N.Y.U.'s Class Act

Six months after Hakan Yalincak was sentenced to 42 months in prison for a jaw-dropping Ponzi scheme, New York University has finally gotten around to taking his name off the wall.

The wall of the lecture hall, that is, that was intended to be built using cash that Yalincak had fleeced from investors and turned into a charitable gift to the university.

Of course, little of the $1.25 million down payment on a $21 million pledge ever went into the project. The so-called Yalincak Family Foundation never contributed a penny to the lecture hall--which might seem like reason enough for stripping off the name.

And then there is the embarrassment of being deceived by one of your own: Yalinak was a student when he made his mega-million donation.

Not familiar with this scandal? Here is--pardon the expression- a cheat sheet: In May 2005 Yalincak, then a senior at N.Y.U., was arrested on charges stemming from trying to pass $43 million in bad checks and from soliciting investments for a phony hedge fund, Daedelus Capital, which he started as a college junior. Yalincak posed as a wealthy Turkish heir, and with the help of his mother and some sophisticated marketing materials, defrauded sophisticated investors of more than $8 million. Like Daedelus' son, Yalincak quickly fell to earth and pleaded guilty in June 2006 to bank and wire fraud.

Wouldn't N.Y.U. want to get its paws off the tainted money and dissociate its name from the Yalincak's as quickly as possible?

The school did initially promise to return all illegitimate funds - but apparently was in the end not as bothered by the idea of accepting dirty money as it was by the annoyance of having to eat construction costs. The university backpedaled, and asked to keep the $200,000 they had already sunk into building. Finders, keepers, suckers!

Earlier this month, there was attention paid to the fact that a year after Yalincak's conviction, the family's name still graced the front wall.

To take down the letters, the university said at the time, would be "unacceptably costly."

A spokesman for N.Y.U., John Beckman, explained that removing the lettering would leave the wall damaged. Restoring it could cost thousands of dollars, because of the extensive woodwork and the need to find matching wooden replacement panels.

Soon afterward, however, school officials must have realized that there were issues other than financial, and the name is now gone. Unfortunately, the university decided a bit too late that the cost to its reputation could be greater than the cost of fixing a wall.

Liz Gunnison