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.