A majority on American University's Board of Trustees has concluded that suspended President Benjamin Ladner must be replaced, according to two sources close to the board.

Even as the embattled president of American University tries to save his own job amid a growing controversy over his spending habits, Benjamin Ladner has a warning for other college leaders: This could happen to you. The investigation by American's Board of Trustees, the suspended president said, is being driven partly by two federal laws that have changed the culture of accountability at nonprofit organizations.

Those laws are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which applies to publicly held corporations, and a section of the Internal Revenue Code that deals with compensation for officials of tax-exempt organizations.

…In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Chronicle of Philanthropy on Tuesday, Mr. Ladner said he was dismayed because, in his view, the university's Board of Trustees had not properly followed guidelines from the Internal Revenue Service designed to help tax-exempt organizations head off trouble over the compensation they pay. What's more, he said, the board also felt "legal pressure" from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a federal law designed to rein in rogue corporations.

…"A level of fear sets in that is quite remarkable," said Mr. Ladner. "It's almost palpable: 'Oh my God, we're going to be sued. Oh my God, we're not following IRS regulations.'"
"It's a case study in one institution being driven by a kind of fear that we're out of compliance."

American University and its trustees do have reason to be concerned about federal regulators, says a former top official of the Internal Revenue Service.

"The IRS has been explicit in its desire to re-establish itself as a policeman of the boundaries of charitable behavior," said Marc Owens, who formerly ran the IRS division that oversees private colleges and other nonprofit groups. “And I think that is one of the factors that is leading the IRS to be more aggressive in following up on media reports in this area."

Mr. Owens noted that a federal law enacted in 1996 gives the IRS the authority to fine officials of nonprofit groups who receive salaries and other benefits that the agency considers excessive, as well as to penalize trustees who approve the compensation. That section of the tax code is known as the "intermediate sanctions" law because it gave officials a way to avoid the extreme case of revoking a charity's tax-exempt status.

Mr. Owens said he believes that the IRS is likely to review the compensation Mr. Ladner received and might look at a provision in his contract that guaranteed him a high-paid job for life unless he was dismissed as president for drastic reasons.

Mr. Owens said that officials of American University need to be aware of proposed regulations that the IRS issued this month that explain when the agency should revoke the tax-exempt status of a nonprofit group whose officials were already in trouble for receiving excessive benefits from the organization. The IRS said it might consider "whether the organization has been involved in repeated excess-benefit transactions" and "whether the organization has implemented safeguards that are reasonably calculated to prevent future violations."

“$800,000 is reasonable… If people only knew the full story… What a beautiful world it used to be…”

[T]he cost of an education at a top four-year private college [has risen] to more than $160,000. State universities, where tuition has been rising at a faster pace than for private schools, can cost $110,000 to $140,000 for out-of-state tuition.

"The numbers are really staggering," said Rich Calvario, national finance tuition consultant at TIAA-CREF, one of the nation's largest money management firms.

Parents can count on the costs growing. In 18 years, the bill for a private college could easily hit $500,000, according to online financial calculators created by Raymond James planners. To get there, you would have to save $1,000 a month and have it earn 7 percent a month from the day Junior was born. Tuition, which has been rising faster than inflation for two decades, is now also rising faster than the median family income of $44,389.

The factors that have pushed it to rise annually more than three percentage points above inflation - demographics, reductions in state aid to higher education, the demand for college education - are not changing, says Ronald Ehrenberg, a Cornell University economics professor.

Tensions with the board began last year, two trustees said, when Ladner asked for a $1 million bonus and several millions more in other compensation.

…[T]he father of a 2005 graduate said he and his wife had planned to make a "significant endowment" to AU, but they have changed their minds.

"The Board of Trustees has apparently condoned Mr. Ladner's free spending and unilaterally decided that the mission of the university is to enrich the president's lifestyle and NOT provide competitive salaries for professors or scholarships for deserving students," he wrote in an e-mail.

[T]he contract was written in such a way that it gave Mr. Ladner full discretion over his spending, giving him a strong defense against any legal challenge. One trustee involved with trying to reinstate Mr. Ladner, asking that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said: "There is nothing ambiguous at all about the contract. There's not one thing he was not entitled to."

[Ladner’s] current contract, signed in 1997, explicitly allowed him wide latitude in spending, including the right to travel in a "first class" manner.

Trustees on both sides, as well as the former board chairman who negotiated the contract, William I. Jacobs, agreed that it was up to Mr. Ladner to interpret what "first class" meant, beyond his right to buy airline tickets for the front section of the plane.

…Mr. Jacobs conceded that Mr. Ladner chose a broad definition…

Said a performance artist, Hala Faisal, who took off her clothes in public, displaying the words "Stop the War." Where's the metaphor? Supposedly, taking off your clothes ≈ disarmament.

