The Morality of Economists?
From today's Crimson:
Georgios N. Theophanous ’06, an economics concentrator who had Shleifer as a thesis adviser, called the professor a “very accurate” speaker and “remarkably energetic” thinker. He also rejected the relevance of Shleifer’s legal troubles to his standing as a Faculty member. “He is an excellent professor and does remarkable research and those to me are the two main criteria that you should be using in deciding whether or not he’s going to be a valued professor,” Theophanous said. “The other stuff, that is for other people to worry about.”
Mmm-hmmm. And they say Hitler was a pretty dynamic speaker. Anything else, that's for other people to worry about.
A more serious point of comparison: As David Warsh has pointed out, Yale fired Shleifer's protege, Florencio López-de-Silanes, for double-billing about $150,000 worth of expenses. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy put it bluntly: "He has resigned from Yale as a result of financial misconduct and irregularities in his role as director of the International Institute for Corporate Governance. ....Appropriate corrective actions have been taken."
As Fred Abernathy and others have pointed out, Harvard has never said a peep about the
$30 million that Shleifer cost the university....
