… (see the post directly below this one), its highest-profile honorary degree recipient, its 2010 commencement speaker, has been running one hell of a public relations campaign. Ask me anything! Ask my bank anything!
These are some of the tweets J.P. Morgan received (before hurriedly shutting the account):
“What’s your favorite type of whale? #AskJPM,” said The Atlantic’s Matt O’Brien.
“Is your “Chief Compliance Officer” alive? Has anyone checked to see if he’s in his office? #AskJPM,” said Salon’s David Dayen.
“Does Jamie Dimon pet a small cat and laugh ominously while he’s ruining poor people’s lives? #AskJPM,” said blogger Tim Donovan.
Some others:
Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?
If it came out Jamie Dimon had a propensity for eating Irish children, would you fire him? What if he’s still “a good earner”?
Is it the ability to throw anyone out of their home that drives you, or just the satisfaction that you know you COULD do it?
How many homeless people did you create in ’08?
Will the firm explore new markets, like selling candy-backed securities to babies w/o disclosing the lack of chocolate in the bonds?
Did you not realize that The Smartest Guys In The Room was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for mass theft?
Sure. There’s more.
Quick! You’re in a room with no key, a chair, two paper clips, and a lightbulb. How do you defraud investors?
Sorry we ruined your hashtag event, if you could just apologise for your plunder of the global economy, I think we’d be even.
Given the # of reg violations + scale of fines paid across the bank, please explain why the board hasn’t been replaced by livestock?
Enough already!
What’s it like working with Mexican drug cartels? Do they tip?
How do you decide who to foreclose on? Darts or a computer program?
As a young sociopath, how can I succeed in finance?
And:
why did u think this would be a good idea
Brown University’s finest.
Steven Cohen remains on Brown’s board of trustees, an inspiring reminder to students there that you can run “the first large Wall Street firm in a generation to confess to criminal conduct,” a firm whose corruption is “unprecedented in the history of hedge funds,” a firm that has become “a symbol of financial wrongdoing,” and still be a Brown University trustee! Go ahead and be HUMongous financial wrongdoers, kiddies! The more money you make, the more likely you’ll be named to the Brown Corporation!
How humongous, you ask? The man’s a fucking pioneer! He’s making history! The SEC, emboldened by its success against Cohen, is said to be going after a number of other university trustees and honorary degree recipients.
[The SEC is] weighing a criminal charge against JPMorgan Chase [headed by Syracuse University commencement speaker/honorary degree recipient Jamie Dimon] related to its role as Bernard L. Madoff’s [Yeshiva University trustee] banker…
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UPDATE: MattF, a UD reader, links to this important background on Cohen. UD thanks him.
Er, not exactly. What Carlos Slim, world’s richest man, said a few hours ago to UD and 25,000 other people at the George Washington University graduation on the national mall, was “God forgives our sins, but our nervous systems don’t.”
He was trying to say that it’s okay to make mistakes in life, “but try to make them small ones.” God may forgive us, but we might not forgive ourselves, and the guilt we feel will play havoc with our nervous system. The line got a laugh.
Maybe the Washington Post writer got it wrong – and in his misconstrual made the statement meaningless – because of Slim’s strong accent.
Slim’s words certainly weren’t drowned out by the protesters who hoped to silence him (they argue that he shouldn’t have gotten an honorary degree, because of what they take to be his unethical business practices). La Kid, who as one of the GW graduates sat much closer to the protesters, said it was “a little awkward” as they blew their horns and all. Those of us in the family and friends section of the mall heard almost nothing of them.
Slim’s address was pleasantly at odds with the bland upbeat dare to be great business UD had been hearing at the two graduation events – a smaller one just for GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and today’s immense spectacle on the mall – she attended this weekend. Not that Slim was downbeat — not at all. But he took seriously the tragic nature of life, spoke of our tendencies to drag ourselves down, our self-destructive drives…
Against Slim’s flickering old world, bright blue USA shone like mad — the huge sky over the mall burned with full sun, the handsome newscaster who gave the commencement address made us laugh, and on either side of our white chairs neoclassical buildings glistened.
