From New York magazine:

… Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.

Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.

That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff.

Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996, when Hermann served as vice-chairman. Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved…

Yeshiva University: Dollar for dollar, more conflict of interest than all other American universities combined. And there’s absolutely no indication that it’s operating any differently now.

… Ezra Merkin, no one can be surprised that the school is in a ratings free fall. This blog has spent years detailing the damage that this school, with its conflict-of-interest-riddled trustees (a group that boasts such stellar characters as Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf), and its greedy, morally clueless president, did to itself over the last ten years. You don’t get to brutalize a university the way this pack of rascals did (and some of the rascals are still there, rascaling around) without paying a very high price.

… gets curiouser and curiouser. One of America’s most amoral and at the same time most morally self-righteous institutions now turns to the task of replacing as president a man who raked in millions in compensation while presiding over its financial ruination at the hands of corrupt trustees and other powerful campus figures, starting with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. Prominent Yeshiva buildings and programs bear the names of figures like Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf. Several of the, er, friends of Merkin and Madoff remain in prominent positions on Yeshiva’s notoriously conflict-of-interest-ridden board.

Financially, the school is struggling like few other universities of its size and age in the country. Moody’s continues to rank its bonds as junk and recently determined that the school has a negative outlook. In the past five years, the school has been warned twice (in 2012 and again in 2014) by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education about the possible loss of its accreditation.

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Eight years into the university’s financial crisis, Y.U.’s financial problems give no sign of abating. Two years ago, the school lost $83 million. Last year it lost another $84 million. And six months ago Moody’s reported that it expects the school’s financial condition to continue to deteriorate.

Yeshiva leaders represent so much greed and mismanagement that according to Moody’s the school may have to fold. If it folds, this will be due not merely to gross irresponsibility, but – just as importantly – to the ick factor. The gulf between Yeshiva’s self-presentation as a pious institution and the squalid reality of its financial dealings and some of its backers has grown so wide, the school has so profoundly and insistently disgraced itself, that you just have to laugh. It has become a hopeless joke. A tragic joke if you happen to care about the survival of modern orthodoxy in America.

Given this background, UD understands why Yeshiva is thinking of appointing as president a managerially clueless but possibly actually religiously serious person.

Assuming it is trying to survive, Yeshiva is faced with two sort of impossible choices: It can appoint as president a powerful, brilliant, and maybe even honest money manager who might be able wrestle the corrupt board of trustees down and get the school on a roughly legitimate financial footing.

It seems to have chosen not to do this, which means the board continues on its merry institution-destroying way.

Yeshiva University has gone the other way – it has decided to work on its moral reputation. And, I mean, okay – it certainly needs to do this. But it will end up with a nice Queen Elizabeth on the throne and the same bad boys behind the throne.

There are no indications that [Ari] Berman has the experience or even the drive to radically alter how the school functions in order to move it out of the crisis it now finds itself in. While it might be nice in theory to have a president with a PhD in Jewish thought at the helm, the selection of an MBA might have actually guaranteed that the school would be able to matriculate future Jewish thinkers and leaders.

To make matters even nicer, the seemingly endemic corruption and parochialism of Yeshiva’s culture continues unabated with Berman.

Soon, the trustees now guiding the university, including Berman’s uncle, the influential communal leader Julius Berman, will vote on the nominating committee’s selection.

Julius Berman is Exhibit A for what UD is talking about in this post. Notoriously, Berman presided over a holocaust victim restitution fund that for sixteen years was massively embezzled.

[Isi] Leibler singled out Claims Conference Chairman Julius Berman and Executive Vice-President Greg Schneider for particular criticism in a recent Jerusalem Post opinion article. Leibler, a former World Jewish Congress official who lives in Israel, wrote that instead of launching an independent review following the fraud, the two men orchestrated a “Stalinist” board resolution that absolved the Claims Conference of all blame.

“Such contemptuous rejection of all managerial accountability in the wake of such a massive fraud would be inconceivable in any public company or government body where resignations or dismissals would have been mandatory,” Leibler argued.

See what I mean? You just have to laugh. Yeshiva University is irredeemable.

Although unfortunately in Yeshiva’s case, this means its appalling Moody’s rating – B3 – is affirmed as unchanged.

