When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.

Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.

Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.

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James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.

I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.

Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:

Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…

At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.

The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.

More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.

UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.

There’s a potentially very big story emerging out of the University of Louisville (one of the scummiest football factories this blog has covered, by the way), on whose faculty sits Mariusz Z. Ratajczak. Ratajczak has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of money from the Catholic church, to pursue work on

heretofore unknown stem cells present in adult cells. These tiny cells, he claimed, could perform the same tasks as embryonic stem cells, including tissue regeneration and the miraculous capacity that embryonic stem cells have to mimic other types of cell tissue. Moreover, these VSEL cells, said Ratajczak, could be harvested from adult cells without harming human embryos or relying on them for cell material.

Ratajczak claims to have discovered these cells; but no other scientist has been able to find them, let alone test them in any way. Arthur Caplan writes that Ratajczak’s claim (that “he had found very tiny cells residing in adult cells that behaved just like embryos. Ratajczak said they could develop into all manner of other cells, thereby acting as natural repair kits, given the right conditions and genetic tweaking.”) “must be the product of wishful thinking, or at worst, fraud.”

More detail here.

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The University of Louisville hospital has more than its share of problems lately.

Oh, and I forgot all about Robert Felner.

… the University of Louisville (read all about it). It’s the lowest of the low.

But Louisville burnishes its sports reputation with rates of campus employee theft that simply knock the school of the park. In response to the latest theft, the Courier-Journal reviews the school’s klepto-history.

U of L’s problems with employee theft first came to light in 2008 with the case of Robert Felner, U of L’s former education dean, who is serving a 63-month prison sentence.

Felner pleaded guilty last year in U.S. District Court in Louisville to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion in the theft of $2.3 million from U of L and two other institutions.

Most recently, a university audit completed in August accused a former senior program coordinator in the College of Business of stealing more than $463,000 from the Equine Industry Program. That case has been turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office, but no charges have been filed.

The latest thief used stolen money from the athletics program to buy scads of oxycodone, which she later sold.

All schools have internal problems, but UD can think of no American university with UL’s over-the-top combination of sports corruption and employee criminality.

… among faculty and staff. At our most career-criminal schools, like the University of Louisville, the theft starts at the top (UL is currently trying to use the courts to claw back a few of the millions their last president apparently swiped) and moves briskly and efficiently through various heads of programs (who can forget Dean Felner?) and also into – no kidding – athletics.

UD has learned over the blogging years that the less legitimacy – hell, the less reality – something calling itself a university has, the more the random people hanging around this random place will steal. Schools with a graduation rate approaching zero percent – for instance, Southern University, with its beloved, larcenous band leader – and schools approaching zero enrollment, like Chicago State University, will be the national theft standouts.

Obviously, as the school tanks, very few conscientious people will want to have anything to do with trying to run it. You end up hiring rogues, hastening the process of decline.

Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal:

Under her watch, …university employees have stole[n], misspent or mishandled at least $7.6 million in schemes at the health science campus, the law school, the business school and the athletic department’s ticket office.

[Provost Shirley] Willihnganz also was criticized for approving about $1 million in buyouts for former high-ranking employees, some of which included agreements not to disparage the university or its leaders.

She also was forced to apologize to faculty in 2008 for failing to act against [Robert] Felner, the education dean, despite more than 30 grievances and complaints that he had intimidated, harassed, humiliated and retaliated against faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Willihnganz said at the time that she tended to dismiss the early complaints against Felner — including a no-confidence vote by faculty — because he was a “high performer” and because the complaints came from professors and staff “entrenched in their ways and resistant to change.”

She later told faculty at a meeting that she was sorry. “Mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that,” she said.

Felner was sentenced in 2010 to 63 months in federal prison for taking $2.3 million from U of L and the University of Rhode Island.

Ave atque vale!

Wow, finally things get SO bad at the University of Louisville that a trustee squawks. UL is one of the very worst universities this blog has chronicled over the last few years. (See my University of Louisville posts here.) It’s sort of got everything wrong with it: gross-out athletics, of course; but mismanagement, employee crime, Medicare fraud, low graduation rates, Bobby Petrino, Marius Ratajczak, Robert Felner, outrageous dean turnover, medical school on probation, strangely generous separation agreements…

PLUS, it turns out

The University of Louisville’s program to provide continuing medical education for doctors has been placed on probation by its accrediting body less than two months after a different agency put UofL’s medical school on notice.

I say it turns out because the complaining trustee, who understandably tried to resign from this disgraceful school’s BOT but was basically forced to stay on by the governor of the state (!), said that the last straw was finding out about the latest UL unit to go on probation from the newspapers. Wouldn’t want to tell your trustees what’s going on. Not when it’s this bad. And UD‘s betting that a lot of people have a lot of money invested, as it were, in UL’s continuing to operate as – it seems to her – a kind of quasi-criminal enterprise.

Indeed, there must be a lot of raised eyebrows at UL today. You expect trustees, of all people, to just sit there.

He’s more than reached that tipping point where accumulated institutional embarrassments demonstrate the failure of his presidency.

There’s the graduation rate.

There’s Rick Pitino (scroll down).

There’s the last dean of the school of education. (Background here.)

This list (I’m sure I’m missing stuff) describes a university president totally asleep at the wheel. Why hasn’t he been fired?