Modern universities have huge financial footprints; even my tiny little university is a billion-dollar enterprise, Yale must be many times that.
If Petrone-Codrington has really been at this for 8 years, she must have had this position of enormous responsibility since she was 34. That’s a baby by university administrator standards. I can’t figure out what her credentials for this were (though I could find out that her husband is apparently former pro boxer Jaidon “The Don” Codrington).
I am so sick of hearing about “human nature.” Humans are capable of the most wonderful, altruistic things and the most horrible, selfish and destructive things.
Any attempt to ascribe either of those things to human nature or to say that one or the other is contrary to human nature ignores actual human nature, which is in fact extremely complicated, inconsistent and easily overwritten by learned behaviors.
Back in the day, a decent apartment in town and a modest datcha in the country, both with West German appliances, a chauffeur-driven ZiL and maybe a summer holiday at a nice Crimean beach was then what a couple of mansions, private jets and a superyacht are now.
After the soviet system crumbled, there was
a) more, much more to go around and
b) what went around suddenly was hard currency.1)
The first wave of oligarchs all made their riches by buying mineral resources – oil, gas, precious metals - at state-sanctioned prices for roubles (maybe worth the paper they were printed on) and selling them abroad for hard cash.
1) As opposed to currencies international banks avoided wherever they could, domestic products of poor quality and COMECON barter vouchers.
I don’t see libertarian-fantasy, Gilded Age, trickle-down, oligarchical democracies as democracies as such. The only “true” democracy are your examples.
You do. The oligarchs stole entire industries. That wasn’t an option during the soviet era. The scale of looting during the Yeltsin era was extraordinary and possibly unprecedented in the history of the world outside of imperial plunder and invasion.
Are parents, teachers, religious and community leaders pointless? I mean, there’s a lot of work to raising up a child to be a productive member of society…or even to be functional enough to feed themselves.
If we believe in bringing out the best in people, then we don’t throw up our hands and say ‘well, it’s just human nature to use poop as finger paint on the walls, nothing to be done about it’.
I could have sworn that ‘genetic predisposition’ had to do with people’s individual likelihood for developing certain diseases, or other medical conditions.
Unless the argument being made here is that greed and avarice… are a disease?
Dammit! You just can’t trust interns today. I guess Yale should stop putting them in charge of QCing their financial transactions.
It’s official- no interns on the heist gang. Only union.