This blog’s category, TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE, chronicles the twisted, tortuous, Catch-22ish character of university trustee appointments.
You want someone filthy rich, but you don’t want someone filthy. Someone rich as Croesus, but not a criminal.
You’re after a person who may be greedy as all get-out, but who’s also a generous philanthropist. A market predator and a shaping-young-minds idealist…
UD ain’t saying it’s impossible to find people like this. America was built by high-minded robber barons. But from pious Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin to the petty thieves of lesser schools, it’s easy to find compromised trustees.
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It’s not so easy to know what to do with them. Yeshiva held on to the Madoff/Merkin tag team until their investment strategies became an unignorable scandal. Other universities move very quickly, dumping a trustee as soon as there’s a whiff of conflict of interest or fraudulent dealing. Scroll through this category for details.
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The latest story, one UD has been following for awhile, involves veteran University of Cincinnati trustee Stanley Chesley. Here’s the background on this attorney’s astounding greed and cynicism.
The latest on Chesley has him about to be disbarred. He is an embarrassment to the political culture of Ohio, where the attorney general has just pulled him from a high-profile case; and of course he is an embarrassment to the University of Cincinnati, where he presides over the intellectual and ethical – and legal – life of the institution.
UD understands as well as universities do the process by which robber barons cleanse theirs souls – or at least brighten their images – via philanthropy. The process is not to be sneezed at, I guess. But when the delicate balance between predation and patronage is upset, universities look like asshole-enablers. U Cincinnati needs to have a little parley with the governor (who appoints their trustees) and tell him they want this guy out.