… when dealing with moneybags hanging around your university in search of respectability. You need to do some vetting before you take their money. You may not be aware of this, but some of the ways people accumulate large personal fortunes are illegal.

Yeshiva University’s distinguished trustees (Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin) are again in the news as yet a third Yeshiva trustee (Moshael Straus) succeeds in wresting some of his stolen cash from Merkin. It’s a convoluted big-time New York City crime story, and Yeshiva probably would have preferred not to feature in it.

In a dissenting opinion, Cravath Swaine & Moore lawyer Rory O. Millson, the member of the arbitration panel chosen by Merkin, found that Straus, a member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees, lied to the arbitrators, including about his knowledge of Madoff acting as a manager for Ascot. He noted that Ascot was referred to as “Bernie” at Yeshiva and that Straus invested in Ascot shortly after joining the university’s board in 1999.

Huh? Don’t try to figure it out. Just a lot of university trustees in each others’ pockets. What’s the point of being a trustee if you don’t get inside access to elite money managers like Bernie and Ezra?

****************************************

Well, but now it doesn’t look pretty. It didn’t look pretty when Yeshiva had to do a lot of rapid trustee-erasure, in the wee hours after Madoff and Merkin first got in trouble; and it still doesn’t look pretty with Yeshiva’s name dragged through the long aftermath.

And speaking of long aftermaths — the London School of Economics continues to struggle, not just with its Libyan connections (scroll down), but, more recently, with one of its honorary fellows, Victor Dahdaleh.

On Monday, Mr. Dahdaleh voluntarily surrendered to police in London. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office alleges he paid bribes to officials of a smelting company in Bahrain for contracts with U.S. aluminium giant Alcoa Inc. The deals involved large supplies of alumina, a raw material used to make aluminium, shipped to Bahrain from Australia.

******************************************

(Dahdaleh also has long ties to McGill University, but

“I know very little about him,” said a school official who did not want to be named.

Nice try.)

… in trying to get a grip on the London School of Economics/ Benjamin Barber/ Other Academic Friends of Libya controversy, scandal, whatever you want to call it. Start with a university story that has nothing to do with Libya.

Frank Rich recently wrote, in the New York Times:

[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

And he was making millions and millions of dollars. At a one day a week job.

He was paid, what, $800,000 or so to be Harvard’s president.

Put aside whether, as Ben Stein suggests, such a beneficiary of Wall Street money could ever, in his government capacity, “crack the whip” against it (“Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”) and ask rather, from the point of view of the university, whether his raking it in while president is seemly.

It’s not unseemly if you regard a university as an institution like any other in a capitalist economy, primarily geared toward generating profits (in its athletic program, in its entrepreneurial scientific work) and generating personal wealth (for consultants to money funds, like Summers, for consultants to wealthy dictatorships and other countries, like Barber, and for university presidents like Shirley Ann Jackson, who sit on corporate boards and earn millions to attend board meetings).

As Barber says, in his defense, “Everyone gets paid.” It’s exactly the same way university presidents defend giving four million dollars a year to football coaches: There’s a market for everything, and everyone gets paid the going rates.

Absolutely none of this is unseemly (I’m not talking, by the way, about the astounding salaries made by presidents of for-profit colleges. These guys are for profit, baby, and you better believe it.) if a university is a corporation with classrooms, run and staffed by people seriously distracted by big money elsewhere. But a lot of people have a nagging feeling that universities are something more. Indeed these people note that our government seems to feel they are something more, since they receive remarkable tax benefits. Some of them are even public institutions (Barber taught at two of these, Rutgers and the University of Maryland), direct recipients of taxpayer dollars. What happens to Americans’ support for non-profit universities when so much that goes on at those places is outrageously profit and personal wealth driven?

The Libya dust-up is only the latest lesson in a gradual education taking place among the American public as to what really goes on in higher ed.

… has, in the wake of the Libya scandal, resigned. I’ll get some links in a moment.

Here you go. It’s actually got a tiny bit of good news in it. The LSE has – had – at least one faculty member in this game with integrity.

The Financial Times [has] obtained fresh details about opposition from one of the university’s experts on the Middle East to the LSE’s acceptance of £300,000 in donations from a charity run by Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and an alumnus of the university.

Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations who died last year, wrote to the LSE council in late 2009 to say that Libya had made “no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite”.

From The Telegraph:

Col Gaddafi was feted by senior staff at the [London School of Economics] during a meeting conducted via video link just two months ago.

In a video, understood to show a closed doors meeting, the Libyan leader is seen being applauded by members of the LSE staff as he launches into a rambling speech in which he spouts offensive views about Lockerbie.

He also uses the speech to attack former world leaders including Baroness Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The LSE student who leaked the video said she was disgusted at the way senior college figures had behaved towards Col Gaddafi and his son…

Timothy Burke first talks about the London School of Economics, which awarded Gaddafi a PhD:

One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries…

What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.

He then turns to Saif Gaddafi’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Benjamin Barber:

I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down… Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.