some block quotes while I try to figure out a longer post

Jonathan Tasini has some questions about the head of the AFMA he wants the press to answer:

To explain his relationship with a management firm, McCormick
Advisory Group, headquartered in Laconia, NH, and with a law firm, Seham Seham
Meltz & Peterson, based in Westchester County, NY, which has a long history
of representing management in the airline industry.
to explain how The
McCormick Group also founded the Professional Flight Attendants Association
(PPFA), which successfully raided an AFL-CIO union at Northwest Airlines.
To
disclose what the Seham law firm gets from AMFA and whether he knows that the
Seham firm has long represented airline managements in opposing workers and
their unions

While Phoebe excerpts in detail the fantastic Chronicle of Higher Education piece on poor (ridiculously wealthy) embattled and controversial Yale investment czar David Swensen. I'll quote from the article itself rather than Phoebe's post. (Subscription required.)

Mr. Swensen is embedded on the New Haven campus. He wants you to know that
he and the endowment, "a symbol of Yale's wealth and power," are a part of
the university.

Just don't get too close.

Only a handful of Yale's most powerful leaders are allowed to peer inside
the endowment's machinery. For everyone else, investment of the
university's billions is a black-box affair. It is a strategy, critics
say, that is long on secretive investments in nontraditional assets like hedge
funds, venture-capital funds, and other private-equity funds, but that sells
short external oversight. The names of the funds that Yale invests in? Their
strategies for making money? Their investment returns? Privileged
information.
***
But critics of the Yale endowment's management have peered under the veil
of secrecy just enough to reveal what they say are questionable investments that
have harmed people and the environment. The activists -- students, alumni,
members of Yale's unions -- acknowledge Mr. Swensen's enrichment of the
endowment, which in the 2004-5 academic year pumped $565-million into the
$290.2-million collected in donations. They want assurances, nonetheless, that
the opaque endowment will shun shady deals, no matter how much money is at
stake. Mr. Swensen refuses to meet with them.

At issue, say disclosure advocates, is Yale's soul, the essence of which is
articulated in the university's motto and emblazoned on its seal: Lux etVeritas.
Light and truth. "I'm suspicious of the notion that you have to be
secretive in order to get things done," says Roxana N. Tynan, a 1988 graduate
and a member of Yale Alumni for Social Justice.

"Yale is a private institution, but it plays a public role," continues
Ms.Tynan, who works for the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy, a nonprofit group
that got Los Angeles to adopt a living-wage law in 1997. "At a minimum, it
needs to be transparent to members of its own community. Money isn't
blind. Whether we like it or not, [it can be] used to support or it can be
used to oppose a problem regime or immoral practices. It doesn't wash that
it's OK that the only thing that matters is the financial return to the
institution. "

For an endowment manager, however, light and truth can be dark and
dangerous. "Disclosure is just adverse to the investment process,"
says Mr.Swensen.