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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Selective Culling

From the start of the Ladner mess, American University students have shown themselves to be a principled, focused, and effective lot. Recall that they hired a U-Haul van, put a banner on it that read PRESIDENT LADNER: WE'LL HELP YOU MOVE, and drove it up and down campus all day, attracting most of the local media.

Now the students are making noise again, and again they couldn't be more right. UD has watched, amazed, as all of the AU trustees have retained their seats throughout the debacle that many of them created. The students have watched too.

American University students are asking that 13 members of the university's board of trustees be removed. Their request comes in a letter to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.

The committee has been investigating the congressionally chartered private university in a review of tax-exempt organizations. Former university President Benjamin Ladner was forced out of office last fall with a multi million-dollar severance package after an audit questioned hundreds of thousands of dollars of his spending.

The board of trustees has announced a series of reforms to ensure oversight of the school. But student government president Ashley Mushnick says there's still "substantial distrust" for the board. Students are also asking for a vote on the board.

Senator Charles Grassley, the committee's chairman, says he will consider the proposal.
Posted at: 6/15/2006 07:57:00 AM