… wow.
Oakland University [business school] professor Joseph Schiele is charged with seven different counts including possession with intent to deliver, felony firearm and operating a drug house.
… [T]ips from Oakland University [in Rochester Michigan] students started to pile up in January 2016. Students were reporting something suspicious was going on at the professor’s home.
An array of drugs was on offer, including ketamine.
“Oh my goodness … ketamine? I was thinking like Adderall or weed, or something. That’s a big jump. Wow,” said student Nichole Hill.
The coverage includes a way scary mug shot. Professors typically do not look this scary.
This story is shocking on many levels, but the most shocking appears in the headline. A B-School professor is Giving Drugs to Students.
Not selling drugs to students?
Scoot in close, kiddies, while we remind ourselves why UD‘s Beware the B-School Boys category gets one of the most strenuous workouts on this blog. Here’s one Professor Horsky, who for more than twenty years both taught bright-eyed b-school boylets and girlets at the University of Rochester how to do business, and at the same time defrauded the United States government of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Horsky faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. As part of his plea deal, he paid a $100 million penalty. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 10.
I gave you all that fucking money so leave me the fuck out of jail!
And no – in answer to your question… Not one person at Rochester for two decades ever experienced one scintilla of suspicion that one of their professors was a spectacular financial criminal. Not one person. They were totally blindsided by this.
“The University of Rochester and Simon Business School had no knowledge of the situation involving professor emeritus Daniel Horsky, and fully support the judicial process in this case going forward.”
Yeah. Wouldn’t want the IRS sniffing around, wondering why this person retains his emeritus status and all that. They’re still boasting about him! It is kind of strange.
And this one’s at already incredibly notorious Florida State University, run by a know-nothing politician, recent haunt of Jameis Winston, etc., etc., etc., etc. (For etc., etc., etc., etc., put Florida State University in my search engine.)
A federal grand jury handed down an indictment on embezzlement charges for former Florida State University finance professor James S. Doran on Thursday.
The indictment claims that between May 2010 and March 2011, 39-year-old Doran embezzled more than $650,000 in funds held by FSU while he was an assistant professor.
Says, somewhat mysteriously, he “embezzled FSU property valued at more than $5,000.” Given that he oversaw a student-run investment fund, UD‘s wondering if he pinched some of that, and/or helped himself to the classic objets of professor-desir (computers, cameras, anything of value that can be moved).
One of UD‘s most commonly used categories on this blog is Beware the B-School Boys, in which UD attempts to help you see econ and MBA grads coming. (For details, click on the category’s name at the end of this post.) Two recent instructive cases from Harvard are worth mentioning.
Florian Homm played a little basketball for Harvard when he was an undergrad there, but his big thing was business: econ undergrad; MBA grad. He seems always to have been a cultured crook, an intellectual Bernard Madoff who, after years of hiding from the law, has lately been captured. Bernie crafted crude Ponzis; Florian engaged in portfolio pumping, which takes a finer Italian hand.
As with nutty professor Paul Frampton, the New York Times writer covering Florian’s demise cannot help getting giggly:
Given Mr. Homm’s flair for drama, it was perhaps fitting that he was arrested at the Uffizi Gallery, famous for an exquisite collection that includes works by Michelangelo, Rubens, Tintoretto and Rembrandt…
But it is unclear why Mr. Homm, who is 201 centimeters, or 6 feet 7 inches, tall and something of a celebrity in Germany, would appear in a place where there are many German tourists and he was likely to be recognized.
The seduction of beauty! From Sozzo Tegliacci to the SEC in one shattering second!
But seriously, folks; there’s something about a Harvard and high-style Euro charisma that makes investors unwary… And UD‘s a little worried that you’ll still fall for Florian in his latest iteration:
“The pursuit of happiness is not correlated with the pursuit of money,” [Homm said in a recent interview]… Mr. Homm insisted he was no longer the same person who once owned a stake in a Berlin brothel and lived in a $5 million residence on Majorca with a Russian table dancer. He said he prayed daily and was devoting his energy to charity work.