In the wake of expensive scandal after expensive scandal, some of it having to do with the fallout of the sort of conflict of interest you get when your virtually all-male, all-buddy board of trustees has its fingers in each others’ hedge funds (I’m looking at you, Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin), Yeshiva threatens to collapse as a viable financial entity, which Moody’s couldn’t help noticing.

Given the severity of deficits and limited liquidity, the university may exhaust liquidity before completing a restructuring of the organization.

On the up side, Yeshiva’s president, who so far has dealt with the Madoff scandal, the conflicted board of trustees scandal, and the financial collapse by literally trying to airbrush Madoff from Yeshiva history, ignoring alumni begging him to alter the board of trustees, and denying any financial difficulties at the school, has finally decided to drop a hint or two of trouble.

In a recent interview with The Commentator, a Y.U. student newspaper, [Richard] Joel blamed the university’s deficits on a “lack of effective and adequate reporting and controls.”

… He added that some department heads lied about the financial health of their departments.

Well, when the head of your school can sometimes be less than forthcoming, you’re likely to conclude that you can … dance around a little bit too…

… faculty member, brings yet more notoriety to that notorious campus, home of Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin, Zygi Wilf, and a whole cast of other conflict-of-interest-mad characters. Yeshiva University has for some time been American academia’s highest-producer when it comes to both sexual and financial scandal, and now, with the ribald rabbi and his radio, the school is definitely maintaining its record.

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But then Modern Orthodoxy just seems to roll that way.

If the allegations against Freundel are true, they confirm the worst suspicions about the status of women in Orthodoxy: that the all-male rabbinical clubs support their own members in their efforts to control women’s bodies all the time. Freundel, after all, is suspected of using his authority to grab what he wanted from unsuspecting women.

… The award-winning film “A Tale of a Woman and a Robe,” by the Israeli filmmaker Nurit Jacobs Yinon, painfully demonstrates how the experiences of female converts in the mikvah violate their most basic dignity. Three male rabbis watch every woman dunk in the water, as she is naked except for a robe or sheet separating her skin from the rabbis’ eyes. Some rabbis interviewed in the film — including the Israeli modern Orthodox rabbis David Stav and Beni Lau — admit that this practice is humiliating for women, but describe their own helplessness in changing the practice.

… So did Orthodoxy make Freundel a sex offender? Not directly. But it enabled him. Orthodoxy creates an awfully comfortable place for men with sexist and misogynistic predilections and is built around a tight posse of men willing to support each other no matter what the crime.

Same tight posse of men works the Yeshiva University financial magic.

This just in.

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, Yeshiva University’s financial collapse was not the work of a day. (Go here for background.) It took a special mix of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, decades of indifference to the sexual abuse of students, and, more recently, a useless, self-righteous, and highly compensated president, to kill the school. Yeshiva’s board of trustees remains dominated by outstanding moral specimens like Zygmunt Wilf (“the judge decided that the Wilfs showed ‘bad faith and evil motive’ in a case she said was unlike any she had ever seen in New Jersey.“). Wilf and his fellow trustees have been so riddled with conflict of interest that the board seems to have been little more than “an investment club.”

How much lower can Yeshiva go?

Yeshiva, UD feels confident, is capable of falling much farther. Indeed, she anticipates that the school will have to close.

Yeshiva University’s Moody’s rating has just been downgraded to Baa1 from A2; Moody’s is currently reviewing the university for further downgrades.

How does a university get to such a disastrous place?

It was not the work of a day. Yeshiva had to make itself so notorious that students didn’t want to enroll, and alumni didn’t want to donate. This took about five years, starting with the brilliant idea of putting Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – both YU trustees – in charge of Yeshiva’s money. Conflict of interest? Who cares.

The financial and reputational hit was a biggie. But Yeshiva was just getting started.

Instead of dealing forthrightly with its misbehavior, Yeshiva said nothing and simply erased Madoff’s name from all mentions on its website. (It couldn’t erase everything: “Madoff’s name was prominent in the program for Yeshiva’s annual Hanukkah dinner and convocation, a major fundraising event, held on Dec. 14 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, three days after he was arrested.”) It then went about characterizing itself as an innocent victim of this mean man and his friend Ezra.

