The university foundation – the shady organization of rich boosters who want to do nice things for a particular university without having to be bound by the board of trustees and other pesky official organizations/rules – is often a very naughty thing. Sometimes it’s a slush fund for the president and his or her cronies, as at the University of Louisville, where its main function was loading more and more dollars onto the president’s personal haul. God only knows (channeling the Beach Boys) what many campuses’ sports and administration figures would do without The Foundation.
Iowa State University, the inspiration for Jane Smiley’s novel, Moo, has a typical foundation. It buys stuff the administration is too embarrassed, or legally unable, to buy. Until ISU’s president crash-landed one of the planes the foundation bought, no one seems to have been prompted to ask what Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, has asked: “Why does a university need to buy a plane at all?”
In answering that question, UD has always sought the guidance of Purdue University trustee Joanne Brouillette:
Excluding one flight to Naples with several other trustees and administrators, [Purdue University trustee JoAnn] Brouillette’s [twelve private, university-paid] flights [since the beginning of 2008] were to and from Fort Wayne, Ind., only spending 30 minutes in the air. Out of these flights, five of them carried no other passengers.
Big people like go UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN!
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UD thanks dmf.
September 30th, 2016 at 2:39PM
Many people swear that Michigan State and its president John Hannah were the inspiration for Moo.