Worldwide, happiness equates very strongly with equality — mostly status equality, but the countries that have a very short ladder between the richest and the poorest people are a lot happier than those where a few people make a lot of money and a few people don’t make much money. In Denmark, a CEO only makes about three times as much as an average worker, whereas here in the U.S., you can have a CEO making many thousands of times as much as an average worker.

The author of a new book about the happiest places in the world helps us put the resurgent insider trading scandal in the United States in context.

The reason UD goes after universities like Brown and Harvard and Chicago, whose boards of trustees include increasing numbers of the morally shady hyper-rich (boards of trustees have always included small-time crooked cronies — we’re not talking about that), is that of all cultural locations, universities are supposed to be serious places, engaged in serious thought about how to live. Trustees run universities; they set all sorts of crucial policies; they sign off on all sorts of crucial decisions. Symbolically, these people embody and articulate the foundational values of their academic institutions. They’re trustees, after all, people to whom students and faculty entrust the ethical and intellectual, as well as financial, welfare of the institution.

Remember the law professor at the University of Chicago who got into all sorts of trouble and enraged thousands of people because, with a household income of around $450,000, he complained about his deep unhappiness in the current economy, under a President who might increase taxes on some of that money?

If that guy had been located anywhere outside of a university, no one would have batted an eyelash at his sense of entitlement, his refusal to take even a hint of a civic attitude toward his wealth and good fortune. In every place in this country except universities (okay; maybe churches), people positively applaud amoral acquisitiveness. Greed is good, yadda yadda…

So it’s always something of a shock to realize that a university like Harvard until recently paid each of its top investment people 35 million dollars a year, and that it hoarded unto itself a 35 billion dollar endowment.

I mean! No one’s asking for universities to be shabby thready head in the clouds sorts of places; but really…

Blinded by the billion dollar blizzards swirling around hedge fund managers, universities have been piling their boards higher and deeper with these people. Of course the universities know they’re taking a risk by elevating possibly insider-trading hedgies to positions of immense trust. Will the hedgies have time to give the school a one hundred million dollar gift before they have to go to prison? How much damage to the reputation of the school will its high-profile association with financial criminals generate?

Well, we’re about to find out.

Meanwhile, universities might take a deep breath, shake themselves off, and ask whether putting their presidents on the boards of places like Goldman Sachs, investing in firms like Steve Rattner’s, and handing the fortunes of the institution over to money-obsessed cheats is, in the long run, a wise policy.

Yesterday it was Steve Rattner… Today, another member of your university’s corporation is in the news.

All eyes are on Brown trustee Steven A. Cohen.

Plus:

The [FBI] investigation is said to look into a broad range of firms, from hedge funds to Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs is where, for ten years, Brown University President and corporation member Ruth Simmons sat on the board of trustees.

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Update: Says here Brown has invested in Rattner’s firm.

If you’re a just-hired university president, you want to go easy on the confidentiality agreements. As the new leader of Virginia Commonwealth University is discovering, it makes people wonder what you’re hiding.

Remember the brief tenure of Brian Johnson at Maryland’s Montgomery College?

Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.

… kills herself, leaving a last Facebook image of a bloodied hand from Madame Butterfly.

… 39 year old Roxana Briban chose to leave the world stage in a spectacular way, somehow inspired by the great tragic heroines she embodied on stage… One of the last messages Roxana Briban posted on Facebook is dated Wednesday four minutes before midnight and posts an image with a bloody hand, from Madame Butterfly, a part she … sang in 2008 for the National Opera.

The last messages Roxana posted online are [YouTubes of] Casta Diva from Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, and the staggering finale of Verdi’s La Traviata, where Violetta dies.

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Roxana Briban sings.

… Professor in Events and Cultural Policy.

You can play it unprettily and it still sounds pretty.

I’ve been playing from a virginal book tonight on my baby grand. In particular, I’ve been trying to master O Mistris myne, by William Byrd. (Here’s the book.) (At 1:21 on the YouTube: Hear the dissonance? Fun.)

My error-ridden rendition of this gorgeous tune and variations sounded so good that Mr UD, sitting nearby in the living room, protested when I stopped.

I’ve been trying to figure out why you can get away, when playing music for virginal, with being a bad pianist. It’s actually difficult to play these pieces (sometimes you think If it’s old, it’ll be easier than something new. Not so.); so it should sound a mess…

The best I can do is that this music combines a very strong and intensely charming tune, to which it returns very clearly again and again, even as the variations keep manically coming and going. The listener is in love with that tune, and seeks it out in a way that rather blurs the rest of the playing… The listener feels deep happiness each time his ear relocates the tune…

And, after all, the complex variations on the tune are … complex, so if your fingers are muddying them, maybe it sounds as though you’re following directions! The runs and trills, the accidents and ornaments — they merge with your modern messiness until things get all Elizabethan.