With the Madoff/Merkin mess already destroying Yeshiva’s integrity, extensive sexual scandal now hit the newspapers. Decades of important Yeshiva University rabbis preying on children, or looking the other way while children were preyed upon, are the talk of the town. Yeshiva will probably have to settle hundreds of millions of dollars on the traumatized people suing it.

A third crucial component of Yeshiva University’s catastrophe is its inability clearly to admit wrongdoing, coupled with the continued prominence of people reportedly associated with wrongdoing. Take Hershel Schachter.

The power of the rabbinical school rabbis to intervene in student intellectual and extracurricular life could also undermine [Yeshiva University’s] efforts to compete with secular colleges. Rabbi [Hershel] Schachter, who objected to the study of the Christian Bible, also [said] he sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).”

Okay, so far just a jerk, the sort of anti-intellectual endemic on fundamentalist university campuses. But there’s more.

Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter, who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment.

No comment, of course; and Schachter retains a high rank at YU. So does Kenneth Brander.

Better recruiting is [YU President Richard] Joel’s answer to declining enrollment. Back in June, he tasked Rabbi Kenneth Brander, head of the Center for the Jewish Future, with a special assignment: to “re-invent recruitment strategies,” as Joel put it to the Stern College student newspaper, The Observer, in an October interview.

And here is Brander in the Jewish Daily Forward:

[T]wo men have told the Forward that they tried to warn … Kenneth Brander, about Andron. Brander led the Boca Raton congregation from 1991 until 2005, when he took a post as dean of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future.

One man who said that he was molested by Andron for three years told the Forward that he called Brander during the early 1990s.

“I told [Brander], he’s definitely a pedophile,” the man said, referring to Andron. “[Brander said] he would look into it, and he never called me back.”

Another man said he tried to warn Brander about Andron a little more than a decade ago.

The man said he tried to call Brander “four or five times,” but Brander did not respond. So the man said he “had to leave a very uncomfortable message” with someone in the Boca Raton Synagogue office. Later, a “third party” from the synagogue contacted the man to say that the allegations against Andron were “rumors” and that “in any case, it’s behind him,” the man said.

Brander may well be innocent of these charges; but as far as YU’s future goes, it doesn’t matter. The school is in free fall.

This bizarre institution is one of the main locations keeping this blog in business. It specializes in trustees like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, infantilizing and sexist rules for its students, conflict of interest among its post-Madoff/Merkin leaders, and decades worth of hushed-up sex scandals. And it’s all presided over by a very highly paid president who responds to most things with denial or silence.

Yeshiva is the very model of a corrupt university, and it should surprise no one that today its chancellor has had to resign in disgrace, having ordered the hushing up of extensive sexual abuse of students.

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The larger context:

In recent years traditional law prohibiting cooperation with oppressive governments was invoked by ultra Orthodox groups to forbid reporting sexual abusers to the civil authorities (as required by American law). Modern Orthodoxy followed the haredim in denying the legitimacy of non-Orthodox movements. Even at Yeshiva University, a highly respected rosh yeshiva and decisor, Rav Hershel Schachter (seen as continuing Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik’s halachic teaching in the rabbinical seminary), said publicly that the prime minister of Israel should be assassinated if he dared to give up some section of Jerusalem for the sake of a peace treaty. (He later apologized for the comment.) Recently, Rabbi Schachter was recorded warning against reporting sexual abusers to the authorities (lest they be imprisoned and exposed to harm from anti-Semites).

… set the pace here** – and as for bohemoth endowment losses based on interest-rate swaps, no one will ever outpace Harvard’s Larry Summers .

But Dartmouth is certainly doing its bit, with “the investment of $550 million in interest-rate swaps with now-defunct Lehman Brothers that [a faculty and alumni group] says are now worth $250 million.”

A lot of people at Dartmouth are unhappy about university trustees who are also money managers, and they’ve written a letter about it to the governor and attorney general of New Hampshire.

The letter calls for an investigation into money managers who have invested the Hanover, N.H.-based college’s assets while members of the investment committee… The letter accuses the money managers of “enriching themselves” through private equity, venture capital and hedge fund investments made by the endowment.

