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Saturday, September 17, 2005
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DIAMANDOPOULOSIANA As the major media decant their [UD has changed the beginning of this post from her original singular formulation -- "the major media decants its" -- to plural because Jack Bush, a reader from Canada, made an impressive argument that she should do so] annual back-to-school stories about alcoholic undergraduates, spare a thought for their schools’ presidents, who may be dragged just as low by demon rum. It’s not that the presidents are unmasked as alcoholics and carted off; rather, it’s their extravagant taste in spirits that does them in. While his charges are out getting blasted on Boone’s Farm, the American university president may be home getting quietly tight on “daily wine for lunch and dinner at $50 to $100 per bottle,” as the now-notorious anonymous letter to the American University trustees about President Benjamin Ladner has it. Or, like Peter Diamandopoulos, dethroned despot of Adelphi University, he may be out on the town with friends, racking up (as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported at the time) a “$454.65 bar tab” by sharing "$150 glasses of cognac” with “[John] Silber, a former Adelphi trustee, who later said that he had been unaware of the cost of the drinks." And yet man does not live by drink alone. Artnet.com, citing the New York Times, described “the $707 dinner Adelphi President Peter Diamondopoulos [sic] and art critic and Adelphi trustee Hilton Kramer shared at the fancy Links club in Manhattan -- charged to big D's university expense account -- not long after the scandal broke involving Diamandopoulos's $523,000 salary, the second highest among college presidents in the nation. According to the report, $552 of the tab went for a 1983 Chaval wine and Martel cognac.” Like their third-world counterparts, these sorts of university presidents also spend a lot of money suing people and defending their besmirched honor and that sort of thing. Before his current difficulties, President Ladner sued an AU alumnus to get him to shut down his website, benladner.com, because it used the president’s name. He lost. “Frankly,” says the site’s proprietor, “if he had agreed to have a dialogue about his work and our work, thousands of university dollars wouldn't have had to be spent on a fruitless attempt to shut us down." |