UD always wondered what sort of people pay ridiculous sums for conferences like these.

Russian spies.

… no university president comes anywhere close to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson. An article in Bloomberg about presidents sitting on corporate boards reviews Jackson’s steely focus on personal enrichment.

Jackson … sits on five corporate boards, more than most college presidents, after stepping down from a sixth in April. She traveled to Milwaukee and Houston to attend shareholder meetings for International Business Machines Corp. and Marathon Oil on two successive April days.

Shareholders at IBM, Marathon Oil, FedEx Corp. and NYSE Euronext filed proxy statements this year or in 2009 questioning Jackson’s ability to juggle jobs.

“Nobody should be sitting on that many boards,” said Emil Rossi, the trustee for shares who filed a proxy statement with his son to protest Jackson’s board nomination at Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider. Of 14 candidates, Jackson placed 11th in the voting and retained her seat. While getting the fewest votes for election at Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a Newark, New Jersey-based utility, she also held her board post there.

Founded in 1824, RPI is the nation’s oldest technological university, according to its website. Jackson earned $1.6 million from RPI in the year ended June 30, 2008, making her the highest-paid leader of a nonprofit private college in the U.S., according to the latest rankings by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jackson also reaped $982,628 in fees and other compensation such as stock awards from IBM, Public Service, New York-based NYSE Euronext and Marathon Oil in 2009, plus $403,823 from FedEx and Medtronic Inc., a Minneapolis-based medical-device maker, for their latest completed fiscal years, proxy statements show.

Faculty members said Jackson isn’t devoting enough attention to RPI’s endowment losses and credit issues. In May 2009, RPI had its debt downgraded to A3 from A2 by Moody’s Investors Service. While retaining the rating, Moody’s in March changed RPI’s outlook to “stable” from “negative.” RPI’s endowment fell 23 percent in a year, to $612.8 million on June 30, 2009, according to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, based in Washington.

“Her first priority needs to be this university,” said Jim Napolitano, a professor of physics at RPI since 1992.

… Jackson declined to be interviewed…

There’s lots of other stuff in the article about people like Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, who as a Goldman Sachs director “approved a $67.9 million bonus, still a Wall Street record, for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.” It’s worth reading in full.

The Bloomberg writer notes that corporate board sitting takes presidents away from their campus responsibilities, makes them vulnerable to lawsuits, and poses many ethical hazards. So why do presidents do it?

An expert in the field says: “Universities are feeling the pressure for fundraising, and [presidents] think creating these linkages will bring them more philanthropy, although there’s no evidence to suggest that actually happens.”

The philanthropy theory is a very nice way of trying to account for why corporate boards are so irresistable… But as this observer notes, there’s no evidence things work like that.

The simplest explanation seems to UD the best: Sitting on corporate boards is the easiest, pleasantest way in the whole wide world to scare up enormous sums of money for yourself.

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Update: Muckety provides a map.

UD, a fervent amateur pianist, plays a modest baby grand at home. This unassuming instrument seems right for UD‘s skill level.

But she can’t help be excited about the news that an anonymous donor has just given 28 big Steinways to George Washington University’s music department — located on the first floor of the building that also houses, on the sixth floor, UD‘s office.

Six floors down from my desk! 28 beauts!

Of course I’m not worthy of them. Of course it would be an obscenity, UD tromping down there with her Baroque for Babies books…

But I can dream…

The Grassley Report on pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science is here.

Put the words art controversy into Google News at the moment, and you’ll be directed to a couple of articles about an exhibit in Vienna of North Korean paintings.

The canvases are all Socialist Realist propaganda: Kim Il-sung accepts the hysterically grateful embrace of a soldier; happy round-cheeked girls take up their brooms. The pictures burst forth from the walls, big and bright; and their titles tell you exactly what’s up: The Dear Leader Reassures the Nation of His Commitment to its Security and Well-Being.