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In an official letter distributed to alumni, students, faculty, and administration, Yeshiva University President Richard Joel stated that Merkin, who was Chairman of the University Investment Committee, managing its endowment of almost $1.8 billion (as of about 2 years ago), had invested about $112 million in his own hedge fund, Ascot Partners, which was almost solely invested with the [Bernard] Madoff fund. In actuality, it was an initial investment of $14 million that became falsely inflated to $112 million over time. As such, Merkin collected an initial fee of one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers on whose Board of Trustees he sat. He collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone. In fourteen years, the fund grew 9 percent a year, even after subtracting losses for Madoff and expenses. He made at least $10 million from Yeshiva over his tenure. Although Joel implicitly acknowledged that the university’s charter lacked a conflict of interest restriction on the management of school funds, Merkin resigned from all of his positions at Yeshiva that day.

… Yeshiva University … retained a law firm and an investment adviser to review its practices. YU has not made the firm’s findings public, but did say that as a result, the university recently hired a chief investment adviser, and implemented a conflict-of-interest policy for the investment committee. That policy is significant at YU, where [Ezra] Merkin, a money manager who ran one of the major Madoff feeder funds, managed portions of the YU endowment while serving as chair of the investment committee.

Wouldn’t want to make the findings public. That might make Yeshiva look diligent, transparent.

On the other hand, at least it’s doing something.

Tell it to Richard Joel, the president of your university.

He still hasn’t faced the fact that Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin held among the highest positions of authority at your university for years, and that no one ever questioned that. Only when criminal investigations proceeded against these men did your university respond, and it responded by erasing them from its web pages and pretending they didn’t exist.

Nor has Joel faced the fact that a number of the remaining Yeshiva trustees — all male, of course, wouldn’t want to pollute things with a woman (see the post directly below this one)– at your university seem still to be involved in financial conflicts of interest with one another.

Really, Professor Asch. Begin at home. Start by looking around you.

This university’s highly paid president maintained the financial criminal of the century and his victim supplier in positions of enormous campus power and influence. The school lost tens of millions of endowment funds to these men.

The president continues to oversee a board of trustees bursting with conflicts of interest. UD expects at least one more member of that board to be dragged into the Madoff debacle. Yet despite calls from outraged alumni to dissolve the board, the president has done nothing.

Now, finally, faced with the loss of its financial base and any integrity it might have had after being run into the ground by its beloved Madoff and Merkin, Yeshiva’s president acts. He fires sixty innocent people.

The guilty parties – the president and his board of trustees – remain in place.

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UD thanks Tzvee for the link.

Certain universities – Louisville, USC, Yeshiva, the University of Miami – have the smell of more or less criminal enterprises. They’re always generating high-level, multifaceted, scandal; some of their trustees are crooked or even criminal financiers. Yeshiva had Bernard Madoff as treasurer; Ezra Merkin also sat on their board. Also, I believe, Ira Rennert. The school continues to have as a trustee Zygmunt Wilf. These are not pretty people.

Now, Harvard and MIT were indeed buddies with Jeffrey Epstein; Harvard even celebrates as an emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz, at least an Epstein intimate, and at most (according to one of Epstein’s slaves) a secret sharer in the sex. Its erstwhile president, who helped run a hedge fund while president, hung out with Epstein too. (He also hung out with Andrei Shleifer…) But these schools are not the rackety dives those other schools are. They’re not just in it for the money. Nor are they just in it for the sports: The heavy campus hand of plutocrat college sports fans (the recently departed T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State; Phil Knight at Oregon) generates scandals, too – but these are the tired, expected scandals of the jock school.

No, MIT and Harvard are great schools, serious schools, productive schools – they are among the world’s greatest intellectual institutions. They fuck with plutocrats because of their professors’ smokin’ ambition to understand, to invent, to cure. They want money, money, and more money to fund their projects. To be sure, some of this generative creative activity makes some of their professors personally wealthy — the ex-head of MIT’s Media Lab took money from Epstein for his own investments, which adds to the embarrassment of it all… More commonly, professors monetize their medical and technical breakthroughs, producing all kinds of conflict of interest trouble at cutting edge places like Stanford…

We little people, looking in at all of this from the outside, are assured that COIs can be “managed” – the word is always managed – and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads. Yessir!

