PETER BERKOWITZ: Are Universities Above The Law? “Nasar’s allegations, however, are disturbingly familiar. They reflect a tendency at our leading universities to avoid transparency and disdain accountability. This tendency cultivates in administrators and professors an imperiousness in the wielding of power and in professors and students a submissiveness in the face of power. This tendency and the vices it nurtures are no less a threat to the goal of liberal education​—​forming individuals fit for freedom​—​than are the corruption of the curriculum and the imposition of ideological conformity that characterize today’s campuses.”

Whenever you have a lot of money sloshing around without much transparency or accountability, you get corruption. No group is of such high moral standing that it can avoid that for long.

UPDATE: Reader Bob O’Hara writes:

Glenn, your item this morning on financial shenanigans at Columbia tells a story that’s sadly familiar.

Open-book accounting is one way to bring “sunlight” into the darker corners of higher education finance. You posted some comments about it a couple years ago, back before the higher education bubble caught everyone’s attention. Since the problem is evergreen, maybe people should look at open-book accounting again, especially for public universities.

Yes. Though since private universities often actually get more public money than do public ones (because higher tuition gets more federal financial aid, and because they have higher overhead on research grants) it would certainly be fair to condition such money on open accounting practices for them as well. More on that here.