Temple University’s most high-profile (and at the same time most low-profile — as a member of the board of trustees, Bill Cosby attended one meeting in thirty-two years) sort-of graduate likes to drug and mount women.

This predilection has caused some difficulty for the school, which did manage to dismount him from the BOT, but has not been able to sever the intimate relationship between Cosby and his defense lawyer, who doubles at chair of the Temple BOT.

Taking a page out of Yeshiva University’s book, Temple has decided that pretty much any conflict of interest can go down if there’s disclosure. We’ll see how that goes.

So, let’s go there. Let’s pose the question that anyone with even a smidgeon of information about Yeshiva University over the last few years has posed: Why does that university’s grossly incompetent, buck-passing president retain his job?

UD suggests that the answer to the question lies within the question as posed up there in her headline. The board. Why doesn’t the board of trustees at Yeshiva University fire its president?

Well, let’s consider a few present and past board members of that institution. Zygi Wilf, a very powerful board member (an entire campus of YU bears his last name), was a few months ago convicted of “fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.” Ezra Merkin, Bernie Madoff’s right hand man, has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud suits, and there are tons more fraud suits pending against him. Bernie Madoff himself of course was treasurer of Yeshiva’s board of trustees, plus he chaired the board of Yeshiva’s Sy Syms School of Business. Until recently, conflict of interest was rife on Yeshiva’s BOT.

UD wonders. Maybe Joel doesn’t go because he knows too much. About the board of trustees. Maybe there’s more where that other stuff came from.

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One more thing: UD suspects the I could puke factor is also increasingly at play at Yeshiva. Whether in terms of alumni gifts or enrollment, I have to assume that part of Yeshiva’s financial catastrophe involves larger and larger numbers of people just saying Look – the sex scandals (hard to keep track of these, but for those counting, here’s the latest), the money scandals, the conflicts of interest, the lying, the criminals on the BOT… All in the context of Yeshiva’s piously self-righteous self-representation… Yick. It’s just too much. Forget it.

Nobody thinks of assigning him when they stop wining and dining him…

So out he goes, in search of consultancies and media appearances for himself…

The sad post-presidential story of George Washington University’s Stephen Trachtenberg (he was, during his tenure, a dead ringer for Gordon Gee – genial, bow-tied, tending toward inept public statements, and scandalously overpaid) displays all the pathos of a man who can’t sit still after having been a university leader, a man flailing about in search of things to do and failing to do them well.

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Defense of the indefensible is a Gordon Gee/Stephen Trachtenberg trademark. Both men – like Sarah Palin – “get increasingly adorable” as their statements get increasingly deplorable. The bow tie enlarges… becomes pink…

Trachtenberg ran to the defense of Yeshiva University when its greed and corruption turned it into a conflict of interest paradise ruled by Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. In 2008, he dismissed as a Monday morning quarterback anyone who criticized this now junk-status catastrophe.

Trachtenberg’s recent remarks about rape and its causes have embarrassed not only him, but GW, since he’s closely associated with the school. GW is doing what it can to distance itself from him, and Trachtenberg is becoming beyond belief adorable.

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Gee landed on his feet, at West Virginia University.

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Americans really like guys like these. UD has no idea why.

UD is an old hand at university scandals, and Alabama State University is one of the most scandalous universities in the world; so she certainly doesn’t expect to be shocked – WOW shocked – by anything its pathetic conflicted threatened with loss of accreditation board of trustees does.

But UD has to hand it to this school. It has truly astounded her. The two most-conflicted trustees (chair and vice-chair of the board!) have been asked to resign by the governor, “who serves as president of the ASU board by virtue of his elected office.” And why? The governor, like other governors, has tolerated this grossly corrupt institution forever. How do you go too far for the sixth most corrupt state in the union?

Well, you do this:

[The governor] learn[ed] that proposed amendments to ASU’s bylaws had been circulated to members of ASU’s board “excluding me as president and a member of the board.”

[T]he amendments would have done the following in an apparent attempt to grab power from [just-appointed ASU president Gwendolyn] Boyd:

Establish an attorney-client privileges between the university’s general counsel and the board, replacing that between the university and its president,
Provide for the hire of the general counsel by the board of trustees,
Allow removal of trustees only for criminal acts [and not just little bitty ol’ conflicts of interest, get it?] by a majority of the members of the board of trustees rather than a majority present at the time of the vote,
Install a board liaison with the same powers as those designated to the university president,
Prohibit trustees from disclosing confidential information, and
Allow a committee chair to direct the actions of the president.

