A 2004 confidential memo from American University President Benjamin Ladner asks the school's governing trustees to do their best to pay him an additional $5 million in pretax compensation over five years that he felt he needed to "maintain my current living level" at retirement. The disclosure apparently contradicts recent statements Ladner made that he had never asked for more compensation.

The compensation committee and Ladner wrangled for months over the subject, with one member, Pete Smith, quitting over Ladner's demands, according to Smith's resignation letter. Amid rising concern nationally over executive compensation, a board meeting was held in February 2005, and a majority of trustees agreed to lower Ladner's overall compensation from more than $850,000 to $800,000, according to three trustees at the meeting. Ladner told trustees at the time that he was very disappointed.

The IRS could levy tax penalties against Ladner and members of the board if it finds evidence of "excess benefits" for executives in 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations like AU, according to a report from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

Benefits are excessive when "pay and benefits appear too high for the market, in the judgment of the IRS, or [they] raise questions about the nonprofit organization's purposes," according to the report.

The Board provided Diamandopoulos with an outsized compensation package, guaranteed him cash payment for sabbatical leaves not taken, gave him a second residence, and, most importantly, acquiesced in all of his suggestions and decisions, no matter how unwise. The Board of Trustees of Boston University had earlier acted similarly with respect to its President, Adelphi Trustee John Silber, often referred to as Diamandopoulos's mentor.

There are other parallels between the Diamandopoulos and Silber presidencies. Each constantly quarreled and, indeed, seemed to relish confrontation, with a sizable number of faculty creating continuous turmoil on campus. Each formed close relationships with powerful Trustees who championed an array of administrative proposals and decisions. Each made exaggerated claims of having saved their institution from bankruptcy and certain demise. At each school, former Trustees complained that they were forced off the Board for questioning or not fully supporting major or minor presidential initiatives and decisions, while, at the same time, other Trustees were involved in business transactions from which they derived substantial income. And there were widely publicized accusations and criminal investigations into illegal activities on the part of the President and some of the Trustees at both Boston University and Adelphi University.

… The fact of lay governing boards pretty much assures that faculty will be overmatched when a governing board and administration working in tandem hatch some scheme. Boards need only take care not to overreach so as to catch the eye of civil authorities. The Adelphi faculty and the Committee to Save Adelphi did not force the Board of Trustees and Diamandopoulos out; they merely exposed them. It was Diamandopoulos's and the Board's own actions that were responsible for their removal.

Not-for-Profit Corporation Law. Indemnification of university trustees. Liability of former president.

The Attorney General [of New York] sued to hold former trustees liable for mismanagement. The complaint asserted that the trustees had indemnified themselves in violation of the N-PCL [i.e., the New York Not-for-Profit Corporation Law]. The court held that indemnification was authorized if the trustees had acted in good faith and that the complaint and the findings of the Regents contained the necessary allegations of bad faith so as to preclude dismissal. The court refused to authorize advance indemnification for this case (Sect. 724(c)). The court upheld a cause of action for unjust enrichment with regard to a retainer fee paid by the university to counsel for the former trustees but denied with leave to renew defendants’ request to dismiss a conversion claim because of uncertainty whether the retainer constituted a specifically identifiable fund. The court held that the complaint pleaded sufficient facts to support a claim that the defendant former president caused or permitted himself to receive compensation in violation of a duty to act in good faith.

Vacco v. Diamandopoulos, Index No. 401253/97, 4/6/98 (Ramos, J.)

The Board, on which both Silber and Diamandopoulos sat, settled the case for $4.3 million.

[S]eated with her back to the camera, [the professor] notices the faces of a few students have turned towards the door. She turns to see what they are looking at just as the camera’s flash goes off. She blinks to erase the spots from her vision before turning back to the discussion. The first photographer disappears, but another soon takes his place. And another. Most of us are too stunned to think to close the door until they have gone.

Ladner's troubles with the board began more than a year ago, when the panel began reviewing his compensation after he demanded an increase...

The board also has been wrangling with Ladner over compensation -- his salary, benefits and allowances -- which has more than tripled since he came in 1994, according to one source with detailed knowledge of Ladner's pay. In 2004, his base salary was $633,000, but his total compensation was well over $800,000, according to forms the university filed with the IRS.

Last year, some board members became concerned that Ladner's pay was too high for the president of a 10,000-student private, nonprofit school and that they could be liable under laws intended to avoid excessive compensation to executives of charities, sources knowledgeable about board activities said.