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Stephen Dedalus, with his impeccable taste, loved this same music, and in conversation with Leopold Bloom singled out a composer also in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Sweelinck.

Bully. Lunatic. Madman. Fool.

“Bo has a lot of passion for his football team.”

American universities seem to like having a special place on campus for dunces and suckers, a kind of reverse-world Center for Excellence, and that place is always the football program. The overpaid coach; the losing team; the fucked up budget; the students who don’t show up even when the games are free.

The University of Akron is a case in point. Its October 23 football game in its new $61.6 million stadium attracted 756 students.

That’s bad news for an athletic department responsible for about two-thirds of the $3.15 million annual debt payment for the stadium…

So sad, when a high-ranking administrator takes to the local paper to try to calm the populace.

In the wake of the University of Central Florida cheating scandal – brought on by the exquisite synergy of a professor who couldn’t be bothered to write his own exam (“Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?”), and students who, sensing he couldn’t be bothered, found the online exam he used and copied it – the school’s provost natters about how much integrity the school has, how this was an isolated incident, and how they’re going to “add to and improve upon our existing safeguards.”

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

UCF must sense how unpleasant its transformation into a Vegas casino, bristling with security cameras, is, since the provost lists all sorts of behavior-improvement initiatives on campus, but doesn’t mention this one. And this is the one that’s gotten the most press.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

It’s not just for classes anymore!

Your university’s games are increasingly available live, and online.

Recent studies show that students who watch football and basketball games online do just as well as, or better than, students who watch face-to-face. On every parameter – excitement, inebriation, school pride – results suggest that, as with their education, students lose nothing in quality — and indeed maybe gain in quality — by watching games online.

There’s every reason why, in a trend parallel to the onlining of American university education, we should be seeing an onlining of university sports. Universities will save hundreds of millions of dollars in stadiums, tailgate cleanups, etc. And – most importantly – students who are too shy to paint their faces and cheer in public will finally be able to take part in this campus experience.

… round-up gets going, check your university’s trustees, its Outstanding Alumni Award winners… Check the names on your most prominent buildings, because some of those donors might be going to jail…

Matt Taibbi gets at the heart of insider culture:

The other crimes on Wall Street have been so pervasive and so massive in scope in the past decade or so that good old-fashioned insider trading — hedge funds and other gamblers robbing the great mass of uninformed investors by acting on exclusive intelligence not available to the rest of us — seems almost quaint.

… However there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy.

For sure some of the robbers have turned some of their loot over to their beloved alma maters – rather in the way Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin cut Yeshiva University into some of their winnings.

UD gets a nice warm feeling as she anticipates knowing which campuses have the most insider traders in the most prominent positions.

Lowe said pharmaceutical companies refer to him as a “Thought Leader.”

Columbia! the gem of big pharma!
The home of the hack and the shill!
The shrine of drug-makers’ devotion,
The campus where all promote their pills.
Thy professors are prostitutes assembled;
They will read any script you put on view;
Their payments make lesser salesmen tremble,
When borne by the proud and the few
When borne by the proud and the few
When borne by the proud and the few,
Their payments make lesser salesmen tremble,
When borne by the proud and the few.

Of course. It’s been burning for years. It makes the University of Georgia look like the University of Bologna. In 1088.

The Mephitic Factor is getting out of hand on the Corporation of Brown University.

When you mob a university’s boardroom with the mega-rich, you expect, especially from some of the financial biggies on it, a bit of bouncy-bouncy morality-wise. Yes, there’s a whiff of fraud here, a rumor of rule-breaking there, lawsuits trailing like wisteria everywhere… Big deal. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown, sits on the university corporation board, and we all recall her remarkably destructive activity on the compensation board of Goldman Sachs. The president of the university sets the moral tone, so okay…

But now we’re talking straightforward, high-profile illegality. Brown University board member Steven Rattner is described by New York’s attorney general as “a central player in the criminal conspiracy to use bribes and kickbacks to get $150 million in state pensions that he could invest through his company Quadrangle.”

Code Brown, as the doctors say. Things are really beginning to stink.

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UD thanks Roy for the link to the Brown Daily Herald.

… is having trouble swallowing.

… I’m a big Tom Izzo fan, but the news that he has just received a $500,000 raise and use of the [university’s] private jet in severely economically depressed Michigan is a bit hard to swallow.

To put that in perspective, the university president makes roughly $570,000 per year and has use of a state car.

Izzo makes 3.5 million, plus winning incentives.