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Twice a week, UD’s daughter goes to Washington Children’s Chorus practice in a church on the campus of American University. UD, while she’s waiting for her, drinks coffee and reads at the Starbucks at AU; or, if she’s feeling energetic, walks around campus.

As a native Washingtonian, UD has witnessed AU grow in size and popularity. She has watched it gussy up its buildings and landscape and, like most things in Northwest DC and Montgomery County (AU is located close to Montgomery County, where UD lives) get rich.

Now AU is running into one of those problems that rich universities tend to run into: overcompensation of administrators. Universities “are not in the for-profit world,” an expert on the subject reminds the Washington Post in an article about AU this morning. “If there is some unusual perk, it has to be justified.”

AU’s president’s base salary for 2003-04 was $633,000. He gets a free house plus other value-added goodies. On top of this, an anonymous letter to trustees and the Post claims, “the Ladners charged the university over the past five years for their son's engagement party, presents for their children, a personal French chef, vacations in Europe, maintenance of their personal residence in Maryland ‘including garbage bags,’ and wine up to $100 a bottle for lunch and dinner.” An investigation is underway.



The Engagement Party

Let’s start with the engagement party. There are “things that look on the surface like they are personal, but turn out to be donor cultivation,” another expert explains to the Post. “You might have a big wedding party, but maybe 70 percent of the guests are major donors.”

Consider the pathos of an engagement party for one’s beloved child, seventy percent of whose guests are business connections. Consider, more broadly, a family with absolutely no personal life.

If a set of human beings, connected by blood and some sort of history, end up living a wholly institutional life, then compensation for most aspects of that sort of life doesn’t seem out of line to me. You only get one lifetime, and people who miss out on having their life deserve not only pity, but some form of compensation for their loss. If I couldn’t go to the john without taking donor cultivation calls, I’d expect compensation. The question is how much.



Father Flanagan/Dennis Kozlowski

The conceit in the particular case of university presidents is that, having chosen the public over the private sector, they are motivated not merely by greed and vainglory but also by duty.

The university president is located somewhere between a priest and Dennis Kozlowski. He or she is expected to want good money, but is also expected to demonstrate a commitment to non-profit values.

Yet our wealthy country, as the director of research for the American Association of University Professors points out to the Post, increasingly compensates its university presidents “like private sector CEOs,” and CEOesque presidents in turn “often reflect their compensation in their management of the institution.”

This is a delicate way of saying that they often give themselves as stupendous a salary and as perky a set of perks as they can get away with. The AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession notes that “presidential salaries have risen much more rapidly than faculty salaries in the last ten years,” and “the trend apparently continues. This development is one further indication that a more corporate organizational hierarchy is emerging in colleges and universities, in potential conflict with the mission of institutions of higher education to operate for the benefit of society as a whole.”

The AAUP researcher calls “the rapid growth of presidential compensation” a “morale crusher for other staff and faculty members.”



The Red Corvette

It’s hard for most university presidents to get away with truly truly gross and blatant greed. Ask Peter Diamondopoulous. No one tried harder than he.

This rule does not hold true for the University of Florida system, however. There, a university president can do just about anything and be rewarded for it. The current president of the Florida Institute of Technology, for instance, left his last university presidency in disgrace, but got another university presidency right away. Here’s his story, in the Miami Herald:

SOLD: RED CORVETTE WITH PURPLE PAST

It is possibly the most infamous car in the history of South Florida higher education. A former Florida Atlantic University president has sold a red Corvette bought as his retirement gift with money that was supposed to be used for students.

The little red Corvette that former Florida Atlantic University president Anthony Catanese got as a going-away present turned out to be nothing but trouble.

His reputation was sullied. So was that of the school's foundation. And an FAU vice president was criminally charged and forced to resign.

All of that, and it turns out that Catanese barely drove his shiny red bauble. He averaged about 23 miles per week in it. Now, after less than three years of ownership, Catanese has gotten rid of the car.

"Obviously it's very ironic that so much harm was caused to so many for so little," said Kenneth Lipman, an attorney who represented Carla Coleman, who lost her job in the scandal's fallout.

Catanese traded in the car on March 30 to a Melbourne car dealership and bought a silver 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLK350 roadster. Like the Corvette, it's a luxury sports car that sells in the low to mid-40s. Catanese also has a 2003 BMW.

The Kelley Blue Book car buyer's guide lists the trade-in value of a Corvette comparable to Catanese's at $26,100.

A Melbourne engineer and his schoolteacher wife, Randolph Hines and Teresa Baggett-Hines, bought the Corvette on April 12. The odometer read 3,285 miles.

"It looks showroom new," Randolph Hines said. "It was like buying a new old car."

GOING-AWAY GIFT

Catanese, 62, did not respond to an e-mail asking why he hardly drove the car and traded it in.

He requested the car as a going-away gift in July 2002 following his resignation after 12 years as FAU president to assume the same job at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He told investigators later that he wanted a Corvette because it was a favorite car of astronauts on the Space Coast, where he was relocating.

Coleman, a top FAU administrator, funneled $42,000 from the FAU Foundation to Catanese's wife, Sara, so that her husband could buy the car.

STUDENT MONEY

Foundation money is supposed to be spent on programs that benefit students, faculty or the university. Coleman concealed the Corvette purchase by having an interior design firm pay Sara Catanese for "consulting" work on FAU's new presidential residence.

Coleman then reimbursed the firm with a check from an FAU Foundation account.

The scheme succeeded until The Palm Beach Post and then the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began scrutinizing foundation spending in 2003.

In June 2003 Catanese sent a check for $42,000 to reimburse the FAU Foundation, along with a letter insisting:

"I believed the gift was completely legal and appropriate."

NOT CHARGED

The FDLE thought there was enough evidence to charge the Cataneses with felonies, but the state attorney said there was insufficient evidence to obtain convictions.

Coleman, however, who resigned her $185,000-a-year job, was charged with a third-degree felony, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to a year of probation.

When the Hineses, who live in Melbourne, bought the storied car on April 12 they knew none of this.

"They told me it was somebody who got it as a retirement gift," Randolph Hines said.

Now that he knows the Catanese connection, one mystery about the Corvette seems less cryptic to Hines.

"I guess it answers the question as to why there were so few miles on it," he said. "He probably felt bad driving it around."