Okay so I want you to bring a smidgen of doubt to this self-description too, okay? Remember: Beware the B-School Boys.
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Though he seems never to have taken any classes with him, Florian claims to have known and even worked with Harvard’s notorious professor Michael Porter (Porter has said he does not remember Florian). Porter’s now-bankrupt Monitor Group failed to register as a lobbying outfit, did fellatial obeisance to Muammar Gaddafi, and so on and so on. If you didn’t put your money on Florian, maybe you’re tempted to put it on Porter, who remains a Harvard professor, and is not being chased by the SEC. Maybe you’re tempted to make him your business strategy consultant.
Beware!
[Porter’s] picture of CEO-superdeciders helps justify their huge compensation and the congratulatory press coverage, and yet [it] has little foundation in fact or logic. The strategy business … lasted so long in part because it supports and advances the pretensions of the C-suite.
Porter’s strategy theory is to CEOs what ancient religions were to tribal chieftains. The ceremonies are ultimately about the divine right of the rulers to rule — a kind of covert form of political theory. [One observer says] it is “like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think that it does.” … [Monitor was] doomed from the outset. Its embarrassing debacle marked the beginning of the end of the era of business metaphysics and the exposure of the most over-valued idea on the planet: sustainable competitive advantage.
A trustee of the University of Colorado Business School has been indicted for insider trading. Guilty or innocent, he seems already to have been scrubbed from the school’s pages.
A top partner at the firm is also representing one of the suspected leakers, James V. Mazzo, who was the chief executive officer of Advanced Medical at the time of the takeover.
What could be duller than insider trading? It’s so de rigueur even Martha Stewart does it. But universities don’t yet regard it as mainstream enough to want insider traders on their boards of trustees.
UD has said for years that with the takeover of BOTs by way high-flying business people (see the recent Unpleasantness at the Board of Visitors Club) we’re going to see more and more trustees dumped because of suspicions of or accusations of or convictions on insider trading charges.
Now three universities – UC Irvine, University of San Diego, and Chapman – need to start a Google News search on Mazzo, a trustee.
Quick. Online. Largely bogus course content. Incredibly high tuition paid for by someone else.
The always pretentiously named but often cheesy executive MBA degree has always been a major candidate for fraud, and I’m sure Baruch College isn’t the first to run its program fraudulently, but it’s the first to get caught changing student grades so all the money keeps coming in.
The dean in charge when the forgery was going on has flown the coop and landed in a nice job at the University of Connecticut, which must be thrilled to have hired such a great manager.
Here’s another one. Business students at NYU love to hear him lecture on bankruptcy, but he may also know a lot about fraud.
It’s a category on University Diaries. See it? And that’s because over the years UD has covered so many stories of generous MBA guys getting their names on university buildings, and then, when it turned out the money was a small part of an empire of stolen goods, getting their names sandblasted off the buildings, that she decided to collect all of the stories under one heading.
And here’s yet another one.
Ten years ago, the University of Michigan inaugurated Sam Wyly Hall. At the ceremony, the business school dean kvelled about “what the University of Michigan helped [Wyly] to do.”
Well, what Wyly and his brother have done – let’s see if we can be exact about this – what they’ve done, see, is “illegally trad[e] millions of securities of public companies while they sat on the company boards. The SEC complaint accuses the two of using a system of offshore trusts and subsidiaries to hide their interests, selling more than $750 million in stock over a 13-year period. The complaint charges that they used inside information about the pending sale of [one of their companies] to reap more than $31.7 million in profit…”
So… sandblast the whole name off? Expensive. Embarrassing. UD has a better idea. Just change one letter.
WILY HALL
… is a tag UD‘s used so much on this blog that she’s decided to make it a Category.
She’s about to use it again.