Endless jets arched out of left field, then passed behind the Washington Monument and away. The newscaster reminded us of all the other artifacts of air and space in the museum behind us – American capsules that broke out of the atmosphere.
He reminded the students that they’d been the first, on the night Bin Laden was killed, to rush over to the White House and cheer; and they cheered now, at the reminder.
At one point in the proceedings dark clouds massed behind us, over the Capitol building, but then – typical Americans – thought better of it and fell back into blue.
After the ceremony, after tracking down La Kid and making a fuss about her and watching another graduate have her picture taken as she stood between two police-mounted horses (“Now go out and change the world,” said one of the riders, and the student said “I will sir, thanks.”), Les UDs walked to the new Teaism at Penn Quarter and had Thai Chicken Curry.
Handing the name of your university’s sports venues over to the local biotech, banking, or fried chicken establishment in exchange for money – making your university one humongous advertising vector – is, well, pathetic, but so what. There’s only so much whining we’re going to do here about the corporatization of the university. And after all this is a capitalist culture, and the university reflects that culture, blah blah.
To be sure, things get a little dicier when you’re stuck with the Kenneth Lay Chair in Economics, or even the Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History.
The University of Miami had the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge, etc. Many universities have dealt (some of them, like Seton Hall, repeatedly) with the embarrassment of questionable names on rooms, buildings and arenas, on academic chairs, on programs, on honorary degrees, on whatever.
But it’s one thing to deal with the consequences of honoring over-zealous capitalists; it’s another to honor authoritarian regimes whose fundamental political identity is outrageously at odds with the values of American universities.
A National Review writer notes that Harvard has a Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations:
The Sultan of Oman shackles his nation’s media with one of the most restrictive press laws in the Arab world, and Freedom House rates the sultanate, on a scale of 1 (freest) to 7 (least free), a 5.5, making it “unfree.”
Then there’s the Saudis:
In 2005, Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz gave $20 million to both Harvard University and Georgetown University to establish centers for Islamic studies. At Georgetown, the prince’s gift funds the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the university’s vaunted School of Foreign Service. Saudi Arabia may be an American ally in the Middle East, but it is also one of the most repressive nations in the world. Leaving aside Saudi Arabia’s gross violations of the rights of all its citizens, the royal family doesn’t appear to have any more than an academic interest in “Muslim-Christian understanding”: The kingdom lacks even one Christian church.
The atrium of American University’s School of International Studies is named after the crown prince of Bahrain, another scandalously repressive country.
So I guess the point the NRO guy is making is that it’s hypocritical at best and a betrayal of fundamental values at worst when a university takes immense cash from authoritarian regimes and in exchange glorifies the names of those regimes. (Some British universities were, most recently, willing to do this with Gaddafi’s Libya.) The basic deal involves the university using its clean reputation to help cleanse not very sweet-smelling political units. And of course the deal can evolve into the university gradually incorporating nice thoughts about these units into their curricula; or let’s say overlooking some less than pleasant aspects of those regimes (Women in Saudi Arabia? You say there are women in Saudi Arabia? I didn’t see any when I was there…).
…yet another target for his political rage.
So far, he has failed to have his way with two targets: A professor, and a playwright.
Despite Wiesenfeld’s insistence that the professor be fired for views about Israel with which Wiesenfeld strongly disagreed, the university professor was not fired. Well, he was fired, but then he was rehired because of free speech protests.
And now, it’s just been announced, the executive committee of CUNY’s trustees will shortly meet. It will almost certainly reinstate the honorary degree Wiesenfeld succeeded in withholding from Tony Kushner, another person with whom Wiesenfeld strongly disagrees.
It’s a strange, and probably really frustrating, pattern. Wiesenfeld gets his way; he gets the people purged. But then the decisions are reversed.
And why? Well, as the head of CUNY’s trustees explains:
Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name.