Shut ma mouth. There’s something almost impressive about people anticipating both their own conflictual/criminal acts and the way they’re going to get away with those acts…

But what truly amazes me (if I may, at this remarkable moment in the history of my blogging about universities, speak in the first-person) is how flagrant these guys are. I mean, just put it out there… Don’t tell the governor; write it so you take power from the president; protect your ass in advance of further self-enriching conflicts of interest…

This school makes Yeshiva University look well-behaved. This school is afuckingmazing.

Six years ago, a concerned Yeshiva University alum, Andrew Sole, wrote a letter to the president of that school calling for the resignation of the entire board of trustees, a scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Madoff-and-Merkin-led, lot.

Yeshiva’s answer to Sole (which came not, of course, from the president, who is far too busy and important to have bothered with such a triviality, but from some underling… or maybe the response was machine-generated…), Sole told a newspaper, was “scripted,” and “beyond offensive.”

And so it remains today, with Yeshiva the object of renewed contempt as stunning details of its take-down of itself via a combination of risky investments and the Madoff/Merkin tag team emerge. Sole once again calls attention to the fundamental negligence… perhaps amounting to criminality?… of the people who have now succeeded in running the school entirely into the ground (Moody’s has rated it junk); and, incredibly, true to form, Yeshiva has tried not responding at all to him, and then, under pressure from growing media attention, has denied everything. Everything’s peachy at Yeshiva! Plus the extensive report on its shameful activities is all “half-truths and inaccuracies.” Such as?

Yeshiva isn’t saying.

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Yeshiva has had to sell off some of its valuable Manhattan real estate, is trying to pare faculty by encouraging retirements, and has given up control of its Albert Einstein College of Medicine to save money. Yet it’s still at risk of running out of cash next year, Moody’s reported.

Getting rid of everyone but beloved Yeshiva trustee Zygi Wilf!

And how tragic for America. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in filing suit today against one of the country’s many tax syphons (put the phrase tax syphons in my search function for previous posts), calls the exploitation of America’s poor by for-profit colleges like ITT “truly an American tragedy.”

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this morning filed a civil lawsuit against for-profit college company ITT Educational Services, seeking restitution to students allegedly harmed by ITT’s private loan programs, a civil fine, and an injunction against the company.

Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has been a big investor in ITT. Which is… Okay, that’s her business, you might say, though UD would say that it represents at least an embarrassment … But the real scandal here comes from the fact that Blum is a University of California regent who presumably had something to do with that university itself investing in ITT. From a 2010 article in the Berkeley Daily Planet:

… Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million — nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.

The regents’ conflict-of-interest policy requires them to “avoid the potential for and the appearance of conflicts of interest with respect to the selection of individual investments … public officials shall not make, participate in making, or influence a governmental decision in which the official has a conflict of interest.” And the California Political Reform Act of 1974 provides civil and criminal penalties for officials who ignore conflicts of interest — as UC makes clear in ethics training presentations specifically created for university officials. The Board of Regents, however, is self-policing and it tolerates situations that cause others concern.

John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, California, comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”

Shades of Yeshiva University under the management of Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin! … Well, that university investment strategy ended badly, and I think Berkeley’s is about to come to grief too… But … look. You don’t need to be Thomas Frank to be sickened by the cynicism of America’s greatest public university getting rich off the backs of America’s most vulnerable student population…

Especially since it’s not only Berkeley. There’s Columbia University, already famous for its business dean’s starring performance in Inside Job. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, sits on the board of the company that owns Kaplan. Students there were so disgusted by this that they started a petition calling for him to leave the board. The language of their petition pithily summarized the American for-profit ed business model:

Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.

In announcing the suit, the CFPB said this was just the beginning of a much wider action against the whole scummy industry. UD is skeptical. It has been scummy — reeking to high heaven, in fact – for a couple of decades, and no one with any power to really kill it off seems to have cared. That’s the American tragedy.

Or is it just beginning?

[N]o one could possibly be that good given the volatility of the markets. “As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up.” … [Harry] Markopolos noted that during his tenure at Rampart, he traded with some of the biggest derivatives companies in the world, and none of them dealt with [Bernard] Madoff because they didn’t think his numbers were real.

