Qualifications:

1.) Must be a man.

2.) Must have played football for Auburn.

3.) Must be willing to take orders from Bobby Lowder.

University Diaries wrote about this chick years ago. She’s finally – minutes ago – been hauled into court. I guess it takes awhile to pull together a 24-count federal indictment.

Karen Pletz is apparently one of those rare university presidents who steals from her university. And when you’re prez, you can really steal. There are documents to be forged, vouchers to be fiddled, charitable contributions to be falsified… Pletz was a bank executive before she became president (salary: $1.2 million) of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and she knows how to do all this shit.

Yes. Of course I’ll follow the testimony in this case. The details will be amusing.

Why is this post’s title The Taking of Pletz’s Lexus?

The U.S. attorney’s office is seeking forfeiture of Pletz’s Lexus convertible.

Why is this post’s category TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE?

Because she couldn’t have it done it without them.

I know. Duh. But what’s really strange at sports factories like the University of Kentucky is that obfuscation has hardened into cult of personality authoritarianism, complete with pretend oversight committees and pretend boards of trustees. Athletic directors tell the president what to do and the president does it.

UK is one of America’s Potemkin Village universities.

UD followed, when the story first arose, the heavily indebted University of Central Arkansas president who forged the names of some UCA administrators on a letter to the school’s trustees. The letter told the trustees to give Lu Hardin a big ol’ deferred compensation package now, pronto. The remarkably incurious trustees (All pals of Hardin’s, maybe? Hardin’s a Mike Huckabee protege, by the way.) went ahead and did this. Then some damn newspaper began investigating.

University presidents aren’t supposed to steal from their schools, and Hardin now faces thirty years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.

What is it about UD‘s imperial city that generates so many pharaonic university presidents? Presidents toppled from power by grandiosity and greed?

I suppose I’ve already answered the question… It’s the imperialistic feel of the place … There’s something about living, as the old Riggs Bank commercial had it, in “the most important city in the world” (Riggs was brought low by greed too) that takes starry-eyed ingenue university presidents and turns them into whores with eyes of steel. They’ll do anything, risk anything, to get a big seat at the front of the plane.

The most notorious name here is of course American University’s Benjamin Ladner, whose indifference to the running of his institution tracked his sense of himself as Xerxes. Eventually, to get rid of Ladner, AU students had to rent a UHaul on which they’d written something like Put your stuff in here and get out, Ladner. Something about daily news stories featuring the UHaul driving up and down the main street of the campus all day (I think a bullhorn was involved) convinced trustees Ladner had become a liability.

Unlike AU, the University of the District of Columbia is a public university, which means the already insanely put-upon taxpayers of the District are paying for the flight into Egypt described by an outraged UDC student in this post’s headline. Always a substandard school, UDC is slipping lower and lower as its latest president (in its short life it’s had many) runs off with its money.

If the UDC story plays out according to the AU script (it probably will), you’ll see Allen Sessoms regally disdain interviews. His courtiers will rush about making contradictory statements… Meanwhile, his crony-ridden, uncomprehending, fundamentally indifferent board of trustees will try to patch together a quorum to talk about the crisis… But the board’s own corruption will keep it from acting… At which point the students are going to have to rent a UHaul.

On the University of Cincinnati board of trustees sits Stanley Chesley. His term isn’t up until 2018.

Chesley negotiated a settlement of $200 million for 431 people in Boone County, Ky., that were sickened by the diet drug.

Yet almost half of that $200 million settlement went to Chesley and his co-counsels with the lawsuit — William Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, Jr. and Melbourne Mills, Jr. — for lawyer fees. The lawyer fees were approved by former Boone County Circuit Court Judge Joseph Bamberger in a “clandestine meeting” with the attorneys in February 2002 — a meeting that excluded the lawyer’s clients.

From the report recommending Chesley’s disbarment: “The greed evidenced by the plaintiff’s attorneys in this case is astounding.”

But, you know, just a bunch o’ Kentucky hicks; they’ll never figure it out…

The university can’t get rid of Chesley; only the governor can.

… reads a banner that keeps popping up at high-traffic locations on the campus of Brown University. It’s there to greet the trustees, who met a few days ago on campus. And to, you know, get some discussion going.

The banner targets one trustee in particular:

Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 …has settled allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office that he performed illegal favors to garner business for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group by paying multi-million dollar fines and accepting temporary bans from the securities industry.

