… Boys.

Why do you think Beware the B-School Boys is one of this blog’s perennially popular categories? If the statement in my headline is true, or roughly true, what do you think places like Wharton, which not only produced Donald Trump and Raj Rajatnaram and Steven Cohen and many of their, er, close associates, but boasts a long glorious history of producing scads of America’s most spectacular thieves, have been teaching people all these years? I mean, not the specific content of courses… I mean the gestalt.

And what a remarkable fact about American culture, that we have these gilded b-schools specializing in predatory capitalism. And the highest-profile b-school of them all produced not only the founder of Trump University, but – possibly – the next president of the United States.

… cheaters.

Beware the B-School Boys.

… going, plus his recent New Republic piece is a more than worthy addition to one of UD‘s most popular categories, Beware the B-School Boys. Gets a bit preachy at the end (“When a person’s worth is determined only by money, only by success as it is and can be monetized, when one has no sense of being without the BMW, the Rolex, the Armani suits, the yacht, etc, the moral flabbiness emerges. Indeed, it engulfs entire organizations and perhaps even entire societies.”), but one does tend to zoom out in one’s final paragraph…

[The idea that] the only duty of a corporation is return on investment [has now been] drilled into generations of business school graduates… [Further,] evidence suggests that not only are business students more impaired in their moral judgments in a broader sense than are those in other majors and professional schools, but that business schools themselves may be responsible.

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SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL: UD has long argued that this would be a wonderful new motto for Wharton.

The soaring oratory of Maurice Clarett. As UD readers know, UD has long recommended exactly the same thing for the B-School Boys (see her ever-popular category Beware the B-School Boys) — charismatic ex-cons drawn from the same crowd as their audience. Andy “Enron” Fastow is one example, but America’s prisons are packed with ciceronian swindlers.

Together, these two lad-categories (football hero/captain of industry) make up much of our national mythology, and therefore America’s institutions continue to deal gently with them, which is why remarkable numbers of them keep raping women and financial systems.

UD is a big believer in the power of testifying. She thinks Business Ethics courses are bullshit, but she thinks Madoff on the hustings would be marv.

Sure, Beware the B-School Boys; but as UD has often noted on this blog, your engineering school features a scam so smooth, so consistent, so reliable, that it’s positively… engineered.

You know the ol’ diddle me once routine; yet virtually every university equipped with engineering professors seems eager to be taken again and again by the time-honored get-rich-off-your-grant-by-setting-up-a-business-and-shunting-the-grant-funds-to-it. U Conn even let Cui and Shi (apparently there are yet more professors in their department who will be named; similar last names to Cui and Shi will almost certainly mean a UD limerick) start their business on campus, giving them all sorts of university perks and inducements to do so. The guys and gals then turned around and allegedly stole NSF grant money – large quantities of it – by having that money go to their company.

Not only were the purchases initiated by UConn faculty “who had a significant interest in AquaSeNT,” but two of the purchase requisitions they signed indicated, “I have no financial or other beneficial interest in the vendor,” the auditors wrote.

OTOH, there’s a simple explanation here. The guys and gals say they didn’t read the conflict of interest language in the grant before signing off on it. I mean, if they’d known… (You will know this as the George Costanza Move.) Plus they were pressed for time and all.

U Conn’s in deep doodoo too, because they didn’t inform the State Auditors office of the NSF investigation. I guess U Conn’s been pressed for time as well.

… the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green is obviously a major find – a much bigger find, indeed, than University Diaries has ever, uh, found. (A close contender is Monsignor Nunzio “Cinquecento” Scarano, but he didn’t run the bank the way Rev Green did.)

So far this blog has made do with the rad-rectitudinous team of Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel, plus (batting for UD‘s side) Yeshiva University trustees Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff. All of these men stand directly in the Elmer Gantry tradition, cloaking themselves in piety while engaging in antics that range from the morally despicable to, well, Madoff.

But Rev Green is made of bigger stuff than this, and he dovetails brilliantly with one of this blog’s most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Banker and priest and tax evasion enabler extraordinaire, Green inspires the Guardian’s editorialists to rhetorical heights.

“Values,” wrote the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green, “go beyond ‘what you can get away with’.” Reassuring words from the part-time priest who for years ran one of the world’s biggest banks, before being brought into government by David Cameron. Courtesy of the HSBC files, however, we now know that this bank, when under his stewardship – first as chief exec, later as chair – was involved in concealing “black” accounts from the taxman, servicing the secretly stowed funds of corrupt businessmen and allowing the withdrawal of “bricks” of untraceable cash.