Markopolos is talking about the year 1999. It wasn’t until Bernard Madoff was arrested in 2008 that Yeshiva University – under cover of night, without comment – erased his name as chair of its business school. This was farcical enough, but Yeshiva went farther: It invested huge sums with the financial criminal of the twenty-first century. “We thought he was God,” said his fellow trustee, Elie Wiesel.

One appreciates Wiesel’s honesty. He is willing to state openly just how stupid, just how grossly negligent, were the conflict-of-interest crazies running Yeshiva University.

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The excellent Gavriel Brown, who writes for YU’s student newspaper, provides a detailed account of the manifold ways in which the very same fools, who continue to run Yeshiva, have now run it into the ground. The column even provides an edgy graphic (scroll down) complete with smugly grinning President Richard Joel. Brown concludes:

YU can no longer be an empire and President Joel can no longer be an emperor.

Yes, especially since he turns out to be Nero.

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But the farce deepens yet more. The comments on Brown’s column are from outraged Yeshiva insiders who cannot believe that anyone in the Yeshiva family has the shamelessness to air this dirty laundry. How dare he! The next thing you know, someone will point out that the family that endowed an entire Yeshiva campus – the Wilfs – just got convicted of racketeering. That Ezra Merkin held as powerful a position as Yeshiva trustee as his partner in crime, Madoff. That the board of trustees has long been farcically rife with conflict of interest.

Of all the investment managers in New York City and around the world, the board chose one of its own to manage a significant portion of the university’s endowment. Given the conflict of interest, the trustees who approved the decision to invest endowment with Madoff should be held accountable if they failed to perform adequate due diligence.

Do you think anyone has been held accountable? Well, put it this way. Do you think that Zygi Wilf has been removed from Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?

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You want farce? An American university priding itself on its piety as the higher education arm of the orthodox Jewish community resembles a criminal enterprise. It seems to be run by an emperor. It is cheered on to annihilation by idjits. That’s farce.

… there are quite a few Wee Ones.

Wee Ones are teeny weeny provincial pinpricks on the national collegiate map, places run by teeny weeny provincial people all of whom have pretty much exactly the same religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds.

You do not have to be in the literal provinces to be a Wee One; indeed, the biggest Wee One in America (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) is Yeshiva University, located in the dynamic midst of our most dynamic metropolis. Forcing ground of Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, Yeshiva has attained its signature WO mix of academic go-nowhere-ism, financial corruption, and (the true distinguishing mark of the fully-evolved WO) religious self-righteousness, because its all-male, all-buddy board of trustees has difficulty grasping the meaning of the term conflict of interest.

To be sure, some Wee Ones, like President-for-Life Glenn Poshard’s Southern Illinois University, are located (right, check the name) in the provinces. Some WOs lack the moral superiority religious institutions bring to their misdeeds. But all Wee Ones share – now or in the recent past – conflicted boards of trustees; and many, of course, add to this mix a willingly conflicted university president.

If you review this blog’s Conflict of Interest category for the Wee Ones hit parade, you’ll find New York’s St John’s University right at the front of the fun.

Now, provincial typically means convoluted, so you’re going to have to put on your thinking cap to follow all of the insider connections in the latest St John’s (a Catholic school whose president is a priest) scandal. For instance, a certain Wile, chief of staff to President Father Donald Harrington, got a loan from the Chair of the BOT…

Wile used the loan from the former Chair [of the BOT] to help fund a real-estate venture with university president Father Donald Harrington, his boss. Neither loan was disclosed to the board of trustees at the time they were made.

Oh, with Father Harrington! Okay, and you and Harrington and I guess the former Chair decided not to tell the rest of the guys on the board about it. Okay.

Wile went on to be not only Harrington’s chief of staff, but vice-president for institutional development (given his remarkable money smarts, which landed him in a position where he needed massive loans and got them unethically). And… I dunno.. there’s more… but ol’ UD is running out of steam on this one…

Recall this long 2009 New York Magazine article, which notes that

Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva [University’s] investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot [Merkin’s fund], which Ezra passed along to [Bernard] 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 … 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.

Whatever fudging there’d been in the disclosures, Ezra did well for Yeshiva—in fourteen years, the fund grew 9 percent a year, even after subtracting losses for Madoff and expenses. And he did well for himself; certainly, he made at least $10 million from Yeshiva over his tenure.

Which is to say that if you are going to have your hedgie trustees (and eventually all your trustees will be hedgies) invest for you – in their funds – you want to be very careful not to do a Yeshiva. Already Brown University has had to let one way big money trustee go, and now there’s the awkward matter of Steven A. Cohen himself on its board. So first of all you need to weigh, er, reputational issues against growing your endowment.