There’s a pretty impressive market for North Korean Socialist Realist canvases in the west, I suppose because there aren’t many of them (NK releases some of this work to Chinese dealers, but it’s still a closed country, and not much gets out), and because virtually no other countries produce this sort of thing anymore. Sophisticated Europeans and Americans seem to have a taste for what some people call Communist Kitsch; and while one can certainly find postmodern ironists in Europe and America who experiment with the conventions of agitprop, the North Korean product is authentic, part of a living totalitarian world.

The Vienna controversy arises from the exhibit’s total lack of commentary. You go there and see the pictures. There’s no introductory statement from the museum about how these paintings are cult-of-personality propaganda, how they were painted by servants of the state who, should someone buy them, will receive no compensation, since all proceeds go to the state… Nothing at all, apparently, frames this collection of comically stultifying products of arguably the world’s most repressive state.

The exhibition does not include any background explanation on the totalitarian nature of the North Korean regime, a compromise by the museum with authorities in Pyongyang that came under fire from some politicians and artists. But the MAK forcefully denied it was giving a free pass to the regime’s propaganda.

“Visitors know very well that North Korea is the last dictatorship in the world. There is really no need to remind them of this fact. We just want to show North Korean contemporary art, not to talk about politics,” [the exhibit director] told France24.com

The director of the museum says the same thing:

I am neither a politician nor a political scientist. And besides, everybody knows what sort of a regime that is; we don’t have to explain this to anyone,” [he] said, sipping coffee in his office on the same floor as the North Korean artworks.

The exhibit, then, represents a collision of two aesthetic extremes: The most explicit message-bearing art imaginable meets art for art’s sake. The most dire expression of the reduction of human life to ideology meets the nonchalant gesture of the Vienna curator and director: We need say nothing by way of accompaniment to these images. They are art, and that is all.

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And yet they are arguably not art, since they are the entirely conventional work of anonymous hacks done at the behest of a propaganda machine. Further, since they present themselves as political objects with a message, a message intended to inspire the North Koreans and – I guess – convert outsiders, it’s a little strange for the museum directors to take them apolitically, a little unfair to their intention…

After all, the exhibitors’ aestheticist gesture is itself a political expediency, arising as it does from the museum’s compromise with the regime, its willingness to be silent about its nature in exchange for permission to mount the show.

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A Los Angeles Times writer asks:

[Is the show] merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?

It’s not that, as the reporter worries, the museum is a kind of a dupe of the North Koreans, allowing itself to be used as a platform for their social philosophy. No one thinks North Korea is anything other than a nightmare, and bringing its nightmare images of itself to Austria only deepens the darkness. But there is the intriguing matter of the striking popularity of North Korean propaganda images among hip Europeans and Americans.

[The] work has apparently become a profitable export that is able to skirt North Korea’s international isolation, helping to bring cash back home.

Ardent collectors can travel to the country to shop for art, said Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. Or works can be acquired at specialized galleries in more easily accessible locations, such as Beijing. Art can even be ordered directly from North Korean artists or the associations they work for.

The North Koreans themselves “did not understand at first why we would want such an exhibition.” You bet. Why should their trash generate ardency and high prices among people you’d expect to want Rothko or Freud on their walls?

UD asks her readers.

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Update: “What some in the west would call propaganda.” The BBC points out that really it’s a matter of opinion. Some might say what the North Koreans are drawing is propaganda. Others, great art.

… isn’t a satire.

Wall Street Journal: What should one look for when tasting a tea?

[Tea shop chief Thomas] Lee: It’s difficult. For instance, with Long Jing, a green tea, it’s a taste of tastelessness.

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Same crap here.

Raymond Scott is a British book dealer. One night, about ten years ago, he was in Cuba visiting his girlfriend, a dancer at Havana’s Tropicana Club, when his eye fell upon a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio just sitting there at the bar.

O brave new world,
That has such manuscripts in’t!

He grabbed it, hid it in his house in County Durham, and then, last year, flew to Washington’s Folger Library and asked the staff to verify its authenticity.

The staff had him arrested, and now his trial in England begins.

He says it’s all a conspiracy. “[E]xperts desperate to recover the stolen Durham University folio had conspired against him.”

UD is unclear what he means. As the trial progresses, perhaps the basis of his defense will become clearer.