"When it comes to students' money being spent inappropriately or allegations of such, we take it seriously, very seriously," said Joseph Vidulich, 19, a sophomore and secretary of the [AU] student government, adding that students want to give Ladner "the benefit of the doubt." But, he said, referring to a trustee's allegation that Ladner spent more than $22,000 on a first-class plane ticket, "If he was spending as much money as tuition to fly to Nigeria, that is a serious problem and something we need to fix."

Lawyers for the Ladners have responded to the charges with a blanket denial of wrongdoing and extensive explanations for each expenditure, according to documents before the investigators. The lawyers asserted that all the spending was consistent with the terms of Dr. Ladner's employment contract, signed in 1997, and with a recognition that his wife, as American's first lady, represented the university at all times .

In four years, I encountered Benjamin Ladner all of three times, and this was three times as much as the average student, and only because I was a member of the Student Confederation. I enjoyed the lovely chef, and the backyard parties with the waterfalls and koi. All held in a house that cost well over a million dollars.

But it was ok. Because here I was hoping that Ben Ladner was out doing something important for the school. Well as it turns out, he wasn’t. He was frolicking around having fancy-shmancy dinners and sending his chef to Paris for lessons, getting first class tickets on overseas trips, and using a chauffeur to get his dry cleaning….

[S]tudents use the AU SHUTTLE to get their dry cleaning. Tell Mr. Ladner that he should have learned to do the same. Also mention to Mr. Ladner that while many of his students' parents may have some kind of money, I'm pretty sure that money was to be used for their students, not him and his pan-seared foie gras-loving ass.

I want my damn money back. Sorry, my mom wants her money back and she wants it back now. And while you're at it, supplement my income. Mr. Ladner lives in DC off my parent's money. I should too.

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Late last week, the Baylor Starbucks pulled about 500 cups with a quote by gay author Armistead Maupin after a faculty member complained.

Maupin's quote explains that the only regret he had about being gay is that he held it in for a long time. He said, on the cup, that he gave up the freedom of his youth because he was afraid of revealing himself. He encourages others to not make the same mistake.

...The quote by Armistead Maupin is one of a number of different quotes printed in Starbucks coffee cups around the nation. The quotes are part of a program called "The Way I See It" and according to a Starbucks Web site, are meant to "promote good, healthy discussion."

John Roberts Jr. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court - it shows how in America it's possible to rise from privilege to power! That's the hallmark of our great nation.

The rules for our omnibus reviewers are simple. (We bend the rules occasionally for other pieces, when there is a pairing of reviewer and book we especially want—Phyllis Rose and Richard Wilbur, for instance.) They can have no personal connection to any of the authors they are writing about. They do not get to select the books to be reviewed, though we do discuss the list with them and try to make the assignment interesting for them. They are given a strict total word count, which they are free to distribute among the various books as they see fit (e.g., eight hundred words for one book, four hundred for another, etc.). And finally—most importantly—they must express a clear opinion about each book reviewed.

These rules were put in place a couple of years ago, because it seemed to us that the state of reviewing in contemporary poetry was so dire. Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional, and dull. We wanted to eliminate the descriptive review, those pieces you finish without any clear idea of whether its author loved or hated the book in question. We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair.

It has also meant, inevitably, publishing a lot of negative reviews. Any honest glance at literary history will reveal just how rare good poetry is. If a critic gets ten books sent to him for review, and he finds six or seven of them are excellent, then he is either the luckiest poetry reviewer on the planet, or he has no taste. We believe that it is important to publish these negative reviews along with the positive ones (though we would never print what we considered an ad hominem attack). Not only does it give some ballast and context to the critical praise, it also is a gesture toward treating poetry as a public art in the same way that films or novels are, both of which are routinely and fiercely argued over in the mainstream media. It is a service to serious readers.

Of course, this reviewing policy causes us great conflicts and disappointment at times. Anyone who has followed the magazine over the past two years can’t help but recognize that we are often in the position of printing negative reviews of poets whose work we have published extensively. In effect, our reviewers sometimes criticize our taste. This would be a very easy thing to control. It requires only a phone call to feel out a reviewer on a particular book, or a willingness to kill reviews you don’t agree with, or a stable of reviewers whose opinions you can easily predict. All of these options seem to us timid and deadening.

Omnibus reviewers are the most difficult reviewers to find and the most difficult to keep. This is mostly due to the climate of the times, in which established poets almost never say what they think about a range of new books and often lower the boom on younger poets who do. Still, we believe it’s a fight worth fighting. Poetry is not served by protecting it like some endangered species; quite the opposite, in fact. There are all kinds of signs that a much larger audience for poetry exists in this country, and there are also signs that poetry itself is, to paraphrase D.H. Tracy’s (positive!) review of Glyn Maxwell’s latest book, trying to pull its head out of its behind. Here at Poetry, we’re doing everything we can to encourage both of these developments.