She’s always warning universities about their business school faculty. Her experience of this group, as she’s come to know it from keeping this her blog, convinces her that though to be sure most of its members are decent and upright, a disproportionate number of them (disproportionate to other faculty, that is) gets in serious financial and legal trouble. UD’s followed any number of stories of B-school professors – and B-school alumni – whose side or primary businesses become quite the embarrassment for their universities.
Take Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania. One of its most beloved grads, Raj Rajarantnam, has just been arrested in “a $20 million insider trading scheme by federal prosecutors.” He and five others are charged with “using insider information in 2008 and 2009 to trade in shares of companies including Google Inc., Polycom Inc., Hilton Hotels Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., according the complaints filed in Manhattan federal court today.”
It’s awkward for U Penn. Not only do various fellowships and scholarships have his name on them; Wharton’s admiration of him in alumni publications now scans a bit ironic:
… Managing General Partner of the Galleon Group, Mr. Rajaratnam notes that Wharton was “an important credential” when he founded the company more than a decade ago. He also recognizes the School for helping him to land his first job in financial services, and for the skills he has used to succeed since then.
His experiences at Wharton continue to shape his life—in particular, through the relationships he formed. Having recently celebrated his 25th reunion, he says, “my classmates are among my closest friends and colleagues. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t interact with Wharton alumni.”
For Mr. Rajaratnam, he wished to give something back to “the institution that was so important to me personally and professionally.” In so doing, he is helping to create a community on campus that reflects the global business environment Wharton students are trained to lead.
To be sure, Wharton gave him a credential… Which must have made it easier to do what he is accused of having done. And as for the global business environment, if the charges are true, he has certainly done a number on it.
A blog like this one, which features a much-used category titled Beware the B-School Boys, welcomes a bunch of new books with titles like Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools and Leadership BS. Also a bunch of new opinion pieces with titles like We Should Bulldoze the Business School. Very nice.
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UPDATE: Right on cue. A perfectly timed news item on the subject just broke, and it’s being widely covered for all the wrong reasons. Everyone’s hyperventilating about a photogenic go-getter abundantly and shamelessly lying her way into a high-profile job in the current… troubled federal government. Said she went to schools she didn’t go to. Bought her degree from a diploma mill. (Read this page while you can.)
But as you know if you read this blog in its infant days, diploma mills (see that UD category) are a permanent structural reality of all countries. It’s a quirk of the United States that when people here find out you bought your college or graduate degree they actually get upset and do something about it. Most countries don’t care. This is why you want to wait til you get back to the States for that surgery.
So the fact that Mina Chang is a diploma mill grad who claims on her cv to have graduated from Harvard is a ho-hum revelation. Generous chunks of the military, fire departments, and public education are all milled up. Why those locations in particular? Because if you demand an advanced degree for job advancement, people will, er, advance them.
No: The real story lies here:
According to her educational history on LinkedIn, Chang writes that she took part in an “Executive Nonprofit Leadership” program at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
The Non Profit Leadership Certificate Program is a six-day program with a $900 fee.
That’s right, kiddies: Leadership BS at nine hundred (with travel, etc. let’s make it an even thousand) for SIX DAYS. Can you imagine the amazing leadership bs you’re getting for that moolah? Reminds ol’ UD of this 2011 six day New Zealand bs leadership seminar (run by a diploma mill grad – beginning to see the synergy?) that cost around $13,000 dollars in American currency. Or, closer to home, there’s this (quoting meself in a 2010 post about leadership bs seminars paid for by the federal government):
The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name. It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina. Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.
A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.
And that’s not all, folks! Here’s another example of your tax dollars at work, again from a 2010 post:
[Let’s see what] the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government. The school has just raised the tuition. It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks… The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.
As Michael Kinsley once wrote, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal. That a hyper-ambitious young person would survey Trump University World and come to certain conclusions is no scandal. That the federal government enables, and schools like Harvard exploit, the leadership racket is, if you ask UD, scandalous.
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Oh, whoops. Forgot the big shocking news item about Chang and that leadership program. Shockingly, she didn’t really attend it. Shockingly, she listed it on her resume but actually did not attend.
