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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
I did it! You can too! Professor Barry Munitz, a new member of the English department at Cal State Los Angeles, isn’t your ordinary English professor. Recently forced to resign as head of the Getty Trust because of financial improprieties which included using “Getty money to buy a $72,000 Porsche Cayenne, repeatedly fl[ying] first-class, stay[ing] in $1,000-a-night hotels and ha[ving] his assistants express-mail umbrellas when he traveled,” Munitz now brings to the literature classroom a compelling message: PUT DOWN THE BOOKS AND PICK UP THE EXPENSE ACCOUNT. “He’s amazing,” says sophomore English major Trudi Stabenow. “He shows you how a Ph.D in comp lit, which he got, can take you all the way to the top.” What’s Munitz’s secret? “Once you get the degree, you use it as what Professor Munitz calls ‘cultural leverage,’ to get into the world of the rich non-profits. Then you move up the ladder until, well, the sky’s the limit!” Today’s New York Times reports that some of Professor Munitz’s colleagues are dismayed that a man “whose travel and expense spending are under investigation by the California attorney general's office,” and who “was required to repay the Getty Trust, one of the world's richest art institutions, $250,000 when he resigned in February,” is now a tenured member of their university‘s English department. Munitz, however, shrugged it off: “What can I tell you. Crime pays.” |