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Now look. Most people are pretty greedy; many putrid plutocrats realize that a university affiliation can clean them up real good. It’s a marriage made in heaven. But here’s what UD finds remarkable: MIT’s endowment is close to 17 billion; Harvard’s is close to forty billion. In ten years or so, Harvard’s wealth will be, say, a hundred billion. Harvard is a superplutocrat.

These schools are currently in trouble for promiscuous plutocrat fraternization; but given how INSANELY – not to say unconscionably – rich they are, why is this sort of thing happening at all? Just make an appointment with the “super-secret and dictatorial Harvard Corporation” and explain to them that you’d rather dip into the school’s billions and billions and billions than have to take research money from a guy in jail for sexually enslaving fifteen year olds. The worst they can say is no!

And while we’re at it – Why do superbillionaires like Harvard feel compelled to appoint rich turds like Epstein visiting fellows? We know that legacy parents can pay their kids’ way into Harvard; we know that rich parents can bribe coaches to get their kids into schools like Harvard and Yale. I’m not sure we knew that profit-oriented Harvard faculty can gift generous rich guys official appointments. Not a good look. Not a good look at all. But when Larry Summers spends his presidency running a hedge fund, losing $1.8 billion of Harvard’s endowment on market gambles, and defending a faculty crony who misused, for personal gain, government funds to Harvard, whadaya expect? That crony cost Harvard tens of millions in federal penalties, and it made not one bit of difference in terms of his high-profile position in Harvard’s economics department. That’s the way plutocracies work, kiddies. Plutocracies are even smart enough to know when their workings have become too public, which is why right after Larry Summers, Harvard appointed preachy anti-materialist Drew Faust (‘And while you’re at it, find me a woman, for crap sake!”) to maintain the non-profit theatrics.

Skeptical of the clean-up crew function of women when plutocrat sausage parties get out of hand? Read and learn. As FIFA went, so went Harvard – when things get truly desperate and you can’t hide what you’ve been doing any longer, Find A Woman, Pronto. You can always go right back to men when it all blows over.

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As ever, sing it.

[Before and after his conviction in 2008, Epstein was a regular on the masturbatory tech gadfly circuit — an attendee and sponsor of “billionaire dinners” and related sausage-factory soirees at which ultrawealthy men (among them the founders of Amazon and Google), elite scientists and various other male luminaries discussed the future they were collectively trying to build (or, depending on your perspective, squander.)]

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The party’s over

It’s time to find us a dame

Until we start up again

I’m going to miss our game

It’s time to wind up

The masquerade

There’s no more Epstein

To keep us paid…

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.

… with the same extensive ties to Yeshiva University.

Today’s highest-profile arrestee, Mark Nordlicht, even shares Madoff’s biography. Both had fathers who were financial crooks. Both were deeply involved with Yeshiva University, as were many of their associates. And of course both ran/allegedly ran virtually identical Ponzi schemes.

UD is certain that if the Lord had granted Nordlicht the length of time he granted Madoff, Nordlicht would, like Bernie, have been able to do fifty rather than a measly one billion dollars worth of business.

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A brief review of the latest batch of YU-affiliated miscreants.

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“We have to start to become embarrassed by this. There has to be a huge re-set in the Orthodox community.”

Start here: Your most public institution – Yeshiva University – is an increasingly criminalized location. Admit this and start cleaning it up. Remove Wilf’s name from the campus. Remove Rennert’s name from the campus. Strip of their degrees YU graduates who go to jail for massive financial crimes. And don’t strip quietly. Make a public statement repudiating them.

Find a president who doesn’t hide your affiliation with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but who owns up to it and says that you’re now ashamed of it, and ashamed of the greed that made you decide to make those men campus heroes.

Admit that it’s time your university stopped making the news for all the wrong reasons. Admit that your hypocrisy – a pious Orthodox face hiding a cynical self-serving face – has done terrible damage to the school and has somehow got to end.

Subject all of your trustees to financial review by outsiders, with an eye toward conflict of interest and fraud. Then get rid of most of your trustees.

That’s what a huge re-set looks like. At least the beginning of one.