It’s a credit to CUNY that they appointed to the board a man whose free expression is … so remarkably free. Remarkably.
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Oh. And to make the Stalinism complete: Wiesenfeld has said he’ll forgive Kushner if Kushner will make before him a public apology for his apostasy.
Tony Kushner betrays some naivety about university trustees.
Because one of CUNY’s trustees dislikes what he takes to be Kushner’s stand on Israel, the university has rescinded an honorary degree it was about to confer on him. Background here.
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who has well-established self-control issues, is the trustee who knocked out Kushner.
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Update: Wiesenfeld’s been having quite the purge-party.
Earlier this year, Wiesenfeld and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind tried to force Brooklyn College to fire an adjunct professor they believed held strongly anti-Israel views. The university initially fired the professor, Kristopher Peterson-Overton, but soon rehired him, saying it believed the criticism by Wiesenfeld and Hikind was politically motivated.
The president of a teachers’ union in Canada announces that because Nipissing is going to give an honorary degree to a conservative politician, his organization will exact revenge by ruining the teaching careers of that university’s graduates.
I guess at classier, godlier, places, it’s … the tennis coach…
Now, when UD says ‘godly’ she doesn’t mean Libertine University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. I want you to rid your thoughts of President My Brothers in Christ Just Gave My Big Ol’ Dick Ten and a Half Million Dollars to Shrivel Up and Go Away. Jerry’s debauchery has ruled the airwaves for the last couple of weeks; but today I want you to turn your attention to Georgetown University’s Gordon Ernst [scroll down], a truly committed professional long-term larcenist who somehow for over a decade was allowed to swan along the courts of Georgetown impersonating an upscale (gave the Obama kids lessons) tennis coach while fraudulently admitting any kid whose parents gave him two hundred thousand dollars. His wife seems to have been his accomplice and everything… And not one of the Jesuit bros suspected a thing?
The dude just got hit with more charges today – if his criminal enterprise hadn’t been shut down, half of Georgetown’s current student body would be made up of bad tennis players with billionaire forebearers – and it’s clear from descriptions of his MO that if you didn’t fully pay up he came after you. Ask Amin Khoury about that pesky $20,000 Gordie was owed.
I mean, Georgetown really needs to sit down and ask itself why it’s so corrupt, with all its Catholic airs. Something’s deeply wrong with a flamboyantly religious school which long harbored – knowingly? unknowingly? both options are bad – so flamboyantly criminal a person. Throw in Georgetown’s difficulty breaking relations with a whole host of priestly sexual criminals on and around campus, and it makes UD wonder whether she truly wants to live in Adrian Vermeule’s Cathophate.
… so UD assumes that James Levine will remain alongside him, securely honored at her revocation-phobic alma mater, Northwestern University.
NU will apparently take your honor back if it hasn’t formally forked it over yet, as with conspiracy theorist Jeremiah Wright; but once it’s in your hot little hands, you get to keep it.
Levine, whose 1984 recording with UD-favorite Kathleen Battle singing UD-favorite Henry Purcell (Levine’s on piano), is, well, a UD-favorite, has been accused of sexual abuse.
… on the question of whether he’s a career plagiarist; and you would too, especially if you’re carrying around not only your own divinity degree, but honorary doctorates from two seminaries.
Still, this New Republic piece does seem to have the goods on Chris Hedges, prolific political writer…
The case, if proved, reminds UD of Johan Hari, another self-styled George Orwell (Hari even won the Orwell Prize, though he had to give it back) whose plagiarism bore the same reckless mark as Hedge’s apparently totally over the top use of other people’s ideas and prose.
Lots of other wonder boys come to mind here too: Jonah Lehrer. Phil Jacob. Stephen Glass. Jayson Blair. So many others.
Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”
While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.
After all, he’s an honorary doctor of laws.
And if during the proceedings he needs a character reference, he can get a fabulous one from Syracuse University, which not only conferred the degree but chose him to deliver the 2010 commencement address.