Here’s an article that evokes the larger world of which Rattner is a part. The students are right to ask whether these sorts of people should be closely associated with universities. A couple of excerpts:

… Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was … embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

… [It’s] a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance.

… You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.

Brown University trustee Steven A. Cohen continues to attract a lot of attention. Bloomberg asked an expert to track his company’s trading patterns:

At Bloomberg’s request, Houman Shadab, an associate professor at New York Law School, reviewed SAC’s holdings in stocks that federal prosecutors have identified as subjects of insider leaks. He also reviewed the government’s complaints against Longueuil and Freeman.

“While the trades by themselves don’t prove insider trading or fraud, they are consistent with patterns federal investigators are examining based on trading of nonpublic information,” Shadab said in an interview Feb. 8.

Brown University students are beginning to wonder…

… a member of Eastern Michigan University’s board of regents hasn’t been to a meeting in two years. EMU doesn’t say much when the paper asks for a comment… I guess nobody’s ever been kicked off the board before, says EMU’s spokesperson… Ho hum…

But… as long as you mention it… I guess we’ll can his ass! Okay!

Same paper, a few hours later:

Eastern Michigan University Regent Mohamed Okdie has resigned due to health reasons, Gov. Rick Snyder’s office said today. The resignation is effective immediately.

An AnnArbor.com report published this morning showed that Okdie hadn’t been to a meeting in nearly two years and attended just six meetings out of 20 since he was appointed to the university’s governing board in November 2007 by then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

I mean, yeah! Shit! We hadn’t noticed. Thanks.

How do you get great results like these for your university?

Choose your university’s trustees on the basis of the size of their donation to your governor’s election campaigns.

More than two-thirds of the members of the University of Tennessee board of trustees appointed by the state’s two previous governors made donations to those governors’ campaigns.

An expert in corporate governance – I quote him in this post’s headline – asks: “Are we in an environment that once I have incredible wealth, I need political power? And is the trusteeship becoming that model?”

Crony-stuffing. Fantastic way to keep a university down.

It’s total Monty Python at corrupt and incompetent Alabama A&M. Although its meetings are supposed to be public, it can under special circumstances go into hidden ‘executive session.’

So here’s how it goes, as recounted by the excellent Huntsville Times.

… does a brief feature on one of the university’s soon-to-be famous trustees.

… let’s see if they can find trustees who haven’t had to pay the federal government twenty-two million dollars in a Medicare fraud settlement.

Her term on FAU’s board has now expired, but for the last five years Lalita Janke, an expert in the submission of false diagnoses, has tended to the health of that university.

Here’s Trustee Janke, in an interview about FAU’s incoming president, warning the new leader that she’ll “have to prove herself.”

Let’s play with all this money from our students and from the government! You get some; we get some…

You remember the Karen Pletz story, the one that started with the news that an obscure osteopathy school boasted one of the nation’s highest-paid college presidents [Scroll down.]…

Well, the lies and resignations and firings and lawsuits are flying, and we’ll follow all of that on this blog, especially if people say amusing things. But here’s an inevitable feature of stories like this (See Benjamin Ladner, American University. Indeed, one of the whistle-blowers in this case “appended [to her ignored letter to the board of trustees] a lengthy article from Washingtonian magazine about extravagant spending by a former president of American University that led to a federal investigation.”) — a lengthy article about how for years tons of warnings, petitions, complaints, rumors, and letters were dumped on the board of trustees.

But – as was the case at AU – when the board of trustees is itself scummy, none of that makes any difference.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s much-quoted remark applies as much to university presidents; and it’s especially striking to see this gesture at public universities.

When Connecticut State University Chancellor David Carter came under fire from legislators last month, the head of CSU’s Board of Trustees issued a memo defending him, saying, among other things, that Carter had trimmed central office staff by nearly a third since his appointment in 2006.

And in fact Carter cut the staff by more than 28 percent as of this fiscal year, according to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis. But personal services costs for the central office still increased by 14 percent in the same period, fueled in part by double-digit raises for Carter and top members of his staff.

The raises far outpaced the rate of inflation and the growth in pay for faculty and other employees. The largest raises went to Carter, whose annual base salary rose from $247,505 in 2006-2007 to $362,733 two years later, a 46.6 percent increase…