And then there’s Dartmouth’s ongoing problem.

In February 2012, a group sent an anonymous letter to the office of the New Hampshire attorney general. “Who really runs Dartmouth College and for whose benefit?” the letter asked. “For years, Dartmouth has been run by and has paid sky-high fees to a group of investment manager trustees, all Dartmouth graduates, who have then recycled some portion of the fees” back to the college “as generous ‘donations,’ ” often getting a building named for them in the process.

Teehee. They get these huge fees for doing something with the school’s money, and then they graciously give back some of the money the school gave them and call this money a donation.

They are Huh? presidents. The things they do are so nutty, so destructive, that you simply have to sit back and wonder.

These are the university presidents with multiple ongoing national scandals to their names, the university presidents always reeling from massive sex scandals to massive money scandals, never quite catching up with anything… You can sort of see the sweat dripping off of their faces as they stonewall on this one, pass the buck on that one…

Shalala – University of Miami – is still buffeted by the rioting football players scandal and the Nevin Shapiro scandal, but now, in addition to those, she’s got the Pascal Goldschmidt scandal. Much of her medical school faculty is up in arms about Dean Goldschmidt and his, er, management techniques… But Shalala says nothing; whether it’s Goldschmidt, or her other proud med school appointment – Charles Nemeroff, she’s just going to keep on keeping on thank you very much…

Joel, of Yeshiva, is a yet stranger case, a man whose tenure has witnessed the deification and then rapid de-deification of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the existence of a board of trustees (all male, natch; women would be against Yeshiva’s religion) so rife with conflict of interest it became a laughingstock, and a decades-long sex scandal whose legal costs promise to set YU back even more than the $150 million or so it lost because of Bernie and Ezra.

This sex scandal, this latest thing, involving rabbis abusing boys at Yeshiva’s university-run high school, isn’t raising Joel’s game any.

[One of the abused] also said that he reported the abuse to Y.U.’s current president, Richard Joel, before and after Joel took up the post in 2003. Joel did not launch an investigation into the abuse allegations until they were published in [a newspaper].

At first, through a spokesman, he said that Y.U. had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to “assist” in the investigation. Later, he said that Sullivan & Cromwell’s investigation would be independent.

Same old same old. Denial, number one. Number two, try to control everything. Number three, pushed to the absolute effing wall, begin – tentatively, shamelessly, angrily, self-righteously – dealing with it.

Yeshiva University, notorious for having featured both Bernard Madoff and his buddy Ezra Merkin on its board of trustees, is all het up about a rather good short story a student there wrote about having sex.

You’ll recall that Yeshiva’s response to having put those two men in profoundly responsible positions at the university was to quietly erase their names one night from its trustees list and then say pretty much nothing about the matter. When pushed to the wall, Yeshiva described itself as a victim, overlooking the fact that its virtually non-existent conflict of interest policy allowed Merkin and Madoff to do plenty of business at the school.

Yeshiva has never come to any moral reckoning with its shameful behavior in the Madoff matter — behavior all the more scandalous in a religious school. But Yeshiva is totally down for moral hysteria against some undergrad who writes about sex. The student council has withdrawn the paper’s funding, and the university has clamped sex filters on its male students’ computers.

Only the men get the filters because women don’t read about sex.

Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.

At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.

Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.

The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.

The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.

The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.

The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.

This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.

Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?

What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.

This blog’s category, TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE, chronicles the twisted, tortuous, Catch-22ish character of university trustee appointments.

You want someone filthy rich, but you don’t want someone filthy. Someone rich as Croesus, but not a criminal.

You’re after a person who may be greedy as all get-out, but who’s also a generous philanthropist. A market predator and a shaping-young-minds idealist…

UD ain’t saying it’s impossible to find people like this. America was built by high-minded robber barons. But from pious Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin to the petty thieves of lesser schools, it’s easy to find compromised trustees.

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It’s not so easy to know what to do with them. Yeshiva held on to the Madoff/Merkin tag team until their investment strategies became an unignorable scandal. Other universities move very quickly, dumping a trustee as soon as there’s a whiff of conflict of interest or fraudulent dealing. Scroll through this category for details.

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The latest story, one UD has been following for awhile, involves veteran University of Cincinnati trustee Stanley Chesley. Here’s the background on this attorney’s astounding greed and cynicism.

