‘… David Blight, a history professor and a member of the committee … said the Sackler program is just one of many potentially unsavory names at Yale. The renaming of Yale Commons as the Schwarzman Center following a donation from Stephen Schwarzman ’69, a private equity manager who served briefly on one of President Donald Trump’s business advisory councils, also spurred contention on campus this year. [UD wouldn’t take his name off a building for that reason; but surely Yale could find gross shit out about Schwarzman unrelated to Trump…]
“The reality is, as you know, this is how major universities function. Almost everything here has someone’s name on it,” said Blight. “My first reaction, I’m afraid, is skepticism, because behind great wealth there is always going to be an awkward story. Behind great wealth there will be a crooked path of some type, whether that wealth was made in fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, real estate or finance.”’
Yes, it’s icing on the cake that the guy’s name is Blight.
He doth speak the truth. Almost all the major moneybags – David Rockefeller comes to mind as one of the highest-profile, at Harvard – are unsavory, and plenty of them go beyond that, well in the direction of Sackler criminality. I mean, Steven Cohen? Pretty much anyone at Yeshiva University? Don’t get me started. Blight’s right that going down that road means noisy incessant sandblasting.
A scandal-magnet, it’s always sandblasting the names of generous scummy alumni from its buildings, firing degenerate coaches, and, as of yesterday, watching as an assistant law school dean is escorted to prison for three years for stealing the shit out of the place over ten – count ’em! ten! – years.
‘A number of administrators departed Seton Hall after the embezzlement was uncovered. Kathleen Boozang stepped down from her post as law dean but remains on the faculty.’ Why all the departures? Because they appointed as a dean a person who under their noses for a decade stole – with two additional employees – the school’s money. And all of this also under the close eye of the Catholic church (read Seton’s pretentious and – in context – hilarious holier than thou thing here).
UD‘s thing is go ahead and be Yeshiva University, run by Madoff, Merkin, Wilf, and Rennert; be Liberty U under Falwell Jr; be slimy Seton Hall. But don’t try to snow me with your piety.
In honor of history’s biggest tax evader, Jesse Jones has renamed itself The Jesse James School!
As Fran Lebowitz notes, you earn a million; you steal a billion. And the honorable Robert Brockman has devoted his life to demonstrating the truth of that statement, hiding record-setting billions in Switzerland and other fabled havens. Sudden-onset dementia unfortunately gripped the man the moment the indictment came down, and now he’s apparently staggering around trying to find his ass with two hands. Forget finding the money. What money. Let the man die in dignity.
The 39-count indictment includes wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and destruction of evidence, among other charges. These crimes make up a nearly 20-year plot to conceal income in offshore accounts.
He sat on lots of university boards, and while some, like the Baylor School of Medicine, seem to have gotten out in front of the story (speaking of which, lucky Centre College! The whole school might well have been renamed for the world’s biggest white collar criminal.), Jesse James still has his big-shot page up.
Brockman, known for being rather reclusive (wonder why), also gives big money to Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. His name is as prominently plastered on Rice campus buildings as the name Kapoor is at Binghamton, Wyly at Michigan, and Kozlowski and Brennan at Seton Hall.
The Brockman Hall for Opera stands next to the existing Alice Pratt Brown Hall, forming the Brockman Music and Performing Center. Additionally, in 2011, President David Leebron and Rice Board of Trustees Chair Jim Crownover thanked the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust for its centennial gift at the unveiling of the Brockman Hall for Physics.
There’s a poignancy to all those music halls, because if Brockman’s co-conspirator hadn’t sung so loudly to the Justice Department he wouldn’t be going to jail.
Some world, huh? A notorious, spectacular, criminal cavorts about doing his thing for decades during which plenty of people squawk about him (just like they squawked about Yeshiva University treasurer Bernie Madoff!) but nothing happens except that he sits on high-profile university boards and has his name emblazoned for the ages on university buildings.
Our school of pharma doth deplore
The racketeering John Kapoor.
We’ve ordered a slurry
Cuz we’re in a hurry
To sandblast his name from the door.
