There’s a great photo of a (Goldman Sachs-controlled, for-profit) college admission director’s vanity plate here.

There’s a great email from an admissions director here. Oh, let’s quote it.

Why are we letting them off of the phone? Are we making them push us off 3 TIMES?? We have proven that we can close the students we talk to but we need to talk to more students!!!!

Testimony from a former admissions person is here. Oh, let’s quote that too.

“The scales are so tipped; these people have no way of possibly making a good decision. …It was like we were used car salesmen. We would basically psychologically manipulate people into doing this. My master’s was in clinical psychology, and it was like I was using my powers for evil.”

And of course:

According to a JP Morgan Chase analyst report in 2010, [Goldman’s] schools have among the highest tuition of publicly traded corporations in higher education. Tuition at EDMC’s Art Institutes schools can average about $50,000 for an associate’s degree and between $77,000 to nearly $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree.

It’s predatory capitalism, folks: John Boehner changed the laws:

John Boehner, then the chairman of the House education committee, helped to eliminate a key provision that had moderated the growth of exclusively online universities.

The so-called 50 percent rule, which required half of all students to be at a ground campus in order for a school to be eligible for federal aid, had been put in place to discourage dubious distance education programs that offered subpar learning. Boehner helped to nix the rule in a budget agreement that took effect in early 2006, allowing schools to expand enrollments — and revenues — without having to invest in additional ground campuses. A spokesman for Boehner did not respond to requests for comment.

At which point fools rushed in. And the wolves ate them. They’re still eating them.

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Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, sat on the board of Goldman Sachs while it re-made for-profit online higher education.

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UD thanks Roy.

A student at Brown University assesses the presidency of Ruth Simmons.

Simmons took a voluntary pay cut from Brown of about $100,000, but that turned out to be a symbolic gesture when she stepped down from her $323,000-a-year gig on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs with $5.7 million in company stock.

Her resignation from Goldman, though, came only after she had tied Brown to the billions in bailout-backed executive bonuses she approved as a member of Goldman’s compensation committee, drawing the ire of the national media and dragging the University into the recession’s starkest example of tone-deaf corporate greed.

Until recently, the University’s directory listed Villarreal as an administrator in the Division of Biology and Medicine. In an email to The [Brown University] Herald, Mark Nickel, Brown’s interim director of news and communications, called the listing”a professional and collegial courtesy” during Villarreal’s training at Rhode Island hospital. Villarreal was not an administrator…

Brown’s corporate denialist explains that a Brown administrator was not an administrator… That, you know, Brown writes these things in its web pages out of courtesy…

There’s no setting more courteous than your university’s medical school. Courtesy listings which call people administrators when they’re not administrators, and – more commonly – professors when they’re not professors. Courtesy (aka guest) authorships on research papers. Courtesy visits from pharma reps…

I declare, it’s like the first five minutes of Gone With the Wind over there! Everybody dressed in crinoline and bowing and scraping and extending courtesies left and right…

When reality bumps up against these exquisite poses, it’s always unpleasant. Robert Villareal, recent undergrad and medical school student at Brown, has already organized an impressive criminal drug distribution network.

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And speaking of backtracking, Brown has also been having second thoughts about one of its more idiotic money-making ideas: interest-rate swaps. As one financial advisor comments:

“The basic assumptions were wrong… Under ideal circumstance they could have worked out, but what are the chances when you have a 30-year deal that everything would go exactly as predicted?”

Brown has unloaded, at a cost of five million dollars, one of the swaps; there are two others which will cost them twenty million to unload. Two of the three swaps are with Goldman Sachs, on whose board Brown’s president sat for ten years. Reporters want to talk to her, and to Goldman, about that connection, but

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

Ruth Simmons, Brown’s president since 2001, resigned from the Goldman Sachs board in February 2010 after 10 years. Calls seeking comment from her spokeswoman, Marisa Quinn, weren’t returned.

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.

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.

The New York Times seems determined to keep writing about the scandal of university presidents serving on multiple corporate boards. Good.

The piece has a headline and a sub-headline.

The Academic-Industrial Complex

A Fear That Academics are Distracted Directors

Some analysts worry that academics are possibly imperiling or compromising the independence of their universities when they venture onto boards. Others question whether scholars have the time — and financial sophistication — needed to police the country’s biggest corporations while simultaneously juggling the demands of running a large university.

Why do the presidents do it?

Moolah.

Bigtime.

The attractions are clear for the president: lucrative extra pay and useful networking, among other reasons. For a dozen hours or so each month for each board served, in addition to preparation time, and their wise advice, they can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University and the first African-American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs board until she stepped down this year. In 2009, she earned $323,539 from her Goldman directorship, including stock grants and options, as calculated by Goldman, and left the board with stock worth at the time around $4.3 million. This is in addition to her salary from Brown, $576,000 this year.

