Several years ago, I stopped contributing to my Southern Ivy alma mater, when I learned of a deal it cut for a prominent professor of literature on its faculty. He mentioned that he was interested in publishing an article on a particular artist and the dean's office readily forked over $60,000 to purchase a painting by that artist for the professor. Within a year, said prof moved on and the painting went with him. I don't even know that he ever published any article about the artist. Said prof is known to work only on very big deals. Some of them are not very good, but they are all very big.

My threshold for tolerating this kind of thing must be fairly low. It's nothing, of course, compared with what the federal government sometimes does with money, but there are two interesting stories about money management in the Ivy League. Irfan Khawaja at Theory and Practice points out that President Shirley Tilghman of Princeton has recently testified that she diverted $750,000 from the purposes designated by its donors, but that's fairly small potatoes compared with the $26.5 million settlement plus $10 to $15 million Harvard has agreed to on behalf of one of its own faculty members. Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has the short form of the story. David McClintick,"How Harvard Lost Russia," Institutional Investor.com, 12 February, has the longer form and it's apparently at the bottom of the latest faculty discontent with Lawrence Summers.