From a review of a new book.

… Yeshiva University professor Moses Pava reports that his business students tell him that, “corporate social responsibility is merely rhetoric designed to fool environmentalists, consumer advocates and other do-gooders.”

The B-School Boys have responded to their graduates’ arrests for insider trading, etc., by adding yet more ethics courses. Rustle up some more rhetoric! At Yeshiva, no one talked a better ethics game than Ezra Merkin and his BFF, Bernard Madoff.

Lalala … to be sure…

Huh? … Fuck off…

So far this is what Columbia University, and its president, have managed by way of response to the scandal of Lee Bollinger remaining on the board of the company that owns one of the most notorious for-profit universities, Kaplan. It’s the same high-handed indifference Bollinger (and, equally notoriously, Berkeley’s Richard Blum) has shown toward the hundreds of thousands of ordinary American grunts being dragged into and ripped off by the schools.

All praise, then, to the students at Columbia for raising a stink about this. They’re eloquent on the subject of Bollinger’s hypocrisy, and they’re trying hard to get him to resign from the board.

The CU Democrats’ petition says that “Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.” As of Monday night, the petition had over 580 signers, some of whom are alumni.

He’s talking about a libel trial so mad, it makes Moammar “The Umbrella” Gadhafi look sane. Details here.

An administrator at Lehigh discusses laptops in class.

“It all depends on what the teacher is trying to accomplish,” [Greg] Reihman said. “Some faculty members want increased attention in front of the room so if the presence of laptops becomes a distraction, I understand the banning of them.”

… Texas Tech, our nation’s raunchiest, most good old boy-ridden, sports factory. If you’ve got the stomach, type texas tech into my search engine and read all about it.

Or just consider the latest raunch: Upping the football coach’s salary “by $500,000 through 2015.”

The impoverished, salary-frozen faculty is upset – or at least some professors are upset…. I don’t think you get to be the national disgrace Texas Tech is without a lot of professors excited at the thought of debasing themselves for football.

You’ve got your coach – highest paid employee in the state – overseeing a football program which puts thirteen students in the hospital for days, being treated for “rhabdomyolysis, which forces muscle fibers to release into the blood stream and can cause kidney damage.” The condition was apparently brought on by punishing practice sessions. The coach didn’t come back to check on the students when the news broke — too busy recruiting.

You’ve got your athletics director playing golf with alumni in Florida. He didn’t come back either.

And you’ve got your team physician, paid $385,000 a year to take care of the students, enjoying a medical junket at a beach resort:

The meeting’s itinerary, released to the AP under the state public records law, shows participants adjourned by noon most days and didn’t have any business Jan. 26, the day the university confirmed the players were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis.

A Korean voice professor is accused of assaulting her students, demanding money from them, etc.

The case ignited when the school began an inside investigation last week upon requests from her former pupils. Her students also claimed that Kim, who has about 100 concerts and events a year, manipulated the register to cover up her absence at classes.

… sinks yet lower.

ESPN’s number one concern, it would seem, is to not make the channel look like one big UT infomercial.

… Holy Family.

[S]ophomore Matt Kravchuk can be seen in the video getting knocked down by coach John O’Connor during a January practice and then [being kicked by] him while he was down. Kravchuk filed a police report following the alleged incident.

…”Got a little (bleep) blood on you. Good,” the coach says in the video obtained by the TV station.

Amen.

… Carl Elliott, about the University of Minnesota and conflict of interest.

We’ve had one scandal after another [involving payments to U doctors by drug and device companies]. It’s depressing; nothing really has happened. At other institutions, a panel is usually appointed to look into something. Here, the PR response is, “We don’t think we’ve done anything wrong.” I have some hope things will change with the new president coming in [at the U]. But who knows?

… Ireland…

… February 2011.

I’ve said there will be more and more of these university hospital Medicare stories, until they become A Story.

Indeed I foresee (Les UD’s finally got around, last night, to watching Ed Wood — which UD laughed through and Mr UD found “depressing” — and I’m thinking here of The Amazing Criswell’s predictions.) the larger story featured in a long Page One piece in the New York Times.

This particular story, out of the SUNY system, features spine-tingling allegations from a staff doctor who also served as “quality improvement officer” for the neurosurgery department. (He works now at Boston University.)

The chair of the hospital’s neurosurgery department – who fired the whistleblower shortly after he started blowing the whistle – was himself eventually brought down by his Nazi fetish.

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

Update: Note that I’ve changed Syracuse to SUNY. Syracuse sold the hospital to the SUNY system. UD thanks Mr Punch for the correction.

[T]he professors urging us to put away our laptops in favor of pens and notebooks may have a legitimate concern. After all, we go to college to learn from our professors; perhaps we should eliminate the monitor screen standing in the way.

In West Virginia, state Sen. Evan Jenkins said flights on discount airlines between Huntington, W. Va., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. [pill mills] have been dubbed the “Oxycontin Express.”

… reads a banner that keeps popping up at high-traffic locations on the campus of Brown University. It’s there to greet the trustees, who met a few days ago on campus. And to, you know, get some discussion going.

The banner targets one trustee in particular:

Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 …has settled allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office that he performed illegal favors to garner business for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group by paying multi-million dollar fines and accepting temporary bans from the securities industry.

Here’s an article that evokes the larger world of which Rattner is a part. The students are right to ask whether these sorts of people should be closely associated with universities. A couple of excerpts:

… Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was … embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

… [It’s] a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance.

… You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.