The latest on Chesley has him about to be disbarred. He is an embarrassment to the political culture of Ohio, where the attorney general has just pulled him from a high-profile case; and of course he is an embarrassment to the University of Cincinnati, where he presides over the intellectual and ethical – and legal – life of the institution.

UD understands as well as universities do the process by which robber barons cleanse theirs souls – or at least brighten their images – via philanthropy. The process is not to be sneezed at, I guess. But when the delicate balance between predation and patronage is upset, universities look like asshole-enablers. U Cincinnati needs to have a little parley with the governor (who appoints their trustees) and tell him they want this guy out.

… is, as you know, a category on this blog which watches the ways a university’s trustees can wreak havoc.

There’s a strictly limited number of ways, but with a really bad board of trustees, you don’t have to do too much to make a school take a tumble.

The crucial characteristic really bad boards of trustees share is cronyism. They’re all sort of buddies. With each other and with the university’s president. Culturally, they’re very similar to one another. Almost no outside voices are heard. It’s an insiders’ game.

Take scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Yeshiva University. Several on its all-male board had special financial dealings with fellow board members Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. That didn’t work out well for them, or for the school, whose Madoff-related woes aren’t over — another Yeshiva trustee and Madoff investor, Elie Wiesel, is currently threatening a high-profile lawsuit against a playwright who put him in a play she wrote about Madoff. And even without Bernie and Ezra, Yeshiva seems to have a notably conflicted board…

As does Shaw University. Shaw’s been in the news lately because its alumni association is trying to get its entire board of trustees to resign.

This is a rather dramatic gesture, but you can understand their desperation. This isn’t merely about conflict of interest (“[T]he university contracted for insurance coverage with the relative of an unnamed board member.”); it’s about institutional corruption and financial irresponsibility generally:

Citing “gross neglect,” Shaw University’s national alumni group has called for the school’s board of trustees [which includes “boxer Evander Holyfield and boxing promoter Don King”] to step down or be dismissed, an appeal addressed to multimillionaire lawyer, alumnus and board Chairman Willie Gary.

The May 14 letter from the alumni association’s president, Emily Perry, cites no specific grievance, but says: “We can no longer stand by and allow Shaw to appear to deteriorate due to poor judgment. … We have serious concerns regarding conflict of interest, fiduciary responsibilities, adverse interest and commitment.”

Shaw, the South’s oldest historically black college, has spent the last year trying to shovel its way out of debt exceeding $20 million. The May 14 letter is not the first rebuke. In March, the school’s Florida alumni group sent a letter to Shaw administrators saying it was “amazed” that giving among board members totaled only $41,089 since July, despite Gary’s pledge that each of the roughly 40 board members would chip in $50,000.

When the alumni refer, in their letter, to “continued mistrust, negative news media coverage, hostility, calls, faxes and letters,” they allude to the predictable outcome of trustees who don’t attend board meetings, who may be financially corrupt, who hand out contracts to relatives (or to themselves), who have financial dealings with other trustees, and who simply do not understand what a university is.

As we await Madoff’s sentencing today, we revisit unapologetically ill-run Yeshiva University.

[Many institutions connected to Madoff] not only need to more formally organize their investing and giving along more official corporate governance lines — Yeshiva University in particular has been cited for this type of needed reform. [T]hey may need to address their own unwitting complicity in the dissipation of the assets of Mr. Madoff’s victims.

Madoff, recall, was Yeshiva’s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an influential trustee. There’s been no public reckoning with this history on that campus, and conflict of interest remains the all-male board of trustees’ middle name.

Sure, Yeshiva lost money through Madoff. It also made plenty of money – for itself, and for its trustees. Yeshiva has said nothing by way of acknowledgement of the depth of its misdeeds.

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Update: It’s also a good day to remember this letter, written last year to the president of Yeshiva from one of its law school graduates, Andrew Sole. Here are its closing paragraphs:

[H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.

In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.

The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees. The University’s counsel, government regulators, and law enforcement will conduct their proper investigations, but the proud students, graduates, and supporters of Yeshiva University should not have to wait that long for credible and therapeutic action to be taken by this University.

Yeshiva has the opportunity to begin the healing process today by installing new fiduciaries that are untainted by scandal and embarrassment. I hope you will take this letter to heart and I wish the University the best during these incredibly trying times.

Yeshiva responded to Sole with a form letter brush-off.

And all of those men, those hands-in-each-others’-pockets men, those Madoff and Merkin men, remain on the Yeshiva University board of trustees.