the last decade – at all? Put aside questions of reputation, questions about whether universities are something different from corporations – such questions have no relevance to Texas institutions. Rather, think of this developing story pragmatically. You have an endemically corrupt industry. Corruption is all it knows. To quote that guy in An Officer and a Gentleman, It ain’t got nowhere else to go. To quote that guy in the Frank Sinatra song, It’s gotta be it. To quote that guy in the Cage Aux Folles song, It is what it is. To quote that chick in the Barbra Streisand song, Don’t ask me not to cheat I’ve simply got to. To quote that chick in the Mitzi Gaynor song, Get the picture?

So, you know, like SAC Capital Advisors and like Goldman Sachs, GlaxoSmithKline is really really grotty. Is this – university-wise – even an issue? Even a subject? Do all the Glaxo professorships at your institution bother you maybe even slightly? Does the fact that your medical school is run by a Glaxo director stand out to you in any way as something worth thinking about?

… are taking their money and leaving them uneducated and unemployable. Chile’s totally filthy for-profit university sector has now been outed; and though I’m sure – as with all diploma mills – the owners will lie low for a bit and come back again filthier than ever, the forced resignation of Chile’s justice minister is certainly good news.

The resignation of Teodoro Ribera on Monday was the latest in an unfolding saga that has prompted massive street demonstrations, criminal investigations and the jailing of a dean suspected of money laundering and a former government official accused of selling university accreditations.

Same deal as in the States: Pay bribes to get your website accredited as a school and instantly start stashing away state cash. If you have a physical campus:

[Structure] deals with property developers who … build the educational institutions then rent them back to the university. The monthly rent – often paid to members of the same university management team – [is] used to strip money from the institution.

And – hey look! It’s the guys who own the University of Phoenix!

Further revelations … led the Chilean government to announce on Tuesday an investigation into possible violations of regulations by two more universities including UNIACC University, owned by Apollo Global, which according to the company website is “a $1bn joint venture formed in 2007, 80.1% owned by Apollo Group Inc and 19.9% owned by a private equity firm, the Carlyle Group”.

… my readers, who regularly send me items of interest on which they think this blog should comment? University Diaries couldn’t do its thing without all of you linking UD to university stuff.

Just in the last couple of days, readers sent me this facility-porn from the University of Oregon; an instance of jesuitical reasoning in the Georgetown University newspaper; strong commentary and – in the comments on the commentary – strong debate on the just-released MIT report in the Aaron Swartz case; and details on growing civil resistance against threats to privacy at Penn State.

As the new academic year begins, UD will – with your help – continue covering and commenting on university stories like these.

… Jones, on the subject of perks for university administrators. As always, she will link to the piece when it comes out.

Ovidius Ovidius
With rector insidious
Ovidius, Constanta campus!

In a separate case also filed last week, [former Midland University athletic director Jason] Dannelly is accused of giving a 20-year-old student athlete $300 to have sex with him. An affidavit in that case said that Dannelly was empowered to arrange work study jobs for student athletes.

… Pinafore. In the fraud case of Professor Charles L. Bennett, it was, according to the FBI, his “brother and cousin” who improperly benefited (along with Bennett himself, of course) from his personal use of government funds. Northwestern University, on whose faculty he sat while distributing his NIH grant to himself and his brother and his cousin, should have seen that happening, and so has had to choke up “$2.93 million to settle claims of cancer research grant fraud.” The whistle-blower – a purchasing coordinator at NU’s med school – gets almost $500,000 of the proceeds.

Lucky South Carolina College of Pharmacy has pried Bennett free of Northwestern and successfully recruited him to its faculty. What a coup! The center he’ll be running is “is particularly focused on economic return on investment.” So is Bennett.

… The Nation. A Summer Institute of Civic Studies participant, Jim Scheibel, sent it to Mr UD. Excerpts:

…We hike the fees and we re-prioritize.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything ,and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights…

… We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only)
Plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables or else we’re uncompetitive…

… will go to trial.

“The biggest suggestion from me, for the 125 Division I football programs, let’s all invest in NCAA infractions and compliance and let’s have an officer on every campus,” [University of Miami coach Al] Golden said. “You’ll find then that there’s a lot of coaches that want to coach life skills, want to teach leadership, want to teach kids what they need to be successful in every facet of their life, that want education, that are teaching it the right way.

“It doesn’t mean we’re less competitive and that’s a part of the fabric of the United States of America, to be competitive. We’re trying to teach life skills and learning in every endeavor. And I think they would see our mission and our value and our goals are commiserate with theirs.”

Wow – now the president of the Bundestag is accused of plagiarism. UD‘s German friend Chris explains to her that in Germany (in Europe in general I guess) having a PhD is considered very important, very much the done thing, for politicians. (I explain back to Chris that here in the States it’s the opposite. We tend to like our leaders unlettered. Neither Barack Obama nor Elizabeth Warren has been able to escape the professor slam. Sarah Palin put the word professor in front of Obama’s name damn near every time she used it. In his debates with Warren, Scott Brown compulsively called Warren professor.) So perhaps in your haste to get the thing, you copy some or all of it, as Norbert Lammert seems to have done at the University of Bochum.

As with most murders, there’s not much mystery here – about who did it, and how. It’s mildly unusual that a smart person – a professor at a med school – would be stupid enough to order the murder weapon via his university issued credit card two days before the murder. I mean, this sounds like someone who wants to be caught.

Or someone caught up in the passion of his rage against his wife, who he allegedly thought was having an affair. Someone who just wants the thing done, now, because he’s really pissed and he wants it to be over. He’ll show her.

University Diaries has covered bloodier, more dramatic wife-killing by professors – George Zinkhan, Rafael Robb – and the motives are all along the same lines … He thinks she’s unfaithful, or he wants their kid to himself, or she’s in the process of divorcing him. Or all three. Here the wife – Autumn Marie Klein, a University of Pittsburgh neurologist – was herself a distinguished professor, and her death at the age of forty-one is a loss for science.

La Kid, on the left, kisses Aoife,
a look-alike Dublin friend,
at La Kid‘s going-away party
last week. One of the guests brought
an American flag.