In the face of these ugly facts about his old bank’s Swiss operation, Lord Green has said only that it is for HSBC, and not for him, to comment on that institution’s past and current behaviour. No wonder. His obvious refuge would be to claim that, as the boss of a global business in London, he had other worries and could not be expected to know every detail of what distant colleagues in Geneva were up to. Sadly for him, this potential shelter took a battering from something else he wrote: “For companies, where does this [ethical] responsibility begin? With their boards, of course. There is no other task they have which is more important. It is their job … to promote and nurture a culture of ethical and purposeful business throughout the organisation.”

You can’t blame HSBC. What better cover for a tax evasion scam than an Anglican clergyman who writes books about morality?

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Green is also “advising the archbishop of Canterbury on how to shake up the Church of England, advocating more vicars in an MBA mould.” Stay tuned!

This Beware the B-School Boys story has it all: Planted journal articles, inflated statistics, made up statistics, the brains behind the scheme paid one of the highest salaries on campus, and said brains allowed to retire with hearty valedictories by his superiors after an independent audit revealed all.

The head of the entrepreneurship program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City really showed its young entrepreneurs how to get it done: If you want your program ranked first in the country, lie, lie, lie, lie, and lie. Life is about gaming systems, and Michael Song knows how to game. See his big office and big salary – all because he’s a game player.

Get it? Try it.

You say Song’s out of a job? Not for long. Not with his skill set. And note that in his departing statement he admits having done nothing other than showed at all times a relentless commitment to furthering the fortunes of the school. The chancellor, in his statement, agrees. Stand-up guy, Michael Song. We could use more like him.

Ben Edelman, Harvard’s terror-emailer – and the very embodiment of this blog’s signature category BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS – turns out to be a serial threatener of small businesses.

Four years ago, when a sushi restaurant wouldn’t honor his Groupon vouchers, he did it again, threatening to go after their license, etc., etc., etc., etc.

This time, though, the restaurant called his bluff, wished him luck with his complaints to the authorities, and told him that if he ever got near the place they’d call the police.

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Naturally, we’re all wondering what’s next. Will Korean Korners release a 2010 email exchange in which, in response to having been charged twenty-five cents for a second trip to the jasmine tea dispenser, Edelman promises to “take this right to the top, to my good friend, Harvard colleague, and current head of the Consumer Protection Agency, Elizabeth Warren”?

Only 33, and already so adept at fudging conflict of interest for his own gain!

Well, you’d expect such a wunderkind on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

And it just goes to show the strides universities like Harvard – which has had you don’t wanna know from conflict of interest scandals! – have made in dealing with the problem. Really getting the message down to younger faculty.

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OTOH: This guy’s mom must be so proud! Look what sonny boy did! Still a pisher and he wrote something and the stock in that company just fell like a rock!

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All UD can say is: When your models at Harvard are COI giants like Andrei Shleifer and Joseph Biederman (search their names if you dare), the sky’s the limit.

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Oh, one more thing UD can say – and she always says it: Beware Beware Beware the B-School Boys.

… Florida A&M!  They’ve already page-not-founded their securities fraud guy, an engineering professor who with his BFF, a finance professor at Florida State (How many times must UD tell you to Beware the B-School Boys?  See the category on this blog by that name.), was just found guilty of breaking a whole bunch of securities laws.

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UPDATE: The FSU guy remains on the faculty! That explains their not taking down his department page.

Way to pick ’em, FSU. And hold ’em.

Really?

Yet another b-school guy (read UD’s LONG category on this blog titled Beware the B-School Boys) wrings his hands about the criminogenic nature of some of America’s business schools… Which is to say that many MBA programs (in particular Wharton) seem to groom and then graduate real bad asses. What to do? What to do?

Like most of the other hand wringers, this guy’s introducing another whole new revolutionary approach to taking men in America’s most hyper-capitalist educational settings and turning them into women.

See the headline on the guy’s article?

CAN YOU TEACH BUSINESSMEN TO BE ETHICAL?

Forget businesswomen. Either they don’t exist, or if they exist they’re … ethical …? The whole article is men men men.

I guess businesswomen are ethical because they’re not businessmen.