[Shirley Ann] Jackson earned $1.38 million from her directorships, comprising both cash and stock. That’s in addition to $1.6 million from her day job, including bonuses and other benefits.

Plus you learn new things! One president who was on Merck’s board says: “It was one long seminar in the sciences and molecular biology.”

Great. But if you were taking a seminar, why did Merck pay you? Why didn’t you pay Merck?

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Why do the corporations do it?

Universities are among the few institutions trusted by the public …and companies believe they can associate themselves with this quality by installing an academic on the board.

“Corporations think this is a way of enhancing their prestige and legitimacy, especially in the case of Ivy League presidents,” he says. “I suspect that’s the principal motivation. It’s probably not for their business sense.”

John Gillespie, who has written a book on corporate boards, “Money for Nothing,” says academics are often selected for another reason — because they are less likely to rock the boat than directors from the business world.

Academics may be trained to ask tough questions in their own fields, but when confronted with tricky business issues far above their level of expertise they “often become as meek as church mice,” he says.

Right. They’re learning things. They’re taking one long multi-million-dollar seminar.

One expert on corporate boards does not mince words about one of this blog’s favorite board-sitters, Brown’s Ruth Simmons.

… Goldman Sachs was hurt having Dr. Simmons as a director because she lacks financial expertise and was focused more than she should have been on other things like the firm’s philanthropy… “That seat could have been held by someone who understood derivatives.”

But she was learning!

As for the exceptionally greedy Jackson of Rennselaer:

“[I]t is just physically impossible to do the work necessary to be a good director” on so many boards. The Corporate Library estimates that board members must invest 240 hours a year, including meetings and preparation, to do the work properly. But it can become a full-time job if the company runs into trouble.

Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance specialist at the University of Delaware, is highly critical of university presidents who serve on several boards, although he is reluctant to single out particular directors or companies. “If you see a university president on multiple boards, that’s a problem,” he says. “There is no way you can do the job. Someone has got short shrift.”

As academics serve on a greater number of boards, there is also an increased chance of reputational risk if a company runs into difficulties.

“Woe to the university president who would sit on BP’s board,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Erroll B. Davis Jr., chancellor of the University System of Georgia, was on the BP board for 12 years, though he stepped down in April, just days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, causing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His retirement, however, wasn’t enough to protect him from being named, along with other directors, in a small number of lawsuits filed against BP over the disaster.

Plus… He’s only a business professor at Harvard, but… Bill George! Here’s looking at you!

And don’t forget Ruth Simmons. She’s left the Goldman board, but she’ll probably be named in various lawsuits against it.

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I think Phyllis Wise, who has compromised herself and her university by sitting on Nike’s board, puts the matter best:

“Many years ago, academicians tended to be dreamers,” she says. “We assumed somebody else would figure out where the money was going to come from. That notion is no longer the case.”

I mean, I think Wise intends to refer here to the money that comes to the university. But UD prefers to read her statement differently.

Those poor silly old dreamers! They never got rich.

That notion is no longer the case.

… 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.

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

… The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest U.S. union for public employees and health-care workers, [has] advised its members to withhold their votes to re-elect Blankfein and President Gary Cohn, 49, to the board.

Two other Goldman Sachs board members have also been in the spotlight. Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. senior partner who isn’t running for re-election, is suspected by U.S. investigators of tipping off Galleon Group LLC founder Raj Rajaratnam ahead of Buffett’s investment in the company, a person with direct knowledge of the inquiry said last month…

Stephen Friedman, a former senior partner of Goldman Sachs who has served on the board since 2005, resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest because Goldman Sachs is regulated by the Fed. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it plans hearings about why Friedman was allowed to buy Goldman Sachs stock even when he was playing a role in regulating it…

Blankfein’s flippant remark to a British journalist last year that he was doing “God’s work” may backfire at this year’s meeting as three of the seven shareholder proposals came from religious organizations such as the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, a Catholic missionary order based in Maryknoll, New York. Goldman Sachs’s board has opposed all of the proposals…

Our interest here at University Diaries is in the two Goldman Sachs directors with university positions: Ruth Simmons of Brown, and Bill George of Harvard. But it never hurts to get the bigger picture.

… for Ruth Simmons to start thinking about her decade-long directorship of Goldman Sachs.

At one point during the hearings, Sen. Carl Levin played the Jimmy Stewart good-banker role from “It’s a Wonderful Life” by describing capitalism as it’s supposed to be. Levin noted that Wall Street “has been seen as an engine of growth, betting on America’s successes and not its failures.”