The modestly named Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan’s new flagship education facility, has officially opened in Astana. President Nursultan Nazarbayev presided over the June 28 opening ceremony of the state-of-the-art campus on the outskirts of Kazakhstan’s rapidly developing capital.

“Young people should strive to enter this place. I agreed that the university would be named after me so that no-one would let me down,” said Nazarbayev addressing the university’s first matriculating class…

Yeah. Or, as an observer of Harvard University recently put it:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

It’s just like the NCAA. People look at the NCAA and they say Why is that organization tax exempt? Why are all sorts of university sports goodies tax exempt? Do you know how much a luxury box costs? Hell of a tax write-off. Do you know how much the head of the NCAA makes? And it’s a non-profit! The tax laws make it easier for universities to pay their coaches four million dollars a year in order to recruit generations of players who leave school in nine months. Etc.

Eventually, people will begin to talk about immense wealth-generating tax exemptions based on all those fine upstanding educational values.

Indeed, because of the tax breaks, schools like Princeton and Harvard have become multibillionaires, a fact their struggling localities have noted… The localities want the schools taxed…

… U.S. municipalities still reeling from the economic crisis turn to their local universities, whose land holdings are mostly tax- exempt, to close budget shortfalls.

But wait just a minute! The schools will point out how they’re struggling too. They used to have 30 billion dollars, and now they’re skidding along on 20!

Princeton used to have 16 billion and now it has around 13 billion… Its neighbors note that it maintains a teeny student body. Why does it need all that tax-exempt-begotten-money? Does each student get a one million dollar scholarship?

… [One dealer] said that the Kansas incident shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of ticket brokers, just as the misdeeds of crooked car dealer or a rogue government official wouldn’t mean their entire professions were tainted.

Las Vegas ticket broker Ken Solky agrees. Yet he said the pressures on campus ticket managers to generate revenue for their schools could lead some to cut corners.

“You’re in a position to (ensure) that there are butts in a seat,” said Solky, president of his industry’s national association. “If I’m doing my job right, and I’m in the athletics department, I’m going to do whatever I can to get fans into the arena.”

The Kansas incident. A tiny drop in the big university sports slop bucket.

He liked to ski, and one of his children attended George Washington University. The couple donated money to the university during the 2008-09 school year.

Details about a husband and wife recently arrested in Boston for spying for Russia.

Feral rabbits on the University of Victoria campus face death or relocation and sterilization if they cross into “rabbit-free zones” starting this summer.

“The ground is just littered with rabbit feces,” said Tom Smith, executive director of facilities management. “There are many places on campus where you don’t even want to walk across a lawn.”

In its latest attempt to control the 1,600 bunnies that run rampant across campus, the university unveiled a population management plan on Monday.

The centrepiece of the plan are two zones – a “safe zone” in the centre of campus and a “dead zone” around residences, sports fields and nearby neighbourhoods.

Two hundred of the fuzzy creatures will be allowed to live in the 40-hectare safe zone within the perimeter of Ring Road. Food will be provided to entice the bunnies to stay within the prescribed space.

Rabbits found outside Ring Road will be euthanized…

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(Background on this post’s title here.)

A new British radio show transforms hedge funds into performance art.

A recent guest explained her view of hedge-fund strategy in her native Armenian, without translation.

Let’s play with all this money from our students and from the government! You get some; we get some…

You remember the Karen Pletz story, the one that started with the news that an obscure osteopathy school boasted one of the nation’s highest-paid college presidents [Scroll down.]…

Well, the lies and resignations and firings and lawsuits are flying, and we’ll follow all of that on this blog, especially if people say amusing things. But here’s an inevitable feature of stories like this (See Benjamin Ladner, American University. Indeed, one of the whistle-blowers in this case “appended [to her ignored letter to the board of trustees] a lengthy article from Washingtonian magazine about extravagant spending by a former president of American University that led to a federal investigation.”) — a lengthy article about how for years tons of warnings, petitions, complaints, rumors, and letters were dumped on the board of trustees.

But – as was the case at AU – when the board of trustees is itself scummy, none of that makes any difference.