[UPDATE as the trial begins tomorrow:
Also on trial is Sunrise Lee, a former stripper who, as an Insys sales manager, enticed physicians into writing more prescriptions, prosecutors said. “Doctors really enjoyed spending time with her and found Sunrise to be a great listener,” another manager, Alec Burlakoff, told colleagues, according to court filings.]
Kapoor Hall, the fancy pharmacy school building at the University of Buffalo, was dedicated only a few years ago, with a big ol’ ribbon-cutting ceremony and all. John Kapoor himself was there to share his inspiring immigrant story, along with tips on how to run a profitable pharma concern with integrity.
Did UB have any inkling when it took his money that, this Monday, Kapoor’s trial, for “conspiring to pay doctors bribes and kickbacks that were disguised as fees for speaking events,” will put quite the spotlight on their decision to monumentalize him? Since Kapoor’s arrest (and the guilty pleas of several of his company’s executives; and the guilty pleas or upcoming trials of a number of bribed doctors — one of whom is a GW grad! This guy “ignored and bullied patients who resisted staying on the powerful pain-killing spray.”), the school has gone this way and that on whether to sandblast the name of a man who basically shoved for-cancer-pain-only fentanyl down the throats of thousands of people who came to their pusher-doctors complaining of sore knees and elbows. Some of those people are dead; quite a few are addicted; and far be it from UD to deny that this represents one logical and popular way to earn billions in the pharma trade… But the question before us is: Wouldn’t a little due diligence (given how relatively late in his criminal career UB did business with him) have spared Buffalo a good deal of trouble and embarrassment?
It’s an old problem, one that this blog has followed with concern for many years: How do you handle it, public-relations-wise, and logistics-wise, when a politician or money man whose name you’ve plastered all over campus buildings goes to jail for corruption? Certain schools – Seton Hall, most prominently – experience this problem over and over again.
There’s an interesting sort of time-sensitive aspect to it. Most cases, to be sure, are after the fact – the name went up, the guy went to prison, the name got sandblasted. Rising action, climax, denouement. Some are before – Georgetown was going to name Douglas Ginsburg, but the SEC named him first. And a few are sort of during – Nevin Shapiro’s little student lounge plaque had just gone up when when Nevin went down.
Many and varied are the problems associated with de-naming. If, like U Miami, you’ve only done a little plaque, piece of cake. Just take it down. When we start moving in the direction of engraving, however, we’re talking big money. Sandblasting doesn’t come cheap. It’s also embarrassingly loud. You can have some guy steal into Nevin’s room at night and remove the thing; but does this guy look like the quiet sort? Why not just yell We made a terrible mistake or We consort with criminals at the top of your lungs? And try explaining to Seton Hall parents why hundreds of thousands of their tuition dollars went toward pulverizing the names of crooks from three of your buildings. So far.
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Forget trying to see these things coming. No school – up to and including burnished ones like Brown, which will eventually have to do something about trustee Steven Cohen – is likely to scrutinize a politician or a hedgie and decide they’d rather not go there. Money is money, and you don’t want to insult a person from the money class. Word gets around. This is about cleanup.
UD has long proposed the erasure/sheeting approach. Inspired by Hasidic groups who erase images of women from photos (Hillary Clinton is the salient example here), and Muslim or Muslim-sensitive groups who sheet women in photos (Southampton University’s advertising materials are the go-to place here), UD has proposed simply adding or subtracting letters from the name.
So in the most recent case – jailed, disgraced Pennsylvania state senator Bob Mellow – you’ve got a couple of universities there with MELLOW engraved on buildings.
They could sheet/erase, by way of adding, pulling, or shifting letters. MELLOW, without too much work, could be altered to read FELLOWS, which sounds very British (Fellows of All Souls); for less money, they could go in the other direction – down-home and friendly – by dropping the M and W and putting an H at the beginning of the name: HELLO! They could be whimsical and add YELLOW to the name… Joycean, and put an S at the beginning (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”)… They could do homage to Saul Bellow by changing only one letter…
The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…
The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.
The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.
As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:
… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.
One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.
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UD thanks Maurice.
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