Well, that’s what Wall Street proclaims in its advertisements for itself. But when defending themselves against legal charges, Wall Streeters retreat to honesty by saying that everybody knows they are really there to make money and that it’s naive to hold them accountable for the social impact of what they do.

Does she think that her firm should be held accountable for the social impact of what it does?

[There is] a horrifying mismatch between Wall Street’s vast power over the economy and its utter lack of conscience. Although Goldman [Sachs] has long been the most prestigious firm on the Street and therefore nominally the heir to the [J.P.] Morgan lineage [of social responsibility], it has never matured into that older role. It couldn’t really afford any sense of noblesse oblige about the American economy. On the contrary: Goldman’s corporate ethos is clearly more that of a predator than a protector. Indeed, Goldman became known as the savviest and most prestigious firm on the street in part because it had no scruples about simultaneously betting against products it was selling. One reason for Goldman’s success was that as a firm it developed a sharper and more pervasive hedge-fund mentality before the other investment banks did.

Utter lack of conscience. No scruples. Predator.

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… The broader public and political resentment, as one crisis manager put it, grows out of the sense that Goldman Sachs not only hasn’t “shared the pain” experienced by the rest of America, but has “profited from it.”

… The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the guest of honor at a private Park Avenue cocktail soiree for wealthy Obama supporters this month, surely wasn’t pleased when it was reported that a Goldman Sachs partner was present…

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Update: Other people – academics and non-academics – with Goldman Sachs problems:

Republican frontrunner Meg Whitman tried again to put her previous relationship with the bank behind her, telling the Associated Press she regrets taking part in a now-banned stock sale practice involving the company and that she left its board after 15 months because she “wasn’t a good fit.”

But her remarks only provided ammunition to political foes seeking to remind voters that Whitman, a former Goldman Sachs board member, has a past with the investment firm now under scrutiny for its role in the national financial crisis.

… She sat on Goldman’s board from October 2001 to December 2002, a job that paid the equivalent of $475,000 in cash and stock options.

… Whitman told the Associated Press Tuesday that she stepped down from the board position because it “wasn’t a good fit.” …

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A top prospect for the Supreme Court was a paid member of an advisory panel for the embattled investment firm Goldman Sachs, federal financial disclosures show.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to the financial disclosures she filed when President Obama appointed her last year to her current post. Kagan served on the Goldman panel from 2005 through 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, and received a $10,000 stipend for her service in 2008, her disclosure forms show.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

The advisory panel met once a year to discuss public policy issues and was not involved in any investment decisions, Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

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Are we beginning to get a sense of this amazing gig? I mean, Kagan’s?

She goes to New York City once a

year to DISCUSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

public policy. Just sit there, baby! Maybe you let everybody else do the talking… How many people are on the committee? Maybe you say five things… Then you take a train back to Cambridge and wait for your ten thousand dollar check.

President Obama has stressed that he wants the next Supreme Court justice to be able to relate to ordinary Americans. Looks like Kagan has aced that one.

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Ruth Simmons’ fellow academic board member, Bill George, is a business professor at Harvard (though he lives in Minnesota). He hasn’t said anything about recent Goldman Sachs events. Here’s something he said shortly before the shit hit the fan.

Leadership starts with gaining alignment with the mission and values of the organization: What are we about? What do we believe as a group? Goldman Sachs, where I serve on the board, has achieved solid alignment around its mission: “The clients’ interests always come first.”

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times:

… Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.

So why were bankers raking it in? My take, reflecting the efforts of financial economists to make sense of the catastrophe, is that it was mainly about gambling with other people’s money. The financial industry took big, risky bets with borrowed funds — bets that paid high returns until they went bad — but was able to borrow cheaply because investors didn’t understand how fragile the industry was.

And what about the much-touted benefits of financial innovation? … [A] lot of that innovation was about creating the illusion of safety, providing investors with “false substitutes” for old-fashioned assets like bank deposits. Eventually the illusion failed — and the result was a disastrous financial crisis.

… An intriguing proposal is about to be unveiled from, of all places, the International Monetary Fund. In a leaked paper prepared for a meeting this weekend, the fund calls for a Financial Activity Tax — yes, FAT — levied on financial-industry profits and remuneration.

Such a tax, the fund argues, could “mitigate excessive risk-taking.” It could also “tend to reduce the size of the financial sector,” which the fund presents as a good thing…

University Diaries proposes CAT – a Corporate Activities Tax – to be levied on universities whose presidents and other administrators (and professors) sit on the boards of corporations like Goldman Sachs and thereby bring shame and ridicule to their schools.

Let Ruth Simmons and Mark Emmert and Phyllis Wise enrich themselves as corporate stooges. But make their universities pay a price for it.