So then the point would be to make businessmen businesswomen. No competitiveness here! We’re collaborative. And if you fuck up and act assertive in class…

MBA programs could ditch their heavy reliance on class participation when assigning grades – a standard that unfairly rewards extroverts and fosters competition among students to impress the professor. Instead, students could be asked to grade each other on their level of professionalism in class. A few of us at NYU-Stern have begun doing this, and we find that it discourages grandstanding and encourages students to build on each other’s comments.

Shh! Don’t say anything, Susie! Just keep your eye on Babsie and tell me whether you think she’s been abnegating herself…

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Ecoute. Collaboration in b-school means Raj Rajaratnam meets his co-conspirators there. B-school brings like-minded criminals together.

It’s embarrassing, but

The daily scandals that expose corruption and deception in business are not merely the doing of isolated crooks. They are the result of an amoral culture that we — business-school professors — helped foster.

Look at the dean of Columbia University’s business school, for goodness sake.

B-school people seem to think that if they keep producing worried rhetoric and new ethics institutes we’ll forget the nature of the amoral culture their schools reflect and many of their graduates inhabit.

A recent study by a group of business school professors has intriguing implications for MBA programs throughout Illinois.

Because traditions and lines of bribery tend to be both clear and reliable in fully corrupt countries, it’s far easier to do business in them than in only partially corrupt countries.

The authors of the study see no reason why this principle couldn’t apply to American cities and states; and, a Chicago Tribune columnist points out, “Chicago just last year was deemed the nation’s most corrupt city and Illinois the third-most corrupt state in a well-publicized analysis.”

Rather than force their MBA students to take absurd ethics courses (UD‘s critique of these courses may be enjoyed by clicking on the category Beware the B-School Boys), business schools throughout Illinois might instead exploit their state’s curious advantage by offering modules on the tradition and fine-tuning of graft.

… UD was entering a blue line train at Foggy Bottom, and a woman with lots of luggage sat down next to her. The woman apologized for taking up so much room with the luggage, and UD commiserated. “No fun dragging lots of stuff from one car to another.”

The woman explained that she commuted twice a week to a lectureship at GW University’s school of business. “I teach a class in business ethics.”

Readers of the UD category Beware the B-School Boys know that UD has what to say about that.

In her shy, tongue-tied way, UD took advantage of the three minutes they had before they went their separate ways at Metro Center to tell this woman all about her area of specialization.

The woman was a good sport, and she came right back with a defense of the enterprise, and UD came back from the defense, etc., etc.

I swear it was all very amiable, with the woman (they exchanged names on the platform, but if you think UD remembers swiftly exchanged names on noisy platforms, you don’t know UD) insisting that “in the long run” unethical behavior destroys shareholder value, and UD insisting that short-term profit seems to suit a lot of people perfectly well, thank you, and that for instance insider trading – both unethical and illegal – seems absolutely rampant — you might say even structural to the economy — and even after the feds finally drag in Steven Cohen it will continue to be a practice many business people defend and engage in…

UD‘s hastily attempted point (swaying train, unsteady luggage, crush of commuters) was that business schools are hopelessly up against a humongous cognitive dissonance between moral scrupulousness and the nature of competitive financial markets. She was not saying, she yet more hastily hastened, that free marketeering was the work of the devil. She merely pointed out that mild to extreme cheating was endemic to the project, and the business school that fails to take this into serious account runs the risk of having its ethics component be a laughingstock.

You see, the rhetoric of university business ethics courses always looks like this. This Globe and Mail article begins, as most on the subject do, with the rampant reality:

Over the past decade, a succession of high-profile corporate crimes has spurred business schools, globally, to infuse business ethics and leadership into course content.

Not just the last decade, of course; corporate misbehavior and crime has been massive for decades. And business schools have been offering tons of ethics courses through all of those decades. But, you know, check out this category, Beware the B-School Boys. Just read the latest entry in it, about the dean of Columbia University’s business school.

Anyway, the Globe and Mail story goes on to announce that this new guy is really going to turn things around at Ryerson University…

Yet the language he offers his interviewer is dead jargon city. Leadership is a process, not a position… Let’s talk codes of conduct…

Faithful UD readers know what she proposes. Toss the courses. Initiate a lecture series featuring business cheats who got caught. These guys are often articulate, charismatic… Incentivize them by taking a bit of time off of their sentences for each speech.

… because he has stamina and guts and epitomizes this blog category: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS. And I’ll always be able to follow his lawsuits because I don’t think they’ll ever end. Always another effort to appeal an NYU decision to deny him his MBA because while he was a student there he was found guilty of insider trading.

UD enjoys the special human interest part of Rosenthal’s story: It’s a family affair.