“I’d lied about it long enough and when I came out I decided I would not lie anymore. I wasn’t breaking any rules. There’s no stated policy on sexual orientation at Baylor, although they do prohibit homosexual behavior and sex outside of marriage, both of which fall under sexual misconduct. By making the statement ‘I am gay’-- a statement of belief about myself-- I’m exercising my First Amendment right. A university is a place where you learn how to think, articulate a position, and where you come to change your views. But at Baylor, it’s only as long as you never hold a certain position or advocate something else.”

Every so often, a professor captures the minds and hearts of many students. Regardless of the topic and the students' interests, the professor has the ability to appeal to every distinct personality.

An individual who wholly fits this description is Marc Genest, who [to] the dismay of many of his students, left the University of Rhode Island in August.

…Genest described the Ryan Center as a waste of money, and said that, "A university is an intellectual institution, not a training ground for athletes; what's more important to the educational mission, additional faculty or a football stadium?"

…In a statement regarding education, Genest refers to President Robert L. Carothers.

"Carother's famous quip that they don't have a physics page in the local newspaper is an intellectually vacuous statement that completely misses the point regarding the proper role of higher education in American society."

…Junior B.L. Gentile, who had Genest for International Politics last semester said, "He was an amazing professor; he demanded hard work and dedication from his students and he loved his work. Any teacher that can prove to his students he loves what he teaches will always captivate a classroom,"

Another student, Matt Napoli, who also had Genest for International Politics said, "I'm pretty upset, I wanted to take another class with him. He's definitely the best professor I've ever had."

…Genest retired from the university after 14 years and now teaches at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

'Reginald Green, one of Ladner's former chauffeurs, said the Ladners often used the university car for personal reasons, including requiring him to take in and pick up their laundry and the work shirts of their chef.'

King maintained, at state expense, a team of three chauffeurs, Tom, Ray, and Ed. Tom, Ray, and Ed were there (combined salary, $170,000 plus) at King’s bidding to transport him from place to place in the course of his busy day.

The personal chef employed by suspended American University President Benjamin Ladner and paid for by the school has been let go during a probe by the university's Board of Trustees into personal and travel expenses submitted by Ladner, according to sources.

In addition, the social secretary for the president and his wife, Nancy Bullard Ladner, has been transferred, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. Sally Ekfelt is now working in the president's office as an assistant to David E. Taylor, chief of staff to the president of the university, they said.

Sources knowledgeable about the case said Scruggs would sometimes be called late at night to cook dinner for the couple. Two chauffeurs who worked for the Ladners also said they often were required to take Scruggs's dirty white uniforms to a dry cleaner.

ROSEMONT, Ill., Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ --

WHAT: PRESS CONFERENCE to announce findings of the
AAOMS Third Molar Study

"Third Molars: Defusing an Oral Time-Bomb"

2+2 must be 4
Let Poland be Poland

…Wilbur, however famous, however loved and respected he has been throughout his career, has rarely if ever been fashionable. He was unfashionable when vadic hipster utterance was in vogue. He was unfashionable when confessional poetry was all the rage. He was unfashionable when difficult, highly intellectual, deconstructive poetry was respected. His devotion to a tightly constructed formalist poetry has seemed retro for decades. He has been famous for my entire adult life without ever being (in that cursed vulgarism) “hot.” But in the annals of the last laugh, Richard Wilbur must be at the top of the list. For he is still alive, in every sense of the word. The very fact that he has not changed will no doubt soon make him a hero to an age of spin and calculation. Masses of students turned out by MFA programs, more devoted to their own careers than to their work, must look in wonder at a literary personage who doesn’t really care how high his stock stands. Perhaps this smart and self-contained man knew all along that if he lasted long enough, his time would come. What seemed recalcitrance would come to seem integrity. WASP coolness would turn into vision, moderation, and character. Not that Wilbur chose calculatingly to be contrarian; rather he had the self-possession to endure it.

If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?

Why should students at Princeton, where economist Paul Krugman teaches when he is not thundering against the “well off ” on the New York Times editorial page, enjoy income from huge endowments, while students at poorer institutions have far fewer educational resources? How unfair!

Worse, the extreme inequality of colleges is subsidized by the government. Gifts to rich schools are tax deductible for the donors. Universities and colleges pay no taxes on their capital gains, dividend, and interest income. This is an outrage against liberal principles! Remedial legislation is clearly needed!

The disparities in college endowments are enormous. As of mid 2004, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had average endowments of $14.9 billion, while three private institutions of similar size, George Washington University, Georgetown, and American University, averaged $543 million. That is a ratio of 27:1—about the same difference in income between a successful investment banker and a Wal-Mart clerk.