UD finds this admirable. I ain’t saying I’d hire the woman! But she definitely shows good sense here.
UD ain’t sayin’ they don’t look good. They look good!
This one graduated from a school on whose board of trustees sits no less a financial figure than Steven Cohen, and whose last president, in her role as Goldman Sachs trustee, approved a nine million dollar bonus one year for Lloyd Blankfein. And of course he’s been a professor since 1997 at Columbia University business school, whose dean is both a film star and a fan of Countrywide Financial Corp.
Gregory Rorke has definitely got the pedigree.
But what does UD always tell you? What does she tell you so often that it’s one of this blog’s most-used categories?
Sing it with me: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS.
Scroll down here for Rorke’s long-form bio from his participation in a Columbia University conference titled Out of the Storm But Not Out of the Woods…
Though given Rorke’s arrest for “bilking investors including a former student out of $3 million” (Including a former student! What good are students if they can’t be stooges? Talk about sitting ducks. They’re literally sitting there in your classroom being sitting ducks!) for him it currently looks more like Inside the Storm and Deep Into Preet’s Woods…
This would be Preet Bharara, scourge of Wall Street. “Columbia decline[d] to comment on Rorke’s arrest.” They’re taking the MIT route. Who? Bitr… How do you spell that? Thirty-five years on the faculty? Dean? What the hell are you talking about?
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Did Rorke study creative writing at Brown?
[O]n November 28, 2012, after receiving multiple complaints from Navagate investors demanding repayment and/or threatening to sue RORKE, RORKE forwarded an email purporting to be from a representative of Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (“HSBC”), which falsely stated that HSBC had just signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Navagate when, in truth and in fact, the email appears to have been a complete fabrication.
November 2012… mere months after sharing his thoughts on “the emerging lucrative exit opportunities and the challenges that the private equity and venture capital industries are facing ahead” [Bit redundant there, says Scathing Online Schoolmarm. If they’re emerging, then they’re ahead…], Rorke was desperately penning good news from Shanghai…
Too awkward; but UD‘s long been telling you to — this blog has a category named — Beware the B-School Boys.
If Canadian business guy Ian Telfer is convicted of insider trading (he’s an object of an Ontario Securities Commission probe), it won’t be entirely wonderful for the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management to be featuring his name on every piece of silverware. It will need to consult with Seton Hall University here in the States – a school which has blasted more names off of more business school walls than any other. Experience counts.
All naughty creative writing professors are naughty in their own way.
B-School Boys, as you know from reading my Beware the B-School Boys category, are all about extortion of very large sums of money. In their world, it’s just straight down the line fraud.
Creative writing professors deal in smaller currencies, and tend to get involved in lame, convoluted, one-man get-rich-quick schemes. (Clubby B-School Boys always have partners in crime.)
Poète maudit Ravi Shankar, currently placed on administrative leave, has been rather on the loose wig lately. We know from his RMP page (He missed 5 out of 15 classes (yet if you miss 3 you fail) & had us buy 100 dollars worth of books which were barely used (money down the drain)… Great class, when he shows up. Had to meet online a few times, poetry is not the kind of class where online classes are really helpful…) that Shankar is copacetic but kind of out of it. His two recent arrests – one of which found him hiding from the cops in the woods – also speak to some problems.
[Shankar was] arrested …in November after allegedly crashing into a vehicle on Route 40 in North Haven [Connecticut] and fleeing the scene, state police said. State police say Shankar was driving east in the shoulder when he rear-ended a parked vehicle and then drove away. A police dog helped troopers find Shankar in a wooded area.
Shankar was charged with driving under the influence, evading responsibility, failure to drive in the proper lane and operating a vehicle without insurance.
That was his second arrest. His first was much more complicated. You can read the details at the article, but the main point is
[Shankar ordered] more than $22,000 worth of tickets to a soccer game in New Jersey in the hopes that he could sell them to make a profit and pay off his more than $70,000 credit card debt.
Things went terribly wrong.