… The board at Goldman has seen its constitution change in light of the financial crisis, with Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, standing down, and Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey who is becoming entwined in the Galleon hedge fund scandal, resigning.

… The change in constitution of the board could help Goldman deal with some of its issues head on…

So Gupta left because he’s about to be accused of insider trading. And Simmons? The writer for CNN Money doesn’t really say why she’s leaving, though she seems to think Goldman will be better able to deal with its issues “head on” without Simmons.

And why is that?

Because Simmons is incompetent as a director of a complex financial organization. She seems to be good at being a university president. She should probably have stuck to that. But now, after a decade at Goldman Sachs, she’s in deep doo-doo.

… has been on top of the Why the Hell is Ruth Simmons on the Goldman Sachs Board? story; but there’s also a very strong-minded Brown student who’s been after her. And of course UD‘s had her own wee say on the matter.

Now that Simmons has quit the board, Volokh Conspiracy wraps things up.

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UD thanks Brad for the link.

… writing from a Brown University student, as he struggles with his sense of implication in the suicide of an NYU student he didn’t know.

In places this opinion piece gets too highfalutin. But who cares. It’s that rare bit of writing which sheds protective covering and just says it.

With full awareness of the mystery of the act in general, and his distance from this person in particular, the Brown student makes two suggestions:

… The first line of business I’d proffer would be Brown’s departure from the heinously overrated U.S. News and World Report rankings, with a clear statement from President Ruth Simmons that Brown is withdrawing to fight the elitism of Ivy academia. Expressing to the general public that higher education is not about exclusion would reshape the expectations of parents and students, almost certainly alleviating academic pressure.

Another measure would be an encouragement of student-faculty relationships. Bringing undergraduates closer to professors would assist in augmenting self-confidence and inclusion. My thinking is faculty dinners and coffee dates funded by the University (I do know that Brown-RISD Hillel has begun something like this through Shabbat dinners). In these more intimate settings, we can emphasize community…

Although I think the student’s right that isolation and pressure play into some university suicides, I don’t think statistics support the idea that there’s something special about the Ivies, and similar places, like NYU. The two most recent student suicides both happened at St. Cloud State University. It’s true that Caltech has had three suicides in the last few months, all Asian-American males; but my sense of the situation, from covering these events for many years, is that a feeling of intense academic and social pressure can be experienced on any campus.

The faculty-student relationships idea seems to me a good one; it’s likely that greater warmth from professors would make students happier and give them a boost. But administrators have lots of worries about inappropriate closeness; the writer’s language (“intimate settings”) might well scare them. And professors worry about fairness. If I take this bright, fascinating, charming, student in my class out to lunch, will it seem favoritism …?

Orin Starn, the sports-anthropology professor, is less sanguine. Duke, he says, has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.

… If you were starting from scratch at Duke, no one would have imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge outlay of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it should be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it’s taking.”

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Even before the lacrosse scandal, alarms had been sounded over the coarsening of undergraduate life. Toward the end of Nan Keohane’s tenure as president, the school undertook an extensive study examining the lives of women at Duke. The project’s summation reads like a scholarly anticipation of Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the 2004 novel (published after Wolfe’s daughter graduated from Duke) portraying college life as a soul-deadening, booze-fueled marathon of sexual predation:

Students rarely go on formal dates but instead attend parties in large groups, followed by “hook-ups”—unplanned sexual encounters typically fueled by alcohol. Men and women agreed the double standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women lose status. Fraternities control the mainstream social scene to such an extent that women feel like they play by the men’s rules. Social life is further complicated by a number of embedded hierarchies, from the widely understood ranking of Greek organizations to the opposite trajectories women and men take over four years, with women losing status in the campus environment while men gain status.

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[T]he University of Virginia has allowed its top seeded men’s team to continue playing into the [lacrosse murder] post-season. … George Huguely V, the indicted midfielder from the men’s Cavalier squad, has, for nearly all intents and purposes, already admitted to the crime, and, in my mind at least, also implicated — albeit on a very different level — the culture and friends that provoked reckless excess and failed to take notice of a young man spiraling out of control.

… [T]he fact that Huguely was at times reckless and violent, particularly when drunk, and was alarmingly obsessive about Love, would have been recognized by fellow players, and perhaps coaches, too, and certainly should have been addressed. The fact that this was not his first violent interaction with Love is the strongest charge against the friends and teammates that failed to recognize the severity of the situation.

In truth, there are many places in the game’s culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008–when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic–garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

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Huguely’s team is … one on which eight players have been charged with alcohol-related offenses. Is anyone paying attention?… If things go terribly wrong, the culture of protection — including parents, coaches and alumni boosters — hire high-priced lawyers who manage to get records expunged and witnesses to forget what they saw.