The numbers are even more striking in small liberal arts colleges. Grinnell, the richest of those that report data publicly, had an endowment of $1.2 million per student. Annual earnings of just 4 percent would produce more than $46,000 per student in yearly interest. Why does Grinnell charge tuition?

Correction

A report last Sunday about the wedding of Emily Elizabeth Cohen and Benjamin William Cavell misstated the title of one book and the publishing history of another, both by the bridegroom’s father, Stanley Cavell. The title was “Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage,” not “The Harvard Comedy of Remarriage.”

The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message.

It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find.

For me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000?

[L]iterature’s role in the composition classroom is idiosyncratic, or subservient to the teaching of something else, such as popular culture. The number of film titles in our web survey exceeded the number of pre-1945 literary works…. A second survey (involving ninety chairs, composition directors, and interested faculty from colleges, universities, and California community colleges) added to the impression of fragmentation.

Georgetown’s composition syllabi, each with a different reading list, managed to convey a sense of serious engagement with authors such as Frederick Douglass, Anne Frank, Mary Shelley, Orwell, E. B. White, T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Walker, Stoker, Hemingway, Faulkner, Atwood, Ellison, Delillio, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Austen, Hawthorne, Wells, Lee, More, Conrad, Stevenson, Kuchner, Sophocles, Shakespeare (a different play in each of the eight sections that assigned him), Miller, Shaw, Hansberry, Virgil, Homer, Whitman, Salinger, Gilman, Alison, the Beowulf poet, and a dozen more contemporary novelists. Another dozen instructors assigned literary non-fiction by authors such a Primo Levi, Sartre, Pico Della Mirandola, Kozol, Coles, and others. In contrast, the University of Florida, which posted far more titles on-line than Georgetown, listed syllabi with a dozen films, eight television shows, half a dozen contemporary autobiographies, and dozens of topical essays.

The third island of the university is the almost submerged old Atlantis, the humanities. In it there is no semblance of order, no serious account of what should and should not belong, or of what its disciplines are trying to accomplish or how. It is somehow the repair of man or of humanity, the place to go to find ourselves now that everyone else has given up. But where to look in this heap or jumble? It is difficult enough for those who already know what to look for to get any satisfaction here. For students it requires a powerful instinct and a lot of luck. The analogies tumble uncontrollably from my pen. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found castaway treasures that made them rich. Or they are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling, either unemployed or performing menial tasks.

Nothing prevents us from thinking too well of ourselves. It is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our powerful urges and temptations, that is free of all snobbism but has standards.

Conservatives who reread Bloom will also discover that the 60’s left reminded him also of the right-wing hordes his mentor Leo Strauss had encountered in Europe in the 30’s. ‘The fact that in Germany the politics were of the right and in the United States of the left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements,” whose participants, full of animal spirits and spiritual animus, undertook, “the dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry.” Yet Kimball and Horowitz themselves are trying to rouse a mass movement of alumni, the public and legislatures to “take back” the university.

disappointment and dismay at Syracuse University's [recent] appointment of Dr. Douglas Biklen as Dean of its School of Education. Dr. Biklen has long been the world's foremost proponent of facilitated communication (FC), a thoroughly discredited technique … The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Association on Mental Retardation, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Association for Behavior Analysis, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the New York State Department of Health have all issued policy statements advising against the use of FC for autism….

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence against FC, Dr. Biklen has continued to promote it widely and uncritically in numerous venues. In addition, he has continued to dismiss the substantial body of negative findings regarding FC from controlled studies. Disturbingly, FC has been associated with numerous uncorroborated allegations of sexual and physical abuse against the family members of children with autism, some of which have resulted in the separation of parents from their children. Moreover, by first raising and then dashing the hopes of thousands of parents of children with autism, Dr. Biklen and other proponents of FC may have done grave harm to mental health clients and to the reputation of clinical practitioners.

Dr. Biklen's efforts are particularly troubling given the availability of applied behavior analysis and related treatment approaches that have demonstrated promise in controlled studies for ameliorating the cognitive and emotional difficulties of individuals with autism….

By placing Dr. Biklen in charge of a major school of education at a prestigious institution of higher learning, Syracuse University is undermining the nationwide movement to place the fields of education and educational psychology on firmer scientific footing. Whether intended or not, Syracuse University is also sending a clear signal that it is not firmly committed to embracing evidence-based approaches to understanding and treating cognitive and emotional disorders. Their appointment of Dr. Biklen as Dean is a major step backward in the vitally important effort to promote science and combat pseudoscience in mental health care.