The only sensible way to look at this is if these guys weren’t helping international criminals steal money they’d be senior officers in the German High Command. Let them have their fun.

… Markus Braun sat on the Deutsche Bank (bank of presidents!) advisory board. Had a very close relationship with Deutsche Bank.

… Kinda sweetly reminiscent of Madoff, no? Madoff up to the moment of his arrest advised important financial and educational institutions; oversight agencies utterly failed to notice that he was stealing billions of dollars…

UD‘s colleagues Anthony Yezer and Robert Van Order appear to be small players in the very large, competitive game of corporate funded and controlled research results (even corporate controlled faculty) in the contemporary American and European university.

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Lately, some of the bigger players seem to be jostling each other out of the way for the right to pleasure the financial sector. BABY, TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO SAY AND HOW TO SAY IT. WRITE IT YOURSELF IF YOU WANT AND I’LL SIGN IT. LIE BACK AND NIBBLE MY INTELLECTUAL NEUTRALITY.

Harvard’s bipolar babe, Joseph Biederman, pitched his research center to Johnson and Johnson by writing to them that it would “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.”

Most of these chicks deny. Biederman burbles happily away and Harvard can’t get enough of it…

Sure, when he gets really out there they sanction him … But he’s still a big girl on campus… And always will be!

So here you’ve got this latest article in the New York Times about how a German bank gave a couple of universities there a lot of money and

the bank was allowed a say in the hiring of … two professors. It was also given the right to have bank employees designated as adjunct professors, allowed to grade student work. Appropriate topics for research and research strategy would be decided by a steering committee made up of two academics and two bank employees, with the managing director, a bank employee, casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie.

Deutsche Bank was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years. The agreement even specified that the laboratory would be located “in close proximity to the Deutsche Bank” headquarters in Berlin.

Finally, the whole agreement was to be secret…

At last my heart’s an open door; and my secret love’s no secret anymore!

… 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.